Ground Down

Chapter 59

Loyalty was a wretched bitch, asking her to drive a sword he'd taught her to sharpen and wield through his heart. 

Gustus lifted his head, the exhaustion that came with pain and nearing death shaking the movement, shaking his body, the shreds of his armour. That would be repurposed. Passed on. It would live on. He would not. But he smiled at her. Somewhere under his beard and hardly able to form the expression, he smiled at her, looked right into her eyes like he had done when he had told her he was proud of her. Proud of the person she had become. She wasn't. Most times, she wasn't. But she couldn't tell him that. Gustus tried to nod at her sword, the ghost of a smile still present, nodded at her. 

"Ste yuj [Be strong] ," he told her. 

Like a hundred times before. Because it couldn't matter. None of that could ever matter, not in politics, not for her. Not anymore. The Commander of Thirteen Clans could not let emotion get in the way of duty. The Commander of Thirteen Clans drove her freshly sharpened sword through a great warrior's heart and watched the life drain from his eyes. 

The blade caught. She caught his ribs as she drove it through like an amateur who'd never learnt to aim and would end up breaking their best sword in the process, his body curved around it, lips open, a hollow breath grinding against the tear in his lungs. It all succumbed to gravity when she pulled the weapon back out. His body sagged into the restraints, his head hit his chest, a last sliver of air expelled as a thin white cloud lost to the rain, the blood drizzling from his chest, his blood on her sword, her sword tilting towards the ground. With a final click, the tip of the blade connected with the stone. 

"Yu gonplei ste odon [Your fight is over] ," she told him. 

Steadily, but quietly. She told him, not them, not the crowd watching, she told him. And then she lifted her head and searched Clarke across the people, through the rain and the wind and the dark, and found her drenched at the edge of that little space Skaikru were allowed to occupy. With her head up proud and her hands clasped solemn above her belly, with her blonde hair running down her face like a bucket of water had been emptied above her, looking her right in the eye. Standing tall, without any expression to her beautiful face. She drew strength from that. Enough strength to face her people, sheathe her sword, and turn her back to Gustus' corpse being torn apart by the wind. 

"Jus don drein jus daun [Blood has had blood] ," she announced. 

Agreement came quietly, heavy with the death of one of their own hanging over them, the weight of betrayal. Revenge came harder when you had to turn on the people you had believed in, people you had looked up to. They, too, would have to live with that. Just like her. The Commander had been avenged. 

The tower swallowed the rain and the thunder and the flashes of lightning that had seared distorted images of the scenes she'd lived into her mind, and she welcomed it. She welcomed the tepid air that got warmer the further the lift ascended and she welcomed that it sept through her clothes and glued them to her body like a rotting second skin and she welcomed the acidic feeling that brought to her flesh and she welcomed the privacy of being among her guards. Without the crowds. Without Gustus. The drip, drip, drip of Killin and Onsi and Vans' armour leaking rain onto the floors spelled out their number in her head time and time again, three guards, three guards for her, no Gustus, no mentor, Anya would not be there to hold her hair for her should she get sick. 

Lexa probably made her way into the war chamber because of that. If she had returned to her chambers, she would have felt it. In between having to pry herself out of her soaked armour and losing its crushing weight and having to warm up her body, she would have started shaking, even if only from the cold, from the process of warming up, the red skin and the relief and the pain that would have mixed in her muscles, the exertion that would have pulled against a need to wash, to sort out her hair, to sit down and think. She would've felt their absence harder. And she didn't trust herself not to break into that.