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Clarke had expected the zombie apocalypse as much as anyone. Which is to say, not at all.
But when people started coming to her hospital, sweating and pale and not dying, she’d watched enough horror movies to know where it was going.
“The dead are going to rise,” she told Raven over the phone, half joking and delirious at four in the morning.
“Sure they are,” Raven laughed before hanging up.
The dead did rise. Clarke had always been a fan of saying I told you so.
////
“If we’re going to wander round in a zombie apocalypse like a couple of assholes on a bad tv show, we’re going to need more people,” was Raven’s assessment of their situation, huddled together in an abandoned house. They had a dead bird spinning over a fire and were pretty much guessing when it would be cooked.
“We’re fine,” Clarke argued, like the two of them weren’t playing chance with food poisoning. “We caught this bird.”
“It’s one bird. And it was already dead.”
“Mostly dead. Still had some fight left in him.”
Raven shook her head. “The stragglers never last long. Season one, tops.”
“How do we find these people?”
“I don’t know. They usually just appear. Lets get into a sticky situation and hope someone rescues us,” said Raven, military strategist.
It wasn’t a great plan, but Clarke was hungry and neither were good at hunting, not a massive shock but still disheartening when it came to post-apocalyptic survival.
She nodded and waited for the bird to be cooked, not confident in Raven’s culinary proficiency even before the end of the world.
//
Finding people was easier said than done, it turned out, and they didn’t see anyone that Raven deemed good enough as they walked in a direction they both agreed was generally away from danger.
They became good at hiding and had quiet discussions about the other groups they see, still small this early on and no doubt also looking for allies.
Apparently the apocalypse didn’t take away Raven’s ability to be picky.
////
Clarke had found Raven a week after the bout of mysterious infections was officially announced as an outbreak. She had wanted to leave the hospital straight away, but some of the doctors still believed they could save everyone, and she had never been able to abandon her people.
The hospital had become overran in the space of a week and she had bashed a zombie’s head in when it cornered her in the breakroom, running to a school where most people from her neighbourhood were holed up, hoping Raven would be there and throwing herself at her when she was.
They had lasted another two weeks before some idiot got bit and didn’t tell anyone.
It spread fast, and they grabbed what supplies they could and left the city behind.
////
In an exciting turn of events they end up being the ones to do the rescuing.
A girl was hurt and a guy was refusing to leave her, despite the ambling zombies that approach them, and he didn't have enough ammo to get them all.
Raven fired off the headshots and Clarke bandaged the girl’s injured leg, and they all agreed there was strength in numbers.
//
Lincoln had been an army medic and Octavia was worryingly passionate about various martial arts, and both were a lot more adapt at survival in the wilderness than Clarke and Raven were. They still made the frankly ridiculous decision to let them tag along, even after witnessing Clarke spill boiling water over herslef when there was a bug on the pots handle.
“We’re letting them tag along with us,” Raven asserted when Clarke expressed disbelief that they actually managed to recruit. “We’ve got skills.”
She couldn’t think of any when pressed, but maintained they would come to her at any moment.
They slept on the ground when they had to, and in abandoned houses when they could. It wasn’t exactly living, but one night Raven happily proclaimed they were definitely now season two regulars, hot tipped for appearing in season three, and it felt good to laugh.
//
When it was just the two of them they didn’t have a location in mind. Away from death seemed to be consensus. If they found something along they way then all the better.
But Octavia was looking for her brother, who had been in New York, and Lincoln was along for the ride.
No one said that the odds of Bellamy still being in New York or even alive were low. It gave them something to head towards.
//
Clarke volunteered to loot a gas station while the others camped nearby, and immediately found herself confronted by the business end of a shotgun.
“Hands up,” a voice growled. The owner of the voice and shotgun had appeared from behind a shelf of confectionary like a vengeful shop clerk.
Clarke would have complied, but her survival instinct had plummeted recently, and she figured it would be a pretty funny joke to survive the zombie apocalypse for this long and then be killed by a pretty girl with a shotgun.
“I’m holding candy bars,” was her reply instead, and the girl’s eyes narrowed.
“What’s that got to do with it?” Clarke shrugged. “Are you infected?”
“If I was I wouldn’t be wasting my time stocking up on KitKats.”
The snark threw her, and Clarke wonders if she was going to shoot just to shut her up, when laughter came from behind her. Clarke turned to see another girl, a bit taller than the first, with a shotgun balancing on her shoulder in a way that Clarke was sure was a safety violation.
“Drop it, Lexa,” she said. She smiled, but in a way that made Clarke fear for her arteries. “I don’t think she’s trouble.”
//
Clarke arrived back with food, gas, and two new team members with shotguns.
“Season three, baby,” Raven said, high fiving Clarke and confusing the newcomers.
//
They were military, back on leave and caught up in the zombie apocalypse before they could get back to their own warzone. They had been staying at the gas station for a few weeks, fending off anyone who wandered there and surviving on a thirteen-year-old's dream diet. They had been debating whether to move on and find somewhere else when Clarke had appeared to ransack their hideout.
Lexa shot a glare in Clarke’s direction as Anya explained this to the others, and Clarke smiled back, biting into a KitKat without snapping it.
They took up Clarke’s offer to join the group with a little hesitation and a discussion done in complete silence and gestures. The gas station offers little in terms of nutrition, and, Anya informed them, Lexa wasn’t exactly a great conversationalist.
Boredom and vegetables may not the best reason to accept two potentially dangerous members, Clarke supposed, but she guessed they all had more chance surviving together than they did apart.
//
Lexa and Anya questioned their decision to go to New York. Questioned meaning Lexa frowned and Anya called them fucking idiots.
“Do you have a better plan?” Octavia snarled, not appreciating Anya pointing out Bellamy was either dead or undead or gone.
“It’s going to take months,” Anya complained.
“I’m sorry, do you have somewhere else to be?”
After a lengthy discussion that mostly involved profanities and rolled eyes, they all came to an agreement that a shit purpose was better than no purpose at all.
////
When she had been fourteen, Clarke’s dad had taken her camping. It was just the two of them, a treat for both her and her mother, who had a week away from Clarke and her newfound teenage angst.
They went hiking, which Clarke loathed, and then rock climbing, which had made the hiking seem like a wishful dream. By the end of it Clarke was achy and filthy and permanently adverse to the outdoors.
But she had laughed more that week than she could remember doing for a long time. Her dad had promised that next time the two of them took a trip there would be a hotel with a spa attached, and gave his word to never take her camping again.
An agreement Clarke deeply regretted when she watched a campsite be erected in a space of twenty minutes while she awkwardly stood on the sides and pretended to know what kindling was.
////
“Marines?” Clarke asked one day, when Lexa volunteered to give her a private lesson on how to hunt because she was, as quoted, ‘so fucking bad at it’.
Lexa didn’t talk much, Clarke learnt that early on. She nodded and casted her eyes along the floor of the woods. “Sniper.”
Clarke whistled. “Shit. Explains the dead shots.” They had been confronted by a few straggling zombies a few days ago and Lexa had dispatched them all with perfect precision and little effort.
Lexa nodded again. “You were a doctor?”
“Yeah. In Atlanta.”
Lexa looked sideways at her. “Centre of the outbreak.”
Clarke kicked a stone in Lexa’s path, making her sigh and scowl. “At first we thought it was just some new disease. But then-” She shrugged and stopped, not wanting to get lost in memories that were giving her a hard enough time as it was.
“You tried to help them.” It wasn’t a question, but wasn’t a statement either. An assumption that made Clarke’s skin prickle.
“Not enough,” she said quietly.
The leaves rustled and Lexa spun to face the noise, moving so she was in front of Clarke. She drew two knives, handing one over and taking out her gun. “If it’s a zombie we shoot,” she said quietly. “Anything else we don’t waste ammo for.”
Clarke nodded, even though she’s behind Lexa. A deer appeared and the next second had a knife embedded in its skull.
Ten months ago Clarke would have grimaced. Now she just appreciated how close Lexa was and the way her back muscles move when she threw.
The moment they were having faded along with her appreciation when Lexa gestured for Clarke to grab an end of the deer. She chose the obvious.
//
She still had a small bit of humanity left, so turned away when Anya started skinning the deer. They did it inside a house they were squatting in, not wanting the smell to attract the zombies.
Not that they had any evidence what did attract them. Research was happening, apparently, but not exactly broadcast to ragtag bands slowly moving to New York.
Raven sat next to Clarke on the couch that turned away from where Anya had commandeered the dining room as an abattoir.
“I shouldn’t find that as hot as I do, right?” Raven said.
“Nope.”
She sighed, resigned. “Thought not.”
////
There was a conversation, near the start when the six of them were new, around a campfire and about what they did in their life before.
“Mechanic,” Raven said, stretching her legs before her and fiddling with some twigs. “With a side business in automatons.”
There was a lot of raised eyebrows at that and Clarke laughed. “Raven thought she could save the world with robots.”
Raven’s smile was wan and resigned. “If only I’d known.”
Clarke being a trainee doctor and Octavia being a college student was less exciting than robots, and Clarke marvelled at the fact that they had managed to acquire a team made half from military.
“Military doctor,” Lincoln corrected. He smiled at Octavia. “My tour finished a few weeks before the outbreak. Guess here was a better place to be stuck during the end of the world.”
“What about you two?” Raven asked, directed at Lexa and Anya. “How come you were back?”
Anya glanced almost imperceptibly at Lexa. She opened her mouth to speak but Lexa got there first.
“A funeral,” she said. “My girlfriend’s.”
“Shit,” Raven said, the epitome of sympathy. “Sorry.”
Lexa shrugged. “We were broken up at the time.”
“Still.” Raven stretched her sympathetic muscles again. “That sucks.”
Lexa shrugged again. “Love is weakness,” she said, before lapsing back into her familiar silence.
The words sent an uncomfortable sensation through Clarke, and she found herself unable to look away from Lexa for too long all night.
////
“Can you teach me to fight?” Octavia asked day as they sat around a fire, watching Lincoln cook. It was cold, and Clarke was debating if she could get Lexa to cuddle with her or if that would be pushing their new found acquaintanceship.
The question was directed at Anya, who raised an eyebrow.
“What makes you think I can fight?”
This gained four rolled eyes and the shared thought that everything about Anya suggested she could fight.
Clarke shifted to the left a little. Lexa remained unsuspecting.
“Planning hand to hand combat with the zombies, O?” Raven asked.
Octavia shrugged. “We aren’t the only group out here. Unless we want to be ravaged for our shit we should probably learn to fight.”
“Can’t he teach you?” Anya gestured to Lincoln.
“I’m a pacifist,” Lincoln said at the exact moment he cuts the head off a rabbit.
“He doesn’t want to hurt me,” Octavia said with rolled eyes. “Not that he’d get a chance.”
Clarke moved again, disguised by her need to pick up a specific stick two feet from Lexa.
Anya sighed at the great inconvenience. “Any experience?”
“Got in a lot of scraps at school, does that count?”
“Did you win them?”
“Obviously.”
“Then yes, it counts.”
“So you’ll do it?”
“Didn’t say that.”
Octavia beamed, apparently secure in the knowledge Anya had just enrolled her in fight school.
Clarke moved so she was next to Lexa, their legs not an inch apart. Lexa spared her a glance and didn’t move away. Clarke fought the urge to punch the air.
//
Octavia spent three weeks getting thrown to the ground. One day she sprung right back up and clocked Anya on the chin.
She still ended up on the ground again, this time with a foot on her back, but whooped at the victory anyway and attempted to high five Raven with her face plated into the dirt and one arm twisted behind her back.
////
Before the outbreak, before Clarke’s sole purpose was to survive daily, she had unintentionally committed the most grievous breach of trust.
Clarke was seeking stress relief from medical school and unaware she was getting it from her roommate’s secret boyfriend.
Raven had decked her when she found out, a reasonable response, Clarke conceded, but only if she had known who Finn was in the first place.
Raven had then gotten very drunk and apologised to Clarke profusely for three hours while trying to tenderly hold ice to her cheek, failing each time as her drunk brain underestimated her strength and overestimated her aim.
She finally believed Clarke’s forgiveness, and would only be convinced to sleep and drink water by being driven to Finn’s so she could deck him in the face too.
////
Clarke found herself alone in a living room with Lexa one night while the rest of the house slept, Lexa with her feet on a broken coffee table in the most relaxed pose Clarke had ever seen her.
“Hey.” Lexa’s legs flew from the coffee table and her back straightened. Clarke rolled her eyes. “Down, soldier.”
Lexa blushed a little, but relaxed. “Sorry. Habit,” she said.
“No feet up in the army?”
“Something like that.”
Clarke sat a respectable distance from her on the couch. She didn’t know if she was engrossed by Lexa because she’s so unattainable or because Clarke had always been drawn to things she didn’t understand. Either way, if it had been a normal time without the apocalypse bothering them every day she would have done something about it by now. Vanity and Lexa’s continually dipping eyes made Clarke confident her attempt would have been a success.
But it wasn’t normal time, so Clarke sat on the other edge of the couch and pulled her knees up.
“Can’t sleep?” Lexa asked.
Clarke shook her head. “You can go to bed if you want. I can take over watch.”
“It’s okay.”
Clarke didn’t want Lexa to leave so she didn’t argue. Instead she shuffled on the couch so she could also put her feet up on the table. If it meant she was somehow closer to Lexa then that was their cross to bear.
It was like approaching a deer, Clarke found. Too brisk or obvious a movement and Lexa got freaked.
Maybe she had learned something in those hunting lessons.
After a moment of enjoyable but too long silence, Clarke dug in her jacket for the iPod that Raven had found. It had limited battery, and Clarke had swiped it and saved it for a moment like this.
She held out an earbud for Lexa and was met with a frown.
“If there’s an attack we need to be able to hear it.”
“We’ll still have two ears between us.”
Lexa looked ready to argue that stellar logic, but Clarke swung the wire like a pendulum and she relented with a huffed smile. She put the earbud in and Clarke scrolled through the Z’s, thrilled that the previous owner had been a fan of Jamie T when the chosen song made Lexa laugh.
//
“How do you know Raven?”
Clarke had, somehow, managed to get herself alone with Lexa again, this time scouting the nearby area.
It was happening more frequently, with Lincoln and Octavia orbiting each other and Raven spending a suspicious amount of time annoying Anya.
Clarke glanced behind her, where Lexa studied the ground for something no doubt important. She grinned as she watched her nod to herself confidently.
“Are you making small talk?”
“You don’t have to answer.”
“We were friends in high school. Ended up at the same college.”
Lexa made the classic noise of listening, apparently fascinated with whatever she was looking at. She veered off to the left and Clarke figured she may as well follow.
“Which college?”
Clarke rolled her eyes at Lexa’s back. “You don’t have to make small talk. I know how much you love walking dramatically in silence.”
“I’m not being dramatic.”
“If this was a movie there would be ominous music right now.”
“Which college?” Lexa repeated, sounding tetchy.
“Emory.”
Lexa nodded, still engrossed with the floor despite her apparent desperation to know Clarke’s educational history.
“How’d you know Anya?” Clarke figured she may as well play along. She stared at the same spot Lexa was, and nodded conspiratorially to her like she knew what it meant.
Lexa gave her a flicker of a smile, an occurrence that becoming less and less rare and made Clarke’s stomach flip embarrassingly each time. “We grew up on the same bases. Our fathers were very close and served together.”
“Army brat.” Made total and complete sense. “And you both joined?”
“Yes. Served in different places but we both came back when Costia-” She broke off, coughed, and somehow it was possible for her to get more fascinated by the ground.
No sentence ever got past the name Costia and Clarke didn’t know if it ever would.
“Least you get to spend the apocalypse together.”
Lexa glanced behind her and raised an eyebrow. “And that’s a good thing?”
“Of course. What’s the point of seeing off the end of the world if you can’t do it with your favourite people?”
Lexa stared at her a little longer before shaking her head and turning away, but not before Clarke saw her lips quirk, another small victory that will keep Clarke going for days.
“What are we following, by the way?”
“Doesn’t matter. Let’s go back.”
“Are you kidding me?” Clarke followed Lexa back the way they came.
“What?”
“You wander around like a hunter gatherer in their prime element and we’re just going back?”
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Took a fucking long detour considering it didn’t matter.”
“Maybe I just wanted to spend more time with you.”
Clarke tried to kick her in the shins the whole way back.
//
They were squatting in a house with three rooms, and Clarke had been surprised but also not that surprised when Raven proclaimed she was swapping with Lexa for the night.
She disappeared into the room with Anya, and Lexa followed Clarke to whichever one she had chosen as her own.
“I can sleep on the couch,” Lexa suggested, sounding reluctant.
Clarke rolled her eyes. “It’s fine, Lex. I’ve seen you pee in a bush, I think we can handle sleeping in the same bed.”
Lexa blushed and stalked into the en suite. Clarke wonders if it could still be considered an en suite, since it had no running water and probably a million bugs.
She changed into clothes that were different from the ones she had been wearing all day but just as dirty. She got into bed and Lexa joined her a few minutes later, slipping under the covers and lying on her side.
Sleeping in someone else’s bed had stopped being weird a long time ago.
She felt Lexa move next to her, tossing from one side to the other.
“You fidget a lot for someone whose job was to sit on rooftops and not move all day.”
Lexa sighed and flopped onto her back. Clarke turned her head to find Lexa looking at her. Her eyes flickered down to Lexa’s lips.
“Lexa,” she began, not having anything else planned after that, but not getting to say it even if she did as Lexa turned so she could capture Clarke’s lips, moving her back so she lay on her.
They kissed hungrily, and their clothes end up discarded before Clarke had the sense to pull back.
“Hey,” she said, cupping Lexa’s face, “You sure about this?”
“I’m the one who kissed you.”
“I know. Just. You sure.”
Love is weakness flickered in her mind. But Lexa just nodded and surged down for another kiss.
Clarke let herself have it, the past year teaching her the future was unimportant and unlikely.
She flipped them over and pressed Lexa into the mattress.
//
“You know, everyone in this house probably had sex at the same time,” Clarke said after, Lexa surprising her with post-coital cuddles and tucking into her side.
“Oh my god,” Lexa groaned, pressing her head into Clarke’s neck. “Please don’t.”
Clarke laughed. “I’m just saying.” Her fingers skim down Lexa’s bare back, tracing tattoos she had been delighted to see up close. “Great day for the squad.”
//
Raven high fived her over breakfast, and Lexa hit Anya with an apple the second she opened her mouth to speak.
////
When it became clear that the dead weren’t going to stay dead and nothing Clarke and her colleagues were doing would change that, Clarke had huddled in a supplies closet and rang her mother.
Phones would soon become obsolete, she knew, and travel would be impossible and it was unlikely she would ever see her parents in Washington again.
Her mother answered sobbing and apologising. Clarke begged to talk to her father, but her mom said she couldn’t. He had been bitten. She did what she had to do.
Clarke hung up, ignoring the pleas to listen, to talk to her. She stepped from the closet and continued the futile task of stopping the apocalypse.
Her phone ran out of battery without her knowledge. When she found another one and tried her mother’s number it was disconnected.
She left to find Raven the next day.
////
It became cold in the winter, and clear that it isn’t just the undead that was trying to kill them and nature was giving it its best go.
But it gave Clarke the perfect excuse to get Lexa to cuddle with her, who was too chivalrous to say no, so every cloud.
//
Lexa dropped a bag near where Clarke was sprawled on the grass.
“What’s this?” Clarke said, sitting up.
Lexa made a gesture that seemed to say open it and find out. Clarke did, and found sketch books, pencils, and charcoal.
Clarke took them out greedily. “Where did you get these?”
“We found a school and looted it. I came across them.”
A snort came from where Anya sat. “She ran up four flights of stairs to find the art room. Which was in the basement.” Lexa scowled at her. “You did something romantic, Lex, it doesn’t happen often. Embrace it.”
Lexa looked furious. “It wasn’t- I wasn’t-” She glared at the sketchbook like it was its fault. “I thought you’d like them,” she said. “You can share them with Lincoln. He’s also an artist.”
“I will. I do. Thanks, Lex.”
Clarke thanked her properly that night and fell asleep grinning.
//
She filled the book with sketches, many of Lexa, who refused to admit she was at all touched.
Clarke caught her tracing one when she thought she was alone, and stifled a laugh at Lexa’s guilty expression when she smudged the charcoal.
//
Crashing from the house disturbed Clarke from where she was relaxing in the bed, Lexa knuckles deep within her and biting her hip. She shot up and Lexa pulled away.
Her name was called, Lincoln sounding panicked, which scared Clarke as she’d never seen him anything other than steady, solid.
Lexa was already moving, doing her shirt up and tossing clothes at Clarke. She pulled on trousers that were hers and a shirt that could be anyone’s, at this point their clothes doing an impressive job of mingling, and ran down the stairs still doing the buttons up.
//
Octavia sat on the couch, Anya and Raven already there. Clarke was relieved to see she didn’t look obviously hurt, although that didn’t account for Lincoln’s panic.
“What happened?” Clarke said.
“Turns out I did have to fight a zombie,” Octavia grinned, although it looked darker than normal.
“She punched one,” Lincoln said. “And then two more.”
“I lost my weapon.” Octavia said it like it was a discussion they’d had before.
“Were you bit?” Anya said.
Octavia shook her head. “But I was scratched.”
She pulled back her sleeve to reveal three scratch marks. Clarke moved forward to study them. They weren’t deep, no longer bleeding, no obvious signs of any infection. She looked at Octavia, pale with bags under her eyes, but then again so were the rest of them.
“Can it pass through a scratch?” Raven voiced the question they were all thinking. They looked around, no one with an answer.
Lexa and Anya had one of their silent conversations. Clarke waited for them to share it with the group.
Lexa spoke. “We don’t know. We knew someone, very near the start. He was scratched. He shot himself just in case.”
“We’re not doing that,” Lincoln said, his voice harsher than Clarke had ever heard it.
Lexa held up her hands, placating. “I never said we should.”
“We’ll just have to wait,” Octavia said, her voice strong and steady. “And see.”
//
Wait and see was an awful plan, but they went with it.
Octavia was to be monitored, and Clarke and Lincoln took that job while the rest went to sleep.
Lincoln soon crashed next to Octavia on the couch with her feet in his lap, and Clarke felt her head lolling, ignoring Octavia’s very tempting offer to let her go to sleep.
“If I start to feel cannibalistic I’ll wake you up,” she said, which managed to have the complete opposite effect and Clarke sat on the floor, hoping uncomfortableness could keep her awake.
Lexa came downstairs at some point, sitting next to Clarke and letting her lean against her.
Her valiant attempt at wakefulness was futile once her head fell onto Lexa’s shoulder.
//
“I was once kidnapped when I was twelve.”
Clarke kept her eyes closed but let herself slowly drift awake to the sound of Lexa’s voice.
She heard Octavia laugh, but then quieten. “Wait, seriously?”
Lexa’s shoulder shifted slightly. A nod, maybe. “My father was an important man. The kidnappers thought having me would convince him to give in to their requests.”
“Did it?”
“No. He ignored them and sent a team. I rescued within sixteen hours.”
“That easy?”
“I did not say they were good kidnappers.”
Octavia laughed and Clarke fights down a smile. Silence drifted and Clarke debated showing she was awake, but Octavia spoke again.
“If the scratch turns out to be infectious, will you shoot me?”
“Yes.” Lexa said it without hesitation, and Clarke knows that was best answer she could possible give.
//
The scratch healed fine and Octavia spent a long time boasting that she had punched three zombies in the face.
Clarke took to bringing up stories to Lexa all revolving around when she was twelve, an attempt at getting Lexa to share her own pre-teen adventures, notably the kidnapping that she seemed a little too blasé about.
Instead she got a story about how Lexa and Anya had snuck into the town one night and Lexa had ended up spending all her money on a plastic elephant because the female seller had nice eyes.
Not what she wanted, but better than nothing, and Clarke cherished it.
////
Clarke had been allowed to scout exactly once, and it wouldn’t have been that much if Anya had got her way.
“You have that thing that makes you care about other people,” she argued, holding the gun away from Clarke, who had stood up and said she was coming with them to scout a nearby camp. “You know, that really annoying emotion that makes you help people that aren’t us.”
“Empathy?” Clarke guessed.
Anya clicked her fingers. “That’s it. You’ll be a liability.”
“I want to help. I feel like all I do is wait around for you guys to come back and pretend to light fires that Lexa actually does.”
She’d looked at Lexa, imploring, but had been met by a stoic look. Then she’d pouted, and Lexa had turned to look at Anya, who rolled her eyes and shoved the gun at Clarke.
“This will end badly,” she warned the group, stalking into the trees and being followed by Lincoln.
It ended with Clarke rushing into a group of people threatening a traveller, being yanked back by the collar, and a crossbow bolt embedded in a tree three inches from Anya’s head.
She didn’t scout again, instead poking ineffectively at fires until Lexa sighed and didn’t it for her.
////
Lexa and Raven were out scouting, leaving the rest behind in a makeshift camp, when a scream tore the air.
Clarke, who had been carving a design into some wood, intending to give it to Lexa because she knew it would make her roll her eyes and blush, was closest to the sound and took off at a sprint, the others following close behind.
Another scream, not as loud as she first, led Clarke to a field where Lexa knelt next to Raven, whose leg was caught in a bear trap.
Clarke dropped down next to her, Anya close behind.
“We didn’t see it,” said Lexa. She was pale and shaky, and Clarke had to ignore her to focus on Raven.
Lincoln and Octavia caught up with them. Raven’s screams turned into pained gasping, and Anya shushed her gently, pushing her hair from her sweaty forehead.
Raven’s leg was obviously broken, the bone jutting out from her shin, and bleeding heavily from where the spikes penetrate it. It would only get worse once they removed it.
“Shit.” Octavia’s curse made them look up. Five zombies move towards them, drawn by the sound or the blood or whatever it was that made them hunt.
“Go,” Raven gasped out. She was ignored, as it’s a stupid idea.
Lexa and Octavia dispatched them as Lincoln and Anya help Clarke with the bear trap. They opened it enough to allow her to pull Raven out, trying to ignore Raven’s scream, and moved her onto Anya’s lap so she can look at her leg.
There was little Clarke could do in an open field, and she said this as she took off her jacket and tied it around the wound, more worried about blood loss than infection at that moment.
“More will come,” Lexa said. The zombies were dead but they wouldn’t be the only ones.
“Go,” Raven said again, weaker this time. She was again ignored.
“There was a farmhouse that way,” Lexa said, nodding in the direction away from where they came. “I’m guessing they’re who set the traps.”
Forward or back was their decision, made a little more difficult by the fact that all their supplies and most their weapons were at the camp where they left them. For some reason they all looked at Clarke, who looked at Raven, pale and shaking, her hand a death grip on Anya’s.
“The farmhouse,” Clarke decided. “She needs help.”
Lincoln picked Raven up and they cover each other as they moved carefully, mindful of any more traps.
////
The first night they had been reunited, holed up in a school that everyone knew would not last, they had made a deal they both wished they would never have to make good on.
“That’s settled then,” Raven said, her pinky clasping Clarke’s. “If one of us gets bitten the other kills them.”
Clarke nodded. “Remember when our biggest deal was no stealing boyfriends?”
Raven snorted a laugh. “Maybe stick to this one?”
Clarke grinned at the jab. She was smiling a lot more now she was with Raven. But then, she always smiled a lot more when she was with Raven.
“What?” Raven said when Clarke had been quiet for too long.
“Just glad I found you.”
Raven gave her a mock cheers with the mugs that had been handed out. “There’s no one I’d rather ride out the apocalypse with.”
////
The owner of the farmhouse took one look at Raven, limp and breathless in Lincoln’s arms, and lowered the gun he had opened the door with and let them in.
He told them to call him Gustus, didn’t apologise for his bear trap breaking their friend’s leg, but did present medical supplies and mixed something with water that Raven was reluctant to drink, but gulped when told it would help with the pain.
//
Lexa forced Clarke away from where Raven was sleeping on the dining room table, her leg bandaged and her breathing laboured but deep.
Anya sat on the other side and wasn’t going to be moved, but Clarke managed to be coaxed, and only because it was Lexa doing the coaxing.
They went to the room Gustus has given them and Lexa striped Clarke, sitting her on the bed and placing a basin of water of the floor. She took a cloth and dipped it, and only then does Clarke realise she still had Raven’s blood on her hand and arms.
Lexa cleaned them in silence. Once she was done she kissed her palms, once each, and went to pour the water away.
When she returned she kissed Clarke, deeply and thoroughly, until Clarke lied limp and wanting beneath her. Then she sat up straddling Clarke’s hips, and waited for Clarke to say something.
“That was awful,” Clarke said, her voice broken and weak.
Lexa nodded. “It was.” She trailed her hands over Clarke’s stomach. “She’ll be okay.”
Clarke didn’t know how to voice that Raven had to be, otherwise the world may as well fall to zombies because what would be the point. Lexa’s hands and lips protected her from the dark thoughts, which Clarke suspected might have been Lexa’s plan all along.
//
Clarke went downstairs when Lexa fell asleep, slipping carefully from the embrace.
Anya was asleep in the chair, and when she appeared Raven looked away from her and at Clarke.
“Hey,” she said, still grinning despite the injury. “That guy didn’t leave any of the magic water lying around by any chance?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Figures.” She looked at Anya again for a bit before turning back to Clarke. “What do you think? Will I make it past season five?”
“Definitely,” Clarke promised. “Too much of a fan favourite.”
////
“Do you think it’s bad that a part of me is glad for this zombie apocalypse because it meant that I met you?” Clarke once said absentmindedly while she and Lexa had gone hunting.
“Yes,” Lexa said. Clarke watched her expression closely. It was closed off, as usual, and a little amused.
“I thought so.”
Lexa didn’t say anything else. But she held Clarke’s hand the entire walk back, which for Lexa was the closest they would get to public sex.
////
They continued to New York, though Clarke suspected now it was less of a goal and more of a reason to get them moving.
Gustus hadn’t offered them a place to stay, otherwise that might have been a discussion that they had to have. He had enough food for himself, he told them unapologetically, and intended to survive for as long as that lasted him.
He gave them as much medical supplies and food as he could spare though, restocked their ammo, and sent them on their way.
Raven initially refuses to be carried, using the crutches Gustus made for her, but their movement was too slow. She compromised with a piggyback from Anya, and her joke about riding her fell flat.
//
“We’ll die if we keep moving at this pace.”
Lexa had a knack for getting Clarke incredibly turned on and then dropping a bucket of metaphorical cold water, all within the same ten minute period.
She looked down at where Lexa knelt between her legs. They probably shouldn’t do it on the couch in the living room, but Clarke had also returned to camp last week to find Lincoln and Octavia in a compromising position, and wasn’t adverse to a little payback.
“You couldn’t have waited until after you’ve gone down on me to say that?”
Lexa just looked at her. “I didn’t want to get distracted.”
“Only a gynecologist should look that concerned while being in that position. Come here.” She took Lexa’s hand and pulled her so she straddled her, their foreheads touching. “We’re going as fast as we can.”
“It’s not enough. We don’t have the supplies, and Raven’s going to run out of painkillers soon.” They both grimaced, remembering when Raven had thought she could handle the pain without them and had been wrong.
“Then what’s the plan?”
“We need to find somewhere more permanent.”
“Thought we were avoiding permanent settlements.”
That had been Lexa and Anya’s condition from the start. They had been in one originally, but had said they turn totalitarian, turn violent, that they stood a better chance working as a team than offering themselves to a group.
“Needs must. Raven needs somewhere to heal. We can move on after, if we want, but we need somewhere safe for the moment.”
“Love is weakness.” The sudden words made Lexa pull back and look at her. “That’s what you used to say. By that philosophy we should have left Raven behind ages ago.”
A mask slides in place. Lexa looked at her with guarded eyes. “Do you think I’d do that?”
“No,” said Clarke. “I don’t.” They looked at each other. “Do you still believe that?” she said, once it became clear Lexa wasn’t about to speak.
Lexa kissed her. She kissed her hard and purposeful, like she was trying to get Clarke to understand something. She kissed her so she didn’t have to answer, and Clarke let her.
//
They began figuring out where the nearest settlement was over breakfast.
If Lexa had been expecting protests at the suggestion, she doesn’t get any. Anya looked like she was going to speak, then looked at Raven, who was pale and slumped against her slightly, and nodded.
Raven made half-hearted attempts to tell them to leave her behind, as she had taken to doing now and then, and was instantly shushed.
She made to speak again and Anya shoved a dried cranberry in her mouth.
“We’re not leaving you,” she whispers into Raven’s hair, kissing her forehead and going back to discussing strategy with Lexa.
//
“You have to make it to season six, Ray,” Clarke said later as she reapplied the splint on Raven’s leg. “That’s when things really hit their prime.”
//
The settlement found them before they found it, and Octavia was marched into the camp they had made in a forest with a gun to her head.
They all stood once they came into sight. Lincoln’s body tightened and his stance changed, his face set in anger. Clarke hoped he stayed smart.
Octavia looked pissed. She glared at the person holding the gun, a boy with some stupid goggles around his neck, and then at the others who appear around him.
“Heard you were looking for us.” A guy in a woolly hat stepped forward. His eyes went to Raven’s leg, heavily bandaged and supported by the crutches. He nodded. “We can help with that.”
“How?” Clarke had, through no choice or fault of her own, somehow became the leader.
“Help it heal. Make it functional. People don’t live out here with broken bones. Not for long.”
“Could just leave her behind,” said one of them, leaning against a tree and looking bored. Their own group flare, but his companions just sighed or ignored him, like it was normal. The girl next to him whacked his arm, and he shrugged.
“We’re not leaving her behind,” Clarke said.
“As I said, we can help. But we want something in return.”
“What?”
He shrugged, and at a jut of his head Octavia was thrust forward. “Figure it out. Make it good.”
They were all experienced enough to leap forward to pull Octavia back before she could punch him.
//
They found a house nearby and turn it into a collection point.
Their strategy was quantity, and set about collecting as much as they thought they could trade for a moment of safety and whatever they could do for Raven’s leg.
Lexa and Octavia scout and Anya and Lincoln raid and Raven got steadily paler as Clarke kept the wounds as clean as she could.
//
“Happy one year anniversary,” Octavia proclaimed one night. They all look at her cluelessly. “A year ago today Lexa pointed a shotgun at Clarke for stealing some candy bars.”
Lexa grumbled and Clarke kissed her cheek. She was only glared at a little bit and Clarke beamed like it was a marriage proposal.
“And we made this ragtag band of fuckers,” Octavia continued. “So well done everyone for surviving the year.”
//
It felt like longer than a year, Clarke thought that night as she lay next to Lexa, but that’s not exactly surprising given to circumstances.
She wondered if she’d have met Lexa if this hadn’t happened. If she’d have met any of them. Probably not, and even if they had who knows what would have happened between them. People were different when the end of the world was happening around them.
She also wondered how Octavia kept track of the days or if she’d just made it up.
Lexa poked her in the ribs. “Stop thinking,” she murmured, lying on her side and facing her. “It stresses me out when you think.”
“Do you think we would have met? You know, if this hadn’t all happened.”
“No.”
Clarke waited to see if Lexa would expand on the hypothetical scenario of their meet cute, and then scolded herself that, even after a year, she assumed Lexa would talk without prompting.
“How do you think we would have met?”
Lexa cracked open an eyes. “It’s so late.”
“Right. Sorry.”
Guilt always worked a treat with Lexa. She sighed and opened both her eyes. “Is this going to be another time when you tell me you’re glad the world ended because we got to meet?”
“That was once.”
“It’s still odd.”
“Most people would find it romantic.”
“I’d woo you,” Lexa said, grinning when Clarke laughed.
“You’d woo me.”
Lexa nodded. She shuffled closer so her forehead was against Clarke’s shoulder, kissing her there and closing her eyes. “You wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Clarke kissed her forehead and knew she was absolutely right.
//
“I love you,” Clarke said, a little later and with her back to Lexa, the vague hope that Lexa was asleep giving her bravery. The retreat of the arm that had been thrown over her waist told her she wasn’t. “I know you say it’s weakness,” Clarke continued, on a roll now. “But I don’t agree with that.”
Lexa was silent. That didn’t surprise Clarke, but it doesn’t stop it from hurting. Her arm slipped back around Clarke’s waist, though, and the warmth of her body was pressed into Clarke’s back.
“I love you too,” was said a little later, breathed into Clarke’s ear and accompanied by Lexa pulling her closer and kissing the back of her neck.
They don’t mention it in the morning.
////
They had started a tally, of who walked in on who and how many times.
Anya and Raven were winning, due to their tendency to have sex against trees and having no shame, while Clarke and Lexa were lagging behind, due to Lexa’s unending restraint and Clarke’s sneakiness.
She was going down on Lexa and heard their door open and close and Octavia telling Lincoln to add a mark to their names.
Clarke let Lexa finish laughing before she carried on.
////
They found the location of a hospital and decided that if they wanted to stand a chance of getting into Arcadia then it was the only way.
They were low on food and ammo and had resorted to using clothes, boiled and soaked in antiseptic to clean as much as they could, to bind Raven’s wounds. They were healing, but not fast enough for Clarke’s liking, and it was only a matter of time before they got infected.
Gustus’ pain killer was running out and they had been forced to dilute the doses. It resulted in Raven being in constant dulled pain, restless nights whimpering into Anya’s lap while they tried to sooth her.
They needed something good to trade and they needed it fast. Lexa and Octavia scouted the hospital out, leaving for two days and reporting back that it was crawling with zombies but they thought, hoped, that they could do it.
Anya and Lincoln would go with them the next day and they would raid what they could. Clarke wanted to go, but someone had to stay with Raven.
That morning they say their goodbyes, Anya going to kneel by the couch that Raven had barely moved from. Lincoln and Octavia waited outside and Clarke pulled Lexa to their room, hugging her tightly.
“Come back,” she said quietly, gripping the back of her jacket and breathing her in. “You have to come back.”
“I will,” Lexa promised. She pulled back to she could kiss Clarke, cupping her face and smiling. “I love you,” she said. “And it is not a weakness.”
Clarke took a breath so she wouldn’t cry. “Well now you have to come back.” She pulled her back into a hug. “I love you too.”
//
She sat in the chair across from Raven, who was shivering by the fire and wrapped in Anya’s coat.
“Remember when you said we needed people,” Clarke said.
Raven looked at her lazily. Clarke was proud to see she had yet to stop grinning. “Was I right or was I right?”
Clarke laughed. “I’m going to go with right.”
“Have to say, didn’t expect to fall in love with them though.”
“No,” Clarke leant back, thinking of a shotgun pointed at a chest. “That was unexpected.”
“I’m sorry I caused this.”
Clarke looked up. “You didn’t. Raven,” she said sharply when Raven didn’t look at her. “This isn’t your fault.”
She didn’t know if she’s convinced her or not. “They’ll come back,” Raven said, staring at the fire and pulling the coat tighter. Clarke would have teased her for subtly smelling it, but that would be hypocritical considering all her clothes were Lexa’s bar the socks. “All of them.”
“They will.”
They both spoke with a certainty they don’t necessarily have.
//
Clarke dreamt of Lexa returning, pale and dying. She dreamt of holding a gun, gunning down the girl she loved because it was the right thing to do.
She dreamt of a phone call she wished she had returned.
She woke to Lexa’s shaking her, grubby and smiling.
“Hi,” she said, laughing when Clarke threw herself at her and pulled her down on the bed. “Happy to see me?”
“A little.” The words were muffled by Clarke refusing to remove her face from Lexa’s neck. “Did you get it?”
“Yeah. I think we got enough.”
////
Lexa took Clarke outside one night, in part an effort to look at the stars and in part because they had two rooms with rhythmic thumping and weren’t eager to add a third.
They found a clearing, and Lexa had made her lie down and look at the stars, listing names and stories Clarke would probably forget due to the other things on her mind.
“You like stars?” Clarke said when Lexa paused to scan the sky, delighted that she was still learning things about her.
Lexa nodded. “I spent a lot of nights in the desert,” she said. “You can see them a lot better here now that civilisation has ended.”
“So you can say the stars are worth the zombie apocalypse but I can’t say that you are?”
Lexa laughed. She linked her hands with Clarke’s and kissed her knuckles. “Can I tell you more?”
“Will you quiz me in the morning?”
“Maybe.”
“Tell away.”
Clarke watched Lexa as much as she watched the stars. When it seemed like she ran out of stories Lexa sat up and leant over Clarke, forcing eye contact.
“There are very little things that would make me grateful for the end of the world. You are one of them, Clarke Griffin.”
Clarke pulled her down into a kiss.
////
Arcadia let them in with their offering of medical supplies providing they surrender their weapons. Lexa and Anya looked furious to see their shotguns taken away, and Octavia was weirdly fond of her knives, but then a stretcher was brought out and Raven placed on it and their priorities shift.
Clarke linked her hand with Lexa. “You okay?”
Lexa nodded. She scanned Arcadia, not a huge settlement but big enough to house a few hundred makeshift houses scattered around and strong gates accompanied by armed guards.
“It might only be temporary,” Clarke said, unsure if Lexa was even after assurance.
Lexa nodded and kissed Clarke once before tugging her in the direction that Raven was taken.
//
Temporary turned into months, in which time Raven’s leg healed and she was fitted for a brace and, as newcomers, they were expected to pull their weight.
The military experience of Anya, Lexa, and Lincoln had been snapped up, and Clarke had helped out at the hospital. Octavia seemed to have found one of the hunters and latched herself to her, whether Indra wanted it or not.
//
They all met up in the house that Clarke and Lexa shared with Anya and Raven, limited housing meaning house shared were necessary. Lincoln and Octavia had been put with the guy who had conducted the world’s worst negotiation with them the first time. Miller, as it turned out, was not terrible.
“I’m not sure…”
“So we need to…”
Raven and Clarke spoke at the same time. Raven grinned. “Go ahead, oh fearless leader.”
Clarke rolled her eyes. “We need to decide what we’re doing. We said we’d stay for as long as it took Raven’s leg to heal but…”
“I don’t think I’m going anywhere.” The break had healed but her leg would probably never work the same. The brace helped with use, if not with speed. “They’ve offered me work with electronics, getting radios and phones working again. I’m thinking of taking it.”
It went without saying that Anya would therefore stay too. Lexa would be as reluctant to leave Anya as Clarke was to leave Raven.
“I got offered a post at the medical centre,” Clarke admitted, almost feeling guilty. “It’s not terrible here, right?”
She looked at Lexa. They’d discussed, a little bit, about their plans. Lexa liked that she could train people, even if she didn’t like staying somewhere permanent.
Then she looked at Octavia. Though they sometimes forgot, it was her brother they were moving towards.
Octavia sighed. “We’re thinking of staying too. Bellamy, he’s probably not there. I think we all knew he wasn’t there. Maybe I’ll see him again. Maybe I’ll look for him. But for now, staying seems good.”
“So we stay?” said Clarke.
They all nodded.
Raven grinned. “Season seven plot twist.”
//
Lexa slumped into the bed face first, nearly propelling Clarke off from where was making a valiant attempt at a nap.
“You just gonna get mud all over the sheets, huh?” Clarke said, enjoying being the one to scold for a change.
Lexa made a lazy attempt at flipping her off. “Take them off for me.”
“My clothes?”
“My boots.” A pause. “And also your clothes.”
Clarke yanked at the boots dangling off the edge of the bed and tossed them into a corner. Lexa turned onto her back and rubs her eyes.
“Did you get beat up by a twelve year old again?”
She huffed. “I’m training them, Clarke.”
“You got decked in the face by a minor, Lex, just own it.” Another huff and Clarke smiled.
“Take off your clothes.”
“Yes because you’re looking really irresistible to me right now. With your eyes closed.”
“The children stress me out, Clarke.”
“Because they sucker punch you in the face?”
“That was once.”
Clarke knelt on the bed, causing Lexa to open her eyes and then promptly close them in disappointment when Clarke was still dressed.
“You’re grumpy.”
“You did not fall in love with me for my good humour.”
“What did I fall in love with you for?”
“My spirit.” Lexa smiled when Clarke chuckled.
“It was mostly your abs.”
Lexa tapped her stomach. “Well done,” she whispered. “Will you take your clothes off now?”
“Will you show me your abs?”
Lexa lifted her shirt. Clarke breathed out. “There’s the good stuff.”
//
Outside the perimeter of Arcadia was a no mans zone that people were allowed to but didn’t go in, unless they were desperate or dumb or their girlfriend insisted on telling them stories from the stars.
Clarke lay in a patch of tall grass, listened intently to a tale about a warrior and a unicorn, and pushed herself up on her elbows to star down at Lexa.
“That one sounds made up.”
“They’re all made up, Clarke. That’s kind of the point.”
“That one sounds extra made up.”
Lexa tried staring her down but broke with a huff. “I made that one up,” she admitted.
“I knew it.”
“I’ll be honest with you, I’ve been making a lot of them up for weeks now.”
“Why?”
“I ran out.”
Clarke laughed and sunk back onto her side. “You ran out.”
“I like this,” Lexa said simply, turning her head to look at Clarke. Her admissions were rare but heartfelt, and they sobered Clarke completely. She reached out her hand to trace a path from her jaw to cheekbone and back again. “I didn’t want to stop.”
“We can always lie in the grass at night without you telling stories.”
“Okay.” Lexa smiled like she was in on a joke. “Let’s do that.”
It lasted almost three minutes.
“No you’re right, it’s boring,” Clarke said, making Lexa chuckle. “Tell me about another fake constellation.”
“Have you ever heard the one about the six people and a zombie apocalypse?”
“No I haven’t. How does it end?”
“Well. I hope.”