She had shushed you with her hand saying she was fine enough to wait, instead she literally pushed you towards her ailing teammates. But you could see the slouch in her stature, the tilt in her right arm joint and the bloody gash that was brewing under her vest.
Her breathing was unsteady but her gaze didn’t deter from her team. You eyed the CAPTAIN embroidered in her silver badge and her proud stance. You knew she would hold her ground until all of her men were safe and the thought itself stirred something heavenly in you.
Something you thought was long dead.
You assign your team and every nurse at hand to treat her crew of Firehouse 45 and then you had waltzed to the girl her face hidden behind black mantle, and ushered her towards a vacant white room.
You don’t know why but you had taken extra care when you brushed the sponge against her face. Timidly, you have cleaned it and when the clouds around her eyes had cleared, the sheer intensity with which the emerald orbs had you halted in your position, was ambiguously haunting.
When the nurse had tried to push her shirt up, she hissed in pain and you had shunned away the nurse within a wink.
Like docile, affable breeze you had ghosted your hand over her purple bluish back, eyeing the intricately designed tribal tattoo. Straight up from her spine, spiralling downwards. You were so mindlessly side-tracked by its unpalatable magnificence that you had touched it, making her groan in pain.
“I’m so sorry.” You had blurted out and then you resumed your medic training.
You were doing the finishing touches of your ninth stitch on her when she hissed out in misery.
“That fucking bastard threw that motherfucker table on my back.”
That was the first time you had truly heard her voice and it wasn’t anything you would have imagined.
You didn’t know if it was better or worse, but she cursed like a sailor.
“That arsonist?”
The arsonist in question was Roan Queen who pleasured himself off by setting fires to buildings, no matter the lives at stake. But Captain Woods and her team had rebutted his 5th attempt. Not only that, Captain Woods had singlehandedly thrown his mountainy ass to jail.
“Yeah.”
“He got you pretty bad.”
“Nah. Fucking hell … You should have seen the other guy.” She croaked out puffing her chest in pride.
“I think I believe you.”
“I think I believe you too, Doc. Fuck … it hurts.”
She slurs in her words and you aren’t amused, not with the dosage of painkillers coursing through her.
“I don’t swear at all. Usually. Fuck … Shit. I’m sorry.” She still tries to fight the sleepiness that envelops. But unlike any of your other patients, there’s this pagan of sincerity behind her altercations that quench and unquenches something inside you.
“You’ll be here when I …. “
You can see her giving into the heaviness. Against all odds, oddly, you promise her.
“I’ll be, Captain.”
“Lexa ….”
And she was out.
And you were.
By the time you had reached her room, the nurse on duty was tearing your head off at how awful patient she was.
“I couldn’t tolerate her and you weren’t here.”
Her voice was perhaps the clearest thing you had ever heard. There was a gentle sublimeness to husky accent. And the morning rays seemed to have somehow magnified her beauty. From picturesque physique to her astute jawline and her curled chestnut tassel.
Her smile was small, but gravitating.
And her eyes, they were the greenest evergreen that you had the pleasure of indulging in.
“I was getting your release papers.”
There was minutely brisk yet electrifying pulse that scooted down you when your fingers touched, as you had handed her the papers.
It was gone the sooner it came.
“I’ll see you around then, Doctor?”
“Clarke Griffin.”
“Only if you call me Lexa. Lexa Woods.”
She bowed her head as her farewell courtesy and within shimmer she was out of your viewpoint.
You could almost hear the beating of your proverbial heart.
This was how you met her two years ago. At Ark General.
People broke promises more than they kept it. You had gotten used to it. But Lexa seemed to falsify that statement of yours.
When she said she would see you around, she actually meant it.
And you saw her with or without another crew member of hers at least 2 - 3 times a week. Mostly in the hospital, where you both decided to be friends.
She had almost lit up at that idea when you had suggested it. You had wondered aloud, “Why?”
And she had told you, “Nobody wants to be friends with a foster kid.”
Queerly, it had driven you to be her friend even more.
Emergencies in hospitals turned to coffee meets, and lunch dates. Sometimes they even ended in movie nights too. But all of it was labelled under the friend-zone. It should be enough for you except it wasn’t.
Something felt missing.
The first time you visited her was on your father’s death anniversary.
Because your mother had asked you to come over to her house but instead of answering her you had thrown your phone against a concrete wall. On this day, you would always tend to suffer alone, sometimes you would even visit him in the NY cemetery but today your feet had carried you to Lexa.
You broke down in her arms, your waterworks drenching her shirt. She didn’t ask you a question, didn’t ask you why or a how or when. She just accepted you for your imperfections and you never felt more like home.
“Some drunkard t-boned my dad and he was declared brain dead. My mom, Chief Griffin, cut off his life support just out of the blue. Without even telling me. All she said that he was gone and I should accept that.”
You are sitting in her two roomed dingy apartment, feasting on chocolate ice cream and all she does it stare at you. But it’s not demoralizing or even disheartening a little bit.
She crawls up and smooths your pale skin with her thumb, wiping out your tears.
“Tell me about your dad.”
And you tell her.
She knocks on your apartment late one night, somewhere around 10pm all huffed up in her firefighter uniform.
No sooner you see her torn lip and bleeding nose you pull her inside while all she does is argue like a 5 year old on how “that fucker shouldn’t have hit on my face, specially my nose.”
You are so busying nurturing her that you don’t pay attention to the bewildered looks of Aden and Raven who are staring at her, gawked.
“You are a firefighter?” Aden squeaks in his Captain America pyjamas.
“Coz firefighters are badass.” Raven squeaks even further, jumping in her Iron Man shirt.
You notice a distant look in her eyes, a melancholy before she breaks up own reverie.
“I am.”
And introductions were made.
One night, you were all watching your Harry Potter marathon when there’s an incessant knocking on your door. It was late past 11pm.
Lexa stands up fast, you, Aden and Raven following suit when she clicks the door open.
It’s Octavia, still in her work attire. If her tired eyes are anything to go by, you are sure the life of a government appointed social worker’s like her wasn’t a cakewalk as you have been told.
“The electricity’s out in our apartment. I even remembered to pay the bill this time. I called the landlord but Titus is such a baldy bitch, says no can do until morning light. What I’m gonna do?”
“Stay here, O.” You state matter of factly.
Lexa shrugs before piping in, “Mind if I check it out?”
Both of you shrug but Raven and Aden both start to follow her anyway.
It’s like deja-vu. And within 10 minutes, light’s brimming in O’s place.
Lexa even explains it but one way or another, the mechanical voodoo just goes tangential through both your heads.
“You are so cool, Lexa.” Raven exclaims.
Lexa gives Raven a piggyback ride back to your apartment, Aden following suite where the three of them snuggle on the couch to continue their ongoing marathon.
And somehow, it turns into a routine.
“I can see the stardust in your eyes, Clarke.” O cooes at you. Honestly, you feel them too.
“She’s good.”
O says before departing.
She is.
You have known her for months now. You see her every day and yet you are still looking for the right time to tell her, how much it kills to you to be just her friend, because all you want is nothing more than being more than a friend to her.
You find your right time somehow around twilight on your birthday.
You are celebrating your 25th birthday, and you feel so old in your bones. You are standing at your balcony, staring at the night sky, smiling wistfully at the small fire bodies. You shy away from the stars as if they know all your deepest secrets.
That’s when she finds you and asks you, “I was looking everywhere for you.”
You stare at her dark orbs that somewhat seemed clouded to you.
“Were you?” You can’t control your own harshness. It’s your birthday party still it’s your eyes that sting with tears. “I thought you were too busy with the bloody redhead to notice.”
You can her swallowing her words in the charcoal of the night.
“She’s a mere distraction.”
You look at her, and all you see in uncertainty.
“We can’t all have what we want now, can we. Some stars are meant to be just treasured from a distance.”
The evoking truth, that unperturbed flame in her eyes charred yours to ashes. You cupped her face in your hands and kissed her like it was the first time you were doing it. It felt virgin to you, but it never felt so purer before this. before her. She didn’t reciprocate at first, until she did.
It felt like renaissance to you.
Rebirth.
She melted you down, stole your breathe and engraved life in you, like a phoenix.
“Date me, Lexa. Please.”
“Are you sure?”
You only kiss her as your answer.
It was on your fourth day when you had blurted out, “I love you” to her.
You couldn’t help it. She looked pristine under the chandeliers, the green dress had hung to her curves sinfully but the way, dear god, the way she would always look at you, like you are than old song she hums all the time, like you are that open book, she can read anytime she wants, it just made you say it.
You had said, I love you and you didn’t hear from her for five days.
Until you did.
She was sitting on the hospital bed as you stitched up her wound. Lexa was knifed into her stomach by her assailant when she was doing a rescue run at one of the burning buildings.
Turns out, he was a criminal on the run from the police and somehow had mistaken Lexa was a cop.
You are bandaging up her wound when she meekly says, “I’m sorry.”
You don’t answer her. Washing your hands you walk out of the room, signalling the intern to finish up the rest.
You get paged about an emergency trauma case, and when you are on your way into the OT on your way you see Lexa sitting at the waiting room, peering at you. You chaste yourself, looking at her in your periphery.
Five days with radio silence from her only to meet here.
You pull yourself out of your thoughts and enter the OT.
You are in there for near about 3 hours. When you walk out of the OT you are disheartened she isn’t there. You change your clothes and on your way out of the hospital, you see her, shuddering mildly against the night’s frost bites.
She waited, she waited.
Two words hammered in your chest.
You listen to your heart above your head and sit beside her, shrugging off your jacket and placing it on her slim shoulders.
“But you’ll be cold then.”
“Then keep me warm.”
There was a tangent pause.
“You were gone. Were you okay though?”
“Yes.”
“Is it because I said … because I do. I do love you.”
“I know. It’s just, I’m a foster kid, been one since I was four. I wasn’t enough for my parents, I mean they ditched me right. I wasn’t enough for any foster parent. I was … am a street kid. I just … I’m wondering, will I be enough for you? Because I don’t want you to wake up one morning and regret … regret us. You deserve the best, I’m hardly that. So I just wanted to say … will I be enough because if you made me fall in love you only to ditch me midway I don’t think I’ll survive that.”
“I don’t think I’ll survive losing you either.”
“You should talk to her.”
You don’t ask who the “her” is here.
“No.”
Lexa swings her hand around your shoulder and kisses along your blades.
“Words left unsaid can do more harm than having them out in the open.”
You shrug.
“Clarke, she’s your mother. She loves you, I know she has done you wrong, but I think if you didn’t run away from her like she’s the plague every time you see her wouldn’t hurt once in a while.”
“She abandoned me, what about that?”
“You can’t judge someone without knowing their side of the story. I’m not asking you to forgive her, not yet, anyway.”
“But you are asking me too?”
“Yes, but in time. I hope you never know the pain of not having a family, Clarke. It’s unbearably tragic.”
What if some bonds are meant to be …. Broken?
You pick up her hand and kiss each of her knuckles.
You know how much she envies her mother and father. You know how much she still wants them to be here, with her.
It was your third dinner date of sorts with your mother. She had invited you and your girlfriend, it vexes her somewhat to call Lexa by her given name and as much as you would like to decline it, like you wanted to, as always Lexa still made you come.
The questions your mother asked were nothing short of French Inquisition.
Dinner was of unbridled silence but Abby always found a way to bring up your previous conquests amidst the dinner talks. Her favourite being, Finn Collins. You once upon a time boyfriend, to whom you don’t even talk to. Except for the cordial hi’s and bye’s.
You hated the way she would look at Lexa with her judgemental eyes, how Abby would swirl the detestably expensive wine in her glass and ask her questions.
“Well, what do you do?”
“A firefighter, ma’am.”
“Sounds noble.”
“It is.”
Lexa’s grin falls down. “Does it pay satisfactorily?”
“I suppose?”
You stab your meat a little bit harder.
“Where do you live?”
“TonDC.
“Isn’t that a bit ….. shabby?”
“The rent’s cheap.”
You feel her shoulders slack down. The dinner was a fucking mistake.
“What college did you go to?”
“A community college, ma’am.”
“Well, Clarke here went to UCLA. Top of her batch.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m very proud of her.”
“Can you cook?”
“No.”
“Oh, well, Clarke’s practically a sous chef. Don’t expect her to cook for you every night.”
You excuse yourself to the kitchen. You need more than just wine to pass you through the night.
It’s only when you are half way to the dining room when the incoming words, transfix you.
“If you are with Clarke for the money, then I suggest you find someone else. I know all foster kids like you. Thirsting for bloody money.”
You are standing feet afar from her but you can still make out the gleam tear drops that gather around the corner of her eyes. You throw the napkin on your still untouched food. You pull Lexa out of her seat.
“We are leaving.”
Your mother protests but you tune her out. You will be damned if you let your mother or anyone put a scratch on her.
“Maybe I should start looking for a better apartment. I can afford it.”
You try not to glare at her but you end up doing just the same. You watch her slump into her bed, glancing through the pages of her cookbook.
“Lexa ….”
You try to reach for her, but instead she curls herself further into the end of her bed. She looks vulnerable, her voice echoes that vulnerability.
“I can’t cook. I went to some down market community college. I don’t understand, but she’s right though.”
Maybe it’s the way she sniffles against her sleeves under the table light her insecurities ploughing into her like poisoned daggers, maybe it’s the way you love her more than anything in the world, you don’t exactly know what it is but you march yourself into her and chunk down her walls, and enclose her into you.
“My mother is right about many things but she doesn’t hold a candle to you. I don’t care if you can’t cook or not. I’ll cook and you’ll wash the dishes. I don’t care where you went to college, you are smarter than most. I don’t care where you leave, as long as I get to live with you. You are an honourable, beautiful person. You are a masterpiece yourself, so imperfectly perfect for me. I love you, Aden loves you and if dad were here, he would love you more than me. So don’t let my mother’s words get to you.” You sniffle in your nose. “And better stop crying because, if you cry, I’ll start crying too. And I don’t like crying.”
The green of her eyes were lost in the ruddiness.
“I love you, Clarke Griffin.”
“I love you too, doofus. Never ever leave me, ok? I’ll die.”
“Me too.”
Fire.
Your apartment building.
Aden.
The rest of the call gets hung up.
You grab your keys and you run.
You rush your Mercedes against time, barely able to hold your breath when you rely the message to your mother.
She’ll be there as soon as she can.
You are hear her crying on the other end, you know you are in no better shape either.
The six floored pristine building was gone, lost in the fire. Instead, it’s a churned, tarnished mess of charcoal with solar flare eliciting outwards, its demonic orange and yellowish cries snarling against and up to the hollow smoked sky.
The pandemonium is nerve wrecking, people circumscribing the building like a death circle, all gawking up at the bizarre scenario. You fight your way through the crowd, vision blurring with each push, what if you are not ready to hear? What if Aden is not ok? What if no one’s ok?
Your heart clamming, thudding against your chest as you make your way through, towards the fire engines. And the fire fighters.
There’s many familiar faces amongst the saved, but you can’t find the ones you are looking for. You twirl and turn around and ask everyone about your brother.
“Have you seen a 12 year old blonde hair boy, Aden?”
“Is he alright? Please, he is alright?”
But they shake their head in a negative.
You try again.
“Have you seen a raven haired girl, Raven Blake? 10-ish years old?”
They say no, still.
“What about her mother, Octavia Blake?”
You can see them already shaking their head.
No. No. No.
That’s all you hear.
Your heart is sinking.
You can’t go through this again.
The red and blue lights of the ambulances are crawling everywhere, the injured and burnt are being escorted out to hospitals and in your pocket you hear your phone vibrating.
It’s your mom. She’s near.
“I can’t find him anywhere.” You can barely hurl out. The call gets disconnected soon after.
You are busy juggling through the ambulances when you see Raven limp towards you from one, shortly followed by her mother, Octavia.
You can make the burnt skin on her left leg, the bandage so vigorous on her skin, its makes her look so small. It pains you to grey.
You knee down to the girl and clasp herself closely in your embrace.
“Where’s Aden?” you blurt out.
The shade of sadness that evokes Octavia’s dark orbs makes you wish you hadn’t asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What?” you all but shriek. But this time, it is Raven who is snuggled to you, answers.
“We were playing hide and seek. I was supposed to find him, but before I could …. “
Clarke got the gist.
Before you could, hell broke loose.
“What happened?”
Octavia nudges her daughter closer to her. You can see that tension on her unwrinkled face, her eyes dotingly soothing Raven’s injured limbs. You are sure she’ll have scars.
But scars are healed wounds, aren’t they?
“I don’t know what happened.” She pauses before she meets you in the eye. “Lexa got us out. She’ll get Aden out too.”
You snap your head at that heart dishevelling truth so fast that you can’t be sure if there’s a snap sound or not. If your heart felt tight in your chest then, now it felt like someone had broken your ribs and lunged it out of their resting position.
“What? This is not her station.”
“No, but the fire station of our area needed assistance. Firehouse 45 was the nearest.”
Octavia squeezes your cold palms in assurance, “She’ll get him out. Have faith, Clarke.”
But faith’s never been you.
But you still chant it.
Have faith. Have faith. Have faith.
But even you can see the void in it.
It’s been 25 mins now.
The flames are still domineering, identical to ones at the very beginning. It somehow seems to rival and defeat the tanks of water and sand that’s thrown at it, but the saviours still battle. Many lives are still hanging by the thread.
You ran on your heels as soon as you see him. Nyko.
Nyko is Lexa’s partner. If he’s here, where is she?
The paramedics are adjusting his oxygen mask, and applying ointment on his bruises when you interrupt. But, maybe the uncut scar on your face, ridiculed with pleas and questions is too obvious for him to read.
“She’s still looking for him.”
You leave your questions and screams unworded. You are too shell shocked.
“Wherever you are, please please be alright. Both of you.” You pray that unknown deity somewhere up there. That’s all you can do.
You are vaguely take notice of your mother’s presence.
She stands beside you. You both are like two strangers standing on a platform waiting for that final train that’ll take both of your home after your long tiring day.
The question is, when will that train come?
You are both tired.
Your shoulders are slumped.
There’s only one difference though.
Your mother is waiting impatiently for her son, whereas you are still gazing at the burning building, waiting for your darling brother and the woman who stole your heart.
You are waiting.
You are waiting for someone to fill that two gapes in your heart.
Frozen hearts are left on hold.
It’s been a whole 30 minutes now. You are counting every second of every minute. And you are losing patience like sand slipping mercilessly through the palm of your head. You try to hold on tighter, but ironically, it’s only makes it slip through faster.
Patience was never your virtue anyway.
That’s when a rumour starts.
There’s been a blast in the basement downstairs. The circuits have blown. The building might collapse.
Your heart constricts.
Someone’s stealing your breathe in open air.
It’s then you see a body topple through. Before the officers encircling around can stop you, you rush forwards at the heavily bearded man.
Lexa’s second at her station.
Gustus.
His face is lost in the black paint of the smoke and his eyes, they are shaken, unsteady. He’s dizzy on his feet, when his mountain bod falls against you.
For a minute moment, he glances up through his heavy lids.
“… ordered me to go. She’s still looking.”
And unconsciousness grabs in his dormant self. You pull him up and rush him to the paramedics.
It’s not four minutes later when you hear a scream from the officers on guard.
“We need a stretcher here right now. Medics get your fucking ass over here.”
It’s the harshness and the urgency in their voices that catches you distinctly. From the distance, you can’t distinguish the blossoming view but you can see the outlines of a firefighter cradling someone in their arms and another someone of a short stature was holding onto that lain somebody laying on their arms.
It’s like your heart is stringed to her in invisible ties that pulls you forward at their own accord, and that’s when your know it’s them …. It’s her. Your mother following hotly on your tail and so does, Nyko and Gustus, whole of Firehouse 45.
At first, you don’t fully recognize the little guy wearing that oxygen mask, shaded in grey and black dusts, his blonde hair coated with thick strands of black carbon. But then again, such baby blue irises could only ever be him.
You see him not turn his head when Abby rushes into him with a bone breaking hug. You see him, crying silently as he stares at something else.
You don’t know exactly what’s he’s staring at but there’s this obnoxious irking in you that tells you, you know what he’s staring at.
Dried stains break under the weightage and the heaviness of your heart.
You follow his vision and you see her.
You see her as another fellow firefighter cradles her gently on the stretcher.
She’s without her mask, and you can see the blood reeked face. So thick, so profuse in its magnitude that it has somehow coated all her chestnut mane in red.
Like a mundane body, she lies lifeless.
That’s when you break down.
You are doctor, you see blood, and you deal with blood every single hour but seeing your beloved looking so … so out of life, so charred …. You can’t look any further at her. It burns in your pit, like someone has lit you on fire. Alive, you getting torched.
The doctor in you tells you, she’s barely hanging by the thread.
Barely. Barely. Barely.
Your grip onto her, your lifeline and you break down to pieces. You say in stolen breaths.
“You saved him, baby. You saved him.”
You sneer at your mother when she tries to pull you away from her, you nearly fight tooth and nail to all and everyone because this is her Lexa.
And she looks so defeated.
What if … ? What if ….?
But before your mind can catch up with your heart, you are already pushing Lexa into an ambulance.
You only let go when Aden nuzzles into your sweat reeking shirt. Against all odds, he is the one who reassures you and you break a little more inside.
“She’s our Lexa. She’ll be okay.”
You barely speak out.
“She has to be.”
Wherever you go, leave a heart print.
But Lexa hasn’t just left her foot prints.
Lexa had wrote infinity in you.
Octavia’s driving shortly behind the ambulance while your mother looks out of at the flicking traffic lights.
You sit behind, your eyes glued to the taillights of the preceding vehicle. It has Lexa.
Lexa. Lexa. Lexa.
Lexa who always have this iron armour around her. (But she said, you had somehow hammered down that dome of her hardened cement that had taken her years to build)
Lexa who had never fallen sick. (She’s an expert in hiding the fact that she can also get infected like any normal human being)
Lexa who loved to hate hospitals. (Even though she visits it 3 times a week. She’s calls hospitals her “soon to be in-laws house”, after all this was where she met Abby.)
Lexa who mimicked her bald, old doctors and failed miserably to flirt her way out of a hospital bed, even if her life depended on it. (And even tried to smother a nurse with a plastic fork for forcing her to eat hospital “junkshit”.)
You had stood witness to all.
Lexa. Lexa. Lexa.
Aden resting his head on your lap while your ran your fingers subconsciously through Raven’s hair.
All of a sudden you can feel the cloth of your skirt drench, and before you can say anything you hear him sniff.
“What’s wrong?” you ask Aden.
He jerks his head, not saying anything, instead the momentum of his cries increase.
Abby asks alarmed, “Honey, are you really okay?”
Aden nods again but still you look all over him for injuries.
It’s not until Raven, who briskly crosses over your lap to hug her best friend murmuring out, “It’ll be okay. I’m here”, reassuringly that he finally speaks.
“I was got myself locked in the laundry room, before Lexa found me. I was claustrophobic and there was fire everywhere. But she defeated the fire, Clarke. She got to me.”
He sniffs his tears, “We were about to go out, when she saw the floor above us cracking ….” Aden cries entangling in Clarke again, “I was so scared, I couldn’t move and the floor broke on us, Clarke. But she …. She guarded me with herself. The floor broke on her, Clarke. She’ll be okay, right, Clarke. She has to be right?
You bite your bottom lip hard, so hard you are sure you are drawing out your blood.
You don’t have the heart to lie to him.
You also don’t have the strength to tell him that you don’t know.
She saved you brother, you are falling in love with her more.
You are vaguely aware how your mother’s searching for your face at Aden declaration but you don’t bother looking at her.
She never really liked Lexa, anyway.
The car moves in high speed, timidly following matching steps of the ambulance.
It’s when the car stops at a red light somewhere that you see the red and yellow sign of the popular restaurant Grounders. It’s not much of a fancy eatery but that’s where Lexa had taken you for your third date.
You were still in your shitty dress that day, not even had the time to change for your date and she also had run late because she had to go and save someone’s ass from jumping off a skyscraper.
You just had a greasy cheeseburger and some stale cold beer, actually you drank one too many of those beers and had danced uncordially under the fluorescent disco lights, it was so ordinary that it had made you feel extraordinary.
Only because of Lexa. Who didn’t complain for once when you complained throughout the date about one of your shittiest days at the hospital.
Only because that whole night, not for once did her eyes leave yours.
She just looked at you and listened.
You already knew that day, that you were already in love with her.
You hand her the keys to your mother’s apartment, literally kicking Octavia out of the hospital doors because it’s been more than an hour of waiting and waiting. You could tell from the drooping lids of Raven and Aden that they were beyond worn out but they still struggled.
Their Commander was still in surgery.
O gives you the best agonizing and ferocious eyes she can, but you hold your stance because, as much as she’s your best friend, you unknowingly know the life of a single mother who just got out from the whirlwind of a traumatizing experience isn't going to be easy in the slightest.
It’s hard and tenuous.
She leaves after your mother advices her to go.
She leaves before making you promise.
To call even to tell the boring details.
You have lost the count of doctors that entered and exited her room. There’s this itch in your hand, you want to jump up and be off any help you can but the Chief of Surgeon, your mother, Abby … Acclaimed Neurologist Dr. Griffin had requested you to sit it out.
Her words, personal attachments cloud your judgements.
And all you wanted to say was, Fuck off.
But she was right.
Still, that doesn’t stop you from pacing.
There’s her fellow Trauma surgeon Lincoln Black.
Orthopaedic surgeon Wells Jaha.
Anesthesiologist Harper McIntyre
There’s an ENT specialist, some sort general physician mumbling against the MRI scan and X-rays scans. There’s a horde of nurses, and plastic surgeon Finn Collins.
You see him glance at you before he disappears behind shut doors.
You hope for the best.
You rush to the reception to fill out her form.
You stop at the emergency contact column. You don’t know who to write. You don’t know if she has anyone. Even if she did, she sure as hell didn’t tell you.
And you didn’t ask either.
It wasn’t because she wouldn’t tell you or anything, it was simply because everyone time you brought something up closely related to it, you could always see the ghost of foster home days creeping into the brightness of her emerald eyes.
You never want for her to be sad.
You never want darkness to hinge back her clouded beauty. Ever again.
You’ll just keep crushing if you never take your eyes of the rear view mirror, she had told you.
So you didn’t ask.
Instead, you write your name in that column.
It’s been nearly two hours and counting. You don’t know what’s taking so long.
But that doesn’t stop you from jumping anyone who leaves those OT doors, still you don’t get anything out of them. They are tight lipped.
So you wait. It’s all you can do after all.
You are snoring uncomfortably in the waiting area, slumping on those motherfucker chairs when a light hand on your shoulder jolts you awake from your sleepless dream.
“I know it’s useless to ask you to go home, so why don’t you shift in my cabin. It’s comfortable. I have this leather couch there that is definitely better than these chairs.” She adds as an afterthought.
You shrug and out of the periphery you can see Marcus Kane, Neurologist Head of Ark General, peeking out from Lexa's OT, his white gloves going through her chart. You tether your eyes from him and look at your mother.
There's this dreaded agitated turmoil inside you.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
You note her hesitation and wonder whether she’s going to lie to you, or even give you false hopes that doctors tend to indulge the patient’s family in, to lift them up from their drowning.
You nearly beg her.
“Don’t lie, Mom.”
She gulps down her questions. She answers you in that one word.
“Yes. It is.”
Head of Trauma Surgery
You end up on the make shift couch on your office. It’s a bit rough around the edges but this very couch is beguiled in golden memories. So, so many.
And each one of them stars Alexandria Woods. In naked and clothed forms.
You are lulled by the single picture frame on your desk.
It’s Aden, Lexa and you. All of you sporting foamed moustaches.
You mindlessly hum in your tear cloaked voice,
“… we keep this memories in a photograph… where our hearts are never broken … time forever frozen still … “
Forever frozen standstill, indeed.
You are ambiguous about the opening of your door until your mother stands before you. Still fidgeting with the charts in her hand, at the threshold of your door.
You don’t invite her in.
She doesn’t come in either.
“I’m sorry.” She says and you clench you jaw.
Your eyes are red shot, but the fierceness in you isn’t yet dead.
“Don’t say it out of formality or pity. She doesn’t deserve that just because she saved Aden and nearly killed herself.”
She flinches at your uncalled offhanded attitude but doesn’t let it show. She gulps back the lump in her throat before she speaks,
“She’s a firefighter, Clarke. It’s admirable but her future is not written in stone. I’ll forever be grateful to her for saving my son but you deserve the best …..”
“She asked me to forgive you, you know. For dad, because he wouldn’t want us fighting.”
You words halt her. You see the frown settle in her, you see waters drench her eyes.
“She told me you love me unconditionally and that’s why you doubt her so much. She told me I don’t know that pain of growing without a mother or family like her and she hopes I never learn it. It’s like an unbearably tragic, she says. She respects you even though all you have done is find fault in her. And she’s even accepted that you won’t ever like her, but still she looks up to your approval, for fuck’s sake, I don’t even know why.”
You clutch onto that photo frame and press in against your chest.
“It’s me who doesn’t deserve her, because she deserves the best.”
The depth of your words, they hang in the silence between you too. Your mother stands stupefied.
“Now, if you have done belittling our relationship, can you close the door on your way out, Chief Griffin?”
She mumps her hand over her mouth to shut her shuddered cries.
“I only wanted you safe and happy.”
But the statement only makes your laughs.
“You know, when dad died, that day I didn’t just lose my father. I lost my mother too.”
Your words are like a dying melody to your mother’s eyes. But you don’t dignify her dampened eyes with any look.
“Why are you so against Lexa?”
Sinclair, one of Abby’s oldest friends and general physician, asks her in the silence of her cabin.
Abby’s traces the picture of Jake, herself and a happily grinning Clarke, before turning towards that same photograph that Clarke has on desk.
“I just wanted to be happy.” She sighs.
Sinclair looks into the picture of Lexa and mouth erupting laugh of Clarke’s with a grinning Aden sitting between them.
“Whatever made you think she hasn’t been?”
Abby’s follows the view point of his, and stops at the picture of Clarke.
Blue eyes smiling with ecstasy. It seems ages ago since she had last since her laugh so openly.
The realization shatters the earth below her feet. She chokes on her own tears, reprimanding herself for being so blind of what was always in front of her. All this time.
Whatever made you think Clarke isn’t happy, Abby?
She has been happy as this time.
Abby Griffin was so blinded by her own misery, she never just saw it.
Until she did.
People hardly ever change. But they do, when they are standing at the edge of their fallout. That’s when they change.
Abby clasps her face within her palms, water pools without bounds.
“What have I done, Jake?” She asks desperately to his bygone ghost. Its only silence that greets her.
You drink your nth cup of this atrocious thing that they call coffee from the hospital café in the last 8 hours.
Lincoln greets you there.
“You told me the surgery was a success.”
“Yes.”
“Why isn’t she awake then?”
There’s a pregnant pause, before he answers.
“I don’t know, Clarke.”
You don’t converse further anymore.
You don’t have anything more to say.
You glance at Lexa’s file and disheartened-ly peer through the list printed out in black.
Left shoulder dislocated.
Internal bleeding on right lobe of the brain.
4 ribs broken.
Punctured left lung.
Ear drum perforated.
Too much inhalation of smoke.
Femur bone of left leg damaged.
30% burnt skin on her back.
Sprained Ankle.
……
……
……
You shut the file, almost tear it in your hands.
It’s 2am in the morning.
You throw the rest of your coffee and instead look for that whiskey bottle you had stashed up in your office.
“What the fuck do you mean I can’t see her?”
Zoe Monroe, the nurse on duty, peels down her eyes to the ground. She dareth look at her because right now Clarke Griffin looks like a raging bull who’ll not hesitant right to tear anyone down who her.
Presently, it’s Zoe Monroe, that’s stopping you.
“Hospital protocols, Doctor. I’m sure you must know.” She barely whistles out, stammering under your piercing gaze.
“She’s been admitted here at 7.50pm yesterday. Now, it’s 6.30am. It’s been over 10 hours. If someone was to come, they would have come.”
You know she’s right, still you try to factorise with her. You voice loses its ruddy hardness, instead it drops it’s preceding octaves.
“Let me see her, please, Zoe.”
“I can’t, Clarke. Not until she’s awake. Till then only family is allowed.”
You hold up both of your hands airily in surrender.
“I’m so sorry, Clarke.”
You hunch back.
Only family is allowed.
You are just the girlfriend, Griffin.
You are just the bloody girlfriend …. Which on paper doesn’t mean anything.
You are not her anything.
You are not her wife, so you can’t call her your anything.
And if she doesn’t ever wake up, you won’t even be able to mourn her as her widow.
Because, in paper, you are not her anything.
It’s somewhere around 8.30am when a dirty blonde woman rushes up the white corridor only to stop in front of her door.
You were getting your second coffee of the day when you see her. All braided hair, dirty blonde and skinny jeans adjourning an equally fit leather jacket and high heels. She’s talking to Zoe in rushed words when she looks up at you.
You blame your glowering persona. You are practically howling at the intrusion and that only seems to fuel the outlander’s amusement but when you come close you seem the mystified moisture laden eyes.
“You must be the infamous Clarke Griffin. I’m Anya Woods, Lexa’s sister.”
“I didn’t know she had a sister?”
“Foster sister. Technicalities, Doctor. We don’t talk that much, just talk enough to know we are alive, I suppose. I’m not surprised she doesn’t talk about me or the past. It’s not pleasant … ”
You can see the unsubstantial colouring of her skin at the meagre mention of forgotten tales, bewildered at how both of their sisters echo the same thoughts, the same reminiscing air of a past they wouldn’t rather say.
You say instead, “Since it’s not pleasant and an occurrence of the past, maybe you just keep it in the past.”
Your eyes supersede towards her door, nearly yearning just to see her one time.
“Have you seen her?”
She asks. With mirth and utter anguish and despair you nod your head.
No.
“Then come on.”
You have always wondered about that scar that lesioned over Lexa’s upper lip.
All she had told you was it was from a fight. The penetrator had bitten her up but not long before she had broken that arm of his.
You have always wondered about those empty fillings in between her story.
You asked her Anya had gladly filled you in.
“There’s a rule in the orphanage, if you don’t eat your food fast enough, others will snatch it from you. Kill or be killed kinda. That happened to me and when I demanded my food back, they beat me up. Lexa, being the messiah as always intervened. She was 13 and still so fucking short by her age. Still she poked those bears saying, “What, 4 against 1? Geez, without your dicks I would have mistaken you all for girls.” They beat her near about black and blue but she didn’t stop, not until I had my food back, not until she broke 2 of their hands and a nose too. Lexa had this big black eye, her knuckles were all bloody and her face, pretty much dismantled but all she did was fucking grin at me. A week later when that gash formed a scar, she was so happy.
She was like, “Chicks dig scars, An.” “
It’s been a week and she’s still beautiful as ever.
In spite of the gazillion tubes and syringes that pummel onto her porcelain skin.
In spite of the incubator that saves her lungs and helps her breathe.
In spite of the gashes and cuts that still zone out in broad light, furbish her skin.
She has this soft inclination towards poetry. Specially, E.E. Cummings and Pablo Neruda.
You read to her, again and again, hoping she’ll hear not just an echo but a voice too.
I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)
I am never without it.
“It’s going to be 10 days.”
“I know.”
“I don’t understand, Clarke.”
“She’s too stubborn to die.” You say, half-smiling half-sniffling into the phone.
“Clarke …. “ You can hear her worry, her desperation through the telephonic waves that resonates even through the ocean that divides them.
“Don’t Anya. She promised me someday. She promised me, and I’m not letting her go. It takes as long as it takes.” You snap at her and instead of retaliating at your sour tone, she amusedly says almost smiling,
“I’m glad she found you.”
You sniff indignantly against the sleeves of Lexa’s sweatshirt.
It’s plaid and worn out of its cotton, too much detergent clogs your airway but somehow intricately Lexa’s bodice scent has intertwined itself with it.
You are hiding in one of the call rooms.
And thinking of her, you close your heavy eyes.
“But my words become stained with your love
You occupy everything, you occupy everything ….”
Her words traversed your insides, aching and twisting and tightening and filling your empty soul that etched for her, forcing you to bulk your deprived hips for desperate friction.
Her deft fingers trailed past the valley of your breasts, twirling past the pebbled nipples as she taunted them delicious, sucked them in her perfect white teeth until you begged ….
The first you ever made love with her.
The first time, she drew constellations in your soul.
On the 12th day, your mother finds you crying in the lonely stairwell of one of the hospital’s fire exit.
She sits beside you on the stairs, and more silence follows, except it doesn’t bother either of you.
You are letting silence fill those gaps until you find suitable words.
Until then …
“I don’t regret my actions on calling off his life support, he would have wanted it. But what I do regret is not telling you, not including you in my decision. I was so afraid, I thought I could spare you that pain … from making that decision. I love you so much, you are my daughter and as your mother I wanted to do what was best by you, you know. I just …. I’m sorry, Clarke. For everything.”
Her words embed inside you, one layer at a time.
Breathe in, breathe out.
“I want to marry her. I’m scared, Mom.”
You succumb into the raised hands of your mother, your chest recline up and down, and you don’t try to conceal those miniature butterflies that erupt inside you nor those frightening thoughts that tortures you every now and then.
“I’m so scared.”
“I know, I know.”
She shelters you under the wing of her arms because she knows you are going through a free fall.
You are free falling.
It’s the 16th day.
Around 1am in the morning.
And sitting in the chair, by her bed, you are planting fleecy kisses on her cheek and along her jawline.
There’s a slight solitary stream that escapes your eyes at such ungodly hour and you don’t brush it off. When you feather kiss her, you are sure her cheek’s already wet.
You sniffle against the cool air and you bend down to kiss her on her keen nose, a small peck when in the softening beams of hospital lights you are sure you see bleary emerald outlines searching for your own.
You blink again and again and then she calls your name in an obscure longingness.
“Clarke?”
“Lexa?”
You are at the epitome of your world, your heart erupting in starlight as you wedge her in your arms. You feel the outlines of her pillow lips stretching against you your shoulder blades, it makes you feel … elated. Complete.
She gives you that dopey loped sided smile, her gauzed fingers reaching up to meet yours and you see those sleep reeking eyes.
You clasp her hand in yours, and kiss her forehead.
“I want to be a Woods, baby.”
You mumble against her forehead, even though she’s lulled back to her sleep.
Even though Lincoln’s checking in all the miniscule of her details, still standing beside him, you scrutinise him. You can’t help it.
And even when he’s gone, you stare at the beeping machine, the thud thud thud of her heart blaring in your ears. It’s steady, it’s steady and soft and melodic, like the way you always heard it beat. You still stare at it, waiting for the other shoe to drop until Lexa breaks you out of your trance.
“I’m here, Clarke.” She says and pats the space beside her.
She slithers to the side of the bed and you nuzzle your nose into the welcoming warmth of the hollow of her neck, snaking on of your hand around her waist.
She smells of hospital breathe and chloroform and tastes like saline air and unpalatable courage.
Your first kiss after so many days melts in salt tears and in her fragile state, it’s her who holds you in her arms when you speak out in uneven words and sniffled breaths.
“16 days and I died a little bit inside every day. But you are finally here and alive and safe, with me.”
“I’m baby, I’m baby.”
“If you had left me, I would have brought you back and killed you myself, you know.”
And she laughs.
With her uninjured left hand, she picks up a spoonful of some supposed namely, chicken broth, before twirling it down on the bowl.
She heaves yet another minute long sigh before asking aloud, snorting,
“I can’t decide what to choose. Starvation or hospital food. What’s this?” She points on the noodle-y thing on her plate. “It looks like someone’s boiled intestine.”
Zoe curtains her laughter in forced coughs, before sighing towards you and moving out the room.
Now when it’s the two of you, she gravely pouts at you and you feel enlivened, enthralled by her irrevocably.
You glide the loosened strand of auburn hair behind her ears, trailing hazily against the marred skin that now lines in a parallel heavily against the tanned skin. She stiffs beneath you, the previous joyous atmosphere all sunken into unsung tunes.
You arc down and paint it with silk smooches, and when you are almost nearing to her ear you finally say, “Marry me, Lexa.”
The aromaticism of the whole scenario was vivid but when had life ever dealt anyone straight.
“You are teasing me.” She jokingly asks you but you have been never more serious in your whole life.
Her jade eyes fills in the silence as she sees the gravity in you.
“Are you sure?” Her chords tangle against themselves, she stammers in her sentence. You hear that un-surfaced question, Will I be enough?
You are resolute. You are in love. She’s more than enough for you and you are going to spend the rest of your lifetime proving her that.
“Yes.”
Within a flash, she parrots you, broadcasting all her white teeth.
“Yes.”
Aden’s walking in slow measured steps, his still small hands fumbling with the huge bouquet of gardenias that he has brought for Lexa. With his own pocket money, mind you. Raven tugs her small gift between her arms then squats at the back of Aden’s head, because apparently she has negative patience for snail workers, much to O’s horror. Aden vaguely touches his head and delicately soothes his hand over his flowers before walking only a tad bit faster to meet Raven halfway.
But they all stop when you stop. You stop when you see Anya standing at the hallway, her hands shoved in her back pockets.
When you raise your eyebrows in interrogation, she obscurely turns towards Lexa’s room, where you mother is talking to her?
By the time you enter, your mother is already getting up. But all you can see is the transparent glistening on Lexa’s black eyelids and you scowl.
“Mom.”
“Clarke.”
“Babe.”
Three voices call out simultaneously, but you look up to Lexa who only says, “It’s ok.”
Then in your rear view, you see your mother soften a bit before reciprocating Lexa with a small smile.
Lexa returns it as well.
It’s ok?
When Abby leaves, she says “She apologized.” Then adds a little too merrily, “She wants a fresh start. With us, with you.”
She emphasizes you a bit too heftily and you don’t know why but it surges inside you the wind of promise.
A promise that says, you have suffered enough. Now you get to be happy.
Yet you still ask, “And you forgave her just like that?”
“Life’s too short to be holding grudges, no?”
You sit and read the tale like a third person. You read the lines, pause and breathe then you read between the lines, you don’t scrutinise it, you admire it from every edge.
You watch as Aden hands her those flowers. She cradles then ever so leniently before asking him to place them in that empty vase.
“Thank you so much for remembering, Aden” she says and you watch your brother blush burgundy. Brighter than the setting hues of the shying sun.
You see respect in his eyes for Lexa.
You watch as Raven struggles a bit with unwrapping her gift but Lexa smiles patiently as her. Then she places a model car of sorts in front of her, which Lexa had helped built it with Raven for her science fair.
“I know you helped me built this but it’s my first ever creation. It’s pretty important to me but I want you to have it because you are also very important to me too.”
“I’m honoured, Raven Blake.” Lexa ruffles her raven hair.
You see admiration in her eyes for Lexa.
You see O thrust a packet of some sort towards Lexa but the magnamous look on her face when she sees the tacos from Joe’s makes you wonder if people can get heart attacks from being this happy.
“I love this, O”
O rolls her eyes, “I love you too, Lexa.”
The one person who has yet to speak up was Anya. There’s an eerie forlornness decussating her features, hands crossed against her chest as if trying to shield her from emotions. She stares at Lexa with an expression too familiar to you.
Like she’s going to disappear.
Like it surreal she’s even here, alive. Breathing.
You also don’t miss the way pudgy lips curl up at an unarmed smile when she sees Anya.
You wonder when was the last time they had actually been under the same roof together.
“Hey guys, lunch is on me. Pizza and hot chocolate.” You usher Aden and Raven out. Octavia tilts her head at your demeanour but doesn’t question you on.
Lexa’s look at you for a moment, that savaging longing look where she bites her lower lips before mouthing I love so much, thank you … she says it all at once before turning her attention to her sister.
You close the door behind you.
“You are not feeding them pizza for lunch, Clarke.” Octavia hits you squarely on your arm and you groan at the pain, before she links your arms together.
The pieces of your puzzle are finally falling into place.
Lexa has insisted on physiotherapy even before she was allowed to actually opt for it.
And now, freshly out of the shower, in rickety limbs she hobbles onto the couch.
That’s how you find her. Curling like a cat on her couch, she pulls her sliding glasses up against the bridge of her nose, before turning another page on her worn out book, mouthing out words to an unknown song that plays on her loudspeakers.
“What’s the song?”
She doesn’t put down her book, when she replies.
“Between the raindrops”
Between the raindrops.
You are still in your work clothes when you pull out a red box from somewhere within your box.
You fall on your knees to the wooden floor with a thump, and ask Lexa to open the box.
Prasiolite green amethyst rose petal cut stone tall amidst the crowning diamond pebbles.
You had seen it today, while walking down for coffee and you had fallen love with it instantly.
This was it. This was it, your heart had screamed beyond amicable octaves.
“You are it for me. And now, I am putting a ring on it.”
She all but shrieks, though.
“Oh my god, is it Tiffany’s? It’s gotta cost like my 3 months of salary, Clarke. I don’t think …. I can’t accept it, Clarke. It’s just too much … I ..”
Your knee was getting sore and you knew this rant of hers, if you don’t stop it, can run for ages, so you thrust the ring on to her ring finger before swallowing her demands and questions into a much sought kiss.
“You are my to-be wife. So ready to get spoiled now and then, Mrs. Griffin-Woods.”
She nibbles your bottom lip before straddling on you.
“I call dibs on Aden being my best man, then Mrs. Woods.”
I’ll be here every step
Walking between the raindrops with you.