Lexa crawls over to Clarke painfully. "Clarke? Ai hodnes?"
"You're alive," Clarke says, a little weakly. She looks terrible – well, beautiful, of course, because she is Clarke, but terrible in the sense that there are dark bruises under her eyes, her skin is too pale, and her ankle is swollen to easily twice its normal size.
"Sha," Lexa says, aware she probably looks worse. She can still feel the sticky wetness trickling down her shoulder as her reopened wound continues to bleed. Her neck is bleeding as well from where Nia's sword nicked it. "So are you." She glances over at Nia, still curled up and moaning on the ground. "So is she."
Clarke looks over at her too, then returns her attention to Lexa, placing pressure on the wound, an action she must know is futile at this point, regardless of Natblida healing. No one is coming to provide warmth and stitches. Clarke hesitates then pulls off her jacket to tie around the wound and give it more pressure than just the sash can give, ignoring Lexa's protest. She tears off another layer, heedless of what this will do to her, and adds it as well, doing everything she can to prolong Lexa's life. "Stomach wounds can take hours to kill people."
Her words are matter-of-fact, with no emotion at all attached. She knows what Nia is. She knows what Nia took. So Clarke will let her die by inches, allow Lexa to enjoy her revenge, sit here with her and watch as Nia gets back just a little of the pain she gave out.
But Lexa isn't enjoying it. She doesn't even feel satisfaction. She just feels – hollow. Clarke helps. Having Clarke here always helps. But she can't even really bring herself to look at Nia, writhing with agony, dying slowly.
Lexa wonders why Clarke does not think less of her for this cruelty. Torn open, her blood smeared on the floor, letting out keening sobs of agony, Nia seems less like a monster and more like a person. Clarke gets a very specific look sometimes, when she reacts to a ruthless action Lexa has taken, a kind of stunned hurt, as if she is unwillingly horrified. She wore that face with Finn's death, TonDC's destruction, Lexa's betrayal at the Mountain, Pike's murder, the Maunon's execution, and even when Lexa killed some of Nia's gona while they slept. As if for a moment she is not seeing Lexa, or even the Commander, but seeing a kind of monster. It always fades from Clarke's face, but never from Lexa's memory. Will Clarke someday look at Lexa with that expression forever? Will she someday see Lexa only as a monster instead of the girl she loves?
No, surely not. Clarke can be shocked, she is human, but she is not weak and she will never see Lexa as only a monster. Clarke's love is not so fickle. And she loves Lexa just as fiercely as Lexa loves her. They may not have the bonding tattoos, but they are bonded, and what they have is stronger than what they must do. Even if it were weaker, they have days left, perhaps only hours given their injuries, so the 'someday' Lexa fears will never come, any more than the someday she hopes for.
But – is this how Costia's story ends? It started with sunlight and flowers, then it became about torture and beheading, and now it ends like this – a cruel, worthless excuse for a human being made animalistic by pain, lying gutted on the cold stony ground of a crumbling palace.
Costia was a good fisa, when she trained at it. An even more impressive hunter. But she stopped being a fisa because she hated seeing people in pain. And sometimes she lost animals when she hunted, animals another hunter could have gotten, because she refused to slow them down by wounding them. If she could not kill them cleanly, she said, she would not kill them at all. Through the eye or in the throat, a quick kill. For animals, for allies, for enemies. For everyone.
Costia believed in justice. But Costia believed in mercy more.
Lexa wants Nia to suffer. She wants it so badly she can taste it. No, Clarke will not judge her for it. If Costia were here, she would not judge her for it, either. Nia deserves this.
Nia deserves this, to die painfully and humiliatingly and gruesomely. But Costia does not deserve to have this be the end of her story. Costia was better than this. So is Clarke, her bright blue eyes watching Lexa with worry, blonde hair hanging bedraggled and dirty against her face. Both of them so much better than this world, better than this ugly place, their souls shining and clean while Lexa's spirit is caked with a century of old blood.
Maybe if she keeps pretending, someday Lexa will actually be better than this as well. Like Costia was. Like Clarke is.
It takes her a painful few minutes to retrieve the arrow. Clarke does not question it, holds the bow firmly when Lexa tells her to, angled exactly as Lexa asked, so that Lexa can use her one able arm to pull back the string.
The arrow strikes true. A clean shot to the middle of the throat. An impressive shot, given their states, and Lexa wonders if the spirit Costia carved into her bow guided the arrow to its home. Nia stops moving, dead. A far cleaner death than she deserves.
"Yu gonplei ste odon," Lexa murmurs.
"My room?" Clarke says faintly, gesturing towards the door. Lexa nods.
She helps Clarke up with a whimper, and Clarke sucks a breath in as her ankle is jolted. Together they stagger and stumble painfully into the bedroom. Clarke grabs the one torch on the way and lights the one inside as well so that there are two giving the room a soft glow. Lexa lowers Clarke gently onto the mattress that was left there when the bedframe and blankets were torn apart. Clarke sinks into it with a choked sigh.
It's only one step to the door. Lexa takes it, stands there for a moment, then lowers her head to spit contemptuously on Nia's corpse. "I gave you mercy, for Costia," she whispers. "That – that was for me." Then she closes the door and moves to collapse next to Clarke, curling up into her. The room warms slowly from the torches' fire, but most of their warmth is from each other.
"I didn't think it would end like this," Clarke murmurs eventually.
Clarke is so close Lexa can feel the puff of air from every word. "How did you think it would end, ai niron?"
"I hoped it would end better," Clarke admits, "But I thought it would end much worse. It ended worse before."
"You lived before," Lexa points out. Her shoulder has stopped bleeding. She can feel it. Anyone else would be dead already, would have died after they dropped the gas grenade. But Assan's stab must have been a very lucky one, and Clarke put pressure on it almost immediately, and the cold must have slowed the bleeding and caused it to scab, and her black blood must be working hard against the injury. And... perhaps the Commander's spirit wants her to have a few more hours. Perhaps it feels it owes her this much, for all she has done, for all she has given. "You lived."
"No," Clarke says. "No, I didn't. I survived before. This... this is living. Even if there's only a little of it left, it's worth it. It's all been worth it, every moment. I wouldn't give it up for anything."
"Sha, I feel the same. Every single moment with you has been worth it."
They're silent for a long time, just breathing each other in. Clarke's eyes slide closed. "Tell me a story," she requests sleepily. "A bedtime story."
Lexa smiles against Clarke's hair. "Of course, ai hodnes." She thinks for a moment. She does not know many stories, so she makes her own. "There once was a beautiful hunter who lived in the forest. She had eyes the colour of the sky and hair the colour of the sun and all the people around thought she had the warmth of summer in her veins. She had a hut she lived in alone but people came by every day. They came to talk and laugh, sometimes, or they came to trade for her food, but often they came to ask for help. Because it was well known that the hunter would give food to the hungry and would heal the wounded with her fisa knowledge and would give the very saddest the greatest gift of all: her smile."
"And then she met another woman, a gona. One with dark hair and thoughtful green eyes and a solemn face. A woman who stood straight. She saw the woman walking by and called out to her, asking to paint her," Clarke interrupts, stifling a yawn. She smiles at Lexa.
"When she saw the hunter calling out, the gona came to her at once. She felt dizzy just looking at the beautiful hunter, but it wasn't just because she was beautiful. The gona could see the sadness in her eyes. The gona could see that the hunter had been hurt by life, again and again and again, but she still smiled as if the world was wonderful. It was the most amazing thing the gona had ever seen, that smile, strong in the face of all the hunter had seen and done."
Lexa shifts a little and winces at the pain in her shoulder. Her face feels flushed and strange and she realises she's breathing more quickly than normal. Perhaps this is what Clarke was talking about. Perhaps they are running out of air and her body is trying to get more. How strange, she never thought of air as something you could run out of. It was simply there, surrounding you invisibly.
"And the hunter saw the same thing in the gona's eyes," Clarke says, sounding barely awake anymore. "She saw someone who had carried the burdens no one else could manage, someone who sacrificed more than food or healing or smiles. Someone who had given nearly everything they had. Someone who was tired. So she invited the gona in, and the gona sat down, and the hunter began to paint her."
"She painted for hours and hours," Lexa says softly. "They had all the time they wished, because it was a great time of peace in the world so the gona had no one to fight, and the hunter closed the door to show that she was far too busy for visitors. So she painted and painted."
"And then when she finished, she showed it to the gona, and it wasn't just a picture of her. It was a picture of both of them together, bonding tattoos covering their skin, matching smiles on their faces. Smiles with no sadness in them."
"And the gona kissed the hunter."
"Or the hunter kissed the gona."
Their lips pressed against each other, more tentatively than ever before, but lingeringly, as if they really did have all the time in the world.
"It's a good story," Clarke murmurs. She's breathing too quickly as well, but Lexa can sense she's falling asleep anyway. Or drifting away, passing out, perhaps, how is Lexa supposed to know? She did not even know you could run out of air while above water, let alone what happened if you did.
"Sha, ai niron. It is. The best. Well, second best." The real story is the best. Hers and Clarke's. A story that starts with a strange blonde invader entering her tent to try and prevent a war and protect her people, but still ends with a kiss just like the story she made up.
"Ai hod yu in, Lexa."
"Ai hod yu in, Clarke. Reshop."
Lexa drifts into her dreams with a faint sense of relief, letting go of everything cold and hard to travel towards a sunlit hut in the forest, where a beautiful girl paints a picture of her. She can feel the rough, sun-warmed fabric of the chair she sits on, smell the flowers dotting the cosy little room, hear the background twittering of birds and the steady strokes of paintbrush against canvas, drown in the heartbreaking blue of the bright eyes meeting hers, feel the current of joy running through her as the girl flashes her a smile.
Then she feels nothing at all.