"You've been acting a little off lately, Clarke. Everything okay?"
Clarke breaths in sharply. Her eyes go wide. They were just sitting in bed. How long had Lexa been sitting on that question? How did Lexa know? And then, an eve scarier thought: How was she supposed to tell Lexa?
She couldn't even tell herself.
"I'm-" But then she pauses, fumbling for her words. The thought is there, hanging heavy in her mind like water in those clouds that are nearly about to rain, just barely about to explode. Clarke remembers a long while back when her mother was teaching her about condensation and how heavy rain would weigh a cloud down until the first couple droplets of rain fell. After that, usually in seconds, it was pouring and with time the clouds would rise into the sky once more, forgotten until the cycle started all over again.
She was like a cloud in that way, Clarke figured.
"You're what?"
"I'm-" Clarke pauses again. Her eyes slip shut despite the fact that she knew Lexa is watching her intently as she carefully chooses her next words. "I'm heavy."
Clarke opens her eyes in time to see Lexa's face contort. Her brows furrows together and a thin crease on her forehead appears. Clarke can practically see the gears in Lexa's head turning, trying to make out whatever the hell Clarke just told her.
Clarke was a cloud in the same sense that she was constantly drifting places, too. Home was kind of a foreign concept that became more abstract every day. Home used to be so concrete, so sure, until one day it wasn't and home might as well be a the remains of the mountain that got blown away, her doing.
"You're heavy?"
Lexa's face is still contorted but concern is now mingled into her interesting array of features. Her emerald eyes bore into Clarke's in a way that makes her kind of antsy.
"Yeah."
Lexa's frown increases. "I don't understand."
Clarke's fingers twitch and she reaches for Lexa's hand out of habit. Lexa doesn't like not understanding things. (Clarke didn't either.) Lexa instantly accepts her hand, intertwining their fingers together before she starts to swipe her thumb across the back of her hand in a way that instantly calms her.
Maybe Lexa was the calm before the storm.
"I don't either, I think," Clarke begins backwardly. Lexa's grip on her hand tightens. Lexa's scared. Clarke can feel it. "I just feel so heavy, Lex, I don't know how to describe it."
But Clarke knows how to describe it. She feels heavy and hollow, so impossibly hollow, at the same time which causes a conflict inside of her. She doesn't care about anything but cares too deeply about others. She's passive about her lifestyle while being too involved. She's tired but never can seem to sleep.
(Lexa would know. She's there when Clarke has nightmares.)
Sometimes she wonders if thats why she desperately wanted one of the kittens from the litter down in Polis, a yearning for something new. That kitten she held breathed life into her that she hadn't felt in a while, if only for brief moments.
Is this why struggling couples have babies?
"Clarke, come back to me," Lexa whispers.
Clarke's eyes are glossed over with the promise of tears. Her face falls and she stares at their intertwined fingers. "How am I supposed to tell you that I hate myself, Lex?" Lexa doesn't reply. "How? How am I supposed to tell you when I don't even know how to tell myself?"
Clarke cries. Inside of her, that theoretical cloud becomes too heavy and too real and suddenly it's pouring. She's pouring. She's crying.
"Lexa, I don't know what to do."
Clarke whimpers her small confession as Lexa's arms wrap around her shaking frame. Lexa presses kisses to her body so gentle and pure to her body that Clarke almost starts crying for entirely different reasons.
"You don't have to know what to do," Lexa tells her in that gentle voice thats reserved just for her. "You don't have to know what to do."
Clarke's mind wanders to the time she broke her arm when she was playing with Wells. At first, any hope of her arm returning to normal diminished as soon as acceptance set in. She tries to remember the in between, now, but all she can picture is her mom cutting her cast off of her arm, good as new.
Clarke hugs Lexa harder.
Clarke got it wrong. Lexa wasn't the calm, she was the rebirth after the storm. She was the promise of good and everything new. She was hope. Lexa was hope.
Clarke's tears slow and her breathing relaxes, some. Her body slumps against Lexa and Lexa holds her tighter.
"Thank you," she whispers and she hopes Lexa understands. Thank you for letting me be weak.