fragile | clexa

chapter seventy eight

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After having dinner, they decided to go to the beach again, this time with their swimming clothes. After waking up, Lexa hadn't noticed the easel standing by the couch, but she noticed it when leaving. A canvas stood upon it with Lexa, bathed in sunlight, curled up sleeping on the couch, bare skin showing yet in an angle cut so clever than nothing more than the flesh of her breasts was seen.

"This is impressive," Lexa noted while looking at it closer, the skin, the shadows, the linen couch.

"Oh, it's uh- a quick thing I did while dinner was cooking. I can destroy it if you're not okay with an almost indecent picture of you existing."

"Destroy it? No, I love it."

Clarke gave her a shy smile, dressed in her bathing suit and the white robe with the cornflowres again. Lexa was only wearing Clarke's now dry bright linen pants over her bikini. It was easier than digging up her own clothes from the still unpacked bags.

The evening air was warm and smelled like summer and saltwater. This beach's sand was even finer, the water warmer and now that the wind had lessend the waves were more gentle. Clarke tried to move more carefully anyway.

Lexa went for a swim, but didn't move out of eyesight in case the spot that was Clarke at the shore would disappear under the water's surface again. When she came back, Clarke had laid down on the large cloth they had taken for a picknic blanket and Lexa joined her, giving Clarke's bare shoulder a kiss.

"I thought you read all books there were," she teased, looking at the title of the old, tattered book.

"The boring ones are still left."

"What's this?"

"Chronicles of Heda, a biography, Volume 4."

Lexa couldn't help the laught passing her lips. "What?"

"It's a biography about you."

"Me?"

"Well, you're the fourth Heda. Volume 4."

"A bio- wait, did you say the boring ones are still left?"

Clarke grinned and gave Lexa a kiss, turning to lay on her back. The book's stained cover gained one more crinkle when Clarke let it fall next to her on the blanket. "Raven found it on the market and thought it'd be terribly funny if she gifted me a book about my girlfriend. It's fairly interesting, but I like the real thing better."

"Is that so?"

"Mhm."

Lexa rewarded the confirmation with a lingering kiss, then one to Clarke's cheek before she too turned on her back and looked up at sky. The sunset had left a pale red afterglow, which began to turn into blue on the other side of the horizon. The first star had already made its appearance.

"What do you think are stars?" Lexa asked randomly. "Just like clouds for the night? Or like the sun for the night?"

"I think stars are suns, just in small."

"Why would we have so many suns?"

"Not for us. I read about it."

"Of course you have," Lexa smiled softly. "What did you read about?"

"It's not entirely proofed, but I read a book that claimed to be the copy of a book from the world before. They knew. They knew everything. The knowledge burned down with the rest of the world. The book said that we're just this little piece of rock in an infinite universe full of other planets and stars. That star there, they called it Venus. It's a planet, actually. One of our neighbor planets. That's why we see it before all the other stars, because those are impossibly far away. Like, not possibly measurable with our units. If the book was correct, anyway."