Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first thing you notice is that your forearms are weaker.  The solid wooden weapon…a bat, you brain supplies, in your arm isn’t as heavy as your swords but still strains the muscles and tendons beneath your skin.  They feel untrained, soft.  They don’t feel like you. 

No part of you does, awareness radiating through the sinews of your being until you’ve taken kinetic stock of your entire body.  The entire thing feels soft.  Pliable, malleable…your muscles are unskilled and limp and you instantly feel threatened by this. 

You flex your fingers, testing the wood, as unfamiliar as your own arm, as unfamiliar as the green paint on your fingernails as you turn your hand, inspecting.  This is not good.  You do not know where you have been or how you have gotten here, the sun hot on your back, exposed as you are in what appears to be the desert clan’s land, the sand beyond your hand confirming your suspicions.

And yet…and yet it is not the same.  Your wrist looks delicate and the sun above you reflects differently off of these sands. 

“Alicia!” your head snaps up, muscles stiffening automatically. 

You meet the curious brown eyes of someone you know is familiar, but who you can’t place.  You must be looking at her oddly.  In fact, you know you are, your brow deeply furrowed, grip tightening on instinct on your weapon. 

She’s walking toward you but stops, hesitating, her eyes turning unsure.  “Alicia?” she tries again, and you feel your grip loosen. 

Alicia.  That’s you.  That’s you?  That’s you. 

You blink and the tension leaves your body immediately.  You sink into your soft muscles and young skin, relaxing as familiarity washes over you, the concern in the woman’s eyes comforting something in you. 

“Ofelia.” You say, startled.  You still don’t know her, but she’s familiar and your clothing is far too light for you to be in a threatening situation.  Or even a political one.  In fact, you know it’s neither.  As if you would ever be in either of those things ever again. 

You let the end of the bat hit the ground, loosely holding the handle. 

“Shit, I can’t believe there were so many of them!  That was so bad-ass though, where did you learn to swing like that?”

And you’re dumbfounded.  Where had you learn to swing like that?  Where had you learned to swing at all?  You look down at your hand again, the familiarity of your own body returning, your skin crawling only slightly, a shiver running down your spine. 

“I…I don’t know.  Instinct, I guess?” you try, and you’re Alicia and the woman before you is Ofelia, and you’re in the zombie apocalypse that not months before you had been teasing people about preparing for. 

She continues to look at you oddly.  “Where’d you go for a minute there?”

“I…” you shake your head.  Where had you gone?  You hadn’t gone anywhere.  But the feeling that your body isn’t quite your own settles uneasily in your stomach and doesn’t dissipate.  If anything, once again it starts to spread, to the point that you shudder.  “I don’t know.  Just…yeah, that was a lot.” Is all you can offer, and Ofelia takes it. 

“More blood than we’re certainly used to seeing.” She defends your uneasiness for you.

“…yeah.” Is all you can offer, because you know, you just know, that perhaps that’s not true. 

---

It comes in spurts.  It started that day, the rotted and blackened blood of a walker spilling from a crack in his skull that you’d put there yourself in a desperate attempt to fend him off.  It arched and you were back on the battlefield, your knife pulling from the skull of your very own adoptive brother, his black blood spilling and mixing with your own from the wound he’d inflicted on you not long before. 

It tingled on your skin, and your uninjured arm was suddenly in pain, and your weapon was too heavy which didn’t make any sense, because you were you, Heda, Commander of the Twelve Grounder Clans and your weapons hadn’t been too heavy for you since you were 10 years of age.  But you weren’t Heda.  You were young and overwhelmed and the adrenaline running in your veins wasn’t the controlled adrenaline you’d been trained to suppress, but the wild kind that gave you tunnel vision and shut down parts of your brain that were vital for battle. 

That was when you realized the bat, as the block of wood was called, was too heavy and your hands were too soft, your callouses absent and your scars non-existent. 

You are Alicia Clark, your name and its irony are not lost on you.  You are on the cusp of turning 19 and you have lived a year through an outbreak of a virus that has turned human beings into the least scary of Hollywood’s monsters: zombies.  Except they are quite a bit scarier when the possibility of infection is real, and not in one of your brother’s comic book pages. 

And it’s an odd combination of you, and…well, yourself.  You are Lexa, leader of her people, except now you are Alicia, and you are becoming a leader in your own right, in a way that makes you proud of yourself. 

Some days you are more Lexa than others.  You feel your stoicism return to your bones, you feel the true age of your soul weigh you down and you quietly observe your world through Alicia’s eyes.  You are still young and you still make mistakes.  Your memories are fuzzy but not enough so that you don’t know who you are. 

But you are also Alicia.  Your petulance comes through even at your most Lexa moments, and your mother mistakes your quiet days as displays of maturity, instead of days of remembering all of your teachings from your previous life.  Your alternate self?  You are not sure how it works or why, but with each passing day, you grow more used to this skin that you are in. 

---

The first time you see yourself in the mirror, after months and months and months of living your dual existence, you are shocked.  The girl looking back at you is younger than Lexa, and is so obviously Alicia that you understand why this body didn’t feel like your own.  In many ways, it isn’t.  The skin is smooth and unblemished.  The scars that adorned your body before no longer decorate your flesh and a part of the weight you held has fallen with them.  The eyes that look back at you are still young, the face fresh.  You have seen many things as Alicia.  You have killed walkers and watched the person you loved (a boy!) essentially die before your eyes.  Your tattoo is one for him and not for the other nightbloods you killed, not to denote your standing as Commander but to denote your loyalty to a young and fickle heart.  To a mortal life, but well…to a teenager, mortality is but an abstract concept. 

Still, your soul is lighter, as Alicia.  You carry the burden of finding your strength, struggling to find it after so easily having it when you were Lexa.  That burden…or perhaps, lack thereof, depending on how one would look at it, let Alicia’s shoulders stay slightly hunched, instead of strongly and proudly and achingly squared to carry the weight of an entire people.  Alicia’s skin is younger and there is a light in your eyes when you look into them that you wonder if you ever had before. 

Of course, Alicia is younger than you were…last time you were alive.  Despite what you’ve survived, you still hold onto a hope because you are young, and you are Alicia and a part of Alicia is untouched by the responsibilities that Lexa faced.  In many ways, it is a relief. 

---

It is an odd, lonely existence.   You can’t feasibly tell anyone without being accused of being crazy (at the very least).  But you always look.  The faces of most new people you meet tend to bleed together, but there was one person who looked like Lincoln in a gang of shaved men who rode motorcycles in leather vests and jeans and nothing else.  They called themselves Soul Survivors and were nice enough.  It wasn’t Lincoln, though.  Even if it had been, you hadn’t known him well enough for it to mean anything. 

There had been a mechanic who had amputated part of her own arm after being bitten, who looked vaguely like Anya.  You spent a lot of time with her, while you and yours stayed with her and hers.  She kept giving you odd looks because you didn’t know anything about mechanics and truly, you weren’t interested, but her presence, itself very similar to Anya’s, was a comfort to an ache you sometimes forgot you even had deep in your chest. 

---

You find her by accident, in the middle of a sand storm that rips through the desert and that forces you, everyone in your party, and other stragglers to find shelter to hide from the whipping winds and grains of sand. 

The years have not been kind to her.  She cradles a sawed-off shotgun to herself.   Her eyes are dull and distant, jaw clenched the entire time the storm rages outside the tiny shack. 

But god, is she beautiful.  Her name is Elyza Lex and that’s all she tells you, curtly, when Strand asks for people’s names in order to pass the time.    

Her hair is dirty and her brown leather jacket is…well, distressed does not do it justice.  There is a sadness behind the angry, guarded wall she puts up as she glares at each and every person in the shack with her.  You can read her, just as you could then.  Just as you probably could in a thousand lifetimes, if such a thing was possible. 

Her name is Elyza Lex and you are as smitten as you were when her name was Clarke Griffin and she pressed so hard for an alliance between your people and hers. 

You can’t tear your eyes away from her because there is so much about her that is so…Clarke.  Her blue eyes are dull but still full of that fire that Lexa had been privileged to see.  Her hair is dirty but still blonde, definitely.  She still even has her little beauty mark above her lip and you couldn’t tear your eyes away if you tried, and she notices. 

Of course she notices.  Her eyes snap to yours after she’s scanned the room two or three times, and she stares at you before quickly looking down.  The sorrow rolls off of her in waves and thanks to the Lexa side of you, the observant warrior side, you pick up the slightest shake of her shoulders as she hangs her head and refuses to look up for the rest of the time you’re all stuck in the shack together.  You know that she is trying to look angry, but the shaking shoulders give her away.

It’s more than you can hope, but as you continue to observe, you carefully allow yourself that quiet naiveté so characteristic of the young Alicia and fantasize that maybe, she recognizes you too. 

---

Of course she doesn’t.  She avoids talking to any of you the rest of the time you’re all stuck in the shelter, and she bolts out when the storm settles.  It’s not even done, just settled, the winds calmer.  She heads over to an old motorcycle that even you can tell is broken beyond repair.  You’re fairly certain that not even the Anya you’d met in this life could actually fix it.  If she knows, she doesn’t show it, and you watch her while she circles the hog. 

She eventually grunts and sits down on the sand in front of the machine, and starts fiddling with it.  Her hands seem sure, but they shake and it’s not long before someone else is trying to tell Elyza that her bike isn’t even worth scrap right now. 

She sits there in silence for the next four hours.

You only know because you check periodically, helping move supplies and set up camp and getting to know everyone new around you.

---

You don’t hear the conversation, but Elyza leaves with your posse and you realize you’re late to the party as far as that information goes.  Your mom quietly tells you when you raise a skeptical eyebrow at the new guest. 

“She doesn’t have anyone.  Strand thinks that motorcycle was the last thing she really had, except the stuff in her backpack.  I invited her.  I’d say be civil but…well, we don’t even know if she’ll be civil with us.  But she says she’s good with a gun, and we could always use more firepower.”

You’re not sure if she’s trying to convince you or herself, but it doesn’t matter.  Elyza is quiet and withdrawn, though she is indeed civil.  When she speaks her words are harsh but her voice is soft, her eyes as haunted as ever. 

She doesn’t speak for the first few weeks, though.  You hear her voice, sure, talking to Strand usually, or your mother.  She’s polite to your mom, if distant.  She says her pleases and thank-yous and she talks strategy with Strand, though it’s usually in nearly monosyllabic sentences and silent nods or shakes of the head.  She even speaks with your brother and with Ofelia. 

She completely ignores you.  The first words she ever says directly to you are “Get out of the way.” And though it’s more a quiet request than a rude demand, you’re still startled by her voice, her Australian accent merging her words.  “Geddou’ tha way.”  You’re so startled that you do not, in fact, get out of the way, and you don’t register the alarm on her face until she’s physically pushed you out of the way and shot a round off from her gun. 

There’s nothing behind you, and her eyes are wild for a moment, her breathing hard and labored.  And then she’s shaking her head.  Her forearm muscles ripple as she tries to keep a steady hold on the gun and her nostrils flair as she inhales deeply. 

You don’t know what to do, so you just…wait.  You know the feeling of adrenaline pumping through your veins, and an old part of you knows the fear and trauma of constantly being on edge.  Of seeing things that aren’t there and forcing yourself to fall asleep with the images dancing on the edge of your vision. 

She swallows again and says “I’m sorry.  I thought I saw-   You…” she looks you right in the eyes then, and there’s so much pain in them.  She looks away faster than she glanced at you.  “Be careful.  Listen!” she adds, almost a shout.  She turns and runs…not walks quickly, though that’s probably what she was intending.  Runs.    

The Alicia side of you, as you’d come to call the younger part of your soul, is startled.  The Lexa side knows all too well the signs of being haunted: having condemned Clarke to those same effects by allowing her to kill Finn.  Having felt those effects after Costia’s death. 

---

You observe her often.  Her eyes are usually unfocused and her sarcasm is biting, the few times she uses it.  But it’s a defense mechanism, and you all know it.  She’s in so much pain.  She acts tough during the day, all hard edges and clipped phrases.  But she looks at you sometimes the way she did when she had a knife to your throat.  Desperate.  Angry.  Scared.  Like she’s fighting with herself. 

You know you’re not supposed to have seen those looks.  That she only gives them to you in the dark of night or when she thinks you’re reading a book or otherwise occupied.  But you can feel her eyes on you and you subtly watch her watching you.

You wonder if this life has been kind to her, but it seems it hasn’t.  You wonder if her sadness is from one lifetime alone, or if she, like you, holds two selves, fighting for balance, within her.  You can’t tell, but still you watch.

She doesn’t sleep a lot, and the exhaustion shows on her face. 

But she’s still kind, beneath it all.  After her first time yelling at you, she doesn’t talk much, but she warms to you.  She gets within more than five feet of you on occasion, and she doesn’t completely shut down if you talk to her, resorting to nods and avoiding eye contact as much as possible. 

Still, she comes around in little ways.  She stays up with you for watch one night and doesn’t complain once when you dose off three times.  You simply startle awake a few minutes after falling asleep, to catch her eyes trained on the fire.

She goes without eating her usual meal for a week when looters take all of your food. 

She’s distant, but she integrates herself nonetheless, and her kindness shows through.  She keeps her shotgun always on her person and it seems to be the only thing that keeps her sane.  Her grip never leaves the handle except to sleep.  But she doesn’t mind showing your brother how to properly clean it, even letting him touch it, if only sparingly, to understand how it works.  She helps your mom weed for roots and hunt for berries in Yellowstone National Park, as you pass through there: she has exactly two books on plant identification which she uses religiously and that she uses to teach Ofelia how to identify a food source in a pinch. 

She wordlessly helps Strand pick through any scrap metals left behind in abandoned cars.  She doesn’t give herself, so much as her labor, but it’s something and Strand is thrilled that she pulls her weight.  Everyone is thrilled.  She volunteers often for the night watch, and though she hides it well, you know it’s because nightmares await her in the darkness of sleep, and she’s running from them.

She’s always been running, you imagine.

---

She doesn’t sleep much, but neither do you, and you wonder if she notices that. 

You don’t know when you stopped sleeping as much, but you never really adjusted to a zombie apocalypse.  The slightest noises make you jump, even in your sleep, and you wonder if it’s got to do with all of these memories swimming in your head from another lifetime, another body.  Then, and now, any noise could spell your doom. 

So when she starts thrashing, in the times she does sleep, you’re almost always awake.  You start awake, butterfly knife already at the ready.  No matter how many times she wakes you up like that, you react the same way because maybe this time will be the time that walkers are the reason she’s thrashing. 

You hear her crying, some nights.  Sobs that she hides well, but you see her shoulders shake in the dim light and you’re torn between comforting her and letting her cry it out.  You know she doesn’t like showing the pain she’s in and you’ve only read very little about PTSD (and it didn’t exactly exist, as a concept, when you were Lexa). 

Still, one night you hear her cursing and fumbling around, and you catch a glimpse of that book she always has.  You’ve seen it now and again before she tucked it into her jacket, right near her heart.

It obviously means a lot.  Of all of her things, including her gun, she keeps that journal, and a small pouch of broken pens, pencils, and crayons, always with her.  She keeps it in her shirt pocket, a men’s flannel shirt with huge pockets, capable of carrying it.   When that shirt comes off, it goes in her tank top, or in her jeans pockets, if they’re deep enough.  It’s never far.    

She ends up setting it on the ground beside her.  She curses again and you roll over, watching her fumble around, growing more and more frantic.  Getting louder and louder in the process. 

You hear her curse once more, and watch as she throws a small object, the tiny thing rocketing across the room and clacking off the wood of the wall.  She runs both hands through her hair, clearly frustrated, at whatever happened with the pencil.  She starts rocking back and forth, hands gripping her hair for mere seconds before she composes herself, sniffling. 

Art supplies aren’t necessarily hard to come by (charcoal from the fire isn’t great quality and runs low fast, but it’s something) but they are low on the list of necessities. 

Still, you know that Elyza has been running low.  She’s been getting crankier than normal and you even watched her counting her supplies one night, a frustrated air about her as she gingerly arranged them in their small case. 

She seems to settle down, but you can hear in her breathing that there are tears staining her cheeks. 

You’re not as quiet as you would have liked to be when you roll over and stand up. 

You were going to save it for a rainy day.  Quietly slip the carpenter’s pencil you’d found earlier that day into her supplies when she wasn’t looking.  To make her day a little brighter. 

But now seems like a good time for it. 

You try to be much quieter upon your return, but you watch her shoulders stiffen as you come closer to her and sigh internally. 

She pulls the journal away just as you take a seat beside her. 

She’s in dirty clothes.  You don’t think she’s changed them for a week, but you don’t look (or smell) much better.  Running water is something of the past and all water is going to drinking until you get to a town that has working electricity.  It’s okay.  You’re both used to worse. 

You hand her the pencil silently. 

“I know it’s not ideal,” is all you say after a pause.  You purposefully don’t look at her even though you can feel her curious eyes on you. 

She doesn’t take the pencil, not right away.  She wipes her eyes first with her dirty sleeve and pulls in a sniffle. 

You sit in silence, pencil still offered. 

She eventually takes it from you. 

“Thank you,” she whispers. 

“We can raid the upstairs next door.  It looked like a more rugged place.  Maybe an architect lived there.” You offer, and cringe internally because wow, you certainly are an awkward teenager, and what the hell does that even mean? 

She doesn’t really laugh, but she makes some kind of amused snort. 

“I once read a book, in school,” and you raise your eyebrows.  She doesn’t notice. 

“Called ‘The Carpenter’s Pencil’.  The guy who had the pencil stole it from a man he shot, and the man’s spirit haunted him.”

“We all have our ghosts,” you say quietly.

She looks at you, then, and you suspect it’s because that was probably a far more profound thing than a teenager would say.  But you don’t take it back.  Even if you were just Alicia, you’d seen more than enough for things, and people, to haunt you.  A part of that is imprinted on your skin. 

You absentmindedly scratch the tattoo through the sleeve of the flannel that Elyza, ironically, had given to you.  She’d noticed you were cold, threw it to you without a word, and hadn’t asked for it back, or even indicated that she wanted it back. 

A part of her scent lingered in it. 

You hadn’t tried all that hard to give it back to her. 

“I suppose we do.”

Chapter Text

Elyza talks to you more, after that.  She doesn’t open up, per se, but she stops avoiding you…as much.  She still doesn’t look you in the eyes, and she refuses to acknowledge you when you stir on watch, and look over to see tears spilling out of her eyes as she looks into the fire.  But she walks with you when your posse continues on their new nomadic way of life.  She volunteers to go with you when you all split up to do various things: you, usually searching the house for supplies or walkers. 

You don’t know if she just believes you to be a capable fighter or if she just doesn’t want to presume that you need protection, but she gives you space as you both raid.  She hangs back and only rarely cuts in front of you.  One day you hear Strand saying it’s a good strategy, because you’re scary with your little knife and the kill is much quieter.  Elyza says nothing.

She still doesn’t talk to you, though.  Not really: not whole conversations.  Just little huffs or sounds of acknowledgement when you say something, a word or two.  Her usual assortment of words that she uses with everyone, and you find it frustrating.  A part of you is desperate to bond with Elyza, Clarke be damned.  Her sadness radiates from her pores and though she seems to have convinced herself that no one has noticed, you wonder if there is anyone who’s actually missed it.  She needs a friend, at the very least.  And you need to figure out if she’s just her, or not.  If you’re alone in this or not. 

But she does stick with you a lot more.  You fall into an odd rhythm where you both can canvas a house, fluidly, with very little verbal communication. 

And she seems to enjoy that.  A smile is on her face, the first one you think you’ve ever seen, after you finish gutting a house for supplies.  It’s small and it almost seems like her muscles forgot how to form it, but it’s there and you’re startled, to say the least. 

“You learn fast.” Is all she says, but it’s the most words in a row she’s said to probably anyone, so you just stand in shock as she blushes, actually blushes, before shutting down and walking away from you. 

---

You find a walker in one of the abandoned houses, in a town that does have electricity but is more or less abandoned.  It startles you because it’s right there when you turn a corner, and you can’t muffle the scream fast enough. 

But Lexa’s reflexes kick in and the knife is through the walker’s skull at the same time that Elyza Lex has rounded the corner, with her revolver cocked and readied.  Her shotgun is strapped across her back, as always, but you’re pulling the knife out of the dead walker’s head.  You see fear registered in her features, when you turn to look at her, but she also looks stunned. 

You flip the knife closed (with some flair, because…well, you’re proud of your knife skills) and her eyes lock with yours.  She raises her eyebrows but says nothing.  She leaves like so many times before: without a word.

---

She gives you a whetstone.  You don’t know what it is when she first drops the object on the floor in front of you, dropping down herself not a moment after.  Her eyes are excited, though, which you don’t think you’ve seen in the entire months she’s been with you guys.  There is a spark in them that you haven’t seen since Clarke, a fierce determination shining through. 

It’s a rectangle, and you snap the book shut that you’ve been reading.  You look at her and she looks back at you, her eyes bright with expectation, and so you do the only thing you can really think of.  You put your book down and pick up the thing, rotating it in your hands while you continue to feel her eyes on you. 

You keep turning it in your hands, testing the roughness (surprised by it, really), and you finally look at her with what you hope is an innocent and inquisitive look, instead of a flat-out “What is this?”. Her smile fades as she takes in your perplexed state until she sits back from where she’d been on her heels.  She lands on her butt and the storminess returns to her expression. 

You look away then, to the stone, still turning it in your fingers.  “Thank you.” you manage, though you can’t look at her, and she huffs quietly. 

“Sorry.” She says, a moment later.  You look up, slightly surprised by the apology, and she’s staring at the ground, her finger gently tapping the wood.  Her hair drops in front of her face and you wince at the change in her demeanor. 

Gently, you reach out and grab her knee in the lightest of touches.  You can tell her eyes are on your hand by the way she twitches, flinches, even.  You pull away and she, surprisingly, stays put, though you can make out the soft sound of her teeth grinding as she clenches her jaw. 

“I just…I figured you could use it.  You keep abusing your knife like you do and one of these days it won’t be able to pierce bone.” She says it so softly.  So apologetically, as though you’re rejecting her gift. 

It clicks, then, and you swiftly pull your knife out.  The click as you release the blade makes her flinch again. 

“You don’t-” she starts, a whisper, a defeated sigh of failed reciprocation of appreciation.  “Just forget about-”

You don’t care if it’s rude, you cut her off as you see her hastily twisting to push herself off of the ground.  To flee, as usual.  “I don’t know how to use it,” you say, just as softly, though firmly enough that you know she hears.  You gently put the stone and the butterfly knife on the ground before you, careful to leave it in her line of sight. 

You don’t know if it is the right thing to do, with Elyza.  You never really know.  You’re good at reading her but there are moments where she hides herself, closes herself off entirely and in those moments, there’s no reaching her.  She seems like she’s on the point of entering one of those, so you quietly wait and meet her gaze as she eyes you, her own guarded but startled.  You plainly stare back. 

She seems to decide something, the tension leaving her muscles and her jaw, and she relaxes back into a sitting position on the floor.  You see the fire return, a tiny spark of hope that she quickly tries to smite by looking down and snatching the materials from in front of you.

She seems to realize that the gesture is a bit…aggressive, and she gently releases your effects back to the floor.  She coughs, raising her gaze to meet yours again, the slightest hint of a blush on her cheeks. 

“…sorry,” she mumbles, and you send her an encouraging smile. 

Her blush deepens.  She holds up the stone, high between the two of you, level with her eyes and yours.  “It’s not the best whetstone,” she says, and the word niggles a memory in your mind, a faded one of Anya teaching you how to properly sharpen your sword.  She didn’t call it a whetstone, she’d called it something else, and it had looked far different.  Perhaps they weren’t the same thing at all, but your fingers tic slightly and your muscles ache with the memory of running the rock along your blade for hours until Anya had been satisfied. 

Your fingers had bled from the amount of times you’d accidentally nicked yourself on the blade, or where you’d rubbed them raw trying to hold the stupid round rock.  Eventually, the scars left over made for wonderful callouses, and you were stronger for it.  Still, you’d hated Anya for many days after those particularly tough lessons. 

“But,” she continues, pulling you from your memories, “It’s uh…better than what you’re using now.”

You feel your features morph in confusion, and she looks at you just in time to catch the look.  A smirk, an actual fucking smirk, overtakes her features. 

“Which is nothing,” she jokes.  She turns the stone in her hands.  “You have to hold it a certain way, so you don’t cut yourself by accident”

You watch her demonstrate the proper technique with your knife, her fingers wrapped delicately around the handle, and carefully on the whetstone.  She keeps her eyes firmly on the little object, but you hear more words come out of her mouth than you thought her capable of.  She quietly describes what she’s doing and the importance of never taking your eyes off of the blade, because that’s how you hurt yourself, and the guy who taught her that had actually sliced off part of his finger as he was saying it. 

So she never forgot. 

“That’s disgusting,” you say, out of reflex, the very thought of slicing your finger off making you cringe. 

She stops sharpening and looks at you, her eyes, for once, appearing to be relatively calm.  She scrunches her nose contemplatively.  “You’ve done worse,” she says, finally.

It chills you to the core, those words.  Because you have done worse, so much worse, in another lifetime, in another body that resembles this one in so many ways.  And for a moment, you forget that she probably doesn’t know that, that she probably isn’t Clarke and that she probably didn’t witness the bloodshed and death you’d brought upon people during your time as Commander.  For a moment, you’re Lexa and she’s Clarke and there’s more blood on your hands, more kill marks on your soul than your back could ever bear.

Your hands are clammy and the room is suddenly too small, and Elyza seems to recognize that she’s said something terribly wrong, because she’s gone sheet-white (you can only imagine how you look) and she’s sputtering over her words.  “I mean…with, you know, walkers.  Carnage.” She looks away from you then and thrusts the instruments at you.  “I…you should try. Practice.”

And she’s gone.  She’s up and out of the room in a flash and you’re still just sat there, with your new whetstone and your butterfly knife. 

The objects in your hands ground you, though, their weight too heavy for you to be Lexa, and you quietly exhale. 

“…Thank you,” you whisper. 

---

“I killed a man,” you tell her, later that night, as way of an excuse for your behavior.  She’s on watch by the fire outside of one of the two houses you’d all commandeered and you couldn’t sleep.  You’d quietly sharpened your knife for the remainder of the day, your fingers becoming accustomed with the ebb and flow of sharpening a weapon.  The noise the blade made with each stroke became almost hypnotic, and you’d lost yourself in thought. 

You concluded on telling her a bit more about you.  About Alicia.  Because Elyza was right: you’ve seen, and done, worse, even as just Alicia.  And you can only imagine the things that Elyza has seen. 

“Stabbed him through the heart.  Watched him bleed out on the floor.”

“I’m sorry,” Elyza says, and you know it’s sincere.  Her voice is perhaps the most somber…not sad, not angry or sarcastic or biting, just…somber, you’ve ever heard it.  “I’m sorry I said that, I wasn’t thinking.  It was out of line…we’ve all had to do things that are worse than losing a finger.  I just…”

“You don’t have to apologize, Elyza,” you tell her, flatly.  Perhaps harshly, too, which you don’t mean, but there’s a bite in your tone. 

She shuts up.

You want to say something, but saying “I’ve sure you’ve been through worse,” doesn’t seem like it’ll lighten the mood, or cheer her up, so you decide against it. 

You both sit in silence for the rest of the night.  At the first coloring of dawn, you stand. 

“Thank you, for the whetstone.  It means a lot.” And you give her a sincere smile.

She nods and for once, you’re the one to walk away. 

---

You both grow closer, after that.  She starts to talk to you more than Strand or your mom or Ofelia or anyone else.  It’s not a lot of words but it’s something.  She walks with you or behind you or near you during migratory periods, and you notice that she tends to set up her sleeping area near you.  When she’s on watch, she sits next to you.  When you’re both on watch, she’s more relaxed than you’ve ever seen her.  It’s a strange bond, what you share: that silent connection building between the both of you.  But it’s there and you’re not one to deny your attraction.

Elyza seems still, though, to keep herself at a distance.  A smaller distance than before, but you know there are still walls up in the way she’ll be smiling and open with you one minute, and hushed the next.  There are parts of herself that she’s still not willing to share with you, or with anyone, and you respect that. 

You don’t ask when she startles awake, sweat pouring down her face and eyes wild.  You give her the curtesy of not even looking at her, letting her allow herself to believe that she wasn’t that loud, that scared, that lost.  You leave her be when she cries, usually far enough from the group or late enough at night that no one can really hear her.  No one except you, of course. 

You leave her to herself when her personal demons get the better of her and she refuses to talk to anyone for two or three days at a time.  When she loses herself in drawing in that little journal of hers.  When she compulsively cleans her gun until her eyes are bloodshot, her fingertips raw and her expression utterly dead.  When she picks and picks at her cuticles until they bleed. 

You do what you can to let her know that she’s not alone.  That you’re there if she needs you.  Or at the very least…to keep her sane.  It’s not much, but you keep note, as you did with the carpenter’s pencil, of her supplies.  You can tell when she’s running low because she compulsively checks her shirt pocket.  It’s fitting that it’s over her heart because you wonder if anything is as dear to her as the little plastic baggie full of pencil and charcoal and pastel stubs and the small pleather-bound journal. You wonder if anything outside of that little world in her pocket actually keeps her going.  Keeps her sane. 

You’d rather not find out, so you do what you can to make sure she never really runs out.  You never go in the baggie: you already know that doing so would be far too much a violation of privacy. 

So you instead pick up supplies where you find them.  An eraser in a drawer in a child’s room, stiff with age but still viable after you try it.  An 8 pack of crayons (it was a 64 pack but half of them are missing or broken and there are 8 perfectly good ones, in-tact and even with their sharp point still to them).  A decent metal sharpener from the house of a contractor (or so the diploma hanging on the wall said).  A whole, unbroken and unopened package of quality charcoal pencils from a little (already raided) mom and pop art store in what a sign said was Heaven, Iowa. 

You keep the supplies you find in your own little plastic bag, that always gets tucked away in a special place in your now ever-present backpack of supplies. 

On particularly bad days, or what you take to be particularly bad days…days where Elyza refuses to talk and takes constant stock of her belongings…you quietly slip her an extra pencil.  A crayon.  A piece of pastel. 

You try to be smooth about it, really.  You aren’t sure how she’ll react to gifts and you don’t want to make a big deal out of them.  You just…want her to feel better.  To have some source of comfort, and really, this seems to be the best way.  When she doses, you put one of your collected pieces at her feet or by her pillow. 

One night, you leave her one of the charcoal pencils.  You place it down directly in front of her slumbering form, and when you take your eyes off of the pencil, raising them, you notice that Elyza’s are open.  And she looks at you…with such a tender, scared and unguarded expression that it takes your breath away. 

The sadness in them dances as the light catches the tears that well up in them.  She gives you a silent, watery smile before sniffling quietly.  She picks up the pencil not a moment later, her raw gaze still on yours, and you can do nothing but remain, frozen. 

She pulls the pencil to her as though it were a stuffed animal and not a stupidly thin piece of wood with an insanely delicate carbon compound inside of it.

You find it suddenly hard to swallow as her expression morphs.  She clenches her jaw but in her gaze, a true sadness takes over the blue eyes.  She holds your gaze and to your utter shock, she reaches out her hand again, charcoal still in it, and gently grasps your own.  You fingers, still extended on the wood, feel natural in hers as she squeezes gently.

“Mochof,” she whispers, before turning over. 

---

Your ears ring for days after that, echoes of the shell-shock at hearing that word.  You don’t sleep that night, nor for a few nights after.

“Thank you,”

You tell yourself there is no way that you’d heard her right.  That your brain, in its constant state of trying to balance Lexa and Alicia and in trying to figure out if Elyza was doing the same, had automatically translated English to Trigedasleng, half of which you couldn’t even remember anyway.  But you had to remember enough for your brain to automatically translate it, right?  Maybe? 

You don’t know and the word(s?) haunt you, echoing and reverberating in your skull, giving you a splitting headache.  For once, it is you who doesn’t talk, who keeps your distance from Elyza instead of the other way around.

She lets you have the space, too.  Her eyes are curious whenever they catch yours but otherwise she gives no sign that she notices the change in you.  If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that you had both taken a massive step backwards in your…friendship…thing, that you had going.  But no, you realize one of those days: she’s giving you space on purpose.  She seems to get that you don’t want to talk, and as you afforded her so many times before, she allows you your space.  You catch her, a few times, making a move to come towards you before seemingly reminding herself to leave you alone.  A quick shake of her head as you catch her in your peripheral , or some other physical indication that she is fighting herself and her comfort with being close to you, in order to give you space.

If you weren’t so damn preoccupied, you’d appreciate the gesture.  But you’re frustrated and she’s not helping in the slightest. 

Mochof.

There is no way.  Literally no way.  You go in circles in your head.  Mochof.  Thank you.  Mochof.  Thank you. 

You have to have heard Thank you, really.  You just have to have.  Because without being 100% sure, you know better than to just run up to her.  To tell her that you’re Lexa and you only learned of the concept of soulmates because you’re also Alicia.  To tell her that you loved her in a previous life and you’ll love her in this one, too.  You can feel it stirring in your bones, in the odd little ways you’ve both become comfortable with one another.  Just…the ebb and flow of two souls getting to know each other again. 

And if you went up to her, and said all that, and you hadn’t actually heard “Mochof”??  Then what?  You’d be literally crazy, is what.  You doubt that Elyza would run around raising flags, though you don’t doubt that she would quietly mention it to your mother and others to try and figure out their next move or a means of figuring out just how much you’ve lost it. 

You briefly humor yourself with telling her, and you can just picture her look of sympathetic confusion.  You can picture her quietly asking a question or two, perhaps grabbing your shoulders to steady you.  Trying to catch your eye to see if you’re serious while you babble about the Coalition and Roan and Heda and Wanheda.  Trying to decide if you’re just dehydrated or intoxicated or completely off your rocker when you tell her about alternate lives and selves and loves and universes, really. 

As the days drag by, you manage to convince yourself: Thank you.  She said thank you and that’s that, and your over-excited brain translated it to Trigedasleng and that’s that.  You don’t bring it up again, and you start opening up and coming out from the shell of silence you’d built around you.  Seeing the stormy clouds clearing, Elyza doesn’t hesitate to once again be by your side as your new, odd little family unit continues its trek to wherever. 

Everything goes on, and she said thank you. 

A small piece of you remains unconvinced, however.  A small hope deep in your chest that also ached when you found the Anya look-alike.   That throbbed slightly at the familiar, dirty face of Lincoln.  The part that kept you up at night with memories that are simultaneously not entirely your own, and totally yours.  Lexa’s intuition was never really wrong, and Alicia’s had served you well until Lexa’s came along. 

Still, it’s a risk you can’t take.  Not now. 

You tuck the feeling away.

---

Elyza gives you no reprieve, though. 

Her hair is up, completely up, in a messy bun, and she is wearing a completely sleeveless shirt, her leather jacket and usual flannel off, when you spot the tattoo. 

Your breath catches in your throat and you freeze.  Several tiny dots break up what would be a whole sacred symbol…infinity sign.  And it’s there.  On her right arm, right in the crook of her elbow. 

The shock doesn’t wear off, though you come to your senses faster than with the Mochof debacle. 

Your voice cracks when you speak. 

“Nice tattoo,” and you sound foreign, even to your ears.  It sounds like you’re trying to keep your tone even.  Like you’re trying to be nonchalant.  Which, you are, but you don’t want her to know that. 

She starts, actually starts, at the sound of your voice before looking at you, questioning. 

“I didn’t know you had any,” you say, simply.  You nod to indicate the one that has been exposed.

She looks at it as though she’d forgotten it was there.  And then she keeps her eyes on it, instead of looking up at you.  She brings her fingers of her left hand up to the symbol, and gently traces it. 

“I have a few,” she says, quietly, more to the crook of her elbow than to you. 

“I have one, too,” you say, as though there was no way that she could notice the one on your forearm.  You show her anyway, rolling up the sleeve of (her) flannel to show the flower. 

She regards it with vacant eyes.  Her fingers continue to trace hers. 

She nods at yours as though acknowledging it and then looks back down at hers. 

You push your luck, because you’re curious and that dangerous part of you that remained hopeful and delusional about the Thank You aches to hear the words, any words, that indicate the tattoo is for you.  For Lexa. 

“Does it mean anything?”

She stops tracing and clenches her fist before she drops her hand, the tension that had been building leaving her entirely.  She deflates. 

“Not anymore,” she says, with a heart so obviously heavy that you feel yours ache with it. 

The words hurt more than you thought they would.

She doesn’t meet your eyes as she leaves, walking past you, her hand wrapped around the tattoo as though she was protecting it. 

---

“I lost someone,” she says.  Its night and you’re out by the fire even though you don’t need one and everyone’s inside already.  But you’re all in a gated community and you missed normal things, like fire pits outside on cold nights.  In theory it’s a bad idea, but there’s a massive iron fence enclosing this yard, and really, the whole house.  For once, everyone in your group was willing to throw caution to the wind for a bit of normalcy. 

“We’ve all lost someone,” you say, bluntly, and you see her wince.  Your Lexa tact certainly has its moments, like this one, where it completely abandons you and leaves you to your normal teenage reactions.  You regret the words as soon as they’ve left your mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she says, quiet, and you shake your head. 

“No, sorry, I’m sorry.” You rush to say, “That was rude.” You shake your head again to emphasize, “You…you seem like you’ve been through a lot.  More than even some of us here.  So no, I’m sorry,” you murmur, rubbing the back of your neck in embarrassment.  You turn to look at her, but Elyza keeps her eyes on the fire.  She’s in long sleeves, the tattoo covered. 

Still, you know it’s there, the image burned into your memory. 

“I have,” she says, but she doesn’t elaborate, and as always, you don’t ask her to. 

---

You never really noticed how dark cloudy nights were.  Of course, you’d learned to see in the dark as Lexa, but as Alicia you’d never really noticed it.  You’d always lived in a neighborhood with plenty of light pollution and even the darkest of skies could be held at bay by your neighbor’s house or a car or a nightlight.  Even in the boat, with no lights from civilization, the night had never been completely black.

The darkness can still be held at bay as long as your group has batteries or can start a fire, but there are some nights where it’s wet and rainy and the night is black, so black that most of your portable lights can’t cut through it. 

But your favorite nights are the nights when the fire has died down and everyone’s asleep.  When you’re out in the middle of nowhere and sleeping in portable tents (when it’s deemed safe enough).  When there isn’t a cloud in the sky (or maybe one or two, to provide contrast), and the stars are out. 

They’re the same stars, the ones you look at now, and the ones you gazed upon in your other life.  Specs of gas, billions of years away; dust as old as the galaxy and that will outlive you and possibly all of your lifetimes, should you have any more. 

They made you feel small, as Lexa, a feat that you secretly adored.  They reminded you that there were struggles beyond your own.  They grounded you.

Fitting, that a girl born among them would do the same. 

As Alicia, they captured your imagination about as much as they captured anyone’s.  Space was cool and all.  But you hadn’t really gotten the chance to appreciate it without light. 

The Milky Way galaxy stares back at you now, though. 

For the first time in a long time, you feel whole again.  Looking at the stars always did that to you, and you suppose, it makes sense that they still do. For a moment, you exist not as Alicia or Lexa, but as a living, breathing being in a vast and complex universe. 

It makes you feel small again, and the feeling is so familiar that it spreads a certain warmth through your limbs. 

This is home.  You are home. 

Home is full of zombies, but it could be worse.  You could be one of them. 

You breathe in the night air as you hear footsteps approaching.  You know it’s late so it’s not much of a surprise when you see familiar flannel flash in the corner of your vision. 

Elyza sits next to you and turns her gaze up to the stars as well.  You don’t see it, but you don’t have to.  There’s nothing else worth looking at. 

“I lost my parents when I was young.” She starts, “My dad…I don’t remember him, not really.  He loved the stars, though.  We lived in a mining town for a while, Coober Pedy,” she actually snorts at the name.  “It was in the middle of the Outback and the only thing I remember about it is the dust.  You Americans always complain so much about your deserts, but it’s nothing compared to the Outback.”

She continues, “And I remember the stars.  There were so many that we almost couldn’t find the constellations.” She shakes her head.  “The first place I ever lived, though…that I remember, anyway…it was hard to see the stars.  So seeing them properly…” she trails off and you manage to make out a shrug in the dark. 

“We lived underground.  Like, an actual house, underground” she laughs, a sound that for once, sounds care free.  “It’s a mining town and the name literally means white man’s hidey-hole.  Sometimes I forget that.”

You finally look at her to see a genuine smile on her face. 

It’s the only one you’ve seen.  And for a moment, you forget about the stars.

“I never felt trapped there,” she whispers, the happiness fading. 

“You felt trapped elsewhere?” you ask, and she sighs.

“I feel trapped everywhere.” She doesn’t look at you.  Instead she pulls her knees to her chest and rests her head in the valley between them. 

“Sometimes I do too.” You say, simply.

“How do you cope?” she asks you, her voice still a whisper. 

You shake your head, “I don’t think I do.” 

And you both settle into silence.  The noises of the night invade your little space: crickets chirping and a small breeze blowing the grass. 

“What…” she pauses, huffing quietly with what sounds like frustration.  “What does your tattoo…what’s it for?” she asks, delicately. 

Your hand gravitates toward your bicep before you realize what you’re doing.  Your fingers land awkwardly on your arm, ironically displaying to you the tattoo Elyza was referring to.  The colors are faded but it still flowers on your skin.  It itches now that she’s mentioned it. 

“It’s to remember someone.” You graze your fingers over where Lexa’s tattoo had been, though you quietly contemplate Alicia’s. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, quietly, and you shrug. 

“It was a long time ago.  A few years, now.  When the outbreak first started…he got infected.  I thought I loved him,” and you feel tears prick at your eyes, though you haven’t cried for Matt in a long time. 

Elyza is silent, curled up into her ball.  You think maybe the conversation is over, that maybe you’ve said something that has stolen the trust she seems to have built in you. 

“Did you?” she asks.  Her voice sounds so small, so broken, that you physically start and finally look at her.  She’s looking back at you, her gaze guarded and wary. 

You shrug.  You nod.  You shake your head.  “Yes.  I think so.  But” you shrug.  “Maybe I don’t know what love is.”

You know it’s wrong.  Some part of you did love Matt, definitely.  As much as a teenager was capable of love.  Some of that love, the wiser part of you, the Lexa part, hurts because of the lost potential.  Not getting to know what could have been: would the relationship have run its course?  Would you have moved on but stayed friends?  Would he have been your one?  The loss of potential hurt as much as the loss of the love that you had shared with him. 

But you also know that that part of you is nothing, compared to the love you felt for Clarke. 

The budding love you felt when you first met Elyza.  Even if she (probably) doesn’t remember being Clarke.  She feels so familiar, and that deep ache inside of you craves her so, that it seems almost inevitable. 

You’d loved Matt, yes.  But not as much as you could come to love Elyza.  Not the deep love you shared with Clarke.  Not the deep love you shared with Costia.

“I do,” Elyza whispers.  She turns her gaze forlornly up to the stars.  “I’ve known love and I’ve lost it.  Over, and over.  Everything I loved died.  Dies.” She clenches her jaw. 

She’s angry, and she has every right to be. 

You gently reach out, slowly, so as to not startle her.  You rest your hand on her knee and squeeze lightly.  “Is that what your tattoo’s for?”

She shakes her head, and you watch as tears begin to leak from her eyes.  “I loved someone once.  It feels like a lifetime ago.  I loved her and I lost her.  Twice.” The word makes your breath catch in your throat, “I didn’t…I didn’t even get to tell her.  Not really,” she clenches her jaw and wipes at her eyes furiously. 

Your heart beat increases.  Speeds up to the point that you can feel it hammering in your chest, and it’s suddenly difficult to swallow.  

“I watched her die.  She died…she died right in front of me,” and she holds out her hands and stares at them, her eyes lost to the memory they see.  And a part of you feels sick because you remember those hands, covered in black, sticky and hot blood as it spilled from your abdomen. 

She curls her hands, finally, into fists, and presses them to her temples, her breathing becoming erratic.  “I lost her, and then I lost everything, and there was nothing I could do,” she sobs, quietly. 

You feel your own tears pull at you as the sudden realization of her pain rips through your entire being, chilling the air in your lungs and making it hard to breathe. 

“It’s…” and you don’t know if she’s talking about you, if she’s talking about Clarke watching Lexa die or if this is some new lover, in this new lifetime, but regardless, you know how it feels to lose something you love.  To watch your life, everything you’ve worked towards, crumble around you.  You know because you went through it with Costia, and you went through it with Anya and Gustus and the 7 other Nightbloods you killed to ascend to your throne.  You quietly mourned them because love was weakness and you were not weak.  So you know, with the weight of the world on your shoulders, how heavy living truly is.  “That’s not your fault,” you croak, only half believing it yourself. 

She laughs bitterly at that, “It doesn’t matter whose fucking fault it is.  Sure, I didn’t pull the trigger, but I was blamed anyway, wasn’t I?  I was blamed for everything.  ‘Fault’ stopped having any meaning a long time ago.  Who’s fault is it that when I finally, finally think I’ve found peace, I’m ripped out of it, from one tragedy to another?” she tugs at her hair in frustration, “Who’s fault is it that your new life, your new hope, crumbles almost as soon as you start it?  Whose fault is it that fate is just working against you and you lose everything you’ve been fighting for?  Whose fault is it that you lose everyone close to you, over and over and over again, and when you finally moved to a new goddamn continent, a whole new goddamn life, for a fresh start, the fucking zombie apocalypse starts?  Who’s sick sense of humor is that?” she demands, and she’s shaking in anger, now.  “Whose damn fault is it that the woman you love slipped away, right through your fingers, and all you could do was watch?  Huh?  The man who shot her?  Or yours, for not even being able to sav-”

She breaks down then, a sob ripping from her throat and she buries her face in her crossed arms.  The words chill you to your core, but you can’t think about them, not now.

She doesn’t hide the sobs.  They come fast and hard and you aren’t sure what to do, what you can do.  You decide to try to give her space.  You don’t detach your hand, though, simply letting her cry. 

Trying to ground her, like she did for you a lifetime ago. 

---

She stops crying sometime later.  Your fingers remain a feather-light touch, though they’ve dropped to her ankle.  She shivers in the night air and eventually lifts her tear-stained face to the light of the stars once again.  Her eyes are puffy and even in the dim navy light of the night, you know they’re red. 

“I’m sorry,” she says again, her voice still so small. 

You don’t say anything.  You don’t know what to say.  And sometimes (and this you do know), actions speak louder than words.   You open your arms, leaving Elyza an out.  It’s the Lexa in you, that doesn’t want to invade her space.  The Alicia side of you would have already wrapped her in a hug, maybe found her a blanket.  Anything to make her feel better.

Elyza seems confused, but a moment later she’s in your arms, her hands grasping at your shirt.  The hug is awkward from the angle you’re both at, but you don’t complain.  She stays in your arms for what feels like several minutes, her breathing gradually returning to normal. 

Her hair smells like earth and oh, it brings you back. 

You swallow your own tears, your own memories gently tugging at your consciousness. 

When she pulls away you half expect her to leave you again.  To get up and walk away as she has so many times before.

But perhaps it’s the exhaustion from crying or the pull of the stars, but she stays.  She curls up into a ball again and she stares straight ahead, but you’re in a field and the stars are visible in nearly any direction. 

You don’t know why you do it, but you scoot closer to her.  Just an inch, if that.  You cross your legs and let your arms rest on them.  You play with some grass. 

And then you look at her again, and you see her eyes are hooded, her lids heavy.  Heavy with fatigue and emotion. 

You nudge her, gently, with your elbow, and when you have her attention, you merely make a pointed glance at your shoulder.  It’s an invitation, but you’re not sure she’ll take you up on it, and you try to act like that’s fine.

She does, though.  She scooches closer to you and lays her head on your shoulder. 

You doubt it’s comfortable, but for a moment, for a while, you both do nothing but look at the stars.

And again, you are home.

Chapter Text

Things change between you two, after that.  You didn’t really realize it at first, but something shifts and it’s like you’ve found a rhythm you hadn’t known you’d lost.  Elyza sticks by your side even more than she already had been, even setting up to sleep next to you, despite the night terrors that still wake her up.  She no longer seems to care about them.

And when they do wake her, they wake you too.  At first, you can see the regret in her eyes that she’s woken you.  But you roll over and quietly tell her about the first night terror you ever had.  You were five and you don’t remember if it’s Alicia’s first nightmare, or Lexa’s, but it involves being lost in the woods and tumbling down an infinite hole. 

Some nights you just tell her other random memories.  One night, you recount memories of going to national parks with your family and hating Ol’ Faithful because who does nature think she is, anyway? 

Elyza laughs at you when you tell her that story and you bashfully tell her to cut you some slack, you were eight.

“So you’d appreciate Ol’ Faithful now, if we went back?” she asks, eyes crinkling from a smile, the second you’d seen on her face. 

“If it’s still going…yeah.  Probably one of the last things that’s actually as it was before, you know?” and that sobers up the mood far quicker than you meant to.  She doesn’t even answer, just looks at you with the same heaviness in her eyes that you feel in your chest. 

Elyza particularly likes the story of you sword fighting your brother when you both younger, with little sticks and how you made him cry because you knocked him over.  You’d run around with adrenaline singing in your veins and a fierce roar ripping itself from your lungs and you were apparently so excited that you’d tripped on your own feet and fell atop your victim.  His tears had turned to ones of laughter by the time you’d managed to regain your footing.

That story makes her smile the most, so you pretend to not remember telling it to her, and she pretends that you haven’t told it to her already. 

---

She takes to touching you.  Small things, mostly.  Grabbing her flannel when you’re wearing it and telling you it looks good on you.  She mumbles it, really, but it still makes you smile.  Taking your hand in hers and turning your palm until it’s face-up to reveal the callouses you get from late nights sharpening your knife when you can’t sleep and have nothing better to do.  She always nods her head approvingly and then leaves you alone, dropping your hand, the ghost of her touch still radiating through your nerve endings. 

You watch her relax in little ways, and it makes the weight in your chest feel a little lighter.  Elyza trusts you.  Elyza likes you, and everyone notices and lets you deal with her on an off day, or asks you to talk to her about something.  She still speaks to them, but she talks to you.  And she usually listens to you, too, something Ofelia likes to tease you about.

Still, the improvements are small.  But they’re something, and you’ll take them.  Parts of Clarke’s soul shine out through Elyza’s tired eyes.  Her goodness continues to show through too, now around you more than the others, but it’s still there. 

She’s more comfortable with you touching her, too.  Again, little things.  Pulling leaves out of her hair when she’s decided to sleep out under the stars.  (“I’m from Australia, mate, this is literally nothing to me,” she even jokes, when Ofelia asks her how she isn’t afraid of bugs and things that go bump in the night.  Ofelia’s face turns beat red and you laugh so hard you almost fall off of the log you’re sitting on.)  Or holding her things or grabbing her arm when something startles you. 

Little things.

She even starts to welcome the contact.  On occasion, she initiates it.

“Can you braid hair?” she blurts, and immediately looks away, bashful. 

And the truth is, you can’t, not really.  You can do simple braids, sure, but nothing compared to what you used to be able to do before.  You shrug.  “I’m alright.”

“I’m shit at them.” She says, and you wonder if it’s a lie because you’ve seen her braid her hair, when she’s having a bad day, she does it with the tips of her hair.  It almost seems a comfort.  A nervous tic.

“I see you do them all the time,” you point out, raising an eyebrow, and she rolls her eyes. 

“Jus’ ‘cause I can do them doesn’t mean I’m not shit at them,” she mumbles, already toying with the edges of her hair. 

The conversation stops there, and Elyza keeps playing with her hair and you keep reading the book you’d pulled out of your bag a few hours prior. 

“Would you mind if…I mean…I know I just said I’m shit at it but-” and you know what she’s asking even as she tapers off the sentence and looks away from you, discouraged. 

You simply pull your hair out of its loose ponytail and hold out the hair tie, not bothering to look up from your book.  But oh, you want to.  You want to because you want to see the subtle look of fear and happiness dance across her face as she accepts the tie, but you know better.  She’s still adjusting to showing her emotions, or healthily expressing them, and you don’t want to discourage her by looking.  So you let her decide, and after a moment, she does.  She takes the offered tie and situates herself behind you. 

And oh, you’d forgotten the feeling of someone braiding your hair.  Your hair’s dirtier than it ever was before the zombie apocalypse, and the feeling of someone’s fingers, rough with usage, running through it, brings back memories.  They’re dull memories but they fill your consciousness to the point that you abandon your book and tilt your head back.  The tugs on your scalp are familiar and slightly painful, but you swallow the pain now as you did then until it becomes a part of your character.  Part of who you are to just bear it. 

You set your jaw and close your eyes and just like that, you are regal again.  You are cold and calm and you slip so easily into a persona you’d long thought you’d forgotten.  You are alone and on top of the world in your cold tower.

Elyza finishes and gets out from behind you.  She looks at you, you feel her looking, but she doesn’t say a word, and you don’t open your eyes, because for a moment, just a moment, you are Lexa again and she is Clarke, and you are in a small bubble of peace in a turbulent and tumultuous world. 

You never see the braids, not even in a mirror, but you keep them in for days.

---

Elyza gets it in her head that you have to learn to fire a gun.  Despite Strand informing her, multiple times, and Ofelia doing much the same, that it wasn’t going to work.  You’d heard her arguing with Strand about it after your camp had been ambushed by a small army of armed ruffians.  Such events weren’t unheard of, just rare, especially so long after the apocalypse had started, and your little butterfly knife was pretty useless against several guys with rifles.  Even your bat wouldn’t have been much help.

The tense standoff had ended peacefully enough, though you were all down several supplies and your brother ended up with a black eye during tense negotiations.  But it left everyone shaken, and Elyza hadn’t left your side for several days afterwards, constantly staying up longer than you, shotgun never leaving her hands. 

She seemed to put two and two together when she’d handed you the gun at one point and you held it very incorrectly, and as far away from yourself as possible. 

So she drags you out to the middle of nowhere, despite your own protestations, and pulls out a gun.  It’s not her revolver, but Strand’s hand gun, and she quietly tells you that most people will probably only have a hand gun. 

To her credit, she heeds your complaints and instead sets about showing you practical things.  She quietly, slowly, and purposefully unloads the gun in front of you, showing you the empty chamber before putting the bullets on the ground. 

And then, she gets to work.

First, she shows you how to find the safety.  She cradles the weapon in her hand and with a soft, calm voice, she explains to you how the safety can be different depending on the gun, but it will almost always be in a similar location on a hand gun.  She stands close to you to show you but never once moves to give you the gun, simply holding it close and pointing out what each thing is called.  She flicks the safety several times during her talk, and by the end, you know where it is simply because she interrupted herself so much to show it to you. 

You know that was on purpose, too, and you appreciate the subtle approach. 

The smile she gives you when you locate it easily is one of radiant pride, subdued as it is because Elyza always holds back her emotions, to some extent. 

She then shows you how to load it.  She picks the bullets off the ground and carefully explains to you how they’re blanks, but they will still make a loud noise if the gun goes off.  She then shows you how to put them in the magazine, load them in the chamber, and how to take them out.  She moves on to putting the magazine in the gun, the click making you flinch slightly.  Her voice remains steady, perhaps the steadiest and calmest you’ve ever seen her, which surprises you. 

Finally, she shows you how to dismantle the gun.  Or, well, the best you can without proper tools.  She pulls it apart slowly at first and then quicker, reviewing the safety with you every few moments. 

She does get quiet, though, near the end of the lesson.  She offers you the gun, magazine and chamber once again empty, and asks if you’d like to try. 

You fingers fumble over the metal and your hands tremble slightly, your heart beating fast. 

She senses your hesitation.

“May I?” she asks, and you can only nod, holding the weapon at arm’s length.  She gently grabs your hands and guides them through the motions, her voice as soft as her breath caressing your ear as she quietly talks you through what she’s, and by extension, you’re, doing. 

By the end of it, the afternoon sun is setting and the gun is warm from the heat of her hands and yours, but your fingers are far more nimble and deft as you pick the gun apart.  You like it better dismantled, and you get an odd sense of satisfaction knowing that you can rip apart something that once ripped through you.  Elyza had let go of you a while ago, you don’t recall exactly when because you’d concentrated so hard on the foreign object in your hands. 

As if it might go off.  Which you know to be impossible, the blanks tucked into Elyza’s pockets but…well, old habits die hard. 

“Can I…” she interrupts your thoughts.  You nod anyway, out of habit, because whatever it is, whatever she wants, you’ll readily give it.  It doesn’t even faze you anymore. 

“Can I ask…why don’t you like guns?” she practically whispers.  She’s sitting cross-legged on the ground and watching you while you carefully make sure the gun isn’t pointed at you as you re-assemble it. 

“Why do you?” you ask instead, unable to help the defensive teenage response. 

The question seems to surprise her, her eyebrows shooting up.  A deep frown takes over her features and she looks away from you before quietly saying, “I don’t, actually.  I never have.  I’ve lost a lot of people to them, you know?” she explains, hushed.  She sniffs slightly and clenches her jaw and you know she’s trying not to cry.  “I don’t want to lose one more,” she says it so quietly that you almost don’t hear. 

But you do, and she gives you such a pointed, pained look that it steals your breath away. 

“I respect that you don’t want to shoot, I do.  I know…I knew someone like that, once.  She didn’t stand a chance so…so I know that the safety isn’t a lot, but it’s something.  It’s more than she got,” she says, sadly, and you nod.

“Then…thank you.  For showing me,” you sit down in front of her and hold out the assembled gun. 

She takes it but lets it fall between the both of you.  Her eyes are on yours and yours, on hers, and the air between you is charged and you know she feels it.  It’s palpable, and you’re not sure if she’s leaning in or if you are but you’re suddenly hyper-aware of how close she is, her gaze open and raw.  You feel your heart speed up in your chest.  Your breath hitches and for a moment, just a moment, you remember what it felt like, kissing Clarke, and you’re suddenly so overwhelmed with desire, and fear, and uncontrolled adrenaline that you physically can’t even move. 

It’s quick and chaste and you don’t know if you initiated it, or if she did, or if it was her leaning or your perceiving her leaning, even if she wasn’t.  You don’t know but all you do know is the feeling of her lips, just as soft as Clarke’s (just as chapped) and god.  Elyza doesn’t react at first but when she does, she does so gingerly, lips tentative, and the shyness in them makes you ache because it is so familiar, so imbedded in your memory. 

Elyza pulls away first, her eyes looking into yours with so much confusion, fear, and a flicker, just a flicker, of what you hope is…well, hope. 

You hold eye contact for what feels like years, trying to silently communicate, to try to answer the questions and emotions swimming in Elyza’s gaze.  She’s so much like a wounded animal and you have no idea if you’re conveying what you want to, what you need to.  What you are even trying to convey.  If you’re conveying anything at all.  And if you are…who are you conveying it to?  Elyza…or Clarke? 

And oh, if ever you’d had an opportunity, it would be in this moment, but you let it slide by because again, that grain of doubt, now indeed just a grain, is still deeply seated.  Its roots strangle the words in your throat and you can’t do anything but swallow thickly

Elyza looks away first, her face flushing a deep red, blood coloring even her ears.   You think you catch a glimpse of tears in her eyes but she’s already up and walking…no, running, away from you by the time your brain catches up and realizes everything that just happened.  You become conscious of the sound of your own pulse roaring in your ears as she breaks into a sprint.  The noise in your head makes it hard to hear the faintest sob, and maybe you imagine it, but you don’t move, still processing.  Because that look…you didn’t know how to answer it.  You don’t know what you just did or why or if you can even explain if Elyza ever decides to talk to you again.   

“I just don’t like guns,” you say to the air, to her unanswered question, and it’s such a stupid response and your voice comes out rougher than you intended.  Your hands are clammy and you wipe them unceremoniously on your jeans. 

Bitter bile rises in your throat as you look at where Elyza had disappeared into the woods and you realize that maybe, just maybe, you might have blown it.  

It makes you feel sick. 

---

Elyza starts avoiding you.  You know why.  But you’d hoped that, after everything, she would trust you enough to at least…broach the topic.  That after some awkward small talk, one of you would snap and sit the other down and asked what that kiss meant.  Where you two stood.  Where you’d go from here. 

It’s not long after your time in the woods when her silence starts to really bug you.  You still from time to time carefully take Strand’s gun, empty it, disassemble it as much as possible and then reassemble it.  Elyza watches you, though from a distance that you don’t notice at first.  The nervousness radiates off of her and you’re not sure if it’s because you’re holding a gun or if it’s her working up the courage to talk to you, and you let her be because you know (you hope) she’ll come to you when she’s ready.

And then…it stops.  She stops.  She distances herself and for a few days, you only watch as she pulls away from you.  You test it, by trying to get closer.  By walking towards her.  The words you’d been working on to say, to start the conversation, play in your mind whenever you start to approach her.  She purposefully avoids eye contact and ducks away from you.  Further, she starts to set up her sleeping bag nearer to your brother or your mother.  She’s back to clipped phrases and monosyllabic answers if you manage to pin her down and you feel like you’ve lost everything.  All of the progress, all of the trust.  Back to square one.

She carries a look of guilt about it all though, and you watch her as she blushes and purposefully avoids your gaze as you take to glaring at her. 

Then, she stops talking to you altogether and you’re not sure what to do, but your patience wears thin with each passing day.  She stops walking next to you, she stops letting you come near her and when she has a nightmare, she gets up and leaves before you can even completely pull yourself from the grasp of sleep. 

Lexa perhaps would have given her space, more space, always more damn space.  But you’re Lexa and Alicia and Alicia is not having this bullshit.  You’ve come too far, come too close, feel her seeping into your pores and your skin and your bones and your heart, and you’re not going to let her pull away.  Not then, not now, not ever.  Not again.

Her eyes are full of shock when you physically push her into a room during a canvasing mission.  She stumbles and you glare at her, folding your arms. 

“What the fuck is your problem?” you seethe, desperately trying to get a grasp on your internal emotions, but again, your Lexa side fails and all that remains is the rolling turmoil of hurt in your gut.  The heat of it rises up your throat and you clench your jaw.  She still just looks stunned before turning away from you.

“I don’t-” she starts, and you roll your eyes.

“Bullshit, Elyza.” You say.  She hides from your glare and runs a hand through her hair. 

She does glance at you, finally, and you see real fear in her eyes. 

It cuts you to the core and your expression softens automatically.  You breathe out through a huff from your nose and relax your shoulders, letting your arms drop.  Then it’s you running your hand through your hair, frustrated. 

A part of you wants to apologize.

You don’t. 

“Tell me what’s going on,” you say, instead, trying to hold back the frustration in your voice.  Trying desperately to reach out.

Judging by how she flinches, you fail miserably.  But you let it go because it hurts, it really does, that she seems to feel like, after all this time, she can’t talk to you. 

You bite your lip and look away from her.  You can feel her eyes on you and you don’t feel like meeting them because a petulant part of you wants her to know that she’s not the only person she’s hurting.  And you know she’s hurting.  The little sniffles at night and the quiet way she talks to your mom about maybe leaving your little posse at the next trading town. 

“It’s…” you shake your head, “You’re…” you can’t find the words and all at once your throat is burning and your eyes are too, so you turn away from her completely.  “At least have the courage to say goodbye,” you manage, quietly, and you don’t know if she heard but you don’t really care. 

Which is a lie, and you know it, but you try to believe it nonetheless. 

---

“I can’t lose you,” the words hit you.  They’re quiet and the voice startles you, though you manage not to jump.  You do stiffen, though. 

“I can’t lose you.  I’ve lost so many people.  Everyone I’ve ever loved has died, or left me, or been killed.  I know it’s absurd to think that I’m cursed or just a bad omen, but after it happening so much, for so long, I start to believe it.  I start to think that getting attached,” she swallows, loudly, audibly, “getting attached is dangerous for me, for others.  It hurts.  It hurts more than anything.  I never…I can’t, get attached.”

You turn to look at her, and she’s standing there, in her leather jacket and ripped jeans, holding her little journal and staring at the open pages.  For a moment, you wonder if she’d written all of this down, but she’s leafing through it in what you decide is a nervous tic. 

Her hands are shaking.  “I never used to believe that.  But it’s happened over, and over, and over, and I just can’t take it.  I can’t take losing someone else that I,” she pauses, paper and everything, and you swear you see her eyes turn to you for just a moment, though it’s difficult to tell, with her head bowed the way it is.  She swallows again, “that I care about.  Deeply.  More than I’m supposed to, probably.  And…I think you feel it too.  And the other day…in the woods…I know you felt it.  I know what this is.  I know and I c-can’t…I can’t.” ” she whispers, and the crack in her voice makes your heart clench. 

A beat, and you nod quietly.  “I know that feeling.” You say. 

She still doesn’t look at you, so you continue, finally deciding to throw caution to the wind.  “I used to think like that, you know?” and that makes her head snap up to look at you.  You nod solemnly.  “I used to think that was best, not getting attached, not letting people in…I thought it was for the best.  I was taught it was best.  And it seemed to work because for a little while, everything was going fine.  I was detached and I could watch people come and go, and I convinced myself I was invincible.”

“What happened?” her voice is so quiet you almost don’t hear her say it. 

You shrug.  “I was a very bad liar, especially to myself.” 

You meet her gaze, and it’s once again guarded, her brow knitted and nostrils flared slightly.  “And…” you take a deep breath, “I had some help.  Someone who helped me realize that that was no way for me to live.”

“Who?” she asks, her voice hushed, and your heart starts hammering in your chest.  This is too close, too honest, and yet you can’t stop yourself when the words come tumbling out. 

“You,” you shrug, as if it’s nothing, as if you haven’t just cracked your own rib cage to expose your entire heart, your entire soul.  “A long time ago, I thought I was better off alone, surrounded by people but attached to none.  And you may not know it, you may not feel it, but you’re a good person.  You always have been.” You sigh.  “And even though I know, and you know, and everyone knows, that you’ve been trying to keep yourself distant from us, you haven’t been able to.  You love cooking with Strand and you get on with my brother and you try to keep yourself at a distance, but you love us.  You do.  You’d do anything for us and it shows.  When those thugs showed up, you had your gun out the whole time.  You fired a warning shot when they punched my brother.” You shake your head.  “You know it inherently, and no matter how much you fight it, you’ll never win.  Same as me, how I used to be.  I used to think love was weakness, but I could never quite convince myself.” 

Elyza is staring at you now, her expression unreadable, though you doubt that’s intentional.  You look away from her again, out into the woods on the edge of which you’d been sitting. 

“That's what life is about, you know?  It's more than just surviving: it's loving.  Otherwise, what's the point?  Living to die?” you scoff, “We deserve better than that.”

And you don’t realize the impact of what you’ve said until she’s blown past you, her footsteps hurried and a frustrated, irate, desperate air radiates off of her.  Her temples are being pressed by her fists and she spins on the balls of her feet to face you, her eyes wild, scared.  Her breaths are shaky and for a moment, you’re struck with genuine fear.  You’ve never seen her look so wild, so scared, so desperate. 

“This is crazy,” her voice shakes and her eyes are full of tears, and she’s shaking, physically shaking, so hard that alarm runs through you.  “This is crazy!” she adds, much louder, her voice almost a shout.  She runs both hands through her hair at once and starts pacing before you.  “You are driving me crazy!” she shouts, really shouts.  She’s wobbly in her knees and you can’t tell if she’s sad or angry or scared, though you wouldn’t doubt a mixture of all three, and she’s purposefully avoiding looking at you as she continues. 

“This is absolutely insane!  I’ve had to live without you for years!” she shouts, turning to you, the tears coming hard down her cheeks now, “Decades!  I’ve had to live without you and cope without you and do you know now much that hurts?!  And then you show up in my life again and I fall for you, all over again, because how can I not?  And I thank you in Trigedasleng and I do all that I can, I do all that I can to leave hints and clues and try and read you and I can’t fucking take it anymore!” it turns into a scream and she turns away from you, “You’re finally in my life and you don’t even remember who I am, who you are, and yet you say these things, you say these things and you sound so much like her, like you!  And I can’t.  I told myself I wouldn’t get attached and I could take it and just have you in my life but I can’t do it, I can’t!  I can’t stay here-” she pulls in a breath that turns into a racking sob as she turns to go. 

You react on instinct, because in front of you is a breaking woman, one you’ve seen before, who spat on you after your betrayal, who hated you.  Who loved you.  The broken woman in front of you is too familiar, and the words come automatically.

“Clarke.” You whisper, and her gaze snaps to you, disbelief shining in them.  “Her name…your name, was Clarke.”

She freezes with a sharp intake of breath.  Her gaze is almost scared to hope as she tentatively, gingerly, lets out a small “Lexa?”

You nod, swallowing back the lump in your throat as you start: “Clarke.” And god, it feels nice to taste her name on your lips once more.  You say the next thing you can think of.  One of the last things you said to her.  “There are no lines in the sand: not here, not now.  You don’t have to go, you don’t-”

You don’t realize you’ve started crying too until she collapses on the ground, to her knees before you, relief, disbelief, playing across her features. 

“You don’t have to go,” you tell her again, and she’s crushing you in a hug not a moment later, holding you close, sobbing into your shirt. 

“You’re here,” she says, once, twice, thrice, into your collar, and she clings to you, her sobs uncontrollable.

“I’m here,” and you hold her almost as tightly as she’s crushing you, “I’m not going anywhere,”

It’s a whispered promise, and you both know that neither of you can really keep it. 

But for now, it’s enough.