Lightning Only Strikes Once - Clexa

Chapter 25: Rinse and Repeat

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."