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You’re cold.
It’s the first thing you notice when you wake up. Your eyes are still closed and feel like they may have been that way for a long time. When you open them they feel as if they’ve been glued shut and it takes more effort than it should to pry your eyelids apart. Once they’re open and you’ve blinked through the thick grittiness of prolonged sleep, you realize it’s dark out. A spotlight moon overhead is the only thing casting a dim glow over the forest floor you’re laying on, its light impeded by tall trees that have grand branches but no leaves or needles. They look bare and spindly and they sway in the steady wind as you look up at them, creaking.
Laying flat on your back on cold damp soil, you do a quick inventory of your body. Wiggle your toes, make a fist, flex your knees and elbows. Everything appears to be in working order. The only thing that hurts is your head - a localized point on your forehead. It’s a dull throbbing ache that penetrates deeper than just your skin and you raise your hand up to inspect it. The skin there is slick and stings as soon as your grimy fingers make contact. When you pull your fingers away to look at them, they’re covered in dark red blood, sticky and coagulated. That’s…not good. But there’s not much you can do about it at the moment.
Before you try to get up, you lay on the ground staring up at the hazy midnight sky above and try to come up with a plan. You can’t remember how you got here, what you were doing, who you were with. You could be in danger, or you could have been in some sort of accident. From what you’ve learned of the ground, it’s probably the former. Really, you are in danger either way because it’s cold and drizzling and whatever happened to you, you weren’t expecting to spend a night out in the elements. Your thin cotton shirt is sodden and torn and the work pants you wear aren’t in much better shape. You can already feel how wrinkled the skin of your feet is getting from prolonged exposure to moisture inside your soaked boots. The breeze licks cooly at your exposed skin and it’s all a recipe for frostbite, hypothermia.
Thinking makes your head hurt and your brain is moving uselessly slow, neurons firing sluggishly. Trying to figure out where you are and how to get back to camp in the middle of the night is useless. Making a fire will also be futile given how wet everything is and you’ve always been shit at that, anyway. The next best option is to set up a makeshift shelter that can at least block the wind. Then you can hunker down and hope the sun comes up before you shiver to death. You need to get a move on.
So you sit up, hoisting up your weight with your palms sinking into wet soil, and you immediately wish you hadn’t done that. Your head spins and that aching throb in your forehead becomes acute and excruciating. You wince, eyes scrunching shut, and groan loudly as everything around you spins. You think you might just pass out again, flop back down onto the ground and leave things up to fate while you enjoy the peace that comes with being unconscious. Everything was easier before you opened your eyes. But after a few minutes, your body adjusts to no longer being supine and the pain ebbs back into something manageable. You brace yourself to stand, expecting the same reaction, and you’re right. It’s painful and this time you wretch, emptying your stomach of whatever exactly it was you ate last because you can’t remember. You stumble forward and put a palm out against the rough bark of a nearby tree to support yourself while you pant and cough. Your throat burns with bile and the acrid taste in your mouth is almost enough to have you heaving again, but this all isn’t conducive to surviving the night.
Straightening, you scrub the back of your wrist across your mouth and take a deep breath. Scanning around you you’re able to spot a group of trees close enough together to be useful, and you start gathering any stick or branch more than a couple of feet long to create something to block the wind and rain. You mostly stumble around blindly in the dark, but after an indeterminate amount of time you end up with something resembling a shelter. If you squint at it and turn your head just right.
Hunching over to fit inside, you sit in the middle of the shelter, if you can call it that, feeling both accomplished and useless at the same time. A few moments pass before the next big rush of wind rolls through. You scoot across the dirt to lean up against one of the tree trunks, facing away from the wind, and rearrange some of the branches when you identify where the draft is coming from. You pull your knees up to your chest and hug them, knuckles going white from how tightly you grip onto your forearms. Lowering your head, you rest your cheek on top of your knees and this is it. You’ll either survive the night like this or you won’t, and you just need to accept that.
With nothing left to do and a substantial head wound, there actually is one thing left to do. Sleep. A small voice in the back of your head reminds you that you shouldn’t. It isn’t good to go to sleep with what is most likely a severe concussion, not unless you’re being monitored or have been cleared of any serious things like a brain bleed. But you’re alone out here, and you’re so tired . The small voice of reason doesn’t stand a chance in the end.
Clouds roll by overhead and you drift off to sleep within minutes of first sitting down in the shelter. You’re not awake to hear the distant cries that are barely audible by the time they reach you, being carried every which way by the wind and dampened by the drizzling rain.
“Clarke! Clarke, can you hear me?”
…
You wake with a start. This time, the first thing you notice isn’t that you’re cold. Instead, it’s the fact that your head feels like it’s been split open at your temple and you realize the reason it’s hard to open your left eye is that it’s crusted over with dried blood.
After that, you realize you’re cold and you can’t feel your fingers or toes, and your mouth tastes absolutely foul and sour.
The sun is up and the rain has stopped. Last night the only noise had been branches rustling in the wind and the quiet pattering of light rain but now there are birds singing and small animals rummaging around in the dirt. You’re reminded of how small your existence really is, that the world keeps turning even though you’re out here alone and injured and very confused.
What the hell happened?
Your memories from last night come back no clearer than they did when you first awoke on the ground. It hurts your head to think too hard and try to remember and everything feels fuzzy and blurry. Groaning, you decide to focus on the present because it’s all that really matters anyway. You stand and your joints ache and creak in protest and your vision swims while your head throbs, pulse pounding in your ears. Your stomach roils and you think you might be sick again but this time you manage to choke down the bile that rises in your throat.
You take one last wistful look at the pitiful shelter you made the night before. It looks like something a child would make but it was late and you have a head injury so you try to cut yourself some slack. Still, you end up knocking it over just in case, sending the sticks scattering back around the trees so no one can make fun of you for it later.
And also so no one knows you were there, because you still don’t know how you ended up lost in the woods in the middle of the night with your head split open and you may not actually be alone out here.
You don’t know a lot of things right now but there is one thing you know. You have to get back to camp. There are people there who need you and Lexa is waiting for you. With this thought, small details from the day before come back to you. Your legs aching from riding for hours. You can recall Lexa’s dopey smile as she looked over and slightly down at you from her taller horse. You remember people pitching tents when the group decided to stop for the night and eating roasted rabbit around an open fire. And then remember how you threw it up hours later, alone in the woods.
The memories don’t help clarify how you ended up out here in this condition but they do give you the motivation to push through the fact that gravity on your body seems to be multiplied, making your every move take extra effort. You need to get back. You need to find out what happened. If this is where you ended up, who knows if the rest of your group is okay.
If Lexa is okay.
One foot in front of the other. You do your best to use the sun to figure out what direction to head in, but you’re so turned around and there’s a big gap in your memory that is just black and it’s hard to know exactly where camp should be. You think it’s to the East and you have to commit to a direction so you go with it, turning towards the rising sun and marching forward. You’re dizzy and sometimes you see two tree trunks in front of you when you know there’s only one. Your mouth is bone dry and cottony and you ache for a swig of water just to help wash out the foul taste that sits in the back of your throat and coats your tongue.
Your legs feel like wood and your feet feel heavier than usual and there’s no grace in the way you’re walking. Twigs snap carelessly beneath your feet and there’s nothing you can do about it. After only a few minutes you’re so tired and drained that it’s a miracle you’re still on your feet at all. The wound on your forehead stings and occasionally fresh blood occludes the vision in your right eye. You know it isn’t good, but getting out of the forest is your only hope. You need to rest, but another night out here could very well be a death sentence. Never mind the fact that you have no food or fresh water, which is perhaps even more pressing of a concern than exposure to the elements. So you continue on, and on, and the sun seems to barely move in the sky even though it feels like you’ve been walking forever at this point.
After a while, over the crashing of your own feet, you hear something. You freeze, nearly falling forward in the process, and try to listen over the pounding in your head. There it is again - the snap of a twig in the distance. Not far enough for comfort. You scan your surroundings. There’s no good place to hide, but there are some decent-sized sticks and rocks laying around. You lean over to grab one and that’s when you feel something hard dig into your thigh just below your hip. Brushing your fingertips over the area you feel the telltale outline of a knife that’s been tucked into your pants, hooked into the inside of the waistband, and you’re so thankful you’ve learned to always have a weapon hidden on you somewhere. A nifty little trick you picked up from the grounders. You pull the small knife out with one hand and close the other around a fist-sized rock before standing back up. Finding the largest tree trunk in sight, you head for it and crouch down, placing the tree between yourself and the noise. You can tell by the sound and cadence of the steps that it is a human and not an animal, and that does nothing to comfort you at this moment. You might even prefer an animal.
You don’t know where you are. This could be an innocent, oblivious person wandering around the woods near their home. Hunting. It could be a child even. So you’re hesitant to simply strike if this person comes into reach, but you also want to survive. If there is malintent, if this person is looking for you wanting to finish a job that they didn’t last night, it would be unwise to lose the element of surprise. If there’s any left to be lost, because you know you haven’t exactly been stealthy in your travels.
You manage to find a happy medium. When the person approaches the tree you’ve tried to tuck yourself behind you quietly shift around, waiting for them to come into sight, and you pounce. Your vision flickers in and out with the quick movement but the action is reflexive at this point after all the training you’ve gone through. Before the person can spin at the sound of your boots digging into the ground your knife is at their throat from behind. You drop the rock in your other hand in order to grab at the collar of their shirt, fingers scrabbling along skin as you do so. They are much bigger than you, a big burly man, but the tip of your knife is pressing against their jugular and they freeze in place. You sway on your feet and hope they don’t notice that a strong breeze could probably knock you over.
The silence that falls over you and the forest feels deadly. You want to say something but can’t quite put together a sentence. The man speaks first. “Clarke Griffin,” he says, calm and steady despite the blade poking at his neck. “I’ve come to return you to camp. Heda is looking for you.”
Anyone could say that. You’re about to say as much when the man suddenly is no longer facing away from you and your knife is no longer in your hand. He spins around faster than you can blink and he stands in front of you, your knife in one hand dangling from his fingers. He holds up both hands like he is trying not to spook you, though, and tucks the knife away in his belt. His movements are slow and he never takes his eyes off you, like you are a frightened animal he doesn’t want to bolt. He doesn’t know that bolting is not an option for you whether you want to or not.
“You’re injured. I will carry you,” he says, more telling you than offering. You weigh your options again, quickly coming to the conclusion that you’re in no position to resist. If this man is abducting you rather than returning you to camp, you’ll have to deal with that when you get wherever he takes you.
It will feel good to get off your feet, anyway.
You nod and the man scoops you up into his arms like you weigh nothing, an arm under your knees and the other supporting your back. He heads back in the direction he had come from and suspicions aside, you fall asleep with your head on his shoulder in just a few minutes.
…
You’re cranky when you’re next stirred awake. You’re being jostled and there are voices all around and someone is yelling nearby and you were sleeping so good and your head still hurts. Sleeping was so much nicer.
You wake just in time to feel the man who had been carrying you transfer you onto a softer surface. It doesn’t give underneath you like a bed but it’s raised and covered in some sort of fabric that feels soft against your fingertips when you flex them weakly. The movement seems to make the frenzy around you worse and now you feel hands on your face, brushing your hair back, fingers gently inspecting the wound on your head. Someone presses a cold wet rag to the torn skin and the sting of it is what finally gets you to open your eyes.
“ Clarke .”
Her voice sounds pained. You recognize it straight away and as your eyes adjust to the dim light inside the tent you’ve been brought to they dart around, searching. “Stay still,” one of the nameless people tending to you warns, and Lexa steps forward to ensure your compliance, knowing she is the source of your squirming. When she comes into view she looks raw and tired and you’ve never seen that sort of tension in her eyes or around her mouth. Her eyes are wide as she tucks herself between where you lie and the wall to avoid the wrath of the healers that are trying to work on you. She brushes her fingertips across the back of your knuckles like she’s scared you might crumble if she presses too hard. Like she thought she might never get to again.
“Lexa,” you say, and your voice doesn’t sound quite right. Not like you but like the ghost of you. Lexa frets and her hands flex and twitch at her sides like she wants to reach out. You make the choice for her, lifting your arm to grab onto her hand, clasping your fingers together with hers. You’re hurt, but you’re not made of glass and the last day or so has been scary . Lexa’s presence is comforting and her warm hand in yours makes you feel grounded.
“Ai hodnes,” Lexa murmurs, holding your hand in both of hers. Her thumb strokes across the skin of the back of your hand. “I’m so sorry. The scouts say they believe the Azgeda were already here, waiting. There were no signs of us being followed. I should have been more alert.” She swallows thickly. “We started looking for you straight away but it was as if you had vanished. I was so worried that -”
You know what she was worried about. She doesn’t have to say it out loud. The Ice Nation capturing you is one of Lexa’s biggest fears. “I’m okay,” you tell her, and even though you expected it to it doesn’t taste like a lie.
Lexa looks unconvinced. “Your head, Clarke. You had to be carried back to camp and you were unconscious when you arrived.”
“But I’m okay now,” you insist, trying unsuccessfully to keep the slur out of your voice. You’re getting tired again. There must be a fire in the tent because you’re finally starting to feel warm and sleep feels so so tempting. Lexa must see the way your eyelids flutter as you struggle to keep them open because her expression changes, tightening with worry.
“Let my fisas work,” she says, gently disentangling her fingers from yours. You don’t want her to go but there is no fight left in you. “I will be just over there.” She probably gestures to a corner of the tent but you don’t see it. Your eyes are already closing.
…
When you wake, your head feels clear. It’s a stark difference from what you remember from the last time you were conscious, when your mind felt sluggish and bogged down. You notice the warmth behind you immediately; an arm wrapped protectively around your waist, knees slotted up against the back of yours, soft and slow breathing tickling the nape of your neck. It feels good. It feels like home, and you know that you’re in the safest place in the world while wrapped in Lexa’s protective hold.
You’re pretty sure you haven’t moved - you haven’t even opened your eyes - but Lexa stirs behind you. She’s perceptive enough even in her sleep to sense that you’re awake by just the change in your breathing. You turn in her arms and the way she looks at you like you’re a vision makes you smile at her, affection coursing through you. “Hey,” you say, voice hoarse from sleep and disuse.
“Hey,” Lexa says back. The hand she never took off of you even while you rolled over rests on your hip now and she rubs her thumb in circles over the bone beneath the skin there. “You scared me,” she says after a few quiet seconds. You see her eyes dart to your forehead and notice what you think might be a tremble of her lower lip. Her voice has an uncharacteristic wobble to it. “Don’t do that again.”
You laugh, because you definitely didn’t have intentions to get kidnapped by some stray Ice Nation warriors in the middle of the night, but you humor her. You’ve been through an ordeal, but so has Lexa. You wouldn’t have wanted to be in her shoes, either. “I won’t.” You don’t promise it because you can’t, but you’ll do your best. “Did you find who did it?” you ask.
Lexa’s eyes go stormy when she shakes her head, no . She opens her mouth to say something, but you lift your hand and cup her jaw, putting your thumb over her lips before she can speak. “It’s okay,” you say. “We don’t have to talk about it right now.” There will be plenty of time later. For now, you’re alive and with Lexa and that’s all you care to know. You lean forward and press a gentle kiss to Lexa’s mouth before you tuck your head beneath her chin, nuzzling into the hollow of her throat. You know that the sun is rising and that Lexa can’t laze in bed with you all day and you’d rather not spend these moments doing anything other than this. Limbs tangled, breathing synchronized, twin pulses. For this small slice of time, nothing else matters.
“We don’t have to talk at all.”
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