A/N ~ My shot at the clexa reunion which we all know is coming. (Shut up.) I've been feeling the need to write a reunion ever since 2x15 (otherwise known as The Irrepairable Breaking Of My Heart) and although DM's taking up most of my time, listening to Jamie Brown's song Home To Me kind of pushed me over the edge. This is a three shot and I probably won't expand it further than that. Enjoy at your own risk.

After Effects

[ 0.33 ]

Stale rain dripped steadily from the boughs of the trees, the leaves, the leftovers' of the mornings' storm. Clarke's breath froze in her lungs and scraped her throat as it left her. Her fingers were shaking, and the filmy skins of the nuts she'd stockpiled earlier had worked their painful way under her fingernails, but that didn't matter. She had food enough for the next few days. Her knife hung, cold and secure, at her belt. That was all that mattered. She had no idea how long she'd been alone. Moments bled together, no span to time, and the moss-grown days of walking and hunting, foraging and sleeping drifted into one another, an unintelligble mass of blisters and broken thoughts. After a while, solitude shatters itself and becomes a friend.

Clarke hopped down from the tangle of tree roots she'd scouted from, feeling the damp soil crumble under her worn boots. She could have sworn she'd heard something. Well - something more. Every second of her existence was filled with the drip of rain or the crawl of animals on the crunch of leaves, the wind whistling through whispering branches, rivers running over clicking crickets. The endless symphony of the wild. She wondered if she even knew how to speak anymore. Useless practises died hard. Like everything that was good enough to know better.

Snap.

Clarke became ice. Her fingers inched for her knife. Her blood jolted alert in her veins. And she turned around, quiet as possible. The yellow eyes of the wolf met hers with a vicious understanding. She gripped the knife until the ridges of the hilt sunk impressions into the grime of her palm. If she stayed still for long enough it'd leave her alone. If it thought she was a threat she'd have to kill it. That was all she ever did, after all. She could see the animals' thought process. She could see herself through its mind. Just another beast. Feral.

A growl ripped from its throat and Clarke knew what was going to happen. Its paws tore through the soil, bounding towards her as her instinct took charge of her adrenaline, and she took up her defensive stance, teeth bared. She swerved sideways, steadying herself on a tree trunk as wolf ran at her, spinning furiously as it realized she was out of its path. Clarke lunged before it could move, so she was behind it. It turned around the instant before her knife would have lashed out. It was staring right at her, backed up into an oak. Her blood froze as her skin burned, and she could feel her pulse dizzyingly in her fingertips. The wolf flashed a glimpse of yellowed teeth at her, growling as it stalked foreward. She threw herself to the side, scrabbling back upright, and it pounced on the spot where she'd stood moments before. A grunt ripped from her throat as Clarke zig zagged around trees, throwing her body down into the dirt to avoid the brindled grey's claws. She rolled onto her back, and that was when she realized her knife had been lost in her feeble flee. Her cold hands froze on the empty space where her knife should have been. Grey fur rippled in the chilled breeze as the wolf padded over to her. She scrambled backwards, half-heartedly. So this is it then. Yellow eyes advanced. She never could have imagined this was how it finished. Distantly, as if from far away, the voice of a poltergiest wormed into the forefront of her oddly calm mind. Death is not the end. Clarke forced her eyes to stay open as the wolfs lips drew back from rows of lethal teeth, almost snarling.

Then the blood rained hot on her face and she couldn't piece it together.

Not until she caught the glint of silvery-sharp metal protruding from the things' throat. Scarlet dribbled down from the blade, sticking in his fur. The wolf gave a small whine, but the bright danger behind those uncanny eyes was all but out. Clarke blinked her panic away, staring around and up, across the stretch of woodland, and her chest froze over and her insides collapsed at the prescence of the ghost.

The ghost was beautiful and Clarke wanted to burrow down into the earth beneath her, to bequeath herself to the dirt. The trigedakru surrounding Clarke's only breathing demon seemed uncertainly conflicted, but the ghost murmured something in the language Clarke never mastered without looking away from her, and they retreated, out of sight, commanded by the haunted look in the ghost's eyes.

The ghost stepped tremulously forewards, eyes blasted wide open, and Clarke's entire body ached with reality. Her gaze scoured her. They had become each others' shadows. She'd thought her life was worth saving. "Why?" Clarke's voice sounded harsh and unfamiliar in her ears, stripped back and scraped raw. Wild. Or maybe she'd just forgotten what it sounded like.

Lexa glanced down at the spread of moss under her feet, and the hesitation in her lips and the curl of her fingers shot straight to the cold dark place Clarke's heart had once been. "Habit, I suppose."

She had no idea what she was supposed to do now. She wanted to run at her, knock her to the ground and then tear off in the opposite direction, because she could never really hurt Lexa. She wanted to be able to. She wanted to go to her and remember the smell of her hair, to hide inside her and never come out. She wanted her to be dead. She wanted her to be immortal. She wanted to collapse and stay in the soil forever.

And Clarke felt something like the tug of a stitch where she should have felt the closing of a book, and she wondered if maybe it had been Lexa she'd been searching for all along.

She couldn't be still any longer or she'd never move again. Clarke threw herself foreward, agonizingly forcing herself not to look at the woman she'd never quite shaken off, burying her fingers in the russet ruin of the wolf's throat, digging through redundent tendons and the sticky stains smeared through his fur until her shaking fingers could grip the soaked blade, yanking it out and hurling it through the trees towards her with all the force she could muster. Her breathing was taking on its own course, lungs churning oxygen for something to focus on, each drag of earth-scented air scraping the cold inside of her throat.

Then she caught sight of her hands, fingers coated crimson, so impossibly bright against her filthy skin, red, red, red blood that had once flowed through the veins of something pure and something alive, clinging to her hands, branding her. The things we have to do to survive don't define us. They do now. Wolf blood was drying on her face, and still oozing sluggishly from the dead things' neck. I'm not going in. She had to get it off, god, she had to get it off. Clarke's gaze burned into it. May we meet again. She was rubbing her hands, but it was just getting worse, getting everywhere, like when children painted with their hands. She'd killed children who had done that. She was scraping her hands on her clothes, staining, on the ground, gathering earth. May we meet again. She had to get it off.

"Clarke, Clarke," She hadn't realized Lexa was hurrying towards her until she was kneeling beside her in the dirt, and her eyes, her beautiful, beautiful eyes, lost and hurt and everything else under the sun were searching for Clarke's. Her hands found Clarke's, forcefully stilling her crazed crusade to cleanliness. Clarke's skin was electrified, what was left of her heart crumbling away like ash in the wind at the contact, her bones becoming steel. "Clarke, stop,"

Clarke met her gaze because she couldn't not anymore. She wanted to wrench her hands away, tear away from Lexa, to scream and rage and leave as much as she wanted to grip her wrists and grip her tight and not let go. She wanted the dead person she used to be back. She might have known what to do. But Lexa's eyes were like some tempestuous ocean, and so damn readable. There is no stopping for me now. It might have been a minute, or it might have been a millenium that they stayed like that. Clarke wasn't good at time anymore.

But then Lexa stood up and turned away, wiping the blood from her knife on the cloth of her sleeve. Clarke watched her still figure, but she didn't turn back. She waited a moment, and then she was walking away, thick hair rippling in the breeze, like she'd done before, when they were supposed to be beside each other, when they were so close to fixing each other. Lexa was halfway across the leafy clearing when she stopped and Clarke heard her sigh with a sharp clarity. "Well?" She heard the tremour beneath the outward strength of her voice. "Are you coming?"

I can't. Clarke rose to her feet, blood and dirt clinging to her. No. But her feet were already closing the distance. When they were side by side, Clarke focused on the silver cloud of her breath instead of the familiar heart beating in the heda beside her. She wasn't sure where the rest of the hunting party had gone, but it wasn't here. She wasn't sure where they were going, even though she'd spent however long it had been learning the land as well as any grounder. And she wasn't sure what was happening, either.

But somewhere along the line, when she was drowning in the roar of the silence, Clarke found her voice. "You didn't go to Polis,"

"No," Lexa was looking softly, determinedly ahead. The flutter of her eyelashes was quietly destroying her. For a second Clarke thought she was going to say something else, but she was wrong.

After infinity the village rose up around them, wood and smoke and memories, and she nearly turned away, just left. Instead, she followed Lexa's set path. She'd had no idea she was so close to Ton DC. But she tried to stay away from all things human. Either everybody was out on the hunt, or just gone; she only picked up on a handful of grounders going about their business. None stared, none protested; deterred by the warning writ through Lexa's stance. Or maybe they didn't recognize Clarke; Clarke barely recognized civilization. Like a dream. Clarke steeled herself, mouth grimly set, following Lexa down to the room where she'd once decided to let countless people burn. The effect was dizzying, even as she followed the commander into a foreign room, some kind of storage compartment. So disorientating that she just stood there, absorbing the past and shaking it off.

Which was why it took so long for her to realize what Lexa was doing, going around the hall, picking up various items, gathering them with a quietly stormy efficiency. Then her face was opposite hers, and she was loading the things into Clarke's arms. Clarke frowned. Hard bread, waterskins, throwing knives. This time it was her forcing Lexa to just fucking look at her. Clarke studied her and wondered how they got here. "You're making me leave?" Her throat ached from speaking again. This whole thing was so surreal. Like a fantasy. Like a hallucenation. Like a story someone else was telling her. (It was just coincidence that it was also the only real thing she'd felt in months.)

Lexa blinked reproachfully. "I assumed you didn't want to stay."

But you didn't just leave me there. The ghost voice in her mind swam back into focus. You couldn't leave me to die. That was weakness. And then everything came crashing onto her, and her nails bit deep into her bloody palms, and her insides collapsed. I thought love was weakness. Clarke took a step foreward, one step closer, but she couldn't bring herself to actualize the idea of just grabbing Lexa and holding her tight, not yet. She didn't have the strength. The force in her muscles and her marrow drained away. All this time I've been alone. Her mouth was dry with words she hadn't verbalized, throat tight around a tangled ball of unspoken half-sounds, heart pulsing with everything else. She tried to loose herself in the dark green shine of Lexa's eyes. And just like that, like blood, it was welling up and spilling out of her. "I defeated the mountain," Clarke wasn't crazy. Her voice had never sounded like that before.

"Yes." Lexa breathed, with a strange kind of knowledge.

"I defeated the mountain," She repeated, if only to remind herself. Her teeth tore at the inside of her mouth to deterr the tears that was stupidly filling the empty spaces in her. "I killed them all," She shook her head. "I shot Dante Wallace, and then I killed them all." The way Lexa was looking at her made her want to cry even more. "I did it, Lexa," her voice had dropped. She probably sounded insane. She probably was. She existed alone now. Even the reapers were better off. "I pulled the lever,"

Lexa's stare was hard and understanding, but her voice was a feeble attempt. At what? "Jus drein jus -"

"No." Clarke shook her head again. "No. I took the blood of the guilty. But there were people in that mountain who helped me. Saved my friends' lives. There were kids there, Lexa. Children. And I killed them." Lexa opened her mouth to say something, but Clarke couldn't stop herself. Because it had all been inside her for too long. She'd been alone with it all for so long it had gotten into her system, coursed through her veins, poisoned her. And now, here she was, the one person who knew, the one person who she wanted to tell the most. "I saved my people, I got everything I wanted. And then I left them, and I've been living like - like an animal ever since," her voice was rising. "Not because I'm trying to repent, because I can't ever do that, but because I just - I can't be around those people anymore!" And then you show up. (And the sight of you regrows my heart just so you can break it with every sweep of your eyelashes.)

Lexa studied her for a moment. "I understand."

"I know," Clarke murmured. You're the only one who ever can.