It Takes As Long As It Takes

Chapter Eighteen

Notes:

Thanks for everyone's wonderful comments for the last chapter and to everyone who answered my questions - you all are awesome. I was honestly just hoping to meet the anticipation and expectation from sixteen chapters of build up. The response was definitely better than I anticipated!

This is the first chapter of Part 3, their journey back to each other.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Lexa looked all around her. She didn't know how she got here, but she had suddenly found herself in a sea of yellow. She tried to gather more about her environment, taking in the blue sky, the white clouds, and the bright, bright sun. There were brightly colored birds she couldn't recognize flying overhead. Aside from the chirping of the birds and the whistling of the breeze, there was no other noise. She could tell that it should be a hot day, but she couldn't feel the heat. Looking down at herself, she immediately noted that she was in the body of a young girl in a sundress, wearing white sandals. It felt unusual, but she wasn't frightened, simply accepting it as fact that she was now a young girl.

When she looked up again, she saw a familiar van to the side of the field. And standing next to it, with their arms around each other, were her parents. Anya - Young Anya - was standing there too, in her jeans and T-shirt, with her hands folded in front of her. All of them had smiles on their faces, watching her from afar.

She called and waved to them to come play with her, but they made no effort to get to her, remaining standing there next to the van.

Puzzled, but still unconcerned, Lexa turned back to the field. The flowers were everywhere, gently swaying back and forth with the breeze. She could each of them so clearly and she could smell them in the air, in her clothes, in her hair, in her skin. They made her so unexplainably happy, the happiness she had ever been, that she couldn't help but stretch both of her arms out, as if to embrace all of them at once.

She then started spinning around, watching as the yellow marigolds that extended as far as her eyes could see started to blur together until she eventually had to close her eyes to keep from becoming too dizzy. She felt so light and giddy and carefree that she thought she could float up into the air to join the birds. She heard a laugh - a high-pitched, childlike laugh, as full of sweetness and innocence as a laugh could be - coming from her lips. That spurred her to speed up her spinning. All of a sudden, she felt herself trip and fall, landing, without any pain, on her back in the bed of flowers.

Lying there on her back, out of breath and still giddy and dizzy, she opened her eyes and looked up at the sky, expecting to see blue. But it had suddenly turned to night and the sky was now filled with shimmering stars instead. And once in a while, a shooting star would streak across with a flash of brightness, leaving a magical trail of light that seemed to remain there, suspended in the middle of the night sky. It was unusual and mysterious and beautiful and she didn't question it. She tried to look for her favorite stars, seeking out the well-known constellations, but the patterns in this sky were different, and she couldn't find any of them.

After a while, she decided to sit up. When she looked around her, she saw the same field of flowers, only now it was under the soft gleam of the moon and starlight instead of stark light of the sun. Now, in all the times she had thought about this field, she had never imagined how it would look at night, so what she saw now amazed her. Each individual flower was emitting a soft yellow light, waxing and waning in intensity from dim to bright, bright to dim. Each flower was offset from its neighbors, so the entire field was filled with slowly pulsing, glowing luminescence all around her. She looked down and reached out to touch one of the flowers. It felt cool and soft against her fingertips. She desperately wanted to pick one up, but was worried it would then die and lose its light.