Lightning Only Strikes Once - Clexa

Chapter 25: Rinse and Repeat

"That's insane," Octavia snaps, but she looks even more shaken now.

"That's how I knew Raven would come down," Clarke says, still unable to care about much of anything. She's staring at the hole through a man's head and she feels nothing except a numb distance from everything real. She's fucked up. She's fucked up so badly. "How I knew Trigedasleng. How Lexa knew what the radio was. How I and Lexa knew each other. How I knew where that hiding place was – I helped Raven do some things there, in the last world. It sounds insane, but it's true, and it explains everything."

"But it does not explain why Emerson would remember," Lexa says, sounding stressed, worried about Clarke. "Please, ai hodnes -"

"I'm so stupid," Clarke says, closing another warrior's staring dead eyes. They should be getting out of here straight away, but she can't bring herself to care enough right now. Their guards are dead, Murphy and Drew have either been taken by the Mountain Men or are dead as well. She wanders back inside numbly and looks at the walls, seeing the truth immediately. "There, look, one of their knock-out darts missed and hit the wall. The others must not have – kind of amazing they missed with any at this range, maybe one guy pulled his shot up at the last second to avoid overdosing one of them on sedatives. They use those darts on small groups, with only two or three people, and save the gas grenades for larger clusters. So Murphy and Drew are probably alive. For the moment. They'll have their bone marrow sucked out by tomorrow, I bet. Maybe a little later since they were talking about interrogation. And we can't do anything about it." She bends down and picks up the useless empty gun, discarded here by Murphy, and stares at it for a second before shoving it into her waistband.

Lexa plucks the dart out of the wall, curling her fist around it as if to hide it from Clarke's view. Clarke hopes she doesn't squeeze too hard and knock herself out. "Clarke," she says, almost pleadingly. "This isn't your fault -"

"Why would they take them?" Octavia says, clearly still trying to comprehend what's going on. "I mean, take them alive? Why?"

"They can't handle radiation," Clarke says, moving her gaze to Lexa. "They burn up if they leave the Mountain. Using our bone marrow, they can. There's nearly four hundred of them, they need one person per seven, so Murphy and Drew will only help fourteen..." and then she breaks, the force within her, the sadness, the horror, finally overcoming the walls of numbness. She screws up her eyes so much that they sting with the force of it, but the hot tears still well out of them, tracing lines down her face.

"Clarke," Lexa says, "Clarke," And Lexa's arms are around her pulling her close, so that her tears soak Lexa's shoulder, so she snuffles against her, so her wails are muffled against the woman she loves.

And that's how she's able to stand again, with Lexa against her, with Lexa's strength flowing into her. She sobs against her and ignores everything for what seems like hours but is probably only minutes, and then she runs out of tears, and she leans on Lexa and pulls herself together. She doesn't even know why she's reacting this badly. She didn't know Drew, didn't know the gonas who died for her. She knew Murphy, but he was kind of a dick. Maybe again he would have become more – maybe not. He's lost the chance to, now.

But maybe she's crying because she thought that this time, no one had to die. She and Lexa, with their command of the future, could save the day! Sure, they'd lost a few. Atom, Trina and Pascal had died. More would when the Ark came to Earth, that was unavoidable if they landed wrongly. But there was no reason why it couldn't work out for the rest of them. In the back of her mind she'd even been going over deals they could make with the Mountain, ways they could trade their bone marrow for the destruction of the fog machine and discontinuation of the Reaper program, for example. But now that's useless. Emerson won't let that happen. He hates her too much.