Chapter 1
Her first thought is that she hasn’t been this disoriented since after graduation when Raven kept handing her shots of tequila to the point which her internal organs nearly burst and then spun her around until the sloshing in her stomach became ringing in her ears and then vomit all over Raven’s already deteriorating wheelchair. Her second thought is that her phone is ringing at 4 AM on her day off, and no doctor suffers through years as a lowly intern who changes bedpans and loses feeling in their dominant hand from writing so many prescriptions without the guarantee that they will never have to be on call.
“Dr. Griffin?” a female voice cuts through the receiver after Clarke’s slight groan intended to serve as a hello.
“Yes, who is this?” she manages to sputter out despite the sensation that milk is curdling in her mouth and her body is being put through about the tenth rinse cycle in an obnoxiously perky washing machine. That outing with Raven and Octavia the night before was not a good idea. It never is.
“My name’s Sharon. I’m one of the nurses on duty in the E.R. at Mass General.”
The ER? Clarke is the head doctor for the cardiology unit—something about the heart just always seemed to intrigue her. She would have continued to study to become a heart surgeon if it weren’t for her Dad’s—the expectant huff on the other ends regains Clarke’s attention. E.R. doctors very rarely transferred any of their patients, which could be because most of the patients in need of intense care in the ER didn’t make it. Or maybe it was because the ER doctors are good at what they do, just like Clarke is…if she were well-rested and not interrupted on her only day off.
“What can I do for you, Sharon?” Clarke does her best to force some semblance of kindness to trickle through her voice into the phone. She may not like to be woken up in the middle of the night, but she definitely cannot stand being KEPT up in the middle of the night. If she can just convince whoever this nurse is that the matter so pressing to disturb her doesn’t require her immediate attention, then perhaps the next morning’s hangover won’t be as inevitable as it already seems.
“I don’t mean to bother you, Doctor Griffin.” Too late. “It’s just, one of our patients here is asking for you.”
“They tend to do that when they see a Dr. in front of your name.”
“No, no.” Clarke can imagine the nurse frantically shaking her head and doing her best to find the words to explain. In the time it takes her to do that, Clarke could have clenched an artery, resuscitated a patient pronounced dead, and maybe clicked her ballpen a few times, just for good measure. She imagines doing so in her head, and at the conclusion she is still waiting. Finally, the woman speaks up. “He’s asking for you by first name. He keeps saying, ‘Clarke, get Clarke,’ over and over again.”
Clarke’s palms begin to sweat. Her work is separate from the rest of her life—she is Doctor Griffin at the hospital, only and always. She could use all her years of medical school to suggest some Nyquil for a friend’s sore throat, but there is a line she refuses to cross. If someone she loves is in danger, no amount of expertise or training could prepare her for the heartbreak if she couldn’t help them. Her role as a doctor ends when someone she so much as shared a taxi cab once with appears in her hospital—she can’t perform her job with the heavy weight of familiarity, the undeniable sense of personal responsibility. Not ever. Not again.
“If I had a dollar every time a disoriented man murmured my name,” Clarke jokes, because that’s what she does, she avoids the graveness of a circumstance particular to her until she absolutely can’t anymore. Or at least, she pretends to.
“His name is Finn. Do you know a Finn?
Maybe Clarke is just still drunk, or maybe she has just learned that her childhood best friend—and her current best friend’s boyfriend—is in HER hospital, tremoring under sheets she indubitably cleaned back in her days as a nurse, asking for no one but her. When she hangs up abruptly to sprint down the stairs of her apartment into the street and call a cab, she doesn’t notice that she’s forgotten her key. The only thing that feels missing is her ability to breathe, her tranquility to think, and her willingness to live.
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“You can’t just keep sitting around and doing nothing,” her best friend tells her through the phone.
“Physics may beg to differ,” Lexa quips, and she almost laughs, a ghost of a giggle may even have hovered by her lips.
“It’s been 11 months,” Lincoln sighs. “You have to move on. Don’t you think you owe it to yourself, don’t you think that’s fair?”
“It’s been 2 minutes within this conversation,” Lexa notes, “and already you’ve commented on what I should and should not do. Hardly seems fair to me.”
“Why don’t you just move back here?”
“I would remember.”
“Moving across the country won’t help you forget.”
“Lincoln,” Lexa snaps, and she almost startles at how sharp her voice has become, how quickly Lincoln has fallen to intimidated silence on the other end. “I moved back to Boston,” she continues softer, “because it’s the town I grew up in. It’s familiar, and right now familiarity is—”
“Essential, yeah, I get it. Aren’t I familiar, though Lexa? Familiar enough to walk you home from the bar every night that I told you to stop going to, familiar enough to hold you when Costia’—”
“Do not say that name” Lexa snarls. She knows Lincoln is apologizing, but she hears none of it. “I can quite clearly take care of myself, Lincoln, or I would have conceded on the many other occasions that you insisted it was ill advised for me to move here. Nevertheless, I’ve survived.”
“I care about you, Lex. That’s all,” Lincoln finally whispers. “And it would kill me to know that you’re hurting out there when I am trying so desperately to help. Just let me in, Lexa. Please.”
“The kettle’s whistling,” she does her best to sound distracted, but the only sign of absentmindedness Lexa can ever manage is a blink, which Lincoln wouldn’t be able to see anyway. “I have got to go.”
“Okay. I love you, Lexa. Stay warm.”
“Goodnight, Lincoln.”
He hangs up before she can requite, because he knows she won’t. She’s glad, because that way he doesn’t hear her whisper into the receiver, “But everything’s so damn cold.”
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“But I don’t want to play doctor again,” a young Finn whines. “We always play doctor, and I’m always sick. Let’s play war!” He springs to his feet and unveils expertly crafted finger guns. “Pew pew pew! I’ve got you, bad guys. Watch out!”
“There are no bad guys, Finn” Clarke huffs out unamused. “This is daycare.”
That makes Raven Reyes chuckle from across the playground. Already, she has the laugh of a woman who is always two steps ahead of you. At the present moment, she is tinkering with a pair of glasses she found abandoned on the snack table. ‘Finders keepers,” she told herself and if they are hers to keep, they must also be hers to play with. The only thing is that Raven doesn’t play like regular children. While Finn and Clarke are about a minute away from a tousle over who gets to go down the slide first, Raven is testing the way light bends off the glasses she found. She figures if she angles it just right, sans the presence of shadows…
“Raven Reyes!” a voice booms. She makes no attempt to hide the pair of glasses she is starting to think she perhaps shouldn’t have and looks up to see Mr. Pike, one of the teachers more acquainted with discipline, towering over her. “What do you think you are doing with a pair of glasses that I know do not belong to you?”
“I’m using them for science, sir,” she mutters, just like her mother taught her to do when somebody had a problem with one of her many experiments.
“Science?” Mr. Pike laughs. “We are learning about shapes and the alphabet. That’s it.”
“Some of us are farther ahead than others,” Raven snidely remarks, eyeing Bellamy Blake, who appears to be eating his own boogers.
“Farther ahead, hm?” Mr. Pike muses, but he doesn’t seem to be impressed like Raven was hoping he would be. “Why don’t you march yourself nice and far ahead back inside the classroom and straight to time out.”
“I’d rather not, sir,” Raven answers, averting her attention back to the glasses. In the mere moment she spent talking to Mr. Pike, the exact location of the light has changed, which must mean…
“That wasn’t a question, Miss Reyes. That was an order.” He grabs by her the shoulder and gives her a shove toward the building, but not before snatching the glasses from her hands.
Raven looks up to see most children continuing to play, unaffected by this interaction. Clarke is one of them sitting with Bellmany’s small sister Octavia who must have agreed to let Clarke be doctor. Finn, however, stands staring. He squints and then calls out when Mr. Pike and Raven get closer. “Those are my glasses,” he quickly says. “Must have lost them.” Mr. Pike nods with little interest and hands them to Finn along with something about “being more careful” and “troublemakers stealing them.”
As Mr. Pike hustles forward to open the locked door, Raven feels something slide into her pocket. She can’t help but bear a giant smile when she realizes Finn has snuck her his glasses, that he has been watching her this whole time. “Let me know when you start a fire,” Finn says.
Raven feels all the blood rush to her cheeks, and the gears in her mind turn rapid speed. “I will.”
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Lexa could never quite decide if she were an early bird or night owl, but it’s three a.m when she leaves her perpetually empty childhood home in pursuit of orange juice, air freshener, and ramen noodles, so she supposes she is a bit of both. The front porch is so icy that she nearly slips, and she is sure if it weren’t for years of agility training in martial arts, she would be dead right now. When she starts the car and rap starts blaring, she doesn’t question it. She doesn’t listen to any music containing curse words more severe than “hell” and she never allows the radio to exceed a volume of 2, but lately, she is so numb that she can’t remember much about herself. She taps her fingers on the steering wheel in a wild effort to stay alert. Lincoln insisted she stopped moping, so she hopes this counts.
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Clarke’s well-worn moccasins make a slapping noise against the damp pavement in front of the hospital as she runs. No snow managed to compile under the pavilion, but still it is wet and slippery. She runs all the way to the automatic doors, her heavy breathing the only sound in the annoyingly calm night. When she was first starting as a doctor and still working adjustable hours, she felt like nights were always the loudest. During the day, families could slip away to call friends or could binge eat their worries in the cafeteria. But during the night, alarms sounded often due to the unsteady pulses sleep for the dying causes. She may be too logical to believe in the mystic, but Clarke is entirely convinced that death is a chase with many false endings, thus all the alarms sounding, and then the family members wailing, and the uncomfortable nurses’ fingernails tapping, it is an endless cycle of trauma and distress and pain. The stillness, that is what’s scary.
As soon as Clarke reaches the doors, she slows her pace. She relishes in the familiar smell that she could only compare to the smell of plastic bags her mom used to pack her sandwiches in, or the rubber of the containers that stored away all her precious things while she was at college. Clarke as a doctor never ceased to be composed. She may not be one to tell people what they need to hear, but she always finds a way to pose the truth in such a fashion that it doesn’t hurt as much as it can. At least, that’s what she learned to do when she had to tell families about their children dying due to heart failure from drug overdose that was never supposed to be more than just once, or that a very old man who collapsed due to a heart attack would never get to meet his great grandson the next month. Studying medicine taught Clarke a thousand cures. But it also forced her to learn that millions of things just couldn’t be fixed.
She makes her way to the nurses’ station of the ER portion of Mass General, approaching who she assumes to be Sharon if she’s managed to correctly recall her voice despite remembering little of the phone conversation besides that everything hurt and it wasn’t just because of the alcohol.
“Automobile crash. Vitals failed, before he fell into a comma. Room 407,” the woman rattles off, and if realizes she shouldn’t be revealing such information to Clarke, especially during non-visiting hours, she doesn’t show it. Everyone in this hospital knows the legendary Dr. Griffin. What they don’t know is behind her is just a woman who gets shampoo in her eyes all too often, who sniffles through romcoms and curses when she doesn’t correctly predict murder mysteries. Behind her is a girl who hoped if she looked every day into the face of many tragedies, she wouldn’t have to lose anything.
When she enters the room Finn is in, Clarke isn’t sure whether or not she wishes she were a doctor. She knows immediately by the looks of things that Finn will suffer brain damage, without a doubt. She also knows if he does not regain conciseness shortly, the loss of memory and ability will be extreme. But Clarke is so certain that Finn is strong, hell, he once rode a mechanical bull on a dare and held on until he was purple in the face. Now he just looks strangely blue, which Clarke knows to be oxygen loss, the adjustment of natural respiration to manual intake from a machine, and Finn’s skin is so cold she could close her eyes and imagine she were outside, building snowmen with him and Raven, hoping the couple wouldn’t be so busy building their very own family that they would forget her completely. “Oh Finn,” Clarke whispers, “What have you done?”
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“What do you mean the entire road is closed?” Lexa practically yells, her breathing coming in puffs through her open window.
The police officer shrugs. “We had to stop traffic, ma’am. There was a big accident.”
Lexa shakes her head. She finally has urged herself to leave the house, and now this? In the middle of the night no less. What are the odds, she thinks? Could life get any stranger?
“Some young guy, probably about your age. Fresh out of college and everything. What a shame.”
For some reason, Lexa is curious. She finds it easiest not to consider the details in lives lost, but something about this night, the way the stars are so decipherable despite it being the dead of winter, makes her wonder if she could feel again. And if she’s feeling, she’s hoping. She’s hoping other people are feeling and approaching a stable state of mind too. “Who is he?”
“I couldn’t tell you that, honey; I’m a police officer, that’s a violation of privacy. Besides, I didn’t even get a good look at I.D., the whole scene was such a mess.” The man shifts on his feet, his brown eyes boring into Lexa’s green as she would see if she were looking. She isn’t. “But how about I buy you a drink? There’s no reason a pretty lady like yourself should—”
“Not interested,” Lexa refutes. “Is he going to be okay? Were there other people involved?”
“You ask a lot of questions for someone driving so late into the night.” The man drawls. He leans so close that Lexa can smell a hint of stale coffee, hummus, and dubious intentions on his breath. “Maybe I should be asking the questions.” He leans forward to trace her chin, but before his fingers can touch her skin she has his wrist twisted a direction it shouldn’t be turned, and he’s yelping in a pitch she didn’t know a man’s voice could reach.
“Tell me his name,” She snarls.
“Jesus christ, fine! Jim? Tim? God, it was something, it was something like…not really common, but not a lot of syllables, you know what I mean? Rick? No, it was something weird like, like, maybe Fish?” Lexa glares at him, “Unless you have a brother or something named Fish, which is completely normal, who am I to judge what’s normal, who am I to...uhm. Len? Glen? So the same but…so…what’s the word…oh, different!”
He continues to dabble as Lexa sits frozen in the driver’s seat. When was the last time she cared about anything? How can she feel compassion towards someone she doesn’t even know when she hasn’t been able to say I love you to her best friend in months? What kind of messed of form of caring is this? She doesn’t know, she doesn’t know who this is, not until the officer manages to sputter out, “Finn! It was Finn!”
That’s all Lexa needs to hear before she is putting her car in reverse and headed the alternate route to the hospital she used to frequent after tournaments. She has only heard the name Finn in regard to one person, but she heard it nearly every single day of her life during high school. They had hardly ever met, besides heated exchanges over whether the gym was reserved for his sweaty bonehead basketball teammates or the archery club which she led, and besides one peculiar instance where she walked in on him whispering into the neck of Clarke Griffin at their senior prom despite the fact that he had forever been dating Raven Reyes, she knew little of his private life. But private or public, his life could be about to end. Under the loud bass of rap she returned to its initial volume, she whispers to herself that she cares, that this matters, and that Finn matters. She tries not to let herself think about how perhaps the potential death of another has made her overwhelmingly aware of how easily her life could end too. That should scare her.
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When the nurse she never confirmed or denied to be Sharon finally shoos her out, Clarke collapses in front of the door of Finn’s room. Of course, she did so after she pretended to take the elevator out, but she couldn’t fathom being far from Finn, not right now. She can feel chunks of her blond hair, which she never even bothered to brush, clinging to her skin, secured by snot. Clarke thinks if she cries hard enough, she can return to the night before when Raven was licking hot sauce off her bare stomach in the wing eating extravaganza she considered necessary for every pregame. Raven would be happy, and Clarke would be temporarily content, and neither of them would have to anticipate mourning one of their closest friends. Does Raven even know yet? This makes Clarke cry harder, because she is always the one to contain secrets it feels like, she can’t escape the many impossible situations the world thrusts upon her no matter how hard she tries. It is only when she feels warm, delicate arms curl around her that she realizes she is trembling. It is only when nimble fingers scoop hair from her cheeks and her forehead that she can begin to acknowledge that the hospital lights are not flashing but rather her head is just spinning so quickly that everything is dark and then light and then dark again. The comfort of a body pressed against hers is enough to reconcile, to silently plead with God or whoever invented this universe to keep Finn alive, it is enough to rejoin the workings of life and open her eyes. Her first thought is that the woman encompassing her in sweater arms is beautiful, is lanky and precious and a bit haunting, but so beautiful that Clarke feels a pang in her chest that isn’t quite pain but isn’t too close to something else. Her second thought is that just like all workings of her life, this woman is familiar, she is a reincarnation from her past, she is someone she hasn’t seen or really thought of for many years but now it all comes rushing back. She intends to pull away rapidly, to create an impenetrable distance, but all she can manage is a slight cough that unfortunately elicits a bit of spit from her throat that because of the proximity goes flying right into the other woman’s eyes. Suddenly, Clarke is not afraid or upset, she is not comforted or secure, she is angry, she is blissfully and yet terribly immersed in an emotion so intense that she can’t decipher what exactly it is. “You bitch,” she growls, and if it weren’t for the dryness of her mouth and the flood in her eyes, it would come out as a shout. But it is weak, even if Clarke Griffin has always been and will always be strong. She is so strong that it is hardly impossible for her to soften. But then the woman before her, the one called Lexa, is all wide eyes and shaking jaw, saying, “Hello, Clarke,” and so soften she does.