fragile | clexa

chapter twenty three

Clarke was palming her left breast, tightly pressing down, and it took Lexa a few seconds of confusion to realize Clarke was feeling her heartbeat.

She stayed still, her eyebrows relaxing, and somewhen felt Clarke press her ear on Lexa's chest to hear it too.

Her hand reached out with a sigh, finding Clarke's hair and softly combing through it, caressing the girl's temple once before taking the hand back to herself. "Talk to me?"

Silence for a few seconds.

"There's so much."

"So much what?"

"So much everything. In my head."

Lexa's hand had subconciously made it way back into Clarke's hair. "Okay," she said softly, supressing a yawn so Clarke wouldn't realize her tiredness, and then hummed in thought. "Can you tell me what you were thinking about?"

Lexa could feel Clarke's breathing quickening. "I- you..."

The brunette's fingers swept across the skin of Clarke's cheek, who let out an involuntary and almost silent sigh.  "You reminded me of someone," she breathed. "I- so much is... it's in my head. Everything. I don't know anything but it's there and I- I remember- she... you- I see it so realistically. It's real, Lexa, right in front of my eyes, I can't do anything."

"Breathe, Clarke. Breathe. That you can do," Lexa said, not fully understanding Clarke's words, so she just kept brushing through the blonde's hair. "Who is 'she'?" she then asked.

"346. That was her number. I think. She was-"

Images ran through Clarke's head again, nausea and sickness creeping along her body, and she quickly shook her head. "I can't."

"That's okay. Was she a slave?"

Clarke nodded slightly.

"And you didn't know about it before?"

"I don't... I think I don't know. It was so blurry. Everything is so blurry. And so clear all the same. I'm going insane, I know it, this isn't what I'm supposed to be doing, I'm growing mad and-"

Lexa cut her off with another soft 'Clarke'. "It's called trauma. Your mind can supress really bad things and if it gets triggered, it might all come rushing at once, or step by step, and you have those really bad things in your mind again. Did you think about your past in ways you didn't before, maybe?"

"He asked me," Clarke said after a while.

"Lincoln?"

Clarke shook her head, and then the reality hit that she had lied to Lexa, and now needed to explain, and she was so tired.

She didn't want any of it.

She wanted to sleep. She wanted the pain to be gone. She didn't want to explain her mistakes. She was so tired.

Her body curled further up against Lexa in a defense mechanism, burying herself beneath the blanket and closing her eyes like that erased all problems.

"Clarke, who talked to you?"

Clarke curled up further, closed her eyes harder.

"I'm not mad at you dear, tell me who talked to you," Lexa coaxed and of course Clarke's mouth was working automatically with the nickname falling from Lexa's lips. Damn it.

"The healer's assistant."

"You had a healer here?"

Clarke didn't answer. She thought maybe if she neither confirmed nor denied, they would move on, but probably silence was another kind of confirming too.

"I'm not mad at you," Lexa repeated and her arm snaked around Clarke's torso to hold the girl, who now had her face nuzzled in Lexa's chest and the blanket. "So there was an assistant and he asked you something about what happened?"

Clarke nodded again, and Lexa would leave it like that if it wasn't so odd that Clarke, right, Clarke had lied to her without having a panic attack.

"Clarke, what did he do?"

No answer.

"Did he touch you?"

Silence, no movement, and then a tiny little nod.

Lexa was boiling, and if it hadn't been Clarke in her arms, she would've crushed the next thing beneath her forming fist. Instead, she pulled Clarke a little further up to her.

"I'm sorry," Clarke said quietly, muffled through the fabric she was speaking against.

"Stop apologizing for everything," Lexa replied, her mind full of ways to kill that damn assistant. What did he even allow himself? "I'm sorry because I wasn't there when I should've been."

Clarke shook her head, though didn't further say anything, and after a while of Lexa just spacing out and Clarke subtly snuggling a little bit closer, the brunette's eyelids started getting heavy. "I'm going to take care of him tomorrow," she muttered, tirednes layering her voice, but she thought that maybe Clarke was long asleep.

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