Mount Weather is a days walk from Camp Jaha, three days if you take the scenic route, as Clarke does. She wanders, and so does her mind.
Her path takes her by the dropship, now well-looted and nearly unrecognizable. The walls they had built, strong with the frantic hopes of teenagers, were now torn down. The ground was still charred, but grass sprouted through. Soon flowers would grow over the skeletons that had found their final resting place there, incinerated by desperate, terrified hands.
Perhaps it would have been kinder for Finn to pass here, as Clarke had initially thought he had. His hands would not have been stained so unforgivably – neither would Clarke's.
Clarke stops a moment, mumbles "may we meet again," although it just feels wrong. She adds, "yu gonplei ste odon," as Lexa had taught her. Now, no matter the side they fought for, they were appropriately farewelled.
That was the last Clarke saw of human life – regardless of expiry – until she reached Mount Weather. The huge door lay ajar from where they (Clarke could no longer put a number to the they, because it started at 100 and had only gotten lower and lower and to define that was to accept the reality of it) had escaped, Grounder and Sky People alike, under vastly different circumstances.
Outside it was overcast, appropriately grey, but otherwise normal. Inside, it was dark and still. After a moment, Clarke's eyes adjust and she can see the faint glow of the emergency lighting on the floor. It leads her to the nearest stairwell, which clicks open without a protest. Clarke's hand brushes the surface of the scanner by the door, recalling briefly the press of Maya to her body, the glass cutting into her palm.
Clarke takes the stairs two at a time, running against the prescribed arrows in the strips of emergency lighting. She lingers on the landing of level three before dismissing it. For some reason the idea of braving the (mostly) innocent souls down in level five is easier than going into the medical labs. Clarke doesn't stop to consider what that means, she just returns to the stairs. Each foot step echoes noisily in the otherwise silent building, and the cold metal handrail stings her palm.
Up until Clarke reaches level five, everything is fine – normal, if a bunker full of corpses could be considered normal in any liberal interpretation of the word.
When she opens the door, again inactive, everything changes.
Just as rain on earth has a scent ("Petrichor," Clarke remembers from lessons on the Ark, "and maybe one day you'll be on Earth and experience it for yourself" the teacher had said, wistful), so does death.
The smell of death is arguably less pleasant. It is better not described as a smell, or an aroma, but a stench: cloying, overpowering, suffocating.
Clarke drops to her knees, the force of the stench as strong as any physical attack. She pulls her shirt up to cover her nostrils as she clamours to the space beside the door where the Hazmat suits were always kept. With watering eyes and inaccurate hands, Clarke comes to the agonising conclusion: there are no masks left. They would have used them all when Clarke threatened to irradiate them all, if not sooner.
Just as the stench pushed her to the verge of nausea, so too did the thought of not going any further. Clarke was the reason these people were dead, who was she to demand the luxury of a pleasant journey?
Demons did not cater to those they haunted.
Through sheer will alone, Clarke continues into level five. This was where all the citizens of Mount Weather had been herded, locked down for their own safety. This had been where Clarke pulled the lever and doomed them all to an agonising, if not quick, death.
The corpses are everywhere, illuminated under the dim, yellow glow of the emergency lighting. Some caught in loving embrace with their family, others alone, some still at the table with a cup of tea in hand. They hadn't yet decomposed, they were simply there. Blistered, red skin. Through some miracle – all the doors and seals, perhaps? - no bugs had yet gotten in to feast on their flesh. The thought makes Clarke gag. These people hadn't done anything wrong.
They were owed a proper burial. Hundreds of them: men, women, children. This is what Clarke needed to do. This is why she couldn't have simply joined in with the others at Camp Jaha, celebrating the alive and mourning the dead. This chapter of her life needed to close before she could write the next.
Clarke reaches out to the nearest corpse, the size indicating whoever it was had not yet reached adulthood. As her hands grab the figure, stiff with rigor mortis, she thinks of Charlotte. Charlotte, unable to escape the nightmares that plagued her – Charlotte, falling to a too-soon death. Clarke starts, steps back, heart in her throat and stomach following closely behind.
Her feet collide with another corpse, knocking a burned hand so hard that it simply snaps from the arm.
Clarke cries out as though it was her own hand severed from her body, jumping away instinctively. Tears escape her eyes, no matter how tightly she clenches them shut. She can't breathe – and it isn't the stench now, but terror clawing at her throat.
Clarke turns, tries to escape, but in her fear she'd moved into the heart of the room. All around her, finely dressed bodies and rotting food. They'd never known this would be their last meal. Their final supper.
Lips dry, Clarke looks down at her feet, trying to find any spot in the room that wasn't occupied by a body although she knows that task is near impossible. To her left is Maya's corpse. It is unidentifiable, and Clarke could be wrong, but she suspects she is right. Someone has posed her corpse with hands over heart, intertwined, and all she can think is Jasper.
"I'm sorry." Clarke whispers, crouching beside Maya's body. She isn't just sorry for their tumultuous relationship, but for ending the one Maya and Jasper had formed prematurely. From the snippets of conversation Clarke had overheard on the way home from Mount Weather, Jasper had taken charge and done everything in his power to save them all.
Even as Clarke's fingers wrapped around that lever, he was in the lab with a blade, ready to fight.
Even as Clarke ended lives, Jasper was trying to save them.
Clarke's fingers move to press against her temples, for no reason other than the gesture gives her some illusion of control. "I'm so sorry." She mumbles repeatedly under her breath, loud enough to carry to every dead ear in the room. "I never wanted this."
Mount Weather had preserved so much of the old world within the bunker confines. They had works of art and weapons of old, and though it would be a shame to lose it all, this place could not continue to stand. These people deserved a burial, a proper farewell. Ark custom was to float dead bodies, and Grounded custom was to burn them. On the ground, the 100 had buried their dead, but these people were already buried.
Clarke reaches out to touch Maya's hair, to brush it back from her indistinguishable forehead. Perhaps the Grounders were onto something in burning. It seems wrong to leave them as they are. Clarke doesn't want anyone else to set foot here. The atmosphere is like a poison. No good could come of preserving this.
She toys with the thought of removing the artworks and saving them. They were relics of an older time, and could be saved where most of Ark history could not. The true question is this: would the Mountain Men rather have their homes, their lives, looted after death? Or would they rather take this with them? This snapshot of their life, sent up in flames. The clothes they wore, the things they loved, burned together – never separated, even in death.
Clarke owes them that much.
To each corpse Clarke stops and says something. To the small, apologies. To the large, farewells. To the guards, thanks ("for keeping them safe, for helping them, for protecting what you thought was right" and as she went, Clarke began to feel it more, and the resent drained into honesty knowing she'd do [had done] anything for her people).
To each she presses a gentle kiss to her fingers, then touches it to their hearts.
"We're all humans doing the best we can," Clarke implores one body, as she is two-thirds through the room and feeling rather introspective, "and none of us deserve this fate."
"Clarke."
The noise Clarke makes is one she would rather went unmentioned as in one smooth movement she spins around, rises to a single knee, and withdraws her weapon. The tears welling in her eyes retreat in favour of a hardened stare, directed the same place the barrel of the gun was pointed.
"Lexa." Clarke growls, gun wavering only momentarily before shifting to focus on the Commander's forehead.
"You should not be here alone." Lexa notes, voice haggard, leaning heavily against a nearby column, "had I the desire to kill you, you would be dead."
"If you'd ever had the desire to kill me, I'd be dead anyway."
A ghost of a smile crosses Lexa's lips. "True."
"Why are you here, Lexa?" Clarke asks when it becomes clear the other woman won't break the silence on her own.
"Watching you. Why are you here, Clarke?"
"Why are you watching me?"
"If I don't, who will?" Lexa states, as though it really were that easy. Then she takes a long, rattling breath."Why are you here, Clarke?"
"I don't need someone watching me!" Clarke bites back, pointedly ignoring Lexa's other question. Why did it matter to her the reasons Clarke was there? Lexa should be off celebrating her victory, not following Clarke around, unless she sought to rub salt into the raw wound.
"Reapers plague this building now. If you wish to make peace, do so quickly."
The entire time they had been talking, Lexa looked as if Clarke was a non-threat. Someone boring, little Clarke of Skaikru, crying over a few dead bodies.
It fans sudden, angry flames within Clarke, and she holsters her weapon. If nothing else, her offence comes from Lexa tarnishing this place, now something akin to a sacred burial sight.
As Clarke approaches Lexa – to what, fight her off? Yell at her? Ask her kindly to go? - the brunette drops down a fraction against the column, and then again, leaving a smear of blood in her wake.
"Lexa?" Clarke's tone changes from defensive to concerned. Her pace increases as she masterfully dodges bodies, picking out the sparse gaps in the dim light.
"If they told you your people were going to be slaughtered unless you agreed to betray me, would you have done it?" There were tears in Lexa's eyes as they struggle to focus on Clarke. Her skin looks paler without the war paint, as though she was trying to blend in with the white stone column.
"Lexa, what happened?" Clarke, unsurprisingly, finds profuse bleeding a more pressing concern than questions that asked too much of decisions Clarke didn't want to dwell on.
"Answer me." Lexa insists, reaching both hands up to wind around Clarke's wrists.
Clarke gently pulls Lexa forward, and the Commander puts up no physical protest. She all but sags into Clarke's arms. "I would have spoken to you first." Clarke answers in hopes it would distract Lexa from her gently probing fingers – curse black clothing and how easily it masks blood stains.
"No, you would have taken the offer." Lexa smiles, an expression that is equal parts sad and knowing.
"Probably, Lexa, but right now you're bleeding – what happened? Tell me, please." Clarke might have once thought she could hold a grudge, but something about Mount Weather has changed her. What use is there in harbouring a hatred when your life can end so quickly? Had she been one of the people in the dining room when the lever was pulled, she would have regretted pushing anyone away.
Despite what Lexa had done, when Clarke sits down with her thoughts she knows she would have done the same. That thought alone scares her.
"I told you – Reapers. They seek –" The words leave Lexa as though she'd been winded, and she looks at Clarke sadly. "I have to apologise to you. What I did for my people I would do again, but from the look in your eyes I may never recover."
Clarke laughs because she has nothing else she can do, but it's devoid of all merriment. "I accept your apology." Clarke says, and the tears well up again because Lexa apologised. And, above all, she apologised in a way that Clarke can relate so closely to.
She may never recover from the lives she took in Mount Weather, but for her people she would do it again and again.
"Who we are and who we have to be to survive are two very different things." Clarke repeats the words Bellamy told her so long ago, back when Clarke had thought it was as hard as it would get – before she'd realised how wrong she could be.
Lexa hums her assent, and opens her mouth to reply, but all that comes out is a pained groan. Clarke comes back to herself with a start, and her fingers continue their quest to find the source of Lexa's injury. Lexa arches up in Clarke's arms, another groan escaping her throat, and Clarke knows she's found the spot.
"What happened?" Clarke asks as she gently turns Lexa around in her arms. Clarke shifts Lexa's arms so they're propping her up against the column, and Clarke is able to better investigate the wound.
"Reaper, sword. Surely you can figure that one out yourself, Clarke." Even when breathless with pain, even when it takes her a minute to get out a complete sentence, Lexa has an attitude. Ridiculous.
"Surely you can be quiet whilst I take a look at you." Clarke says, and it's mostly in jest. She removes Lexa's spaulder. Lucky shot from the Grounder – the blade sliced in just below Lexa's armour and twisted up beneath it. Lucky for Lexa, though, that the wound is a straight in and out. Had the blade been twisted or jerked around, Lexa would have needed stitches and they were a day (minimum) from Camp Jaha.
She removes Lexa's shirt, using a knife pilfered from her belt to cut away where it was stuck to pale, sweaty skin. Clarke shrugs the rucksack from her shoulder, rummaging through the limited supplies she bought with her. The tiny first aid kit she bought contains, thankfully, an antiseptic ointment and some real bandages. Clarke had never been more thankful for forethought as she pulls them both out, and then a water bottle.
"This might sting." Clarke warns Lexa, but the only reply she receives is a snort. Maybe Lexa doesn't know that Clarke can see her knuckles, white with how tightly her hands are balled up in fists.
She starts by cleaning the wound with the remains of her water. Then she somewhat liberally applies the ointment, before winding it in the bandage. It's a good job – much better than Clarke would have been able to do without the kit – but it leaves a lot to be desired. A wound that deep needs stitches, more likely than not, but the bandage will keep it together for now. All Clarke needs to do now is ensure Lexa won't get an infection or bleed out simply from getting home. The rest can be done by a Grounder healer.
"Are we done?" Lexa's voice is strained, as though she speaks through clenched teeth.
"As done as we can be with what I have." Clarke replies as she packs away her supplies, leaving the bag propped up against her side. Her pants are damp with water and Lexa's blood, her fingers carry the thick scent of antiseptic. It somewhat fondly reminds her of the Ark.
Lexa sighs heavily and sags back against Clarke, her eyes closed and face coated with a sheen of sweat. "Thank you, Clarke." The three words carry more weight than they should. Lexa is not just thankful for the patching up.
"I do accept your apology, Lexa. You did what I would have done." Clarke can't meet Lexa's eyes when she says it, so she's glad the other woman is in her lap not facing her. "I keep telling myself that I did this because of you, but... I made this choice. To kill all these people."
"I would have done the same, had our roles been reversed. Dying by your hand is kinder than what they would have otherwise received. Every Grounder has lost someone to this place." Lexa's wistful as she speaks, sighing and leaning further into Clarke. She must not realise she's doing it.
They sit in silence for a time. It's probably too long since there are Reapers in the building and Lexa is injured but it feels nice. Clarke runs her fingers through the unbraided parts of Lexa's hair, untangling them and flattening them against her back.
"I want to burn this place down."
"I can help you." Lexa replies simply, and begins to talk Clarke through the best way to do so.
Without an extreme amount of accelerant, Clarke will never come close to burning down the entirety of Mount Weather. Luckily for them, there are oxygen tanks in the floors between each levels. "They were constantly locked in. Without it, they could not breathe." There is no guarantee the flames will reach the oxygen – it likely wouldn't breach the metal flooring – but it is something. At the very least, all the corpses in the room will burn. The paintings, the furniture, all of it flammable.
"How do you know all of this?" Clarke asks, strangely curious about where a Grounder learned about oxygen. Or is it simply that Clarke has underestimated them as a savage people, incapable of rational thought? Even after Lexa has proven that incorrect?
"I have my ways." Now that Clarke has stopped poking around her shoulder, Lexa is much more talkative, but she has to maintain that air of mystery. "I need tinder."
Clarke grabs the nearest painting and breaks the frame over her leg, handing Lexa the canvas and wood to arrange. It doesn't take Lexa long to turn it to a flame, a thin curl of black smoke rising from the ancient art piece.
"Some people believe that when the body dies, the scent that comes off is all of the negativity leaving the spirit." Lexa tells Clarke as the blonde observes the room. She nudges a length of the frame that wasn't used to birth the fire into Clarke's leg.
Clarke dips the edge into the flame, then holds it up.
"Can you stand?" She asks Lexa, who pushes herself unsteadily to her feet. "We'll need to leave fast, just in case."
Perhaps this is the sort of thing that requires more consideration, as Clarke and Lexa then have five flights of stairs to tackle. There's no guarantee an oxygen tank hasn't already leaked, and they won't all go up as they're trying to escape. It is, in Clarke's mind, a risk worth taking – and Lexa apparently agrees, or she wouldn't have hung around.
Clarke takes the flame to the fire side of the room, as Lexa heads towards the exit. As she ignites a body, she dips her head. Clarke has no more words for these people. Nothing she could say would bring them back. All she knows is she has said her part – she has made her peace, as Lexa said earlier. Now the Mountain Men will have theirs.
There is no time to dwell. Clarke returns to Lexa's side just as she finishes speaking and tips her head. Already the flames are catching, moving – the Mountain Men's tendency towards decoration has worked in their favour as it ignites rugs and curtains and frames, moving fast through the room. The fire Lexa started has also built taller, and will soon be able to leap and fill the room.
It takes from the door to the stairwell for Clarke to acknwoledge they need a better escape plan. Though Lexa's legs are unharmed, her body is exhausted and she can do little more than trail behind Clarke.
Carrying Lexa bridal-style up the stairs is not how Clarke expected her day to end, but stranger things had happened on the ground.
"This smell – of the dead – do your people have a name for it?" Clarke asks in between pants as they reach the second level, the emergency lights guiding her to their safe exit.
"No." Lexa replies, bouncing a little in Clarke's arms and trying not to cringe at the pain it causes her shoulder – or perhaps she is trying not to cringe at the situation itself. In her arms she holds her spaulder, toying with the strap on it. Her shirt was doomed to burn with the Mountain Men, so the bandage and an undershirt are all that cover her torso. "It is something... without a word."
"Ah." Clarke replies, catching her footing on the landing of level one. "We have a lot of feelings like that. Things you all know, but can't describe."
When prompted, Lexa opens the door that takes them into the Mount Weather entrance. Ahead they can just make out a sliver of light sneaking in through the heavy door. Clarke slows her frantic speed the closer they get until she returns Lexa to the ground, the both of them leaving the bunker side-by-side.
Outside the grey sky has broken and rain is falling gently to the ground. It's no storm, it's barely more than a drizzle, but it cleanses Clarke. It washes from her the sweat and tears and blood, and her hands feel cleaner than they have in a long time. Today they were used to put people to rest, and to heal another. Today her voice was used not to issue threats but to forgive another.
"Petrichor." Clarke observes as she inahles deeply the scent of fresh rain on earth, hands extended.
Lexa gives her a strange look. "What does that word mean?"
"The smell of fresh rain. That's our word for it."
"Oh." Lexa is leaning against the door, sheltered from the rain that is soaking Clarke through just centimetres from her. "Do you have a word for feeling torn between your duty to your people and the desires of your soul?"
Clarke spins around, damp hair clinging to her face and neck. She blinks at Lexa, who is looking somewhat sheepishly at her. Her teeth are worrying her bottom lip almost imperceptibly.
Despite the lives they have taken and the wars they have fought, moments like these always catch Clarke off-guard. Moments that make evident the fact that they are both young and human.
"I believe so." Clarke says, closing the distance between them. "I think it goes something like this – let me show you."
She places one hand on Lexa's cheek, the other on her hip, and pulls their bodies together. Clarke is gentle as she presses their lips together. It is soft and intimate, the water dripping from her face catching the sweat on Lexa's and leaving the taste of salt between their mouths.
There is no rush to deepen the kiss. Lexa's injured arm remains limp at her side, but her other tangles in Clarke's hair, winding them around and keeping her close. Lexa is the one to press forward with a warm tongue, and Clarke parts her lips to receive her. Together they are warm and wet and real.
They part all too soon, though they linger a hairs breadth from each other.
"We should get you somewhere safe."
"Thank you, Clarke. I did not expect your forgiveness, but I cannot say I am displeased at earning it." The sincerity in Lexa's eyes at that moment is the same Clarke saw as her people marched free from this door days earlier. "Before we go, though, let me just make sure I have the pronunciation correct."
Their lips meet together and form a language all their own.