There's a painting Clarke did in college that hangs in your shared apartment, over the table where you eat dinner when her (your) friends come over, where you and Raven get too competitive over poker, where Octavia and Lincoln fleece everyone at beer pong when you drink like you're still in college and they pass out on the sofa, the counters, the floors, the balcony. You'd insisted on hanging it there, where you can see it when you come in the door, see it when you stand at the stove, see it out of the corner of your eye when you sit on the couch and watch television. Clarke put up pictures across the walls: her father, her mother, Octavia and Lincoln, Raven, Bellamy, Monty, Jasper. Clarke has many friends, too many you feel sometimes when they are all in your space, talking, but you understand. Who could feel Clarke's warmth, experience her brilliance, touch her life, and not want to stay?
"Are you sure?" she'd asked you, brow furrowed when you stepped back to see if the painting hung straight. "It was like… a generic exercise. An urn. So boring." You knew she thinks it's boring because her art now is explosive, shadows and bursts of color, imaginative and otherworldly. There's never been anything generic about Clarke.
"It's a carafe," you corrected, and you had to smile, because of course she doesn't know the difference between an urn and a carafe. You tilted your head and frowned. Not quite straight.
"I think I have another of a fruit bowl," Clarke'd said, curling her hands over your hips and tugging you back against her, gentle.
"No," you'd said, and frowned again, because you've never been able to articulate everything you feel, not ever, and it never felt like so much of a failure as it does when you're with Clarke.
"Okay," she'd said, indulgent of your oddities, and she'd kissed you under your jaw, to make you shiver. You laid her out on the table, knelt between the soft apex of her thighs and took her apart with your tongue, until she shuddered, squeaked, too sensitive and urging you away with a hand tangled in your hair.
/
You lost your parents first, and sometimes Clarke sings in the shower and you linger at the sink to brush your teeth because you love her voice, humming above the water, the first cut is the deepest and you have to smile because she's so country sometimes, in her plaid and her hats and her flannels, rolling down the windows to feel the wind in her hair and blast Sheryl Crow and Shania Twain. You lost your parents first, but it was the littlest hurt. You don't remember them, after all, and it's possible they're still alive, somewhere.
Clarke tells you about her dad very late at night, curled up in your arms in the bed you share together, in the apartment you bought together, Clarke telling the realtor she loves the windows while you stand quiet at the door and love the way the sun lights up her hair, the curve of her smile; golden. You hold her very close and wish you had words to ease her pain, sweeping careful fingers under her eyes and carrying her tears away from her skin. "I think he would have liked you," Clarke whispers and you wrap yourself around her, try to fold her into yourself-your armor is cracked and worn but it's strong, and you want to tuck Clarke inside it next to your heart.
/
You'd known you were in trouble when both of your schedules had lined up at the hospital and during the eight hour break between brutal shifts you'd staggered into the on-call barracks and squished yourself into one of the tiny, thin, uncomfortable mattresses with your feet hanging off and the metal rails digging into your skin, the crick sharp in your neck, all just so you can feel her pressed against you, snoring in your ear.
/
You have brunch with Abby every other Sunday when your schedule allows in the house Clarke grew up in, her art framed across the walls, her father smiling from the mantle. You care about Abby insomuch that Clarke cares for her, so her opinion of you is important. The first time you could hardly choke down your food, drinking orange juice even though you hate it to give you something to do with your hands, your mouth. You sit in the porch swing and rock it with your toes while they catch up in the kitchen, and you like it best when Clarke settles in next to you, your hands tangled.
"Maybe I could meet your parents," Clarke says one Sunday, cautiously timid in a way that's unlike her.
"I don't have any," you murmur. Her hand tightens around yours, and you want to meet her halfway, you want her to know you, so you admit: "I was given up very young." Your mother had put you in a pink dress and your father had dropped you off at the preschool birthday party of a classmate, and neither of them ever came back. You remember how much you disliked the dress more than you remember either of their faces, and you feel guilty when Clarke wraps you in an embrace, because you don't think of them often, and when you do it doesn't hurt you much. Not the way Costia hurts you, Anya. Gustus. You're not brave enough to tell her, because you want to stay in the warm circle of her arms.
/
Clarke takes you to meet her father, and you google flowers because you're not sure what else to do. Her gaze is warm when she sees your arms full of carnations, pink and white, a single violet tulip. You've never met Jacob Griffin but he gave the world Clarke and you are so, so grateful. You listen to Clarke introduce you and leave your regards at the foot of his gravestone: gratitude, friendship, faithfulness. You hold her hand while you walk away.
/
Anya had been the one to call you the Commander first. You could use a nickname, she argues, to keep the interns in check. When you are on shift you are head of the ER unit and you enjoy the challenge, thinking on your feet, problem solving as you go. Anya's the one who broke into your studio apartment with takeout when you'd been studying too long, Anya's the one who took the bottle out of your hand after Costia, Anya stitched you up after they brought you in after the accident, when you stared at nothing, stuck in the moment just before the car exploded around you, Costia's soft eyes looking into your own.
/
You'd met Clarke on a consult, in the elevator, escorting a patient to surgery. You'd rattled off vitals and prognosis with the ease of practice and handed over the chart. It was a child, and you are always a little softer towards them. You like children, because they're easy. All you read and see on television says that children are so complicated, and maybe they are; but you've always found that all they want is your attention, your caring. You don't care well, but children understand respectful touches and a gentled voice so much more easily than adults do. You patted him on the wrist and promised him Dr. Griffin would take good care of him, and after your shift is over you go to visit him, solemnly admire the neon green he'd picked for his cast.
"You're different than I expected," she'd said to you, both waving as he skips away to claim his candy from a nurse.
"What did you expect?"
"They say you're cold."
"I am," you say, truthful. You hear the whispers: a hospital is more like high school than your own high school ever was, and you can't help but agree with many of them: you don't care about people the way you should, you're professional but rarely have a kind word for the patients, you're good at your job but shitty with friendship and camaraderie. It's funny, you think, that she chose that one to disclose because you feel cold often. In your most poetic moments you think Costia took all the warmth out of your blood with her when she died.
"I don't think so," she'd said, and took you down to the mess for a coffee so subtly you don't even notice it was an invitation until you're sitting across from her, your hands folded stiffly in your lap. She chats with you about work and her friends and tells you a story about the newest intern fucking up that makes your lips tug upwards, however hard you try to keep them flat, and when she pushes her coffee across the table you take it, sipping. It slips down your throat into your belly, trailing fire like lit gasoline. You feel warm.
/
The first time you loved her with your body you were both fully clothed and you're drunk from a single whiskey sour and overflowing with how she makes you feel, pressing her against the cold brick wall of the bar, Octavia and Lincoln dancing inside without you, your fingers moving inside her while she shakes apart around you. You make out in the back of a cab like the drunk teenagers neither of you are, and she pulls you up to her apartment and you can't wait so you have her again against the closed door of her bedroom, kneeling to fill your mouth with how she smells, how she tastes, how she sounds when she keens.
She lays you out on her bed and you tremble when she runs her fingers up your bare legs, surrounded by her clothes and her sheets and her knick-knacks tumbling off the nightstand because she was so eager to cover your skin with hers. You don't let her take off your shirt and she doesn't push you, dotting your thighs and your hips with bruises from her teeth, trochanter, femoral head, pubic symphysis.
/
The balcony is your favorite place in your apartment, after your bed when Clarke's in it, and sometimes when you wake in the middle of the night, your scars aching, and can't go back to sleep you slide out of the sheets and the lingering warmth of her body and smoke a cigarette, watching the end flare when you inhale, blowing smoke out with a soft sigh. You like it best when it's so quiet you can hear the paper burn. Costia had smoked, and you keep a faintly crushed pack of menthols at the bottom of your drawer full of gloves and scarves and winter hats.
"You know I hate that," she whispers one night, voice sleep rough, and shivers when she joins you.
"Yes," you agree, and then: "sorry, love." It slips out because you were thinking of Costia, and sleepy as Clarke is she squints at you, surprised. She takes the cigarette from your mouth and inhales lazily, blowing it through her nose like a dragon. When she puts it back into your mouth your lips brush her skin, gentle. "I-" You frown, but it's otherwordly this time of night in the dark, the roads quiet under your feet, all other life sounds very far away, and it feels easy to tell her when you're not quite sure if you're dreaming or not. "I lost someone, once."
She takes your hand in hers, so careful with you the way she always is when you curl up into yourself. "I know."
You tell her about Costia, how you met in high school when your clothes smelled like wet mold from the garbage bag you kept them in as you moved from home to home, how she never let anyone but you touch her hair, how you lived together in shitty apartments and borrowed too much money from her parents and crumpled under the weight of your student loans and scholarship requirements and promised her, every single day, that you'd take care of her as soon as you got your first residency.
"I lost her," you say, and Clarke squeezes your fingers but doesn't move closer, and you ache with how well she knows you. You tell her about that night, how you took her out on a date to a restaurant you couldn't really afford because you knew she deserved it, how you remember her lipstick on the wineglass, how she laughed and teased you while you drove home, her hand on your knee. You were thinking about how you much you wanted to kiss her when a black sedan ran a red light and crumpled the used volvo you bought with your first paycheck like a tin can.
You pull your sleeves up and rub at your scars, dotted across the pale skin of your inner arms, glass and metal gouging you when you tried to crawl to her, your mind cataloguing her injuries even as you begged her to breathe, listening to the blood bubble in her lungs. There are matching scars on your torso, cutting through the first tattoo you ever got high on your chest, manubrium, costal cartilage.
"I'm sorry," Clarke says, and kisses the inside of your elbow, the delicate bones in your wrist, lunate, hamate, capitate. You pull her close and dip your head into the hollow of her throat so you can feel her pulse flutter against your skin, proof of life against your lips.
/
The day after your first date with Clarke you go to see Gustus. You frown when you see the lawn overgrown and hear the door squeaking in its hinges, his hands shake when he lifts the kettle.
"I met someone," you tell him while they wait for the tea to steep.
"Hm," he says, disapproving, and you hate that it affects you.
"She's a doctor," you say, and try describe the strength she has, how life knocks her around and she keeps getting back up, keeps caring. She is stronger than you, because she never shut herself down, kept reaching out. "She is so light," you tell him. "She elevates herself."
"I only want you to be safe," he says, and you drink your tea and feel frustrated towards him for the first time since you were his student, a rebellious teen convinced you'd never make anything out of yourself other than another unclaimed body in the city morgue.
"She is important to me," you say stiffly, and don't kiss his cheek when you leave.
You get the call two days later: heart attack, in his bed. You claim the body and pay for the cremation, hike the largest mountain in the nearest national park and spread his ashes into the wind with your calves still burning, your chest still heaving. You miss the next three dates with Clarke and don't respond to her texts. You avoid her in the halls and after two weeks she stops calling.
/
You eat lunch on the roof even though it's bitterly cold out and Raven of all people is the one who finds you out, bitching about how she climbed the stairs in her brace and how the cold makes the metal freeze against her skin.
"No one asked you to come," you say dispassionately, and Raven throws a french fry at you.
"Just because you've made Clarke cry doesn't mean everyone hates you," she says. "Only most of everyone."
You frown deeply into your thermos. "Clarke… cried?"
"Cries. Present tense." Raven eats her sandwich, sighing. "What's the deal, Lexa? I know you're not this much of a bitch. Intimacy issues? Abandonment issues? Daddy-"
"I am finished here," you say, and stand abruptly. You're halfway down the stairs when you sigh and go back up, help Raven up and let her bitch at you while she limps down the steps, refusing your aid for the sake of her pride.
/
You visit Anya's grave-Costia is buried near her parents, half a country away-and frown. You try to talk to her and only get out a few stiff sentences before you give up. There is nothing of Anya here, nothing of her fire and her grit and her knife's edge smile. You don't have any flowers because Anya hated them, a waste of money just for something that would die in the span of two or three days. You sit above her body and pour half a beer into the grass and the dirt, leave the bottle leaned against the tombstone.
/
You go to Clarke's apartment with a speech prepared on index cards, although you're hopeful you won't have to reference them. She lets you in without argument, which was the first five cards, so you mentally skip ahead. "Clarke," you says, clearing your throat, "I-" you sputter to a stop, swallowing, and get caught up in her bright blue eyes, vast and catching, like a riptide, filled with hurt that you caused. You open your mouth again, to start over, and sob instead. It shocks her out of her stance against her wall, arms crossed and angry, and she comes towards you.
You back away, fighting each sob as it rises in your chest and losing. "I-" You'll try again tomorrow, you think, and try to retreat. Your mind is on how fast you can get to your car, where you can deal with whatever's happening in your mind and your body alone, but Clarke grabs you in your distraction, dragging you to her sofa. You pull away from her hands, hunching in on yourself, and stuff a fist into your mouth.
"Lexa," she murmurs, soft, and lays a hand on your back, rubbing. It's too much, and you cringe away. It takes five minutes, but you get your breath back, shuddering, and she's still sitting there, watching you with loving eyes.
"I'm sorry," you say, clearing your throat. The words you practiced in the mirror that morning come back to you. "I treated you poorly, and there's no-" you have to pause to sniffle, "-excuse, but I hope you will accept-"
"Lexa. Stop." You blink at her, owlish. "What are you doing?"
You fumble in your pocket for your index cards. "I-" You push them at her and she takes them, shuffling through, bewildered. "I practiced," you confess lamely.
She smiles, which is even more confusing, because you're pretty sure she's still angry with you. "Tell me the truth."
"I did practice," you mutter, but you know what she means. "Someone died," you say, weary, because every landmark in your life can also be marked by a loss. "I… dealt with it poorly."
"I'm sorry," she says, and when she touches you again you curl into her, a leaf reaching for the sun.
"You should be angry."
"I am. But I'm also sorry."
"Thank you," you say, and shift awkwardly. You reach tentatively for the index cards, still held loosely in her grasp, and she draws them further from you.
"Oh no, I'm keeping these. Possibly forever. I may frame them."
"Clarke," you say, but you can't keep the smile from blooming on your face.
/
Raven and Octavia take turns calling your phone while you're on shift and leaving you voicemails, dramatic readings of the speech you'd agonized over. Sometimes one of them takes on the role of Clarke, swooning loudly in the background. You play them back for Clarke during your makeup dates, where you do things you'd sworn never to do for forgiveness, like dancing all dressed up, cooking for her, posing for her to draw you. She giggles in big peals of laughter to hear them and you can admit (only to her, sworn secrecy), that they are amusing.
/
It is Clarke's birthday and you're frustrated. You don't know what to buy her, what to say, where to go. You try to interrogate Octavia, and then Raven, and finally in desperation, Lincoln, who is the only one nice enough not to laugh in your face.
You sit up at night and try to write how you feel about her, thinking it'll be easier in a letter, fumbling to hide it when she wanders out, barefoot and pouting that you left her alone in bed. Your written words are just as inadequate as your spoken ones were, and you shred draft after draft, your frustration mounting.
You take Clarke to her favorite restaurant, order her favorite foods. You don't order wine because you're drunk off her smiles and her leg pressed against yours under the table, and because she never drinks wine anyway. The big birthday bash is scheduled for two days later; Raven has dropped hints that the cake will be inappropriate. Tonight is for you and Clarke alone, together, and you take her to your apartment with nerves jangling under your skin. You'd filled your bedroom with flowers before you'd left to pick her up: ambrosia, camellia, aster: love, love love.
You undress her and mouth every inch as it's revealed: her shoulders, her ribs, her navel, the inside of her knees and her ankles. She lets you lie her down and cherish her with your hands on her back, digging out the aches from 52 hour shifts of standing on her feet, 10 hour surgeries, the crick in her neck from trees on trees of paperwork. You kiss between each vertebrae: cervical, thoracic, lumbar, until she flips you, impatient.
"It's my birthday," she says, tugging at your top, and you are helpless beneath her as you always are, your back arching as you marvel that she knows your body the way she does, how to make you gasp and moan and beg her in every twitch of your fingers and quiver of your voice: Clarke, Clarke, Clarke.
/
You go running every morning. You'd gotten Clarke to accompany you only once, in the early stages of dating where you're so eager to spend time with one another you try to partake in each other's hobbies, and she'd hated every second. She'd flopped on the first bench she'd found and refused to move again, gasping, and you'd run an eight minute mile to the nearest coffee shop and back, fed her donut holes and laughed when Clarke licked powdered sugar off your fingers.
So you run by yourself, your music blotting out the world around you, and take meandering routes through the neighborhood. On Saturdays, laundry day, you slide into the bed, shining with sweat, and rub yourself on her while she groans and shoves at you, until you slide a knee between her thighs and rock, and then she comes awake under you, hungry and eager and cursing the strong elastic of your sports bra.
/
Clarke doesn't drink. It takes you a while to notice, because you don't drink much yourself and neither of you have the time to party regularly. But you do notice eventually, when you go to the big parties her friends throw and lean on the walls, breaking only to chat with Raven or Octavia, let Lincoln pull you into a drinking game. Clarke cheers everyone on and always has a cup in her hand, and slowly you notice it's always full of sparkling water and lime, or ice and cranberry juice. It's an observation that cuts and you pay attention, when you go out to a bar and she comes back with something alcoholic for you and something virgin for herself. It's interesting but you two are in such a good place right now, just moved in together, and you're too scared to ruin it. You take the rum that someone gave you at some point that you keep behind the olive oil in the pantry and pour it down the sink, toss the bottle into the recycle bin, and don't think much about it again.
Raven's the one who spills the beans. She tells you she's throwing a party for Clarke at your apartment and orders you to go pick up the cake. When you pay you flick open the the box and recognize the look of it, the quote, the Roman numeral. Five years sober, you think, and count backwards, trying to match things Clarke's told you to a timeline.
You go to your apartment and sigh when Octavia makes you help her hang streamers, standing on a stool while Octavia prefers to sit on Lincoln's shoulders, and you laugh when Raven hits herself in the face with the freezer door, slipping on an ice cube and shrieking, and have to admit to yourself, however grudging, that they are your friends and you care about them.
You draw the line at hiding behind the couch and shouting surprise. Instead you lean against the wall and watch the love bloom over Clarke's face when she sees the people she loves the most all in one place, all to celebrate her. You like to think it's sharpest when she looks at you.
/
You wake up from the familiar dream with a start and can't go out to smoke because there's your love and your friends snoring out from your bed to the sliding door in the living room, so you stretch out, cracking your spine, and roll over to smash your face into her chest. She snorts, awakened by your movements, and slides a hand through your hair. "I don't know why I didn't tell you," she admits quietly. "Don't be mad." Your dream fades like mist, leaving only with how her eyes are squinty because she's tired, how her lipstick is smeared around her mouth because she forgot to wipe it off before falling into bed with you. You want to tell her you love that painting of hers from college because she made it with her own hands and it reminds you of yourself, how you swallow every feeling Clarke inspires until they overflow like a carafe when you kiss her and you hope she understands why it's so difficult to say you love her even though it comes easily to her, love yous whenever you talk on the phone, little post its attached to the fridge. You hope she knows that you hate that you can't reciprocate, and that you tell her you love her with every paint you go out of your way to buy her, when you ride the elevator up to give her pastries to eat between patients, when you sleep next to her and feel her breathe against you.
"I am not mad," you whisper. "I am happy." Her hand stills; she is surprised. So are you. She pulls you up into a kiss, morning breath and all, and it's broken only when Raven and Octavia begin bickering in the hall. She pokes you in the ribs and you roll over, tucking the duvet over your head. "They're your children before sunrise," you say, and when she laughs your heart beats: too fast, too big, too full.