Lightning Only Strikes Once - Clexa

Chapter 131: Bonds

Assurances that she forgives her, that she still needs her, trip onto Clarke's tongue automatically, but she closes her mouth and swallows them. They need the truth more than they need comforting lies. "We all do horrible things when we're trying to do what's right," she says instead, just as quietly. "I understand why you did the things you did. Forgiveness will take time and effort, but it will happen, I promise. I love you, Mom."

"I love you too, baby," Abby says, but her voice still sounds tight and her eyes still look lost.

"You've done good things too," Clarke tells her, trying to find something to take that look out of her mother's eyes. "Lexa told me that people need to think of the lives they've saved as well as the ones they've taken. You saved all the people who would have been killed to conserve air. You sent Raven down here. You looked after Lexa when – when I wasn't here." Her voice stumbles over the last sentence.

"She's a wonderful girl," Abby says, then corrects herself shakily. "A wonderful woman."

Clarke smiles at the effort. "You should stop thinking of this bonding ceremony as losing me. I'm not a child anymore, but I'm still here and I'm still your daughter, and now you get to have an amazing daughter-in-law as well."

"That's true," Abby says, and now a tentative smile spreads across her face as well. "I hadn't thought of that. Another daughter." She kisses the top of Clarke's head gently. "I'm sorry I've been so... difficult. I do like Lexa, and I know she loves you, and you love her, and if you believe that it's the kind of love that lasts forever than I'm happy for you both. It's just hard for me to see you setting up a life, a family, that doesn't seem to include me."

"There'll always be a place for you in my family, Mom," Clarke promises. "In our family."

"Good," Abby says, regaining her usual confidence and composure. "Then I suppose it's about time I gave you these." She takes hold of Clarke's hand and enfolds something into it.

When Clarke opens her hand to see what she's been given, a pair of simple gold rings sit on her palm. "Mom," she breathes.

Gold rings were rare on the Ark – any gold jewellery was. Gold was an excellent conductor, useful for wiring and computer issues, so there was a small annual supplies tax for keeping any to yourself. Some families had managed to hold onto a pair of wedding rings anyway, to pass down each generation when their child got married. It hadn't even occurred to Clarke that her mother would still have the ones that she'd exchanged with Jake, that her mother had exchanged with her father, that her paternal grandparents had exchanged with each other, all the way back to when the bombs fell. If she had remembered that, she would never have expected to be given them.

"It doesn't seem to be a Grounder thing, and if you don't want to have these as well -" Abby starts to say, voice a little anxious in response to Clarke's silence.

Clarke turns, stands and embraces her in one quick movement. "Thank you," she says, inflecting her tone with every bit of gratitude and love she can manage.

"I don't know if I can say that every couple who wore them have been happy," Abby tells her, looking a bit tearful again. "But I can honestly tell you that every single couple who exchanged them loved each other more than they ever thought was possible ."

Raven re-enters the room just as they pull apart. "Would you believe it, I already have the mascara here. Weird, huh?"

"Raven," Clarke says flatly. "Have you been waiting outside the door the whole time?"

"Noooo. Of course not. Why would you think that? Would I do that?"

"You left for eyeliner, not mascara," Clarke ticks off her points on her fingers. "Your room is much further away than the five minutes you've been gone. You've already used eyeliner and mascara – on yourself as well as me." She pauses for a moment, then finishes with, "And yes, that's absolutely something you would do."

"I was being tactful," Raven says loftily.

"And that's something you wouldn't do," Clarke says, but can't stop her smile from pushing its way across her face again. It's impossible to stop smiling today.

"Hey," Wells comes into the room, smiling at her, his whole face lit up with happiness for her. She gets up again and throws herself into his eager hug. "Clarke, you look beautiful."

"She does, yes," Raven studies Clarke's outfit thoughtfully, the hard leather, the belts, the zips and buckles, the many knife sheaths. "But she also looks like she's about to stab someone."

"And here I thought that was your type," Wells says, so innocently that for a second Clarke's not even sure he's joking. Before she can be sure, he turns his attention back to her and says, "Sorry I'm so late, I was with the other ambassadors. There was some debate about how many people from their clan they each should bring, because according to them, I'm bringing about a dozen Skaikru. I pointed out that only Kane is really there in an official capacity, but it took a while to get them to see my point of view."

Raven mouths the word 'hypnotism' at Clarke, raising her eyebrows in an exaggerated way.

"I'm glad to see you before the ceremony," Clarke admits, hugging Wells again.

"Looking forward to getting your first tattoo?" he says, sounding a little amused.

"I offered to whip up a proper tattooing needle," Raven says, sounding a little sulky. "But everyone turned me down. It would've been such an interesting challenge, too, I've never made one before."

"No offence, Rae, but we weren't crazy about the idea of being your test subjects," Clarke tells her. "We're only getting the outlines done today, anyway. The full designs will take at least forty hours each." She looks proudly down at the two pieces of paper with the designs.

They had taken a long time, although not as many hours as it had taken to paint the room. But they're done now, and Lexa loves them, and she loves them, and even thinking about having the bonding tattoos etched onto them for life gives Clarke a warm glow.

The designs aren't identical. Bonding joins your souls, as Clarke understands it, but they are still different souls. So her and Lexa's designs are different in some ways.

Both are a simplified, slightly abstracted landscape, with the skyline of Polis featured starkly. The composition is identical, but part of Clarke's tattoo depicts dark clouds, white stars winking through them, and lightning branching off in different directions as it joins ground and sky. In Lexa's tattoo, in the place of the clouds are thick set leaves, instead of the stars there are little white flowers strewn in amongst the leaves, and in place of the lightning is the pale trunk and branches of the tree.

If Clarke blurs her eyes just enough they look like the same picture, but they're not – they're very similar and very different at the same time, perfect for her and Lexa. Their individual tattoos show where they're from, but the picture of Polis that's framed by Clarke's stormy sky and Lexa's tangled forest shows where they are and where they're going – it shows their home.

"Wanheda?" one of the guards politely enters the room, head bowed respectfully. "It is time."

Clarke stands, picking up the pieces of paper, although she knows there's already a copy waiting there for her. The two best tattooists in Polis volunteered to do their bonding tattoos – actually, all the tattooists in Polis begged for the chance, but Gustus had chosen the two best and respectfully turned the others down.

"Good," she says to the guard, unable to believe it's really time, finally. "I've been waiting forever."