The 100 One Shots

Numb*(Clexa)

It was just after dusk. Clarke registered the mellow spectrum of color painted along the horizon. The remains of the sun’s rays oozed and settled over the forest, drifting onto Polis like a layer of fine dust over wood.

A content hum settled in the back of her throat. She sat comfortably on the balcony outside the bedroom, her maternal gaze overlooking the sprawling city below her. It had been a slow day, a rare one that granted Clarke the leisure to soak up the remnants of the day in peace. The warm cushions protected her from the cold stone bench beneath her. An unfinished sketch lay idle in her lap as Clarke dropped her sketchpad from her tired grip.

She sighed, clenching and unclenching her fist like she has done countless times in the past few months. A cool wind settled over her and chilled her hands. Clarke stared at her right hand, as if willing it to register the cold, the wind, anything. It remained dull and muted.

No one knew that Clarke couldn’t feel in her right hand, not even Lexa. The fact had never really bothered her before, and it had never impaired her when she scribed new treaties or familiarized herself with swords, bows, and knives. Clarke found it strange that her discomfort finally manifested itself now after all this time.

It all started years ago at Mt. Weather. It began with her panicked awakening in a stark white room, her frantic pleas for Monty, her desperate escape through a shattered window. Clarke had hardly registered the shard of glass slicing her forearm open, how deep the ragged edge had cut her. There was far too much going on, far too much at stake, for Clarke to have preoccupied herself with her own well-being.

But she did remembering struggling even then to maintain a strong grip, how she clenched and unclenched her fingers trying to get more blood supply to her numb fingers. It didn’t help that, in a brilliant escape plan she had concocted with her brilliant mind, Clarke brutally ripped open her stitches a second time. She’s quiet sure that move alone exacerbated her nerve damage beyond repair.

Loss of sensation wasn’t without its perks, though. Clarke was grateful for her startlingly high pain tolerance during her first and last encounter with the Ice Queen. She had to bite back a smug smile when she dug the knife harshly across her palm without a flinch. Intimidation was easy when you couldn’t feel pain, literally.

Then, of course, there was the day Clarke ripped the still-smoking barrel of her gun away from a manic Titus. She remembered it (always with sickening dread) as if it had happened just a day ago. Clarke had desperately yanked the gun away just in time to deflect a shot carelessly aimed at Lexa. The moment of her lover’s near demise burned into Clarke’s memory more than the white-hot metal had burned her skin.

Clarke shuddered, though not from the cold. She stared at her hand again and gently probed for sensation. Clarke mechanically recalls the sensorial and mechanical functions of her ulnar, radial, and median nerve. After methodically examining each finger and the palmar and dorsal side, Clarke determined that there must be at least some damage in all her nerves (though she suspected her median nerve took the heaviest damage since she could hardly feel anything in her thumb, index, middle, and ring finger). Pain and temperature detection was obliterated, though general touch has been markedly dampened. She still registered sensation, but everything felt ghostly and less defined. Thankfully, her motor functions were more or less intact. Were that not the case, Clarke was certain Lexa would have noticed by now (for multiple reasons). Clarke smirked and blushed as memories of gloriously toned skin and a graceful arched neck above fur bedding flashed across her mind.