here, catch! 4,000+ words worth of angst.

now, read, ponder, and enjoy!

"Excuse me, please explain."

Narrowing her eyes, Clarke took a pause in jotting down on her 60-year-old patient's chart to look up at her best friends, who had apparently decided to leave their posts to come barging into the ER. They were lucky it wasn't a busy day, not yet. She mirrored Raven's narrowed eyes and tilted her head.

"You're gonna have to elaborate," she said.

Octavia widened her eyes and leaned closer, jaw clenched and panic evident on her expression. "Tell me you didn't report Marcus Kane and Finn Collins to the council."

Clarke raised her brows, a little thankful that her best friend had opted for a lower volume. Still, she looked around her to see if there was anyone who'd overheard, but fortunately, the closest nurse was much too absorbed in a phone call with her uncle to care.

"No, everyone already knows – they're just too scared to ask you about it."

She sucked in a sharp breath and whipped around to look at them. Raven was nodding smugly while Octavia was just glaring at her. She gulped and collapsed into a random chair nearby, throwing her head back – a good show of professionalism, sure to increase patients' trust when they came in.

Well, not like she cared, now that everybody knew, she should probably expect a termination letter in her inbox soon. Maybe during her joblessness, she could get back into drawing while waiting for Lexa to come back and fully bank her. So much for doing things on her own.

"Oh, they adore you for it." Clarke sat upright. "Not everyone's totally blind, you know. They've been watching Finn and Kane do shady things for as long as they've been here; they're just too afraid to say anything because Finn has connections and Kane is the chief," Raven offered. She reached out and pinched Clarke's arm, eliciting a yelp, finally attracting the other nurse's attention, however brief. "Now explain!" she hissed.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to explain. You seem to know everything."

"No, not the Kane and Finn thing. We know that," Raven disputed, smacking her palms on the table repeatedly. "Explain how you just disappeared for days after dropping a bombshell on the hospital and ignored our calls and basically became the worst friend on earth!"

"Oh, that."

"And what exactly is that?" Raven pointed out, leaning closer.

"Well..."

She trailed off, resting further against the counter and looking around again to see if there were any sneaky ears and eyes trying to get dirt on her. After all, they all knew about her part in Marcus and Finn's suspension, and it was no secret that there was still a rather big portion of her colleagues who had fallen under their charms, even her mother – and she didn't even work in this hospital.

Then when she was sure no one was out to get her, not yet, she thought about her absence for the past few days. The absolute bliss of it all. The absence of noise and unnecessary concerns. The greens and blues and sweat and curses. Lexa Woods, the Second Princess of Polis Kingdom, loving her. Those days at the campsite had been…some of the most wonderful, up there with the moment she came home for the first time since heading off to college and seeing her parents waiting for her on the doorstep.

It was beautiful. It was wonderful. It was something she wanted to keep to herself just a little bit longer.

"Hey, did you know Octavia's seeing Lincoln?" she diverted.

Octavia's eyes widened at her, a combination of glaring and panicking as she directed her gaze between the doctor and the tech. Clarke winced and shrugged unapologetically at her friend. Honestly, she had wanted to give the nurse more time to keep it to herself, but this was a dog-eat-dog world. Plus, it wasn't as if Octavia herself hadn't bombarded her at the beginning of her reunion with Lexa.

So, yeah, consider this payback or something. The bottom line was Clarke wasn't going to let her blissful memories go down the drain this fast, even if at the expense of Octavia getting attacked by Raven. She should consider herself lucky that Clarke hadn't chosen to overwhelm her the moment she saw her with the prince.

"Wait –"

"No."

"Lincoln, like the pr –"

"Okay, I'm leaving now." Octavia started retreating. She eyed Clarke, motioning with two fingers between her eyes and Clarke. "Clarke, I'm gonna get you back."

"Hey, no!" Raven started catching up with her, and Clarke hurried after them. There was no way she wasn't getting the juicy details. "No, I cannot be the only one – what?" The Latina shrieked, attracting the attention of everyone in the ER, including the incoming patients. Luckily enough, there were enough doctors here that Clarke wasn't exactly needed.

They chased after Octavia, despite how fast she was and how Raven was significantly slowed down by her bum leg and how Clarke absolutely despised exercising, into an on-call room, with Clarke locking the door behind them and blocking it so Octavia wouldn't escape again. She threw the nurse a meaningful look over Raven's shoulder.

"Spill," Raven demanded, crossing her arms.

Octavia groaned and settled onto the bed, knowing that she was in no place to escape this conversation. "Well, I – It's a very new thing." She groaned again when Raven and Clarke didn't say anything. "I met him when Princess Lexa came sneaking in looking for Clarke at Bellamy's shelter."

"Bellamy's –" The tech swung around – she had always surprised her friends with her agility despite the prosthetic. Truly a legend. She pulled out the chair and sat on it, glancing between her friends with disbelief. "How was I not there?"

"Well, because you are such a good influence on my brother, you'd managed to convince him to take a day off and do…things. Two-people, private things that I don't ever want to imagine my brother and my best friend in. Together. By the way," Octavia added, glowering now.

"Okay, and?"

"And Lincoln and I just…clicked. He is very handsome."

"I am well aware how handsome he is. He's the prince."

"Don't use that tone with me, young lady."

"You used that tone with me when you found out I'm boning your brother, younger lady."

Octavia screwed her eyes shut and clapped her hands to her ears, shaking her head viciously and making a noise that sounded like a cat being strangled. "Oh god, ew, stop. You promised no sordid details about you two, good fucking lord."

"Okay, so now what?"

It took awhile, but the nurse eventually lowered her hands and leaned back across the bed so she was lying against the wall. "Well, now we're just seeing each other. Discreetly. Seeing how it goes," she said with a shrug and a genuine smile on her face. "I mean, he…" she drifted off, looked into space, and then sighed dreamily.

Clarke and Raven shared a look, simultaneously happy for their friend and seeing an opportunity to tease her. The blonde cleared her throat and crossed her arms. "So what I'm hearing is you should be thanking me for this recent advancement in your love life," she remarked, smirking when Octavia came back into real life and quickly switched into defensive mode.

"Excuse me –"

"You wouldn't have met if it wasn't for Lexa going to the shelter to see me," she cut in, raising a brow challengingly. When Octavia relented with a sulk, Clarke chuckled and responded to Raven's fist bump cheekily. "So, yeah, you can thank me by buying dinner or something. I'm good with coffee on a good day."

"You're a terrible person. I can't believe you just outed me like that."

Clarke shrugged, feeling only slightly guilty. They were snapped out of their mock-glaring session when Raven suddenly released an ugly howl.

The doctor was half scared that someone would start knocking on the door, but given the trio's reputation around the hospital even though Clarke hadn't even been around for a year, she suspected that they could be dead in here and the rest of the hospital would still think they were up to no good.

And then Raven just stopped howling and collapsed back in the chair, with it tilting so far back that Clarke automatically moved forward just so she could have a slim chance of saving Raven from breaking her other leg if the chair really did collapse under the weight. Her friend seemed unaware of how close she was to being a total cripple, given that she had her eyes closed and her brows furrowed intensely.

"What is it, Raven?" Clarke asked, patient like a mother who still had patience. She shared a look with Octavia when Raven started flinging her arms around. "Stop doing that. You're gonna fall and break your other leg."

"I cannot believe you two are dating royalties while I'm stuck with a man with an irrational obsession with tacos," she complained.

Octavia snorted. "I certainly didn't encourage you to fall for my brother."

The Latina opened her eyes, staring at the ceiling. Eventually, the frown dissipated and her mouth stretched into a silly smile. Clarke couldn't help but smile at the way her friend's cheeks puffed up at the movement, but most importantly, she couldn't help but smile at watching her friend be in love.

"Nah, I don't regret a single thing," Raven said softly.

Clarke leaned back against the wall, thinking about her own girl herself. Look at them, three lovesick fools. If the whole hospital could see them like this.

Escaping to go camping with her princess girlfriend for days, apparently, did not mean life back home would just go on. As in, escaping to go camping with her princess girlfriend for days did not mean the investigation in Marcus and Finn would just move along without her.

Apparently, they were all waiting for her to come back and give her statement at the council headquarters. She was essentially the one person they were waiting for to get the ball rolling in getting witnesses and camera footages and yada yada. As if she hadn't already gotten the ball rolling by sending that email in the first place.

She felt like she should actually tell them in detail exactly how stressful it had been for her to write the email and click on send without telling anyone or even just chickening out. Maybe they would let her off the hook if they knew.

But hearing Lexa's voice helped – even though the veteran had sounded rough and tinny over the flimsy connection a SAT phone could provide.

That was essentially how she got back into the swing of things – the knowledge that her girlfriend would be back soon and spending time with her best friends, whom she had, regrettably, neglected since she and Lexa had made it official. Thankfully enough, they understood – after all, they had their own love lives to revel in.

And then – and then Octavia texted her just as Clarke was about to watch some news while there was some downtime in the ER. Octavia texted her, sounding solemn and serious, and asked her to meet them in the on-call room they frequented. Them? Who's them? Clarke didn't know, but she made her way there anyway, thinking this was just Octavia being dramatic.

Only to realize it wasn't dramatic, because there was not one, but two royals standing in the on-call room, along with her two best friends. All of them with concerned looks on their faces. Clarke flimsily waved at Lincoln before shifting her attention to Princess Anya of Polis, Duchess of Warlington, eldest child of the Polis Royal Family, first in line to the throne.

"Um…" she drifted off, not sure what to do.

Look, the first time she met Lexa, she had her hands literally deep inside the woman in a ratty operating room in Libya. The first time she met Lincoln, it was a discreet trip and he was too enamored with her best friend to really pay her any attention. No one had really taught her the protocol of meeting a royal for the first time under normal circumstances.

Not that she met a royal regularly, but there was a point.

"I curtsied," Raven tried to help.

Clarke widened her eyes, momentarily glancing at her, before turning back to the princess and starting to do the exact same, only to find herself stopped by two scrambling royals. She stood up straight, hardly getting used to one royal touching her, much less two.

"Save the curtsey for later," Anya brashly offered. She stepped back, looking like she wanted to be anywhere but here. A little scared. A little concerned. A little angry. "I'm sure you know who I am." Clarke nodded numbly, casting pleading looks at her friends, who were looking everywhere but at her. "I told Lincoln to sneak me in here after learning the news. My parents wanted you to know too."

It wasn't that Clarke was stupid. She was an ER attending, for fuck's sake, and she heard through the grapevine that three other hospitals across Polis were still waiting for a chance to snatch her up. So yeah, she was fairly intelligent, if she might say so herself. And, yeah, maybe Lincoln and Anya's presences were already a hint, but people had also said that Clarke was well-versed in denial.

Just ask her mother; Abby Griffin would tell you all about how Clarke had refused to come home for two years after Jake had passed away, because she didn't want to look at the urn on the mantel and remember. Suddenly, suddenly, Clarke found herself sympathizing with her mother back when she had first found out her husband was dying. And hell, she and Lexa weren't even married, for fuck's sake.

"Where –"

"We don't know."

"When –"

"She went out on a patrol with the guys there."

Clarke frowned, tilting her head. From what she remembered of her conversation with Lexa, her job was simply to show up, shake a few hands, and spend three days with them. She never mentioned anything about patrolling. How the hell was Lexa supposed to patrol with a fucking cane?

As if she understood what Clarke was thinking, Anya nodded with a helpless shrug, a storm taking over her face. "Lexa's always done things that are out of our imagination. It's probably time you learn that you will occasionally find Lexa hanging on the wall like Peter Parker and not question it."

"This is not Spiderman –"

"I know," Anya said, firm and regal. Right, so this was the princess that Lexa had spent her whole life looking up to. "The fact remains that my sister had been attacked by insurgents in Libya and she's missing. Half the squad was reported dead. Our American counterparts are doing all they can to help us, but they're Americans. We've even issued a royal prerogative to send out a team to find her."

Clarke was pretty sure Anya wasn't supposed to tell her half these things, but she stood still, because Lexa was missing. But now, she understood exactly why Lexa so idolized her sister. Because despite all the things that she had told the doctor, Anya never wavered. She was tall, straight-backed, and essentially too composed for someone who had a missing sister.

She could see where Lexa got some of her traits from. The duties of a royal. No, no, the duties of the first-in-line.

"I don't –"

Her knees felt so weak that she staggered back. And she would have fallen down if it wasn't for Anya quickly catching her by the elbows, holding her up and staring right into her eyes with a sort of tenacity that Clarke could recognize in Lexa's.

"All we can do now, the only thing we can do now, is hope."

Hope.

Clarke had hoped. She'd hoped that Lexa would get better. She'd hoped that she would be able to be there for Lexa no matter what. She'd hoped that Gustus, someone who was important was Lexa, would warm up to her eventually. She'd hoped that Lexa would come back to her and they could grab more McDonald's and sit on the stupid bench.

She'd hoped. Those hopes hadn't exactly panned out.

Anya and Lincoln had left, with the former nodding at her curtly and the latter giving her a hug. Raven and Octavia had advised her to take a couple of days off.

Now, she was frantic, trying to save a guy's life after having been T-boned by a drunk driver at an intersection a few blocks down, pushing the thoughts of Lexa missing to the back of her mind. Because, the thing was, there was no way she could go home now. Going home would mean…silence. Loneliness. Lost. She couldn't go home.

Her heart was aching, but she let that slide. There was no thing to be done about her heart until she received more news. But right here, she could do something about this man's life, and maybe more later when she was done with him.

She just wasn't going home. Not until she saw Lexa again.

She took out her phone and scrolled through her call history until she landed on the number of the SAT phone from which Lexa had called her.

She dialed it.

She got dial tone.

She dialed it again.

Coffee cup in hand, 48 hours into her extended shift, she strolled back into the building, ready to take on another case. Another life. Another distraction. Her feet came to a halt when she saw the woman standing by the nurse station in the ER, and god, this was the last thing she needed.

She sighed, starting to take steps back out of the ER. However, Abby Griffin had a sense of these things, like a predator who just knew her target was trying to run. Her mother turned and locked her sights on Clarke, eyes narrowing when she saw the blonde stopping mid-step. She raised her brows wordlessly. Clarke sighed again and scratched her eyebrow with her free hand before making her way to her mother.

"What do you want?"

"That's no way to talk to your mother."

"Mom," she said warningly, avoiding the woman's eyes.

Her mother went quiet. And in that reprieve, when the ER was not bustling with angry doctors and frantic nurses, Clarke realized how tired she was. Her eyes were drooping and she had overclocked by twelve hours. Her entire body sagged against the station. She wanted her mother to just leave her alone.

"Are you okay?" Abby asked, her steely tone quickly dissolving into a concerned one.

Clarke would lie, but she couldn't even find it in her to do that now. She shook her head, sipping at her coffee, which totally wasn't working as she was still sagging.

Look at her, being honest with her mother. Jake Griffin would be proud if heaven was real and he was really up there watching over them, as the father at the church had once told her. It was something that she had completely thought to be bullshit. But currently, she kind of wanted it to be real, because if worst came to worst, Lexa deserved to be up there more than anyone.

"What happened?" Abby pursued.

Clarke narrowed her eyes slightly, breathing in through her mouth. "How did you –" She gulped and looked down at her coffee cup. "What was it like when you found out Dad was dying?"

She heard her mother take in a sharp breath, unexpected and surprised. She still didn't dare to look at her mother, choosing to will the coffee cup to burn up right in front of her. She didn't know what she had expected when she had asked the question, but the shocked silence was probably among her expectations.

It wasn't that she thought Abby didn't love her father. She knew they were one of the rare ones – truly in love, obsessed with one another even after two decades of marriage. If anything, Clarke had aspired to be like them when she fell in love – unwavering in their devotion for one another.

Perhaps it was because Abby had loved Jake a little too much that when he died, a huge part of her died with him. The part of her that understood how to love another human being without caveats to go along with him. When that part of Abby died, the only other person in her life, Clarke, became collateral damage.

Since the moment she understood love and saw the very idea of it between her parents, she had always been curious. All these questions roaming around in her head; how two people could love each other this much, what it was like to be in love like them, where they found the effort to stay so devoted – it was only when she met and fell in love with Lexa that she started to understand what it was like.

This wasn't her forgiving her mother – they still had quite a long way to go, if they could even make the effort – but right at this moment, she just needed perspective, and her mother seemed to be the only one who could give it to her.

"Can we talk somewhere else?" Abby requested, and it had been a long time since Clarke had heard the woman so fragile and uncertain.

She nodded, and together, they made their way towards the nearest on-call room. She had been spending a lot of time in on-call rooms in the past 48 hours. She watched as her mother lock the door and gingerly sit down in a chair, gingerly playing with her fingers as she contemplated her next words. Both of them were a little too afraid to look at each other.

"I was there," Abby started, her fingers fidgeting more. Clarke blinked, finally looking up at her mother, kind of finding it unbelievable that she was actually being candid for once. "Your dad asked me to join him, thinking it was just a fluke. I was very worried, because, you know, as a doctor, I had to consider all possibilities. And when Dr. Cartwig told us that it was…cancer, I remember –" Abby cleared her throat and looked up to the ceiling, blinking rapidly. "It felt like a nightmare coming true. Not even a horror nightmare, you know. A nightmare where I would lose him," she said, her voice growing deeper with each word. She cleared her throat again. "Hell, he had to hold me that night because I was crying so hard."

Clarke blinked rapidly to get rid of the tears as well. She swallowed, failing in swallowing down the clog that had been driven up her throat. Licking her lips, she clenched her fists together on her lap and asked, "How did you –"

"I didn't." Abby smiled sadly at her daughter and shrugged. "I just – I'm not religious, so I didn't pray. I just…worked. I pretty much took over Cartwig's desk and started thinking of trials and chemo and ridiculous ways to help him as he got worse. And then one day, I came home, and he was napping on the couch, looking ridiculously handsome; I remember thinking there's no one who can compete with him in terms of looks."

"He was very handsome," Clarke tried, eliciting a shaky chuckle from her mother.

"And I guess that was the day I finally understood there was no helping. It's too late. He was so tired, and he just wanted to spend time with his 'best girls'," Abby finger quoted with a fond smile. "So I put down all the work. I took indefinite time off. And I just…spent time with my husband. However long I could."

The blonde slowly nodded, grateful to have been offered this chance to understand her mother a little better, though not by a long shot. The thing was Abby could still find her husband and spend time with him in his last days. And she was just…here, not knowing anything or whether there would even be a body to bury.

She had seen far too much to know that there were a lot of times when empty caskets were buried because there were no actual bodies to be found. Clarke didn't want it to be that. Lexa had to be whole, she had to be.

She didn't know what to make of her mother telling her the story. At the moment, her heart was a little too faint and her brain was a little too muddled to understand the effect of those words. Did it help? Did it make things worse? She literally didn't know. She just wanted to sleep and wake up to find out it was all just a, like her mother had said, nightmare.

"I heard about the princess." Clarke's eyes snapped back to hers, widening. "Raven didn't tell me, don't worry." Abby hesitantly reached forward, but ended up taking her hand in hers anyway. A mother's warmth. "Call it mother's instinct."

And Clarke was too tired to even mock the woman now. A mother's warmth, even a distant mother, was enough to break down the dam and let the tears burst forth. She shook her head and whimpered weakly, allowing Abby to pull her forward and held her torso in her lap, shushing her while brushing her hair.

She couldn't hear what her mother was saying through the hiccups and sobs, but the touch and the familiar vibrations that used to lull her to sleep during the time when she believed in closet monsters were good enough…for now.

alright, see you in two months.