Ground Down

Chapter 58

The hail overpowered Raven's screams. It'd come out of nowhere or maybe she just hadn't noticed it until it had started hurting on her head and face because she'd been so busy staring at Lexa. Either way, it hadn't stopped. Lexa had turned away, had cleared a path through the white little particles bouncing off the ground with her sash that the hail had destroyed again, Lexa stood, watching, in between Gustus and her three guards, as if she didn't feel the weather. 

Clarke dragged Bellamy's arm against her chest and held it tight. He kinda angled it out of the way of her belly, put his hand warm and guarding over its curve best as he could from that angle, but she hardly felt the hail. She hated the hail. She hated that it had her shaking inside her jacket and she hated that it drummed against her skull and onto her belly because they both stood out anatomically and she hated it for slamming against the ground with an angry roar that droned out all other sounds. She needed to hear Raven scream. As cruel as that sounded in her head, she needed to hear her scream to know she was still alive, to know that she wasn't stuck in a nightmare. 

According to all the definitions she knew of the term nightmare, she was stuck in one. Or in something much, much worse. Either way, she needed to hear her scream like one needed to pinch oneself when one had just woken up from a dream that had left one drenched in cold sweat. She needed to know that the blood she saw soaking into Raven's clothes was real even though it felt like it had to be paint, like it had to be blurry on an old TV screen, like it sat behind glass and maybe that would explain why she couldn't feel much. Why she stood, watching strangers take a grim kind of joy in carving into her friend's flesh, and didn't feel much. 

Maybe her screams were punishment then. Maybe she needed to hear them because of the guilt she felt for not feeling much or maybe she needed to hear them because she knew that the nothing she felt was the paralysing fear that came with utter helplessness and she needed to hear her scream because that meant something could still be done. If anything could have been done. As if she hadn't been standing right there, clutching Bellamy's arm, staring at a stranger pushing up Raven's shirt to draw the knife over her abdomen. The fabric stuck to the blood when they let go again, hid how her flesh shivered from the pain, but it didn't numb that she cried out. 

Clarke turned her head away. She needed it to stop. She needed them to stop hurting her, she needed them to stop drawing blood, she needed to stop the pain, she'd been about to take the Hippocratic oath and swear she'd never do harm once upon a time. Right then, she wished she had. She wished she could find what was left of that person she had been back then and force it into every part of her being like one would draw a giant blanket around oneself to hide from the world. And hide from the part she played in the world around her. 

"They can't do this," she said. Because she had to say it. No matter how quietly, no matter that nobody reacted. She had to say it because she wouldn't recognise the person she had become. "They can't do this!" 

"Clarke." 

Bellamy put his arm around her, undecided between caging and protecting, she twisted herself into his hold, undecided between squirming away from that and searching his warmth. Hail crunched under her feet. 

"Mom-" she craned her neck, caught Abby's eye through the curtain of angry white in between- "mom, she's going to die. They're going to kill her." 

Her mother nodded that she knew that, shifted her arms around herself, hands clutching her sides, facing away from the plaza. Just far enough not to have to see it and Clarke inhaled to scream at her for that, to tell her that if she'd meant it when she'd said she'd wanted to adopt Raven, she should stand tall for her while she died. If she couldn't do anything else, she should be doing that. She should be strong. Somehow, she needed her mother to be superhuman, to be stronger than being Skaikru's best surgeon and the Skaikru Chancellor medically and politically allowed her to be, facing a decision made by the Commander. Stronger than a failed medical student, failing ambassador, and failed former best-friend could be. Stronger than her daughter.