heda | clexa

ten

The house's kitchen is small and the chairs of the dinner table are hard and uncomfortable. The person who built them can't have been very skilled at woodworking. A little distrustworthy of their stability, Clarke slides onto one of them, tucking her cold feet beneath her thighs.

Lexa rummages in the kitchen for a while and seems to get overly excited about the presence of certain foods and ingredients in the meanwhile, most of which passes Clarke by. Just something about Lexa having brought food, but someone already having taken care of that in excess? The quality of the present food? Or lack thereof?

Clarke doesn't know, she lets Lexa's voice go into one ear, leave some comfort behind and then out the other.

Her fingers brush over her knees, which had been soaked in mud not half an hour ago.

What had happened? What had been wrong?

As though noticing Clarke's thoughts drifting, Lexa sets down a box in front of Clarke. "We have eggs," she says, and draws Clarke's focus back to the task at hand; baking 'chocolate chip cookies', whatever that might be. "So we're going to make good use of them." She sets another few boxes down in front of Clarke and simply tasks her with measuring and mixing ingredients together.

"How do I measure?"

Lexa seems to contemplate that for a moment and shrugs. "Feeling?"

"Feeling?" Clarke repeats skeptically and Lexa forms her hand into a cup to show Clarke.

"You pour it into your hand- wash it first- and then mix it together. Here, you go ahead, I'll tell you how much."

Clarke's eyes leave the softness of Lexa's eyes, now across of her, and move towards the boxes of ingredients. She only needs to take off the lids and pour the contents into her hand. There's nothing difficult about that.

Where Clarke is from, there is no 'kitchen', no extra room to cook. You cook in the middle of the living room or outside in the summer months. There are always people gathered around the cooking fire, always another child to keep from trying the hot food right off the fire, another aunt with fresh herbs, another neighbor with fresher gossip.

So this type of kitchen, in a house of only two inhabitants, catches Clarke off-guard. There's something there that, when Clarke makes the realization, causes a pang of panic deep in the fractured thing that is her chest. Clarke, for the umpteenth time that night, feels unbelievably small.

This type of kitchen causes one thing Clarke didn't account for when agreeing to trying that stupid chocolate; intimacy.

How does the proposition of something so small make Clarke so scared? How does she go from Wanheda, infamous predator, to a puppy cowered in a corner for once too many times that night?

Clarke swallows. "Can you show me?" she asks and her voice is coarse and weaker than she wants it to be, but at least her eyes are steady on Lexa's.

Lexa draws in a sharp breath that is not audible as anything out of the ordinary. Nothing about her suggests that she's having an existential crisis, because her expressions are ever so unchanged and her shoulders are ever so squared. Opposite to Clarke, who no longer looks like a divine warrior at all.

God, Clarke looks so young all of a sudden. Where did that confidence go? Where did that danger go?

She looks like a teenager now, a teenager reaching out for something like a starved stray dog would reach out for food, torn fur and bared teeth yet glassy eyes.

Lexa's heart is beating in her throat when she nods and her body is unusually still when she approaches, every little muscle under complete control. She stands next to Clarke then, close enough to feel the warmth radiating off Clarke's body, close enough to smell the soap Clarke used when she bathed, close enough to hear the exact pattern of Clarke's breathing. "Can I?" she asks quietly and Clarke's breath changes, a tiny hitch, almost unnoticable.