#how do you reconcile with the fact that in choosing your siblings you are damming all that you love

[tiredqueermushroom]

There is something about the way in which the Prime Deities can construct and bend reality to their will but still are unable to conceive a reality in which they can both love and protect their siblings and their children.

[madisonsclarks]

Beautiful Goodbye

Author’s Note: So I’ve heard from a few people on Twitter who wished the goodbye scene was longer/explained more about why Abby chose to take off the necklace with Jake’s ring. Since I agreed, I decided to write a short (well okay, close to 4,000-word) thing about it from Marcus’ perspective. So basically, this is my interpretation of how the goodbye scene could have gone down if the writers hadn’t chosen to cut away after the kiss.

Rating: M-ish? I’m TRASH and hyped up on The Scene, so of course there’s sexytimes.

It was dark in the tower, save for the flickering of a few candles aligned at the sides of the hallways: hardly enough to fend off the blackness of night. Striding through the empty corridors, Marcus mused on the iciness of the streets below. The danger that lurked in every shadow, the hatred hidden in glares and deciphered through threats. His chest ached, remembering the ambassador’s hatred of Skaikru, his refusal to choose diplomacy over violence. A stab of pain so intense that it might have been he, not the Ice King, who’d been shot.

How deftly Marcus had tried.

How decisively he’d failed.

There has to be another way, he’d thought, urging Roan to delay his battle in favor of negotiations. And he’d been so sure he could do it – so confident they would see his side, cherish life over bloodshed – that the ambassador’s refusal had knocked the breath from his lungs like a punch to the gut. Diplomacy, he knew, was far from an exact science. There were no guarantees. But to have failed now, at such a crucial time...he could hardly offer himself forgiveness when regret was the only emotion available.

Octavia had barely looked at him after that; instead of remaining with him, she’d chosen to seek out Indra. Since midday, he hadn’t so much as glimpsed her. Marcus thought he’d seen something pitying in her gaze – something that spoke more than her words ever could, something that implied she blamed grounder politics and not him for his shortcomings – and as small a gesture as it was, he appreciated it. If nothing else, at least she’d been willing to give peace a chance.

A soft breeze blew through an open door, and Marcus breathed out a soft sigh as the coolness of the night wind washed over him. As loath as he was to admit it, there was nothing more to be done. He would have to accept whatever came in the morning, swallow the bitterness of self-loathing that had burbled again inside him when the boy mentioned what the chip had forced him to do. Focusing on what came next was easy when hope was abundant, but in its absence his mind turned back to territory it had explored a thousand times before, terrain he and his people had mapped out so well.

It was a land of remorse.

Dwelling on the past did him little good, but in times like these it became harder to construct a dam strong enough to hold back their tide. A few more seconds, and he could have taken Bellamy’s life. Had ALIE’s hold over him not been broken in time, had his hands not relaxed and his composure returned, his story might have been an echo of the young grounder’s. Their hatred for Skaikru might have been pronounced, but the boy had no inclination of how alike they really were. The shame they shared.

If he’d told him what he’d been forced to do, a member of Skaikru equally torn by his actions under the influence, would it have helped? Could it have saved whatever fractured bond they might have with the grounders? More importantly, could he even trust his own voice to recite so sensitive a memory?

He could still feel it; the sickening agony of looking down and seeing the eldest Blake sibling on the dusty throne room floor, gasping for air, his face bruised and bloody. The look in Bellamy’s eyes shone forgiveness mixed with fatigue while his own blurred with tears, appalled with himself for what he’d been forced to do. What his hands and legs and arms had done without his consent, all because of a woman in a red dress and a computer chip.

He remembered something else then, drifting back to him through the listless fog of misery. A gun pointed to Abby’s head. She’s still here, he reminded himself. Bellamy’s still here, Clarke’s still here, Octavia’s still here. There is still hope.

And hope, as he’d come to know from the woman who held his heart in her hands, her smile, her sigh, was everything.

He opened the door to their room, hoping his gaze would land on her when he stepped inside. The sound of the knob turning startled him from his reverie and solidified a barricade between past and present, shoved thoughts of ALIE’s torture to the back of his mind. In the flickering candlelight he could barely distinguish her form, but he would have known her even in utter blackness.

“Abby,” he said, warmth returning to every inch of his skin. She was here, standing next to the window in their room, flowing chestnut hair stirred gently by the night wind. She was safe, illuminated faintly by white curtains and beams of moonlight. Even the darkness could not eclipse her beauty.

The tiny fires on the wicks of the candles provided just enough light to see by, and he wasted no time in making his way toward her, crossing the room in a few lengthy strides. The day’s tasks had separated them completely – she’d gone to Roan and then treated the City of Light’s wounded while he attempted his fruitless negotiations. It was hard to reconcile the gray, drab place in which they lived now with the bright, charming image of the dwelling it once had been: the place where she’d tried, so long ago, to give him the Chancellor’s Pin.

“Did Roan fight?” he asked, and her downcast gaze was all the answer he needed. His stomach sank, and that monster of regret stirred once again in his chest.

“It’s too soon,” she said, defeat resounding in each syllable.

It wouldn’t be too soon if you’d done your job, he thought, self-loathing seeping slowly back into his thoughts. He gave a deep, frustrated sigh.

“One simple task, and I’m failing,” he said. It was, he thought, its own kind of perverse déjà vu. On the Ark he’d had one simple task: to keep his people alive. What had he done instead? Led the Culling. Sacrificed 320 innocent lives. And here, he’d failed again: instead of bringing Roan peace and diplomacy, he’d delivered a battle the king had no chance of winning.

“No,” she said, firm, her gaze hardened steel. “You’ll figure it out.”

He wanted to smile, to believe in himself with the steadfastness with which she believed in him. Yet he sensed a deep exhaustion in her tone, a slight slump in her shoulders only he would be able to detect. Whatever he’d been through during the course of their day, it seemed she’d braved similar rough waters.

Her wide-eyed gaze was an apology, and he knew what she might say before her lips so much as parted. But there was something as intimate in assuming as asking, and if their words with each other were now to be limited, he wanted to hear as many of them as he could.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, and he waited.

“There’s nothing more I can do for Roan,” she said as his eyes sought hers in the embrace of darkness, the realization dealing another blow to his sinking morale. After all, he’d known that tone. It was the one she used with patients before surgery, with Clarke before refusing her something she wanted, with Raven before telling her she couldn’t do something her heart was set upon.

Her brown gaze trailed down to the floor for a heartbeat, and he knew his assumption had been correct. What had happened, he wondered, to make her so uncertain of her value? She was a doctor, an ex-Chancellor, one of the most respected leaders in Arkadia. Certainly, there was a place for her in Roan’s Polis.

Then again, he couldn’t exactly count on himself to be objective where Abby Griffin was concerned.

To some extent Marcus thought it might be true: as talented a doctor as she was, she couldn’t heal the Ice King’s wounds. Time, rather than her skilled hand, would see to that. But these words weren’t hers. Left to her own devices, Marcus knew she would have stayed by Roan’s side until she could be confident of his full recovery – her mouth held words from the king himself, not from her. Abby Griffin never abandoned her patients.

Despite his own shortcomings, the ways he’d failed the Coalition’s leader that day, a selfish part of Marcus wished Roan had never spoken to her.

They’d had nine days in which they’d decided to push one crisis aside in favor of another, traded a nuclear apocalypse for grounder politics. But in those moments, in that first night when she’d chosen his arms instead of the multitude of abandoned guest rooms that could have kept her more than comfortable, he knew this was about more than just democracy and healing. This was about building something in spite of the destruction raining down on them. This was about finding the light in each other when the world was bleaker than ever. This was about continuing where “may we meet again” and “we will” had left off, adding chapters to their story when the universe threatened to burn the whole damn book.

She’d kissed him as she guided him back against the mattress, her lips a tantalizing mixture of softness and decadence and urgency, the threat of six months etched into the insistent pressure of her mouth on his skin. And although they’d known such pleasures were fleeting, the emotions behind them were stable, strong. Distance could not soften them. Miles could not make them weak. So Marcus said the only thing he could say, the thing she needed to hear. The sentence that was best for their people, though it might deal a deathblow to his heart to say it.

“You need to go back to Arkadia,” he said, the words tasting like poison, immobilizing, bitter. He was thankful it was only nine words: much more than that, he wouldn’t have been able to handle. “To Clarke.”

The irony hidden in the fact that his goodbye spanned the length of days they’d spent together was not lost on him. How was it possible, he wondered, for his tongue to disregard his racing heart so fervently?

She nodded, swallowed hard, battling with the same emotions that surged through him. Sadness. Regret. Yearning. Hope. Holding her gaze only intensified his agony, and he allowed himself to look away. But his heart lurched as his glance locked on her chest – or rather, the empty expanse of skin where a ring had rested for over a year.

Thoughts spiraling, swirling from one extreme to another, he fumbled with words until he latched onto something that made sense.

“Your necklace,” he said, reaching forward to brush the soft skin where he once would have felt metal, a fundamental part of him unwilling to accept its absence until his thumb could confirm the image. He remembered fastening the clasp this morning, insisting that Jake was a part of her, brushing the soft strands of her dark hair aside to secure that memory – an emblem of a man better than he could ever hope to be – in place.

Her hesitation this morning hadn’t gone unnoticed, but he thought his urging might have convinced her of its necessity. As long as he held her, he would ensure there was space in her heart for Jake Griffin. Jake had been a man of honor, a man whose sacrifice had saved lives, a man worthy of Abby in every way. He was her first love, part of her soul, as integral to her being as the blood that flowed through her veins. He had given her years of happiness, a daughter whom she loved with all her strength, his sacrifice fueling her to keep fighting even after Jaha ordered him to be floated and Clarke locked away.

And what had he, Marcus Kane, given her over so lengthy a time span? For the majority of it, nothing but headaches and spiteful, explosive arguments. It seemed fundamentally wrong, he thought, that she should remove a symbol of a man so powerful, a man whose influence echoed in her every word.

Where had it gone? Why had she taken it off? And why had seeing the absence of that familiar silver circle from around her neck stolen every wisp of breath from his lungs, left him with a burning ache?

“Marcus,” she whispered, moving closer, the heat from her skin warming him as the night air cooled around them. Her voice trembled slightly as she spoke, wavering just enough to show the forethought she’d given her choice. “I…I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Since before we stayed here.”

Lost for words and fighting a lump in his throat, he could only nod.

“I love Jake. I’ll always love him,” she said, pausing to take a deep breath. She appeared equal parts emotional and nervous, shrinking against the flowing white curtains, far removed from the brazen confidence with which he so closely associated her. “But I don’t need a necklace to remember him. He’s always with me, whether I wear a ring or not. I’m going to give them to Clarke when I get back.”

Her words sounded faint, far away, as though she were speaking to him from the opposite end of a tunnel instead of from a few inches away.

“And when I made the choice to wear his ring, I wasn’t the woman I am now,” she said, reaching out to enclose his hands in her own. “When I first put on that necklace, I never thought I’d love again. That when Jake died, that part of me might have died with him. And I was okay with it.”

She looked at him, her eyes chocolate brown in the orange candlelight, full of tears and hope and adoration.

Her voice broke.

“You changed that.”

Without thinking he pulled her close, relishing the feeling of having her in his arms. It was more than he could accept, the belief that he’d opened her heart to romantic love again, especially considering their history. A part of him might always reject that notion, but for now – in this moment, with her head resting in the crook of his neck and her warm breath igniting the depth of his own emotions – he could push away his petty doubts.

“Abby, I –“ he started, but she wasn’t finished. Shifting in his arms she leaned away enough to stare directly into his eyes, each of them baring their souls in the intimacy of their gaze.

“I love you, Marcus,” she said, stroking the side of his face, running her fingers through his hair and drifting them through his beard. “Just as much as I loved him. And I’m ready for whatever comes next.”

And although she hadn’t said it, it was clear: she loved him enough to let go of that symbol of her past, the absence of that ring symbolizing how he’d opened her heart to love once more. Lost for words, half-faint with the depth of her confession and the petrifying knowledge she’d be gone tomorrow, he did the only thing his feeble brain could tell him to do.

He leaned in and kissed her.

Nine days of savoring each other had robbed the contact of all its awkwardness, given them boldness and stolen away timidity. So instead of going slowly, savoring the moment when moments were harder and harder to come by in a world determined to wipe them out, Marcus wrapped an arm around her and pulled her flush against him. She gave a tiny moan of pleasure – a sound to which he’d grown achingly, adoringly addicted – and he opened to her at the warmth of her pink tongue tracing his lower lip.

Her hands drifted to the hem of his jacket, asking a question he answered by helping her pull the garment over his shoulders and yanking it off. They stumbled over toward their bed, shedding layers along the way, leaving shirts and jackets and pants in jumbled piles to sort through when morning came. For now they had precious few hours to spend with each other before fate guided them apart again, and he intended to savor every minute until she left for Arkadia.

She slid under the covers first, smiling, eyes sparkling brighter than the stars that shone overhead. And he followed, lowering himself on top of her with a soft exhale, the dull pain in his wrists not enough to overpower the sheer sensation of being with her like this. The electricity of skin on skin, surging power when his lips moved to her neck (he’d learned, over the past nine days, that the friction of his beard against her pulse point drove her crazy), the overwhelming need to give her everything he had. Right now nothing existed but the two of them, fitting together like matched pieces of a jigsaw puzzle underneath the soft furs.

Abby guided his mouth to hers as soon as he settled between her legs, wasting no time in re-establishing their contact. She tasted sweet despite the bitterness of the moment, like the last piece of chocolate on the Ark, the sound of her heartbeat reminding him of what he wouldn’t have next to him the next time he lay in this bed. But this craving, this incessant hunger, this beast that roared to life when she pulled him down to her with her fingers in his hair…it sometimes felt as though it could never be sated. And now that they’d named it, given it power over them as he let out a groan of pleasure against her lips, he felt himself succumbing to its power and letting all thoughts of the future slip away.

He groaned when, after several minutes of hungry kisses and moans and sighs, she reached down and guided him inside of her. No matter how many times they did this – no matter how well they mapped out each other’s bodies with their lips, unified in any and every possible way – Marcus thought he’d never get used to the sensation of being inside her, of looking down and seeing her pupils blown wide with desire, of knowing the same adoration-laden pleasure coursed through her as it did him.

They’d had each other quite a few times since that first night when she wandered into his room, and yet every time felt like the first, better than the last. Each time taught them something new about each other, deepened their rapidly-expanding intimacy.

He tried to go slowly, to prolong this for her for as long as he could. There was a decent chance this would be their last time until Polis was done with him, until he could return to Arkadia and find his way back to her – and his heart, which she held in her hands – again.

But the sounds she made – quiet, desperate little cries buried into his shoulder as he withdrew from her almost completely and slid into her again, her back arching as her breathing grew uneven – made it damningly hard to keep a steady rhythm. He could barely choke back his own grunts and groans of pleasure as her walls closed around him, the world around him blurring as he buried his mouth in the hollow of her throat, making his way slowly toward her pulse point. It was as though he was fire and she was gasoline, fueling him into higher and higher ecstasy with each passing second.

“Marcus,” she panted, his name a pleasure-soaked moan, murmured in time with the faint thunking sound of the headboard against the wall. “Oh God, Marcus.”

He knew what she wanted, staring deep into her soft brown eyes, realizing somewhere in a tiny recess of his mind not flooded by pleasure that those eyes were his home. That her arms held him steadier than any four walls and a roof, that his security could never be found behind a locked door.

Leaning down, slipping a hand between their undulating bodies to find the cluster of nerves at her aching, throbbing clit, he closed his eyes and kissed her (less precisely, now, addled with sensation and near-release) and stroked her until her muffled cries molded to his name and grew silent. He spilled over inside her only seconds later, the sound of her sighs and the friction of her bringing him to the edge and pushing him over.

“Oh, Abby,” he gave a strangled groan, lost in a dream from which he never wanted to awaken.

They collapsed, boneless and weightless, holding each other close against the slowly-lightening night. Abby leaned in and pressed her mouth to his again, her fingers running through his beard, her smile evident in the shape of her lips. And for a while they stayed in that euphoric haze, building a bubble of bliss through which no tragedy could touch them.

But eventually, as dreams are wont to do, it ended.

Marcus slid out of her and leaned away, propping himself up on his elbow to keep pressure off his wrist. Abby stared at him for a moment, kiss-swollen lips still smiling, hair unkempt and splayed out in all directions against the fur-covered pillow. His chest hurt as he realized he’d never before seen a woman so achingly beautiful, so pure, so fiery and ferocious.

A woman so determinedly devoted to him.

His gaze drifted to the empty stretch of skin at her chest where a ring used to lay, and he felt a too-familiar disbelief wash over him. But for now, lying in bed with her, he knew that one day he could believe himself worthy of that void where silver had once shone. One day, he would believe himself enough to merit Abby Griffin’s determination to move on into the future while continuing to hold on to her past.  

“I love you,” he said, throat tight with the utter perfection of her, and her smile widened. And in that moment he knew no distance could truly separate them. No number of miles could pry her from his thoughts, fade his memories, loosen the ironclad grip she had on his heart.

No matter where she was, he would always belong to her.