Work Text:
1. when you really met
You were volunteering the summer before your senior year, doing the grunt bitch work for everyone in the hospital and hoping it’ll turn into a job after graduation. The ambulances roar in with a scream and there was a pile-up just a half-hour earlier and the ER is jammed up so they sent you out to help wheel the new patients in.
“Drunk driver,” the EMT tells you, rattling stats off. You catalogue the numbers automatically. “Two more behind me,” the EMT continues, “driver will walk away with a scratch; this one’s a goner.” You look at the goner, see a beautiful girl with smooth dark skin and her curly hair matted with blood. You hook the chart to the side of the gurney and wheel her to a trauma room. A nurse grabs the sleeve of your scrub shirt.
“OR 3,” she orders, and pushes you into an elevator with another gurney, another beautiful girl in a back brace and a spine stabilizer. She’s awake.
“Hey,” you say, soothing and comforting as you can. You remember how out of it you’d been when you woke up in the hospital after the accident, your last memory Raven screaming and Finn’s blank eyes. “You’re going to be okay.” The girl’s fingers twitch against the metal railing.
“Costia,” she croaks.
“It’s okay,” you repeat, for lack of anything else to say. You don’t know this girl but you recognize the choked look on her face, the loss.
“Costia,” she says again, and tries to move. You stabilize her immediately, and slip your hand in yours. She locks her eyes with yours and you’re caught. They’re brilliantly green; her right pupil is fixed and blown. Concussion at best, brain bleed at worst.
“Sorry,” you say quietly. “I’m sorry.” Her eyes roll back, fluttering shut, and the elevator dings. You pass her off to the surgical team and go back to the emergency room.
//
You don’t think about her again, the girl with the broken eyes, until she tells you about Costia on the balcony of the apartment you share, her hand tight and tense in yours. You kiss her and she tastes like cigarettes and grief and you have a flash of a thought: you’re grateful Costia died, because otherwise you’d never know the curve of Lexa’s smile, what her teeth feel like against your skin, the tangle of her hair in your fingers. You recoil from the thought, horrified, and after she falls asleep you slip out of bed and take the pack from where she thinks she’s hidden it well under her scarves and chainsmoke your way through it alone. “Sorry,” you say outloud to the girl you’ve met but never knew. Mine your heart says fiercely, she’s mine.
2. you know she loves you
Lexa is confident and professionally ambitious and focused, and when it’s just her and you she’s thoughtful and sweet and endlessly loving, and she thinks she hides her anxiety well but she happens to be almost hopelessly, adorably, transparent. You’d said I love you first, after she’d taken you back to her apartment after a date. She’d kissed you while she fumbled with her key in the lock, and you both fell into her apartment, attached at the lips. You pushed her against the nearest wall and kissed her so thoroughly you were panting when you pulled away, your nose brushing hers, and you’d pulled in the breath she’d just exhaled and told her you loved her, the words slipping off your tongue before you can swallow them back.
You watched her face go slack, shocked, and you saw her eyes heat up slow and dark as she processed your words, the pupils dilating. She kissed you breathless again, surging her body against yours, stretching your bodies out on her hardwood floor next to the jumble of her shoes by the door, her body heavy on yours. You came with her name on your lips, shuddering, your back bowed, and felt her shake against your chest, tears on your collarbones.
She’d made you breakfast in her bed the next day and fed you cut up fruit with her own fingers, swiped powdered sugar across your nose and your cheekbones with little happy smiles. Underneath she thrums, nervous energy. You push her down and drop half a grape into her belly button, sucking it out while she peers at you, bemused, and you sit on her hips and eat toast, dropping buttery crumbs on her skin, her sheets, her floor, until she’s soft and relaxed against you, smiling big and happy.
//
You get soppier, leaving her hearts in the mirror while she showers, post-its on the fridge when you have to leave before her, sleepy mumbles when she slips in bed behind you and draws you close.
//
“It doesn't bother you?” Raven asks during your shared lunch break, eating the roast beef sandwich Lexa’s left saran wrapped in the fridge for you, layered with the expensive mustard she hates but you could (and do) eat with a spoon. “Because I’ll fight her if you want me to.” Raven brandishes a spork. “I’ll kick her ass.”
“I don’t think you getting your ass kicked is going to help anything,” you say, and dodge the cherry tomato she flings at you. “I think she’s just… different. I don’t mind.” Raven’s eyes widen and she jerks a finger across her throat, just as you hear the elevator ding.
Lexa’s hand settles gently on your arm and she kisses you, mustard and all, and her eyes are incredibly soft and she’s brought you the shockingly sweet coffee you like from the place across the street and she kisses you again, her nose wrinkled at the mustard, and you don’t mind anything.
//
You’ve just had the worst argument you’ve ever had, worse than being too stressed and too tired or tripping over each other’s shoes or putting the empty milk carton back in the fridge, worse because you haven’t actually argued at all. She stood you up, won’t answer your texts or your calls, adjusted her schedule so you hardly see her at work, sends the interns when she absolutely has to tell you something. It’s everything everyone warned you about when you started dating her, that she’s emotionally closed off and cold, and you refuse to throw yourself where you’re not wanted so you go to a bar and call Octavia to pick you up before you can drink the shot that you ordered and cry in her lap on her couch while Lincoln makes you both hot chocolate.
//
She shows up on your doorstep, looking like shit, and you’ve just showered and your hair is a wet tangled mess and you’re wearing a sweatshirt she’d left behind and if you had any dignity at all you never would have let her in but you’d seen her through the peephole and yanked the door open before you could think it all the way through.
She starts crying, her face crumpled in on itself and your anger and hurt don’t seem as important anymore. You drag her to your couch and let her curl up into herself, protecting herself as best she can even now. She tells you quietly that she lost someone and you recognize that look in her eyes from the elevator years ago, her bloody hand slack against your latex gloves. She tries to apologize and you page through her stack of index cards, written out in carefully deliberate, impeccable handwriting, and you put them aside to wrap both of you in a blanket and cuddle her close.
Two weeks later and everything’s mostly forgiven, and you’re naked in her bed while she goes down to the Chinese place on the corner for takeout. Your sweat is dry and you’re cold now, so you go to steal her sweats, because you like the way she licks her lips when she sees them on you, a little long in the leg and little tight around the thigh. You also want her wool socks, because they’re amazing and you like to slide around in them because it’s fun and it makes her smile. You drop them and grumble when they roll under the dresser, going down on all fours to fish them out. There are piles of index cards there, ripped in half, crumpled pieces of notebook paper, scritch scratch in her handwriting as she struggled to articulate how you make her feel. When you open the drawer for a top there’s a thin stack of printouts hidden under the zipper hoodies she wears she goes running. You draw them out and they’re apartment listings, with notes in Lexa’s handwriting Clarke likes windows and extra room = studio space?.
She comes through the door, calling out she’s back and you kiss her so fast and so hard she loses her grip on the takeout, eggdrop soup splashing the walls. You fuck her boneless on the kitchen tile, relentless, making her beg and come twice before grinding out your own release slow and dirty on her thigh and when you finally roll off there’s white rice crushed under where you pinned her arms and ordered her not to move. “I love you,” you tell her, and watch her say it back in the way her eyes go soft and the way she yields to the close mouthed kiss you press against her chapped lips and the way she exhales, shaky when you touch her every time, like it shocks her to be loved by you.
3. you knew anya
Anya had been the resident in charge of you at your first internship.; She’d been terrifying and blunt and relentless, with rarely a kind word and never a praise, and you’d learned more from her than all four years of medical school combined. You think she might have hated you, thought you’d try to cruise on your mother’s name and reputation, until she dragged you to the roof after you'd failed to resuscitate a nine year old boy, his dead eyes accusing as you noted his time of death: why didn’t you save me?, after his father crumpled against the wall, sliding down with his head in his hands and his mother sobbing in the rickety waiting room chair.
She’d propped you up in the sticky summer heat and made you recite the odds and the statistics until you accepted in your head, if not your heart, that you’d done everything you could have done. Then she split a cigarette and a smashed brown banana with you and pretended you weren’t crying, until you could wipe your nose and your eyes off on your scrubs and go back to work.
You heard about her death a week after it happened, a meaningless, senseless loss, and lit a candle for her in the hospital chapel. You weren’t her friend like some of the other doctors who petitioned to get something named after her and you weren’t her family like Lexa, who still can’t eat Anya’s favorite food or watch her favorite movie without the shadow of grief weighing down on her shoulders, but you miss her. You miss her talent and her presence and her knowledge, and you miss the happiness she must have brought Lexa for Lexa to grieve her so deeply and fully, curled up away from you on bad nights until she makes herself get up again.
4. your mother doesn’t like her
You drag Lexa to brunch with your mother and she eats everything your mother puts on the table with the grim determination of a soldier marching into battle, answering her questions with impeccable politeness and respect. She drinks half a pitcher of orange juice during the thinly veiled interrogation even though you know she hates it and she flees to the porch swing to give you time alone as soon as she can. You drop the dishes in the sink and notice that your mother has hidden the wine she usually keeps on the counter, like if you wanted to fall off the wagon you couldn’t walk your own ass down to the corner store and buy a handle.
“She’s not what I would have picked for you,” your mother says, judgmental and faintly disapproving, and you warn her fiercely that if she ever hints so much at Lexa you’ll go back to the strained gaping silence that existed between you after your father wasn’t there to bridge your two personalities, too different and too similar all at once.
So every other Sunday you and Lexa go and your mother makes sure there’s a full pitcher of orange juice because she mistakenly thinks Lexa likes it and Lexa talks at great length about the color wheel and postmodernist deconstructionism because she mistakenly thinks you got your love of art from your mother and when you get in the car Lexa exhales big and loud and you kiss her to get the orange juice taste out of her mouth and drive her home and make her something she likes to eat and sit on the couch under the same blanket and make out, goofy and too wet, and you tell her Abby likes her, definitely.
5. you know when her birthday is
Lexa opens to you like a pomegranate, you think, when you’re post-coitally stupid and poetic, slow and messy and so sweet, revealing little bits of herself, her past like seeds against your searching fingers: she grew up in a series of homes, some okay, some indifferent, some that make you clench your nails into your palm in impotent rage, nowhere to direct it, no way to change it. You know she tries to only tell you the good memories--the time she went to the state fair and rode a roller coaster for the first time, the family that had a dog that slept on the foot of her bed and kept her toes warm. You treasure everything she tells you but it’s the darker memories that feel the most intimate, Lexa whispering in the dark about how she got the fine scars on the outside of her right elbow, why she gets anxious when the pantry’s empty and how the smell of eggs makes her nauseous.
She doesn’t celebrate her birthday or even mention it at all and for the first year you don’t push. For your birthday she wrangles for both of you to have the day off and spoils you rotten. She dotes on you and then takes you out to your favorite restaurant and back to her bedroom, full of flowers, worships your body with careful fingers. What you really want is to feel her naked against you and she gives you that too, smiling while she says your name like a ragged prayer.
//
You're driving slow and careful in the snow to Lincoln and Octavia’s housewarming party when she sucks in a sharp breath, her hand flying out to cross your chest, and you turn--you’re looking at her when the SUV hits you, spinning on black ice. Your car crumples: you hear the metal screaming and the glass shattering, and the slam impact of your car into the roadside snowbank, the bruising jerk of your seat belt. The airbags explode and the last thing you see is her terrified eyes, her hand still outstretched to you.
You come back to yourself when the car is still slowing to a stop, so you know you’d only been out for a minute or less, stunned. Your whole vision is white, and when you suck in a breath you choke on hot dust. You cough, flailing as you push the rapidly deflating cushion away from you. “Lexa?” You can hear her coughing. “Lexa!”
“Clarke,” she says, and grabs your hand. “Your wrists.” The dust is clearing, slowly, and you look down. Your inner wrists are red, and will sting badly, but the hurt is still distant. You’re more worried about her breathing, which is starting to whistle.
“Hey,” you say, trying to wave the dust away. “I’m okay.” She holds your hand too tight and you try to talk her through breathing more normally until the firefighters cut your door off, Lexa ordering her first, her first over your objections. You stumble around the hood of the car, slipping, and she falls into your arms. You drag her to the ambulance and strong arm the paramedic into wrapping her in a shock blanket and she’s still not breathing right and your face hurts from the airbag and you can’t tell if she’s panicked or injured, which is making you panicked.
You text Octavia on the way to the hospital and she bursts in while you’re still waiting to be seen, Raven limping behind her. Lexa goes in for an x-ray and Octavia feeds you the hors-d'oeuvres she’s supposed to giving out to her guests while Raven finagles you access to Lexa’s chart, which is useless because she hasn’t been diagnosed yet.
Lincoln arrives from parking the car and uses his access to the sisterhood of nursing to tell you that Lexa has two cracked ribs and the shaky after effects of a serious panic attack, probes your nose with careful fingers and pronounces it unbroken. He slathers your wrists in soothing ointment and helps Lexa sign her release form. Then he squishes everyone into his van and takes you all back to Lexa’s apartment because it’s closest. He sits everyone on the couch and puts on a random movie.
Lexa can’t stop looking at you, touching you, and you can’t fault her because every second she spent in the bathroom you spent having visions of her collapsing, undetected internal bleeding stealing her from you forever. She falls asleep in your arms, exhausted and drowsy from the painkillers you made her take, and you take your first full breath since the accident. Octavia comes at you with baby aspirin and an immovable attitude and Lincoln helps you carry her to the bedroom and doesn’t let you apologize for ruining his party. You see them hug each other too tight in the hallway before he ushers everyone out and tells you sternly not to go to work for the next four days.
The heat is on too high because everyone had been too shaken to remember to turn it down and you sweat under the comforter but you need to feel her breathe against you. You tuck your face in her neck and shake, minutely.
//
Lexa gets cranky because she doesn’t like to admit anything hurts, ever, and you get cranky because you can’t take the good painkillers and you don’t understand why she’s moving so gingerly until you argue again and she admits she threw the drugs away, looking guilty, and then you feel guilty because she’s hurting for you, so you won’t have to look at the orange bottles on the bathroom sink, and then you pick a fight about how her heater doesn’t have auto-shut-off and she picks a fight about you not applying your ointment at exactly timed intervals and you both try to exile yourselves to the couch and then you fight about that. You think you’ve won until you shuffle to the bathroom in the middle of the night and trip over her sleeping on the floor in the hallway and it’s all so ridiculous because if you really wanted to be away from her you could go to your own apartment. You kick her awake and you both sleep badly in her bed until you wake up Sunday morning and drag yourselves down to her car for brunch with your mother.
You both stand and look at her car, the keys dangling limply from her fingers. Then you look at each other. You extend your hand and she takes it, leading you back up to the couch, and you text your mother an excuse and she orders a pizza. You watch reruns of shark week and get too excited about hammerheads and when she kisses you she tastes like pepperoni grease.
//
Two weeks later you both have the day off and you go together to a car dealership and Lexa muses that she’d really like for you to drive a tank in a way that makes you suspect she’s only a little bit joking.
//
Another week after that and you realize you know when her birthday is, from her chart, and it’s in five days. You don’t know if she doesn’t celebrate because she genuinely doesn't care or if there’s something dark and painful associated with the date, so you take her out two days before. You try to give her everything she usually denies herself: upscale restaurant, appetizers, expensive steak, fancy wine and mineral water for yourself, decadent dessert. She side eyes you when you present her with extravagant bouquets back at her apartment but you only have eyes for the way she smiles when she brings them close to her face and inhales.
On her actual birthday you’re aggressively casual, to the point that she may be suspicious. You eat cold takeout leftovers at odd hours, chopstick fighting over the best bites, and you squint suspiciously at medical journals while she reads steadily and makes notes in the margins. You make vague offers to go back to your own apartment and she blinks at you, confused, so you give up and go change into your pajamas. You’re slipping into bed with her when she starts talking, and for a single second you think she might be breaking up with you. By the time you’re finished dealing with that ludicrous thought she’s looking at you expectantly and you must not hide the blankness very well because she sighs, rolling her eyes, and asks you again.
You topple her over onto the bed, launching yourself in a kiss that’s too enthusiastic, missing her mouth entirely as she laughs under you, her hands steady on your hips.
//
You move in together a month later and she makes you hang a confusingly ridiculous painting in the spot of honor in your new living room, some boring thing you did in college, a still life, and you don’t get it but it makes her happy so it makes you happy. Then she makes you really happy, propping you up on your new dining table and eating you out until you can’t remember your own name.
6. how much you love her
You’d known you were in trouble when you’d drawn her the fifth time, and resigned to being in trouble when you’d flipped through your sketchbook and seen nothing but the lines of her jaw, her strong dextrous fingers, abstract imaginings of the scars and tattoos that map her skin like poetry.
You always take your father’s birthday off, so you can visit him, clean his tombstone, tell him about your life. You’d taken Lexa once and she’d greeted him solemnly, left beautiful flowers, and you’d felt flushed with how lucky you are, to love and be loved by her. On the anniversary of his death you usually laze around the house, try to paint something, read the book you usually don’t have time for. But’s a round number this year, and you’re in the most serious relationship of your life with a job you love and you’re good at, and it hurts more now somehow, that he’ll never meet Lexa or dance at your wedding or sit on the couch and talk to you about art and music, not ever. Then you think about Finn, and how he’d loved you quietly and devotedly--most of the time, and in any case, hadn’t deserved to die the way he had. So you stay in bed, indulging your grief, and sleep too early and too long.
Lexa wakes you. “Get up,” she says, and you blink the sleep grit from your eyes.
“What?”
“Up.” She pushes you into the bathroom and you have the most businesslike, least sexy shower you’ve ever had. She dresses you, rubbing a towel briskly over your skin, and marches you into the car.
She takes you to the beach. It’s cold and empty and the water numbs your ankles when she pulls you into the surf. She flicks saltwater into your face until you sputter and retaliate, and you lie in the sand with your damp skin all pressed against hers. “I love you,” she whispers into the curve of your ear and if you weren’t already lying down it would have knocked you down, what you feel for her. A million hearts on a million sticky notes feels childish, a hundred flowers and a thousand kisses isn’t enough. You want to spend the rest of your life listening to her lecture you on your suture technique and watching her eye twitch when Raven buys you a penis shaped birthday cake and feeling her body respond to yours, electricity in your fingertips when she pants your name.
“I love you,” you say back to her and when she smiles it hurts, the force of your joy.