Ground Down

Chapter 40

She couldn't sleep. If she was honest with herself, that may be because she had spent the past few hours trying not to cry. Successfully, but the feeling remained stubbornly scratching behind her eyes and sent her mind spinning and spinning like a dog chasing its own tail. She had tossed and turned in her bed, dreading how time passed by, counting down the hours she would have had left had she fallen asleep right then, and then she had turned and tossed, and then called quits and thrown her legs over the side of the bed. The floor had been really cold under her feet, but that had been how Lexa had found herself in the kitchens hours before dawn and had startled two maids and a cook who had started to panic before she had confirmed the ridiculous time of night and asked them to not mind her. 

Of course, they minded her. Their persistent shoulder-glancing had not changed nor lessened in the time she had spent sitting at one of the tables since. Lexa flipped the page in the book trapped in between her array of nutritious breakfast foods and her elbow, frowned from it to the dried berries she had picked up to decide whether they went onto the right pile or the left pile, and gave up with a dejected sigh. Whoever had written the damn thing had not included the details she needed. In the hallway, the lift door got cranked open, the material stuttered into its folding joints. She made a mental note to remind someone to get it oiled again and thumbed through the pages in pursuit of a different listing of berries.

Her sister appeared in the doorway before that could have any result, her long hair open down her shoulders, skin bristling from recent exposure to cold air, bleary eyes and scowling lips commenting on how they would have preferred a blanket, a dagger resting on her lap because the loose-fitting top trapped under her brace and her shorts hardly allowed for holsters. Lexa smirked to herself, put her hand flat down on the open book when Anya came to join her, one elbow on the table, hand shoved into her messy hair, she glared right at her until Lexa nodded permission for her to speak freely. 

"Why the fuck do you have me summoned at two in the morning?" Anya underlined her facial expression. 

The three people working by the counter turned, skittish glances that her sister deliberately ignored, one of the maids turned to the other to tell him that had been English, and Lexa drew satisfaction from the other one shaking his head. Still, she waited for them to turn back to their work. The soft clinking and clanking of crockery being moved around filled the air in between them. Her sister narrowed her scrunched-up eyes at the book under Lexa's hand, then at the foods sorted into two neatly separated groups, and then she dropped her arms onto the table and her head onto them with a numb, hard thud. 

"Did I interrupt something?" Lexa put the berries down. 

Anya shook her head against her arms. 

"You sure?" She took her coat off to drape it around her sister's shoulders because, out of the two of them, she was more appropriately dressed for a winter night. "I told the guards to check Raven's room if you're not in yours." 

The duct-taped edge of Anya's brace gave a numb crack from her pushing herself up to her elbows, one hand on her chin, one on her temple, hair spilling over her fingers, she glared at her from that tilted angle. Her pillow had left impressions on her cheek that faded in the light of the candle Lexa had shoved towards the wall. 

"Do not joke about that," she asked of her. 

Lexa pulled her head back with grin changing to frown. In between the three of them, Gaia excluded, sharing a floor and a bathroom and her and Anya sharing a room growing up, teasing had never been a problem. 

"Why not? Did something happen?" 

She almost squished the berries sitting up, pulled back and shuffled them towards the apple with the edge of her palm before she decided to put them back with the not-yet-deemed-safe group instead. Civilians did some things differently, she knew that from her father, but Raven hadn't struck her as a stuck-up traditionalist. Whatever exactly that entailed for civilians.