Chapter 5:

It was hard to think of Arkadia as home anymore. It's weird to say that about the home of your only remaining family, your closest friends, and your most intimate confidants. It's odd to say that of a place where people you'd committed genocide to save were living. I'd been back exactly once in the last four months, and even then, I barely stayed for an hour before I'd had to escape again. But, truth be known, I wouldn't have stayed long even if it were an option. None of the reasons that I'd left in the first place had changed, and as a result, there wasn't much drawing me back. Polis felt like home. The forest between them felt like home. Niylah's outpost felt like home. Arkadia didn't. It only barely felt that way when I first made it back there with Anya – God it felt like that was ages ago – and it definitely didn't feel that way with Pike in charge.

"Are you okay?" Niylah's voice broke into my reverie.

I nodded. "I just thought that coming back to Arkadia would feel more like…" I let my words trail off.

"Like coming home," she finished for me.

"Yeah," I said. As close as we'd been, Niylah could do a pretty decent job of reading my mind.

"Yu gon we suna [you've been away a long time]," she said.

"No, taim swich ai op [no, the time changed me]," I replied.

I glanced over at Lexa, who was seated on a stump a few feet away. She wore a thin mask across her nose and mouth just in case we ran into someone who could recognize her. She'd also changed her war paint, so that even seen unmasked, she'd be hard to recognize. Few people outside her most intimate circle were fortunate enough to see her face unpainted, but the bird's wing motif she always painted over her eyes was both unique and readily recognized. She'd replaced it with a quartet of vertical bars that slashed down across each of her eyes to curve under her jawline. If nobody looked too closely, it would probably fool a solid majority of those grounders who had never been in the same room with her.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Niylah look over at me, then quickly look back, hoping that I wouldn't notice. "She was worried about you," she said, "when you did not return. She was worried."

"Worried about Wanheda, you mean," I replied.

"No, I don't," Niylah replied. "I know what it is to be worried for you, Klark. I know the difference."

I looked over at her, with some sympathy. This couldn't have been easy for her. She pretended not to notice when Lexa and I were together, and she did a good job of hiding her discomfort when she saw the two of us alone, but she was hurting, and I was the one who had hurt her.

We'd been watching the village for almost six hours at this point. In that time, Pike had sent two patrols out into the surrounding woods. One of the two had returned, the other was still running a circuit. They were on foot, for the moment, so it was unlikely that they'd cross what they thought was a 5-mile buffer zone. They were keeping it close to the camp, creating their own buffer zone, as it were. Sooner or later, though, Pike would push out farther. He'd either try to break the enemy lines, or he'd attack some Grounder village, assuming he hadn't done that already.

We'd decided not to ambush a patrol until we knew that they were going to break the 5-mile buffer zone. For the moment, anyway, it was critical that they thought they had some free movement within that buffer. They had to believe that Lexa— that Ontari was honoring her end.

I froze at my mis-thought. "Shit," I whispered.

"What?" Niylah asked.

"How did you find out that Lexa was dead?" I asked her.

"A messenger arrived approximately an hour before you did," Niylah replied. "He announced that a conclave had been convened."

"Lexa," I called her over. She stood from her stump and walked over to join us.

"Yes?" She asked as she sat next to me.

"When a conclave is announced, how do they pass that news to the different clans and villages?" I asked. "I mean, exactly what do you do?"

"A number of messengers are sent to all the major clans. From the major villages in each clan, they organize additional messengers to the surrounding villages. If needed, the fleimkepa organizes a search in all of the clans for any natblida." She summarized.

"What about Skaikru? They have no nightbloods, and by the time a conclave had been called, they were blockaded. Would a messenger be sent to them?" I asked.

Lexa shook her head, and her brow furrowed. "No. What are you thinking?"

"They don't know," I breathed, the realization felt like a punch in the chest, and I felt like an idiot for not realizing it sooner. "They don't know you're dead, and there's another commander in charge. As far as they know, you're still heda."

"Why would Pike care about that, even if he did know?" Niylah asked.

"He wouldn't, but the Lincoln and the other grounder warriors that he has imprisoned might," I countered. "They don't know either. How would they? Even if Pike had a messenger coming to him, which according to you, he didn't, he isn't exactly about to let his prisoners have mail call," I told her. "If we free them, they will follow you."

"How would we do that?" She asked.

"I don't know, yet," I admitted, "but if we can get you in front of them, have you breathe in and out for them a few times, and free them, will they follow you fighting their way out?"

"You're asking me to lie to my own people," Lexa pointed out.

"Yes. And maybe even ask them to die for you based on that lie," I told her. "Will they do it?"

Lexa chewed uncomfortably on her lower lip before she nodded silently.

"Okay, that changes things," I inwardly cursed myself again for not realizing it sooner. There was a lot of that going around. On the ark, communication was practically instantaneous, the people who needed to have information could get it within seconds. Here, it could take hours to weeks for word to spread out, and even then some people who might need that information wouldn't ever hear it. I had somehow thought that all the grounders, no matter where they were, would just magically know that Lexa had been replaced. Pike had built his own Trojan horse, and the Greek warriors inside didn't even realize it yet. "It's what we tried – what we would have tried to do at Mount Weather," I told her.

"It is a good plan," Lexa intruded on my thoughts, "if incomplete at the moment." She offered a one-sided smile.

I turned to Niylah. "Thank you," I told her.

She frowned, confused. "What did I do?"

"You make it easier to think," I told her, "easier to clear my thoughts."

She reached to take my hand almost without thinking before she glanced over at Lexa and stopped herself. Instead, she stood, her fingertips tracing the length of my forearm as she stepped back from me. "I will join Murphy in watching Arkadia," she announced. It was a painfully transparent excuse to get away, and I winced as she turned to leave. I watched the tree behind which she disappeared for a moment before I finally looked over at Lexa.

Lexa took one of the four throwing knives she had sheathed along either side of her torso and gently checked the edge. Satisfied at its sharpness, she unsheathed one of the two long swords that crisscrossed her back and similarly tested it for a moment. She'd opted not to carry a bow for the attacks on Skaikru. I'd seen the force and accuracy with which she could throw a knife, and it was hard to argue against the decision.

"You care for her," she said, finally. It wasn't an accusation, or even a question. It was an observation. A pure statement of fact. It was as if she was pointing out that it looked like it could rain later. "And she," she added, "cares for you."

I looked over to where Niylah had just stepped out of sight before I met her eyes again and offered her a wry smile. "You don't miss much, do you?"

"The ability to read body language has saved my life more than once," she replied.

That was certainly true. As commander she spent pretty much every waking moment of her life living with the possibility that a trusted advisor or ambassador could try to kill her at any moment. The ability to know when someone could attack her unexpectedly had undoubtedly saved her life on many occasions.

I took a moment to formulate my answer before I spoke again. "It's not what you think," I said finally.

Lexa gave a gentle nod for me to continue.

"After I…" I stopped and rephrased, "after Mount Weather," Lexa's expression darkened at the mention, but she did not interrupt, "I ran away. If you'd asked me then, I would have told you that I didn't plan to return, ever. I understand that even my own mother had practically given up on finding me, saying that I would only be found if I wanted to be, and I can tell you now that I didn't want to be found. If you hadn't sent Roan out to collect me, I would either still be out there," I glanced around the woods, absorbing their familiarity for a moment before I corrected myself "out here, or more likely, one of the bounty hunters that Azgeda sent after me would have gotten lucky." I paused, collecting my thoughts.

Lexa gently gestured for me to go on. Her expression was soft. Neither jealous nor accusatory, it merely encouraged me to continue speaking.

"For three months, when I heard anyone approaching, I went the other way. The occasional hunter entered my hunting grounds, but I gave them a wide berth. I watched high in a tree on more than one occasion as search parties from Skaikru tried to find me. Bellamy and the rest are smart, but it seems like never once did they think of looking up." I smiled at a memory, "they once stopped for lunch thirty feet directly below the branch I was resting on. All I needed to do to go home was to let them know I was there. It wouldn't have taken much, either. Barely more than a whisper, and I'd be sleeping in my own bed by nightfall. Instead I sat in complete silence for twenty minutes and watched them eat before they all piled back into the rover and drove away, without even once feeling the slightest temptation to speak up. For three months, I did everything I could to avoid any human contact. Even from people I knew and loved."

"I'm not sure that I understand," Lexa prodded gently.

"She," I nodded to where Niylah had disappeared, "was the only exception. I needed to trade for supplies, so I couldn't completely cut myself off from anyone else, but hers was the only trading post I went to, and even then I'd watch and wait until I knew she was alone before I went in."

"So you became close," Lexa realized.

"Not exactly," I paused, "I mean, yes, but it was more than that. It wasn't just that she was the only person I had any contact with. She knew who I was, and she protected me, even when I didn't even know I needed protection. When I knew her, I didn't know I was Wanheda. I didn't know that Azgeda had a bounty on my head. I didn't know that you were searching for me, and I didn't know that I had somehow become a pawn in high-stakes grounder politics. It would have been easy for her to hand me over to any one of what must have been countless bounty hunters that stopped by her little outpost. But she didn't. Instead, she was a friend when I didn't think I deserved one, a sounding board when I didn't think I wanted one, a nurse and caregiver when I didn't care if I was healed," I paused, uncomfortably, before I decided that Lexa didn't deserve a lie, "and a lover when I thought I shouldn't have one. And apart from all that, she was family when she knew I'd abandoned mine. It's how I knew I could trust her when you – when we needed a place to hide."

"And how did you feel about her?" Lexa asked.

This answer came a little more easily, "when I was with her, for just a second, I wasn't the mountain killer anymore. I wasn't holding the weight of the hundreds of people at Mount Weather that I'd had to kill to get my own people back. I wasn't seeing the faces of the men, women and children who had trusted and helped me as the radiation burned them all. I wasn't seeing Finn's face as he bled out because I couldn't watch him tortured to death, or hearing Raven's scream as she realized what I'd done. I wasn't seeing the faces of the hundreds of people that I abandoned to be blown up at TonDC, and I wasn't seeing the faces of the three hundred of your warriors I ordered burned to death at the drop ship. She was what I needed, and although I never asked, I think she knew how desperately I needed it."

"Dula yu op hod em in?" She asked.

There wasn't even the tiniest hint of jealousy in her question, and it shouldn't have surprised me that that was what she really wanted to know. I pursed my lips as I looked over where Niylah had disappeared for a moment. It was a question Lexa deserved to have answered, but if I'm being honest, I wasn't exactly sure what a truthful answer was. My feelings for Niylah were… complicated, to say the least. There was no doubt that Niylah held a special place in my heart. And there was no way I could deny that I felt a bond with her that I could describe as loving. After some thought, I finally spoke, "not in the way you mean, but Niylah was – is – very special to me. For what she was and what she did for me, yes, I will always love her."

Lexa nodded, accepting my answer for the truth that it was. She followed my gaze to where Niylah had been a few moments before. It was nearly a full minute before she spoke again. "I am glad you had someone to help you heal," she said, finally, "I only wish that I hadn't been the reason why you needed it."

"Don't," I shook my head, "you did what was right for your people." This was a sore point, and to be honest, I was tired of retreading the same ground.

"You are my people," Lexa told me. "I did not realize it then. I should have."

I reached to clasp her hand with my own. It occurred to me that in a very real sense, we'd had a way out. Back when we first arrived at Niyla's outpost, we could have disappeared. We could have vanished into the woods forever and nobody would have found us. Hell, there was probably a time when Lexa would have suggested it. The fact that she hadn't suggested it, nor, to my ability to determine had she even considered it said a lot about how much the last months had changed her. I remembered how we'd both expressed a longing for a time when we would no longer owe anything to our people. Now that dream seemed more unreachable than ever.

-x-

I looked down at the front gate of Arkadia. I'd removed the scope from the rifle I'd used a few days earlier. It wasn't a telescope, exactly, but it allowed me a better look at the camp than the naked eye.

"What do you see?" Lexa asked.

"They're staging another patrol," I told her.

"So why are you smiling?" She asked.

"They're loading the Rover," I replied. "Wait's over. They're going to try to run the blockade."