Work Text:
Guess I should have seen it coming,
Caught me by surprise...
I wasn't looking where I was going,
I fell into your eyes.
“What would I do without you, Pet?”
Clarke splashes dish soap at Octavia where she sits at the kitchen table. “Live in squalor and starve, I’d say.”
“Aw, hooey! You’re not my only friend,” Octavia pouts.
“Says you.” Clarke is tipping out grey water when the doorbell rings.
“Case in point, Dollface.” Octavia runs off to get the door, the cast on her arm knocking the door-frame on her way through.
Clarke takes up a dry towel to wipe off the dishes for putting away. Chipped and cracked in places, Clarke loves every one. She has so many fond memories of this house when she was a child. Now it’s run down, with no money for upkeep but still so very much a home.
She can hear Octavia at the door. Three new voices with Octavia’s droll tones mixed in. A broken arm and helpless to boot, and Octavia invites the whole neighbourhood round for dinner. Well, Clarke isn’t cooking. No way, no how.
“Need any help?”
She jumps and turns with a hand over her heart. “Jeese. You scared the stuffin outa me.”
The girl looks down contrite and takes off her cap (her get-up so strange – a girl in suspenders and a cap just like a newsboy’s). Waves of chestnut hair pours down over her shoulders framing fine features.
“Well, I certainly apologise,” the girl says sincerely before looking back up. Green eyes, Clarke observes.
“Oh no it’s alright. I shoulda been used to it by now. Octavia cat footing around like a thief in the night.”
The girl smiles like she understands. Her smile is sweet – and a rare sight, Clarke reckons.
“I’m Lexa.” The girl steps close and holds out her hand to shake.
“Clarke.”
Lexa’s hands are warm and calloused and Clarke spies ink black under her nails; not just looking like a newsboy then. They stand together for long moments, longer than they should, looking into one another’s eyes. Clarke feels Lexa’s assessment and matches it in kind. Interesting, she thinks. This girl is interesting.
Clarke accepts her help and Lexa busies herself over a bushel of potatoes, not minding the red dirt coating her hands as she peels one after another. Clarke tells her how she ended up coming to take house duties for Octavia when she broke her arm.
“I lost my job sewing hems at Sydney’s and had nothing better to do.” She shrugs and Lexa understands. Times are tough all round. A girl who’s not married or working takes a roof and soft bed where she can find it. Even if that means taking favors from a friend and giving favors in return.
“Lincoln by way of Bell found me the News Run.”
“Not the most glamorous of jobs is it? With a face like yours I’d imagine broadway or talking pictures as more your scene.” Clarke winks and Lexa feels her cheeks warm.
She faces the sink to wash her hands and hide the blush. “Yeah, well, not many producers keen on hiring a girl fresh outa the clink, so…” she trails off and firms her shoulder, bracing for the usual awkward disconnect. The sudden end to their conversation.
“Where were you?” Clarke surprises her.
“I—” She turns to see Clarke halfway through an onion, tears plain on her cheeks, blue eyes deeper for their shimmer. “I was in Wallace Pen at Mount Weather?”
Clarke nods, sniffles, and Lexa holds out her handkerchief over the board of half chopped onions. Her own handkerchief. “We coulda been cellmates.”
Lexa doesn’t hide her surprise. “I was G block.”
“Ah. B block.” Clarke hooks a thumb over one shoulder as if the prison is right behind her.
Lexa shakes her head when Clarke tries to hand back the tear-wet linen, Initials LW embroidered in one corner.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Clarke nods, understanding. “Me too.”
Over dinner, Clarke doesn’t mention her time in lockup. Lexa knows why and doesn’t mention it either. It’s something that they can share, that that no one else in the room can understand.
“My whole crew would have been dropped in the shit if I hadn’t given myself up. Them cops had it in for us and weren’t gonna stop. Not without a big prize.”
“And what makes you so special?” Clarke is teasing but Lexa’s expression shutters.
“Nothing that can be as good as your story. What happened,” she prompts with an elbow nudging Clarke’s arm.
Clarke remembers to eat some of her dinner then, taking the chance to look away from Lexa. She got all the introductions, meeting Echo and Anya for the first time, Raven for the second. If the conversations happening around them are interesting she wouldn’t know it. She’s only been talking to Lexa.
“I was…” Clarke hesitates but Lexa is watching her, expression serious, taking in every syllable Clarke offers. “I wasn’t too keen on staying home.”
“You were locked up for running away?”
“Well, that and the ah, documents I mighta liberated on the way outa town.”
“Documents?”
“I could tell ya, but then they’d have to kill ya.”
Over their nightcap Bellamy takes charge of the wireless, leading Echo in dancing circles around the room while Octavia switches her attention between Raven and Anya in equal measure.
Lexa keeps Clarke to herself in one corner, unable to deny the girl’s charms. They share more than either one of them has in a long while.
Clarke reveals the hard truth about the boy she’d loved and left behind. “We never could have made it.”
“What happened to him?”
“An old Ford, icy roads and a bellyfull in ‘25. I guess he didn’t take my leaving too well.” She sighs and the sound could break Lexa’s heart. Clarke blames herself for the boy’s mistakes.
“I lost someone too,” Lexa finds herself saying. She doesn’t usually. Anya is the only one who knows everything. But Clarke is special. She knows this already, even after only a few hours.
“When.”
“At Weather.”
Clarke frowns. “You mean a…” she trails off, hands making an hourglass of the air.
“Well she weren’t no guard.”
Clarke’s cheeks pink but she recovers quickly. “She got out?”
“No,” Lexa says and Clarke understands.
At some point Bellamy and Echo disappear, then Raven slinks out with Octavia. Anya is asleep in the chair having polished off the last of Bell’s bootleg gin. Lexa kicks the woman’s boot. She’s dressed much as Lexa in rolled up tweed slacks and suspenders, all in a disarray on Clarke’s favorite chair.
“I gotta work in the morning, and she’s fried to the hat,” Lexa sighs and glances to the door.
“I can walk you to the stop?”
Lexa raises both eyebrows. “As if you’re safe walkin back on your own? Not a chance.”
Clarke rolls her eyes and takes up the baseball bat from by the door. “I can take care of myself.”
“Know how to use that thing?”
Clarke steps into Lexa’s space, bat held over her shoulder ready to strike forward with the butt of the handle. Lexa reaches to take it from her and Clarke swings the wider end up over her shoulder pushing Lexa’s grasping hand down and landing the bat softly against her cheek. “Well, I coulda mussed your pretty face just now, so yeah. I got some ideas.”
Lexa smiles again with Clarke standing close enough to see the faint scars on Lexa’s cheek and across her brow. Her grin is warm and full like Clarke saw when they first arrived. “Let’s go then.”
The night is warm and quiet, the moon low to the horizon, but enough to light Clarke's hair silver.
“You know, I’ve never met a proper violets girl before,” Clarke says after a few blocks. She’s swinging and twirling the bat like a marching baton and Lexa can’t help but smile.
Lexa snorts. “I’ll bet all the dough re mi in Wallace’s vault that you have.”
She looks at her speculatively. “You can’t mean all those girls in lockup?”
Lexa just raises one eyebrow.
“Nah,” Clarke insists. “They were just girls bein lonely stuck on the inside.” She hesitates at Lexa’s look. “Oh well, I guess some mighta… All of them couldn’t have been—”
“Not all,” Lexa says. “But most. We aren’t so rare as you think”
“Oh.” Clarke holds the bat across her hips then, chewing her lip in thought. “So you’re a… I mean, your sweetheart was really a… A sweetheart?”
Lexa feels the familiar pull in her chest but she nods. The feeling of her heart trying to claw its way out of her chest has faded these last few months. It all seems less real now she’s out. Still stings though.
“Well then.” Clarke must sense her melancholy and takes Lexa’s hand in one of her own. “You might not be a talking picture star but I still feel like I met someone special tonight.”
Lexa looks from her hand to Clarke’s eyes, confused.
“Gee whiz,” Clarke lets out a long low whistle. “A real life violets girl, my friend after all.”
Her foolish grin lifts the weight from Lexa’s shoulders.
When the bus arrives to take Lexa away Clarke doesn’t want to let go of her hand. Not just yet.
Neither does Lexa. “My home aint much.” She chews on her own lip as she stares at Clarke’s. “But I could show you, if you’d like.”
Clarke hesitates for a second. She tries to ground herself with the feeling of cracked timber varnish in her hand. Lexa’s eyes, the shy nervous plea in them make Clarke’s knees wobble, her feet feel a vast distance from the ground.
She nods. “I’d like that.”
Lexa has to sneak her past the matron of the women’s house. “She’ll wake up at a mouse’s fart and shout down whoever’s comin in after curfew. No guests allowed either.” She gives Clarke’s hand a squeeze, her expression deadly serious.
Door closed behind them, both girls are panting and grinning as if they’d run a mile.
“What woulda happened if we were caught?” Clarke has her hand against her chest. She can just make out Lexa’s eyes in the dark, the white of her smile. She feels movement as Lexa shrugs.
“Nothing whatsoever.” The mischief in her voice makes Clarke gasp.
She slaps the back of her hand against Lexa’s stomach. “You dirty rat! You had me thinkin I was halfway back to Weather.” With her eyes adjusting to the barely moonlit dim, Clarke sees Lexa rub at her stomach as if wounded. She pokes her again and Lexa grabs her wrist.
“You’re ticklish!” Clarke laughs.
“Am not.” Lexa’s quiet voice is petulant, her grip on Clarke’s wrist tightening as she draws a hand up and over Clarke’s lips. “And shush, we still don’t wanna wake no one up.”
The low voice accompanied by pressure from Lexa’s fingertip against her lips makes Clarke’s breath stutter. Lexa swallows and Clarke glances down.
“I’m not meant to bring anyone in here,” she says, low as a confession.
“You can trust me,” Clarke promises.
“I do,” Lexa sounds surprised at the revelation but Clarke is the one to gasp when soft lips press wetly to her own.
Lexa pulls back when Clarke doesn’t respond immediately. “Sorry, I just, I shouldn’t have,” she stutters. “I just thought that you—”
Clarke presses a finger to Lexa’s lips now and the jumble of words immediately ceases. “Just ask permission next time, Violet.”
“Next time?”
Clarke shrugs. “I woulda questioned the new nickname myself, but each to their own.”
“Clarke?”
“Hmm?”
Lexa’s hands light a trail of fire along Clarke’s skin as they travel from wrists to elbow crease to shoulders – up to cradling the blunt edges of Clarke’s jaw. “May I kiss you?”
Clarke knows Lexa will feel it even if she can’t see, so having lost her voice, she nods.
The next kiss is gentler, but just as wet. Clarke tilts her chin, and sinks in all the way until Lexa is drawing her backwards and pushing her down against a clicking mattress. Clarke shuffles back on heels and hands to the pillows, and Lexa follows with beguiling grace. Her gaze asks further permission but Clarke just grabs both suspenders and collar to pull Lexa against her. Lexa’s hips fall flush with Clarke’s and both of them gasp.
“Trust me, Violet. You have all the permissions.”
In deepening dark, with the moon disappearing from Lexa’s window Clarke learns just what Violet girls can do with a woman beneath her.
//
You came into my crazy world like a cool and cleansing wave.
Before I, I knew what hit me baby you were flowing through my veins...
Clarke should have known trouble would find her. Or she would find trouble again.
Lexa sits behind the wheel of their getaway car. They'll have no driver. Didn't wanna drag anyone else in.
"You ready, Baby?" Lexa's cheeks are flushed, her eyes alight with sparkling energy.
Clarke can't help herself, she takes a hold of Lexa's cheeks with both hands and pulls her into a kiss. Love and excitement flows through her veins. When she pulls back, Lexa is imploring, nervous and shy as the first time she asked Clarke to come home with her.
"Ready," says Clarke. "You good?"
"Copacetic," Lexa laughs.
One last kiss and they leave the car, machine guns in hand.
Clarke’s heels click on the marble floor as the bank doors creak closed behind them. Lexa's hand is warm at the small of her back, her nerves are tingling. "Ready, Violet?"
The single gunshot doesn't make her jump as they share an easy smile. Lexa replies with a wink before adressing the room. "Everybody get down on the floor. This is a stick up."