Prompt: Clarke needs to get back at Lexa for being kind of an ass, and she sees her opportunity when Lexa asks her to help her put on her warpaint. Lexa has no idea what's coming.
_______________________________
Clarke is smart about it. She's also not an asshole, much as Raven might disagree. She understands from Octavia that in Grounder culture, being granted permission to put on a warrior's paint is a big deal – a very, very big deal. The paint is meant to incur the favor of the gods, and shield its wearer from harm – thus, inexpertly applied paint is considered a terrible omen for a warrior's prospects in battle. So being invited to apply Lexa's war paint is a gesture of extreme trust – and coming from Lexa, that might as well be a daylong parade ceremony with fireworks in the evening. So Clarke doesn't strike the first time she puts on Lexa's paint, or the second, or the third.
But Lexa does need to be taken down a notch, and further than that Clarke still needs to get her back for when she'd laughed uproariously at Clarke's fall from her horse. Of course they didn't fucking have horses on their fucking spaceships, so how the fuck is she supposed to know that her heels should be down and not up and she should be holding her reins like this and not that and isn't Lexa supposed to be teaching her, not fucking laughing? There had been mud all over her favorite pants. It wasn't funny.
So Lexa needs to be taught a lesson, but Clarke is patient. She can wait until that lesson isn't a deep and serious breach of Grounder etiquette, and of the trust that Lexa has so recently put in her, but something truly and deeply satisfying that the Commander will never in a million years suspect. And then they'd see how much the big bad Heda Leksa liked being laughed at.
"You're going somewhere?" Clarke says, groggy, at some ungodly hour of the theoretical morning when civilized people are meant to be sleeping and Lexa is currently creeping about the tent, searching for her pants. The look she gets is momentarily guilty before the blank mask of the Commander returns.
"Yes," she says, rummaging through the pile of clothing they had discarded in a hurry the night previously, when there had been a party and Monty had been trying a new distillation technique for his moonshine. They'd mixed it with some sort of berry juice provided by the Grounders and it had all hit them more or less at once. One moment they'd been talking and laughing around a bonfire, swapping war stories and bullshit in equal measure, and the next they were all sweaty, dirty animals who couldn't keep their hands off each other. Octavia and Lincoln had practically been having sex by the fire, Bellamy had been wrapped around his latest Grounder girl, and Clarke...well, she had climbed into Lexa's lap where she'd been sitting on a log in front of the fire and not left it until Jasper and Monty's hooting and Bellamy's fake vomiting noises had driven them back to the Commander's tent.
Clarke's head throbs like an open wound, and she can't imagine that Lexa's feels much better – Grounders tend to have even less of a head for alcohol than the Sky People do, and Lexa is no exception. In fact, if Clarke remembers it right, they'd just barely made it to the tent before Lexa had actually ripped clean through her shirt, which –
"You're replacing that, by the way," Clarke says as the Commander finds the offending garment, and this time there's a full-on blush, which Clarke savors.
"As you wish, Princess."
"It's too early for that crap, Lexa. Where are you going, anyway?"
"There is...some trouble. On our northern border. One of the generals of the Ice People has been raising a warband, but they're small. " She smirks. "Not too many eager to go up against us, after the Mountain. So this shouldn't take long."
Clarke nods. The victory at Mount Weather, while painful, had been decisive. Among other things, it had left Clarke with a broken wrist and Lexa with a nasty gash on her side. The scars, she can see as the Commander pulls on her shirt, are still pink and shiny, and they make something tug in Clarke's chest. "So this is your idea of a Saturday morning? Go quell a mini-rebellion on three hours of sleep with a hangover?"
