three years ago, in a fic set after the end of season three, I wrote the ending that I always wanted for Kabby.
In my heart, this will always be the ending that they got.
Right now, I don’t know what else to say, except that I love them, and all of you, so much.
* * * * *
It wasn’t given to Marcus and Abby to know how their story would end while they were still living it – just as it is not given to any of us to know, when we are born into the world, what will become of our lives.
Thelonious called them a “transitional generation.” Keep humanity alive on the Ark, that’s all they had to do. They were like Moses, guiding their people to a Promised Land they themselves were never meant to see.
They could never have predicted Earth. They could never have predicted this love. They never saw any of this coming.
There are so many things they don’t know about the future unfolding before them, as they lie in their fur-draped bed in the King of the Ice Nation’s castle, listening to each other’s gentle breathing as the sun streams in through a high stone window. They don’t know about the geodesic domes Raven will invent, the rows of hydroponic greenhouses Jasper and Monty will design to create self-sustaining food sources, or the communication link Clarke will establish through the Commander’s Flame with Becca that allows her to shut down the three nuclear plants nearest to Ice Nation, leaving their mountain runoff water supply uncontaminated.
They don’t know, yet, that they will live.
It’s not six months, it’s a lifetime, a long and good one, with a camp full of children and green things growing under a still-blue sky. They will finish the work Jake Griffin started, to find the Sky People a permanent, lasting home. And hundreds of years from now, children will walk through the wreckage of those now-empty glass domes and tell each other the stories of how the people from the earth and the people from the sky united to survive the Great Storm and rebuild the world. They will run through the fields, now bursting with fruit and flowers and trees in bloom, and they will know the names of the men and women who came together here centuries ago to build them this home.
Every year, on the feast of New Unity Day, the children will perform a pageant depicting the day the Grounders, Sky People and Ice Nation finally moved into their new home, Kongedacapa (“Coalition City”) to weather the Great Storm together. They will gather around the Eden Tree – its vast, ageless canopy of green casting a sweet cool shade over the center of the city - with sticks as toy swords and crowns made of daisies, to honor the great heroes who once saved the human race. Roan the Ice King, whose land became their home. Lexa and Luna, greatest of all the Commanders. Clarke Griffin and Bellamy Blake, who led the army of children from the sky through dangers untold. Lincoln the Gentle and Octavia the Bold, first of the Grounders and Sky People to believe that together their people could know peace.
But the greatest honor is reserved for a boy with a round knot symbol drawn on his forearm in the ink of wild berries, and a girl with two small rings on a chain – centuries old, preserved with care – around her neck, who kneel side by side for the ceremonial watering of the Eden Tree. Marcus the Peaceful and Abigail the Life-Giver, the Last Chancellors, who fell from the stars to find love at the moment they thought the world was ending.
The boy and the girl will kneel on the spot where Marcus and Abigail were wed so many hundreds of years ago, when the tree was first planted in the soil after the Great Storm ended, and perform the ritual. Water from the river that runs through what was once Ice Nation is poured from a stone bowl that once belonged to Commander Lexa onto the roots of the tree that Chancellor Marcus Kane tended on the Ark as a child.
It will be a fable to them, a legend of long-ago heroes and warriors. They will make their parents tell them the tales of Clever Raven, who never met a riddle she couldn’t solve, or the sinister Mountain Men who once kidnapped children to lock them underground, or the love of the Last Chancellors who changed the course of history.
They’re stories, really. Not people.
But the thing that matters is that they lived.
They lived, and their people lived, and the children will remember.
