When they leave their hiding place, they find nothing but a few milling horses, and the bodies of Grounders with neat bullet holes in their heads. Distantly, Clarke notes that the horses they left are a godsend – whatever sensors the Mountain Men installed here will be being continually triggered by them, so the Maunon are unlikely to come back and investigate again for a while. They should probably go in a different direction to head back anyway, just in case it's some kind of perimeter sensor, but they'll probably survive.
"They threw this at the gonas, knocked them all out with it," Clarke says tonelessly, picking up a used gas grenade and handing it to Lexa, who takes it with a visible look of disgust. "It's amazing they managed to shout a warning at all. One of the gonas must have spotted them first and then they all tried to yell out to us, and fight, but then the Mountain Men threw these... after that, they would have been knocked out. So the Mountain Men walked around and shot every single one of them."
"Clarke..." Lexa says softly.
Clarke swallows the bile in her throat. "Maybe they had silencers. I didn't hear the shots, did you? I don't understand why they'd bother with silencers, though. It would have been easy to shoot them, since they were unconscious. Maybe I just didn't hear them, I was too worried about us. There was no reason to shoot them, either, since they were already unconscious." She reaches down and closes one of the warrior's eyes gently, hand shaking slightly. "They just shot them because... well, why not. Bullets are cheap, easy to make." She closes the eyes of the woman next to him as well. This gona has a facial tattoo, and Clarke wonders what it means – do the three bars on her cheek represent her children? Her siblings? The number of wars she's fought, the number of decades she's been alive, the number of people she's fallen in love with?
"What's going on?" Octavia says, her voice trembling. "Why did they do this? Who's Emerson?"
"I killed his children," Clarke says, her voice still a monotone. Somehow she can't force herself to wake up from this shock.
"No," Lexa says forcefully. "No, you didn't. You did what you had to do. And that wasn't here, Clarke, wasn't now. It did not happen."
"But he remembers it," Clarke says dully. "So it did for him."
"Why would he remember?" Lexa says reasonably.
"Remember what?" Octavia says shrilly. John is still sick, lying on the ground just inside the drop ship – one of them should probably be helping. He started throwing up when he saw all the corpses, the careless bullet shots to the middle of the head for each of them, not neat and clean like in movies but complete with brain matter and blood and the ugly realness of murder. Octavia seems to be holding together better, but only just. Neither of them have seen things like this before.
"Remember everything," Clarke says to Octavia, abruptly sick of lying. It's too much effort, in this moment. John can't hear, and they agreed to tell Octavia anyway. "Everything about the first time around. The first time we fell from the Ark. Jasper was hit by a spear, Charlotte killed Wells, Bellamy threw away Raven's radio and hundreds of people up there died because of him. You were kidnapped by Lincoln, we tortured him, you became a warrior. We burned three hundred people alive, Finn shot people in cold blood in TonDC and was executed, the Maunon wanted us all dead, so we killed them all, even the children, but then Pike started killing off all of the Grounders even though they were helping us..." her voice fades away. She doesn't know what to say. There's too much. It hurts too much.
Lexa takes over for her. "Clarke and I lived through the first year of your people coming to the ground already," she says quietly to Octavia. "We fought each other, and the Mountain, and the Ice Nation, and each other again. Then I died. And Clarke went to the top of the tower in Polis, and lightning hit her, and we both woke up and remembered it all."
"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.
She thought this was about love. Her love for Lexa, powerful enough to rip through time. Her feelings for Lexa were so strong they seemed bigger than just her, so it almost made sense to Clarke that she could change the whole world just with grief and need. But when has anything on the ground been about love? "It's all about blood," Clarke says finally when she's in control again.
It's always about blood. Grounder blood, healing Maunon so their burns fade away like they'd never existed at all. Skaikru blood, giving them the addictive taste of sunshine which spurred them to murder. Lexa's black blood soaking Clarke's hands, Clarke's blood boiling in her veins as the lightning struck, and just the tiniest touch of Emerson's blood to ruin it all. Clarke thinks she's been covered in blood more often than rain since she got here.
"What is?" Octavia says, looking unnerved. Even if she thinks they're crazy, their devotion to this lie has her on edge, Clarke can see.
"This. How we were brought back. The lightning hit me, so I came back," Clarke says. "My hands were covered in Lexa's blood, so she came back. But I must have had some of Emerson's on me as well. Just a little, the smallest amount, but I guess it was enough."
"How would you -" Lexa begins, then stops. Her eyes widen. "Oh," she says thoughtfully.
"Yeah," Clarke says, almost rueful. "He tackled me, wrestled me to the ground, opened up my forehead. He was covered in blood, had a bloody nose, forehead, chest, hands... he must have gotten a smear on me. I was wearing the same clothes then as when you died," she swallows hard. "I didn't wash them. I don't even remember if I bathed properly between then and the lightning. His blood could have been on my clothes or in my hair or under my fingernails... I've ruined everything."
There's a momentary pause, and then Octavia snickers.
"Octavia!"
"What?" Octavia tries to stifle it, but can't stop laughing. "I'm sorry... but... you... you've doomed the world... through poor hygiene?" She really can't stop. "That's your epic-level mistake? Not washing?"
There's a long pause. Then Lexa swallows hard and looks away from Clarke.
"Lexa!" Clarke says, in the same half-horrified, half-angry tone of voice.
"I... Clarke," Lexa visibly tries to force her expression to remain stoic instead of smirking. "This is all very serious, of course. It's just... that statement is hard to take seriously." She and Octavia make eye contact only to look away from each other, Octavia struggling not to crack up again.
Clarke massages her forehead, grits her teeth to stop herself bursting out into hysterical giggling as well. She knows that's what it is – neither Octavia nor Lexa are the kind of people to find something like that funny while in a clearing filled with corpses. In fact, Lexa almost never laughs at all. But the truth is, this situation is so morbid and bizarre it's hard not to lose your composure.
"I apologise, Clarke," Lexa says, managing to contain her inappropriate amusement. She clears her throat, schooling her face back into blankness. Octavia sobers as well. "So. You believe you had some of Emerson's blood on you. But we cannot be sure."
"We can't," Clarke admits. "But it explains this. Why they reacted so fast. Why they took dead bodies, even though they showed no interest in them the previous world – Cage was checking to see if Emerson was telling the truth. Emerson would have gone straight to him, he's the follower type, he wouldn't have wanted to act on his own. And the timeframe just means it took him a little while to convince him." She thinks about it. "I bet the drop ship falling convinced him, especially if they checked it out. And then Emerson's guesses stopped working, but they took Trina and Pascal's bodies just in case he was on to something anyway."
"And they found something in the blood or bone marrow that convinced them he was telling the truth," Lexa says slowly. She nods. "So they put sensors here to catch more prey, hoping you would be one of them. It's a possibility, certainly. If this is about blood, though, did anyone else bleed on you around that time? Is there another person we should worry about?"
Lexa opens a pouch at her belt and puts in the knock-out dart she was still holding in her hands, as if she'd only just remembered it. To show Indra later, Clarke assumes, though why Lexa would need to prove anything to Indra is beyond her. She closes and knots the pouch carefully again.
Octavia looks between them, clearly still at least half-convinced they're either mad or making the worst-timed practical joke in history.
"Ontari," Clarke says slowly, "But I washed that off incredibly thoroughly, trust me, having her blood on my face creeped me out. Roan? No, I definitely washed several times between being captured and... what happened. No one else I can think of."
John staggers out of the drop ship. His dark skin still has a greenish tinge, but his face is furious. "Murphy," he manages to choke out. "Where's Murphy -"
"Out of our reach," Lexa says bluntly. "You should come back to TonDC with us. Your friends will likely die before we can do anything about it, whatever we try. But if you wish to have even the chance of avenging them, you will come with us." She looks at him. "Of course, if you still wish to leave for the ocean, I will not stop you."
John blinks. "He was my friend," he says hoarsely. His skin is returning to its normal colour, his face beginning to set with determination and anger.
He was your partner in crime, Clarke thinks disrespectfully, unable to stop herself. He provided the brains, you provided the brawn. Together you made one whole bully. Well done.
She doesn't say it. Whatever they were, John is clearly upset by what's happened. So is she. No one else will care about the probable death of Murphy, no one but them and maybe Bellamy. In the other world she remembers John trying to stop them lynching Murphy, but not going with him after Charlotte's death – she doesn't know if that's because he was horrified by her death, or because he didn't care enough about Murphy, or if his fear of the Grounders back then just outweighed any other considerations. She doesn't know what kind of man he is at all.
John thinks for a long moment, then his face hardens. "Let's go," he says to Lexa. "I'm not going back to Polis, though. I don't want to keep learning how to hunt, I want to find my friend. Save him."
"Was learning to hunt so bad?" Clarke asks curiously before she can stop herself. She remembers that he seemed eager about hunting when he signed up for it.
"No, I liked it," he says. "But Murphy asked me to come with him. And he's my closest friend, and it didn't look like the Ark was gonna come down, not really. So I came with him. Come on, let's go. And on the way, you tell me exactly what we're up against."
Lexa nods and makes a clicking noise with her tongue, summoning several of the horses to her easily. She helps them up onto the horses one by one, showing no concern about her dignity as Heda. Then she mounts her own and leads them off.
Clarke follows, digging her heels into the sides of the horse, praying that she's wrong. That Emerson remembers nothing. That she and Lexa are safe.