heda | clexa

twelve

Clarke, once again, doesn't sleep that night.

She lays restlessly awake, face turned always to the window, where the moonlight throws long, silvery shadows that slowly lose their brightness as the sky steals it instead. The black turns purple and then pink, until it's the same pale blue of a lake frozen on the coldest winter day. Shortly after the sun rises, it knocks downstairs and Clarke tenses, sure that this must be her punishment, that these must be the guards coming to execute her.

Lexa, who went downstairs at sunrise, opens the door- Clarke can only hear the noises. There's some talking, Clarke thinks she can hear Octavia's voice, but that must be her mind playing tricks on her.

The door closes again, and someone walks up the stairs.

Clarke knows it's Lexa, given the nearly silent movement on the old and creaky stairs, but she closes her eyes tight and pretends to sleep nonetheless, anything to catch a potential guard off-guard and fight her way out of being arrested.

Lexa sets something down next to Clarke's bed. There's no other presence in the room, at least not audibly, so Clarke dares to crack open an eye and see Lexa walk to the corner of the room to kneel and pray.

She slids out of bed quietly and is surprised to see her weapons laid out on a canvas before her. Not all of them, mostly daggers and one small ax, but much better than nothing. She immediately puts them in their rightful places on her body, and their known weight comforts her, lets her breathe a little easier, feel a little better about ever stepping outside of this house again.

Lexa must have heard her get up, but she doesn't move from where she's silently praying, and so Clarke closes the bedroom door behind her and moves on to the bathroom, where she washes herself and gets dressed.

As usual, she washed her clothes the night before, and now she puts on her socks, her pants, her boots- all up until she reaches her chestbindings, which she realizes hang unwashed and torn over the sink, right next to her equally dirty and ruined shirt.

Shame floods her when she realizes she didn't wash them because she didn't have the courage to touch them.

Clarke runs her fingers over the rough fabric and remembers the man's rougher hand on her, the hungry eyes, the bad smell. Goosebumps run down her back and she thinks over and over again about that moment in which she flinched, in which she feared, in which she froze.

She looks at herself in the small mirror and twists to see whether or not her back is injured. A tiny scratch from a nail paints her spine alongside the bruises and she scoffs at herself.

What is she doing?

Is she going to cry again over a little blood?

Is that all it takes these days?

The squeak of the door makes her jump and she doesn't make the same mistake twice. This time, she doesn't waste time making ammends, what a ridiculous attempt in the first place, and she just charges forward with her dagger.

There's a split second in which she realizes simultaneously that she's thrusting her dagger towards the intruder and that the intruder is Lexa. A split second, but not enough for her to change course.

Her dagger digs deep into something, but strangely, it's not Lexa's body. By the time Clarke realizes her blade is stuck in the soft wood of the doorframe, Lexa is already standing with a perfectly straight back against the wall, escaping the dagger.

"That is not what I gave you these for!" Lexa hisses with a strict tension to her voice.

"Lexa," Clarke sighs and yanks her dagger out of the doorframe. "Spirits, sorry. I didn't realize it was you."