In the end, it's the reapers who outnumber them.
Still reeling from the losses of their last war, still healing the scars from their old battles, they try and avoid fighting at all costs.
But reapers are not men. They don't crave peace or allies. They crave blood. That's what they're told when they build a fortress around their camp. That's what they're told when anyone old enough to hold a gun and not topple over is lined up at the gate to that fortress and trained to shoot. Trained to kill. Trained to die.
That's what they told Clarke when she was shoved back into the medical bay.
"We need people here," they told her. "To heal. To build. To make the fight worth it."
But she was no doctor.
She was just a girl who had to watch her friends line up one by one to go fight a war they couldn't possibly win.
They tried to take volunteers first, when it came to the younger ones. Any adult who wasn't a necessity at camp was given a gun and sent out to fight straight away. Any remaining member of the hundred was put through "boot camp"—which was really just a way to delay the inevitable. If they didn't know how to fight after everything they'd been through then they never would.
But it was hard to send a fourteen year old kid off to die without convincing yourself you'd given him some sort of preparation. That she'd at least have some sort of chance.
Bellamy was the first volunteer.
Clarke watched him as he stepped up to Commander Kane. She watched him as he reached across and shook his hand. As Kane put a gun in his hand and slapped him on the shoulder, as if they had just made drinking plans, rather than agreeing to send Bellamy off to die. She watched as he glanced over at where she stood, frozen halfway in the door to the med bay, and she watched as he gave her a small nod before following Kane to the training base.
He was the first of her friends she watched line up and shake Kane's hand and he was the one who taught her that it was easier to feel numb than to acknowledge the pain.
She started convincing herself that he was dead before he was even gone. If she got used to it early, maybe it wouldn't hurt as much when they put his broken body on the table in front of her, asking her to save him when they knew she couldn't.
So she told herself that it wasn't him, it was just his ghost she kept seeing around camp. His ghost who would stand at the door to the med bay on his break for lunch, waiting for her to pause and talk to him, and his ghost who shook his head in disappointment every time he was called away before she would look over at him.
It was his ghost who waited outside her tent at night and his ghost who reached out but never touched her arm.
His ghost who asked her to please, please understand that if this was the only way he could help his people, then that's what he had to do.
It was his ghost who pressed a kiss to her cheek and who made her an impossible promise on the day he had to leave.
"I'll come back."
His ghost whose blurry figure she watched walk out of camp, and his ghost that she called out to right as the gates closed.
After that day she the only two places she went were her tent and the med bay. She took a route that didn't pass the gate because she found if she lingered by it too long she would see more of her friends trickle out to greet death. She'd see them come back in pieces, or she'd see a closed gate where she willed her friends to walk through, and she'd see nothing at all.
She stayed away from the gate.
She didn't pause for meals most days. A young girl training to be a doctor would sometimes remember to bring something in for Clarke to eat, but she had long since lost her appetite. She couldn't tell the difference between the ache that had grown in her stomach since the day he walked out of camp and the ache of hunger, and the first ache seemed so much stronger, so the second was often ignored.
She learned that the number of lives she saved never erased the pain of the lives she lost, and that blood didn't like to come out from under fingernails, and that a patient can tell when you're lying so sometimes it's better to say nothing at all.
The first one of her friends to be brought through the gates on a stretcher is Monty.
She didn't even realize he was back in the camp until he was lying on the table in front of her. It had been a while since she'd treated one of her friends and she'd forgotten how the breath always left her body when she saw their face twisted up in pain, and how a rope wrapped itself tightly around her ribcage and tugged with every anguished noise they made.
She had to remind herself to be numb as she covered his bloody leg with her hand as she waited for someone to bring her the moonshine to wipe it clean. She couldn't remember how to be numb when she felt the heat of his skin under her hand, and the trickle of blood seeping through the cracks between her fingers. All she could remember was Monty, the Monty from before any of this happened, the one from their original camp, messing around with Jasper, and everything felt wrong, because that's where Monty should be, not on a table ripped open in front of her.
He was the first of her friends that she stitched back together on her table, and the first of her friends that she begged for forgiveness, for staying behind like a coward. He was the first to hold her hand and let her cry by his bed when she found out that as soon as he was healed, he was going back out again.
He was the first person she had to see walk out twice.
It was four months before Bellamy came back through the gate.
He was laid out, being carried by two other men. She could barely make out his face as they brought him over to her, he was covered in dirt and blood. His eyes were swollen shut, and she was grateful because then he wouldn't see her weakness, he wouldn't see her gasp for air at the sight of him mangled in front of her; he wouldn't see her knees buckle underneath her, or her collapse into a chair.
He wouldn't see her finally regain her breath only to walk out of the med bay and leave him in the care of someone else.
He wouldn't see her storm to the back of camp, where the wall towered high, and the ground around it was deserted. He wouldn't see her pick up a rock and throw it at the wooden wall blocking her from her friends and he wouldn't see that the horrible scream, muted only by tears came from her.
She was supposed to be as brave as him, and she was glad he couldn't see that she wasn't.
She was glad it wasn't her hands trying to put him back together because she still felt in her palms every broken and bruised part of Monty that she hadn't been there to prevent. She still felt the warmth of his blood on her skin, and the shame that came with knowing if she had been there to have his back, he might have lost less. Her hands couldn't take anymore, and if they were the tools used to put Bellamy back together, she was afraid she might just fall apart.
She's not there when he wakes up.
When she finally does go to see him, he is sitting up in his bed, looking down at his hands in his lap and she almost turns right back around because that's not Bellamy Blake, it's not the Rebel Leader she knew, it couldn't have been the man who had been by her side for so long, the man whose absence had been a weight pressing in on her from all sides for four months. It couldn't be him.
He was beaten and broken and had never looked so small, and Clarke felt selfish for crying, because if anyone deserved to cry—had the right to cry—it was him. But he let her rest her head on her hands on top of his bed and he stroked her hair while she cried, waiting for his own chance to grieve.
She couldn't watch him leave a second time. He didn't ask her to, but he left her in the med bay without a promise, and she thought that maybe he was waiting for her at the gate to finally give it. But by the time she was able to drag her feet towards the great wall, he'd already gone, and she was back where she had been before, left staring at a gate, eyes growing darker and less hopeful each day.
More came back and left.
She'd stitched up Octavia twice, and Miller once. Murphy came back unconscious, and she was forced to see him lying there in the med bay, unresponsive, day after day after day.
Wick came back with a broken spine and a cut up face, and she had to watch him cry when she told him that in all likelihood he would never walk again and she had to listen to him bark at her to leave him alone.
He was like her. He didn't want his friends to see him weak. He didn't realize there were much worse things she had already seen, and there was no protecting her from them.
He made himself a wheelchair, and he followed her around the med bay.
He'd tell her stories about what it was like outside the walls. He'd break her heart with each word, not knowing that all she wanted was to be out there with her friends, and if she couldn't have it then she wanted to live life in a vacuum, pretending that nothing outside the med bay existed.
But he was there, and he was with her, and she felt selfish and guilty because the rope around her ribcage loosened a bit because at least she wasn't alone anymore.
It was three weeks and the only one of her friends that Wick hadn't mentioned was Bellamy.
She couldn't decide if that was better for her. At least she wouldn't have to know the horrors he was going through without her by his side.
But without it, without knowing, she was left to imagine. And she imagined the worst.
Six months to the day that Bellamy left, Wick came into the med bay.
"He's trying to be brave," he told her.
"He doesn't have to try."
Wick didn't say anything else that day. He left the med bay, leaving a note and a small parcel on her table, without a word. It wasn't a day where she wanted to talk.
She opened up the note and the parcel later, when everyone else had left. She walked to her tent through the route by the gate, and when she got to the gate she stopped, sat on the ground and open what Wick left for her.
The parcel was really just a small bundle of fabric tied together with rope. She untied it and the fabric fell away, leaving her holding a small wooden carving of a shooting star.
Clarke, the note read. I think I know what I'd wish for.
She got back to her tent and tucked the note into her pocket. The carving she shoved under her mattress. It was too hard to look at a gift from a dead man.
He didn't come back until three of their friends were dead and buried in the ground.
She'd had them buried just outside the gate so that everyone who led a new group out of their camp, had to lead the new recruits right past the graves. They had to see what they were condemning them to.
It was the only time she was allowed to leave the gates.
She brought flowers every day. The three mounds of dirt were covered in ratty wildflowers she found on the edges of their camp, because she couldn't find anything better and anytime she went to venture further into the woods one of the guards would stop her.
So she piled them with brown straggly flowers.
It wasn't enough.
Instead of flowers one night, she grabbed a gun. She made her way to the back of the gate and pitched the gun over. There was a tree within the walls that had a branch that dangled over the other side of the fence.
Her ankles screamed out as she dropped down, slamming into the dirt below but she just picked up the gun and slung it over her shoulder and made to move out.
There was a crack of a branch behind her. She whirled around pointing the gun at the dark figure coming out from the trees.
"Hey," he said, holding his hands up. "Don't shoot."
She didn't talk to him until they were in front of the graves.
She'd dropped the gun before they made it all the way around, but he picked it up after her. He stayed behind her as they stood in front of the flower covered graves.
"It's been ten months."
She sat down next to the first one. "I haven't heard a word about you in months. For all I knew you were next."
He sat down next to her, wrapped his arm around her shoulder, pulled her into his chest. She rested her head on his shoulder and her hand on his chest. She felt the rise and fall of his chest. He was there, he was alive. It wasn't her ghost from before, it was him, it was Bellamy.
"Think it's about time for me come home," he whispered into her neck.
Clarke just leaned into him and felt the beating of his heart under the bloodstained skin of her fingers and felt the rope around her ribcage slip free.