"Letting yourself be killed will not bring you redemption, Clarke." Spoke an all too familiar voice. "May I?" Lexa motions to sit next to her. Clarke doesn't move and utters no word. Lexa feeds the agonizing fire and remains silent, absent-mindedly staring into the dancing flame. Clarke turns to look at her. Her war paint is faded and mixed in with dry blood. Her clothes are filthy. Her scent is that of caged-in despair. Despair trapped inside her rib-cage, flowing through her veins, yet contained, unable to break loose.
Clarke hadn't consciously pictured this moment, but if she had, she wouldn't have imagined her feelings to be such as they were. She would have expected rage, or a ravenous need for retribution. Yet she feels nothing of the sort. Inexplicably, she feels that Death's grip is not so icy anymore. Betrayal's screams are not as relentless as they were. Lexa meets her gaze.
"Clarke…" She begins, her voice broken and her expression suddenly vulnerable.
"I understand" Clarke hears herself interrupt, and goes back to staring into the fire. Lexa nods, her chin trembling almost imperceptively. She moves in a little closer to Clarke, their arms brushing against one another's. She stares blankly into the darkness ahead of them. Almost in spite of herself, Clarke feels the melting warmth of Forgiveness slowly take over. Betrayal steps back, abashed. Lexa seems to pull herself together enough to utter one confident sentence.
"We did what we had to do to save our people." Clarke nods. She feels a tickling sensation in her throat, quietly untying the knot that had almost kept her from breathing.
But she cannot muster the strength to talk. Not yet. Instead, she regains awareness of her own aching body. A hungry body. Lexa notices and quietly stands up to get the dead wolf and proceeds to skin it and gut it. Clarke gets a strange, primitive pleasure in watching her do so.
Once the meat is roasting, Clarke finally attempts a longer sentence.
"Take me to Polis." She says. Lexa stares warmly into the sizzling fire, and nods, her lips almost curving into a smile.
When she had left her camp, she hadn't been sure as to what exactly she expected to find. Yet, without her realizing, her spirit had guided her to the very last person she expected to see ever again. Only as she sits next to the blonde girl who has come from the Sky does her body notice how tense her muscles had been, energy coiled in every sinew. She doesn't understand why, but seeing Clarke makes her mind numb, it blurs her thoughts. If she hadn't been thinking clearly when she decided to ride through the woods, now there is no synapse taking place in her brain at all. It is as if the wolf she killed had taken over her brain, turned it into mere instinct and stealth. Yet her muscles relax a little once the Ski girl speaks. She understands. That is the only human thought running through her mind as she watches the fire burn. She understands.
It's her primitive instincts that tell her that the girl sitting next to her hasn't eaten in days. As she busies herself readying the meat to be eaten, the tension in her body diminishes more with the slow, meticulous movements. Being able to focus on a clear task at hand, her brain starts to awaken slowly. It's as if her entire self had been in hibernation, and only now started to shake off the winter frost, which melts away and runs down her cheeks as her face leans close to the fire, which runs down her shoulders and arms and drips on the floor. Her hands are busy with knife and flesh, fingers warm with the blood of the recent kill. The repetitive movements of the long ago-learnt task soothe her.
She remembers she is not alone when she lifts up her gaze and meets a pair of sky-blue eyes, and becomes suddenly conscious of the way they look at her. Clarke's gaze isn't dead as it had seemed only moments ago. It isn't just the ravenous gaze of the hungry predator. She realizes that Clarke isn't looking at the dead wolf at all, but looking at her. She watches Clarke watch her work, and sees a spark in her eye that she can't quite make out. Clarke looks into her eyes, then her arms, and her busy hands, her bloody fingers. She notices how her own spine tenses a little bit, reacting to the attention. And Clarke's eyes continue to pierce her. Her hair, her jaw-line, her neck. Her collar and her chest and abdomen. All the way down to her kneeling legs. Lexa feels the sweat drip down her spine and, with her newly-awaken mind, decides to focus on the task at hand once more.
After they've eaten, she ventures to speak again. She's afraid that Clarke's gaze will freeze and become lifeless again, but she speaks anyway.
"I'm sorry"
"You don't have to be" Clarke hears herself say.
"I chose what was best for my people, I wasn't lying when I told you that I had used my brain to decide, and not my heart." Lexa continues. She somehow feels that unless she explains herself, she will not be able to move on.
"I know"
"If my heart had chosen, I would have stayed next to you and many of my soldiers would have died that day"
Clarke nodded. "We both did what we had to do… What I don't know is how to deal with that now that it's over" Clarke says. Lexa has to know how to deal.
"You tell yourself that you are the leader of your people and that the burden of your clan's kills must lie on your shoulders" Lexa says. "That way, you let them live, you let them be happy and rejoice"
"We carry the burden for them" Clarke says, trying to understand, allowing herself to think a little and to feel a little. Just enough. Lexa nods.
"It is part of what it means to lead"
After that sentence, a leaden silence falls over them once again, broken only by the sound of the burning fire and the wind dancing on the tree branches. Lexa glances at Clarke before she goes on.
"Why the Polis?" She asks. She remembers when she offered to take her, eons ago, before MountWeather. She had been hopeful back then; she had thought they had a chance at something more than an alliance, and she can't help but feel the frost that had been covering her melt a little more, can't help but feel a bewildering warmth right in the mouth of her stomach.
"You said you'd like to take me" Clarke states, simply. She feels the Grounder's eyes on her profile, but dares not look back at her. Why do I want to go? She's not so sure herself. Truth is, she has nowhere to go. From the corner of her eye, she imagines she can see Lexa's lips curve into a smile of sorts. Lexa's lips. Too quickly for her mind to stop it, the memory of the kiss they shared haunts Clarke's memory. She softness and warmth of it, the coiled, contained passion that didn't want to be unleashed but could be sensed anyway. It had been a restrained kiss, as if the Commander had been afraid of hurting her. It had been a confusing kiss, arousing emotions she hadn't been ready to deal with. She feels her cheeks fire up as she remembers the feel of Lexa's lips pressing against hers, Lexa's hand in the back of her neck, pulling closer, asking for more. She glances back at the alert Commander, who looks back at her. Into her, her eyes staring right into the cloudling's. She feels Lexa's eyes as they see right through her, feels the Grounder's penetrating stare read her very soul. She finds it hard to breathe, afraid of betraying her thoughts by filling her lungs with much needed air. But in spite of her fruitless attempts, the Grounder already knows what had been going on behind her eyes a second ago.
Her primitive spirit awakened once again, Lexa leans towards Clarke without hesitation. Biting her lower lip as her gaze travels from quivering eyes to parted lips, she pulls Clarke into a kiss. This time, there's no restraining, no holding back. Agile, she deftly straddles the cloudling's thighs. Pulling her closer with a commanding palm on her back and pulling up her chin, the earthling takes control. Clarke feels completely helpless as Lexa commands her body. Closer, deeper. Clarke feels the Commander's hunger bite her lower lip, kiss her in a primeval, ravenous way she hadn't been kissed before. Her heart pounds quickly in her heaving chest as Lexa's fingers run through her hair, pulling and tugging and forcing her to look up. She opens her eyes and blurredly sees the outline of the dark trees against the starry sky. But she can't focus on that for long, for soon she feels Lexa's hungry lips kissing her below her jaw-line, nibbling at her neck, feels her heavy breathing by her ear. Clarke exhales the air she hadn't known she had been holding in her lungs.
Struggling to regain control of her own body, Lexa lets go of Clarke and sits up straight. She looks at Clarke, sees the fog in her eye and the abandon in her limbs.
"I- I'm sorry" She mutters as she quickly stands up. "Get some rest, you'll need it if you want to start heading for Polis tomorrow morning". She turns around and stares into the darkness. "I'll stand watch."
Speechless, bewildered Clarke lies down by the fire, unable to ignore the command. The Grounder forces herself to keep looking into the forest, wondering if she has gone too far and unable to come up with an answer. The cool wind appeases her breathing and the night engulfs it all.