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She’s sharp on nineteen-hundred hours for the drop. The scope feels tight and cool when she first presses it against her skin. The dusty heat of the day has disappeared into a typical desert evening where the cold, dry air curls around her skin, searching for warmth beneath the light fatigues she’s wearing.
She’s been running along the crumbling skyline under forty minutes, her boots barely making a sound as she slips through homes like smoke; a shadow quickly fading against a wall. When she finds the spot she settles in quickly, pulls the backpack loose and loosens the drawstring to get the gear out. Far below, she can see the group of men gathered around a campfire. It’s illegal at this time of year where brush fires can blaze up at even the scent of a cigarette.
They’re big. Too many for her to take on in hand to hand, which is why she’s brought her rifle, but if push came to shove; Clarke Griffin knows she’ll kill them with her bare hands if she has to.
She takes less than a few minutes to set up her position where she crawls onto her belly to look at the quarry beneath the edge of the rooftop.
She stares at them for a long time. Each man distinct, edges sharp within her scope. She breathes out slowly as she searches for him. The one who had betrayed - she can’t even think of the name without making her mind stutter to a halt.
Bellamy fucking Blake. Traitor. Thief. Braggart. Asshole with anger management issues - not that she can judge as right now the rage has solidified in her blood like little pockets of hatred that have congealed beneath her skin.
She feels the trigger hard against her finger. She focuses her gaze. An eye for an eye in a world that has no space for offhand comments that can land your leader in the hands of the enemy. She loves the irony as the rim of the scope pushes on her eye socket while she zooms in on his deep brown eyes, which are almost black in the deepening shadows.
It has been over a week since they’ve seen her. Lexa. God, don’t think of her. The barracks had been in a frenzy and she knows that the heads of intelligence are freaking out at the slow trickle of information that has been coming back from the usual ‘channels.’ And no-one would tell her anything. So Clarke had done what she knew she shouldn’t have and started her own investigations. She had killed no one; yet . But she’d scared the shit out of enough people to get her to this point.
Bellamy fucking Blake .
Last known person to have been with First Lieutenant ‘Commander’ Woods, before she disappeared almost eight days ago. At the cafe where they’d all meant to meet for drinks and dancing. She remembers the heat of bodies as they’d swarmed into the room, the rhythmic cadence of percussion - women, sinuous as they moved like sprites through the darkened space of ancient rugs and bubbling hookahs; the scent of rose and lemon seductive and heady interspersed with the ever-present hashish in these regions.
It disappointed Clarke when Lexa wasn’t there. For weeks she’d been pushing the growing feelings down until she couldn’t think anymore. She’d grown cold. She’d danced that night, and she’d danced hard. Nobody could touch her. The mask on her face had been cold enough to keep even the drunkest of her brothers and sisters in arms at a distance. Affability or social graces was not what they knew her for. Cold. Sharp. Lexa had laughed at the barriers she’d put up and had systematically broken every single one of them.
She’d done it all for her. Exposed her heart. She hadn’t expected undying devotion, as she’d never told Lexa how she felt. Lexa had respected her. Used her more often than not as her wing woman. Each time Lexa had gone home with another gorgeous woman was another bullet in Clarke’s ice-bound heart.
She’d become even more of a bitch, but Clarke didn’t give a damn. It had been the only way to cope with the growing hurt. The ache whenever she thought of the woman; the lithe, tanned, muscled body, the dark curls of long hair that flowed around in a rapture of chocolate, gold and russet mostly pulled back into tight braids. Clarke swore that Lexa’s face had been fashioned by something ethereal - she can’t count the times she’s imagined kissing those full lips, the bone structure alone is enough to make Clarke’s fingers itch to trace the strong jawline, to feather across high cheekbones.
Lexa had made her swear. Over and over like a mantra; cross your fucking heart, Clarke, and never fucking die - as they clinked beer bottles in the fading light. Camped outside their tents, Lexa wiggling her boot in time to some imagined tune. It had driven Clarke insane and relaxed her in a way that nothing else could.
And Clarke had made her swear the same as the beer sat bitter in her gut.
And here she was, about to bang up one of her own because of the shadow of a whisper. He was the one. That night. Boasting to the owner of the place who Lexa Woods was. Indiscreet with drunken hyperbole, never knowing that his words would cause her capture.
Clarke hated this devotion she feels for a woman to whom she can never admit her feelings. She’s doing all of this for Lexa, and she knows deep in her heart that she’s better off without it. No emotions, shut down; shoot.
So she takes a deep breath and moves from Bellamy’s smiling gaze to a non-lethal shot further down his body. She’s good enough just to nick him.
“Don’t do it, Clarke .”
She almost falls over as shock rips through her. Her neck almost snaps as she looks for the source of that voice. She releases her hold on the rifle and shifts her position.
Against the plain sandstone edge of the rooftop, she sees something that makes no sense to her eyes.
“Lexa? How?” Clarke struggles as she looks around frantically; looking for the punchline, the joke. Their friends hidden; waiting to watch her shocked response. But there’s no-one, and the wind seems to come up from nowhere, painful in her ears as the shrill of it swirls around her.
“He’s not to blame, Clarke,” Lexa’s voice is tired and Clarke can see the deep fatigue in the woman’s gaze. There are marks on her face. Blood. Dark. Her uniform is in tatters. She’s shrouded in darkness.
Clarke leans forward to touch her. She feels the chill of the wind deep inside her throat when her hand goes through nothing. She feels the frayed edge of a wail creep up her throat. No. No. You promised!
“What the fuck, Lexa?” she whispers harshly. She doesn’t realize she’s crying until the prone woman tries to reach out to her too, flinching when fingertips meant to erase Clarke’s tears go through her face. Clarke shivers at the sudden coldness of her skin.
There’s a quiet look of confusion on Lexa’s face before her lips tremble into a soft smile.
“Behind Cafe Nia.” Lexa’s breathing sounds wet. Ghoulish.
The drumbeat of the pulse in Clarke’s ears threatens to explode her skull as she tries to understand what’s happening.
“We searched there first, Lexa. They must have moved you.” Clarke doesn’t know why she’s whispering, for the wind snatches her words out of the air as soon as she speaks. Lexa seems to hear her. “Are you -“
Lexa laughs, then groans softly as she clutches at her stomach.
“Not dead yet , Griffin. Going to take a lot more than what they’ve done. And you can’t shoot Bellamy. I need something to look forward too.” Lexa jokes and Clarke wants to cry. She wants to tell her everything. Of her stupidity. Of being stubbornly cold. Of pushing her to the friend zone before she even knew what she felt. Fuck. The cowardice of Clarke Griffin knows no bounds.
“Lex. Please,” and Clarke can feel the snot beginning to clog up her nostrils as the sobs bank up. “Where the fuck are you? How do I find you? Where are you fucking hurt, bitch? You promised me.”
“Cross my heart; never die. I know, I know. Damn it, Clarke. Hurry. The woman - Nia. She’s the one. Downstairs backdoor. I’m underneath. I can hear the music.”
And if Clarke listens closely, she can hear drums, muffled along with the low rumble of a Saturday night crowd.
She looks at Lexa and there must be something in her eyes as green eyes soften, a small smile curls up one side of her mouth.
“Hurry the fuck up , Griffin.”
And when Clarke looks again, she’s gone. The wind has died and Clarke can hear Bellamy and his mates from the other squadron roaring with laughter.
She doesn’t think. She repacks her bag quickly; she’s a soldier first, and her training won’t allow for weaponry to be left in the wrong hands.
She runs. And she radios Raven Reyes, her only other friend on the base.
“Reyes. Need a medic at Cafe Nia. Now. I found her.”
Clarke doesn’t need to tell her who. Raven’s been helping Clarke all week, trying to find avenues for information. Ways to beat the juggernaut of military bureaucracy, and the simple pumping of ‘friends’ in the local community. As they’d gotten closer to the truth; people had clammed up. Obviously too scared of the clan leader who ran this district to say anything of value.
She can hear Raven’s quiet whoop of joy and her muttered response, “onto it, Griffin. See you there with bells on.”
“Just bring artillery. And someone who can sew up a bullet wound.”
She runs and doesn’t stop to respond to Raven’s “how the fuck are you getting this intel without me, bitch?”
By the time she reaches the backdoor Lexa told her about she’s breathing hard. The door goes into a stores area she remembers from when they did a sweep last week. There had been nothing.
Clarke can feel panic rising in her. Where are you? She looks around the walled-in area at the back and starts pushing at bricks; hoping for a Nancy Drew moment and hidden staircases. But after several minutes; she found nothing. Was she hallucinating? Is she finally breaking down? She hears the thump of boots behind her and spins around with her rifle up and ready to fire.
“Woah there, Princess Leia.” It’s Finn Collins with Raven not far behind. Clarke lets a slow breath and feels the panic ratchet up a notch as they’re making more noise than she’d like.
“Where is she?” The medic comes through and Clarke recognizes the younger Blake with her backpack strapped tight, closely followed by Anya Forrest. Fuck. Lexa’s older sister.
“She said she was underneath,” Clarke says as she continues to push at the ground looking for something, anything that would lead her beneath the cafe dance floor.
“She what now?” Anya’s voice was clear and Clarke could hear the confusion in her tone. “Did she get her hands on a radio?”
Clarke can’t say how she knows. She’s well aware of exactly how that would make them see her. So she keeps moving and says sharply, “We don’t have time. She’s hurt badly. She’s here somewhere but all of us tromping around as obvious as fucking fuck ; is going to let them know and they’ll probably kill her.”
Anya nods and motions for most of the group to move out. They drift towards their trucks, trying to pretend at being Saturday night tourists.
Clarke moves closer to the sound of the dance floor. She just wants to rip through it, but knows Lexa would be dead before they got through the first layer of wood. She finally feels something different beneath her feet near the old boiler out the back. She knocks against it and can hear the hollow echo.
“Here.” Anya and Finn move to help her push. “Lift, lift, lift !” Clarke whispers in a frantic rush as the sound of metal on concrete grates loudly, making all of them still so they can hear whether anyone is coming to check. T
Beneath the metal, the concrete is wet. There’s a metal door and Clarke can feel her heart rate pick up again. It only takes Raven a few twists of one of her tools before the lock on it snaps open. Clarke can feel the adrenaline that’s slowed down after her run rises again and swirls through her stomach as they crept down the stairs.
She can feel Lexa close by. It almost hurts. She’s surrounded by her comrades and she feels a surge of kinship with them as they slowly make their way through. Anya motions for Clarke to move with Raven and Octavia to the left, while she whispers into her radio alerting the team above as she and Finn move to the right.
Clarke can feel how damp the space is, and she wonders how when they’re surrounded by the dry desert air. She can’t remember the last time it rained.
Above them is the steady sound of the drums being hit in syncopation with the pluck of stringed instruments. The thump of the dancer’s feet bare against the floorboards. Clarke recognizes the muffled music and looks hard into the darkness. There’s no-one manning the place, and Raven hasn’t picked up any cameras yet.
They find a dog crate in a corner. The metal has yellowed with rust in places. They catch bits of fabric on some corners. Clarke rushes to it and almost cries out when she sees the rumpled clothes and blood. The lock is along one side of the cage door where someone has tried to pry it loose, leaving behind strings of skin and blood.
It’s so dark and the roof is low enough to force them into a crouching position. Raven moves forward and cuts the cage lock when they hear a sound behind them. It’s the distinctive sound of a pistol being slid into a firing position. Clarke stiffens before moving around slowly. Octavia and Raven have both stilled. She’s startled at the sound of the cage door clattering to the ground.
“Now who is going to pay for that?” The woman’s voice is silky and Clarke can only see a vague outline in the inky black of the space. “Uh -uh, keep the gun down or I will shoot through the cage first. Understand?”
Clarke doesn’t have her usual body armor on. She’s hoping this woman doesn’t know that. She shifts a little so that her body is covering as much of the cage as possible. There hasn’t been a sound from the mound of clothes, but Clarke can feel her. It’s Lexa alright, and she’s not letting this bitch anywhere near her.
“What do you want?” Clarke growls. The darkness is going as her eyes adjust to the muted light. She can see the shape of the woman’s mouth, the length of her hair that winds down her back, and the very professional grip that she’s got on her weapon. She’s beautiful and Clarke hates her. She realizes this must be the woman that had encouraged Lexa to join her in her fucking boudoir. If they get out of here alive, she’s going to kill First Lieutenant Woods with her bare hands.
“Well now, I think I have most of what I need already.”
“I doubt that very much,” Clarke snarks back and raises her voice. She hopes to God that Anya can hear her over the damn music.
“You must be Clarke.” The woman’s grin is a slash of white in the dim gray beneath the floor. “She didn’t stop talking about you when I took her to my bed. A slap in the face. I would say that I have had my revenge for such insouciance, don’t you think?”
Clarke’s finger is almost trembling against the trigger guard. It would take a second to lift it, but that second would be enough for a bullet to tear through Lexa’s body.
“I don’t understand what you’re doing here holding a gun against us when you know we’re eventually going to get her out and bring you to justice.” Clarke keeps her voice steady and louder than normal. There’s a soft grunt behind her, and her heart clenches when she hears a quiet whimper in the now stale air.
“I like to play with my food,” the woman responds, and there’s such an air of malice to her tone that Clarke stops breathing.
She’s right. There’s a soft clicking in the background and Clarke realizes just what it is she’s listening to. The beat of the percussion had been a distraction, and they’d never heard it as they walked right into this trap of sorts.
“You blow this place up and thousands more of us will descend upon here and make your life hell,” Octavia snarls in the background.
“We’ve been here for thousands of years. Do you think your ridiculous country can change our history? We’ve had a thousand of you before, and I imagine a thousand more to come. You are nothing. We will defeat you when your people get sick of their money being spent on a war far from home. No value . No profit . No need .”
She spits the words - casual darts of hatred imbued in every syllable until there’s nothing left. Clarke has heard it all before.
The luminescent trajectory of the bullet seems dreamlike as Clarke watches it impale the woman’s eye. They rattle the pistol out of her hand under a spray of bullets, and Clarke doesn’t think as she dives to the cage entrance. She crawls as far in as possible, her hands gently patting around Lexa’s body, feeling for the worst of her injuries.
“Clarke - get out. I need to load her up.”
It feels like hours, days - a month; a year. Clarke doesn’t know. She only knows that Lexa is alive and still hasn’t woken up from a deep slumber of pain management and emergency surgeries. She had a bullet in her gut that had hit none of her major organs or arteries. They had shredded her back; lines of carefully wrought pain as her captors had sliced through her skin. Many were superficial. Some had needed stitches deep beneath the skin.
Clarke hadn’t understood what had happened that night. Neither had military intelligence who had questioned her for hours on how she knew where to find her fellow officer. Clarke knew that if she’d said she’d seen Lexa’s ghost who had told her where to find her body while Clarke lay on a windswept rooftop; she’d be sectioned and on her way home within hours. So she kept her mouth shut and murmured cliches about a ‘woman’s intuition’ and ‘gut feelings.’
Nia had been the wife of a local clan leader. She’d heard Bellamy bragging about the Commander who knew so many military secrets from the number of high-ranking women she’d slept with. Nia had not known that Bellamy had been shaming the ‘commander.’ That he’d been spouting off in a drunken haze as Clarke ‘cold as ice’ Griffin had rejected his advances yet again. He blamed Lexa. Any idiot could see Clarke’s infatuation with her from a mile off. Nia hadn’t known that it was a foolish tirade of sexual frustration.
Clarke still felt anger at Bellamy. It would come out eventually, and he’d be lucky with a dishonorable discharge. Octavia had been furious when she heard the whispered rumors.
There was the soft brush of something across her skin. Thinking that it was the incessant flies in the region, Clarke flicked her fingertips across her arm to shoo it away when she collided with something that wasn’t a fly. Her gaze lifted, and she looked into those damn pools of green. She didn’t want to, but she felt the first of a hiccoughing sob tighten her throat.
“Hey.”
“Cross my heart, never die,” Clarke tried to say between her blubbering.
Lexa laughs, and it’s sweet. Clarke hates herself for never having told her.
“I didn’t think I’d see those beautiful blue eyes again.”
“I’m sorry I friend zoned you. I don’t want to be your friend. I mean I do - but not just your friend. I’ve always wanted more. And I don’t know how you fucking did what you did, but I’m so glad. Otherwise we’d never have found you.”
Clarke hates herself even more than ever now. She had wanted to say this with a little more panache, more finesse; but she’s her usual blunt object self hammering at the crystal vase of her unrequited pining.
“Slow down, soldier,” Lexa teases and then her face sobers. “I don’t know how I saw you, Clarke. You were going to fucking shoot Bell. One minute I was in pain and then floating above my cell and then I - I felt you. And then you were there.”
Clarke laughed through her tears.
“You scared the living shit out of me. I almost shot Bellamy on accident.”
Lexa smiled and Clarke could feel her heart burst. Her mouth tilted up towards the skies as a grin spread across her face.
“Clarke - I thought I was going to die.”
The words are terrible and it almost cuts Clarke in half; fast deflating the joy she’d felt. She struggles to find her breath.
“I kept thinking, I never told you something that I’ve been meaning to say for a long time. From the moment I met you.” Lexa’s voice gets stronger as she speaks.
Clarke groans as she thinks Lexa is going to give her a hard time for rejecting her that first time, yet again.
“No. Stop.” She interrupts, and that small line appears between Lexa’s perfectly shaped brows to show her level of discomfort. It’s only a small line, so Clarke continues. “I’m a coward. I’ve been so scared of getting close to anyone. Out here. Where any day, any time - I could lose you. I didn’t want to risk it. My heart. I didn’t want anyone to know me. Touch me. Get close. I couldn’t. When the bullets are flying, Lexa; my only thought has been of you. Is she safe? Will she stay alive? I didn’t want anyone to own this heart of mine. Least of all you. And then, God - every time we went out you’d have someone new.” Clarke’s voice broke.
“Clarke. We all face that. I didn’t do those women because of you. I had to keep my own demons at bay.”
“And that almost got you killed!” And there were those damn tears again. Clarke wiped them away, furious with herself.
The softness of Lexa’s fingertips against her skin stilled her heart and the raging mouth that didn’t seem to know how to shut up. She breathed out a slow, soft sigh.
“Clarke. I’m sorry. I fucked up,” Lexa whispers.
“No. I should have been brave.”
The line between those dark brows deepens, and Clarke knows she’s really confused her. She moves closer until their faces are so close she can smell the antiseptic on Lexa’s skin.
“I don’t understand.”
She can feel Lexa’s words as puffs of air against her lips. Before she can lose courage, she brushes her own against the softest mouth she’s ever touched. And her stomach tilts a few hundred degrees over when she feels Lexa kissing her back.
It’s gentle, but she can feel the need in the way Lexa tries to keep her exactly where she is. But Clarke has more that she needs to say.
“I should have told you I’m crazy about you. That it only took me a few weeks since flying in to base to know that. That I lied when I ‘friend zoned’ you. That I think of you all the time. That I’m not surprised that your damned spirit found me and gave me a hard time about shooting Bellamy.”
The words are a jumble as she moves away to look at Lexa’s expression, which has grown stormy. Her heart stutters. It’s too much. And the acids in her stomach curdle when she thinks Lexa doesn’t feel the same way.
“For fuck’s sake , Clarke. You never talk this much. Shut up and kiss me.”
And Clarke feels an explosion of warmth move across her chest. She was never meant to feel this endless, crazy devotion; she can’t help it though.
Lexa Woods has her heart whether Clarke stays in the shadows or walks into the spotlight.
Clarke traces that God damn jawline, which she’s been imagining for months. And it feels better than good.