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She spends nearly all of her time at Camp Jaha’s med-center, so it’s really no surprise that she’s there on the day that Raven walks in, dripping blood all over the floor.
She has a regular shift (4:00 to midnight - it isn’t her fault that she’s at work during the camp’s relatively social dinner and evening hours) and procedures to follow, and it just isn’t at all the same as it used to be back when she used to patch up her kids in the first level of the dropship.
The point is that she’s not okay -- none of them are okay -- and there is always work to be done.
*
The point is that it’s easy to hide, and Clarke has become good at hiding.
*
It’s late afternoon when Raven walks into the med-centre.
She has a positively defiant expression on her face, clutching a blood and oil-covered rag to her forearm, and the sight makes Clarke’s breath catch in her throat.
“Shit, Raven,” Clarke says with a gasp that she can’t quite manage to stifle. She tries to grab Raven by her good arm, leading her towards the row of med-centre cots, but the other woman flinches out of her grasp.
Clarke knows that she deserves it, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. “What the hell did you do?” she settles on asking, as she starts to unwind the dirty cloth.
“Always check for jagged edges before sticking your arm into an engine,” Raven says, and her face softens with a touch of self-depreciation. “It’s like the absolute first lesson on the absolute first day.”
Once the wound is finally uncovered, Clarke nearly sighs in relief. Raven has definitely fucked up her arm, and it’s going to require stitches for sure, but the slice is clean and managed to miss anything major.
Just another scar.
Clarke forces her face to remain impassive. Stoic. Professional. “Can you put pressure right here? I need to grab the suture kit.”
Turning away from Raven is an immediate relief. Like pulling the blankets up over your head to hide from the monsters lurking just beyond the edges of the light.
Like walking out into the forest, to hide from the very people that she had sacrificed herself to save.
*
Walking away from Camp Jaha was easy.
A hug, a kiss on the cheek, walk away, don’t look back.
*
Clarke didn’t look back.
*
It’s also easy to hide herself away in the camp’s medical centre. At least here, she can be useful.
At least here, she isn't hurting anyone. Not anymore.
Clarke digs through the cupboard, easily finding the suture kit. She steels herself, before turning back to Raven.
“I’m going to need to clean the wound before I can stitch it up. It’s going to hurt like hell, and we don’t have any anesthetic for when I do your stitches,” she says, as she frowns at Raven in apology.
“It’s fine,” Raven says, defiant. “I’ve had much worse.”
Clarke’s eyes trace up to the thin pale scars that streak across the skin of Raven’s upper arms, almost without meaning to. She nods. “You’ve been through a lot.” Clarke says, as if she isn't stating the obvious.
“And you can’t make any of it hurt any less.” Raven’s face is unreadable.
She hisses at the first touch of the antiseptic, but she clenches her teeth and is silent as Clarke finishes cleaning out the wound. Clarke is halfway through the stitches before Raven speaks again.
“So, this is where you’ve been hiding?”
Clarke grimaces, not looking up from the needle. “My mom needs help here, so here I am.”
“And it doesn’t kill you to be dealing with puking kids and frostbite all day, instead of leading the camp like you should be?” Raven asks with a scoff.
“I shouldn’t be leading anything.” Clarke’s tone sounds bitter even to her own ears and she knows that Raven won’t miss it, either.
“You shouldn’t be hiding yourself away in medical, avoiding all of us,” Raven fires back. “What was the point of even coming back?”
There’s nothing that Clarke can say.
She finishes up the last stitches in silence, and then before she can even give the standard wound care instructions, Raven is gone.
*
There really isn’t anything to say.
She tried to talk to Bellamy one evening, a few days after she came back. She hadn’t even made it halfway to his tent, before turning around.
*
She tries again that night, and makes it a few steps farther.
*
So maybe Clarke’s gotten used to the silence. And that’s why it’s a surprise when Raven is back several days later.
They hardly speak at all as Raven sheepishly shows her the burn on the palm of her hand. (“I might have gotten a little over-confident in my handling of gun powder,” she says, clearly annoyed.) A smile threatens at the corners of Clarke’s lips as she applies the burn salve and bandages the burn, before sending Raven away.
Two days later, it's Raven’s scheduled day to have her stitches removed from her arm, and Clarke once again works in silence.
She can't help thinking that she would prefer their arguing to the silence, and wonders if she should consider that to be progress.
*
When Raven limps into medical a few days later, Clarke almost rolls her eyes, before she registers the look of annoyance and actual pain on Raven’s face. She’s up and halfway across the room before she even realizes what she’s doing.
“Oh my god, Raven. What happened?” Clarke asks, looping an arm around Raven’s waist to help her limp the last few feet over to one of the cots.
Raven gestures to the gaping hole in one leg of her pants. “I ate dirt. I guess I’m not as graceful with my brace as I like to think that I am.”
Clarke gently pulls the fabric away from Raven’s leg and, sure enough, her knee and shin are covered in bloody scrapes, deeply embedded with sand and gravel. She winces in sympathy.
“It’s going to take me awhile to clean all of the debris out of your leg, Raven,” She says, before hesitating for a moment. “Do you think that you could take your pants off for me?”
Raven smirks, so fast that Clarke nearly misses it. “If you had said that a few months ago, I would have thought that you were coming on to me.”
Clarke laughs, a hoarse sound that surprises even her. “I probably would have been.”
Between the two of them, they manage to remove Raven’s torn pants (“Shit, these are my favourite pair! I’ll take them to Octavia, see what she can do with them,” Raven says, and Clarke wonders, not for the first time, just how much these people have changed in the months that she had been gone.) and then Clarke begins the painstaking work of picking gravel out of Raven’s leg. She tries to be gentle, but Raven still winces and hisses occasionally as Clarke works.
“It was right in the middle of the camp, too,” Raven finally says, after several long minutes. “I don’t know what hurts worse, my leg or my pride.”
“I’m sure both will recover,” Clarke answers, not looking up from where she’s using a pair of tweezers to dig a piece of gravel out of Raven’s knee.
“It was really fucking rough after Mount Weather,” Raven says. “I basically had to learn to walk with my brace all over again, after the job that those assholes did on my thigh.” The scar is pale and obvious, now that Raven has brought attention to it.
“I’m sorry, Raven.” Clarke starts, and then trails off, not even sure what she’s apologizing for.
“I was so angry when I woke up here, and you were gone. I mean, fuck, Clarke. You were just gone.” Raven’s voice was getting louder as she spoke. “I was in so much pain and couldn’t even walk again, and Monty doesn’t sleep, and Bellamy barely even talks to us anymore, and where the hell were you?”
“I don’t know what to tell you—“
Raven interrupts her. “We don’t need excuses or explanations. We just needed you, Clarke!” Raven was practically yelling at this point. “You just fucking disappeared for months, and now you’re back and you might as well still be gone.”
Clarke’s throat suddenly feels too tight and her eyes burn, and she isn’t crying yet, but with the way her voice sounds, she might as well be. “I can’t expect you to understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t understand, Clarke. I know that we used to be friends and you told me that you’d pick me first, and… now I have no idea who you are anymore.”
*
Clarke has no idea who she is anymore. Maybe that is the problem.
*
She tries to make an effort.
She makes small talk with Harper, tries joking around with Jasper, and even sits down next to Bellamy during one meal.
(He smiles at her cautiously, but there is a hesitation in his eyes, where there used to be only trust and respect. It feels like a blow to the chest.)
*
Still, it's definitely something.
*
She isn't even surprised when Raven saunters into the med centre one afternoon, as if their fight never even happened.
“What is it this time?”
Raven just smirks.
“Hello to you, too.” She turns, so that Clarke can see her leg, where a four inch long splinter of wood is solidly embedded in her thigh. “Jasper and Monty convinced me to let them try making a cannon out of a tree trunk. Predictably, it exploded. Of course, I was smart enough to make all the kids stand back out of the way, and I wore my welding gear, so my leg was the only casualty. And it’s even my bad leg, so…” She chuckles. “I can’t feel anything. I pulled out most of the shrapnel and Jasper almost puked and fainted at the same time. It was awesome.”
Clarke can’t even stop the laughter from bubbling up out of her chest, and it sounds foreign to her own ears.
“So why did you come see me? Just wanted to show off?”
“That’s part of it. But there’s one giant-ass splinter that I can’t seem to get out myself. Do you have anything to pull it with?” Raven asks, and her grin is hesitant, but there.
It only takes a minute before Raven is holding the bloody splinter of wood in her hands, clearly impressed. “Shit. I guess that’s the one benefit to being partially paralyzed. That motherfucker would have hurt if I could have felt it.”
“You know what I’m going to want you to do now, right?” Clarke asks, her tone light and amused in a way that it hasn’t been in longer than she can remember.
“Are you trying to get into my pants again, Griffin?” Raven winks, even as she starts unbuttoning her pants and pulling them down over her hips.
*
There was a time when Clarke would have grinned and maybe even blushed at the innuendo, but she sometimes wonders if that Clarke is gone. Just as dead as the bodies still rotting inside of Mount Weather’s dining hall.
*
It is not that time, and Clarke is no longer that girl, and so she simply disinfects the wounds and bandages the worst of them.
*
Raven is quiet and serious when she finally speaks again.
“You said that we don’t understand what you’ve been through, Clarke, but I want you to know that you can talk to me. If you want to.” She bites her bottom lip, almost nervous, and Clarke has been trying not to think about this Raven.
And shit, she suddenly wants to.
It feels good. Joking around with Raven, just being friends again. She didn’t even really realize that she had been missing it. Her stomach twists with something close to longing, for something that she hadn’t even remembered that she wanted, until this very moment.
*
It feels a little like waking up.
*
“Does this look infected to you?” Raven asks, breezing through the door. She’s holding one hand out for inspection, as she flops onto one of the cots near Clarke’s desk.
The wound in question is a thin neat slice across the pad of one of her index fingers, and even from a couple meters away, Clarke can clearly see that it is not, in fact, infected. That doesn’t stop her from coming over to sit next to Raven on the cot, however. She takes Raven’s hand in hers and makes an exaggerated show of checking it out.
“After everything you’ve been through, you’re that concerned about a paper cut?” Clarke asks, grinning wryly.
“Hey!” Raven protests. “It was a pocket knife!” she adds, sheepish.
“I guess you can never be too careful.” And it actually physically pains her to be smiling so widely.
She digs through a drawer until she finds the small jar of antibiotic ointment that Lincoln had shown them how to make using the seaweed that grew in the creeks nearby. Using two fingers, she carefully smooths the ointment onto Raven’s hand. When she finally looks up, Raven is smiling apprehensively.
“Monty has a new batch of moonshine. A bunch of us are going to test it out tonight and you should definitely come. There is an eighty percent chance that I will get drunk enough that I start speaking in math.”
Clarke looks down at her hands again; she is still clutching Raven’s hand in one of hers. Her fingers are still rubbing gently against Raven’s index finger, worrying the calloused skin with her own. It’s been so long since she has just relaxed with the others (Unity Day? Had it really been that long?) and the idea fills her with a deep sense of unease.
Sitting with the others during meals is one thing, but social gatherings? Something completely different. Seeing the kids being kids just reminds her of everything that she had given up for them. How she would never really be one of them again.
But Raven is still smiling at her, and she is biting her lower lip nervously, even as she cocks one eyebrow, trying to give every appearance of being self-assured and cocky.
“I’ll come for a little while,” Clarke finally says, appeasingly. It is just about the most lacklustre affirmative response that she could have given, but Raven still smiles gleefully, as she pulls Clarke in for a quick hug. Her hair tickles Clarke’s cheek when she presses her face into Clarke’s neck.
Clarke can almost swear that she feels Raven’s lips against her throat for just a fraction of a second before she pulls back.
Just for a fraction of a second.
“Look at you, coming around,” Raven teases gently, but her eyes are bright with triumph.
*
Raven does, in fact, get drunk enough to speak in math.
*
Also, Clarke meets Bellamy’s eyes over Raven’s head, and it doesn’t surprise her at all to notice that he has been watching them. His eyes are dark and intense, and the edges of his mouth are curled up into the barest hint of a smile.
Clarke smiles back.
She definitely calls it progress.
*
Raven is really a very physically affectionate person, once she decides that she wants to be.
And right now, she’s practically immobilized on Clarke’s hospital cot. She moans suddenly, rolling on to her side and curling up slightly, not quite into a fetal position.
Clarke has seen her at her worst. At a point where any normal person would be delirious with pain, and yet still holding on. Talking about rocket science and still teasing the rest of them. And so this Raven should surprise her.
It somehow fits perfectly, though.
Clarke can’t help smiling slightly, as she fills the hot water bottle. She tests the temperature, before wrapping it in a towel and handing it to Raven. “Here. Hold it against your stomach. It should help.”
Raven sighs, a deep breathy groan, as she curls her body around the hot water bottle. “Do you have other stuff to do?” Raven asks, quiet.
This part fits perfectly, as well.
“You’re my only patient. I’m all yours for now.”
“Awesome.” Raven answers, before falling silent once again.
“Is it always this bad?” Clarke asks.
“Yeah.” Raven pauses for a moment, thinking. “The cramps have always been really bad, and since I was shot, it’s like my entire back tenses up and pain radiates all through my lower back and hips. It sucks.”
Clark hisses in sympathy, a sharp sound in the quiet room. “Is there anything that I can do to help?”
*
She knows Raven.
(Knows Raven when she’s wounded.)
And Raven will lick her wounds in private, rather than let anyone know that she’s in pain.
This Raven is here for a reason.
*
It should maybe scare her to think about how alike they really are.
*
Raven looks almost ashamed, but she plows forward anyway.
“Can you just stay with me? When I came here, I knew that there wouldn’t be anything that you could do, medically. But it helps just to have some distraction.”
Raven is still curled up into a ball, but she moves a little, making room on the bed.
And, oh fuck it, Clarke thinks, before lowering herself on to the cot next to her, being careful to leave a couple inches of space between their bodies. Raven's breath sounds loud - shallow and slow - in the quiet of the med-centre.
*
Even later, Clarke wouldn't be able to tell you why she chose that moment to talk.
*
“The first few days after I left, I didn’t eat at all. Barely drank anything, either. I think I was trying to kill myself,” Clarke says. Her voice is just above a whisper, but still sounds impossibly loud in the quiet room.
“What happened?” Raven asks, hesitant.
“It turns out that it’s really hard to starve yourself. It’s like instinct just takes over. Your will to live,” Clarke shudders, remembering those first few days on her own. “It took me weeks to recover from those first few days. I was really lucky that something — or someone — didn’t find me in those first couple weeks. It didn’t feel lucky at the time, though.”
“Do you still want to die?”
Clarke thinks for a moment.
(Doesn't really have to think. Has been thinking about it for months.)
“I haven’t for awhile. But I still can’t quite convince myself that I deserve to live.”
Raven turns to face Clarke, still hugging the hot water bottle tightly against her body. Her eyes are dark and sad, and Clarke can't bear to look at them. She gestures for Raven to lift her head so that Clarke can slip her arm underneath it, pillowing her cheek against her shoulder.
When Raven finally speaks, Clarke can feel her warm breath against her neck. “I wish that we could have helped you through those first few weeks.”
“Me too,” Clarke whispers.
*
That’s what makes her different from Raven or Bellamy or Monty. That need to escape. To handle it all on her own.
*
She wishes that she could have taken Bellamy up on that drink.
*
It's a few more months before she can tell him that.
His eyes are sad, but he throws an arm over her shoulder and pulls her close into his side.
"We all do what we have to do to survive," he says. And, this time, Clarke actually believes him.
*
But she’s not there, yet, and won’t be for awhile.
*
A few days after Raven's last visit to the med-center (a few days after Clarke fell asleep on the med-center cot, with Raven's head pillowed against her shoulder and her breath warm against Clarke's neck), Clarke goes to find her in engineering.
"Woah," Raven breathes out, "this is different." And her tone is only about twenty percent sarcastic.
(Which is practically a record for anything that comes out of Raven's mouth.)
“I wanted to talk to you,” Clarke starts, before realizing just how serious she sounds. She tries again. “There’s nothing wrong. I just…” She trails off, but somehow Raven makes the leap.
She gestures to the spare chair -- Wick’s chair -- in the corner of the room. “Do you wanna…?”
Clarke considers it for a moment, but she’s filled with a nervous energy, a need to keep moving. She declines with a quick head shake.
She just needs to get it out.
“I want you to know.” Clarke pauses, takes a second to collect her thoughts. “That I’m starting to get better. Or… trying, at least.”
Raven nods, but she doesn’t say anything, encouraging Clarke to continue.
“I’m not there yet, but I’m hoping that I will be, eventually.” The next words leave her in a rush, like she can’t get them out quickly enough. “And I’m hoping that maybe you’ll be there when I’m ready.”
Raven’s smile is luminous, the kind that lights up her entire face. And she’s looking at Clarke like she’s a first glimpse of dark brown earth and blue sky and a million shades of green leaves.
(That smile is how Clarke tries to remember Raven, right before she falls asleep at night.)
She reaches out, and grasps Clarke’s hand, tangling their fingers together, and once again there is nothing left to say.
*
She’s not okay, and this doesn’t make it better, but maybe this is how it starts.