Lightning Only Strikes Once - Clexa

Chapter 112: Breathless

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.