Kass Morgan - Homecoming

“So, you ’ re on the Council?” he said to Bellamy, smiling for the first time that evening.

Bellamy nodded, his face reddening slightly with embarrassment and pride. “Yeah, trust me, I was as surprised as you were when they voted me in, but hey, I’m just giving the people what they want.”

“Wells was voted in as well,” Clarke said. “Actually, he was elected first, way before Bellamy.” She smiled from one to the other. Bellamy returned hers. Wells didn’t.

“I’m very glad to hear that,” Max said, placing his hand on Wells’s shoulder. “Your people are lucky to have such a fine young leader. I know you’re going to do your father proud, Wells. You’re going to make all of us proud.”

“Thank you,” Wells said, meeting Max’s eyes for the first time.

As they helped Max clear the few dishes they used, he told them the plan for tomorrow. “It’s our custom to bury our dead at sunrise,” he said. “We believe that dawn is the time of renewal. Endings and beginnings are inseparable, like the moment before dawn and the moment after.”

“That’s beautiful,” Clarke said softly.

“After the Cataclysm,” Max went on, “our ancestors suddenly had to struggle with the idea that light doesn’t always follow dark. That one day, the sun really might not come up again. That’s where the tradition started. It’s gratitude, really, that the sun came up for one more day.”

“I bet Sasha liked that idea,” Wells said with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. Something in his face had changed, Clarke thought, as she studied him in the flickering candlelight. There was something harder in it, but wiser too. “Max, do you mind if I spend the night in the tree house?” Wells asked.

“Not at all. Though it’ll be pretty cold out there.”

“I’ll be fine. I’ll see you all in the morning.”

“I’ll walk you,” Clarke said, rising to her feet. “I want to go check the radio room one more time, if that’s okay.”

Max nodded. “Of course.”

Bellamy stayed behind to keep Max company, and both Clarke and Wells stepped into the night.

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay out here by yourself all night?” Clarke asked as they approached the tree house.

Wells gave her a look she couldn’t quite read, a mix of sadness and amusement. “I won’t be by myself,” he said quietly. “Not really.”

Clarke didn’t have to ask him what he meant. She squeezed his arm, then gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and left him with his memories.

She walked quickly to the Mount Weather entrance and disappeared down into the bunker, back to the spot that had become so familiar to her. She fiddled with the radio dials, her fingers working from muscle memory. She moved through the standard combinations she liked to try, starting with the one that had worked the day she heard her mother’s voice. Her desire to hear it again was physical, a craving.

An hour passed with no results. Clarke wasn’t even sure anymore whether the hiss and crackle of the radio were in her head or coming through the speaker. Her back ached from leaning over the console, and her head had started to throb. Bellamy was probably going to come looking for her any moment.

She stood up and stretched her arms over her head, then leaned from side to side and shook out her wrists. She knew she should shut down the system, but she wasn’t quite ready. One more time , she told herself. Just one . Clarke sat back down and began to adjust the dials.

She was so focused on listening to the tonal shifts in the static that she almost didn’t notice the clomping of footsteps in the hall until they were right outside the door. They were quick and heavy. It must be later than I thought .

Clarke spun around on her seat and looked out the door. “Bellamy?” she called. “Is that you? Max?”

There was silence in the hall as whoever was out there paused. Clarke rose from her chair, the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. Surely Bellamy knew better than to play a trick on her at a time like this, after all they’d just been through. Could the violent Earthborns have returned?

Two figures stepped into the room, one right behind the other. Before she knew what was happening, Clarke had been enveloped in two sets of arms, and she was crying tears of joy.

It wasn’t Bellamy.

It was her parents.

The next morning, Clarke, Wells, and Bellamy stood side-by-side on a bluff overlooking a river, shivering in the cool darkness. Row after row of stones jutted from the ground, the names carved on them unreadable at this early hour. Max stood at the head of an empty grave, staring silently down into it. Sasha’s body rested nearby, wrapped tightly in a shroud the color of the dirt that would soon envelop her.

Clarke had spent all night talking to her parents, if talking was really the right word to describe the stream of words, sobs, and laughter that had poured out for hours after their reunion. Her parents were both much thinner than they had been the last time she saw them, and there was a lot of gray in her father’s new beard, but other than that they looked exactly the same.

When she’d finally managed to stop crying, Clarke’s mom had unleashed a series of questions, asking about everything that had happened during Clarke’s trial, her Confinement, and then her trip to Earth. But her father had barely managed a word. All he could do was smile and stare at Clarke, holding her hand as if afraid that she would vanish into the air at any moment.

She told them about being dragged from her cell, about the violent crash, about Thalia and Wells and Bellamy and Sasha. As Clarke spoke, she felt herself growing lighter. It was like she’d been carrying two sets of memories with her for a more than a year—the memory of what really happened and how she’d imagined her parents would react. And now, every time her father smiled or her mother gasped, more of that weight broke off. Clarke was desperate to hear about her parents’ time on Earth, but by the time her mother had finished questioning her, it was nearly dawn.

They decided that it was best for her parents to stay behind at Mount Weather rather than make a sudden appearance at Sasha’s funeral. Although they’d gotten on well with the Earthborns, the memory of the first Colonists’ betrayal was still too fresh.

Standing between Bellamy and Wells, Clarke felt a strange mix of elation and sorrow. That seemed to be how things worked on Earth. There was too much happening, too much to process ever to feel one emotion at a time.

She turned to the side to look at Wells, wondering if he felt the same way, or if his grief were all consuming.

The sun cracked the horizon line, sending orange and pink scouts racing ahead of it into the sky, as Max laid his only child to rest. In a hoarse voice that made Clarke’s chest ache, he shared some of his favorite memories of Sasha, some of which prompted chuckles from the assembled Earthborns, while others left hundreds of eyes glistening with tears.

As he wiped a tear away from his own eye, Max gestured to Wells and asked if he wanted to say anything. He nodded, let go of Clarke’s hand, and stepped forward to speak.

“The connection we feel to other people isn’t bound by geography or space,” Wells began. Although Clarke could see him trembling, his voice was strong and clear. “Sasha and I grew up in two different worlds, each of us wondering and dreaming about what was out there. I watched from above, never knowing for sure whether humans had survived here on Earth. I didn’t know if we’d ever set foot on this planet again or if it would happen in my lifetime. And she looked up”—he pointed at the fading stars, still faintly visible in the dark blue sky—“and wondered if there was anyone up there. Had anyone survived the voyage into space? Had people managed to stay alive up there all these hundreds of years? For both of us, getting answers to our questions seemed so unlikely. But a million tiny forces moved us toward each other, and we got our answers. We found each other, even if it was just for a moment.” Wells took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Sasha was my answer.”