fragile | clexa

chapty eighty five

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The guards looked a little conflicted letting Clarke into the dungeons, knowing she had the full right to move everywhere but also knowing that if anything happened, the Heda wouldn't be happy with them at all.

In the end, they let her in, but held their spears just a little higher and were just a little more focused.

The dungeons were long corridors with dark cells along them, and Clarke only noticed she was barefoot when her feet hit the cold, slightly damp stones. In the cells, the people looked dirty and miserable, possibly awaiting execution or another few years in the same spot.

Clarke passed them all, and she only stopped for a few seconds when she passed Jaha's cell. She'd imagined it would freak her out to be so close to him alone, even with the cell as a barricade, but it turned out she wasn't afraid at all. Jaha looked like he lacked food and sunlight and a reason to live. His hunched body had fallen in, his hair was greyer and his muscles had deflated. It seemed like his body had aged as though 20 years had passed in the last few months.

He didn't even notice her, so she walked on to the room at the end of the corridor. Inside, there was the dress, the mask and everything else that belonged to the Light, different sacred objects besides that, their holy scriptures, notebooks.

Clarke picked up the book with the scriptures, settled on a chair and tucked her cold feet under her thighs. Everything felt uncomfortable down there, but the interest the book sparked was stronger, so she accepted the darkness, the discomfort, the cold.

They had heard stories of the Light of course, but never the whole thing. Never the notebooks that were stacked there on the table, even though they looked important. Never all of the illustrations.

And so Clarke began to read. The scriptures, the notebooks, whatever she could find, and it changed everything.

Not once in her life had Clarke felt so upset about the cult that had nearly ruined her life.

-

Of course it wouldn't be a relationship with Clarke if there had been no waking up in the middle of the night, finding Clarke gone, probably up to another catastrophe.

Lexa got seriously stressed out when she found out Clarke had left for the dungeons. The guards down there looked too scared for Lexa's liking when they saw her coming. "Where is she?" Lexa asked, her heartbeat accelerating upon seeing their miserable features. "What happened?"

"She's in the room with the cult's objects. She's been in there for a few hours now, but we haven't seen or heard anything, so she must be fine."

Lexa rushed down the corridor and stumbled through the door, indeed finding Clarke curled up on a chair, uninjured. Clarke jumped with the sudden entrance and relaxed when she saw Lexa. "Oh," she breathed after a sharp inhale.

"What are you doing here? I was so worried."

"Sorry, I didn't mean to worry you. I uh- searched for information," Clarke said quietly.

Oh.

She was reading the cult's books. Lexa had considered them rubbish and never cared for them, but if they could preoccupy Clarke for so long, they must be worth something.

Of course they were.

Lexa heard it in Clarke's voice. She saw it in her face.

Immediately, her adrenaline went down and her tense body relaxed. She looked at Clarke with in concern furrowed brows. "What did you find out?" she asked softly.

Clarke was pale in the dark room, only lit by a candle, staring at the book in her hands. "Everything, I guess."

"And what's that?"

"A lie. Everything was a lie." She threw the book on the table and got up, wincing in the pain shooting up her stiff legs. "They lied about everything! You think they're a stupid cult with paradoxes, but everything made sense. That they worshipped a woman and hurt all of us. That they abused us so bad physically, mentally and sexually. It wasn't about the money or the sex, it was about the power!"

Lexa looked at Clarke a little confused. "But- but wasn't that obvious?"

"No, no you think it was. They told us that we're the weak sex, that we're supposed to die and serve them, that men are superior, that their goddess knew that and wanted balance- no. They were afraid of us, Lexa. They were afraid of women. All these men who sold their wives, girlfriends, mothers, daughters, whoever? They didn't want the money or the satisfaction of their ego, they were afraid."

"Why would they be afraid? That doesn't make any sense," Lexa said carefully.

"Yes it does. They worshipped a goddess because they believed women to be superior, but didn't accept being overpowered. They saw that women can create life, that women are so much more difficult to understand and please and love, that women can give birth and bleed for days every month and wear battle wounds so much better than men because of higher pain tolerance and they drew the conclusion that we're worth worshipping. They believed that women had reached the last level of life and that the men were at the start, not vice versa, like they made us believe. That's exactly what they wrote down here, but of course men have the bigger ego and they couldn't stand it, so they chose to brainwash us, use their muscles against us and make us think we deserve it when they believed it was the other way around. They found a goddess that was happy with being the only woman worshipped, so that she would get all of it. Two female teachers kept the balance, because the men thought they were incapable of doing it themselves."

Lexa was rarely speechless, but Clarke brought out new sides of her. All she could do was let Clarke finish talking about all the stories that the slaves never learned about, all the beliefs and their proof, the proof that the men of the cult were afraid of women's strength and tried to tame it. They tried to tame it and yet it were all the survivors that had lived through months and years of torture and built themselves back up and Jaha only needed a few months in prison to be miserable. They tried to tame it and yet that was the reason they all died.

The fact that they wrote that down, admitting it, even while fighting it made Lexa believe that they truly had believed women held some kind of special power. A special power that they believed was strong enough to only be weakened by making all these women burn in hell, and it didn't work in the end anyway.

She still hadn't found her words when she picked Clarke from the cold floor and the dark dungeons and brought her back upstairs, tucked her into bed and said, "These people were the dumbest I can think of. They were so afraid to worship you but they didn't even have any idea how breathtaking it is to do so. They wanted you to be fragile so bad but they never saw the beauty in your strength."

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and this, all of you lovely loyal readers, is a wrap for 'fragile'.

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