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A rumble of thunder wakes Clarke. Rain patters above her.
She lies still in her bed of furs listening, eyes scraping the ceiling of the tent.
Lexa had provided her and Octavia with sleeping quarters in the Grounder camp since Indra demanded her second’s presence at ungodly hours of both day and night, and Clarke was increasingly involved with planning and tactic meetings with Lexa and the other Grounder clan leaders.
At first Clarke had been resistant, happy to take the hour trek back to Camp Jaha. But the more time she spent in the Grounder camp, the more at ease she’d become. There was something to be said for warm, roomy tents that smelled like moss and wood, that turned the sounds of the outside forest into an ever constant lullaby. Camp Jaha, all metal rooms and shiny surfaces was like a prison.
There was a flash and, a moment later, more thunder.
Then, over the sound of the rain, came the sharp noise of twigs breaking underfoot. Clarke sits up.
Who, in this weather, would be creeping around outside in the middle of the night?
Making her mind up quickly, propelled by the voice in her head that whispers mountain men, mountain men Clarke pulls herself out of bed, drags on a coat and stumbles to the flap of the tent.
She peers out into obscuring curtains of water. The damp smell of wet earth presses itself against her face.
There is another snap of bracken under foot and Clarke flicks her eyes in the direction. The rain pours midnight black but through it Clarke catches the brief sight of a dark braided figure disappearing through the trees, amour winking in the moonlight.
Not a mountain man then, but Lexa.
Clarke hesitates on the threshold of the tent, torn momentarily between the coaxing of warm, comfortable air and the bright fresh breeze.
She recalls sixteen years dreaming of the earth, of rain, of running wild and uncaring through crashing storms.
She steps out.
Clarke finds Lexa some ten minutes later, stumbling upon her in the darkness, soaked and raw with cold.
Lexa is a darker profile against a dark sky, sat in the fork of a tree. Her head turns as she hears Clarke’s squelching approach.
‘Clarke.’
‘Commander.’
Lexa reluctantly turns her head from the rolling clouds above to look down at Clarke, ‘it’s raining.’
‘I’d noticed.’
There is a soft huffing breath from the taller woman and Clarke, tilting her head to catch the noise better over the rain, wonders whether it was of amusement or annoyance.
They stare at each other for a few moments until it becomes apparent Clarke isn’t leaving and Lexa shifts over on her branch, nodding, almost imperceptibly, at the space.
Clarke grasps at a lower down branch and hauls herself up, ‘thanks.’
There isn’t much room on the branch and Clarke tries to ignore the press of the Grounder Commander’s wet thigh against her own equally so ggy one. ‘It’s a little wet for star gazing isn’t it?’ she asks, following Lexa’s upward gaze to the rolling clouds.
There’s a beat of silence.
‘Does it rain in the far sky, Clarke?’ Lexa’s voice is soft and Clarke forces her gaze to remain on the clouds.
‘In space? No.’ There is a chinking sound of glass on metal and from the corner of her eye Clarke see the frosted blue lip of a bottle. She frowns and inclines her head towards it, ‘Kane’s gift?’
Lexa nods, bringing the bottle to her lips. She swallows and offers it. Clarke takes it without hesitation.
‘What’s the celebration?’
Lexa closes her eyes and hums ‘today is Anya’s birthday.’
This has Clarke snapping her eyes from the sky to Lexa so quickly she worries briefly if she’s strained something but Lexa, Lexa is... smiling. A smile that is at once sad and soft and nostalgic. Clarke wrestles with a sudden rush of affection for this girl warrior, whom she did not realise could smile.
‘She was more than my trainer Clarke ,’ Lexa whispers, like this information is secret and the trees themselves are listening.
‘Oh?’ Clarke says. The information sinks in, ‘oh...that’s uh- nice.’
‘Our relationship was always very physical,’ Lexa nods.
Clarke reflects that Grounder culture probably does not have the phase “T.M.I”. She clears her throat, ‘I’m very.... um, glad.’
Lexa looks at her oddly. Clarke fidgets and tries desperately to push away the image of Anya sat astride Lexa thrusting that comes unbidden into her head. She is sure, even the gloom, that Lexa can see her blushing.
‘Clarke...’ Lexa says softly, strange look still in place. Though now, the blonde girl thinks, it looks more as if she is trying not to laugh, ‘I mean that Anya was my sister.’
‘Oh! I see!’
Lexa lets out a sudden short laugh. It pierces the rain soaked forest like bird song and startles Clarke so much she almost falls off the branch. She grins back at the other girl when she regains her balance. ‘Just you said physical so... I assumed you meant....’ Clarke trails off with a complicated hand movement.
‘I meant,’ Lexa says ruefully, ‘that we fought a lot. We did not... hug or cry.’ Lexa says hug and cry as if discussing a very far and scientifically puzzling galaxy. The Grounder commander glances up the trunk of the tree, ‘every year, on her birthday, we would climb the biggest tree we could find.’
Clarke smiles and thinks of brightly coloured candles, soggy cake and rousing, out of tune renditions of “Happy Birthday”. ‘What did you do when you got to the top?’
‘Jump,’ says Lexa simply.
Clarke’s jaw drops, ‘What? That’s so dangerous!’
Lexa looks amused again, she swigs from the bottle. ‘Not all the way down - to other trees. It was a race. Though...’ The taller girl tilts her head, ‘when I was fourteen she pushed me off. I fell straight down and broke my ankle.’
‘How.... celebratory.’
Lexa nods and raises the bottle as if in toast. She takes a pull then offers it to Clarke. Clarke obliges.
They stare out into darkness again, shoulders just brushing, passing the bottle back and forth.
‘When I was seven,’ Clarke offers into the rain, ‘the Arc ran out of unprocessed food rations.’ On seeing Lexa’s questioning look, she adds, ‘no flour, eggs, butter. We only had packaged supplies.’ Lexa nods but Clarke does not notice, now lost in her own nostalgic memories. ‘I so wanted a birthday cake. With yellow icing for the sun. But there was no way, so my Dad,’ Clarke’s mind reels back to soft grey fuzzy jumpers and deep bass laughs, ‘helped me paint a paper one. Yellow and sun shaped. We cut it up into triangles and pretended to eat it.’
A hand, cold and damp with long slender fingers, finds its way into her own and squeezes once, twice and then withdraws. Clarke breathes into the night.
‘He sounds nice.’
Clarke hums, happy and sad at once.
‘Clarke?’
‘Lexa?’
The taller girl’s sombre serious eyes find Clarke’s in the darkness, ‘What is “birthday cake”?’
The blond girl laughs and, suddenly brave with her stomach buzzing and warm from the alcohol, presses a long kiss to Lexa’s cheek. The dark haired girl goes very still.
‘Clarke, do you want to race with me?’ Lexa whispers, her head half turned towards Clarke’s.
For a moment Clarke is lost in metaphorical and romantic meanings, until she remembers that this is Lexa who does not lower herself to metaphors and whose version of romance is letting Clarke alight a funeral pyre.
‘Up a tree?’ she asks.
Lexa nods, already wriggling into a crouch on the branch.
‘Um, okay... But I’m not jumping anywhere.’
Lexa tucks the bottle into her coat and then bears a grin at Clarke. The blonde girl is apparently not the only one feeling the effects of the blue frosted bottle. ‘Ready?’ She asks. ‘Go!’
‘Wha-Lexa! Lexa, I’m not racing you!’ But Lexa is already a branch above, swinging herself easily and gracefully through the foliage.
Clarke groans and reaches for a wet slippery branch.
Clarke makes it to the precarious top of the tree much more slowly than Lexa, who climbs like some strange cross breed of Grounder and wild jungle cat. She catches her breath as she nears Lexa and allows herself to look out.
Their tree rises above the forest ceiling and all around is a dark green swaying ocean. It is both terrifying and beautiful. Clarke grips the trunk tighter, attempting to edge closer to the Commander.
‘Perhaps,’ she grunts, ‘we should have done this before drinking?’
‘No Clarke,’ Lexa says, eyes trained on the forest. ‘It is better inebriated.’
‘More dangerous.’
Lexa looks across at her, face blank and calm. ‘I do not like heights.’
Grounders, Clarke thinks, with sudden clarity, are crazy. ‘You are scared of heights but you climb massive ass trees every year in the dark?’
Lexa looks uncomfortable. ‘I am not scared. I just do not like them.’ Clarke must look entirely unconvinced because Lexa rolls her eyes, ‘besides, why else would Anya make me climb them?’
‘She... she climbed them on her birthday because she knew you were afraid? That’s... that’s...’
‘Love,’ says Lexa.
‘Weakness,’ Clarke counters.
The other girl tilts her head, conceding but also thoughtful. ‘Loving Anya is not weakness for she made me strong. She still makes me strong.’
Clarke watches her, waiting for more, but Lexa offers nothing else. A thought, a single stubborn thought, echoes round the Sky girl’s head and, before she can check herself, she is opening her mouth and the echo is spilling out of her.
‘You make me strong.’
Lexa looks at her hard. ‘Do not give me the credit, Clarke of the Sky people, you are strong by yourself. Strong enough, almost, to be a Grounder,’ she grins at Clarke, all teeth and alcohol and exhilaration.
Clarke feels a rush of happiness and knows this is the closest Lexa will ever come to saying I accept you.
‘And what,’ Clarke asks, words bubbling out of her, ‘if you also make me, maybe, weak... weaker?’
Lexa drops her gaze, away from Clarke’s, ‘I do not know. Perhaps’ and the taller girl finds her eyes again, ‘perhaps we deal with the consequences in the morning.’
They are suddenly at lot closer and Lexa’s mouth is soft and wet over her own; their eye lashes swap rain drops and they flutter closed in tandem. Clarke breathes Lexa in, desperately wanting to pull her back as the other girl’s mouth moves away again, but too conscious of her precarious footing on the wet branches.
‘And now,’ Lexa says, her hand finding Clarke’s, ‘we jump!’
Clarke makes it back to her tent as the sky is turning orange in anticipation of the rising sun. She has several long cuts across her arms, her cheeks and her neck from being whipped by branches as she fell from tree to tree. No, was pushed from tree to tree.
Lexa is slightly worse off. There are dark circular bruises up her arms and across her shoulders from Clarke’s deadly grip on her, a large stinging hand print across her cheek from Clarke’s hand when the two had finally touched solid ground, and a swollen red bottom lip from the blonde girl’s own mouth.
Clarke manages to maintain her glare for two days, though she knows, from the quirk of Lexa’s lips, that the Grounder Commander is not fooled by her scowl for a second.