Scene 3
“You too?”
Clarke nodded sympathetically. Yes.
She felt a twinge around her neck and reached out her hand to massage the outlines of her plastered neck. She saw the brunette scattering ahead of her in a faster pace, so tugging at the shortened length of the green scrub, she trailed after the mysterious brunette to match her fast movements.
It was only when they were about to turn up a corner round the hospital, in a thunder speed, that she felt the brunette gasp onto Clarke’s unhindered arms and push her to a corner. She didn’t understand the sudden change in the docile nature of the green eyes and Clarke’s mind wandered off to the late night binge shows of CSI and Criminal Case and the horrible depictions on how a simple, innocent face can turn into a sexual suicidal sociopath predator. She shivered when the unnamed stranger held her by her too cold palms and arrested onto her mouth to prevent the blonde from eliciting any sort of scream. And in that particular moment Clarke pacified. She was going to die like a Jane Doe on the morning hours in New York by this girl,this vigilante basking in beauty.
Maybe it was her continuous squatting at her arms or maybe it was the way she inhaling deeply against the frozen palms of the brunette, who was still looking over Clarke's shoulder like kidnappers do before thrusting them on to their white vehicles, that green eyes finally looked at her. And this time Clarke was like really really dumbstruck. Not at the zillion ideas that were squandering in her brain feeding like devious ideas on how she will be murdered today.
Evergreen emarald eyes looked at her and Clarke realized for the first time that they were the greenest and probably that haunting most eyes, she had ever got stanced on. So mystic. So unearthly. Her jaw seemed tightly clenched, long and too perfect for a human specimen and the grip on Clarke’s hands felt almost suicidal. And somewhere along the lines when Clarke, but not intentionally at all, had tried to free from herself underneath the stoic face's gasp she might have felt the toned muscles underneath the overcoat rugged overcoat. She gulped.
“There were police officers, over there. If they saw us they might have thought we had just run from a mental hospital in these clothes. Now, I don’t know about you but I certainly for one don’t wish to end up in a psychotic cell.” Replied the husky British voice.
She softened her reptile hands and moved away a feet steps from Clarke and was now gaping at her, her eyes intensifying on the blonde.
There was a momentary pause. “And just so you know, I’m attracted to you in any form or shape. I don’t want any misleading ideas in that tweeny brain of yours.”
Now Clarke was truly perplexed at her words.
Lexa knew that was a white lie. In mild shades only though. If she could crave a dent into yesterday’s midnight tales, she knew one thing for sure. She had been awed by the blonde’s beauty and now she was enchanted. The stranger’s beauty had in some heavenly way even multiplied under the frosty rays of the morning lights and somehow it was shaking some ground underneath Lexa’s. Head before heart. Head before heart, she muttered like a chorus. She was going to be a distraction. And the last thing that Lexa didn’t need right now was bloody distraction.
“So should I be relieved that you are not attracted to me or should I be wondering instead why you aren’t attracted to me.” The blonde bit her lower lip for a second. “Not that I want you to be attracted to me or anything, but you know.” The blonde had a coy smile on her face, her big white teeth shining through pink lips.
“Whatever,” snorted the brunette.
Lexa looked down the empty street and seeing no further possibilities of being detained at the moment, she walked clear past the agitated blonde. But as luck would have her, no sooner had she walked ten steps, tentative feet caught up with Lexa.
“I’m Clarke. Griffin.” Smilingly, she whisked her hand forward for a friendly shake but Lexa rolled her eyes off. She could have sworn she had heard the blonde huff “you are so rude” under her breathe.
Finally Lexa decided to give in. It was just a name. “Alexandria Mikealson.”
The plausible smile on Clarke was somewhat amusing to Lexa. “Long name.”
Comeback for on her tongue tips. She smirked her reply, “Weird name. And I prefer to be called Lexa.”
There were definitely about to turn a corner down the street when the blonde, Clarke spoke,
“So, um, do you want to try again, together?”
Lexa, the finally named mystical being, stopped and looked at her. Dumbstruck at the proposition. What was it, two in one bonus, a death proposition?
Lexa all but shrieked in whispers, “We are not playing double tennis here that we’ll partner up. I don’t know about you but I’m serious about this. Just leave me alone.”
Colour rose into her pale skin. She stepped her ground, finger pointing accusingly at Lexa. “I wasn’t joking either. Fuck, listen, the thing is, I have always needed this push to do something in my life and I just want to make sure I go through this, just in case I don’t falter the last step.”
Lexa, always the cautious believer in thinking before doing something, went through her words though she couldn’t help but wonder what made the blue-eyed wonder to desperate to numb her life in forever silence. On the other end, Clarke tapped her boots impatiently at the overthinking Britisher. She was making Clarke roll her eyes so much often that Clarke was fearing they might get stuck back at the back of her skull.
“Ok.”
“Ok. So we can go back to our place and…” Clarke’s statement was brutally butchered by another shrieking reply her co-suicidor. Suicidor is a term right?
“What?” Lexa’s hands flew up at her assumption.
“I’m not inviting you for coffee.” The brunette was giving her migraines and Clarke didn’t even have her fill of caffeine yet to tolerate it. “Whatever, we can always go back to yours?”
There was a fall in her demeanour. She hesitated her words. “I don’t … think I have any place to call mine anymore.”
“Then mine it is.”
They walked a block down to the back side of a red bricked building. If Lexa had wondered why they were entering its premises through the back, rather suspiciously might she add even though there was a very perfect front gate at the entrance, she didn’t word her thoughts. But maybe her face was screaming questions at a sheer volume or maybe Clarke was a sort of mind-reader, when she answered Lexa's most wanted query for the moment.
She shrugged. “I kinda don’t have my key on me at the moment, not like I actually ever have it and this way’s much easier anyways.” And the statement unsettled Lexa heavily. The blonde was a utter disaster in a blessing.
She jumped a feet or two and pulled down the crinkling ladder.
Lexa gestured ahead, “After you.”
Clarke narrowed her eyes at the excuse, “I think since you are the guest you should be the one going up first. Come on, hurry up. I’m freezing my ass up here.”
Clarke struggled under the narrow opening of the dingy windows of the 90’s and even though her upper body was up through, her hips were kinda stuck at the pane, embarrassingly. She bit her lips at the current thought that bypassed her mind but finally asked.
“Can you push me in, Lexa?”
Much to Clarke’s disliking, Lexa smirked. “With pleasure.” And roughly pushed her through making her topple on some of her still unboxed stuff.
Lexa even though being rather fit and proportionate somehow met the exact same fate as her one of her wobbly feet got stuck within some box and she too toppled on the red carpeted floor, knocking not-to-wildly on her bandaged head.
The room wasn’t a room per se. It was more like an art studio which was albeit the artistic view was nothing short of hell itself. It made Lexa cringe. She watched her step through the dishevelled room, tiptoeing through dirty laundry and white papers that was scribbled across the floor.
She looked for somewhere to sit and a detained sofa, of sorts, caught her eyes and Lexa put aside some of the clothes and was just about to sit on the soft surface when the blonde interrupted her.
“I hope you aren’t making yourself too comfortable.”
Despite the underlying assumption, Lexa sat on the edge of the leather. “In this hellhole? Of course not, Klark.”
The way her name rolled up Lexa’s mouth, her tongue clattering against the scalp of her mouth felt almost unnerving, nerve wrecking to Clarke. Maybe it was her lavishing-ly hot accent or maybe it was just Lexa but the sound of her name from her was causing some unnamed weird chemical toxification inside her. Clarke felt she had strong feelings to Lexa for using the name in that way, but Clarke had yet to decide whether it was good or bad.
“So, what do you think about hanging?”
“I don’t see any ceiling fan or remotely anything hang worthy here. What about sleeping pills though?”
Clarke looked into her one havoc of the cabinet shelf. “I have some but not enough for two. For more, we’ll need doctor’s prescription and stuff. Hey wait, we can light my place. Gas leakage? It’ll be all done and done in a second.”
The idea oddly appealed to Lexa. “Now, that sounds not bad.”
Clarke turned up all the gas stoves, making the gas disperse in whatever small domain of her apartment and Lexa tried to shut through the window but left it open mid-way, it somehow didn’t want to be shut. And Clarke searched for matchsticks around and about everything. She found them and standing bravely in front of Lexa, she picked one of the only remaining four. Only. Such was their luck. The stick broke underneath Clarke’s pressure against the friction and so did the next.
Lexa rolled her eyeballs and took them from her slip, with a “May I” and lighted up the matchstick but interrupted with a weird question.
“Wait, do you smell any gas?”
Clarke sniffed round the air, nodding her head in a negative. What the fuck.
The light was about to go off and Lexa started to call out for papers and Clarke without thinking handed her a one or two. Out of which, one turned out to be her gas bill. One which Clarke had somehow, most definitely and innocently forgotten to pay. Fury engorged Lexa and she thrusted the half burnt paper into Clarke’s.
“Good heavens. How did you not know?”
“I don’t know, because I don’t cook?”
“Is this all some sort of a joke to you, Griffin? Because I assure you to me it’s not. If you want to toy around with someone then go to a bar, you’ll find plenty there.”
Red hot smoke was releasing from her ears and Lexa had expected some sort of a cranky of bitchy reply in return but no, instead, watering baby blues met her emerald eyes, who quickly turned their back on Lexa’s and whispered a “I didn’t know” reached fell in the open.
Lexa was a daydreamer. A reader of poetry and somehow through them, she came to believe that there were some people we meet in our lives, no matter how short of a duration, who are just meant to be happy. People who would just look at you and you’ll feel just a little bit better, and oddly Clarke seemed one of those. And seeing anything less than a smile, let alone tears in Clarke’s eyes trembled something inside Lexa’s.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t reply and Lexa didn’t pry. She looked around the apartment which still looked like as if it had been hit by the latest twister. “Are those cellophane rolls?”
“Yeah?”
“We can both … you know suffocate ourselves.”
Clarke picked the alleged material started wrapping the foil around Lexa’s head and she went round and round her, like a merry go round, wrapping it up.
“You have such a long face, Lexa.”
Before her lips were cut off, Lexa smirked trying to mimick Clarke's voice, “I think the correct words you are looking for is, You have such a well defined face, Lexa.” Even Clarke couldn't stop laughing at the bad mimicry.
By the time she was finished Lexa looked as if she had a mummified skull with a human body. Clarke asked if she was able to breathe at all and Lexa nodded a No. Pat on your back, job well done, Clarke. And placed the foil onto the brunette’s hand.
“Ok now.” And Lexa started rolling the cellophane when midway her work was halted. Lexa was on the verge of doing her work but her steps and the wrap both going sixes and sevens at each other. She was literally blindfolded.
Clarke stomped her feet, impatient and by the she turned around at what was delaying Lexa, she shrieked at the scene. She motioned her hands into fast action, pushing up the cellophane that was lashed onto the brunette’s face, like second skin.
“Oh my god, I can’t believe I trusted you with this. You cheat, I knew you wouldn’t help me. You were going to die and I would have ended up in jail as your fucking murderer. Murderer.”
Lexa pulled up the remaining foil. “You closed my eyes while wrapping, Clarke. How was I supposed to see? I don’t have X-ray vision like superman.”
“We’ll give it another go.”
And this time, to be sure, Clarke pulled out another extra cellophane roll just in case they ran out. Which, they did. This time it was Clarke who went first and when hers was done, she did the same to Lexa. Only this time, there was no extra third foil. Lexa panicked at it and Clarke too didn’t look far away from it. They had promised they would do this together so frantically Lexa and Clarke both started working on tearing off the clothed mask from the blonde’s face.
Clarke heaved in an unknown relief. A rather blemishing thought stuck in her and she didn’t even know why she bothered to voice her thoughts.
“Do you believe in signs?”
As expected, Lexa’s eyes narrowed, her brows furrowed at the sudden confusing statement. “What?”
“Signs like these. Like trying to die and falling at it miserably.”
“What, absolutely not.”
“I don’t know. It’s like we have some unfinished business left or something. It’s stupid, right?.”
“Yeah, it’s stupid.” But Lexa’s resolution somehow faltered this time. Gustus’s words flashed in front of her eyes as if he was just here, telling her, almost begging her to some to the bank’s meeting. You are our guarantor, Lexa.
“Yeah, I guess so. But do you think we should hold this off for some time?”
“Then when we’ll try again?”
“What’s today’s date? Um, yeah, 26th November. Maybe we can try again on …”
“31st December? New Year’s Eve?”
“That’s like …”
“In 34 days. Yes.” But as if Lexa had been in some trance, she jerked her head to herself, as if some hard truth realization had suddenly dawned on her. “Oh my god, what am I doing? This is stupid.”
“Lexa …”
But the blonde’s words were sent array. She gripped the door knob and thrusted the door closed behind her and ran down the stairs until she was out up front. But only when she saw the cross road up ahead, she didn’t know where she should go. Where was home?
You threw us literally to the sharks. The market crashed Lexa, we don’t have a dime to pay. You were all bloody losers behind desks. We all have a family to feed unlike you, Lexa. The bank’s called for a meeting on the 28th December.
Your mom’s gone, Alexandria, we have to leave this neighbourhood. You are running too fast, Alexandria, I don’t think I ever catch up. You don’t call anymore, are you even alive?
Tears streamed down her cheeks. She sat on the concrete pavement and buried her face in her hands. She felt a soothing hand on her shoulders and the intensifying gaze she gave to the blonde, made her flinch back. But against all odds, Clarke didn’t move any distance, she stayed put, something Lexa was happy for.
She sniffed, “I don’t have anything else to live for.”
“Me either. So New Year’s Eve?”
“New Year’s Eve. What will we do until then?”
Clarke shrugged, her lips mildly tugging up. “Things maybe we have stored on over “One Day I’ll List”?”
“Sounds good.”