archenemy | clexa

thirty three

"You really only have to look at the stupidity of someone to know they're Skaikru," Lexa scoffs as soon as Abby left the tent, pacing back and forth, her sword back in its sheath.

"Don't insult my mother like it's her fault," Clarke rasps as softly as possible. Her voice sounds much better now, though it's still scratched and husky. "I went through the worst night of my life, almost died, woke up like newly born although chances were I'd die, and you deny my own mother access to me."

"I didn't deny anybody access!"

"You know that your guards don't let anybody talk to me if you're busy talking to me. Although we haven't exactly done much talking. You can't blame my mom, you did after all just walk in here to kiss me like you'd never be able to do it again."

"Because I thought I didn't!" Lexa yells and faces Clarke now, eyes sharp, jaw tense, evoking an unplacable, irritating feeling in Clarke. The green of Lexa's iris is the only thing about her that's blazingly alive now (apart from her lips, kissed by Clarke to a gleaming cherry color), settled inbetween everything dead and tired.

Red, puffy eyelids, bloodshot white around that green and dark grey rings on her unusually pale skin. Tense shoulders but a tired way of holding up her body. Messy hair.

Clarke just knows Lexa has been walking pointlessly around camp since the early, cold morning hours. Likely, she hasn't slept a minute that night.

This far up north in Azgeda, the night seeps into everything. Into the afternoon, into the morning, never really leaving around noon either, and Lexa looks like the night has possessed her, too. Like it isn't satisfied with taking over time anymore and has taken over matter. Like its darkness has seeped into those black rings under Lexa's eyes, its cold into her voice, its danger into her agitated posture.

Though at the same time, there is a vulnerability to light that has come with this darkness and that appears it might shatter Lexa's entire being. As if she would fall apart at warmth, at a smile, at a softer kiss, at a hug.

Nightblood, is what her kind is called. Black blood, warpaint of charcoal, dirty skin after every fight, leather armors and dark-inked tattoos- it's there now, this unapologetical, irrevocable darkness, in Lexa's tiredness and irritation, in her tousled hair and crimson, plushy lips still shining with those kisses she gave Clarke as though they were meant to suffocate her.

"I haven't slept," Lexa concludes Clarke's analysis sharply. "My generals advised me on how to proceed after your death. The burier asked whether you should get an extra, single grave because of your status. Your family and friends exited this tent crying. Yes, Clarke, I fucking thought I'd never kiss you again, or even just look at you again, or hold you, or listen to your shitty voice annoying me to death!"

"If I'm so annoying, then why would you ever think kissing me is more important than my own mother seeing me?" Clarke snaps back, voice raised just as much as possible without breaking it.

Clarke has never seen Lexa like this before except when the woman has nightmares, she realizes. The usually so logically working, unemotional, put-together and perfect Heda has unraveled into a mess. All of it, chaos, like the beginning of the universe, which maybe this whole thing is, but the Big Bang is Lexa's next, shouted words.

"Because it is everything! Because I believed I would fall to pieces last night, because you rendered me unable to sleep, to think clearly, even to accept, and I have never needed anything so existentially as I needed you. It disgusts me impossibly, yet there could not be a more important thing than to kiss you, to see you, to touch you, except perhaps to kill you, because you are dragging me into a madness I should not be ready to live with."