.
.
They've been at it for hours.
Clarke pulls off her straw-weaved hat, fanning her armpits and blowing air noisily between her lips. Her end of her golden-blonde fishtail smacking harshly against Clarke's jaw.
Even deep, deep inside this old network of caves, it feels a hundred million degrees.
She straightens up and refocuses, dropping her excavating trowel, kneeling to the gigantic, desert cave-wall in front of her. Doing a simple head-tilt makes her a little woozy. Clarke's mouth feels dry, like the obvious plastering of hot sand between her bare, sunburned-pink fingers.
One of her friends — another young, competitive field archaeologist — dust himself off, walking behind her.
"You need anything, Clarke?"
"Uhhh…" Clarke sucks in a deep breathe, wiping her hairline with the back of her forearm. "The giant bottle of water from the truck?" she says uncertainly, and Monty nods cheerfully, beaming.
"Got it!" He speed-jogs away. "Don't start on the radar until I've fixed the jammed mechanism!"
"That's why I'm busy data-collecting, Monty!" Clarke yells back, wincing at the sheer amplification of her own voice in the desert-cave and the pounding, painful headache creeping up on her.
She can hear Jasper and Octavia, and the rest of their excavation group, joking and hanging around in the cave's entrance. Taking a break. It's been more than an hour and a half. Clarke doesn't understand how this place isn't fascinating to them. Lost relics of time. A hidden colony of people.
All that Clarke dreamed about was exploring fearlessly what other scholars dismissed. These cave paintings, made of animal dung and blood (so far Clarke has guessed in her analysis), and the huge, sprawling drawings carved into the eroded, pale brown stone… they're incredible. Life-changing.
There's local rumors about shapeshifters and ancient curses, but… hell, Clarke doesn't believe what she cannot touch herself. Examine. Contextualize in origin. That's the whole point of science.
Clarke slips out her miniature tool-pick out of her padded, beige-canvas vest. She works on gently scraping a dirt sample from the wall, and begins spacing out. Clarke's eyes wander over an elaborate but crude sketch of a young woman, bare-breasted and holding a spear. The nipples are lopsided, Clarke's haze-filled brain supplies unhelpfully. But she's pretty. In a cave drawing sort of way.
Trembling. She can feel the pale brown stone trembling against her hands. Her lantern flicking off and on. The entire ground then violently quakes, tossing Clarke backwards onto her ass.
She can hear her group further off, panicking and yelling terrified for each other, for Clarke.
Her lantern breaks apart, its glass shattering. Clarke scrambles back to her feet only to be thrown again, but this time, she lands into someone's warm, firm hands clutching desperately for her. A heavy object falling.
The earthquakes dies down. Clarke still feels like she's quivering, blind in the dakrness, her arms looping around the other person's neck for support. Clarke's nostrils pick up the odor of strong, acidic desert-dust and rain. "Clarke!" Monty shouts, and she can hear footsteps racing towards her.
But then who…?
"Monty?" Clarke murmurs, letting go of her rescuer and furrowing her brows. The new source of orange-tinted light reveals a tall, sinewy women, staring over Clark with faint interest. Doubt. Monty calls for Clarke again, standing directly behind her with his electric lantern and gaping at both women.
The woman's features are pretty, smeared in dark, loose earth. Her eyes a moon-luminous green.
"Klark."
Her voice raspy, dreamy-soft. Clarke lets it overcome her, passing out from shock and dehydration. She misses how the young, nude woman effortlessly grips onto her, draping Clarke over her shoulder.
Clarke wakes in the back of the open-air truck, her pounding, woozy head cushioned against the woman's thighs. Her friends managed to convince Clarke's woman to yank on Octavia's crop-top and one of the boys's spare khakis. She slings off the emergency blanket wrapped around her and arranges it neatly around Clarke who moans quietly, raising a palm to shield her eyes from bright, white sunlight.
"Klark," she says with a hint of affection, stroking her dirtied fingertips over Clarke's forehead.
Everyone else thinks "Leksa" is one of the village girls who managed to escape being trafficked. She's probably got long-term amnesia, Raven blurts out. Traumatic memories, Bellamy guesses.
Maybe they're right.
But Clarke feels something different about her — in her mind, in her heart and in her blood, in how Leksa's breast bleeds black through the sky blue material of Octavia's crop-top.
The truck rumbles, carrying them out of the sweltering-hot desert.
.
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The 100 isn't mine. It's the last day of Clexa Week 2019! I'm sorry I couldn't do more but I'm glad it happened! I was trying to think if I was gonna do a Canon AU or Modern AU (which I've never tried before) but then found a list of interesting pairing prompts and decided on an AU! "Female Archaeologist/Woman Who Came Alive from Cave Painting"! This was for Day 7 "Free Day" and I hope you guys liked this! Clexa still lives on! Any thoughts/comments are so so welcomed!