Chapter Text
“I could literally throttle her.”
//
This wasn’t the first time Clarke had fantasized about murder. Though it was perhaps one of the few times she’d actually meant it. It’d been three in the morning, pitch black and cozy warm in her cocoon of blankets, and she’d been right on that blissful precipice of sleep.
And then, for the fourth time that week, the door had flung open, her roommate had rushed out, knocking over god knows what on her way, and Clarke was left wide awake, blinking at the ceiling while she tried to remember what a normal heartbeat felt like.
//
“You should probably just tell her, Lexa. It’s not like she’s unfamiliar with the subject.”
Not for the first time, Lexa looks at her sister like she’d lost her god damn mind.
//
There was no particular day Clarke could pinpoint the implosion of their friendship. No special occasional or calendar date to remember it by.
More accurately it’d been a series of occasions, a smattering of calendar dates that tumbled one after another until neither of them could really manage to stand each other.
Perhaps it’d started with middle school. Perhaps Lexa had been right to say that Clarke had changed for the worse and was hardly recognizable with her fake friends and her fake smiles and her fake face.
But Lexa had changed too. Lexa, who once couldn’t hurt a fly. Lexa with her big, green eyes and her shy smile, standing against the chain-link fence at recess like it was all just a little too much for her tiny self. Lexa who’d blossomed with Clarke’s friendship into her brilliant, slightly neurotic but beautiful, self.
Lexa who turned fourteen and suddenly stopped smiling. Lexa who threw glares and spewed vitriol at anyone who wandered too close. Most viciously at Clarke. Lexa who got in fights, who spent more time out of school then in it by the time they were in high school. Lexa who still graduated early and left Clarke to fend for herself.
Lexa who never even bothered to call when Clarke watched strangers put her father into the ground.
Yeah, Lexa had changed too.
//
“I don’t understand why you just don’t get a room change,” Octavia mentions that day at lunch. As if Clarke hadn’t already thought about it. As if Clarke hadn’t already filed the request, met with the Student Life Coordinator, and bargained her life away with the RA when the previous had denied her.
“Tried. System hates me.”
“Try again?”
With an exaggerated sigh, Clarke raises up from the table and glares. “They said I don’t have enough cause. Apparently, ‘I hate her fucking guts’ isn’t a good enough reason to get a roommate switch.”
“You have to admit it’s kind of funny,” Raven pipes up, ignoring the look of poison Clarke shoots her. “Like, in what world do you and Lexa not talk or see each other for two years and then you end up roommates when you get to college.”
Clarke chucks a raisin as hard as she can at Raven’s face. She misses by a good several inches, but she’ll just chalk it up to sleep deprivation if anyone points it out. “The better question is in what world does a junior still live in the dorms. Shouldn’t she be off brooding in an apartment somewhere with her mellow dramatic collection of candles?”
“Maybe she likes the camaraderie.”
She doesn’t literally choke on water, but she comes pretty damn close. She snorts. “Lexa wouldn’t know the meaning of camaraderie if it slapped her in the face.”
//
Clarke does this thing, from time to time, where she shoves her foot so far into her own mouth it’s a wonder she’s able to ever talk again.
//
When Octavia and Raven just stare at her awkwardly, sometimes looking behind her, sometimes looking away, she knows this is one of those times.
//
Lexa does this thing from time to time, where her usually angry, condescending, annoying judgmental face turns to something more like pain and sadness, loneliness and some kind of generic suffering.
When Clarke turns around, and sees Lexa’s face, she knows it’s one of those times.
//
She closes her eyes for a split second in an attempt to try to forget the way Lexa’s wide green eyes remind her so much of the ones on the scared little thing she’d found pressed into the fence on the first day of kindergarten recess.
When she opens them though, she remembers she can never really forget.
She sighs. It’s too early in the day for this weird, complicated thing she and Lexa have. This hatred that burns a little hot and a little to deep and little bit too much like something that’s not hatred at all.
//
“Lexa—hey.”
She watches as Lexa’s eyes flicker between the group at the table. People she once knew. People she once dared to call friends. Good friends. Best friends, even. (Though that was something she only ever called Clarke. Once, out loud. In the middle of a thunder storm, pressed into Clarke’s warm back.)
She doesn’t mean to be an asshole, but there’s this thing she does, from time to time. When the waiting and the watching and the sadness of it all makes her uncomfortable and impatient and angry. She hardens until she’s brittle. And then she snaps.
“Did you need something?”
//
It’s a little amazing to watch the way Lexa can traverse emotions; like an Olympian on a ski slope, slipping from open and sad and vulnerable to angry and harsh and down right terrifying.
Lexa had read her part of a poem once from a book she’d gotten out of the middle school library. Whitman. Just that alone was enough to dazzle Clarke who was still stuck in elementary school, feeling like a child in Lexa’s auspicious presence.
Clarke had chuckled at her when she read it—her gangly, limps and wild hair and glasses too big for her face all wrapped up in a blanket on her bed. Reading years beyond either sets of their peers and scaring Clarke with the stirrings it caused inside of her. She said Lexa sounded funny.
Really she had chuckled because Lexa made Clarke uncomfortable in that warm, wonderful kind of way. She had chuckled because Lexa contained more multitudes than Clarke could ever hope to understand.
And it made her magical.
//
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
//
Lexa hands her a coffee, looking mildly annoyed when Clarke just stares at it. “I wanted to apologize for waking you up again last night.”
“You wanted to or you are?”
For a split second, Clarke thinks Lexa might squeeze the cup of coffee so hard it’ll explode spewing hot liquid all over them.
Instead she watches that shift happen, effortless and cool and practiced. Lexa’s eyes grow dark and her lips set thin and taught. That little bulge pops out of her jaw and for a second, Clarke worries for her safety.
“Do you want the latte or not?”
“I don’t like coffee,” she snaps.
Lexa looks at her, really looks at her, and for a moment Clarke prepares herself to be yelled at.
Instead, Lexa’s voice is quiet and reserved when she speaks.
“It’s lilac-infused. Though you might like it.”
//
Clarke stares so long, so hard, she barely notices when Lexa rolls her eyes and places it on the table for her.
//
She’d told Lexa once, when she’d cornered Lexa in the parking lot after her graduation—yanking herself out of her robes and tumbling into her rusty, red pick-up, cursing the world—that she missed her.
She told her that she missed their hushed conversations under the covers with the flashlight, so serious in their pre-teen minds. She missed Lexa’s hugs and her laugh and the way she always had something new and magical to show Clarke about the world.
Most of all she told her how she missed the way her pillow always smelled faintly like flowers after Lexa spent the night. Told her the scent made her feel safe. Told her that after her father died, she’d spent hours roaming stores looking for that rare but distinct smell that was the only thing that kept her from hurting so hard she sometimes puked.
She told her that sometimes Lexa passed her in the hallway, she caught a whiff of that smell, and it made her ache for time when they didn’t hate each other.
She told her she never did figure out what the scent was. She asked her if maybe she could tell her.
//
Lexa had gotten in her trunk and started the engine.
Clarke had walked away feeling like a moron.
//
The next day, the sound of a truck’s backfire in front of her house had woken her up with a start. By the time she’d made it down stairs and thrown open her front door, the early morning street was empty again.
But there was a box on her porch. Small and heavy, wrapped in brown paper and tied with tweed. Just two words sat scrawled in thick, black ink on the beige, threaded paper.
//
Clarke holds the coffee close to her chest and doesn’t participate in the rest of the conversation.
//
It’s lilac.
-L
The note read.