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When Clarke wakes up, every part of her body thrums with pain. Her head, despite bearing its full weight on a flat surface that she thinks might be the fluffy rug on the floor of her apartment, feels heavy on her shoulders, and her legs ache from the balls of her feet to her hips, both from the overzealous dancing she has vague memories of and from the heels she regrets ever thinking it would be a good idea to wear to a nightclub. Clarke’s insides twist and lurch uncomfortably, an uneasy nausea threatening to empty the contents of her stomach all over the floor beside her.
She didn’t even realise that her eyeballs could be capable of throbbing until she opens her eyelids and feels them scream out in pain to be closed once more.
But perhaps worst of all is the horrible sensation inside her head that feels as though somebody is clawing at her brain, moving it ever so slightly within her skull but never actually going so far as to remove it completely.
The groan that Clarke lets out does only a fraction of the job of expressing how much discomfort she is in, but it is a sound that in itself almost makes her feel worse, the vibrations of the sound that leaves her throat thrumming through her head in the most painful of ways.
It takes her a few long seconds to rouse from her sleep enough to realise that there is nobody poking around inside her head, and that the terrible throbbing is actually coming from music in the next apartment across. Vaguely recognising it as a violin, Clarke curses her next door neighbour loudly as the music pierces her aching brain, even through the walls of their apartment. She groans once again, using one hand to cover her eyes and rolling over on the floor, in the process hitting her knee on the coffee table she had forgotten was there.
“Fuck!” Clarke spits, clutching at her probably newly bruised knee with the hand not on her head.
Just when Clarke thinks that her morning (she’s not even sure that it is still morning, or whether she has slept until past noon in her drunken stupor from the previous night) can’t get any worse, the violinist next door starts practicing the same series of scratchy notes over and over and over again. Each one is like a blunt knife penetrating her skull, and Clarke is almost certain that it would be less painful to have a high speed train collide into her – at least then death would be instantaneous, instead of excruciatingly drawn out like this.
It takes a lot of effort to haul herself to her feet, and when the contents of stomach lurch around unsettlingly, Clarke thinks for just a moment that she isn’t going to make it without painting her living room floor a brand new shade of vomit. But she does make it, albeit very unsteadily, and she stumbles her way out of her front door and into the corridor beyond, until she finds herself standing outside her neighbour’s apartment.
The movement wakens her a little bit more, or at the very least alerts her consciousness to her surroundings and gives her the chance to properly listen to the music that comes from behind the door in front of her. She realises quickly that the violinist is actually quite good, to the extent that Clarke would probably be impressed if she knew the slightest thing about playing the violin.
Or, you know, if she wasn’t hungover out of her goddamn mind.
Clarke raps three times on the door of her neighbour’s apartment, each knock sending a shooting pain through her head akin to having nail hammered roughly through her temple.
The music on the other side of the door stops abruptly, only to be replaced by the sound of soft footsteps gradually getting louder as they approach. The door swings open to reveal a woman of around Clarke’s age, brown hair pushed up into a messy bun and sweater sleeves pushed up to her elbows. The violin is clutched in one hand, the long fingers of the other curled loosely around the bow.
“Can I help you?”
Reaching out a hand to the door frame and using it to prop her body up, something that she’s not entirely sure that she’s capable of doing without such support, Clarke answers brusquely, “Yes, actually. I’m Clarke, by the way. I live next door.”
“Lexa. Nice to meet you.”
“Listen,” Clarke continues, ignoring her neighbour. “I’m sure that you’re a very talented violinist, but let me put this bluntly – it’s Saturday morning and I’m hungover as fuck so could you maybe practice at another time?”
“Afternoon.”
Clarke blinks confusedly a few times, and then asks, “Sorry, what?”
“It’s two thirty in the afternoon,” Lexa clarifies, smiling in gentle amusement as Clarke lets out a heavy sigh and leans even more of her body weight against the door frame.
“I really wish that fact made my hangover slightly better but it really doesn’t.” Lifting her gaze up to meet Lexa’s green eyes with her own, Clarke adds for effect, “I want to die.”
Lexa stares at Clarke blankly for a few seconds, then tilts her head slowly to the side as she says, “Okay. Thanks for letting me know.”
The door starts to close in Clarke’s face but, in a move so unexpected that it startles even Clarke, she moves one of her feet forwards to block the door in its path towards the doorframe.
“No!” she cries out in protest, wincing as the door hits her bare foot with a painful thud. “Look, I’m a mess.”
“I had noticed,” agrees Lexa, arching a single eyebrow in judgement. “Listen, I understand – I’ve been there. But I’m a busy woman and the weekend is really the only time I have to practice for more than about thirty minutes at a time.”
With every cell in her body throbbing in the most unsettling of ways, Clarke’s brain seems to have lost the ability to use any of its usual processes and she merely lets out a long groan is displeasure. She’s fully aware that it’s not much of an argument in her case against Lexa and her violin playing, but it’s also the best she can come up with when she’d really rather be unconscious than trying to have a conversation of any kind.
“Could you not have thought about this a little bit when you came crashing in at three in the morning, waking up the entire building in the process?” Lexa sighs exasperatedly.
Clarke screws her face up in thought, trying to recall the exact details of what happened when she came in last night, but it’s all a complete blank. She doesn’t remember much after leaving Octavia’s – she remembers hitting up a bar in the city centre, dancing, so many shots…
And that’s it. Her mind goes blank after the second shot of absinthe. No recollection of what happened next, no memories of how she got how or why she ended up passed out on the floor of her living room instead of in the nice comfy bed in the next room.
Seriously considering just collapsing onto the carpeted floor of the hallway and waiting for either the embrace of death to engulf her or for a neighbour with slightly more sympathy than this one to rescue her from this hell, Clarke looks at Lexa with the most pitifully pleading expression she can muster in her current state and waits for it to have its desired effect. After a long few seconds, and a pout from Clarke that is probably more of a wincing grimace than what she actually intended to cross her face, the neighbour finally seems to concede.
“Why don’t you come in?” she suggests, stepping aside slightly and opening the door to her apartment a little wider so that Clarke can see inside to an immaculately kept open-plan living area that exactly mirrors her own next door. “I can make you some coffee and I can practice something a little less…”
As Lexa trails off in thought, searching for the right word, Clarke offers up her own conclusion to the sentence. “Scratchy?”
Arching a single eyebrow at Clarke, Lexa says, “Well, I was going to say intense, but I guess scratchy works too.”
Without waiting for any further invitation, Clarke pushes her way into Lexa’s apartment and makes herself at home straight away, abandoning any manners that she may normally possess and letting herself collapse onto the couch. Her head falls back onto the cushions behind her and her eyes droop closed, a soft groan of pain leaving her mouth involuntarily as her temples throb painfully at the sudden movement.
“How do you take your coffee?” Clarke hears Lexa’s voice call out from somewhere to her left.
Keeping her eyes closed and her body as still as possible, Clarke replies, “I actually don’t give a fuck as long as it’s caffeinated.”
“Strong, then,” chuckles Lexa. “Gotcha.”
After passing out on her neighbour’s couch, Clarke wakes up an indefinite amount of time later, the soothing violin melodies that invade her dreams interrupted by the sound of voices, which are quickly followed by the weight of another body dropping down at the other end of the couch. It is this movement that draws Clarke out of her sleep, blearily rubbing at her eyes and pushing herself up into a seated position.
Other than the blanket draped across her lap that wasn’t there before and an untouched mug of coffee that sits on the edge of the table just a few feet from where Clarke is curled up on the couch, the only new addition to the room comes in the form of a woman. She sits at the other end of the couch – no, she slouches, her left ankle resting on her right knee and her arm draped casually across the back cushions on the couch - wearing black ripped jeans, a dark leather jacket and a smouldering frown aimed at Clarke.
“You didn’t tell me that you had a girlfriend, Lexa.”
In her hungover state, albeit her slightly-less-hungover-than-before-the-nap state, it takes a few seconds for Clarke to realise that she must be the one that this new entrant to the apartment has mistaken for Lexa’s girlfriend.
“A girlfriend?” snorts Lexa. “Wait, you think…?” Lexa’s eyes widen as she reaches the same realisation as Clarke barely a second later, “This is Clarke, she’s my next door neighbour.”
The woman at the other end peers across at Clarke with her nose wrinkled up, then says, “Ew, Lex, don’t fuck where you eat.”
With a heavy roll of her eyes, Lexa lifts the violin to her shoulder, performs a little flourish with her bow before setting off into a fast paced piece of music that almost has Clarke’s head thrumming in discomfort again. Even as she is playing, Lexa speaks up above the music, “We’re not dating, Anya!”
Feeling slightly embarrassed about the fact that she accidentally fell asleep on an almost stranger’s couch, and even more embarrassed that she is now still on said couch with yet another stranger judging her tousled hair and smudged eyeliner from the other end of the seat, Clarke reaches out for the nearby mug of coffee as a way of giving herself something to do. Though it’s not cold yet, it’s definitely only lukewarm at best, though Clarke hardly cares as she sips at the tepid liquid. She knows that it’s scientifically improbable, but her senses are so fucked up today that she could almost swear that she can already feel the caffeine in the drink starting to permeate her brain.
With the pulsating inside her brain marginally less uncomfortable than before both the nap and the coffee, Clarke allows herself to watch Lexa playing her violin for the first time. Her fingers dance across the strings with captivating dexterity, the bow in her other hand moving up and down with gusto as she scrapes out the same difficult passages over and over again with increasing success each time she does so. Though Clarke’s knowledge of music, least of all violin repertoire, means that she can only tell the wrong notes from the right ones by the look of dissatisfaction that passes across Lexa’s face each time she makes a mistake.
So captivated is she by the passion with which Lexa practices her violin, that Clarke doesn’t notice the other woman – Anya, as Lexa called her earlier – shuffle closer to her on the couch until she is within whispering distance.
“She’s single.” Anya’s words so unexpectedly close to Clarke’s face are enough to make Clarke startle in her seat, grateful that she’s drunk enough of the coffee in her hand that it doesn’t spill at the sudden movement. Anya adds with a dry smirk, “And good with her fingers.”
Clarke’s eyes widen in shock at Anya’s suggestive comment, and once again the words I’m too hungover for this shit passes across Clarke’s mind. Except that now she cannot draw her eyes away from the way that Lexa’s fingers dance across the strings of her violin, her mind immediately going to places that it shouldn’t be as she imagines what else Lexa is capable of doing with such strong and nimble digits.
“I was talking about playing the violin!” Anya protests when Clarke forces herself to drag her eyes away from Lexa with a blush. Anya holds her hands up in mock innocence, though the hints of a wicked little smile that pull at the corners of her mouth are more than enough to let Clarke know that the innuendo was intentional. “But that reaction is enough to tell me that you’re not straight. Neither is she, by the way,” Anya adds, nudging Clarke with her elbow and raising a single eyebrow suggestively. “As gay as they get. And did I mention that she’s single?”
“Yeah, you did.”
“Just some food for thought,” Anya adds suggestively.
Clarke lets her gaze travel back to Lexa and, now that her brain is working at least a little bit more than when she first woke up, she allows herself to properly drink in her neighbour’s appearance. Lexa is far from unattractive and, Clarke realises, definitely her type. She’s dressed casually; a pair of skinny jeans and a loose sweater with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, her hair pushed up into an untidy bun on the top of her head, but she still looks incredible.
Clarke considers her own appearance, still dressed in the top she wore out last night but with the sweatpants she wears to bed on her bottom half – Clarke doesn’t remember changing but she can’t help commending her former drunk self for both the great idea and the motor skills required to successfully remove a pair of stockings while drunk – and realises that there is no comparison between the two of them.
“Lexa, Clarke was just checking out your ass!” Anya speaks up so that she can be heard from across the room.
The music stops as abruptly as Lexa turns around, eyes flitting quickly between the two women sitting on her couch as she tries to establish what the truth was.
“I was not!” Clarke protests feebly, lacking the energy to properly defend herself.
“And that’s my cue to leave,” says Anya, hauling herself up from the couch and plunging her hands into the pockets of her jeans as she saunters towards the door. As she makes to leave, she calls over her shoulder, “Call me, Lexa. You still owe me a drink from like three weeks ago.”
And with that, Anya leaves the apartment and lets the door slam shut behind her, her visit so brief and the conversations so surreal that it leaves Clarke wondering whether the entire presence of a third person in this apartment has just been a hallucination of her hungover mind.
“Well that was the weirdest thing that’s happened to me today,” Clarke voices her thoughts aloud. “Which is seriously saying something considering the fact that I woke up on my floor with no recollection of last night, then took a nap on a stranger’s couch.”
“Anya is something else,” Lexa agrees, finally placing the violin and its bow down on top of the empty instrument case that sits open on a chair across the room. “I’m sorry for anything she said to you. She’s overly invested in my love life, or my lack of a love life.”
Clarke feels her cheeks turning red as her eyes drop to Lexa’s fingers, the fingers that Anya had been so keen to point out the musical prowess of, and then downs the rest of the rapidly cooling coffee in the mug in her hands to provide herself with a distraction. With her mind as scattered as it is today, she really can’t afford to be thinking about what else those fingers may or may not be able to do, especially when she can’t guarantee that her mouth won’t blurt out something stupid and inappropriate in front of the neighbour that she barely knows.
“I should go,” she mumbles, pushing herself up into a standing position and steadying herself with a hand on the arm of the couch as her head swims for a couple of seconds. “Thank you for the coffee. And for putting up with my shit. Oh, and sorry for waking you at three am. I’ll try to be more considerate in the future.
“And maybe try not to get so drunk in the future,” Lexa teases, escorting Clarke to the front door.
“You don’t know my friends!” Clarke replies. “Though next time one of them suggests absinthe, I’m going straight home.” Clarke points a finger at Lexa and hurriedly adds, “Quietly, of course.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Lexa nods with a smile on her face.
Remembering what Anya told her (and wondering why she’s taking advice from somebody that Clarke can only describe as an asshole in a leather jacket), Clarke decides to take advantage of the fact that she’s too hungover to properly consider her next words.
“Well if all of this,” Clarke gestures down at herself, noticing in the process that there is an unidentifiable stain of something on the front of her shirt that she failed to notice earlier, “hasn’t put you off, would you let me say thank you for the coffee? And for putting up with my hungover ass. How about dinner? Are you free on Wednesday?”
“Wednesday isn’t good for me but I could do Thursday. Pick me up at seven o’clock?” With a little smirk pulling at the corners of her mouth, Lexa quips, “You already know where I live.”
“I … that sounds great!” Clarke grins. “I can’t wait!”
“See you on Thursday, Clarke!”
And as Lexa’s front door closes behind her, leaving Clarke alone in the corridor outside their apartments, Clarke decides that this hangover could turn out to be one of the best things that has ever happened to her.