#45, out of anger 😤 please and thanks!
Lexa winced slightly as the door slammed heavily, hard enough to make the remaining windows rattle in their panes. Her fingers tightened slightly around the small cracked ceramic pot before she resumed her methodical job of painting on her signature black warpaint. She was finishing touching up the streaks down each of her cheeks when a fuming blonde avenging angel appeared behind her, dark blue eyes stormy, betrayed.
The Commander set the pot down with a quiet clink as she grasped her dressing table, the wood groaning slightly in protest. She knew without a doubt that Clarke was itching for a fight.
“Hei, ai hodnes.” Heda murmured quietly, leaning forward to check her warpaint in the cracked and fogged looking glass that leaned askew against the back concrete wall. Behind her in the mirror, Clarke crossed her arms firmly, refusing to soften in the slightest. She cracked with fury, emanating off her in waves as she faces off with her warlord lover.
“When were you going to tell me, Lexa? As you were riding out of the gates with your warriors? Send me a letter from the battlefield? When they brought you back, wounded or worse?!” Clarke’s voice cracked on the last sentence, her eyes glistening in a way that had Lexa reaching for her automatically, desperately, to soothe the pain that glittered and ran over her wife’s skin like a living, breathing thing.
Clarke jerked away, the golden braids woven into her hair by Lexa’s loving hands earlier in the day swaying as she moved back to stand by the open balcony. Hands still tucked into her slides as though trying to stem the flow of a mortal wound. The sun was high in the sky above, the birds chirping mockingly as the tension steeped and grew within the bedchambers of Heda and Wanheda.
Lexa pulled in a deep, sustaining breath as she rose from the table, going to her war chest to pull out her leather bracers that Anya had given her prior to her conclave, her fingers picking out a few prized possessions among the gleaming array of daggers and smaller, sharper weapons that she favors to tuck into her chest plate as she fights. The swords she’ll strap on before they leave, she decides.
As she laced her fingers through her bracers, pulling them on through muscle memory, she turns to her distraught wife as a planet orbits its sun.
“Clarke, they came to me this morning as you were working in the infirmary,” she informs softly, knowing that nothing will derail Clarke now, logic least of all. “I leave now to solve the squirmish among the Azgeda border. If all goes well, I will be back by midday tomorrow at latest. I am sorry I did not send a messenger to tell you, I thought you would be back well before we had to leave.” Regret infuses her tone; she knows that if she had informed Clarke sooner then she might have been able to head off this tsunami of anger that threatened to overtake her, just a scant half hour before she had to ride out with her warriors.
Clarke refuses to soften as Lexa approaches her. A kiss meant to soothe, appease, misses its target as Clarke jerks her head sharply away, soft lips landing on a cheekbone instead of on its partnered pair of lips.
“You know what happened last time you went to that border,” comes the soft, sad whisper, twin tears falling like shooting stars down Clarke’s cheeks as she swipes roughly at her face, angling away from Lexa as she denies her lover the chance to comfort her.
They both know. Two seasons ago while riding to break up what they believed was a routine complaint of vagrants looting caravans in one of the northern quadrants of the Podakru and Azgeda border, Lexa had been shot with an arrow through the shoulder, despite the best efforts of her guard.
She had been returned to Clarke’s desperate care in the dead of night, feverish and hallucinating as she had cried and fought, whimpering alternatively for Clarke, for her friends from the Conclave, for Anya, as she cried black tears of blood. Clarke had never been more terrified in her life.
Clarke had worked with a desperate crew of five other trusted healers through the night to attempt to ascertain the antidote to the poison, to save their Commander.
In the end Nyko had saved her, remembering an obscure Azgeda poison that grew only from the moss that flourished in the thawed pools that formed in the northern caves in the summer.
The same caves that Nyko had happened to visit last summer on a foraging expedition in an attempt to ease past tension between King Roan’s people and other members of the Kongeda.
They had packed Lexa’s dark wound with the dried moss and prayed.
She would never admit it, but Clarke’s tears had mixed with the dressing as she slumped over her wife, shaking with silent sobs when Lexa’s fever had finally broken, waking with a quiet, “Clarke?” and a weakened hand threading through dirty blonde locks.
In present day, Clarke’s burning gaze locks with Lexa’s softened one that begs for forgiveness. In a moment of bravery Lexa tentatively inches towards her love, twining their fingers together. She presses herself to Clarke, willing her to soften. Clarke lets herself be arranged into the embrace as Lexa threads her fingers behind Clarke’s neck, bringing their foreheads together.
“In any world, any universe,” Lexa breathes as their eyes slide shut, bodies pressing together, heartbeats slowly synching into one, “I will come back to you, ai Haiplana. I will crawl if I have to.”
Clarke nods fiercely without breaking their embrace, more tears escaping from beneath her trembling eyelids.
She yanks Lexa even closer, smashing their lips together as she clings to Lexa as tightly as she possibly can, willing her body to meld to hers. Clarke tastes blood as her lip splits, teeth clashing as she tries to deepen the kiss while scrabbling against Lexa’s leather breastplate for purchase. Lexa lets herself be soft, lets herself be lead as she presses into her wife, selfishly soaking in the love and fear that emanates from Clarke.
A soft knock on the door breaks them apart slightly, both breathing fiercely, foreheads still touching as their hands lock. The door cracks open the scantest inch.
“I will be at the stables in five minutes, Ryder,” Lexa calls back in her Heda voice, unwilling to break the fiery stare that Clarke is burning her alive with. She presses one more desperate kiss onto Clarke, swiping away Clarke’s tears as best she can with her thumbs.
Clarke silently walks across the room to fetch Lexa's two favorite swords. She straps them wordlessly to her back, dried tear tracks still lingering on her cheeks. They both know that Clarke won’t come down the stables to see her off; it's too painful for both of them for her to watch Lexa leave.
“You will come back, Lexa Kom Trikru,” Clarke orders in her fiercest, coldest voice as she checks over her lover’s armor, making sure every piece is strapped and tucked in place perfectly, to cover Lexa’s weak spots when she cannot.
She places one last kiss on Lexa’s helm of awe as she walks her to their bedroom door, checking her over one last time with a critical eye.
“You will come back, or I will come fetch you myself.”
