Hello everyone! Sorry this is out a little later than the other chapters have been, but I think I'm going to post a new chapter every other day instead of every day, cause you know life and summer and work and such. Well I would just like to acknowledge something. I finally got a comment asking me about the whole morphling thing, if any of you have actually noticed. Shout out to you Drez, for finally noticing/letting me know you noticed. I have been using morphling instead of morphine the whole story. I would like to point out that this is a little hint at the Hunger Games fandom and also would like to say to watch out for more little references to other fandoms. Kind of like an Easter egg hunt. And let me know when you guys find them. I want to know if you're paying attention! Enjoy the new chapter and as always, let me know what you think or if I made any mistakes. Oh and good luck…
I wake up slowly, not suddenly like I always do, mostly from nightmares the rest from my damn alarm clock. And it's nice being able to wake up on your own, letting yourself gently start to push away the lure of sleep. It's made even better by the warm body underneath me, chest slowly rising and falling still, fast asleep.
I look up at the person who I happen to be sleeping on and can't help but smile when I see Lexa's calm beautiful face, eyes closed and mouth slightly open. I can't help the stupid ass grin that finds its way onto my lips as I watch her slowly wake up.
"Hey Lexa, how'd you sleep?" I whisper into her black Nike sports bra.
"It was some of the best sleep I've ever gotten Clarke." She whispers back, warping her arm tighter around my waist.
"Oh yeah? That's good. I have some good news. Professor Gustus called last night, left a voice mail that said if we needed to, we could take the day of today. Said something along the lines of you needing to stop getting stitches and I need to look after you because you seem to not be cable of not getting stitches." Lexa snorts.
"That is exactly what Gustus would do." I nod, resting my head back on her chest, again careful not to disturb any of my new work. Silence falls between us again, not awkward silence, a heavy silence that foresees the coming conversation. After a while I finally break it.
"Lexa?" A soft hum, "What about the nightmares, any last night?"
"No, none. Honestly Clarke it was some of the best sleep I've had since the accident." I can feel Lexa's chest tighten at the last word, but before she can close off, I run my fingertips slowly, gently over the stitches that run from under her eye to her jaw.
"Lexa, can I ask you another question?" She again hums in acknowledgment, her whole body vibrating with the sound.
"Do you ever just sit and think, think about what could have been if nothing would have happened, if things would have ended differently?" With those words uttered and no way to take them back, Lexa takes my hand with her free one, bringing both of them to rest over her heart before answering.
"At first I did, Clarke. I would sit alone, on top of the goal post at Polis. The very top, not just the horizontal bar. It would scare the shit out of everyone. The first time it happened, my old football coach found me after school. He about had a heart attack. Called the police, the firefighters, the news. I came down by myself when they all showed up. That was a rough subject to discus with Anya that night over dinner. But I continued to go up there whenever I needed to think, which turned out to be a lot, but not always about what happened. People got used to it at some point, and stopped staring and calling the principal." I chuckle quietly and Lexa smiles in return.
"I used to go up there with a notebook and write about things that were happening or things that I was feeling. It really was the only way I got everything out, all my thoughts, my ideas, my goals. After a couple of months though, I rarely thought about what could have been, what should have been. I went up there the most when I was self-destructing, found it really peaceful in all of the chaos around me. I would write for hours, watch the sunset, and finally go home or to a party when it was too dark to write anymore. I haven't thought about what ifs for a long time though. They never made me feel any better, pretending what could happen. It only made me blame myself ore for what happened. So I stopped pretending and focused on what was in front of me." She grows quiet, face neutral, her eyes are a calm bright green, the same color as a field in mid spring. But in them are turmoil, a storm brews on the horizon of them, just waiting for something to change, to set it in motion, but I won't let it form, I won't let the storm roll in, not now.
"I used to do something similar, still do really. Once I got here, I tried to find the best place to go and think. Somewhere quiet, but where I could see everything and watch people go about their normal lives. I found it right above our heads." At this, Lexa looks up at the ceiling and I can't help but smile.
"There's a fire escape outside of our window. If you get out on it, you can climb up onto the roof. I'd sit there and draw or write for hours, letting my thoughts out through my pencil or charcoal or paint. I'd write about my parents, how I loved going to the lake with them on break or about our nightly dinners together, just talking about our day. But then I'd write about what was going on in my heart, not my mind, but my heart. What I was feeling, what my heart wanted me to write. I'd draw the scenes below me, what was going on in the courtyard, the few students that stay here over the summer, the teachers running around getting everything ready, and the athletes training. I'd paint the sky, the oranges of the morning sunrise, the light blue and white of the noon day sky, the reds and purples of the sunset, and the deep dark blues, blacks, and greys of the night sky. I'd sketch the faces of people I've seen, from my father's world, from my mother's, of my friends and old classmates, of the new people I met here." I can feel Lexa completely relax under me, her breaths evening out. I look up into her eyes and I see the storm receding, her eyes clearing so that they are the beautiful bright green of the spring field untainted by the coming storm.
"But I never liked to think about what ifs either. They never helped me get on with what happened. It hurt too much, to think about my mom loving my dad like nothing happened. I could never imagine a life with her and him loving each other like they used to. If I did picture a life like nothing happened, it never included her, it was just my dad and I." Lexa turns onto her side looking closely at me.
"Lexa you really need to be on your back."
"Oh really Clarke, what for?" An evil smirk colors her lips at my obvious poor choice of words.
"That's not what I meant!" I shout, sitting up to prove my point, but Lexa has other ideas.
"Now, now Clarke, no need to get excited. Stay a while, enjoy the view." She pulls me back down so that now I'm lying on my side too, our faces mere inches apart.
"Clarke?" She asks in a whisper, "Can I ask you a question?"
"You can ask me anything Lexa." I whisper back.
"Oh anything? You sure you can give me this kind of power Clarke, you trust me?"
"Of course I trust you Lexa. And yeah, you can ask me anything, got nothing to hide from you." I say with a smirk.
"Clarke, can I kiss you?" And the smirk is gone, instead it's replaced with a suddenly dry mouth and malfunctioning brain. But somehow I manage to croak out an answer.
"Yeah." And that's all it takes for Lexa to close the distance between us, pressing her soft lips against mine, bringing her right hand, with the IV in it, up to cup the side of my face while I move my left hand to grab her waist and pull her closer. We pull apart slowly, but stay close together, pressing our foreheads together.
"Lexa…" I whisper, my lips barely brushing against her own.
She gulps, Adam's apple bobbing hard, "Yeah Clarke?"
"Can I ask you a question?"
"You can ask me anything Clarke." She croaks out.
"Can I kiss you again?" Lexa doesn't even bother responding, instead she surges forward, getting rid of any space in between us. Pushing our bodies tightly together, her hand tangling in my hair as she shifts so that she's now leaning over me. She pulls back for a second and I watch as she pulls out her IV line, chucking the tube behind her, sitting down on top of me. I don't waste a second, sitting up to meet her, wrapping my arms around her shoulders, and pressing our lips back together. Lexa runs her tongue along my bottom lip, asking for permission and I quickly grant it. Our tongues fight for dominance for a few moments before her's takes over and really I'm not complaining. Unfortunately nothing lasts forever. Someone starts pounding on our door and yelling for me to open it.
"The actual fucking hell." I mutter under my breath, still wrapped in Lexa's strong arms, chest heaving, and no desire to move.
"If we ignore them, do you think they'll go away?" Lexa whispers, arms tightening around me.
"Well I wasn't planning on getting up were you?" She shakes her head no and press back into her, lips gently running over her jaw, pushing her back so now I'm leaning over her. Sadly the pounding on the door doesn't stop and the yelling person doesn't go away.
"For the love of God!" I shout, carefully getting off of Lexa much to her displeasure evident by the absolutely adorable little groan she makes.
"Fuck them Clarke, come back…" She whines as I get to the door.
"Trust me, I would love to but I don't think they're going away anytime soon." And with that I turn the deadbolt and fling the door open which makes the person standing against it trip backwards forcing me to shove them back which I don't mind.
"Can I fucking help you?" I growl at this horrible person who dares to inter- and he's Professor Gustus, shit.
"Hello to you too Clarke. Was I interrupting something important?" He quirks one of his bushy eyebrows making me turn every shade of red ever imaginable.
"Uh, no, no sir. Nothing important, just um checking on Lexa's stitches, uh why are you here?" I try to look a little less suspicious by leaning against the door frame but it only makes Professor Gustus look more suspicious.
"Clarke, is everything okay? Lexa's doing fine, you're doing fine?" He seems genuinely concerned about what's going on and not at all suspicious, hopefully, about what Lexa and I were just doing.
"No, yeah everything is just fine. Lexa's stiches are looking good. The ones on her face are healing nicely and her new ones are infection free. And I'm doing fine. Cage is an ass, but I can deal with him."
"Well that's what I wanted to talk to you about Clarke. You see when I brought Mr. Wallace to the nurse's office, Dean Jaha asked about what happened. Mr. Wallace in a word spilled his guts and Dean Jaha is not happy Clarke. He is requesting your presence in his office this afternoon to discuss the and I quote, 'the course of events that have transcended these past several days,' end quote. I highly suggest that you do not pull a stunt like you did the last time you were in his office. And please do not bring Bellamy as your back up, not after last time. Just go alone Clarke, he just wants to talk to you. And if he does punish, let me know and I'll deal with, but please can we stop hitting Mr. Wallace in the face. It's not solving anything, it's probably only making things worse." Professor Gustus gives me a pleading look, but sighs and turn around when I don't say anything in return. As he's walking away I finally give him an answer.
"Professor, what happened last time was not Bellamy's fault and you know it. Oh, and we both know he doesn't 'just want to talk.' As for Cage, I am making no promises about the wellbeing of his face or the rest of him and really I don't care. I got my revenge, but I know a whole team of football players along with many other people who wouldn't mind seeing him and his man posy roughed up a little more. So don't worry about me or even Lexa, I would worry about everyone else. Now if you excuse me, I need to change Lexa's bandages." With that I step back into my room, shutting and falling back onto the door. It's quiet for a few minutes, then a soft padding of bare feet on the solid wood floors, and soft hands wrapping around my waist, holding me up. I lean into the solid body of Lexa, resting my head on her shoulder, wrapping my arms tightly around her muscled shoulders.
"Clarke, hey. What happened, how was that, what's wrong?" Lexa whispers in my ear, gently running her hands up and down my back, trying to calm me down.
"It was Professor Gustus. He asked how you were doing, told him your stitches were fine. Asked how I was, told him I was fine. Said that Dean Jaha wants to talk to me and to not bring Bellamy this time an-"
"Wait, wait, wait. What happened last time, what'd Bellamy do? And why the hell does the Dean want to see you?" I feel Lexa's heart rate start to increase, her heart pounding, steady and loud in my ears.
"Hey, Lexa. It's okay, just listen." When her heart rate starts to level out, I start again. "Last year I got into some trouble with Octavia and we were sent to the Dean's office. Well Bellamy insisted he go with us to make sure Jaha would give us the fair punishment. Long story short, Bellamy freaked out when Jaha gave us 2 weeks detention, trashed his office before the security guards finally stopped him. He was lucky Professor Gustus convinced Jaha to only give Bellamy detention for the rest of the semester which was about a month. As for why the Dean wants to see me," I let out a half sigh half chuckle, "Apparently Cage spilled his guts about what actually happened to his wrist to Jaha when he went to the nurse's office so I get to pay the esteemed Dean a visit this afternoon." Lexa takes all of this in before giving her own input.
"So you're supposed to go alone even though I broke his nose and threatened him after our fight?" She murmurs into my hair.
"Yeah, Gustus said it would be best if I went alone and promised if Jaha tried to punish me, he's talk to the dean himself." Lexa nods, gently guiding us back to her bed. She plops down, pulling me with her so that I'm sitting in her lap.
"He better, otherwise him and I will be having words that would make the sailors cringe."
"I'll be sure to let him know the next time I see him." I joke causing Lexa to smirk.
"Hey Clarke?" I hum in response, "Do you want to go on the roof?" I look up at her in surprise, but she's looking over at her trunk instead.
"Um, yeah if you want, but I don't know if you should be climbing right now."
"Oh come on Clarke," She says standing up and taking me with her, "I think I can manage getting onto the roof from here, after all, you can do it."
"Fuck you," I say slapping her lightly on the arm, "I was climbing onto roofs while you were still in diapers.
"That would mean you would also be in diapers." She snarks back.
"Well I guess I was just a little more adventurous than most." I'm now at the window looking back at Lexa who's digging around in her trunk for something. When she stands up, she's holding a thick leather bound journal and black ball point pen in her hands. She catches me watching her and blushes, actually blushes, like a normal human. I swear the Lexa I met on the first day of school's been abducted by aliens and replaced with an actual human clone.
"Hey, Clarke," She says waving her free hand, "Whatcha looking at?" I bite my tongue knowing exactly what I want to say but holding back also knowing it's what Lexa would expect me to say. Instead I counter with something I don't think she's expecting.
"Do you want me to bring mine too?" The look of surprise on her face gives her away.
"What? Did you not think I'd guess what that was?" I gesture to her journal, "Cause I have several of my own so…" I mumble. Lexa's silent for a minuet but then says exactly what I thought she would.
"Yeah Clarke, you can bring yours." I nod and turn to my own trunk, grabbing my sketching notebook and a couple pieces of charcoal.
"All right ready to go up now?" Lexa nods in return so I open the window and climb out onto the fire escape. When Lexa's out, I close the window behind us and attach the outside lock which gets a questioning look from Lexa.
"I put this bad boy in after Raven and Octavia found my hideaway. I left the window open one day when I disappeared and Raven being Raven used the Google satellite to scour the roofs of the campus finding me on top of this one." We easily climb up the three feet of wall, sitting on the edge of the building, "They came through that window and freaked out when they saw we laying down on the edge drawing away. Since then I put that lock on the window so that even if they want to find me, they can't get to me. Sometimes you just need some peace and quiet to think." I trail off looking over the campus, at the forest that surrounds this place, at all the students that just got released from their most recent class.
"Yeah I know exactly how you feel. It took me a while before I started using the top of the goal post as my escape. Before that I tried the many closets in school, empty classrooms, trees around the property or in the park, but there was always so much noise or people asking me questions, trying to talk to me. Then one brilliant day after physical therapy, I was walking back from the training room and looked up and it just hit me, if I could get up there, no one would talk to me, it was high up enough that any noise on the ground would be drowned out by the wind, and I had a really nice view of the city of Polis. So the next day, after physical therapy, I jumped on the horizontal bar, pulling myself up, and then climbing up one the uprights. It was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be and when I got to the top it was well worth it." Lexa trails off looking out at the horizon, taking in the whole of Ark High. We sit in silence for a long time, just watching everything below us or the horizon beyond us. At some point though, Lexa's journal ends up in my lap, open, with small neat handwriting covering the pages while Lexa's carefully inspecting the black and white drawings in my sketch book. I stop on one page reading, rereading, and rerereading a small exert written on the crisp white page with an equally small poem underneath it and accompanying poems on the next pages, 4 in all.
"Their violence was petty and ignorant, but ultimately, it was true to who they were. The real violence… the violence that I realized was unforgivable is the violence that we do to ourselves…" –Nomi Marks
The first poem is titled Mind Games:
What does it mean, to be trapped in your own mind?
To understand everything around you even more than everyone else, but not be able to explain what you're thinking.
To run around in circles, trapped in a mental maze, constantly looking for an exit. But the maze shifts and changes every minute, it has multiple levels problems you have to solve, but can't. You just keep going and going until your mind stops trying and all you do is think and over think and solve and it never stops, it's never quiet, but you are.
The second is called The Fake, The Addict:
Caught in a world of lies, spinning, spinning, out of control.
Hiding, hiding everything from prying eyes.
Pretending to be something you're not for other people, for popularity, for our parents, for yourself.
Caught in an infinite cage, trapped, trapped and nowhere to go.
High, High, must have that high to live, to survive.
Lost in a world of repetition, needing that one thing to live, to continue. That one drug, that one thing that one activity, that one feeling. That one person.
The third is called What is Freedom?
It's the ability, the privilege to live outside of the box. But most of the time people don't understand true freedom.
People think it's their right to do whatever they want. They think they can do everything like they are truly free, people think they know freedom.
But that's not what freedom is. Freedom is understanding what others can't. Freedom is finding yourself in the things you do and knowing that you do those things. Freedom is not letting other people's idea of freedom influence your own. To truly know freedom, what the word means, you have to decide that for yourself.
The fourth is called Why We Feel Pain:
Pain is supposed to be controlled in our minds right? People think we can turn it on and off. That we can control the pain we feel, we can condition ourselves to not feel. But that's only physical pain we feel. We have emotions and we feel and they can be hurt and we can feel emotional pain, and it hurts more than any physical pain can.
How badly do you have to be hurt to not feel emotional pain? How many times do you have to be hurt to not feel anymore? At what point do you forget about feelings that you master control of emotional pain?
Physical pain can end in a few days or weeks or months. You can learn to deal with it, to accept it. Emotional pain goes on forever. It consumes you, plagues you, it eats you from the inside out. It never stops and it knows no mercy, it knows no compassion, it knows no end.
I sit there for what seems like ages before I finally look over at Lexa who seems to be staring at one page in particular. I'm surprised to see tears in her eyes and in that instant I know exactly which page in my sketch book she's looking at. It's one of the first in the book, one of my earliest sketches, one of the ones I did right after the whole mess. It's a sketch of my living room, the TV on in the corner, my dad sitting in his leather recliner, reading some crime novel her got from the dollar store and making notes in it, probably about how the legal terms are wrong or the law that the author used is in fact, made up. My mom sitting on the couch smiling over at me, papers scattered in front of her, most likely telling me to go get changed out of my uniform so we can all watch a movie together. It's a sketch of normal, a sketch of something whole, a sketch of something that no longer existed. On the next page is the same set up at the first sketch, TV in the corner, on, recliner off to the side, couch pushed against the opposite wall, pictures of the family everywhere, except in the recliner sits a single bullet with a dark stain underneath it. Over by the couch is my mother, but she's no longer sitting, or smiling, her papers scattered on the floor, and on either side of her, griping her arms lightly, are two FBI agents.
We sit there, on the edge of our dorm room, the whole campus spread in front of us, not saying a word, not needing to. We sit in silence thinking, thinking about what we've shown each other, what we've revealed to the other. Things that neither of us have shown anyone else, things that we trust no one else with. And we take comfort in each other's shaking hands, our trembling fingers, our heaving chests, our shaking shoulders pressed tightly together. We take comfort in this silence that we can share together, a silence that no one else can understand.
Oh damn, what did I do…
The quote was shared with me by parad0x1n and it is from the show Sense8.
The 4 poems in this chapter are my own creation and if they happen to be like any other poems you know of, I swear I didn't plagiarize them. I wrote those poems while on the bus traveling around France without WiFi.
I hope you guys liked this chapter and if you want more poetry from 'Clarke and Lexa' let me know.
