fragile | clexa

chapter twenty three

TW for this chapter in particular, right from the beginning to a point I'll mark with a ' * ' there's a scene covering a direct memory of Clarke's abuse, don't read if you're not comfy with that, safety first!!
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Clarke was lying on her side. The mattress was hard, and stains covered the already yellowish surface.

Her hearing was slowed and blurry, everything echoed, her head was throbbing.

The only thing that seemed to be working in her entire body were her eyes and her nose, apart from all those little cells that recognized the rough hands currently digging into her hips and sent the message of pain up to her tired brain.

Her eyes were on someone else's. A pale, empty green that stared right back at her with such terror caught frozen in their expressions.

The eyes were desolate, nothing in there but that fear, completely hopeless.

The girl was dead, needless to say.

She had been for days.

That was the other thing, her nose, it had been taking in that smell of a decaying body for hours over hours and it fogged her senses. When her current owner was sick of Clarke though, he still touched that goddamn corpse, and Clarke had to witness it all right there stuffed into that way too small bed. Especially since she had to share it with a dead body and a man of over six feet.

She felt like she was already on her way to die too. Maybe she'd have one more hour, or two, but she couldn't say she was very much mourning her own death, or fearing it.

There was a constant nausea located among the throbbing headache, right in the back of her throat, and if it wasn't death, then Clarke wanted nothing but to get out of there, to breathe again, to smell something other than pure, unhidden death.

There was a third girl that the man had bought a while ago. Clarke always had her head in sight on the nightstand, but she didn't look at it if she wasn't forced to.

Her body was thrown away in the back of the room, already rotten to something that might be creating more of the smell than the newly passed brunette. Why he kept the slaves he killed, she would never know.

It all mortified Clarke. Not that she was noticing much of it, but the empty stares and the bloody stain over the wood of her owner's nightstand, that scent- it kept burning into her mind further and further to a point where it had inflamed everything.

*

All Clarke knew that moment, past crippling fear and overwhelming anxiety, was the smell. Death. Rotten. Human flesh and blood. Sex. Rape. Alcohol.

The hard mattress, the wood of the bed poking through into Clarke's skin.

Blank eyes, full of nothing and still with a faint signature of pain, like there was a ghost hovering behind them.

Her hands were frantically rushing over Lexa's body, feeling it warm and the skin soft, intact, her hair freshly washed, her breathing.

She was breathing.

Clarke was with Lexa.

Her nose buried in fabric, in Lexa's hair, her neck, taking in every ounce of flowery scent she could get. It was all Lexa. Lexa alive, not anything even close to decaying.

Lexa herself didn't know what was going on. She tried to calm Clarke, but didn't dare speak, her hands trying to hold the girl in place, though that seemed unnecessary when, after a long while, the blonde's body just slumped against her. Breathing still ragged, body still trembling and then- Lexa started at the feeling of Clarke's hand on her breast and she raised a brow.