Clarke’s a few steps behind Julian, slower because she’s keeping her dress from snagging. When he stops and turns back to her, the beauty of him is staggering. He’s crafted in neutrals—black hair, golden skin, white shirt, caramel pants—and dusted with a thousand iridescent crystal refractions. Melancholy sweeps over her in a drowning wave.
She’s going to lose him. They’re going to fight, and it’s going to be brutal, and it’s going to tear down every slat they’ve added to the bridge they’ve been building. She doesn’t want that. But if he doesn’t respect her, what choice does she have? She has to respectherselfenough to know that she deserves better than someone who speaks about her the way he did to Atreus. It’s self-preservation at this point.
Something Clarke apparently needs to keep learning over and over again: Sometimes, self-preservation really,reallyfucking hurts.
Julian has kept his face carefully empty since she told him they needed to talk, but now he drops the mask. Worry crinkles his forehead, the corners of his eyes. “What is it? What happened?”
Clarke tears out her heart and lays it at his feet. “When you told Atreus Skordi that I wasn’t good enough for Provenance, that I wasn’t good enough to be a champion. Did you mean it?”
The worry vanishes, replaced by confusion and shock. “You—how do you—”
“Did youmeanit, Julian?” Clarke’s patience has run out. After hours of his words circling in her head, after the hurt and the anger and the dissociation while playing nice for Graham and Hailey’s sake, she can’t listen to him cobble truncated phrases together. “Is that really what you think of me, or were you just telling him that because you want the job yourself?”
He takes a step toward her, hands out, palms down, pleading. “Clarke, I—it isn’t—”
Clarke backs away, hands up, palms forward. A crystal jabs her in the thigh. It’ll bruise. Good. Clarke wants proof that this happened, a physical reminder she can press her fingers into later, when she’s missing him. She needs to learn this lesson, once and for all. “It isn’twhat? I was there. I heard you say it.”
“I was trying to—okay, I get how it—how much did you hear?”
Clarke laughs. It is not a pleasant sound. “Why, so I don’t catch you in a lie?”
Julian closes his eyes briefly. “At some point, you are going to have to stop assuming the absolute worst of me. No, Clarke, so I know how much to explain. If you’re even interested in an explanation, that is, because it seems like you maybe just want to be mad.”
“It seems,” Clarke repeats, slow and deliberate, outrage and volume increasing, “like I just want to be mad?It seems like—”
“I’m sorry, is this you being receptive?” Julian snaps, his own anger rising in response to Clarke’s. “Every single one of your walls is up right now. You don’t want to listen to what actually happened, you just want to justify what you already think.”
“Tell me more about how I’m supposed to react,” Clarke snarls. “No, please, it’s really helpful. Tell me how I should feel about you thinking I’m not good enough for the sport we have both dedicated our entire damn lives to.”
“I don’t think that! You’re fuckingincredible, Clarke, I havealways—”
“You said it!”
“Because—”
“Because you are just like Anders,” Clarke says. It lands hard enough that Julian recoils, and it takes a chunk out of Clarke’s battered heart to hurt him, but there’s also a vicious, spiteful part of her that wants him to suffer just as much as she has. “He told me I’m not good enough, too. Did you guys compare notes? Have a chummy evening looking at my stats and deciding I don’t measure up?”
“Clarke,” Julian says, stricken and reeling. “Clarke, it doesn’t—it’s not—”
“He left me behind, too.” The words are edged and salted, cutting and burning their way out of her. “And you both only deigned to get involved in my life again once there was benefit in it for you.”
Incredulity sharpens Julian, his features and posture and presence suddenly larger than life. “Ileftyoubehind? Are you out of your mind?”
“What else would you call it?” Where Julian is sharp, Clarke is blurry, rage and misery and anguish all seeping into one another. “I couldn’t give you what you wanted, and after you went to F0—after Connor—what Icouldgive you wasn’t enough anymore. You left me behind.”
“You’rethe one who left!” Julian shouts. “You’re the one who walked away. And I let you, because I have never, ever wanted to push you into being with me, and you know that, so don’t try to make it out like I couldn’t handle—gods, what are wedoing?”
He stops himself. Covers his eyes with his hand. Breathes, like he hasn’t since this conversation started.
Clarke doesn’t have his self-control, and shehatesthat it’s so easy for him to shut this down. “What, backing off again? Is this not worth your time, or—”
“Atreus asked for the meeting. I agreed, not because I want to leave Chronicle but because I wanted to know what he’d say. If there was anything I could learn that would help me beat them.” Julian has changed shapes entirely in the last ten seconds, rearranging all those pieces that were honed and hardened a minute ago into something—not tamed, exactly, but caged. Contained. “He told me what everyone already knows, that Oliver’s causing problems and he wants to get rid of him. And then he told me he’d be happy to have me as Delphine’s secondary until she retires.”
“Delphine’s only twenty-nine,” Clarke says, frowning, distracted enough to momentarily forget that she’s mad. When she’d been daydreaming about a potential move to Provenance, she figured that would be the case for her: secondary to Delphine. She’d been willing to accept it, at least as a starting point. But Julian’s…Julian. It’d be a huge step back for him.
“Yes.”
“Is she planning on retiring early?”
