Disclaimer: Do not own Marvel, DC, The 100, Teen Wolf or Carmilla
Warnings for trauma, child abuse, child neglect, physical abuse, stalking, attempted gang rape, reckless behavior and past talk of an underage person masturbating.
Story for WolfHowlRunner61's Her Guardians series
New awareness of the flesh
Clarke Griffin had always known that she liked things that weren't good for her. Arguably, that was any human being. But to even Clarke? She felt sometimes like it was excessive.
She ate a lot of sweet stuff, drank an excessive amount of alcohol at times, and had a lot of sex, often with a lot of strangers.
Now, Clarke's decadence predated her sexual lifestyle.
When she was a child, she always would eat too much chocolate or ice cream in one sitting, not paying any attention to the disgusted looks her biological mother, Abby Griffin, would give her.
She had realized already at a young age, that she would never be good enough for her mother.
Henceforth, Clarke, since age seven, just did what she wanted. She wanted more than anything else, her mother's love, but it was clear that she would never have that. Instead, Clarke was left with the much shallower pleasures of too many other things. Too many desserts. Too many chips, barbecue flavored, specifically; she'd learn later that she liked the onion flavored ones much better, but at the time when she was a kid, only had the barbecue flavored ones available to her, because there was no way her mother would ever get her anything that she wanted. Too many books; again, her mother would never get any books for Clarke, but Clarke's late father, Jake Griffin, was a huge reader before he'd died, and Clarke just stole some of his books from where Abby kept them, when the bitch wasn't looking.
And there were far many other things. And to be perfectly clear, Clarke knew that books were far from a "shallow pleasure." But if she could have her mother's love over the books? She'd happily take her mother's love.
But she didn't have that. Which left Clarke with the wonderful worlds of the many books she had at her disposal.
She'd also steal some paint from her mother's supply closet, while trying to paint, and kept those projects under her bed or in her closet, to keep her mother from finding them and throwing them out, angry over Clarke's theft, or just because Abby didn't want Clarke to be happy.
Long story short? Clarke just indulged in whatever there was to indulge in.
After Abby and her lover, Kane were murdered? Clarke was put in an orphanage, where she met her brother and sister to be, Wells Jaha and Lydia Martin.
She and Wells and Lydia were soon adopted afterwards by the Barton family.
At the time, she was eleven years old. She lived with the family and her new siblings for a few years and reached puberty.
And when she had seen a movie on TV that she knew she wasn't supposed to watch? She had done what likely was the unthinkable. Her new parents and some of her siblings were out. The other siblings at the Barton home, were asleep, or out of the room where Clarke was.
And Clarke took advantage of that.
And she sure as hell was going to, when she felt that strange feeling between her legs, watching the scene on TV.
She reached her hand into her pants and watched the sex scene, and she learned what pleasure she got from masturbation.
She knew, even without needing to ask, that what she'd done, was something she probably shouldn't talk about outside of the house.
But she decided not to talk about it at all, ever.
But the feeling she'd gotten from that porn scene and the masturbation, had stayed with her.
Perhaps she had just found another decadent distraction to keep her mind busy and keep her from ever thinking about what her life was before the Bartons had adopted her, Wells and Lydia.
She didn't want to remember everything before that.
She didn't want to remember how her biological mother ignored her, looked at her as if she were a pure waste of space, or, how she lost her biological father before she could even get to know him, or, how the staff at the orphanage and most of the other kids, especially the now dead Murphy, Miller and Jasper, considered her worthless and better off dead; yes, she had heard some of the staff members actually talk about her like this.
Talking about how she got upset about being isolated by her biological mother, as if it were a burden.
And no, she didn't want to think about how Murphy, Miller or Jasper treated her, either.
And knowing exactly what her body could do when it was excited enough sexually?
Just offered her another way of making the painful memories go away.
Clarke was hesitant to act on her new discovery for a few years, both because she knew it would involve bringing in strangers into her life and into the Barton home, and because she wasn't sure what her new family would think of her.
But soon, she had the confidence enough to bring a boyfriend into her family's household. His name was Dax Summers.
He was only a few months older than Clarke and Clarke adored him. He was sweet, affectionate and made Clarke feel like she was seen. Unlike her biological mother, Dax actually saw her. Made her feel like she mattered.
And yeah, everyone in her household now, treated her that way. But Clarke knew there was a more complicated explanation for it. The short answer for why she was still insecure, was called "trauma."
But no one wanted to admit to that, did they?
That was why, when Dax had approached Clarke that time in the school gym and sat down next to her and grinned at her all beguiling like, said, "I bet you really want to punch those girls in the faces," and he said this, while nodding to some of the snootier girls in Clarke's class, Clarke couldn't help but laugh and instantly be taken with him.
Clarke hated the saying, "I'm not like other girls." That was so clearly a way of girls saying that to put down other girls. It was a way of saying that being a girl in general, was a bad thing.
To cut down another girl to gain male attention, always just felt yucky to her.
But then, hearing Dax say that? And looking at her like that? She felt like a total hypocrite, but she couldn't help but be completely taken with him.
Besides, all those girls put her down first.
Jillian and Lydia both, who went to the same school as Clarke, had offered to beat those girls up, but Clarke had insisted she didn't want that.
Cooper and Wells would never hit a girl, but they had offered to get between her and the girls, should those girls ever say anything rude to Clarke again. But again, Clarke had insisted she was fine.
She didn't want her family to have to interfere in every complication in her life.
The point was? Dax made her feel special. And they started going out.
Clarke had wanted to experience sex with Dax. She had masturbated a lot after the incident involving the porno.
But she had never had an actual sexual relationship before.
And after meeting Dax, realizing how attracted to him she was, how much she wanted him, she wanted her first sexual relationship to be with him.
But Dax had kept putting it off. He said he wanted it to be special. Those were his exact words.
His words being, "We should wait till it's the right time. I want it to be special."
Clarke only thought that it would be special with Dax, but if he really wanted to, she'd wait.
It wasn't often it was the boy that wanted to wait, right? If he wanted to wait, then it had to be for a good reason. She thought a few times that the reason why he kept putting it off, might just be because he was gay.
If he was? Clarke wouldn't treat him badly, obviously. If he was gay, that was his own business.
But if he didn't want to be with her or wasn't actually attracted to her, then she needed to know, because that would be Dax wasting both his and her time.
Time they could be spending with people they actually wanted to have sex with.
When Clarke had carefully asked Dax about that, Dax had looked stunned, but not because she'd asked him if he preferred boys, but from he said, his shock was because of her indicating that he wasn't attracted to her.
He insisted that he was. He just wanted to wait, was all.
Clarke had accepted his answer, but still had questions.
A month later? Dax and a group of his friends were found by a river, dead. Their bones crushed while they had still been alive. Then they were killed.
Clarke was devastated when she found out. She had cried and cried and cried. None of her family could comfort her. She was in so much pain.
Her mother and father and siblings held her and comforted her, not knowing what else there was to do.
It would be several years later, when Clarke had her answer as to who killed Dax and his friends, and for what reason.
During Clarke's time grieving for Dax, her pain, the pain that she had tried so hard to ignore throughout the years, weighed on her without pity.
Another trauma to live with.
And this? Led her to becoming without question, promiscuous.
She waited until she was in college to begin the exploits that she had begun to think about after realizing how much pain she was because of Dax's death.
She understood that Dax's death was just the tipping point and that there was a lot more underneath it; her biological mother abusing her, her biological mother's death, everything that had happened to her at the orphanage, she could understand that. But she ignored all of that, and her losing Dax.
And what she was going to use to ignore all of that? Was sex.
And when she had reached her college years, she had let that need out, that need to rely solely on superficial pleasures, rather than addressing her issues.
When she had graduated from high school, then got her acceptance letter at her college and she turned eighteen, she had shared a grin with her family, but she wasn't happy for the same reason that they were.
She was happy, because now? Now, she could do what she wanted, with whoever she wanted, as long as she was breaking no laws and hurting no one, and her family didn't have to know.
Throughout her years at college, she doubted that there was a single person at that college that didn't know what she did with a lot of people. And no, she didn't doubt that word got back to her siblings, who went to the same college that she did.
She had seen how some of her siblings looked at her when they would hear this. She saw no vindictiveness in their eyes or any pointed fingers.
Clarke just saw sadness and worry in her brothers' and sisters' eyes. They worried that Clarke would do something that she'd regret, or something that was over her head. But they knew they couldn't stop her.
And knew that the problem ran a lot deeper than just the sex.
Clarke had slept with a lot of men and women alike at the college. But strangely? Clarke realized that she was very picky about who joined her in bed.
She only slept with men and women too, if they were gorgeous and they had bodies that she was attracted to.
Apparently, she was both promiscuous and superficial.
What a fun combination.
She understood that it was probably shallow of her to care only about appearances, but she had decided that in all of college and maybe even longer afterwards, she'd do what she wanted with who she wanted.
As long as she got her kicks? Who cared? She wasn't trying to hurt anyone physically, and she always had sex with people her age or older, and it was always consensual, from what she could see, so she wasn't hurting anyone.
And she was in pain. She needed comfort. Even if it was shallow comfort.
She had sex with older men, older women, men her age, women her age, it didn't matter.
There was that one time at that bar where she had almost let that man there hurt her, fuck her till she was in pain, but Clint and some of her siblings had stopped him. Clint, Clarke's adoptive father, had looked at the then unconscious man like he wanted to kill him, but instead, Clint and Clarke's siblings just took her back to the Barton house.
It was that incident that made Clarke realize that she had to be more careful about what her family new about her sexual activities.
She had thought that when her siblings found out about what she did in college, they'd tell their parents, but Clint and Laura didn't know. Not from what Clarke had heard so far.
Clarke's siblings probably figured that they'd make the situation worse if they told Clint and Laura.
For their silence, Clarke was grateful.
Clarke's friend in college, Laura Hollis, hadn't told anyone either and didn't look down on what Clarke did. Laura was way too engrossed in her own life and what she saw as the mysteries of the college they were at, to focus too much on anything else.
Then Clarke met the people who had protected her, for her whole life. The women who had exterminated all of the threats to her, including her biological mother.
Vampires. Vampires that had watched and protected her since she was a child.
Twenty-five of them.
Their names were Wanda, Diana, Natasha, Jennifer, Felicia, Dinah, Gamora, Nebula, Melina, Sable, Carol, Sif, Hela, Yelena, Brunnhilde, Helena, Shayera, Hope, Maria, Beatriz, Tora, Sigrid, Mari, Anastasia and Thundra.
And they claimed something that Clarke had never imagined. That they were her mates. Her soulmates.
And that they wanted to be with her.
Clarke's time with them at the beginning, was casual, even if the vampires had made it clear what they wanted with her.
From what Clarke had learned from the vampires? Their group was split into two halves, and the two different halves, were contemplating what to do about Clarke and her mortality. A good portion of them wanted to turn Clarke into a vampire, even if she didn't consent to that.
The other half wanted Clarke to come to the decision on her own to allow them to turn her.
That would come to ahead one day, and it would end with Clarke choosing to ice out her mates for forcing her into being a vampire, for ten years.
But before that, Clarke had discovered something that she hadn't even begun to dare think about.
When she had begun having sex with people left and right in college? She had thought she had known everything there was to know about sex.
Boy, had she been so fucking wrong, it wasn't even funny!
When Clarke first had sex with one of the twenty-five vampires, that being with the tall, muscled, black-haired Greek vampire, Diana, Clarke was exposed to sex she hadn't even begun to imagine.
Intimate, passionate, raw, frightening, indescribable, even.
When she at last, was on the bed, panting and limp, with Diana hovering over her, smiling with satisfaction, to say that her mind was blown? Was a huge understatement.
And sex with the rest of her mates? Was just as unimaginable. Just as raw and passionate and everything else.
The emotions that were forced out of her, when she reached overstimulation, kept being more and more overwhelming. And she realized that she couldn't hide from her emotions or trauma much longer.
Her pain, her nightmares, her abandonment issues, her loneliness that kept affecting her, even if she had a family and friends that loved her.
Her mates were forcing her to have to face all of it, even if Clarke tried to ignore it her whole life.
Sex with her twenty-five mates? Was like someone pushed endless pleasure into her and tore her open raw at the same time.
One day, when Clarke's mates forced her to be a vampire, she would be enraged at them and shun them for ten years.
But now? As a human? Watching her mates from across the room of the main building of the college library, which now was more or less "at ease," which was a lot different from how it was before, Clarke watched her mates as they sat where they were, some sharing smiles with her, some packing Clarke's things and getting ready to go back to the Barton home.
The vampires had stalked Clarke for years. And they had been near the Barton home all that time, keeping an eye on Clarke. Now, all of the Barton family, including all of Clarke's siblings, knew about them. There was no reason for them to keep themselves a secret now.
To the right of them, Laura Hollis and another vampire, Carmilla Karnstein, Laura's mate, as it turned out, were dancing in a corner of the library, one of the record players at the library, an old antique left there, playing a record that had a beautiful number that was only instrumental.
Laura and Carmilla were tightly in each other's embrace, moving around, caught in their own world where only each other existed.
Clarke smiled as she turned back to look at her mates.
They all had gone through a lot together. There were a lot of things they had needed to deal with on this campus. Not least of all the vampires and werewolves. One of her friends, Scott McCall was now a werewolf. And Clarke's sister, Lydia was now a banshee. Clarke had no idea how that happened.
Clarke's brother, Wells, had met a woman who at first, had worried Clarke because she was of the supernatural, too. A kitsune. But this woman, Kira Yukimura, was a friend and had proven to be good and would fight to the end with them.
Scott's girlfriend, Allison, a woman that hunted the supernatural, to kill, had proven more of an issue. But she too, became an ally against the worst enemies they had.
Now it was over. Werewolves, vampires, gigantic anglerfish (yes, that was an actual thing), dictators that tried to hunt anything supernatural down, and everything else that had threatened them aside? They were safe now and happy.
Clarke watched her mates, thinking about all they'd gone through and how protective she was of them. And how protective they were of her.
Several of them were looking at her, smiling.
Clarke smiled back, seeing Wanda, Thundra, Natasha, Hope, Yelena, Dinah, Jennifer and several others' contentment just watching her.
Even those that weren't looking at her right now, she could feel their protectiveness for her.
It probably was best not to think about all of that danger. How close Clarke had come to losing her mates during all the battles here at the college. And how close she came to losing some of her family and some of her friends. Better not to think about that pit where the anglerfish was (again, yes, that was a real thing) had collapsed and had almost taken not just Carmilla and Scott with it, but also almost had taken Shayera, Diana, Mari, Hope and Sif.
They were all safe now. No need to think about everything else that had almost happened.
She had always accepted that she hadn't known even a small bit about love, before meeting her mates. Sure, she thought she had loved Dax Summers. But even without knowing what Dax had intended to have him and his friends do to her, that being gang rape, apparently, she knew what she had felt for him at the time, was nothing compared to what she felt for these women.
But sex? She thought she'd known everything there was to know about sex, before her first time with her mates, specifically with Diana.
But she had no idea just how intimate and beautiful or, how terrifying and raw sex actually was. Not till these women.
She had foolishly told herself, totally jaded and convinced that she had experienced what probably was the basics in sex with men and with women.
But she'd had no idea.
How torn open she was, after sex with her mates, forced to expose her emotions, her passions, her fears, her trauma. These women had made her challenge how she handled her problems and had left her a sobbing, shaking mess, that they would take into their arms and comfort and soothe.
Clarke had thought before that all sex was, was a while to feel like the world around you didn't exist, that all existed for a period of time, was physical pleasure.
Now, she was forced to realize that it was so much more than that, with the right person or people.
Clarke was forced to realize that her sexual life would be far more intimate than she had allowed it to be before. And that would give her exactly what she needed.