a/n: misty! what's this?! another post-canon clexa fic?
i don't imagine that i'll ever fully parse out the complex feelings i've got about the 100, not for a while anyway. but that ending was something i won't stop thinking about for a while either, and i got to writing this after the election and the weird amount of empty relief lots of people felt, knowing how much there's left to do. and i figured it fit pretty well as my last fic of the year so i finished it up and here we are
title is from i know the end by phoebe bridgers
"I just don't really know what I'm supposed to do, now," Clarke murmurs, a few weeks into the After Days (as Murphy has taken to calling it). The Judge sits, cross-legged, a foot or so away from her. "I mean, I'm not used to it. Peace."
"None of you seem to be," the Judge responds, casting her - their? - gaze out at Clarke's friends, who have gathered around a massive trout that Octavia and Indra had managed to hunt down. Raven's excited to try and cook it with some new contraption she's put together. Clarke wonders, idly, if it will explode. "But you in particular."
"It's sad, right?" Clarke doesn't wait for an answer. "I don't know how to act when someone's not trying to kill me." She looks down in the creek where they're sitting a distance enough away from the others that none of them see her talking to an…an alien or a god or whatever it is that the Judge happens to be. She isn't even sure if the others would see anything at all, if they looked. The Judge doesn't have a reflection. Clarke keeps thinking that she'll turn around and be played the fool again, the girl chasing imaginary friends.
But the Judge had stayed. Even after Clarke had felt such immense, expanding relief and joy at knowing she finally, finally owed nothing more to her people, that she was with people who had loved her enough to give up everything else (and who would have predicted that?), even after she had no real reason to keep talking to something that had taken the form of her soulmate, the Judge had stayed.
And Clarke had welcomed that.
"You have suffered," the Judge says, carefully neutral in that way Lexa always was. Is. Despite the glaring fact that the Judge isn't Lexa, Clarke knows that she's somewhere in their collective, which means she's there. Sometimes she swears she can see her, the real her, in the way the Judge's face twitches, the way they say Clarke with the emphasis like that, spoken in Trigedasleng even when the rest of the sentence was in English. "And now that you are no longer suffering you are at a loss."
"Something like that." The sky is so blue. Clarke makes a mental note to teach herself to make some paper, to crush some berries for paint. It would come in handy, to have supplies here.
"And this is not the same as when you lived alone with Madi?"
"The world had just ended," Clarke retorts dryly. Verbal sparring with a god wearing the face of her soulmate. What had it all come to? "I had other things on my mind."
"So it is." The Judge closes their eyes, serene. The wind blows through their hair, and it occurs to Clarke that it shouldn't. She hasn't dared to touch them since the Test, fearing that her hand would pass right through and she would lose this, too.
But if she did. If she reached out. If Lexa was really there, impossibly, brilliantly…
"How do you do it?" Clarke adds, not expecting a solid answer. The Judge talks in riddles, when they're not nonchalantly bringing up some deep-buried memory of Clarke's as easily as she'd bring up the weather.
(It's sunny. It's been sunny for weeks, blue and warm and gentle, and Clarke keeps expecting something else)
"Carrying all those…species on your shoulders," she continues, as if the Judge can't literally read her thoughts.
"We aren't as prone to emotion as you are."
"Thanks."
"Our burden is nothing, that is all." The Judge hums a little to herself, one tiny note. Clarke tries to remember if it's something that Lexa had sung, but Lexa had never sung, so it probably isn't. It might not even be a song - the Judge might have no concept of music, as far as Clarke knows. "You cannot seem to let go of what weighs you down."
"The guilt?"
"All of it." The Judge picks at some dirt beneath their fingernails. Clarke thinks that this must be something they've learned through watching, which strikes Clarke as very creepy. "Your people, your responsibility, everything you've reached and struggled and sacrificed for. Now it's over."
"Do you always psychoanalyze the subjects of your tests?"
"No." And there it is - just a tiny bit of Lexa, just enough to give Clarke pause, just enough to wrench something out of her chest she didn't still think she had. "Just the ones that interest me."
Not everyone. Not you.
"Lexa's in there." It's not a question. "Isn't she?"
"We absorb some aspects of all subjects," the Judge says, clearing her throat a little. Clarke refuses to let the hope blossoming in her chest turn into anything else. "But due to the transcendent properties of the Flame…the way she has stubbornly against all manners of reason rallied for you…her consciousness has frequently forced its way to the forefront of our collective mind. In a manner of speaking."
"She can see me." Definitely not a question. Clarke's heart beats faster.
"Yes."
"If I…" Clarke almost does it, then. Almost reaches out to hold her hand - Lexa's hand - illusion-shattering be damned. Then the Judge straightens their back again and the hint of Lexa is gone.
"There are so many of us," the Judge says, expression too impassive to belong to Lexa but the eyes so world-weary, so exhausted. "You must know that, Clarke."
"I do."
"You cannot expect her to always be there."
"But she could be there? In…in some way, right?"
"Perhaps."
"Please." Clarke hates how small her voice sounds. She can't imagine it sounding any other way.
A pause. A long silence, broken only by the gentle babbling of a stream. Clarke can't remember a time before two weeks ago when she wasn't on high alert, when there wasn't the threat of war or death or a thousand other things looming behind.
Instead it's just her and a god wearing the face of her greatest love, hesitantly promising something that will break her if it's not true, and somehow this feels like the most dangerous thing she has ever done. The Judge shimmers, disappearing into the air, and for a moment Clarke thinks that she has failed again, that she has disappointed them with her pesky feelings and that they've decided to return to the stars, leaving her here in the forest, talking to nobody when she could be with her friends, rebuilding the world. But then something flickers in the corner of her eye and she feels like she's been hit with a rover.
"Clarke." Lexa looks at her, briefly. And it is Lexa, Clarke knows this. Her heart twists violently in her chest, not a docile puppy crush but something full of the universe shaking the overgrowth off itself and stretching towards the sun for the first time in over a hundred years.
"It's you," Clarke murmurs, and she doesn't reach for her - can't do it, can't let this moment end a second before it has to, before she wakes up or the Judge's impassive expression replaces the fondness in Lexa's face.
"I've always been with you." Lexa puts a hand to her face, wipes off the war paint with her palm. Her eyes are shining. Clarke inches closer. "You've borne so much, Clarke. You can rest now."
"I miss you," Clarke says, and she knows she's about to cry, but she wills the tears to wait just a little while longer. She needs to see Lexa clearly. She has to know she's here. "So much. I'm so tired, Lexa."
"I know." Lexa says it not with the cold, probing authority of the Judge, but with an understanding that Clarke never thought she'd feel again. Without needing to say it, Clarke knows she feels it, too. The exhaustion. The emptiness.
"How much longer do we have?" Clarke has so many questions, is the thing, but she doesn't think she'll ever ask them. All she wants is to bask in her, sit beside her, stay together in a way they never could have a lifetime ago.
"I don't know." Even as Lexa says it, she starts to shimmer. Clarke has to stop herself from reaching out and holding her. "This isn't it, Clarke. This isn't the end."
"I know." That doesn't stop Clarke's throat from clogging up, doesn't stop her from finally giving in and touching her fingertips to Lexa's, just a ghost of a touch, before she disappears completely and the Judge sits in her place, staring curiously at Clarke.
"How was that?" There's no malice in the question. Clarke knows it, because then she does start crying, and the Judge lets her, and the sun's gone down. She doesn't remember it setting, but it's nighttime now, and she can see a million stars from here.
"Thank you," she croaks out. Some part of her hates the Judge with the strength of worlds, for still looking like Lexa when she knows for certain now that they're not. The other part of her thinks that an alien with no concept of love didn't owe her anything at all.
"Lexa is persistent," the Judge says. "You will see her again. After all, you have an entire lifetime ahead of you."
"I do," Clarke breathes out, an exhalation nearly two centuries in the making. "Don't I?"
"But you'd best return to your companions before they start to tear the planet apart in search of you." The Judge stands, arms folded behind their back, and looks down at Clarke with the ghost of a smirk. Maybe some things can be taught. "Aren't you coming?"
"One second." Clarke looks at the stream, feels freer than she has in years. She stumbles to her feet, stomping out the numbness. There are so many stars, here. The Judge waits and then walks through the woods, out into the clearing, and Clarke's heart cracks open a little more at the sight of her friends around the fire, singing some old Earth song off-key.
"Another quality unique to your species," the Judge says, standing next to her. "Shifting vocal cords into lyrical musings and passing them along, generation after generation. Applying words to the noise."
"You don't sing?" Clarke almost elbows them before realizing her arm would probably pass right through. The flames dance in the Judge's eyes. Raven looks up and waves.
"Hey, Clarke!" she yells. "Where'd you go?"
"Just thinking!" Clarke yells back. The last members of the human race start another rousing rendition of "Toxic." She turns to the Judge. "You won't disappear again, will you?"
"No." The Judge pauses, nudges their head in the direction of the group. "But you would do well to remember that they're waiting." There's a blink, a shimmer, and Lexa is there again, and she walks in step with Clarke as she runs to join the world.
a/n: thinking about how jason said in the interview that there were moments when lexa shone through the judge.
may 2021 be better to us. we'll make it better.