After the talk, Lexa had extinguished the flickering candle and left Madi's room. Madi didn't ask where she went—maybe it was the pressure sores again, or something else, but she had other things to think about.
She was left to her thoughts—and for a long while, Madi couldn't sleep, thinking about it all. Until finally, a sense of peace fell over her mind like a black blanket of the night.
In the end, she thought, it didn't really matter anyway. Because no matter what conclusion she came to the days still marched on and the stars still twinkled on in the night, that couldn't be extinguished like how Lexa snuffed out the candle. And her thoughts shouldn't be her biggest concern right now—because what was most important now was sleeping.
It felt like how the sun rises and the night sets—everything that'd gone in a circle, that trudged on no matter what was in between. And though Madi still thought—she couldn't not think about it after all—it felt comforting. And soon, she let the thoughts, fleeting and quick, float through her mind—but she didn't think about it and let it be, and soon, Madi fell asleep.
...
Died in a blaze.
Because she dared avenge; her family, murdered in a massacre because she dared become Commander.
She didn't forgive her people for what they've done to her family.
(But if they were still alive—would her family forgive her for what she's done?)
(To avenge them?)
Died in a blaze they said, yet Lexa said it was nothing of the kind—found dead in her chambers, blood leaking from her neck with a blade tossed to the side— the perpetrator they couldn't identify.
Her name—
Maddie the Commander.
...
Madi thought about it.
Luna did regret. But the things she regretted wasn't the things that Madi wished she'd regret. And her regret didn't cover nearly all of what she was supposed to regret—it was as if instead of tucking someone in with the entire blanket, they only tucked them in with a quarter. It was regret, but it wasn't regret, not really—or, at least, it wasn't total regret.
But did people regret things differently when they were surviving?
And it was in that moment, when she thought about it, thought about it for minutes, agonised long and hard, played with her trebuchet in an attempt to feel less frustrated about the question, until finally, she came to a conclusion, and told herself—they did. Of course they did. Because how else would they survive? How else would they live with the knowledge of all the bad things they've done during their survival? How—how else would they justify themselves to other people?
Like Clarke. Clarke—Clarke didn't seem to regret the Maunon's deaths. Didn't seem to regret all the people she had to kill—didn't seem to regret Carl Emerson or anybody else. And Madi didn't get it, not at first—because how could she regret but not forgive? How could she regret but not regret, not entirely? And now she thought, and thought again—it was because at that moment Clarke was surviving, and survival was a different persona entirely.
And Lexa. Lexa was the Commander. She slaughtered thousands; killed everyone, at least almost, everyone, in the Conclave... so she could live. So she could survive. She must've regretted it, in some form or another—had shown it even, in form of the tattoos on her back, but it wasn't total regret, because total regret would mean that she regretted her survival as well. But she didn't, she didn't have survival's guilt—or even if she did, she didn't show it, or had gotten over it, or didn't dwell on it at all—because, because the two lives, the two personas of survival and non-survival had to be kept separate, because if they intertwined with each other then that'd mean an entire reevaluation of themselves. And eventually, eventually, Lexa would've stopped feeling guilty over it as well, because it was what she needed to do to survive.
