#a stranded holiday

[mopeytropey]

@dreamsaremywords per your comment on the holiday fic from last year, I can’t say I haven’t thought about and potentially mapped out some possible content 👀

[mopeytropey]

A very Happy Holidays to @mymiddlenameislextra who I was given for Clexa Secret Santa :) It was nice getting to know you a bit, and I wanted to gift you something for the New Year. Hope you’ll enjoy the read :) 

a stranded holiday

It’s not the worst way to spend her holiday.

Unconventional, yes. Potential fodder for a serial killer novel, also yes. But Clarke is nothing if not unorthodox, and she took those free Krav Maga classes last spring that left her feeling like a complete badass well into the winter season. As she drives farther into an unfamiliar, heavily-wooded area, she doesn’t let a creeping unease win out over her determination to have a new experience.

What she doesn’t anticipate is the prolific mud. Her car isn’t that old—no matter it dates back to the year she graduated high school—at the very least, it doesn’t feel old. Still, it struggles to maintain its grip on the slick, narrow road that is winding her deeper into snow-lined trees and away from civilization. The car slips more than once, and Clarke’s hands grip the steering wheel until her tires regain traction.

“Shit,” she exhales just as the tiny, wood frame house appears in a small clearing up ahead. “Finally.”

The drive hasn’t been excruciating, just long enough to have her craving a good stretch of her back and limbs in the open, mountain air. She’d given up on the accuracy of her GPS some twenty minutes prior, hoping like hell she wasn’t driving to her meet her own demise in the mountains of New Hampshire. The car’s wheels spin one last time, but Clarke jams the parking brake and cuts the engine. Enough is enough. She’s within walking distance anyway and no slouch to some mild hiking activity (so long as it is at a low-grade incline with an end in sight).

Her boots fair so much worse in the thick mud than her car tires, and Clarke nearly goes ass first into the messy driveway slush on more than one occasion. But, she keeps going. If being a woman in 2018 has taught her nothing else: it is to persist.

The house in, indeed, very small. Tiny houses are the going trend for overworked, underslept city folk who long to commune with nature and destress before anxiety overtakes their busy lives. Though she’s lived in Boston for years, Clarke has yet to bend to this current fad—has never once longed to sleep in a treehouse or yurt or luxury teepee—but she is also not above capitalizing on free lodging.

‘Take the reservation,’ Raven had said to her a few days ago. ‘I’m gonna have to eat the cost of the house anyway since my girlfriend—ex-girlfriend is a thankless, thoughtless pain in the ass. Someone may as well enjoy my fucking spoiled romantic gesture.’

An ill-timed break-up (that Clarke doesn’t think will last through New Year’s Day) means that Raven’s booked get-away house set in the White Mountains is now Clarke’s end-of-the-year lodge of peaceful solitude. Too sullen to join her, Raven had stayed at home in Cambridge to stew and wallow about her broken relationship.

It’s brisk, but not freezing, and any snow in sight is residual from earlier storms. Clarke treks along the muddied path towards the front door with a duffel slung over her shoulder and the curiosity of new surroundings ringing in her ears. She doesn’t notice the small trickles of smoke curling upwards from behind the house. She doesn’t think twice of the blue cooler sat beside the front steps. She definitely does not anticipate the door swinging open as she searches her messages for the security code Raven had sent her.

“Shit!” she starles, now with a spiked heart rate and unchecked fear ricocheting against her ribcage.

Death by serial killer it is then.

“Shit!” she says again as her boots, entirely caked in slippery mud, have her careening backwards off the first step.

A hand wraps around the material of her coat, near her upper arm, and helps to right her balance again. The courtesy of mad, woodland murderers is not something Clarke had expected, and she looks up to meet the face of an equally startled woman about her age.

“Are you okay?” the woman asks, slowly releasing her grip on Clarke’s jacket.

The woman is, without being dramatic, extraordinarily attractive, and Clarke can only hope that her audible stutter isn’t as noticeable to the woman’s ears behind the flaps of her woolly hat. “I—um, yes. You scared the living shit out of me.”

A subtle shift crosses the woman’s face, something on the edges of a smile. “Likewise.”

Read the rest over at a03