Lightning Only Strikes Once - Clexa

Chapter 129: Flying Blind

Clarke knew Lexa had to come back tonight at the latest – their wedding is tomorrow, after all. That's why she's had the strip of thick, opaque black fabric in her pocket all day. It would have spoiled the whole thing immediately if Lexa had gone into their room before Clarke could stop her, but she'd gotten back from settling the dispute over the tannery area guard just in time.

"Can you see?" she asks.

"I cannot," Lexa says patiently. Answering the question for the third time.

In Clarke's defence, no one else could so easily navigate these corridors blindfolded. All the years that Lexa's lived here probably help, sure, but even so she's so graceful beside Clarke's clumping limp that it's hard to believe the cloth is actually blotting out her vision.

Her left arm still looks very stiff though. It's interesting, Clarke thinks, that the damage done to them is in some ways consistent. The injuries and the scars that don't heal, the emotional ones as well as the physical, are received in the same ways.

Lexa's greatest injuries are always caused by the few people she trusts and should be able to trust – Gustus with poison, Titus with a gun, and now Assan with a sword. Only one has left a scar that can be seen, but in some ways it's the least serious wound of them, because while Lexa placed some trust in Assan it's nothing to the trust that Gustus and then Titus betrayed.

Clarke's broken ankle was self-inflicted, like most of the things that have caused her the greatest pain, apart from her father's death. Nearly all her injuries come when she's trying to do the right thing and most times 'the right thing' has meant killing people. Her ankle might never fully heal. But her worst scars are from when she killed Finn in the first world, and when she destroyed the Mountain, and those deaths hurt considerably more than the deaths of the Prison Station guards when she first broke her ankle trying to escape. And when she broke her ankle again – well, her ankle may not heal perfectly, but she has no guilt or pain to deal with at the thought of Nia's death. For once she knows, deep in her soul, that the ruthless and reckless action was the right one to take, that the people she had to kill to get there were not killed in vain.

So now she walks with a limp, and Lexa keeps her left arm unmoving so that her graceful walk is a little less graceful than usual, and Clarke thinks that the price they paid this time was worth it. She'd pay it a hundred, a thousand times over to have Lexa here beside her, wounded or not.

Then they're in the middle of the bedroom.

"I haven't totally finished yet," Clarke says, a little nervously. "It seems like there's always someone calling me out to settle something. Lincoln's been helping, otherwise I couldn't have gotten this much done in a few days..."

"This much of what?" Lexa asks.

Clarke swallows. "You told me how much you loved the forest at night. How much you missed being a Seken, being able to sleep out in the woods, instead of inside a tower. So – I -" She pulls off the blindfold.

Lexa inhales softly.

Clarke's spent hours working on this – so many hours she's not sure she can judge it impartially herself. But then, she's never been great at judging her own work. She's proud of this one, though – as proud as she's ever been of anything she's done, with the exception of the bonding tattoos she drew. The walls are now a painted tangle of vines, dark lush leaves, pale flowers glowing in the candlelight. In one direction you can see just far enough through the latticework of vines and branches to a tiny moonlit hut that is woven into the woods like it is part of them.

On the ceiling the moon glows faintly, sprinkled stars break up the dark serenity of the night sky, and there's a single out-of-place larger star. It could be the pieces of the Ark still up there, drawing lonely figure eights in the stars above them. It could be the drop ship falling down, leaving a faint burning trail as it speeds the hundred towards where they're meant to be. It could even be a spirit – Jake's, or Costia's, or the Commanders that have come before – if you believe in that kind of thing, which normally, Clarke doesn't.