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It was dark, dark, and the cold bit harshly at Clarke’s skin all the way down to her bones. The blue light of the prophecies provided a gloomy glow on the shelves around the little group, but the endless hallways between them were pitch black. A shiver ran down the blonde’s spine. She threw a quick look at Raven behind her. The brace around her leg would make it hard for her to run should the need arise. A frown took hold of her brow, but then again, they all were frowning. Worry was almost sweet when compared to the sheer fear coursing through her veins.
“O?”, she whispered, loath to disturb the chilling silence around them. “We’ve got to hurry up and get out of here. Which one is it?”
Octavia nodded, as though coming out of a trance. The blonde almost sighed in relief as she saw her friend come back to her senses but was smart enough to not shout their victory quite yet.
The blue-eyed brunette started walking slowly, her group of friends following, wands out and tips glowing, scrutinizing the darkness and the secrets that it hid in the velvet of silence. Bellamy was to her left and Clarke to her right, with Raven, Lincoln, and Finn forming a triangle behind them. They needed to get the prophecy Octavia’s dream warned her about and walk back out of here and to the safety of Hogwarts before anything drastic happened.
“There”, Octavia whispered as she approached a shelf. “I think this is the one.”
Clarke barely watched her friend’s hand reach out to take the small, round object swirling with prophetic magic, as her attention was being relentlessly pulled to the darkness around them. It was as still and quiet as it had been from the moment they entered the room, yet she could not help but feel a little tingle on her skin, like electricity caressing her soul. It was disconcerting, and she was terrified.
When the prophecy was safely tucked in Octavia’s hands, the feeling of a presence intensified, leaving Clarke to grasp at Raven’s sleeve with choking breath.
“We need to leave”, she panicked. “Right now.”
“It’s alright, Clarke”, Raven tried to soothe her, taking her hand. “We’re leaving; she’s found it. It’s fine. Just breathe, okay?”
And it should have been. But then a dark, velvety voice rang out of the darkness, and it sounded so beautiful Clarke started to tremble.
“Well, well, well.” A female voice. Two sets of footsteps echoed in the darkness. The group huddled closer together, tightening their grips on their wands, looking right ahead in the face of the voice. “What do we have here?”
Then the two figures stepped into the low light provided by the surrounding prophecies, and Clarke stopped breathing. All the Gryffindor bravery, loyalty, and principles flew out the window, and all she could do was stare at this woman in dreading and longing awe.
Those were the words she had printed into her skin, down the length of her left forearm. She felt dizzy with the truth of it.
Oh, she had heard of this woman. Recently escaped from Azkaban, rumoured to have been made half-mad by the Dementors and her pureblood family’s terrible values and discipline, His most loyal and deadly servant, stood before them, a gaze made of green steel trailed fixedly on Octavia and the prophecy she held.
Lexa Black.
Clarke’s soulmate.
The woman standing beside her looked down on her friends as though they were a mere speck of dirt on her shoe, her wand casually dandling from the loose grip of her hand, as though they were no threat at all. Power dripped out of the two women, demanding respect. Anya Malfoy née Black, then. Tris’s mother. Slytherins, all of them.
Distracted as she was, Clarke almost failed to hear the discreet footsteps joining in, coming from all the alleyways around their gathering. Soon they were surrounded by people dressed in black from head to toe, metallic masks covering their faces. Death eaters.
She could still feel Raven’s hand gripping at her own she had not yet let go of. She was sweating, Clarke could hear her breathe loudly. The blonde looked down at her friend’s injured leg, slightly shaking in her brace. Back up at the people slowly closing in. She couldn’t look at her.
“You know”, Anya drew the group’s attention back to her. “You really should learn to tell the difference between dreams and reality.”
She was still walking towards them, agonizingly slowly, her sister right beside her, eyes roving over each of their faces.
“You saw only what the Dark Lord wanted you to see”, the dirty blonde woman resumed her speech, a haughty little smile stretching her lips and showing her sharp teeth. “Now hand me the prophecy.”
Immediately, loyal to her own fire and impulsivity, Octavia answered, “If you do anything to us, I’ll break it.”
Then, there it was. A laugh that pulled at the edge of Clarke’s sanity, sending her heart into wild beatings both in fear and excitement. It sounded too loud, amused and evil, it was not the laughter of the sane of mind, yet it was not mad either. Lexa’s face lit up in pure delight.
“Ah”, she fixed her green eyes back on Octavia. “She knows how to play! How wonderful.” Amused, cruel. Beautiful.
“Lexa Black,” Raven whispered beside Clarke.
As though she had heightened hearing – and she probably did, the woman was barely human - the brunette perked up and shifted her attention to Raven, who trembled under her intense gaze.
“Raven Reyes, is it?” Her eyes narrowed as she travelled through her memory before her devilish grin came back to play on the pale lines of her face. “How’re Mom and Dad?”
Trembling, not for fear any longer, but for rage, Clarke tightened her grip on her friend’s hand. Raven had been orphaned at a very young age, both parents murdered at the hand of the monster before them. A monster who had killed so many, rumoured to laugh in delight as she would cast her signature spell, the Unforgivable cruciato curse. Clarke did not think that to be true. Clarke did not want that to be true.
Why? Oh, she could not think of that.
“Better”, Raven spit out in answer, drawing her wand high into the air as if preparing for an attack. “Now that they’re about to be avenged!”
Getting into battle position in response, Lexa’s hand was soon covered by Anya’s. Octavia stopped Raven as well, eyes pleading her friend not to do anything that would lead to them not walking out of this encounter alive.
“Everybody just calm down, shall we?,” Anya spoke up, as though this was a perfectly normal situation to be in. “All we need is the prophecy.”
Clarke still felt frozen into place, unable to react, body covered in little waves of shock. She still hadn’t talked. She needed to be careful, to stay silent all the way through – that way Lexa would not know. That way, perhaps, they would be safe.
“No.” Lincoln’s hand found Octavia’s as the girl denied the dark witch’s request. “Not happening.”
Anya and Octavia kept on exchanging, Clarke dazing in and out of focus, her whole life and future now blurry like never before. She felt so cold, so hot. Her head was spinning around, a little music drafting through… Hand clenching, unclenching. Her friend sighing in fear. And then a hand, gentle but firm, pressing against the small of her back. She startled, looked around at the unmoving figures of the death eaters, not daring to look back. None of them were missing. She looked at where the two women had stood…
Lexa was gone.
“Hi Muddy,” a delicious voice dripped into her ear. Heat diffused from the small of her back, the hand there grounding her and letting her float away all at once. “ ‘Brightest witch of her age’, they call you. Yes, I’ve heard all about Octavia Blake’s little mudblood friend. I have to say, it’s such a shame you were born out of such dirt. You are quite a beautiful creature. And as I’m sure you’ve been made aware by the obscene amount of delightful rumours floating from ear to ear about dear little old me, I do so enjoy playing with beautiful things.”
Clarke shivered and felt Raven gulp beside her. The woman was so close Clarke could feel her breath on her neck, her cheek. She needed to remember not to say anything. Lexa could not know, and Clarke would not let her. Who knew what a dark witch like His most loyal servant would do to the one her soul was destined for?
Seven hells and her soulmate was one of them.
The conversation was still tense between Anya and Octavia in front of her, but Clarke’s attention could not stay with those words, no matter how crucial their outcome would be. Not when she stood so close, not when she could smell the cinnamon and pine drifting from her dark hair.
A rich, low laugh resonated in the crook of her ear.
“You’re scared”, the woman said. Oh, how Clarke wished she could see her, the dreadful glint of pleasure in the dark green of her eyes at having some pitiful creature at her mercy. “Scared of your better. It makes sense I suppose.” A pause. “You know, it truly is a shame. Perhaps if you’d been born pure of blood I would have courted you. Now, I’ll just have to watch you die a pitiful death fighting for a pitiful cause… Tragic, really.”
“I am not afraid,” Clarke blurted out, forgetting herself in the light of her anger. “Not of you.”
And she found that in this moment, it was true. Lexa Black was a monster. Lexa Black was mad. Lexa Black was a Death Eater. Murderer. Liar. Torturer.
And yet, Lexa Black had a soulmate. A soul. It had to mean something.
She felt more than she heard the sharp intake of breath from Lexa behind her. There it was, the reaction. The realization. Those had been the words written on Lexa’s skin since infancy. The hand withdrew slightly.
There was a long moment of suspension, before long, strong arms wrapped around Clarke’s frame, and the fear came flooding back in like the tide of a stormy ocean.
“Well then”, she heard Lexa’s voice, muffled through the blood pumping in her ears, “There she is.”
And then Octavia shouted, the prophecy was smashed down onto the floor, and spells flew in from all sides.
Arms tightened around her frame, the sound of apparition, quick, and then Clarke’s world faded to black.