Definitely, Maybe

A/N ~ These last few chapters have made themselves a hell of a lot fluffier than I intended. But still. If anyone needs fluff right now it's the clexa fandom. I am on a crusade to fill the world with clexa fluff. Also, as you probably have noticed, I've slowed down my updates, simply because I've finished writing this now and I need to drag it out. #ravenknowswhatsup

21.

"Have you got everything you need?" Abby was asking, from her seat on the footrest-thing across the coffee table.

Clarke finished her cereal, pushing her empty bowl away. "I think so," She nodded. "But I'll let you know if I forget anything and you can just send up whatever." Thank god she'd woken up early enough to disentangle herself from Lexa, and take a walk to get her pictures printed. Lexa was in the shower now.

"Thanks for your faith in me," Her mom muttered. Then she leaned foreward across the coffee table and adopted that facial expression that made Clarke want to tear off her hand just for something to throw at her. She sighed and wondered what she'd done now. "I've barely seen you. You've hardly told me anything about college."

"Because you know it all." Clarke's phone buzzed a text through, vibrating on the table and half of her wanted to reach out and start texting as an act of normal teenageritis rebellion. But that wasn't really in keeping with her whole I'm-at-college-I'm-a-responsible-almost-adult appeal. She sighed. I knew it, I this was going to happen at some point. "I Skype you at least once a week, we text, we phone. And you're the one who said the more the merrier, if it meant that much to you, you could have told me to save Lexa for another time." What happened to me being a proper person?

"Lexa," Abby sighed. Lexa was currently using their shower. Clarke should have known she was going to start in on her the minute she was out the door. "Lexa seems interesting."

"Hey," Clarke frowned. For fucks sake. "She's trying!"

"You live with her the whole year through and even that's not enough?" To her credit, her mother didn't look angry, persay. Just confused, and tired. "Sorry. I just think it's a little strange that you see this girl every day, and she picked staying with us for Thanksgiving over her family."

"You see Kane just as much and he was welcomed with wide arms," Clarke muttered, purposefully focusing on the breakfast show that nobody was watching.

"He just lost his mother," Abby softened as much as her mom was physically able to soften. She sighed. "Look, Clarke. I'm sure Lexa's great, once you get to know her. But I'm just saying, don't loose sight of other things."

"What are you even talking about?" Clarke grabbed her phone, and her empty cereal bow, standing up.

"Whatever's going on with you two -"

Clarke froze. "Nothing's going on." She had no idea why she said that, and it became evident the moment it left her lips. She kind of wanted to go upstairs, drag Lexa down and start making out with her just to prove a point. Where did that come from? Whatever. She was an independant freethinking person who made her own decisions. "What would be going on?"

"I just meant -"

"I'm going to go see if Lexa wants any toast." She gave her mom her best only-I-know-what's-best-for-me face, walked through the kitchen to dump her bowl in the sink and hurried up the stairs. Lexa was still in the shower. Clarke collapsed on her bed, beside her bag, stuffed with her essentials and a few t-shirts she'd missed, unlocking her phone and opening up her new message. Octavia. Bell hasn't got the van fitted out in the back yet but you're good w danger and law breaking right?

Pretty much, Clarke replied, locking her phone and shoving it in her pocket. She reached out to grab the stack of snapshots sitting on her desk. She'd gone out before Lexa had woken up to get them done. She faintly recognized the cashier guy. That was something she used to think was nice about Ark; the constant familiarity. After living in a huge college town for a few months, it was weird. She was used to not knowing who the fuck anyone beyond her immediate social circle was. Finding the ball of blu-tack that lived on her desk, she got to work.

The bad-quality shot of Octavia and Lincoln (sorry, Pocahontas and black Mozart) pulling stupid poses out front of the frat house on Halloween went up between her eleventh birthday party and the squad decked out in their senior prom finery. The game night montage she tried to spread out a bit; Raven in Jasper's goggles, Monty balancing a can of that mango drink on his head. And eventually she got to the most recent ones; the selfies she took with Lexa wiped her mind of everything awkward regarding her mother and put a smile on her face. Lexa really doesn't realize how cute she is.

"Hey,"

Clarke turned around. Lexa was towelling her hair dry, and Clarke was immediately, agonizingly aware of the undone belt hanging loosely from her standard black skinny jeans. She smiled, pressing up the last photo, and about to warn Lexa about their ride back to college, when her gaze snagged on her window. "Oh my god."

"What?" Lexa asked, going over to shove her shampoo bottle in her bag. (Clarke said she could have used her shampoo. But whatever. She assumed grounder hair required special treatment or something.)

"I think it's snowing." Frowning, she bounded over the other side of her bed. Beyond the misty glass, bone-coloured flecks were drifting sluggishly to melt into the ground. "Holy shit."

"You don't get much here?" Lexa sat down on the end of the bed, struggling to tug her comb through her hair.

"Not on Thanksgiving, this is ridiculous." It clearly wasn't going to lay, but still. Still. "Oh, and you know how I said Bellamy could probably give us a lift if he got the van fixed in time?"

"Yes,"

"Well, it's done." Clarke turned away from the window, instead surveying the new additions to her wall. "Except the back isn't fitted yet, so there's a slight chance we could get arrested or die. And, um, Raven and the guys are going to squeeze in as well. But we can always get the train if you'd prefer..."

She watched anxiously, and she could see the slightest shift in Lexa's demeanour. When Octavia had text to say Bellamy had finally cashed in that lump-of-rust car Raven was always ripping apart for this mysterious second-hand van, and that there was room enough for the whole crew, her first thought was that it was a godsend. She was poor, trains were expensive. But then she thought of Lexa. And while Octavia had briefly okay-ed bringing her along, Clarke wasn't really... She didn't know. Hours of driving, shut up in the back of a van with Octavia and Jasper and Monty plus Lexa. It wasn't that her friends were stupid humiliating dorks (which they kind of were) or that it had the potential to be as awkward as when Jasper dragged Maya to movie night (which it did) but she was more concerned about Lexa. Lexa was awesome, but she did have a tendancy to shut down and wall up around new people. Clarke didn't want that. She didn't want her worrying.

"We can go with Bellamy," Lexa allowed, voice painfully flat as anticipated. At least she was making an effort. "It's the convenient thing to do."

"Yeah, but we don't have to do what's convenient." Clarke dropped down to sit beside her, bedsprings bouncing. Hell if I've done anything convenient at all lately. "We should do what we want." Like this, for example. Inviting her Lexa to stay with her for Thanksgiving. That wasn't really convenient. But it was just how she felt.

Lexa turned to look at her. "You want to go with your friends."

It wasn't really a question. "Yeah, but -"

"Then we're going with your friends."

-0-

As the two of them embarked on their meandering walk to the meeting place (The Blakes' postage-stamp garage) The snow was gentle and fucking freezing. The sky had faded to the colour of cloth that had been white a long time ago. The wind had stilled to nothing, a subdued death, and a trio of chill and chance and snowflakes had bullied the flowers (that were possibly weeds; Clarke didn't know shit about flowers.) lining all the ugly, neat old-people gardens down the street into submission. Her goodbye to her mom had been brief but not bad. She meant her I love yous, for whatever reason. And Lexa was quiet. (Well. Lexa was always quiet, she was just saying even less words than usual.) Clarke could see the strain in overheld breath, the razored focus in her firmly frontward gaze.

Octavia's house was only ten minutes away from hers, and something like muscle memory awoke in her tissue, because she wasn't even thinking about her destination, but her legs still carried her. Clarke burrowed down into her coat, stubbornly refusing to put up the hood. The snow descended softly, vanishing as it touched the concrete of pavement and road and other scars on the earth left by humanity. After a few awkward moments of silence, Clarke couldn't help thinking Lexa was almost - nervous? Above the cut of her fingerless gloves, she kept picking at her nails, and the line of her mouth was an echo of anticipation.

They were about to turn onto Octavia and Bellamy's street when something made Clarke stop short, beneath a broken lamppost. "Lexa," Lexa gave her an expectant look. There's definitely something up. With the pallid white flecks of snow swirling, weightless, through the cold still air, there was something nearly magic written into the fabric of the moment. (Christ, I'm cheesy, Clarke inwardly winced. But this wasn't the time to complain about the romantic in her.) Because Lexa was just so beautiful, that it was almost hard to notice it all at first. It crept up on you unawares, layer by layer by layer, and frozen crystals of snow were catching in her hair, one melting on an eyelash. And she could see her breath, realized by the chill, mingling with her breath in the live-wire space between them. Whatever she'd been about to say deserted her. She didn't need it anymore.

Clarke savoured the moment she closed the distance, her lips meeting Lexa's slowly, her arms going of their own accord around her neck, fingers finding purchase in the dark curls matted damp with snow. Every cell in her body relaxed, in resonance of coming home. The warmth in the pit of her stomach unfurled, releasing the butterfly army, and from the gentle touch of her lips radiated a supernatural kind of soft heat, filling her up. She didn't care about the snow anymore, the cold had evaporated, irrelevant. She could feel her eyelashes flutter closed, Lexa's pulse in her cheek against hers. Clarke stayed like that for a small infinity, relishing the warmth, the joy, the whatever it was. But she couldn't be still forever; her lips moving more firmly, more certainly, and Clarke told her through the blood in her veins against the blood in hers that it was all going to work out. Her head tilted slightly, to spare her nose, as the snow came down, and her skin flickered on cell by cell, electric, crackling.

She couldn't quite see past the moment, and she didn't want to. Her heart was flooding the rest of her with something like a drug. Her blood was dancing through her system to the song of her heartbeat beside Lexa's. But however essential to her continued existence kissing Lexa seemed, she really did need to breathe.

Damn you lungs. As they drew back, burning in the early snow, Clarke struggled to get her heartbeat under control, to blink her vision back to reality, to gather back all her thoughts. She watched her breath melt into the air for a few seconds. "Um," I swear I knew how to speak a minute ago.

"I..." Lexa was breathing better than her, but at least she wasn't alone with the sudden mindblank.

"We should..."

"Yeah..."

Clarke still wasn't exactly recovered when she and Lexa turned up at Octavia's driveway, and she could tell Lexa wasn't either, but that was better than Clarke being awkward and Lexa being weird. Octavia was bounding around in the drive as Bellamy hugged their mom goodbye, and Jasper and Monty, who was bundled up in the most ridiculous overreaction of a snowproof coat, were leaning against the chipped paintwork of what was assumedly Bellamy's new van, talking to Raven, who was smirking and tapping away at her phone.

"Clarke!" Octavia noticed her first, and Clarke waved (she had no idea why), hurrying over. "Hey. Good weekend?" Her grin didn't waver for a second, hair damp from the snow, as her eyes flickered to Lexa. "Lexa?"

"Yeah," Clarke nodded. She was starting to loose the dizzying force of the kiss, and everything was hightened now; the smell of the snow and the wet pavement and the trees, the spectrum of white and grey and brown eye-searing, the orchestrations of Lexa breathing beside her. She could feel herself filling up with a bubbling kind of excitement. She didn't realize she'd started grinning until her face began to hurt.

"Cool. We're going in, like - well, we're meant to be going now." Octavia said, as they were approached the van. She raised her voice. "But the dumbass momma's boy won't get a move on!"

"I'm coming," Bellamy called, grinning, as their mom chided her language and waved a hello at Clarke. Aurora Blake was kind of her second mom by this point. "Ok, we've really got to go."

And so, as Bellamy insisted Octavia be strapped firmly in the front, Clarke piled into the back of the van with everyone else, sitting on the empty carpeted floor, squashed up beside Lexa. (To be honest, with everyone packed in, it was probably as safe as it was ever going to be.) Octavia twisted around in her seat, so she could still talk to everyone. "Road trip, bitches!"

-0-

"Who in Gods name are you texting?" Monty finally voiced, from where he was leaning against the back of the van, where the trunk would be if it was safe to sit in.

Raven, against the opposite side to Clarke, didn't look up from dull glow of her phone screen. "None of your business, chopstick."

"Is that a bit racist?" Monty snorted.

"Not when you're skinny and weird and exactly like a chopstick." Raven assured him, tapping away.

"Shots fired." Bellamy called, from the front seat, as he pulled out onto the highway.

"Seriously, who is it?" Monty pressed, the second Jasper, beside her, lunged for her phone and came up victorious, rolling away from Raven with a shout of triumph.

A grin flashed onto his face as he scrolled through the messages. "Challenge time," Jasper announced. Raven rolled her eyes and looked put out. "Three guesses to who Reyes is texting, based on the following messages; This is why nobody hires engineers. Yeah, well, who told you mustaches were hot? Oh - oh! - I liked you better before we slept together -"

"Give me that, dickwad," Raven snapped, snatching her phone back at stowing it in her bra, out of reach, as Octavia fell into raucous shouts of laughter and Clarke leaned her head back against the side of the jostling van, watching Lexa, a few inches to her left, breathing and occaisionally smiling and looking awkward, and trying to resist the impulse to hold her hand.

Nobody had really commented or made any kind of deal regarding Lexa's sudden appearance on their road trip, but that was probably only because Clarke was trying to give off the vibe that she'd slay them if they did. And yet, and yet, she felt so different post-Lexa-make-out that it was hard to believe she didn't look any different. She felt so acutely alive, like her whole body was fortified with something inately unbreakable; she felt like she was glowing. She felt radioactive.

"Oh my god, Clarke, our mom saw your mom the other day with Kane -" Octavia was exclaiming. "And apparantly they held hands. For like, a second. But still." Clarke smiled, despite herself. But then Octavia turned to the others, it seemed, before she went on. "God, Thanksgiving at the Griffin house must have been fun, with those two mooning around making heart eyes at each other the whole time."

"Yeah, it was," Clarke retorted, stretching her legs out into Jasper's personal space.

For some reason, everyone found that hilarious. Jesus Christ, what did I say?

Raven stared at her. "Seriously? You haven't worked it out yet?"

Clarke frowned, and she was about to say something, but Jasper threw her a packet of Skittles, and that was that.