Lightning Only Strikes Once - Clexa

Chapter 123: Love Is Not Blind

"We're leaving tomorrow," Clarke says abruptly. "Do you care?"

He doesn't turn around, still concentrating on the piece of wood he's whittling, but his shoulders tense up. After a long moment, he says "Hey, Princess."

She wonders if he expects her to reply with 'hey, Spacewalker' and pretend he hasn't done his level best to emotionally destroy one of her best friends. "I asked you a question. Raven's coming to Polis, it could be months before she comes back here again, years even. Do you care?"

Finn's shoulders slump and he lets the piece of wood clatter back onto the table, putting the small knife carefully beside it. She can see that his hands are crisscrossed with small scars and fresher cuts – clearly, learning to make art out of wood without his sight has been hard on him. That there are dozens of marks makes her feel a flare of pity that dulls her anger.

His voice, old and weary and lost, takes away the rest of it. "Of course I care. You think I don't want to go see her? Wells, too. There's nothing I'd like more."

Clarke hesitates, then takes a seat next to him on the bench, awkwardly clacking into it once with her crutches before she manages to stow them beside her. She reaches out and touches his shoulder. He flinches in surprise for a second but then relaxes again. It's hard to see his expression with the length of cloth still wrapped across his eyes and she wonders if he ever takes it off. "Then why not go and see them? They want to see you, I know they do, they're just... trying to respect your wishes."

There's a long period of quiet and Clarke's nearly decided to repeat herself when he finally speaks. "Rae's my best friend. I've known her my whole life, nearly. She's more than my best friend, actually. She's family." He smiles, but there's nothing happy about it. "She likes to say that I saved her life. She leaves out the part where she saved mine too." Finn sighs, and he doesn't sound like Finn at all, nothing like the boy she used to know. He's not a boy anymore, she thinks, he's grown up like the rest of them now – damaged like the rest of them.

"What do you mean?" Clarke asks.

"My parents were better than Raven's, they fed me, at least, but they weren't really – present. You know? It used to feel like Raven was the only person who saw me. And then we got older and older and other people saw me, but Rae was the only who saw something worthwhile. I was a dropkick and she was a genius but she thought I was her knight in shining armour. And then one day when we were still just kids, she turned to me and said she was in love with me, and I didn't know that there were different kinds of love, so I said it back." He rubs his thumb across the piece of wood he was carving, and Clarke realises it's a bird – not a detailed, realistic bird, more like the outline of one in flight. He reaches his hand up to touch his blindfold but drops it before it makes contact. "So I kept trying to be her hero instead of a loser, and she kept trying to be my girlfriend instead of my best friend, and then I went to the Skybox and she really was the only person who saw me. It was like I only existed when she was visiting, you know? We grew up wound around each other so much I didn't know who I was when she wasn't there. I don't think she knew who she was without me either."

Clarke thinks suddenly of Wells, their lives so close and parallel that they'd never really been without each other until her father's death. She'd never felt like she needed him to be, though, not like what Finn describes. But Wells – the way his eyes used to brighten when she spoke to him, how quiet he always was until she asked his opinion, how much he seemed to need her to lead so he could follow – maybe he felt like that, back then. "I guess I know what you mean. But the way you -"

He talks over her, the words flowing out of him as if he's been waiting to explain. "And then I was falling to earth and she was a whole world away. And I could be – I could be me. I got to figure out who that was. I missed Rae, but at the same time, I didn't. It was such an adventure. I could make my own choices." This time he does touch the blindfold, ruefully. "I guess I didn't do that great a job at it."