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ecfandom · 8 years ago

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Step 3:

On the first date, teach them something you care about. Something real. Invite them into your world. If they listen, see them again.

Clarke’s voice is thin on the phone and somehow it makes Lexa’s fingers itch to do something about it. She presses her phone tight to her ear as she lay in her bed with her back turned to the nameless sleeping thing next to her.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I don't know," Clarke sighs. "Wait. Why are you whispering? Oh... oh god, are you with someone? I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have—“

“No, no,” Lexa says a little too loud and glances behind her to check for any stirring. “It’s fine. We can talk. Are you…are you okay?”

There’s a long pause. Long enough for Lexa to pull her phone away and make sure Clarke’s name is still on the phone with the timer counting the seconds like the beating of her heart, slow and steady and silent. She puts it back in time to hear a burdened sigh.

“I just—I don’t know. Am I broken?”

Lexa sits up and swings her legs over the edge of her large, grey bed. She rolls her shoulders and twists her spine a few times before she slips out into the dark expanse of her bedroom in search of some clothes. She dawns them, then ventures out onto her balcony, where the stars seem to peer down at her critically. She glares back up at them and tries to swallow the sleep from her dry throat.

“You’re not broken.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“What happened?”

“I listened. I listened and listened and then he asked me out. He took me to a park and it was wonderful. He brought flowers. Wine.”

“And step 3?"

"I tried."

"What did you teach him? How'd you invite him into your world?”

“I talked about Picasso. About art. You know, just. I don’t know.” The girl on her phone sighs and Lexa wants to gather it up and put it back, not liking at all the way it stings on her ear. “I thought he was into it. He seemed into it. All the way up to his door.”

Another long pause. Lexa closes her eyes and settles into her lounge chair. “You slept with him.”

“He called me beautiful.”

She can’t find it in herself to chastise her, so she just shakes her head, unsure of what to feel. “You are.”

“What?”

“You are beautiful.”

“He didn’t make me feel it.”

“No,” Lexa muses, “I suspect not.” Her free hand is in a fist and she’s not sure why, so she shoves it into her sweat pants pocket.

“Why did I do that?”

Lexa stares out across the city, eyes bouncing from lone office to lone office lit against the deep blue of the late night-morning. She wonders if the men and women inside feel the way she often did when rooted at her desk after everyone else has left.

“Because you’re lonely,” she sighs.

The line goes silent for longer than ever. She doesn’t pull the phone away this time. Just waits. Hoping, and not sure why.

“I looked you up.”

The confession whips out into the air with the breeze that claws at Lexa’s exposed skin— her knuckles and ear tips, cheek bones and nose, are white and pink with every gust. It whips up into the air and into those stars which Lexa lends her eyes to again.

“You’re kind of a big deal. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t do it for the attention.”

“Why do you do it?”

“Because I’m lonely too.”

She hears Clarke pause. And then, “Where are you?”

Lexa closes her eyes. “Where are you?”

“At the park.”

“Alone?”

There’s no answer and it pulls Lexa back into her room.

“Clarke?”

“Yes, I’m alone.”

She pulls on her shoes.

“What park?”

“The big one. You know. In the middle of the city.”

Despite the fear scratching its way up the inside of her ribcage, Lexa grins. “Where in Central Park?”

She finds her in the middle of Sheep Meadow, spread eagle on the wet grass and completely still except for one arm stretched skyward, pointer finger dancing and analyzing imaginary lines.

She watches Clarke move and not move, that once rambling, golden blur now subtle and calm and completely new. She hugs her jacket around her tighter and watches.

When Clarke senses her, she turns just her head. There’s a small smile that blooms when the moonlight catches Lexa’s features and exposes the familiar face. Her arm drops unceremoniously. Lexa feels the drop in her chest, but is too busy meeting Clarke’s sad eyes to notice.

Lexa drags herself forward, a mime on a rope, moving beyond her control and struggling all the same. She drops down next to Clarke and feels an immense something wash over her at the sight of this sun looking so extinguished beside her.

“You came.”

Lexa sighs and hugs her knees. “Of course I came. You’re alone at 3 in the morning in the middle of Central Park,” Lexa snaps, suddenly annoyed.

Clarke just smiles and soothes the barbs with a quiet hand to Lexa’s shoe. “What’s her name?”

Lexa looks down at her and unconsciously traces the contour of the silver and orange light constructing Clarke’s face into all kinds of geometric shapes. She itches to measure and mold and explore. “Who?”

“The girl in your bed.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sarah, maybe. Something like that.”

“Sarah.” Lexa watches Clarke taste it in her mouth and wonders if it feels as metallic for her as it does in her own. “Is she pretty?”

“Yes.”

“Really pretty?”

“Clarke.”

Clarke hums in thought. “Funny?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Have you been with her before?”

Lexa does that muffled sort of growl that Clarke finds so amusing and endearing. She smiles and waits patiently until Lexa is done huffing and puffing. “Do you like her?”

“Why do you care, Clarke?”

“I’m lonely, remember? I have to live vicariously.”

Lexa feels petulant around Clarke. The girl’s constant expectations for her to be open make her want to scream and kick and pout until she’s left alone in her more comfortable silence. She gives a mighty huff and runs her hands along her arms, smoothing the chillbumps there.

“It’s fine. You don’t have to,” Clarke murmurs.

And she’s got Lexa again. All tied up and guilty and wishing more than anything she knew how she got here.

“She’s fine, I guess. She was willing to spend the night and only the night. So she did.”

“I’m surprised you let them even spend the night. Isn’t that like rule number one?”

Lexa grinds down hard and fidgets herself into a tight ball. “I didn’t come out here in the middle of the night in thirty-degree whether to be lectured about relationships by someone who can’t even get a second date.”

It’s meant to bite and it does. It’s bites through Clarke until she is finally silent. But, of course, it doesn’t make Lexa feel any better the way she’d hoped. She rolls her eyes at herself, or maybe at the girl who makes her want to apologize when normally she couldn’t care less. She can’t quite find any words, so she scoots forward and lays down next to the little extinguished sun instead. She can’t help it when she turns her head to look at her.

Clarke’s eyes bounce around the light polluted sky, searching for stars past the sirens and smog and the unbelievable noise that Lexa’s staring causes in her mind. “What was her name?”

Lexa has to blink several times before she’s able to process a word that comes out of Clarke’s thin, chapped lips now purple from the chill. “We’ve gone over this.”

“Not Sara.”

“Who then?”

“The girl who made you like this.”

A cop car wails down the street, but it’s muffled by the murmur of leaves in the wind, stretching off their branches in a valiant attempt to fly free. It otherwise seems so still here. Still and vast and like she’s being swallowed whole by the immensity of this girl who asks her too many questions and listens like she cares. Lexa turns back to the sky and tries to see whatever it is that’s making Clarke so brave.

“Costia.”

“Costia,” Clarke murmurs. “That pretty.”

Lexa nods.

“What happened?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Did she leave you?”

Lexa wants to rebel and rebel and rebel against this girl who doesn't take no for an answer and pushes all of her buttons. But having experienced Clarke enough at this point to know that she’s not going to win, she relents. Or maybe she's just tired. Tired, so very tired, of keeping it all in. Especially when Clarke gets like this, hunting and gathering with an intensity that belongs to a different species, a different world. “In a sense,” she murmurs, giving up. And it feels like cobwebs in her mouth. Sticky and old and scary.

“Were you happy?”

Lexa nods.

“Why did she leave then?”

“Sometimes things just aren’t meant to be.”

“But if you were happy—“

“She died, Clarke. Okay?”

Clarke flinches, but then she nods, all too familiar with the motivation behind Lexa’s lashes and barbs. She doesn’t repel though, just sits quietly and waits for Lexa to simmer back down. She always does.

Lexa is more grateful than she’s used to feeling when Clarke remains silent, allowing her to get used to the way her chest guiltily balloons a little with a bit of the weight chipped away and forced out of her.

They stare at the stars together, and Lexa wonders when this weird, quiet thing between them quite was born. She’d never expected to find a friend in Clarke, but her back was wet with dew and her spine ached with the cold of it, and she could pretend all she wanted, but the truth of the matter is that she wouldn’t be here if she didn’t care.

Lexa turns her head, tracing and constructing again because she can’t help it. Clarke is full of shapes and wonderful symmetry that Lexa’s engineering mind is so effortlessly drawn to. It doesn't mean anything. Lexa just appreciates the impeccable construction.

“My dad died a few months ago,” Clarke admits, quietly, suddenly. Lexa expects her to continue, but she doesn’t. Just presents it in a sort of morbid solidarity.

“The engineer,” Lexa offers.

Clarke hums and pushes herself up to sitting. Lexa thinks for follow her, but before she can, Clarke is back. She hands Lexa her phone with a picture pulled up. “My dad,” she says simply.

Lexa studies it and it makes her feel important and awful. Like an undeserving ward of something delicate and sacred, too much so for her calloused hands. She returns it. “You have his features,” she tries.

Clarke smiles and stares at the picture. “His eyes are my favorite. They were so blue.”

“Like yours.”

Clarke hums.

“What kind of engineer was he?”

“Aeronautical.”

Lexa whistles. “Tough field.”

“Much like yours, I bet.”

It’s comments like those that has Lexa wondering when exactly she’d gotten here. When exactly she’d let someone know enough to want to assure her of her own importance. Lexa had never needed assurance from external sources, and yet here was Clarke, ever steady, ever assuring. It made something in her swell though she forced it down with all her might. She didn't need it. She didn't need her. She stared her own company, built it, grew it, friendless and loveless and parentless. She didn't need this.

“Just different,” she remembers to murmur.

Clarke smiles at Lexa’s constant show of humble deflection and tries to source the discrepancy between the girl’s cocksureness about women and sex, and the almost gentle denial of praise with everything else. She goes to say something, but sees the discomfort in Lexa’s eyes. For a face so passive, so unyielding, her eyes betray everything. Clarke pretends not to notice for the sake of the stoic set of Lexa’s jaw, and turns back to her phone. She eyes the man she can’t quite remember on her own.

“He was brilliant, Lex,” she sighs. “Just so…so full of ideas and ways to make things better. He was—“

Lexa hears it catch in her throat. She brushes their knuckles without really meaning to, but it settles them both. And then Clarke is unstoppable in her rollercoaster of tones—quiet chuckles followed by rousing recollections that then dip into soft regrets and stirring stories.

Lexa watches her come alive against the grass, ebbing and flowing. She smiles slightly at times; the times when Clarke turns to her mid conversation, chest pumping out words as her eyes widen to convey them all. She frowns at others, when Clarke goes quiet and her hands fidget in knots against her stomach. In times like these, when Clarke just about disappears up into the stars where she seems much more comfortable, Lexa feels an inexplicable tug to bring her back down. This is when Lexa shifts and responds, and Clarke immediately drifts back, tethered by the treat of Lexa’s words when they are normally so scarce.

Lexa finds herself intoxicated by this power. She finds herself asking more questions, just to hear the rambling or the silence. She finds herself ignoring the calls and texts from maybe-Sarah. She finds her eyes fluttering as Clarke’s voice continues to dip and peak in passionate patters that comfort Lexa because they make her feel small. Small, but needed. She finds herself startling awake when cold fingers gently prod at her wrist an hour or so later.

“We should go,” Clarke whispers.

Lexa shifts onto her side and hisses internally at the way the cold air immediately attacks her exposed, wet back. Clarke turns to meet her, head pillowed on her hands, shivers much more prominent than Lexa’s own. She doesn’t really know what she’s doing until she finds her jacket wrapped around Clarke’s shoulders and Clarke’s head dipping to meet her forehead.

“I don’t know what to do,” Clarke whispers and the tiny cloud of condensation tickles Lexa's face.

Lexa stays only because Clarke is warm, and the proximity offers just enough to take the edge off. “Nobody does," she whispers back. "If they do, they’re just pretending.”

“How do I pretend?”

“You follow the steps.”

Clarke let’s her eyes really roam over Lexa for the first time. She catches the softness of her long-sleeve shirt, clearly thrown on in a hurry. Sees the sleep still gathered in the corner of her green eyes, and the way the draw string of her pajama pants don’t quite form a knot. It makes her wonder if maybe Lexa really does have the right idea. No attachments, no expectations. Just the ability to leave a nameless someone in your bed in the middle of the night, and not worry about it.

“I think I’ll have to start over,” she decides.

Lexa nods. “Step one.”

"Until I get it right."

"Yeah," Lexa echoes, mind clouding, body shivering, eyes roaming. "Until you get it right."

#clexa #clexa fanfction #clexa fanfic #clexa au #10 Steps #Step 3 #Chapter 3

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