Lexa's body is a map; a story of places been and history made. Her tears run like streams and rivers, welding gorges through her war paint and pooling as oceans at the curve of her jaw. And with each of them she kisses away, Clarke leaves columns and towers – a foundation for a future they would build. Every whisper of lips pressed against tender flesh is a promise of hope.
Her eyes are a forest; brilliant greens, vibrant with life and densely guarded. Clarke could get lost in the world showcased between a gate of fine black lashes. She is captivated enough by the different hues of the falling leaves to forget the danger of treading on unknown territory.
Her skin is bronzed by sun and marred by survival. A trail of scar tissue weaves across her chest and the nodules of cracked bones that have healed over time leave behind mountains. Clarke lets her hands roam the hills, created by the stretch of her ribs, and explore the valley formed between the peaks of her hips. She lets her fingers tangle themselves in locks the colour of tree bark and as soft as woodland moss. Released from their braids, her hair is as thick and rich and wild as a jungle.
Her hands are rocky terrain, calloused and weathered through combat. Her fingers are ice deserts; cold as the poles from constant exposure. And as they quiver, the ground shakes, lands cracks open and monuments crumble. But Clarke wraps them in her own, carefully – as if they held as much life as the tropics or the reefs – and if she holds them long enough, the trembling eases and the ice melts, trickling as gentle paths traced against paler skin.
She smells like earth. The scent of soil burying a maze of tree roots; the dew that coats the leaves in a web of droplets each morning and the tiny flowers that only grow in clusters around pond edges surround her, and Clarke inhales it as she presses herself closer. She tastes like the berries that the children forage from the undergrowth and the round fruits that grow ripe and full in the uppermost canopies of the trees. She leaves Clarke on a high; as intoxicating as the crimson currents plucked from between crimped leaves and used to induce euphoria. And so, as their lips meet, Clarke allows her eyes to shut in ecstasy – she knows her way round Lexa's body off by heart anyway.
Clarke is new and unfamiliar; the girl who fell from the stars. Her eyes are as endless as the sky and hold more shades of blue than Lexa has ever seen before. She thinks, maybe, that not even the oceans could match the depth of her irises or that the sun could compete with their incandescence. She likes to watch Clarke's eyes as she talks. It is strange the way they flood with emotion so easily: lighting up in joy, gleaming with sorrow, darkening in fury or softening with affection.
Her face is so flexible – not bound by duty or hardened by loss. Her expressions flow, changing as often as the stars in the night and it is mesmerising to Lexa. At the same time though, she is as constant as the North Star. She is ever present. Bright and burning and so much bigger than anything else in the world, but always there to look to for guidance.
Pale skin and fair hair are a rarity seen in people born on the ground as separate features and Clarke, who possesses both, is so oblivious to the awe people so often gaze upon her with. Her hair is the wind; light and flowing in wisps like the clouds after a thunderstorm. It is long and pinned away from her face in a way that reminds Lexa of the women she'd seen sketched on stone walls or illustrated in the few storybooks salvaged after the war. And her body is wrapped in white paper; a reminiscence of the Old World and a blank canvas for what the future holds. Time on Earth has left her a sun-kissed golden but has yet to scrape away the smoothness of her skin. Her hands are delicate and precise, with both a pencil and a needle, and Lexa wonders how somebody's ten slender digits could ever mean so much. Her own rough palms have crushed so many bones, snatched so many lives – a stark contrast to the life Clarke creates through gentle brush strokes and the lives she saves through careful stitches.
Her freckles are the constellations and, at night, Lexa memorises them, carefully tracing the patterns when sleep doesn't come easy. And if Clarke wakes, she will mummer to her, until her eyelids become heavy. She tells her of the planets you could see so clearly through the technology on the Ark or how to map the actual shapes of the stars in the sky rather than the ones painted on her face. Sometimes she'll talk about how Earth looked from up in the night – how the seas and land all ran into one another like water colours and what the different continents looked like as it turned in the sky. Lexa finds it strange that she is so amazed by Earth because, as Clarke talks about it, all Lexa can be fascinated by is the way her lips quirk upwards, slightly more on the right side than the left, or crinkle at the corners of her eyes – and how the light of a million stars burn so intensely behind them.