Chapter 1
Clarke Griffin dies on a Wednesday.
She wants to say that there was something special about the day. An epic battle or an heroic last stand.
She wishes her death was for something, to save something, to save someone.
She wishes it was more than just a slow succumbing to a relatively unremarkable disease.
Clarke guesses that because her life was full of such chaos, some deity must have decided that she should go quietly.
It isn’t quiet though.
Raven’s the first to find out, after Clarke of course.
Clarke wanted to keep it a secret for as long as possible but she should have known that it wouldn’t be that easy.
In fairness, Raven waits until the third time Clarke collapses before she locks them both in the engineering lab and demands to know just what the hell is going on.
Clarke barely manages to form the words “I’m dying,” before she bursts into hysterical laughter which then dissolves into gut wrenching sobbing as she takes in the look on Raven’s face.
Clarke wishes Raven would have accepted the inevitable as quickly as she had, but she doesn’t. Raven starts working on more effective radiation therapy and medication delivery systems and a bunch of other things that Clarke knows won’t make any difference. She’s dying and she doesn’t deserve any miracles.
Abby is the next to find out and Clarke has never seen her so angry.
The worst part is Abby isn’t even angry at Clarke.
Clarke wishes she would be. It would be easier to deal with if everybody blamed her. If they just shrugged and patted her hand and silently looked at her as if they’d expected it after all the damage she’d done.
But Abby is even more determined than Raven. They work together developing new technology and treatments and they even rope Monty and Jasper into gathering herbs and plants and pouring over medical textbooks for anything that could possibly help.
Clarke wants to scream and she wants to cry and she wants to fight and give up and she just wants to be done but they won’t let her. She loves them for it but she also hates them for loving her so much.
With Monty and Jasper on the ‘We Will Save Clarke’ bandwagon the positivity is almost overwhelming.
She nearly sags with relief when Octavia’s reaction is more subdued. Oh, there’s still a whole lot of hope in her eyes. She was, after all, the girl under the floor with every odd stacked against her. Octavia knows exactly how valuable hope is and how even in the darkest circumstances your wishes can come true.
But there’s also an uneasy acceptance that this time hope might not be enough. That even when you fight something with everything you have, sometimes, you still lose.
Murphy surprises her.
She’d thought he’d be pretty indifferent to it, laugh it off, make a joke about how even princesses have to face the reaper. That just because she’s one of the privileged doesn’t mean she’s untouchable.
He barely even blinks, just nods and tells them all that he’ll help in any way he can. Later he’ll touch Clarke’s shoulder, quirk his lips and whisper that she never gave up on him even when he was dying of whatever disease the grounders had unleashed upon them. He’ll tell her that he owes her for saving him even after all he’d done, even when saving him meant risking herself.
He tells her that he’ll be here for whatever she needs.
Clarke nods past the lump in her throat. She never expected to appreciate him as much as she does now.
There’s an unspoken agreement that no one is to tell Bellamy until they know for sure there’s either no saving Clarke (she doubts they’ll allow that thought even when she’s taking her last breath) or when they’ve found a way to save her.
She wants to pretend she doesn’t know why this unspoken agreement exists.
Bellamy is her partner, her best friend, the one person she knows will understand everything she’s feeling, but she can’t tell him. She just can’t.
Predictably, when he finds out (because, as Raven kindly reminded her, ‘of course he was going to find out Clarke, you idiot’) all hell sort of breaks loose.
She wasn’t prepared for their argument and she’s pretty sure whatever surviving vestiges of humanity on the other side of the planet weren’t either when he starts yelling at her for keeping this from him.
It takes a lot of time to calm him down and even then she’s about 90% sure he’s in danger of having a heart attack from all the strain it’s causing him to get himself under control.
He looks as broken as she feels and all she wants to do is weep.
She does weep when he looks at her, really looks at her, and voices the thoughts that have been lingering between them for months now.
“We were supposed to have time.” His voice is brittle and shaky and she’s afraid that if he so much as tries to swallow his whole being will just collapse in on itself with the emotions he’s obviously trying to hold back.
Because she gets it, she really does.
They were supposed to be an us. In some vague, distant future there was time for them to work out this thing, this bond, between them.
They were meant to be more and now that more that they’d fought for will never happen.
She almost feels relieved that they never started anything because the pain she feels over losing what was never really theirs is startling in its intensity. It runs rampant through her veins, eating at her nerves and cutting through every last inch of her skin, burning her irreparably with its viciousness.
Clarke chokes with the knowledge that she can never have everything with this man that she has grown to love more than she ever thought possible.
Bellamy is initiated into the ‘We Will Save Clarke’ club and somehow ends up becoming it’s number one advocate.
It’s three months later when things really start to take a turn for the worse.
They’ve exhausted all their options and everything they’ve tried hasn’t helped. Clarke almost wants to say ‘I told you so’ with each failed treatment, but she recognizes how painful this is for everyone around her so she tries for their sake.
When she dies everything will stop. There won’t be pain or grief or sadness. She won’t have to find some inner strength, shake herself off and soldier on. She’ll just be dead. Gone.
Death will happen to her but her loss will happen to everyone else and again Clarke wishes they didn’t love her so much. It would be easier if she were hated.
She weakens substantially a week after Octavia leaves with Lincoln to find a clan with medicine Lincoln thinks might be able to at least slow down her deterioration.
Bellamy barely leaves her side any more. He tells her stories. Sometimes he tells her about the Earth’s history. Long ago battles and people who were revered as legends.
Her favourites are his stories of mythology. He tells her about the gods and the goddesses, the heroes and the monsters, the winners and the losers. Mostly he just emphasises how, even when it looked like there was no hope left, the heroes still won.
She loves him a little more every time he tells those stories.
He’s so strong, so determined and focused. He makes her happy. He makes her want to hope.
She tries to sit with him as much as possible, loathes having to lay down whenever her body can no longer support her.
Bellamy is gentle and kind and he makes her ache for everything she’ll miss when she’s gone.
He kisses her more than he should but less than she wants him to.
She knows every kiss, every moment they share, will cost him in the end. It will make it that much harder to let her go but she can’t help wishing he’d give in completely.
She wants to get lost in him before she’s lost to the world.
Clarke gets her miracle when Octavia and Lincoln return.
The medicine they bring works wonders for about two weeks.
It’s the best two weeks of Clarke’s life.
She spends most of it with Bellamy.
They go on walks by the lake, go swimming under a giant waterfall, have picnics in the middle of a field full of sunflowers. He kisses her with everything he has and she kisses him back with everything she has left.
They sleep under the stars on a particularly hot night and finally give in to everything between them.
Clarke wants to sing with joy when Bellamy gazes down at her as their bodies work together. It’s slow and tender and sweet.
She loves him and she tries to convey every ounce of that love with every kiss and every touch she gives him.
When they finally come back down, Bellamy laughs into her hair. He asks her if she ever imagined they’d be doing this when they hated each other so much in the beginning.
She tells him, smirking, that she did but she pictured them fucking against a tree after a particularly loud argument. Bellamy laughs harder and mutters an ‘of course you did, princess.’ against her neck.
Bellamy Blake asks Clarke Griffin to marry him the night before she dies.
She collapses before she gives him an answer.
When she wakes up a few hours later, her heart beating far more slowly than she knows it should, the first thing she sees is his face.
“Figures I’d ask you to marry me and you’d just about drop dead with excitement.”
She smiles weakly, coughs to clear her throat and squeezes his hand.
“That’s not funny.” She whispers with as much force as she can.
“I’m not laughing.” Bellamy swallows harshly, blinking back tears.
Clarke closed her eyes and smiled again.
“What did Poseidon say to the sea monster?”
Bellamy huffed, exasperated.
“Seriously?”
Clarke smiled wider and waited.
“Clarke.”
She raised an eyebrow and laughed quietly.
“Fine. What did Poseidon say to the sea monster?”
Clarke opened her eyes and winked.
“What’s Kraken.”
Bellamy laughed, shaking his head. “Nerd.”
“Hey, who taught me this stuff? You’re the original nerd, loser.”
Clarke grinned at Bellamy, congratulating herself mentally as he grinned back.
His next words brought her back to reality.
“I’m not ready.”
“When have we ever been ready for anything?”
“I can’t do it, Clarke. I can’t...I can’t say goodbye.”
“So don’t.”
Bellamy scoffed.
“Tell me about us. Don’t say goodbye, just...just tell me about us.”
He looked at her and smiled. The tears were flowing freely now and Clarke could feel the beginning of hers gently cascade down her cheeks.
“We would’ve married in the summer. In the field with the sunflowers.”
“You’re pretty confident I’d have said yes.” Clarke whispered.
“You love me.”
“I do.”
“Then we’d have married in summer. I’d have built us a cabin, our own house, with a hearth and at least 3 bedrooms. I’d have built you a swing on the porch and we’d sit there after your shifts at medical and just talk about our day.”
Clarke swallowed back her tears. “3 bedrooms?”
“A room for us, obviously. One for any guests and one for the...the nursery.” Bellamy’s breath caught and Clarke could feel him struggling with his next words.
“We’d have had at least two. A boy and a girl.”
“Let me guess, you’d have picked the names and they would’ve been something to do with history or mythology or some old timey place.”
“Hey!” Bellamy exclaimed, faking offence, “Alexandria and Nicodemus are fine names thank you very much!”
Clarke breathed out a laugh, then nodded.
“Alex and Nico. I like those names.” She smiled.
“Alex and Nico Blake.”
“Alex and Nico Griffin-Blake.” Clarke corrected.
“Of course.”
“Ugh, can you imagine the fights over who would be the godparents.”
“Miller and Wick would be taking bets. O and Raven would probably duel and I don’t even want to think what kind of trouble Jasper would get into trying to get more votes than Monty.” He laughed, throwing his head back.
“Who would you pick?”
“Whoever offered me the biggest bribe.”
“Bellamy!”
“What? They have the privilege of having our kids as godchildren, they should be falling at our feet.”
“You’re ridiculous.” Clarke closed her eyes and breathed deeply, wincing as a sharp pain shot through her chest.
Bellamy must have noticed because she felt him shift so he was lying next to her on the bed. She turned as much as her body would allow and looked into his eyes.
“I wish we could have had that.”
“Me too, Clarke. More than anything.”
Clarke felt her consciousness begin to slip as she fought to keep her eyes open.
“Tell them that I love them all. So much.”
“Clarke, please. You can fight this, I know you can!” Bellamy whispered fiercely.
Clarke shook her head slowly.
“I love you, Bellamy. I would have loved you all my life.”
“Clarke, no!”
She felt her grip loosen on his hands and tried to squeeze harder. Everything was becoming clouded and keeping her eyelids open felt like lifting the whole world.
She briefly thought of Bellamy’s story about Atlas and a small smile graced her lips.
She could hear Bellamy pleading with her frantically to stay awake. She wished she had the strength to do it but his words were becoming harder and harder to hear.
She could feel her body shutting down and she had several terrifying seconds to realize that this was it, this was the end and she was really dying.
She felt pressure against her lips and heard one last broken ‘I love you’ before everything became calm and then stopped.
Clarke Griffin died on a Wednesday.
The day was nothing special. But the woman was.
