They sit, watching the second sun chase the first across the horizon, as the colours that threatened to dim just moments ago reconsider in a burst of rejuvenation. Clarke's fingers brush frantically across the page but her companion remains still, mute, a silent unmoving presence beside her.
She knows what this costs her. Knows the weight of his brow when his eyes snag on them, the weight of a stilted silence settling on the mess hall as they collect rations. But after six years of unanswered calls, Clarke is content with this.
It was borne of nightmares, of two girls tormented endlessly by the weight they bore for their people, the choices they took from them, the lives. Night after night breaking with only the two discarded leaders to trace its shadows and chart its ghosts. The girls who survived when no one wanted them to, the girls who traded their souls for titles bestowed, the girls he never returned to.
Now that peace has been brokered, bargained, bought, there is no need for her. In these times of peace neither of them have a place to belong. So they end up here, day in and day out. This rocky desolate segment of the land that no one bothers with. Sometimes Octavia will immerse herself in books from the settlement or in small sewing projects; more often she will just sit, hands and chin perched on bent knees in contemplation.
It's slow but bit by bit they get their forgiveness. It comes in small moments - when Octavia breaks their silence with a ragged "I really did try" and Clarke meets her head-on as the replies a steadfast "I know"; when Miller returns a familiar sketchpad to Clarke, its edges crinkled in crimson and remarks a gruff "I saw this when we... with Kane... Thought you'd... Our history is important."; when Octavia meets his eye with a fond relieved smile. It's there in the times that Murphy makes them laugh with his melodramatics; when he lays a soft hand or crushing hug on them; when Jordan brings them both to tears by so carelessly throwing out there that they had been Monty's first friends on the ground and he had never forgotten it.
Sometimes Clarke looks at Octavia - the girl under the floorboards, the adventurous younger sister, the peace-broker, Skeiripper, Bloodreina - and marvels at where they started, at where they ended up. The Princess and the Red Queen as Murphy likes to put it, banished from the new world by a peoples they gave everything to keep alive.
They don't talk of him, not really. He weighs on them both enough that the words seem hardly worth the air; his absence is felt keenly regardless. He lingers in the familiar motions on Clarke's sketchpad as her mind drifts, before the abrupt halt and the violent turn to a fresh sheet; he is the steady rhythm in Octavia's needle through cloth as she hums absentmindedly. He is the hand on Madi's shoulder when they cannot sit beside her. He is the ache they both swallow, the "I love you" they never got to hear.
And in a way it's easier like this. Easier to not have him fighting her battles, constantly defending her right to be there. After so many years of imagining what peace could look like for them, it's easier to fade out of the picture, to slip away between the moments where Shaw shoots her an apologetic grimace and Emori lets her eyes skip right over her. They have peace, at last, there is no need for the Commander of Death. But the good knight still has his role to play.
Murphy somehow morphs into the uncle, almost pseudo-parent, for both Jordan and Madi alike, much to his loud dismay. Octavia adopts the clean minimalist fashion of their foster world, lets the girl chasing butterflies peak through every so often at the surprises it throws their way. Diyoza joins them from time to time, laying Hope in the arms of these tortured women and pondering the resilience of females, of the human spirit. When Indra watches them she is reminded of an old truth, that warriors do not dream of war; they want to bored, to let their braids fall out and leave their guns unholstered; warriors want the battle done and the good guys victorious.
And in this way, ever vigilant but exiled to the outer circle, the dethroned watch the birth of a new life for their people. In this way, the young women begin to create their own.