Chapter Text
She tallied them all up, an old method she was returning to. The only part of her old life she was returning to.
As a child she used to count things when she was bored or lonely. She could tell you how many stripes were on her comforter, how many guards were on each shift, how many screws adorned the roof above her bed, how many hours her parents were called away, so busy sustaining the last hope for the human race they left her with nothing better to do than count and count.
Things got better after Well's dad got elected Chancellor. At first, she couldn’t figure out if it was the loneliest sort of companionship or the most intimate solitude. Eventually, it didn’t matter, they were friends as if she had never been alone, had each other as if they had never been apart.
Until they were.
She counted again for the first time in years locked in the skybox, the nuts and bolts and plates, three generations of slightly off colour repairs in her blanket. She drew, though sparingly as months of incarceration loomed between her arrest and her eighteenth birthday. She had lived her whole life rationing art supplies, but it was easier when she had other options to occupy her time. To pace herself, she counted the strokes of her pencil against the cool metal. When she had nothing else, she counted the sunrises cresting over the side of the Earth.
She would lie awake in the dark and trace her fingers over the watch her dad had left her, counting every scratch, nick and dent. She didn’t need to count them, didn’t need the light to know them. She had traced them a thousand times over the years, felt them grow in number. She could tell you her father’s explanations behind each one, whether it be a long winded play-by-play of how he nearly had to be cut out of a ventilation shaft after trying to retrieve a lost screw (but hey, Gregg owes me a week of dessert rations), or a half-asleep grunt after a particularly trying day (pure stubbornness). She wanted to be mad over the most recent addition, a longer scratch on the side courtesy of whichever guard threw her in her cell, but she could still hear her father tell her how glad he was for each and every mark, because they chronicled his life and gave him a reason to talk to her every night.
She wondered if he would say the same about the marks that now marred her skin: freckles from weeks lived under the sun, callouses from a new life of labour, scars, so many scars. Some from her first days on earth, turned white now. Some pink and new. Some still open wounds, barely healing without rest, bound to scar thicker and uglier without proper care. One, on her outer thigh, unnoticed while the adrenaline of battle flooded her system, was refusing to heal and probably in need of much more care than she was willing to give it.
She counted these scars but found it impossible.
She felt the pull of reconnecting flesh across her shoulder blades where she could not see. To look at her forearm, it was impossible to say if there was one, large graze or the result of several frantic journeys through the thick and unforgiving foliage.
She spent many days walking, thinking of counting things, thinking of old lives and new. Each step a desperate attempt to distend herself from her inner turmoil. Each one only exhausting her until she was no longer strong enough to carry that burden.
She tried to count the miles but it was pointless.
The days blurred as the forest grew thicker and the season grew darker. As sleeping was replaced by passing out, only to recover with no sense of the time gone by. Distance was meaningless as she was pretty sure she had left going north, but has hit every point of the compass since.
She was trying to assuage her guilt, or come to terms with it, or anything that stopped her from feeling like she was slowly turning into crumbling lead from the inside, out. Then her guilt would return tenfold, for surely, after everything, she deserved to feel that way. After the casualties of war or the price of leadership or whatever bullshit excuse.
So she tallied them all up. All the lives, all the souls ripped from the earth with her name branding them. She counted and it was an endless cycle.
She thought of the mountain first, then Ton DC, then Finn. She thought of those she was too late to save and those she had killed herself. She counted all those who died, and moved on to all those forced to live with the consequences of her actions, those hurt or forever changed by the path she forged.
She thought of those she lost along the way. An already estranged mother who could no longer recognize her daughter. Jasper, from whom she'd taken Maya. Raven, who'd never truly forgive her for Finn. Octavia, who burns with the truth about the missile. Bellamy offering to share her burden, Bellamy who once couldn't kill his own friend out of mercy, what had she done to him.
It was useless to count, her guilt grew regardless, resting on her psyche until her list was convoluted and unrealistic. Anyone in a better state of mind than she would have said so.
But she was not in her right state of mind. She was sore, tired, hungry, and past the point of assessing her time on earth, merely bringing each person and event into her fold of troubles, methodically building them up into the crushing weight resting on her shoulders.
It will never be known whether it was te shooting pain down her leg, pure exhaustion, or the depletion of her emotional stamina that brought her to the ground. Only that once she lay there, staring up at a gap in the trees, she did something she had never done before.
Clarke counted the stars.
They had always been too great, so completely innumerable that she had never bothered before. But surely they weren't as vast as the pain she felt, with lives weighing on her and the closest thing she had to family either gone or pushed away.
She remembered an old religious tale she had learnt in earth studies of a man told to count the stars so that he may have the family he dreamt of. She counted until she could no longer see straight, this singular yearning passing through her eyes along with the image of remorseful green eyes she refused to acknowledge.
Despite this, no one could predict what was to happen when the sun rose.