#Thinking about all the times I’d just hang around the panini press debating if my bread’s crispy enough yet

[shortshowname]

Been on a streak of drawing Two-Brains in a ponytail after thinking about that one time I drew Two-Brains in a ponytail

[clarketomylexa]

Halley’s Comet and Other Extenuating Circumstances

“Halley’s comet,” Lexa finishes her train of thought with red cheeks. “I wish I didn’t have to wait,” she admits. “I want to go camping. Somewhere like Nevada. I want to see it properly.”

“Nevada?” Clarke whistles. “You’d miss calculus.”

“It’s chance I’m willing to take.”

“Skipping class?” Clarke says, appalled, “what would your perfect attendance record say about that?”

“It’s an extenuating circumstance,” Lexa maintains.

Clarke nods conspiratorially and leans over the table. “I believe you.”

read on ao3

The town stops for game day.

The post office closes early, which may or may not be a federal offence and the football players—rowdy and egging each other on with their letterman jackets slung around their shoulders—are excused from last period early. But perhaps the worst casualty of game day fever is the library which closes early on Friday afternoon because Mrs. Rodriguez's grandson plays wide-receiver on the team and she hasn’t missed a game of his since he was eight-years-old.

It leaves Lexa with precious few places where she can revise Spanish conjugations without being interrupted by people decked out in green, white and yellow and frankly, it’s stupid. For a phenomenon that occurs every week, it’s hardly worth the fuss it entails, especially when Lexa’s proposal to the city-council for a town-wide blackout in preparation for Halley’s Comet in forty years’ time was turned down as quickly as she submitted it.

“Did you know that it reflects 4% of the sunlight it receives,” she says, carefully writing out the present participles of the words listed in the assigned page of her textbook. Technically the pages aren’t due until Tuesday—her Spanish teacher is lenient with homework at best and in the habit of forgetting he set it at worst—but has AP History to study for on Sunday and Anya is dragging her out on Saturday for some ‘sister bonding’ under a guise of a house party Lexa doesn’t want to go to.

“What does?”

“The comet.”

Disgruntled, a heavy-set man emerges from beneath the counter of the diner, oil-stained rag tucked into the pocket of his jeans. Gus was swoon worthy in his day her mother would tell her over the dinner table while her father dropped his jaw, positively appalled. He was the quarterback for the championship winning team in 1986—the year Lexa could swear the town is stuck in—and was on a football scholarship to Ohio State until an injury put a kibosh on his NFL career and he was forced to return home with his tail between his legs and a bad disposition. The years of frowning have aged him and taken a toll on his hairline but his hatred for anything resembling football means he has become Lexa’s Friday night company and unlike her classmates, he has never once complained about her ‘fun facts’.

Anya says they deserve each other.

“‘S that right?” He grunts, wiping his hands on the rag and assessing his handiwork.

Lexa nods. “It only shines bright when it’s close enough to the sun for its dust and vapours to be burnt off.” She watches Jack frown at the still-leaking sink and leans on her elbows to peer over the counter. “Do you want me to take a look?”

“What ‘re you going to advanced Spanish the leak out of it?”

Lexa rolls her eyes but, point taken, she concedes.

Manual labour is not her strong point.

He resolves that he will have to call in the plumber on Monday and makes a note for himself to stick above the decrepit coffee machine that is still hanging onto life. Whenever she works the morning shift, she dreads the moment someone will ask for a cup of coffee because she is sure that today is the day it will give out on her completely and leave her with a mob of un-caffeinated townspeople on her hands.

“Can I get you another milkshake?”

She nods and slides a neat five-dollar bill over the counter.

More fool him for perpetuating her sugar addiction.

They both look to the door as the bell rings obnoxiously to signal the entrance of five girls clad in the green, white and yellow of the high schools cheerleading uniform and instinctively, Lexa goes to pull her belongings closer to her, resting her elbows on the counter and pulling herself inwards as they walk by and claim the booth by the window. If Gus sees the way her cheeks flush miserably, he has the good grace not to mention it.

He takes their order and sets Lexa’s second milkshake down next to her Spanish notebook before serving the girls their diet root-beer floats in five tall glasses and returning to the counter. Lexa stares at him as she listens to the mindless chatter—one of them has found a bar in town that doesn’t card, another got sent to the councillors office for a lecture on ‘appropriate behaviour on school grounds’ after she got busted making out with her boyfriend behind the gym. It makes Lexa want to pound her head in and by the look on Gus’s face, the diner owner feels the same.

She has always found it hard to connect with people.

It’s something that she seems come so naturally to her peers but whenever she went up to someone at recess in elementary school the ‘hi my name is’ and ‘can I play with you’ felt forced and awkward and ultimately would find her chickening out of a conversation she had initiated. Her father told her she was just ‘wired differently’ after she came to him in the third grade after a weekend researching into antisocial personality disorder. And although, admittedly, she was relieved to find out she wasn’t a psychopath, she couldn't help but think how unfair it was that out of a family of philanthropists, doctors and cheer captains, she had to be the one person who was average.

She tried her best not to be average—student government, debate team, six AP classes and two advanced ones—but so far, all it has done is entrench her further in a type of anonymity that she can’t seem to shake.

And she does want to shake it.

“Hi, Lexa.”

Wide eyed and calming the throbbing tattoo of her heart, Lexa slaps a hand over her notebook before turning to the voice. November is waning and Clarke is wearing the long-sleeved uniform top prescribed for cold weather—she knows it because of the number of times she has had to pick it up off of the floor of the laundry after Anya comes home from practice. But paired with the usual pleated mini skirt that Anya, as captain, petitioned to make shorter purely for ‘stunting reasons’ and not the glee of seeing her little sister spontaneously combust at the sight of her crush, it makes her sip of shake grow solid lodge itself in her throat like non-Newtonian fluid.

She swallows.

“Hi, Clarke.”

“You’re not coming to the game?”

Lexa knows she is being polite.

She hasn’t gone to a game since she was twelve-years-old.

“Spanish homework,” she shakes her head. “You?”

Clarke piques a brow and it takes Lexa moment before she realises her mistake. She tugs at the neck of her sweater, suddenly feeling hot beneath the knit of her turtleneck. “Sorry,” she blanches.

Clarke waves her hand as if to say ‘don’t worry about it’ and on the contrary, Lexa knows it will be weighing on her mind for the next week—for all the time she spends sitting in the bleachers staring at Clarke in uniform as she waits for Anya during practice, you’d think she’d remember what it stands for.

She drums her nails delicately on the counter even after Gus has given her change for the fifty she used to cover her table and Lexa tries not to think she is stuck on something—stuck on her maybe.  She blew her chance with Clarke when she chewed Anya out in front of the entire squad for bringing twenty-four girls home floor a sleepover without telling her in Pikachu pyjama pants and her middle school track and field t-shirt.

“If you ever did want to go to a game I’d be happy to give you a ride,” Clarke posits when Lexa has all but given up on her saying anything at all. “I know Anya can take you, but if you’re ever at a loose end.”

“Football isn’t really my scene,” Lexa smiles apologetically.

Clarke laughs. “I gathered.”

She hovers for a moment longer.

“The offer stands,” she says.

Her friends call her from the door and she disappears down the steps, car-keys swinging from her fingers before Lexa can reply and she sits on her barstool feeling shell shocked. Her cheeks are ruddy and she digs her chin into the lip of her sweater as if she can retreat behind the protection it provides and Gus has the good grace to allow her a moment of quiet contemplation before wiping the counter down with a dish towel.

“You don’t have to stay on my account,” he says as nonchalantly as he knows how. “If you want to go, then go.”

“I don’t,” she mumbles miserably.

He presses his lips in the silence and she juts her chin to fix him with an intent stare, unblinking from behind round glasses.

“I don’t.”

He sighs a long-suffering sigh and slings the dish-towel over his shoulder.

“Have it your way.”

The next Friday Lexa is working a shift and she is grateful because waiting tables and keeping Gus from throwing the panini press out of the window, cord and all, takes her mind away from the fact that Clarke hasn’t come in for a pre-game diet root beer float. The last week wasn’t the first time she had come in on a Friday—Lexa has spent more than she can count watching the gaggle of cheerleaders in the window booth push missing the time Anya insists they be at the stadium to warm up by—but it was the first time Clarke made a point to talk to her and the change in routine is unsettling. Especially since, in the space of the week, she had talked herself into saying yes should Clarke as if she wanted a ride again.

The four o’clock crown wanes to a lone man in a tartan scarf, furiously avoiding the football stats in the Tribune like the plague—a kindred spirit Lexa thinks—and Lexa busies herself with the calculus revision she sets up behind the counter. Gus comes past to wipe down the counter and she moves to let him through. He follows her and she moves back.

“You stare at that book any longer you’ll become a differential equation,” he grumbles.

“I’m surprised you know what that is.”

“Don’t take your anger out on me just because your girlfriend missed your date,” he holds his hands up in surrender and

“She isn’t my girlfriend,” Lexa says too quickly.

Gus mutters something that sounds like ‘damn teenagers’ under his breath as he takes a basket of French fries to the table in the corner and Lexa pretends not to hear.

When the diner is empty Gus lets her buy a burger and fries with a twenty from the till.

It comes with a lukewarm Cherry Coke that was miss-poured earlier and she sips it as she moves from calculus to AP English and her essay on the characters and themes of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. An hour later, she is on the second paragraph. She is in the middle of writing about how ‘Hamlet, in essence, is a detailed dialogue on appearance versus reality’ when the bell rings and she tempers her annoyance at being interrupted to paste a customer service smile on but when she looks up, Clarke is standing in the doorway and the sight of her makes Lexa do a double take.

Her hair is scraped up into a high ponytail—the prescribed three-inches from her hairline as set by Anya in the team handbook— but strays fall listlessly about her forehead as casualties of their half-time routine and her cheeks are pink. She has a thrift-store windbreaker over her uniform and bare legs, her fingers wound in the strap of the bag she has slung over her shoulder.

“What can I get you?” Lexa schools herself.

“A root beer float, please,” Clarke smiles, sliding a five dollar bill over the counter.

“Just you?”

“We won,” she nods, as if it’s an explanation, “everyone went out.”

“Not you?”

Clarke shakes her head and Lexa watches her lip sneak up between her teeth. It leaves her hot and reeling for a reason she doesn’t want to get into in the middle of her work place.

“I have Spanish homework.”

It takes Gus to intervene and pry Clarke’s change out of the the till before Lexa comes back to herself. Clarke is staring at her in a way that Lexa can’t decipher and it’s making her anxious—more than anxious, dizzy and clammy and horribly underdressed in her school clothes and cloth apron. She pulls the ballpoint pen from behind her ear.

“Lexa can sit with you if you want,” Gus says.

“I’m working,” she replies immediately, voice edging up an octave in panic.

It’s one thing imaging these circumstances from afar. The act of doing is always the part Lexa has trouble with.

“She’s off the clock,” Gus pats her on the back with a hulking hand.

He steers them to a booth and Clarke’s drink comes a minute later.

Lexa sits opposite Clarke, picking at the hem of her jeans with fingers that won’t seem to cooperate.

“I can get another straw,” Clarke offers.

Lexa shakes her head. “I’m sorry about Gus,” she inclines her head to the man, “he takes his duties as pseudo-father too seriously.”

“I heard that.”

Chagrined, Lexa ducks her head.

“I don’t mind,” Clarke says brightly. “It’s nice.”

“Really?”

She nods, grin widening.

“I don’t get to see you like this. You’re always so serious.”

“I don’t like Fridays,” Lexa says plainly.

Clarke looks at her in open-mouthed reproach as she liked a stripe up her vanilla ice-cream covered straw. “Who doesn’t like Fridays?”

“I find town wide shut downs troubling.”

“But they’re okay if they’re for a ‘once-in-a-lifetime astrological event’,” Clarke recites gleefully, “right?”

“You remember that?” Lexa winces.

“Do I remember the thirteen-year-old who got up in front of the city council to demand they make allowances for a comet that will only be visible in forty year’s time?” she piques a brow.

Lexa’s cheeks grow hot and she wishes the floor would open up and swallow her whole, looking everywhere but at Clarke who is laughing a soft, airy laugh that is so different in cadence to what Lexa hears when she listens to Clarke giggle about the football players at college boys.

“If it’s any consolation, I think it’s nice,” her voice softens when she sees Lexa’s reaction and she slides a hand across the table, fingers stopping just short of where Lexa’s rest—Lexa has it in her to feel disappointed. “I like that you’re so passionate about things. The world would be a pretty boring place without it.”

She says it so succinctly, it could be a fact in a textbook and for that fact, Lexa feels herself compelled to believe it.

“I wish it was sooner,” she says softly.

Clarke lifts her focus from the melting ice-cream and carbonated soda of her float, lips pursed around her straw. “What?”

“Halley’s comet,” Lexa finishes her train of thought with red cheeks. “I wish I didn’t have to wait,” she admits. “I want to go camping. Somewhere like Nevada. I want to see it properly.”

“Nevada?” Clarke whistles. “You’d miss calculus.”

“It’s chance I’m willing to take.”

“Skipping class?” Clarke says, appalled, “what would your perfect attendance record say about that?”

“It’s an extenuating circumstance,” Lexa maintains.

Clarke nods conspiratorially and leans over the table. “I believe you.”

“Gus, please,” Lexa whines, all but desperate.

She has her usual textbooks tucked beneath her arm and backpack over her shoulders but a newly affixed pout on her lips that has been put there through no fault of her own. Or perhaps it was a fault of her own. But in truth she hasn't spoken to Clarke since Gus shoved them unceremoniously together in a booth last Friday night and as far as she was concerned she wasn’t going to again. She had had her five minutes. It was enough to last her a lifetime.

Clarke, apparently, had other intentions and when she approached Lexa in calculus third period, pulling her book over to Lexa’s desk under the guise of ‘asking for help’ in the otherwise silent classroom to ask her to come to the game Lexa had practically leapt out of her skin.

“This is me asking you to come,” Clarke had said, it wasn’t cocky but it had an air about it that she was used to getting what she wanted. “So now you have to. You’re contractually obliged.”

She slipped her a note later that said she didn’t have to if she didn’t want to of course but by that time Lexa’s brain was buzzing too hard for it to sink in.

She panicked.

No one ever said she’s a functioning excuse for a human being.

“You work anymore shifts and I’m going to run out of money to give you,” Gus grumbles, hand on her back as he guides her towards the door.

“I’ll work for free,” she wagers.

He walks her outside and stands in the door, hand on the door jamb and looks at her sagely.

“It’s not a trap,” he tells her after a moment. Lexa’s heart loosens in her chest at the words and she thinks that he might be smarter that he gives himself credit for.

“How do you know?”

“I have eyes,” he scoffs, rubbing a hand over his face like she is giving him a headache. By the frequency of the movement, she thinks she does it a lot. “You do too,” she says when she doesn’t seem to understand. “And you’ve been using them to moon over that Griffin girl since you were fifteen-years-old. Today, she invited you to the game and if I have to sit there,” he jabs a finger towards the counter, “ and watch you look miserable for another week because you let yourself get in the way, I may just sell up and force you out.”

Lexa swallows and adjusts the weight of her books in her arms and he softens his presence.

“Go see your girlfriend, Lexa.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

She goes to the game.

She doesn’t know what else to do.

It’s loud and bright, and the absolute opposite of what she thought she would be doing with her evening but she makes the most of it. She sits halfway up the bleachers with her clear-file of physics revision in her lap and pretends that she isn’t bothered every time the family next to her launches themselves to their feet at the sight of their son with the ball.

After half-time, Clarke pulls Anya aside and points up the bleachers to where Lexa is sitting. She can see the frown on her sisters face slowly melt into something devilish and wants to throw herself to the ground and hide but before she can, Clarke is bounding up the metal stairs and shimmying her way down the row to the empty seat next to Lexa. Her hair is neat but her cheeks are red and there is sweat clinging to her hairline. She grabs Lexa’s forearm with a dazzling smile.

“You came,” she beams.

“You invited me,” Lexa replies dumbly.

Clarke smiles a small, secret smile and Lexa finds herself wondering if it is for her.  

“I thought football wasn’t your scene,” she levers herself into the spare seat, so close that Lexa can feel the heat of her through her coat.

Anya looks up with a wacky thumbs-up to which of them, Lexa doesn’t know.

All she does know is that she isn’t on speaking terms with her anymore and her cheerleading top is going to get an unfortunate soak in bleach the next time she leaves it on the floor of the laundry room.

She looks at Clarke and smiles.

“It was an extenuating circumstance.”