Chapter Text
Clarke brought her knees up to her chest as she hugged her mug of hot chocolate in one hand, the other listlessly sketching as she stared out the window across the street for the fourth time in the past hour. She had been in this very seat that long, and would be here for the next eight hours unless someone told her otherwise — and it wouldn’t be the staff.
After all, the baristas at Ark Café had seen her between the hours of eight and five far too many times to even bat an eyelash at the sight of her curled up in their window seat with a sketchbook and the first — or second, or third, or fifth — of many drinks in her hand.
Usually she people watched, her attention never held for all that long. Her eye would wander from subject to subject as she sought inspiration, the charcoal pencil in her hand only ever sketching out fractions of the whole picture.
It was a sort of thrill, Clarke supposed, to draw her own impression of something she knew so little about. That was enough for her, at least, to create and fill in the blanks when she had no idea.
For someone’s whose primary joy in life involved keen observation, Clarke had a astonishingly short attention span.
But this view, Clarke could — and would, if she kept up what she was currently occupied with — stare at it all day, content to just watch and let her hand wander over curves and sharp angles, over darkness and barely drawn light.
She could hold Clarke’s attention for as long as Clarke never thought she would be able to give it.
On her page now, Clarke took in as she finally pulled her eyes away from the window across the thin street, were outlines already filled in for the most part. A tall girl — Clarke could apparently tell that much, even though the lithe figure was curled up in a chair much like she was, a thick stack of paper in hand while she had her long, slender fingers curved around a stub of a pencil.
Her face, though, that was still a blank.
Clarke could see the shape of her face, tilted down and angled ever so slightly towards the window as she furrowed her brow. Clarke could see the dark hair pulled back from her face, evidently tied back in some complicated braid or hairdo that Clarke could never even imagine her hands deft enough to pull off.
Clarke could see cheekbones high enough to make the girl look as if she had been carved of marble. If she had been a sculptor, the girl across the street in Grounders Coffee Beans and Brewery would have been a subject she would die to work with.
What Clarke could not see, not for the life of her — for the past few days, week even, she had tried — were her eyes.
Taking a sip from the swiftly cooling mug in her hand, Clarke’s own blue eyes flickered back up off her page, and refocused on the sight just beyond her window.
There was something about the windows, perfectly aligned but clearly of different sizes, framing the girl and creating a sole focal point that Clarke could hardly pull her attention away from.
Sure, she heard the shuffling and clanking and all that white noise that made the Ark such a comforting but distracting place to work in, and gave the passers-by the periphery of her vision to wander about it but there was nothing ever significant enough to pull her attention away from the girl across the street.
Or perhaps, the girl was significant enough that Clarke did not feel the need, even subconsciously, to allow her attention to wander.
The thought of moving on to another subject had never even crossed her mind since she started to sketch the girl.
Though, she did find herself wondering what it was in her hands that had her so utterly focused and lost in her own world, despite the voice in the back of her mind that told Clarke that the same could easily be said about herself.
Occasionally Clarke’s eyes would wander down to the page she was working on, her pencil stilling as she took in her impression of the girl who had evidently left such a deep impression on her.
Her hand would itch to fill in the blanks upon the figure’s face. Her mind would protest that there was probably too much in those eyes she had never seen for her to do them justice.
Reason told her that no one would see this sketch anyway — she did guard all her unfinished works, or those she held too close to her heart to bear sharing, with her life.
Within the time that she had spent mulling over the incomplete state of her newest sketch, three drinks had come and gone, the charcoal pencil she had in hand being the second she had worn down to a blunt point.
Switching her pencil out for a fresh, sharpened one from her tin, she glanced up only to find herself looking straight into the eyes of the girl who had held her attention the entirety of the morning.
Inadvertently a gasp forced its way out between Clarke’s parted lips, her hand immediately moving in a flurry across the page to catch the steely gaze that she had finally gotten the chance to see.
Shame, though, that she couldn’t see the colour of her eyes all that well across the distance. But that was beside the point — at least that was what Clarke had to tell herself — since Clarke sketched in shades of grey, black and white. Colour mattered in this sketch just about as much as it mattered in Picasso’s Guernica.
Clarke pulled her hand away from the surface of the paper the moment she finished the stroke that filled in all the shading, afraid that her usual nitpicking would mar the sketch before she could properly look at it.
Allowing herself the a brief celebration of victory, Clarke made to smile at the girl across the street — after all, Clarke had never had such a perfect muse, not even with still life or with people she knew.
Before they caught each other’s eye, however, the girl had calmly turned back towards the interior of Grounders as someone sat down heavily in the seat opposite her.
Snapping her gaze back to her lap, Clarke cursed under her breath and made to fling her pencil at the bunch that lay on the table.
The shift of the door at the corner of her eye — Grounders’ door, that is — caught her attention, prompting Clarke to keep her hold on the pencil, scrawling a signature in the bottom left corner of the paper as she would a painting, and leaping out of her seat, leaving absolutely everything behind as she sprinted out the door hastily.
The girl from the window seat across the street was striding towards her, caught up in half-silent conversation with the blondish girl matching her stride for stride.
Before she could take another step closer Clarke realised how hard her knees were shaking, and how strange she must look, standing flustered on the sidewalk outside a café, paper in hands covered in black.
Turning tail, she ducked back into Ark and settled herself sullenly back into her seat. Refocusing her attention back on the passing foot traffic, Clarke couldn’t help but notice the drifting piece of thick paper that was meandering the narrow street between Ark and Grounders, one that looked all too familiar and had all too strong a pull for her to ignore.
Rising from her seat once more, Clarke moved to pick it up.
The paper was heavy in her hand, thick and soft with five-lined staves inked on, and pencil markings of notes and rests that Clarke could barely find in her memory to comprehend.
This must have been what she was working on.
But it was a page, one with no beginning and no end, no context with which to comprehend it. It must have been a part of something bigger, and whatever that was, it was now missing an entire part of itself.
She’d have to abandon her seat once more, Clarke supposed, the next time she saw the girl, she would hand her the paper — just that. After all, if she ever lost any of her sketches, she would most definitely want them back.
It was just a courtesy, artist to artist. Well, artist to composer, anyway.
Maybe she’d finally find out what colour the composer’s eyes were. Lined with thick kohl or something resembling it, Clarke yearned to satisfy the deep need to know what her eyes really looked like beyond the glance she had been granted, one she had never quite felt before.
It had grown into a habit Lexa found she didn’t mind — settling into the window of Anya’s coffee shop, weaving music out of white noise and the movement around her.
Of the people she saw, the snippets of life she heard, all that seeped into her work and made her wonder why she had always worked in the silence of her own room in the past.
The music of the people, she decided, gripping her pencil more firmly — it was too short at this point, but she felt compelled to stick to her habit of a pencil per piece, even if it didn’t seem wise for an entire symphony — was to be written among them, integrating them into its every beat and every rest.
How else would she know what life felt like?
Her sister had dragged her out of her room one morning, insisting that Lexa finally get out of her room for once in her life. She could write music anywhere, Anya had insisted.
And she could.
Especially in Anya’s café, the scent of freshly ground coffee beans permeating her senses and the foot traffic just outside giving her more than enough to draw inspiration from.
Even if it didn’t, the opposite café did, every day from eight to five.
Where Lexa had eyeliner, the fair-skinned blonde across the ribbon of a street had what seemed like charcoal smudges. Where her pencil grew stubby and too short for her long fingers, the girl had an endless supply of sharpened pencils at the ready.
An artist, Lexa supposed.
Anya stopped by from time to time, her warm hand finding Lexa’s shoulder and clipped words Lexa knew were spoken out of concern finding her ears.
Somehow the music just flowed, just as smoothly as the coffee and tea did, in this seat.
Just a week in this café and she had written far more of this symphony that she had of any other work in the past year and a half.
Lexa had never had bursts of creativity before. It had always been a steady stream, ever since she had picked up mallets for the first time. Music came naturally to her, be it in the form of new melodies and harmonies intertwined or in the form of new instruments to learn.
And then there had been the dry spell.
She had only ever had one, and it had come with a vengeance. Costia left a void that could hardly be filled, and Lexa surmised that the music must have realised that.
Not that she would not have appreciated the comfort of her oldest companion, or at least the distraction.
Anya had assured her that it would come back. After all, Lexa had hardly gone three years in her life without music, back when she had been too small to even clamber up on the seat of the rickety upright piano as Anya’s fingers danced across the keys.
The moment she was tall enough and strong enough, she would wrestle herself up onto the bench and sit by her sister, head leaning on Anya’s lap as the then-eight year old played her Schubert and Bach.
Now as she allowed herself to soak up the atmosphere of the place — Anya swore it was the lack of sun that caused the drought — her pencil flew across the page with the dexterity she was so used to once more.
Of all the pieces she had written, Lexa had a feeling this one would be the one she would be most proud of.
Even more so than the one piece she could no longer bring herself to play, or listen to. She had half a mind to contact the publishers, to rescind all copies of the score still left on the shelves and to put an end to it altogether.
When Anya had felt reassured enough that whoever was closing up — probably Indra, if she was leaving early — Lexa gathered up the thick bundle of manuscript paper and tied it together with its ribbon, setting it in her messenger bag.
She left two loose pieces, though, the two that she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what was not quite right. There was a note, somewhere in the bars that connected those two pages, that didn’t quite sit right with what she was going for.
It didn’t help, of course, that while Lexa abided by every other rule she had ever come across in her life, music was the one domain in which she couldn’t give two hoots about rules or their implications.
Granting herself one proper glance out of the window, Lexa found herself staring into bright blue before the jolt of Anya setting herself into the chair opposite her pulled her back to Grounders’ interior.
“Ready to go, sis?” Anya slurred, half exhausted from a day on her feet.
Lexa nudged her sister in the ribs, causing Anya to squirm and then glare daggers at her, before rising to her feet and offering Anya and hand up. They walked side by side out of the cafe, headed towards their shared apartment in tandem.
Lexa still missed the times she would lag behind her sister, the one who had always seemed to tower over her. It had been that way until one day when Lexa was sixteen or so when she realised she no longer had to look up to talk to Anya.
Most of their communication could be accomplished without words, more so before Lexa had shut herself away, but they were getting back to where they were.
Anya broke her reverie by hip checking her, attempting to steal the sheets out of her hands just as they passed through the doors. Hurriedly Lexa slipped them as best she could into her bag while holding Anya off with the other.
No one would see that symphony until it was done. It had to be perfect if she was to continue to write music even after she had stopped for the better part of a year. Not if she could help it, in any case.