Posted this on AO3 yesterday. Took me a while to understand how FFnet worked, so this is me hoping the formating will be great.
This chapter is more of an introduction. More interactions to come.
TW: references to suicide & alcohol abuse
Wildfire in the night
Her eyes pierce the heavy suffocating smoke. She can hardly breathe and she's not even close to the house. All she feels is the burning heat caressing her skin, the thin layer of sweat uselessly trying to cool off her body.
Flames are eating this place alive, not giving it a single chance to protect itself. They fly right toward the edge of the sky, not bothering to stop when they collide with the powerful water jet controlled carefully by the firemen and firewomen.
Fire lives for destruction, nothing more, nothing less.
Her tears are dried as soon as they leave her eyes, for the atmosphere has transformed to a living hell. She listens to the subtle kind of chaos, unable to move forward, frozen in front of the warmest type of glow.
Many people are calling out names, ordering their loved ones to move away from there. Wind grows stronger, blowing into the mess, as if it was trying to feed the blaze. Trees are desperately trying not to be broken by the ongoing war between the elements. And a single house is burning violently, its memories of a peaceful existence sparkling down to ashes.
She watches everything, eyes wide open, dust cutting her face, and remains silent.
Slowly but surely, the fire defies the world. It is confident. It knows that those people don't stand a chance, that they can only watch as death claims a new territory.
Shadows surround her, and soon enough, the moon stares down at the show, imperturbable, saying farewell to a place it used to cast its light on through the night.
The smoke is still suffocating her, and her throat hurts as the irritating air hardly reaches her lungs.
She thinks she hears someone screaming her name in the distance.
She looks over, but doesn't see anyone.
She's lost.
Lost in the past, when that house was full of joy, when happiness filled it everyday, reminding her it was the king of the castle. When the smell of fresh baked chocolate chips cookies would make her drool as soon as she'd step in. She's lost in moments of bliss, like whenever the improvised pool would welcome her as she'd splash around carelessly, or whenever she'd sit on the roof, observing the almost invisible stars decorating the night sky.
And mostly, she's lost in the shadow of her loved one, of her presence by her side, smiles permanently stuck on both their faces. She's lost in laughs and smiles and playful punches on her shoulder. She's lost in the feeling of another hand gently stroking hers, soft skin brushing against each other. She's lost in heated kisses, lips owning hers without hesitation, tongues dancing in harmony as the world would be forgotten.
Now everything's falling apart.
She glances around, breaking free from the pull of the now gone past. It feels like she's being awakened from an unpleasant trance. She coughs. She can't breathe. It's too much to bear.
A part of her wants to move toward the fire too, wants to be combusted. She wants to be burn, be turned to ashes, before the panicked eyes of the firefighters as they would try to save her, only to realize it's too late.
She can't stay there, useless spectator of a disaster. She wants to be inside that house, with the one person she knows is trapped in. Or maybe she doesn't want that. It must hurt to burn alive. But it is surely something she needs at the moment. Perhaps burning alive does not hurt as much as the way her heart is being shattered to pieces right now.
She had always wanted to be part of her world. The world she had never really been a part of. The world she wanted so badly to understand, but was never given the chance to. She had always known her girlfriend's smile was nothing but a game of pretend, a beautiful illusion to decrypt. Deep secrets were hidden under the multiple "I'm fine" and "I'm happy", secrets always slightly out of her reach. The cries for help never reached the surface. Help was not something her girlfriend would ask for. She would put on that perfect mask and fool everyone.
The wind almost throws her balance away, interrupting her thoughts, but not quite. She stares ahead as the left wall of the house crumbles and falls flat to the earth.
Everything she was told, everything she witnessed, was a planned, calculated lie.
No, she thinks, not everything.
The multiple "I love you"s and "I care about you"s whispered in the most secretive tone were too real for this world. Those words came from beyond, from a land of honesty and mutual trust. A world she had thought would have allowed her to see through the masquerade. It seemed she had been wrong.
"We found someone!"
She doesn't even glance up at the voice. She simply keeps her eyes on the emptiness ahead. She knows who they found. There can only be one person to save.
Scratch that, there can only be one body to find.
She feels sick.
She puts a hand on her mouth, trying to fight the sudden urge to throw up. A white sheet covering an indistinct shape lying on a stretcher is all that is rescued from the disaster. She knows life is no longer part of this body. Now, it's just a group of atom fitting imperfectly together, waiting to be eaten away by time.
She knows nothing can be done. She feels it in her bones, her soul, the deepest parts of herself. She sees it in the eyes of the paramedics who don't even move in the direction of the victim. She hears it in the whispers of the men and women fighting the fire. She smells it by the scent of burned skin and scorched limbs.
"This accident must have occurred when she was sleeping…"
She glares at the reporters talking together, curses them. Her house is not a fashion show. It is not a hockey game, a football mid-time show or a movie premiere waiting to be commented. The victim is not a nameless human, a dead body that only belongs in a small corner of the news. She wants them to leave. She wants them to stop commenting on the tragedy that is taking roots in her heart like it does not matter. Her lover deserves better than that.
They don't understand the situation. They don't know the person she lost tonight will haunt her forever. They will be gone tomorrow. They will be interested in new problematics. They will have new tragedies to cover. They will smile at their family when they arrive home later that night. They will keep writing, and keep being paid, and the earth itself will not stop moving, and time will not stop running.
They will be able to move on. She won't.
She already knows she won't.
She already sees herself, insomniac, sleepwalking inside her new place, calling out for rest that will never come. She imagines herself, walking endlessly in busy streets with no destination to reach, an invisible ghost to every other person. She pictures herself avoiding specifics places, songs, movies, tv shows, sports, just because the thought of enjoying them alone seems as possible as surviving in space without the appropriate protection.
She is surrounded by fire, and she feels as if she is drowning in a bottomless ocean.
She knows how wrong the reporters are. She wishes, oh how she wishes they were right though. It could be an accident. It could be something related to the wires twisting inside the foundations of the house. It could be someone who forgot their half lit cigarette on their lawn. It could be the fault of the dysfunctional oven they were supposed to have replaced two months ago. Really, it could be anything that isn't what she is thinking about. Anything would be better than what is on her mind.
But it is not, and she is not foolish enough to lie to herself.
The person inside was not sleeping. That person was probably staring outside as the sparks grew behind her. She probably had one hand on the doorknob, hesitation marking her eyes as she'd be torn between staying and going. And she probably had the other hand holding a lighter or an empty pack of now burned matches.
The person inside wanted it. She wanted it even though the girl watching the flames had told her so many times she would never let her go. The person inside had never wanted any help. She had never asked for it. All she had desired was to be left alone whenever she would have had a problem. She would not have shared her troubled thoughts.
But I was hers and she was mine. I should have known. I should have seen through her mask. I should have broken those boundaries she'd put between us. I should have acted.
I should have been there for her.
I should have been enough for her.
Why was I not enough for her?
The smoke rises higher in the sky, clouding the neighborhood like a funeral march.
She still can't tear her eyes from the bright yellow and orange monster.
"Lexa!" The voice she thought she had heard rings like a church bell. "I came as fast as I could!"
She feels arms circling her body and she is pulled in a tight embrace. She's not the one to accept such a display of affection, but she doesn't care this moment. All she sees are the colors of hell.
"Anya…" She barely registers her own voice. It comes from too far away.
"I'm here, Lexa, I'm here."
But, Lexa thinks, she's not.
The one person that matters is not here. Not anymore. She won't ever be there.
"She was inside."
"I know Lex, I know…"
Her best friend's presence doesn't ease the pain.
She realizes everything she ever took for granted is a lie. Love is not enough to keep someone alive. Love is not enough to protect her from tragedy.
Love is weakness.
It's barely dark outside and the streets are surprisingly empty. The moon is not up yet, but the cold wind of the evening slowly conquers the neighborhood. The girl is alone and wanders lifelessly around the different houses. She sighs loudly. She doesn't have the energy to walk, but her car is being held in hostage by her mother until she promises to never almost crash it in a tree again.
To her credit, she had not been drinking. She had simply being distracted by the wandering hand of the girl sitting in the passenger seat. Of course, she would never have admitted that to her mother, so she had invented some stupid story about miscalculating the time it would have taken to eliminate the alcohol from her system.
Now thinking about it, she should have just told the truth. Maybe her mother would have been more merciful with having car sex than driving drunk.
The girl has been doing a lot of stupid things recently, but drunk driving would never be one.
Her blue eyes are dull when she finally reaches her apartment. She searches for her keys and unlocks the door, throwing her bag at the floor carelessly. She notices the lack of light first. Her roommates are absent, and the silence is deafening. She walks to her messy bedroom and changes to sweats, ignoring the pile of dirty dishes that threaten to fall from her desk. She closes her door and makes her way to the living room.
She just spent the day half listening to her teachers and fighting the urge to close her eyes, and all she wants right now is to crash in front of the television and die there.
She turns on the television and crashes in the couch. She sighs, almost in pain, as she gets up again and grabs the bottle of vodka from the superior shelf to her left.
Her new best friend.
She takes a sip, winces at the taste and lies down. She barely registers what the people in the show are saying. She's too busy pondering her past day, week, and even month. She knows she shouldn't be doing that. Her medical education had taught her that rumination inevitably lead to the release of stress hormones, which really wasn't all good for her mind and body. She doesn't care.
She knows she hasn't been taking care of herself. Truly, anyone could see it, with the way her eyes almost close automatically from the lack of the sleep, the way her clothes faintly smell dirty, and the way her blonde hair appear to lose their bright color. Her voice is raspy, tired, exhausted, and when she moves, it looks like she's portraying a character in slow motion.
She would be a terrible actress.
She keeps thinking about her day and yawns. The only reasons she still drags her lazy ass out of her apartment is because she doesn't want to start her whole semester again, and because she needs to work. Not asking her mother for money is her sole motivation. Well, that and the fact that her roommates have forced her to socialize a minimum.
She doesn't understand why 'clubbing and sometimes having sex with random boys and girls' doesn't fall in the acceptable way of socialization.
At least it meant going out of the house.
It should be an acceptable form of socialization, she judges, because she interacts with people, and even gets to see them naked. This is basically the peak of socialization.
But after she had spent days at a stranger's house and worried her friends to death, she had stopped.
She turns off the tv, nothing is interesting, and she's rather concentrate on the way vodka feels in her throat. She alternates between drinking straight from the bottle and mixing it with juice, so that the taste doesn't make her sick too fast.
She's way past the drunken state by the time she notices it.
A heavy trail of black smoke, dividing the sky right in the middle.
She narrows her eyes. She can't see well from the living room's window, but the trail is large enough to indicate a large fire incident. Whatever is burning, it's doing it fast. Her senses are biased by the alcohol, but she still hears the faint sound of the firetrucks racing toward the blaze. She assumes it comes from a farther neighborhood.
Well, then, it is none of her business.
She turns her attention back to the bottle just as the two other occupants of the house join her.
"C." Octavia's voice reaches her ears. "It's the third time, in four days, that we come home and you're almost puking on the couch."
Raven quickly steals the bottle from Clarke's hand as Octavia delivers her usual speech about why drinking is the last thing the blonde woman should be doing.
"Almost." Clarke slurred answer escapes.
Raven doesn't take any chance this time, and she empties the bottle in the sink, under the mortified look of her friend.
"Rae!" Clarke moans. "O, do something!"
Octavia rolls her eyes. She understands Clarke's situation, but it doesn't give the right to her best friend to poison herself every night. She was 500% on Raven's side this time. She sits next to Clarke, lets out a sigh and stares down at the half passed out student.
"We really need to do something about you, Griffin." Raven stands in front of her. "Get up."
"Don't. She'll throw up for sure." Octavia intervenes. "At least she's not having anyone over this time, it's a good day."
Raven looks pissed. They have been playing this little game for too long. She has allowed Clarke to be lazy and self-destructive for a while, because that was what the girl needed, but now, Raven really wanted her best friend back, not simply a shell of who that used to be. It has become nothing more than pathetic.
She misses the days when she would come home and find leftovers carefully wrapped for her in the fridge, or when she would find Clarke and Octavia playing some stupid video game and she would jump in front of the screen. She misses the way Clarke used to laugh her lame jokes and the way she would playfully slap her shoulder whenever the blue eyed girl would be pretending to flirt with her. She misses Clarke's impulsive joy and violent motivation to change the world.
Raven sits on the floor in front of Clarke's bowed head. She really hopes the blonde won't choose that moment to throw up, because that would make her a direct victim. She takes the risk nowadays, because her words need to get through.
"Clarke. Get up. You're going to bed."
Clarke ignores Raven's words and even pretends to be snoring to add effects to her rebellious behavior. She truly believes she's a ferocious lion ready to jump on her prey, but only manage to make a slight noise.
"Stop pretending you're badass when I could throw you by the window and lock you outside." Octavia rolls her eyes.
"Friends don't say that." Clarke's weak voice mumbles.
"Bellamy said it."
"Bellamy's your brother."
"Friends don't let other friends slowly fade out from the planet." Raven suddenly snaps. "You get your ass off this couch or I'll drag you myself!"
Just to prove her point, she grabs Clarke's hand and proceeds to move the girl as far from the couch as possible. She manages two steps before Clarke pushes her away and crawls back to the precious furniture item.
Raven is furious. Clarke is her best friend, and the most reliable person she has ever known. She has been there through Raven's worse moments, and there was no way the mechanic student would ever give up on her. She had given up on her own mother in the past, but Clarke was not going to become an alcoholic, not under her watch. She would send her on a deserted island before she even allowed that to happen.
Octavia looks at the duo. Sometimes she felt like the third wheel in between whatever relationship these two had. Tonight is no exception, but it doesn't matter. As much as she wants to help Clarke cope, she knows Raven will find a way to have the final word. She admires the girl.
Clarke weakly throws a cushion at Raven's head. Raven throws it back with twice the force and Clarke pretends to be hit fatally.
"Tell my mom - Ugh, fuck, don't tell her shit." Clarke resigns with her hand pretending to grip her heart.
"Knocked out!" Octavia chuckles under the severe stare of the third girl.
Clarke passes out during the two minutes she has been pretending to die, and the Blake woman helps a tearful Raven to move her to bed.
They watch her for a moment, making sure she won't wake up soon. Raven exchanges unspoken words with Octavia and goes back to the living room. They take turns to look after their sleeping beauty, both giving up on the idea of having a full night of sleep.
They always do that whenever they find Clarke in this state, and it never bothers them. They know how comforting a familiar presence can be when one wakes up the following morning of an alcohol overdose.
Clarke never sleeps well when she drinks. She has eerie dreams about the universe above their head, and it makes her twist in her bed relentlessly. She wakes up too early, with a killer headache.
It's a little past three when blue eyes look at the world again. Octavia is reading next to her, but stops as soon as she sees Clarke awake. She wordlessly passes her an aspiring and a glass of water, a ritual that has become a bit too familiar to both their liking.
"Raven hates me." Clarke whispers, and even her voice is enough to make the pain triple.
Octavia shakes her head.
"It's happening less." She says.
It's true. Despite the three past days, Clarke has been drinking less and less. In fact, she rarely drinks that much anymore. She usually has long periods of abstinence. She just relapses in a pattern whenever something comes up. And those patterns are less frequents than before.
"It might have been three times in four days," Octavia explains, "but it's the first three days in two months. You're doing great, C, really. And you know, you KNOW, your drinking abuse never lasts more than four days. Soon you'll be back on your feet."
Clarke knows Octavia is right, but the guilt is eating her out. She wishes she didn't have such an urge to drown her problems in alcohol. At least, she comforts herself when she compares it to how she used to be.
"Raven knows it too." Octavia adds.
"I'll be back." Clarke says as she stands difficultly.
She fights the urge to vomit as she walks to the living room. She sees Raven sleeping on the couch and the guilt increases. She knows Raven isn't sleeping in her room, which is situated farther from her own bedroom, because the girl wants to be ready to help Clarke if Octavia falls asleep and the blonde gets sick in the middle of the night.
She pours herself another glass of water. She still can't fully walk straight and almost bump in every piece of furniture. She notices Raven's eyes fluttering at the noise, and hopes she didn't wake her up.
The girl deserves to sleep.
She glances by the window as she turns back to her bedroom. The trail of smoke is gone. She remembers how impressive it was, and how high it reached in the sky. She remembers the blackness tainting the already night sky and shivers.
She hopes whoever was in the burning place got away safely.
She sneaks back to her bedroom to an exhausted looking Octavia.
She thinks about Raven's words and silently makes a contract to get herself back up.
She feels thankful for her friends. She's doesn't know where she'd be without them, but she certainly knows it wouldn't be in the comfort of her bedroom. They have always been there to support her, through the ups and downs, not matter their amplitude.
Her two best friends are the reason why she had given up the one night stands and stayed at home instead, and they were also the reason why she was in a much better place than the one she'd been before.
They protect her from possible tragedies.
Love is strength.
AN / FAQ:
New writer? In the Clexa world, yes. In other worlds, I've written many OS, a 100K monster and a 200K alien.
Is this going to be super sad all the time? I hope not
Are there really going to be references to the 100 tv show? So many of them
Are you aware of all the mistakes? English is not my first language, though I'm mostly billingual French/English
Ways to comment/advise/insult other than FFnet? Fan twitter: McEvilQueen (personal twitter is linked there)
Why so serious? Here's a smile :)
NEXT CHAPTER'S TITLE: 'I don't know' (no, really, that's the title)