Chapter Text
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word prompts
brontide (n.) - the low rumble of distant thunder
aeipathy (n.) - an enduring and consuming passion
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She hears the low rumble of distant thunder but thinks nothing of it. A storm is coming, the creak in her joints tell her as much. The low hanging clouds confirm it. Yet, the threat of the sky breaking does not scare this tired warrior, these old bones. Not when what fell from it nearly a lifetime ago now lies cradled with a silver head of hair on her lap.
Lexa cards prune, calloused fingers through the once-golden tendrils, retaking up the task of undoing its knots, careful not to disrupt her houmon’s peaceful slumber, a hard earned rest after their breathless run into the forest. The steady heartbeat under her other hand protecting over a gently rising and falling chest, is the only sound her ears are attuned to.
An ambush had turned a quiet midsummer day’s ride into a frantic, desperate search for shelter, separating them from their horses and guard. On returning from the union of a carpenter’s son and a miller’s daughter—a first light observance taking place beyond the Floukru border where she and Clarke were honoured guests—they had stopped along the route for an impromptu afternoon swim, ditching their ceremonial garb for the direct relief of water against the high noon’s mugginess. No sooner had they gotten dressed after emerging from the river, which had left aging skin soothed and wrinkled and produced sun-kissed smiles, that Lexa had to rely on aching muscles and old battle instincts to defend from the onslaught of bold thieves too young to know not to test the retired Commander and Skaiheda. Despite the lasting peace since Aden’s ascension and the end of her reign, the odd fractious clans, with poor memories and insurgent youths, have been pushing the boundaries of the coalition lands to try their luck at stealing from Trikru prosperity.
Weaponless and undeterred by the significant generational gap, she and Clarke staved off the surprise attack with unspoken, coordinated precision, though not without sustaining and delivering some injuries. Moving from swift and elegant violence, Lexa became a fury of fists on noticing the cut to Clarke’s leg and the blood spilling down her side, one strike away from ending the remaining attacker’s life when the footfalls of a larger calvary stomped closer in their direction. Anticipating they would soon be outnumbered and readily out-powered, she abandoned her pummelling to whisk a fallen Clarke into her arms and hurried them to safety into the deep of the woods.
Silently, while shouldering Clarke’s weight, Lexa navigated through the thick copses, nimble and barefoot, boots left behind by the water’s edge. Luckily they had already crossed back into territory where the sequoias were as familiar to her as the verdant canopies of her childhood, finding and camouflaging her way through the giant trees with practised ease. Although Lexa was never one to back away from a fight, let alone run and hide, with Clarke’s compromised mobility, the best option was to retreat, hoping their Nightblood escort who had respectfully stayed some distance away for their bathing privacy is since halfway off to alert Polis Tower. Now, after temporarily bandaging Clarke’s wounds with a torn piece of Lexa’s cape, they wait it out, nestled inside a found hollow trunk until more reinforcement arrives.
Rain pours down. Lexa watches with pointed interest as the forest floor dampens until soaked. Good, she thinks. It will wash away their tracks.
The sky cracks again, the sound louder than before. Getting nearer, more insistent and menacing. In the days when a sword was always strapped on her back, graunsheikas were a dependable harbinger of terrible things to come, their rage a soundtrack to accompany the roar of war and precipitate devastation and destruction. Thunderstorms were markedly not one of Lexa’s favourite things about the vulnerability of survival on the ground. In her senior years, however, they are welcomed, earthly reminders of life’s persistence. Of what remains unbroken after the rubble is cleared, and unhurt, once all the scars are counted; of what can still be felt in weary bones and seen by crinkled eyes.
The fear of loss is not what it once was in their youth. There are no longer worries about ice nations or reapers or paunas. Though the latter does draw a smile across Lexa’s face remembering that first shared encounter with one, and how they ended up much in the same position as they are now with Lexa sitting, keeping vigilant while Clarke lightly snores. Protecting over her sleepy lion.
As the ceiling above brightens and darkens in quickening intervals, it means more than surviving that Lexa is able to witness the symphonic lightshow when all the noise of the world has long quieted to the murmured rhythm of her fingers stroking through Clarke’s hair.
Another crack.
It startles Clarke awake. Her whole body jerks in alarm, the force of it nearly knocking Lexa back, an inch from hitting her head against the wood.
“Shhhh,” Lexa coos, readjusting Clarke onto her lap and tightening her hold, “it’s okay, niron.”
A breath of recognition slips from Clarke’s lips at the familiarity of her voice and softness of touch. Eyes scan intently all over her body for any visible signs of trauma before they find Lexa’s pair, awashed with relief to have come up empty-handed.
They soften into the gentlest blue—somewhere between aqua and azure—that Lexa has yet to find an equivalent translation in Trigedasleng.
You’re here. You’re safe. They wordlessly communicate.
What Clarke says aloud instead earns a light chuckle from Lexa as she pushes a strand of grey behind her ear. “Still got it, huh, grandma,” she remarks with playful mockery despite sounding just as thin and worn.
Taking no pride in her fading strength, Lexa dares not tell her wife that her heart is still a stuttered beat from normal. Its skipping and accelerated rate may well have more to do with the fond look she’s receiving than their recent exertion, nonetheless, she straightens her shoulders back and juts out her chest, peacocking to Clarke’s delight. She maintains, “I need to keep up with you.”
“Ai mighty Heda,” Clarke teases, giving a humouring squeeze to Lexa’s tricep. “Good thing your arthritis didn’t act up.”
“Those branwodas picked the wrong pearl-clutchers to mess with.”
Lexa’s language lessons with Reivon pay off, the unexpected cultural reference causing Clarke to brim with wincing laughter. “Don’t make me laugh,” she chastises, a hand gingerly holding her side as her breath catches between a laugh and a spluttering cough.
Lexa brushes a thumb over the top of Clarke’s hand to make amends for the pain but she is unapologetic about its cause. Softly, she contends with all the conviction and seriousness of her previous station, “It is my life’s duty.”
Clarke’s features indescribably soften before suddenly furrowing in thought. The levity of the moment passes, preempting Lexa’s sentimentality from taking deeper root. As if recalling for a fleeting second when Lexa’s presence and safety and her mantle were not a certainty—when one bullet meant the slippage between this life and another—Clarke presses a hand to her abdomen before darting forward to draw Lexa into an urgent kiss. The physical reassurance a necessary balm.
Rain, thunder, forest; they all fall away as Lexa falls into the sweep of Clarke’s lips. Since reluctantly withdrawing from public service because of how marked and weathered her body and movements have become from the brutality of a life spent in combat, bending under and folding into the give of Clarke’s mouth has been the only sustaining weakness Lexa does not begrudge.
She is weak to the way Clarke kisses, remembers how the first time it made her want to be reckless. To tug closer, part her lips for the psalm in Clarke’s as the hum of her name met the hymn of Lexa’s. The way it left the ribbed vaulting of chest and cage hallow then hollow, akin to how old-world cathedrals must have soared before crumbling into ruin, when Clarke stepped back and whispered, not yet. Then on the eve of a goodbye came a second kiss that she never thought could happen but regardless continued because of the tremble of Lexa’s bottom lip and the steadiness of Clarke’s hand that led to a night of wreckage of the most breaking but breathtaking kind.
The unexpected overstay almost caused Lexa her last breath the next morning at the pistoled hand of an advisor and his misplaced intention. Obstinately, Clarke willed her to draw one more breath, then another. Stubborn to be the one that makes Lexa’s lungs contract and expand on demand, a third kiss—tear-stained and heart wrenching in its begging tenderness—had given Lexa all the air that she would ever need. Weeks of healing and months of further bloodshed followed before the fourth and fifth and nth kisses came. Each one ineffably softer than the last but somehow still as ruinous as the first.
From wreckage and ruin, those kisses became holy ground on which they rebuilt an alliance between land and love. Solid and firm, they were able to stand tall as the seasons changed, the din of war silenced, and several thousand moons bared witness to events unimaginable before to Lexa’s presumed fate: politically, the rise of cities with Polis as the coalition’s administrative centre and the clans thriving on frictionless trade and productive knowledge-sharing; personally, a bonding ceremony, one difficult and two easier births, and a permanent residence and summer cabin each filled with libraries of books and Clarke’s drawings and yongons laughter.
So Lexa kisses back. Kisses with everything that decades together have condensed into the minutiae of conversation between lips and tongue. They part only long enough for utterances of “ai hod yu in” to find breath. There is no room for anything else.
Nothing is wanting. Not when Clarke still kisses her like this. Not when an enduring and consuming passion tethers the story between ground and sky.
An uncounted time later, the thunder recedes in the distance to a low rumble again. Meagre and inconsequential. It does not scare her anymore. The only thing that matters is the continuous meeting of their mouths and how soon they can return to their furs so that one kiss can become many.
Clarke sighs happily when Lexa slows it down, lengthens the meter of their passes and nips and licks. Surrendering to the gravity of still full lips, she sinks further into Lexa and leaves the task of holding each other up in Lexa’s care.
Even in the winter of their time remaining on the ground, the weight of Clarke’s love—solid and warm—makes Lexa feel like eighteen summers again. At the start of a journey.
Foreheads pressed together afterwards, Lexa hums agreement when Clarke yawns, “I’m tired.”
Contentment colours her exhaustion, a reverberant feeling expanding in Lexa’s chest.
“Reshop, hodnes,” Lexa softly commands, her final before giving into the heaviness of fatigue. “We will return home soon.”
—
Hours later, Aden kneels to find his Hedas embraced tightly at the base of their land’s oldest tree. Clarke’s head rests in the crook of Lexa’s shoulder, her hand laid upon her chest. Two figures curved in tranquil repose. He has never seen them look so blissful and youthful, having only heard reverent stories about the early years from his father and namesake. Holding back tears, Aden reaches up to wrap Lexa’s cape more snuggly where it drapes—careful and tender—around Clarke’s back.
Stillness pervades the forest floor save for the faint sobs of the young, inconsolable Nightblood who had raced back for help but whose guilt now at failing to protect his charges, cuts open Aden’s silent grief. The trees sway in quiet empathy.
The fight must have taken the final toll on their frail hearts. At ninety, it’s inconceivable that they were able to put one up at all. Yet, Aden thinks, when it comes to each other, fragility means something else.
He will have the daunting task of informing Onya, Jeik, and Madi, but finds solace knowing they will be relieved at how their mothers—his grandparents—have travelled onto the next shore.
In each other’s arms, taking their last breath together.
“Safe passage,” he enjoins through a watery gaze.
With dusk dimming the sky behind him, Aden builds two small fires on the ground, then sits and waits, watching the dance of light, crackling, entwining, ephemeral, until the last of their embers fade into the night. Billowing upwards toward the stars.
May we meet again.