somewhere | b.blake ✔️

2x09 Part 1✔️

"Where did I go wrong?
I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life"

-How to Save a Life, The Fray

*****

Ash realizes in her hazy mind that she's running through the forest at an unhealthy and slightly inhuman speed as tears stream down her face.

Trees whiz by, but all she can see is Finn's head lolled off to the side and the patch of blood that spread across his torso from the spot between the fifth and sixth rib where Clarke had shoved a knife into.

Clarke. His love.

Ash wonders if it's some sick form of irony that Clarke, his love, was the one to end her friend's life. It sure feels like it, that the girl who judged him for murdering was the one to murder him herself.

Deep down, she knows that it was the right thing to do. That shoving a knife into his chest is better to watch than death by a thousand cuts. But still, seeing Clarke's bloodied hand with a knife in it—the very knife that ended Finn's life—blocks all common sense that Ash possesses out.

Finn's dead.

Her first Earth friend.

Another member of the 100.

Gone.

Killed.

Never to be seen again.

*****

Smith doesn't look up when she approaches, his focus on the knives he perfectly throws into a handmade target across the room. Only when he throws at least a dozen does he spare a wrecked looking Ash a glance.

"I take it the boy was killed?" No pity, no going around the truth. Just cold, hard, facts.

It's not comforting like it normally is. "Yes."

"Would you like to run until you can't feel your legs, spar with no guard on your fists so that your knuckles bleed, or throw knives until you pull all of the muscles in your shoulders while imagining my commanders face as the target?"

"How about sitting here in complete and utter silence so that I can sort through my thoughts?"

Smith has some sense to offer her a sympathetic stare, "Doing that will end up making you more confused until you destroy yourself." Believe me, I would know. Is what he doesn't say.

"What if I want to destroy yourself?" A stupid, childish answer. But with the grief and anger and who knows what else raging in her bloodstream...it's the truth.

Smith's green eyes turn deadly serious as he grips her shoulders. "Never, never, say that. You are grieving, but you are so very strong. You are strong in a way that few people are. The pain that you feel now, it will be the strength that you will feel tomorrow."

"Spar without guards so that my knuckles bleed." Is all that Ash offers him in return.

And though there is a small amount of worry clearly in Smith at the way that she is looking at the world—likely because it is similar to the way he looked after Olivia died—he complies.