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Clarke is smart about it. She’s also not an asshole, much as Raven might disagree. She understands from Octavia that in Grounder culture, being granted permission to put on a warrior’s paint is a big deal – a very, very big deal. The paint is meant to incur the favor of the gods, and shield its wearer from harm – thus, inexpertly applied paint is considered a terrible omen for a warrior’s prospects in battle. So being invited to apply Lexa’s war paint is a gesture of extreme trust – and coming from Lexa, that might as well be a daylong parade ceremony with fireworks in the evening. So Clarke doesn’t strike the first time she puts on Lexa’s paint, or the second, or the third.
But Lexa does need to be taken down a notch, and further than that Clarke still needs to get her back for when she’d laughed uproariously at Clarke’s fall from her horse. Of course they didn’t fucking have horses on their fucking spaceships, so how the fuck is she supposed to know that her heels should be down and not up and she should be holding her reins like this and not that and isn’t Lexa supposed to be teaching her, not fucking laughing? There had been mud all over her favorite pants. It wasn’t funny.
So Lexa needs to be taught a lesson, but Clarke is patient. She can wait until that lesson isn’t a deep and serious breach of Grounder etiquette, and of the trust that Lexa has so recently put in her, but something truly and deeply satisfying that the Commander will never in a million years suspect. And then they’d see how much the big bad Heda Leksa liked being laughed at.
"You're going somewhere?” Clarke says, groggy, at some ungodly hour of the theoretical morning when civilized people are meant to be sleeping and Lexa is currently creeping about the tent, searching for her pants. The look she gets is momentarily guilty before the blank mask of the Commander returns.
“Yes,” she says, rummaging through the pile of clothing they had discarded in a hurry the night previously, when there had been a party and Monty had been trying a new distillation technique for his moonshine. They'd mixed it with some sort of berry juice provided by the Grounders and it had all hit them more or less at once. One moment they'd been talking and laughing around a bonfire, swapping war stories and bullshit in equal measure, and the next they were all sweaty, dirty animals who couldn't keep their hands off each other. Octavia and Lincoln had practically been having sex by the fire, Bellamy had been wrapped around his latest Grounder girl, and Clarke…well, she had climbed into Lexa’s lap where she’d been sitting on a log in front of the fire and not left it until Jasper and Monty’s hooting and Bellamy’s fake vomiting noises had driven them back to the Commander’s tent.
Clarke’s head throbs like an open wound, and she can’t imagine that Lexa’s feels much better – Grounders tend to have even less of a head for alcohol than the Sky People do, and Lexa is no exception. In fact, if Clarke remembers it right, they’d just barely made it to the tent before Lexa had actually ripped clean through her shirt, which –
“You're replacing that, by the way,” Clarke says as the Commander finds the offending garment, and this time there’s a full-on blush, which Clarke savors.
“As you wish, Princess.”
“It's too early for that crap, Lexa. Where are you going, anyway?”
“There is…some trouble. On our northern border. One of the generals of the Ice People has been raising a warband, but they're small. ” She smirks. “Not too many eager to go up against us, after the Mountain. So this shouldn't take long.”
Clarke nods. The victory at Mount Weather, while painful, had been decisive. Among other things, it had left Clarke with a broken wrist and Lexa with a nasty gash on her side. The scars, she can see as the Commander pulls on her shirt, are still pink and shiny, and they make something tug in Clarke’s chest. “So this is your idea of a Saturday morning? Go quell a mini-rebellion on three hours of sleep with a hangover?”
Lexa’s brow furrows. “What am I meant to be hung over?”
“It’s a word for how you feel the morning after you've been drinking.”
The Commander looks blankly at her. “Why would I feel differently after I've been drinking?”
“You know, like the monster headache, the upset stomach, the –"
Lexa’s still looking confused, and finally Clarke gets it. Lexa has walked off this particular battlefield completely unscathed while Clarke is dying in a corner, and it's not fair. That, if she's being honest with herself, is the last straw.
"Clarke, if you're feeling this way, you should probably see a healer. I can have one sent to the tent if you don't think you can make it back to Camp Jaha. But first…”
Lexa has found her pants and managed, after she's put those on, to dress at light speed. She's buckling on her armor as Clarke rises from the bed, knowing what she’ll ask next and feeling a truly terrible, wicked, and perfect idea take shape in her drink-addled mind. The Commander turns back to her, the shallow bowl of warpaint in her hand, a small, shy smile on her face that almost makes Clarke’s resolve waver – almost. Lexa can be so sweet sometimes – and also an incredible asshole. “Make me ready?”
“Of course, Heda,” Clarke says, pasting a smile on her face that’s not the devious grin it should be, and takes the bowl. She's done this three times now – she remembers how nerve-wracking the first time had been, and how unexpected. Lexa had been nervous too – Clarke could feel her shaking with the effort of refraining from twitching the paint out of her inexpert hands and doing it herself. Clarke had applied the paint with agonizing slowness, terrified of getting it wrong and leaving Lexa open to injury or worse; even though it wasn't her superstition she knew it was Lexa’s, and she knew that going to battle with her paint less than perfect might be enough to throw the Commander off her game. When she'd finished, she'd dropped the paint on the table and thrown her arms around Lexa, nearly ruining her own hard work. Octavia had confided that she'd had a similar reaction when she'd first done paint for Lincoln, so she doesn't feel so stupid.
But now she swirls the kohl in her hands a couple of times, rubs it between her fingers, and sets to work with reasonable confidence. Lexa closes her eyes as Clarke’s fingers touch her skin, and the look on her face just before she begins is the most open and trusting that Clarke’s ever seen it. And then she’s drawing black lines along her eyes, across the cheekbones that could cut diamonds and the jawline of steel, painting war on her face, putting the mask of the Commander into place.
With a twist.
“There, you're done,” she says a few minutes later, and Lexa’s eyes flick open, her lips curving up into a thin smile.
“You're getting faster at this, Clarke,” she says. “Maybe one day I will teach you how to do your own.”
It’s nearly all Clarke can do to keep her face even, but somehow she manages it, leaning up to press a swift kiss to Lexa’s lips while being enormously careful not to ruin the perfection that is Lexa’s face. “Come back to me,” she says. This is something they have come to say to one another whenever there may be danger. The words are getting stale in Clarke’s mouth – she's impatient for a time she won't have to say them anymore.
“In this lifetime,” Lexa promises, reaching for her sword and buckling it around her waist. She leans down to press a kiss to Clarke’s lips, holding her face in her hands so gently it's as though she fears it might break, and then she steps away. The moment is over; the Commander is here, Heda, the one her people need. She strides out of the tent with confidence, calling to her warband that it's time to ride. Clarke quickly throws an old shirt of Lexa’s over her bra and shorts and follows to the opening of the tent to watch.
Indra steps up, followed by Octavia, who looks quite as bad as Clarke feels. They share a dark look, Octavia’s made more impressive by the black smears of paint across her eyes, and then she turns to watch the Commander’s pep talk. Clarke only catches about a third of the Trigedasleng – her second-language skills aren't at their brightest this early in the morning – but it seems to be fairly standard boilerplate about bringing the invaders to justice and blood must have blood.
Instead of Lexa, she's watching Octavia. At first the girl doesn't seem to notice - she's tired and probably has a wicked headache, after all – but Clarke can see exactly the moment when she realizes just what's on Lexa’s face. Octavia’s eyes widen enormously and she has to clap her hand over her mouth to stifle the excited giggle that threatens to escape, after which she turns to Clarke. The giggle nearly makes it out again when she catches her friend’s wide smirk.
The force is about thirty Sky People and Grounders, roughly half and half hand-picked by both Clarke and Lexa, and most of the Sky People get it right away. There's some snickering and some hushed whispering, and then more snickering as it’s explained to the Grounders and more and more of them understand. After a while even Lexa, in the middle of a fist-pumping, blood-curdling war speech, can't ignore the unrest among her usually disciplined squad, and she frowns, speaking faster and faster to wrap up her speech. Clarke only grins wider, like the Cheshire Cat in one of the stories of old Earth her father used to read to her when she was young.
When Lexa’s finished most of the warband is openly snickering now, hiding their mouths behind their hands and ducking their heads when their Commander looks at them, but whenever she turns her attention elsewhere they can't hold it in. Lexa knows something’s up and sweeps over to Indra, who, despite an initial bark of laughter when Octavia finishes whispering in her ear, has managed to school her face into the best semblance of calm out of the lot of them. Octavia has completely abandoned all pretense and is doubled over, shaking with laughter. She has to be held up by Bellamy.
Clarke slips closer; she has to hear this conversation, though she suspects she won't want to be present for the end of it. “Indra, what is wrong with them today? This should be a swift mission - I'd like to have it wrapped up by evening, as I have some business with the leader of the Sky People – but if the squad can't keep their heads I can see this turning into a disaster very quickly.”
Indra’s jaw works.
“Heda…”
Lexa’s face darkens into the expression that usually means someone is going to die very soon. “Indra, tell me.” Her hand strays to the hilt of her sword. “The consequences will be for your silence, not your words.”
Indra swallows. “Perhaps, Heda, you'd be better off asking your Sky Princess.” She nods to Clarke, who's been creeping closer and is all of a sudden caught like a deer in the crosshairs of Lexa’s glare. She bolts back to the safety of the tent.
“CLARKE!”
Lexa follows quickly after but the final portion of the trap has already been laid: Clarke’s holding a mirror at just face height, so the first thing the Commander sees when she enters the tent is her own face, and the warpaint done in the shape of…
“Heart eyes?”
Clarke had been a mess of giggles but now she openly bursts out laughing, and hears Octavia’s answering mirth from outside the tent. Lexa is storming around, ranting in Trigedasleng and wiping at her face furiously, scrubbing off the warpaint and hastily redoing it herself, but Clarke is too ecstatic to pay any attention to the promises of retribution currently being spat from lips white with anger and is doubled over with laughter, gripping onto the map table to keep herself from landing on the floor. However she winds up paying for this, it'll be so, so worth it. Clarke knows Lexa gets the reference – she had once overheard Octavia using it to refer to her and the dopey, doe-eyed look the Commander often gets in Clarke’s presence, and Clarke had found herself forced to explain its significance.
“We will discuss this when I return,” Lexa growls as she sweeps from the tent. Clarke’s laughing so hard she’s crying now, and finding it somewhat difficult to breathe.
“Whatever you say, Commander Heart Eyes,” she manages to call after her, before dissolving into a fresh wave of cackles. She’ll always have the look of complete and utter astonishment on Lexa’s face at the moment she’d looked in the mirror. It’s an expression she’ll treasure forever.
Lexa spends most of the ride to the northern border grumbling to herself about stupid sky girls and rotten tricks, but at one point she pauses in her ranting to pull her horse up alongside Indra’s and ask her in an almost humble voice, “Why would she do this? She knows what the paint means to us, to me. And yet she uses it to make you all laugh at me.”
At Indra’s side, Octavia loses it all over again, nearly falling off her horse until her superior snaps at her. Yet the general’s own voice is not entirely steady as she answers.
“Heda, I believe that’s called a prank. And, to use an expression of the Sky People, she got you good.”