Clarke Griffin changed out of her scrubs and back into her dark wash jeans and navy v-neck sweater, tired after a long shift that included setting the broken bones of Mr. and Mrs. Trubschenk, an older couple who were so in love, it would almost make her sick if they weren't so perfect for each other.
The Trubschenks were victims of a head-on collision a couple hours prior. He had been driving when the other car crossed the median and hit them. Besides the scrapes and bruises, they were very lucky to have only broken his right hand and her left wrist, a clue that did not escape Clarke's deduction: they'd been holding hands at the time of the accident.
Old people still in love, she thought wistfully. That could have been her parents - high school sweethearts who married right out of college. Clarke had asked them multiple times throughout her childhood for a little brother or sister, and each time they'd answered, "We'll see."
But they never had another child, and the reason, as Clarke found out by accident when she was looking through old family documents, was that Clarke's mother Abby suffered complications during delivery which required an immediate postpartum hysterectomy. Logically, Clarke understood it was not her fault, but emotionally, she still felt the weight of that guilt, especially because she had asked so often with no clue about their grief and heartbreak.
As Clarke collected her messenger bag stuffed with her dirty scrubs, protected from the fabric by a waterproof plastic bag, as well as her wallet, keys, phone, and umbrella, she heard her mom approaching in the hallway and rolled her eyes. She undoubtedly was going to ask -
"Clarke, honey, how are you?" Abby just missed the eye-rolling as she rounded the corner and fixed her stare on her daughter.
Pulling her royal blue scarf around her neck and fishing her wavy bright blonde hair out from under it, Clarke huffed loudly and grabbed her jacket from the locker. "I'm fine, mom," she said, meeting her mother's eyes and hoping her stare was firm enough to get across the idea that she was, in fact, fine. "Honestly, you ask me like five times a day," she said, slipping on her coat. "Like I'm some fragile figurine in the menagerie that needs constant supervision."
Perhaps Abby thought she did, though. There were a few times over the past year that she caught her mother blatantly checking her wrists to make sure they were still pristine. A lot had happened in the past year, but Clarke had taken no suicidal actions.
Abby nodded, her chestnut brown hair falling forward over one shoulder as she fidgeted with the clipboard under her arm. "I wish you would move back home. It's lonely without you."
"Yes, I know, mom, but really, I'm fine," she tried again.
"I just worry about you, Clarke. You still haven't dealt with-"
"Well, don't," Clarke interrupted harshly, threading her head and arm through the messenger bag's strap. "I just need time." As Clarke passed her mom to leave the on-call room, she heard Abby's defeated sigh.
"Don't forget your umbrella. The downpour was supposed to start half an hour ago."
Stepping out into the chill of the early morning, Clarke felt the moisture heavy in the air and scanned the nearby, almost deserted streets. Though it was cold and likely to rain, she preferred walking home the few blocks from the hospital. Not to the Griffin Estate - just to her apartment. She wasn't ready to return to her childhood home - the mansion across town that the salaries of the Chief of Surgery and Lead Architect had built.
Sometimes she stopped by the all-night coffee shop Pump and Grind for a hot drink or a quick snack. Usually the good restaurant Blackbird was closed by two AM, so she couldn't go there, and she didn't want to go to the shitty restaurant just because it was open. Besides, since her roommate Raven was away on her internship at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Clarke had no one else to go with, anyway. And she sure as hell didn't feel like going to Rory's, the local bar, though when she passed the entrance, the stragglers still inside finishing their drinks before closing looked warm and happy.
She'd just walk home, feed Raven's cat Figaro, have a glass of wine, and microwave her dinner. Maybe catch whatever Netflix thing was hot right now.
She fished her phone from her bag and saw she had a missed call and voicemail. She pressed play and listened to the message.
"Hi, Clarke, it's Iliana from Elysium. I was calling to see if you by chance have any pieces ready?" Clarke could already hear the sadness in her voice. "We have a show coming up and would love to feature your work again. We miss you; it's been over a year, and we haven't seen any new pieces from you since-"
Clarke pulled the phone down and deleted the message. Since my father died. I know.
A crack of lightning flashed like a strobe light and Clarke looked up at the sky, waiting for the thunder, like her father taught her.
Jake Griffin was Clarke's father and her most favorite person in the world. When she was little, they'd sit next to the pool at the back of the estate and stare up at the stars. When the constellations were clear, his blue eyes lit in glee and Jake asked Clarke what she saw - all those little stars so far away were magical because they formed pictures and scenes. Clarke would tell her father about the adventures of the King of Ice Nation, a man whose cheekbones were marked, those scars lined by twinkling stars like the old connect-the-dots games, or of the Princess warrior who became queen, whose long braids formed a pretty Mohawk she outlined by stars. Her father would strum his guitar, lazy and meandering melodies floating on top of her stories like fragrance on the wind, while she dreamed up worlds swimming in the abyss of the indigo sky.
As she grew up, those stories inspired her to pick up her paintbrush or pastels or charcoals, and she'd work into the night, sometimes into the morning, making those visions come to life. When she felt stumped, she'd pick at her father's guitar until she found an inspiring sound. Jake often found her asleep in the pool house (née, her art studio), the room littered with parchments and canvasses, his guitar sometimes smudged with the different mediums.
It was at her mother's insistence that she follow in her medical footsteps, as Clarke had a mind for it. But it was with her father's encouragement that she also pursued art, as she had heart and passion for that. When she met Iliana, the older woman was enamored with Clarke's imaginative pieces, and immediately brought Clarke into the gallery. Eight out of ten pieces sold the first night, and she'd celebrated with her dad by looking up into the deep nighttime sky and wondering new inspirations with the star patterns.
But now, when she looked up at the sky, a blanket of white fog floated between her and those once-wondrous worlds. Now, stars were just stars. Worse, they carried a sadness because logically she knew they were already dead, they just wouldn't see them burn out all the way down here on Earth. There were no more stories of a young steampunk-inspired chemist and his best friend, landing on a foreign planet and discovering fermented fruits never before known to them, getting drunk by accident. No more stories about the iridescent butterflies and their beautiful mutations. No more lyrical ballads accompanied by acoustic guitar. There was no more magic, because there was no more Jake Griffin.
Less than two seconds after the lightning, a rolling boom sounded, and Clarke glanced to the other side of the street where there was a large awning outside of a bridal boutique. She slipped her phone into her bag and started walking quickly toward the crosswalk.
She felt the first drop as she pushed the button signaling a pedestrian waiting to cross, and started to dig around in her bag for her telescoping umbrella. The crosswalk chirped and she stepped off the curb and began walking while the sky suddenly opened up with that downpour her mother warned her about. Somewhere in the background, she heard the restaurant door open and a group of people shuffle out into the night, laughing and talking to each other about how they'd get home and who was getting a ride because someone else was drunk and no one should be driving in this downpour.
She knew from six months' time of walking home that she had twelve seconds to cross the street. With one foot in front of the other, she shuffled through the walk, unable to find her umbrella by touch, and the rain collecting in her hair making strands of it stick to her face. She hesitated only a moment in the middle of the street to squint into her bag and grab the umbrella at the bottom. In her peripheral vision, she caught a thick, horizontal shaft of orange, blue and white light streak by.
Snapping toward the direction of the light, Clarke tried to focus on the entrance to Blackbird to see if it that's where it was coming from, but before her eyes landed on the being by the entrance, two more shafts of bright white light shined in her face from a different direction. A distinctly male voice called out to her, "Hey, watch out!"
Clarke saw only a mop of dark hair before she was tackled out of the crosswalk and into the gutter. With the wind knocked out of her and somewhat hazed vision, her lungs protested her efforts in scrambling to figure out which way was up. Tires sluiced through the intersection and taillights sped past the hospital in the distance, which was the moment Clarke realized she'd nearly been hit by a car.
Her hands found purchase in the form of a muscular chest, and she belatedly realized that the stranger's warm hands were split between the nape of her neck and the small of her back. She shifted in place, and the stranger groaned. Apparently, he'd tackled her, but she'd landed on him.
"Oh my god, I'm so sorry," she began.
As he regained his breath, his first words were, "You okay?" His gorgeous dark eyes sparkled, the concern evident by his upturned brows.
Clarke shifted a bit, feeling those hands of his still holding her firmly against him. "Yeah," she said, her knees posting next to his hips, inadvertently straddling him so she could stand. She felt his grip loosen.
They both got to their feet quickly, and the man wiped his palms on his jeans, even though both were wet and the action proved moot. He chuckled to himself - a deep, rich rumbling Clarke felt through her body, and which she found she liked. She looked up to meet his sparkling brown eyes and wondered why everything about him seemed so enthralling – his voice, his eyes, his laugh. She noticed the freckles under his eyes and tamped down on the sudden urge to count them, memorize them, touch them.
"Are you," she asked. "I mean, are you okay?" She smiled up at him and pushed a few wet ringlets away from her face to see him better.
The olive-skinned man smiled wide, the little dimple in his chin disappearing with the action. He stared into her eyes with something like awe. A genuine appreciation. He traced her hair, her eyes, her cheekbones. He followed the rivulet of rain which fell from the tip of her nose onto her upper lip, and then kept his gaze on her slightly parted lips.
She blushed under his scrutiny. "Because I can check you out if you want."
This broke him out of his trance. He was still smiling. "You can check me out?"
"Oh my gosh, I didn't mean it like that, I mean, not that I don't think you're attractive – I do, you've got this whole tall, dark and handsome thing going on… I can't believe I just said that. I mean," she looked down and bent to grab the umbrella that had been knocked out of her hand during the tackle, and a few of the items that fell out of her bag when they hit the ground. "I, um, I'm a resident at the hospital, so if you need any medical assistance, I can-"
The moment she looked back up at him, the handsome stranger cupped her face in his hands and rubbed his thumbs along her cheekbones gently, as if pressing any harder would somehow mar her skin.
"I, um-" she tried again, her brain short-circuiting at his touch. She could see he was staring at her lips, a kind of hungry expression in his eyes. She felt throughout her bones that he was going to kiss her. For the first time since Finn, she wanted nothing more than to have a man kiss her, this man specifically. But before she could rise up on her tiptoes, the intriguing man surged forward and pressed his lips to hers. It was a persistent, but gentle kiss, and immediately stunned Clarke into forgetting what she was saying and doing. His lips were soft like velvet and caressed hers as if savoring her.
Pleasantly shocked, Clarke reveled in the stranger's kiss for a fraction of a second before he disengaged. His sparkling eyes seemed underlined by those dozens of freckles scattered across his cheekbones.
But that was all the time she'd been given to memorize them, because without further ado, he took off running in the direction of the hospital and her would-be-hit-and-runner.
"Wait," she called, but it was no use. He was already gone. She turned toward the bridal boutique's window and touched her fingers to her lips. "What. The fuck," she mumbled aloud.
In a sudden burst of energy, Clarke nearly ran the rest of the way home without a care that it was storming, and with a slight suggestion of a smile curling her lips.
Really, she should have been creeped out or upset or something, but the truth was, she wasn't. At all. She replayed the series of events leading up to this amazing stranger and his dazzling kiss. He had saved her from becoming another hit-and-run statistic.
Christ, she didn't even know his name. Had he come from the restaurant? The bar? Was he drunk? Why did he run off? How did he learn to kiss like that?
But for the first time in a year, when she burst through the front door of her apartment, she let everything fall to the floor in the entryway, tore off her coat and scarf, and began ransacking the drawers in the kitchen for a pen, a pencil, a crayon – something, anything. Figaro, the black and white shorthair cat, watched her from his perfectly proper seated position on the counter, head tilted slightly to the left.
Clarke found an almost dried-up pen in the utility drawer next to some hot sauce, under a few takeout menus and their stick lighter, and rescued it from what would have been its eternal resting place.
Next, she went right back through all those same drawers, trying to find something resembling paper that wasn't a covered-in-grease takeout menu, or a too-thin paper towel, ending up with a cream colored cloth napkin she and Raven had stolen from the restaurant where Raven caught Finn and Clarke on a date.
Clarke sat down at their breakfast nook table and began sketching. His eyes were so goddamn sparkling, and the constellation of freckles infuriated her because she was so drawn to them but she'd only seen them twice, and not long enough to map their positions on his handsome face, and she just couldn't get them right.
She sketched him eight times that night.