A/N: There are no right answers to the question of who Clarke is talking to in this chapter, or who she is talking about. I didn't even have an answer in mind when I wrote this. I had a dozen answers and all of them could be true. Feel free to share your own take on it in the comments.
Clarke turned the stone over in her hands as she knelt on the ground. It was rough and misshapen. Covered in grime. It felt right for her purpose. She dug a little hole in the dirt with her hands, uncaring of hygiene. Her hands weren't clean. They didn't need to be. The only place where cleanliness mattered was with a scalpel in her hand, and she hadn't held one of those in a long time. The scalpel was only for when things could be saved. There was something poetic about surgery. You started with a clean slate, everything shiny and disinfected. Then you made the mess. If you were lucky, really lucky, then you got to clean up that mess afterwards. You could smile and hum a little melody and scrub things back to that clean slate again, instead of staring blankly at your bloody hands, reminding yourself over and over again that you weren't the one that died. She supposed that this, her plan for the morning, was just another variation of that.
When the rock was sitting snugly in its little hole, she sat back on her knees, hands clenched, spine straight. She couldn't decide where to look. She didn't have much religious feeling. The dirt was just dirt. The rock was just a rock. The sky was just a sky. She couldn't believe in the metaphors of death. But she had to look somewhere. She didn't want to close her eyes. There were scary things in that black space, things she didn't want to see while she was doing this. Her eyes settled on a bird hopping along a branch. It would have to do. She knew it was just a bird. If it flew off in the middle of this thing, she would not take it as a bad omen. She wouldn't.
"So," Clarke breathed out. "I wanted to talk to you. And I lost your grave a long time ago. So this will have to do. I wish I could say that I hope you're proud of me. But I know that you're not. And that's just the way it has to be. If I had gone down that path, if I had listened to that little voice inside my head, listened to your voice, I would be dead. And maybe that would have been right and good, but it isn't what I chose. My instincts tell me to keep trying, to keep moving forward. It might be futile. It might even be evil, when you get right down to it. But I'll keep doing it anyway."
She scratched an itch on her arm and when she looked up the bird was gone. It meant nothing. She looked down at the stone instead. This was better. The sun wasn't in her eyes anymore. "I'm sorry for that. I feel like I could scream myself hoarse saying that I'm sorry until the end of time, and it still wouldn't be enough. But that isn't why I'm here."
She gave in to what felt natural and closed her eyes. "I'm here because you knew a side of me that the people I have left never knew. And I need to access that side of myself. Because there's someone here, someone that reminds me of her so much that it's like a stab to the gut. I have to reach them before it's too late and I just don't know how. That old Clarke Griffin feels alien to me now. She isn't in my head the way you are. She might as well be on the moon. But you always knew how to talk to her. You always knew exactly what to say. So I'm begging you. Whatever problems that linger between us across the void of death, whatever sins and existential differences, whatever love or hatred you have for me now, please help me save them."
There was a silence that wasn't silence, as something was whispered across the void.
"Thank you." It was a whisper on the wind, because Clarke was already gone. She had the time to talk and to listen. But she didn't have time to linger by makeshift graves. She had some saving to do.