Chapter Text
It takes Finn cheating on her (and getting caught) for Clarke to finally call it quits. She’s almost embarrassed about that. All the shit she comes to realize he’s done over the last four years, but it’s her hurt pride—the fact that he cheated on her with some twenty-one-year-old he met at a bar, for three goddamn months—that makes her tell him it’s over and demand the keys to the apartment back.
Finn doesn’t go quietly. First he rages, slamming doors so hard she hears the glassware rattling in the cabinet. He blames her for “making” him cheat, apparently by being too busy with medical school and then her residency, not dressing sexy enough for him, and not agreeing to an open relationship or a threesome. He calls her a stupid bitch and worse.
With a burgeoning, ice-cold clarity she recalls the backhanded compliments, the brutal lectures he claimed were helpful critiques, the teasing that cut too deep. She remembers crying sometimes and him sighing, you’re just so sensitive, remembers him yelling during fights but then snapping keep your fucking voice down when she started to get angry in response.
Clarke thinks she almost prefers the outright simplicity of being called a bitch.
When she doesn’t back down from his rage this time, Finn starts to cry and mope around. He says she’s the only one who really understands him. He says it feels like she’s stabbing him in the heart. He says he’s sorry this happened but he couldn’t help himself, they’ve both hurt each other but we can move past this, babe, he’d had this whole future planned out for them, if only...
That’s when she almost wavers. She’s not a monster, and maybe she owes him one more chance, right? He was good to her (sometimes, an honest voice adds in her mind); she loved him, and she’d pictured their future too. But in that imaginary future, he wouldn’t have cheated on her, tried to hide it, and then expected her to forgive him. He would be good to her more than just sometimes.
So Clarke doesn’t rush to comfort him and accept his half-apology like she always used to. Pretty soon he finds something else to rage about again, and she’s glad she didn’t cave.
Eventually Clarke starts throwing his stuff into boxes until Finn takes it over himself, claiming she’s doing it wrong anyway. She avoids the apartment as much as possible for the three weeks until his new lease starts, camping out in coffee shops to study for her step exam and staying over at Raven’s a couple times when she just can’t take being around him anymore.
The day Finn moves out, Octavia and her boyfriend Lincoln come over as backup. Clarke wants to make sure Finn doesn’t take anything of hers; he’s been swearing up and down it should all be his anyway, since she’s keeping the apartment (despite the fact that she has paid all of the rent and bills for half of the last year, before he landed a new job).
She considers getting the locks changed. But Finn’s too lazy to be truly violent or destructive, she thinks, despite his nasty words and slammed doors. Besides, she doesn’t want to explain it to the landlord.
(Clarke can’t let herself think, just yet, about the fact that she even considered changing the locks, and what that says about their relationship. About him.)
And then Finn is gone.
Octavia pulls her into a hug after the door shuts for the last time behind him. “It’ll be okay. You’re better off without him. You got this,” she murmurs to Clarke, who feels her shoulders drop slowly, untensing.
“Thanks, O.”
Her best friend since freshman English squeezes her tighter. “I already unfriended and blocked him on social media, otherwise I’d offer to cyber-bully his ass for you.”
Clarke just laughs into her shoulder, and if a few tears escape too, Octavia doesn’t mention it.
***
The apartment is so fucking *quiet* without him. Without Finn’s tirades about his old job, his complaints about Clarke, her mom, and her friends, his fits of temper and even his laughter when he was in a good mood...it seems silent as outer space. Her ears strain sometimes for the sound of his keys jingling at the door, her stomach churning, before she remembers.
Instead, she fills the apartment with her own noise. She plays the music he hated, sings along loud and offkey, binge-watches old Buffy and Star Trek episodes in her sweatpants, and calls Raven and Octavia on speaker.
There are so many things Clarke had lost to him, piece by piece so she hadn’t really noticed, like the proverbial frog in the slowly boiling water. Things she’d given up or had started doing because it wasn’t worth another fight. Loading the dishwasher a certain way so he wouldn’t berate her for her supposed incompetence, ordering food he preferred because he was picky and when he was hungry he got mean. Stuff she’s all but forgotten, pushed down in her memory because he didn’t really mean what he said, he was just stressed, and really she should’ve known better, been better.
She starts seeing a therapist after the second panic attack. It hits when she’s parked outside the grocery store only to realize she forgot the shopping list, shit, Finn would be so pissed at her. And all of a sudden she’s dizzy, sucking in huge breaths, and her hands are numb.
In therapy Clarke talks about that, and about waking up from bad dreams with her heart pounding. Like the one where Finn shows up at the hospital and tells everyone how much of a fuckup she is, how she doesn’t have any drive or passion...all words he’d spoken to her in waking.
The worst part is that in these dreams she can’t move, can’t get away from him.
The therapist listens, of course. Listens and tells Clarke she isn’t crazy, or too sensitive. Trauma doesn’t have to be physical or life-threatening to have an impact, Becca says, and it can take time to acknowledge and to heal. She suggests meditation and yoga and grounding techniques, and sometimes Clarke manages to do this stuff. Sometimes it even helps.
***
Raven and Octavia are happy to see more of Clarke; she’d been hanging out with them less and less often, before. The first night she has them over for pizza and a movie, they’re halfway through Ocean’s 8 and the second round of beers before Clarke’s jaw fully unclenches and she can laugh loud as she wants to.
“So do you think you’ll get a roommate?” Octavia asks after a while, when the movie credits are rolling.
“At some point, yeah. I mean, I can just barely afford it on my own. And it’s not like I’m really using the second bedroom anyway.”
“Except as your art storage,” Raven points out. Since Finn left, Clarke has also started painting and drawing a little again. It’s crap--she’s rusty as hell--but she enjoys it, and is filling the smaller bedroom that was always supposed to be a guest room/studio with canvases and sketches. (Finn didn’t get along with her mom or stepdad Marcus well enough for them to stay there when they were in town, and the rare times her hospital schedule yielded enough time for her to work on art, he’d scoff that she was being self-indulgent or imply she wasn’t paying enough attention to him.)
“Yeah, but now I have more space in my bedroom to store that stuff. Plus, sometimes it’s a little too quiet. I’m gonna, like, start talking to the walls or something.”
Octavia groans. “Can we trade? I’ll take the quiet, you can take Miss Call-of-Duty-On-Stereo here,” she says, pointing at Raven with a piece of pizza crust.
Raven sticks her tongue out at her roommate. “You love me too much, you’d miss me.”
Clarke smiles at their antics but then hesitates, swirls her beer. “Is it bad that I miss him, sometimes?” she says, in a small voice. “I mean he turned into an asshole, but he used to make me laugh, he made me that awesome cake for my birthday, we have all these memories and photos and shit…” She blinks hard. She is not crying.
“Oh, sweetie. It’s natural to miss him,” Raven says, shifting to set her own beer down on the coffee table and face Clarke directly. “You were together for more than four years. And he could be a charming, romantic bastard when he wanted to.”
Raven and Finn had dated years ago in high school. He’d been somewhat less of an asshole then, but then again they’d broken up after only a few months, because Raven was leaving for college and didn’t want to be tied down. She had actually introduced him to Clarke, who’d been her college roommate, after he moved to Polis.
“You deserve better, Clarke,” she adds, sincerely.
Octavia raises her beer to toast her words. “Co-signed. You deserve way better. You’re fuckin’ hot, babe.”
That gets a chuckle out of Clarke. “Thought you didn’t swing that way, O.”
“Just ‘cause I’m not on Team Rainbow like you two doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate female hotness,” her friend replies easily, swigging her beer.
“Speaking of which, can we rewatch that movie? Because,” Raven pretends to fan herself, “I need more Cate Blanchett in a pantsuit, unf…”
Clarke laughs. She doesn’t exactly disagree, and appreciating female hotness, as Octavia put it, is another thing she’s clawed back from Finn. He’d claimed to totally respect her bisexuality but mostly pretended it didn’t exist, except when he was drunk and horny and wanted to persuade her to have a threesome.
She’s tired of thinking about Finn. She’s tired of rediscovering parts of herself she had lost touch with. She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, and focuses on this moment with her friends. And on Cate Blanchett’s undeniable hotness.
***
After another month Clarke puts an ad on a few local housing listings, and from the responses she weeds out the college party-types, the few that just seem too weird even in email form to consider, and the one she’s pretty sure is a Russian bot.
She meets with the top three candidates in person, showing them the apartment in return. Based on the emails, candidate number 3–“Anya Woods”—seems intelligent, straightforward, and professional. Anya is an architect a few years older than Clarke herself, who wants to move closer to her workplace. She signs her succinct emails with “Best, A” and offers to provide a landlord reference.
And in person she’s almost intimidatingly serious, has high cheekbones and fucking incredible makeup skills. Anya doesn’t shake her hand and barely cracks a smile during the whole apartment tour, but it’s clear that that’s just who she is. Clarke appreciates the lack of pretense.
“I keep weird hours sometimes when a project is due,” Anya warns, “but I don’t make a ton of noise if I come back late, I do all my dishes, and I can basically sleep through the apocalypse.”
“Oh good,” Clarke says. “I’m doing my residency so sometimes I have weird hours, too.”
“I probably won’t have a lot of people over either. Maybe a couple colleagues from my firm, or my cousin Lexa. I’m not dating anyone, but I am gay. Assuming that won’t be a problem?” Anya’s eyes flick over towards the bisexual flag magnet on the fridge, which Clarke had picked up at Pride some years back and rediscovered in the bottom of a drawer Finn had emptied.
“Not at all, clearly,” Clarke says. “And I just broke up with someone myself. But you’ll probably meet my friends Raven and Octavia, I have them over sometimes.”
“I don’t do dogs. Cats are acceptable,” Anya states flatly. “And I don’t smoke.”
Clarke blinks. “The landlord, uh, doesn’t allow pets. Or smoking.”
“Okay. Do you have any other questions for me?”
Clarke gives her the sublease that day, and within two weeks Anya has moved in. True enough, she is quiet, clean, and considerate. She doesn’t seem to like Raven and Octavia much at first, but she’s at least civil, disappearing wordlessly into her room when they come over to take up the couch and eat all of Clarke’s food.
“Dude, your new roommate is kinda hot,” Raven says one night as she descends on the nachos Clarke just pulled out of the oven. “Ow, fuck!”
Clarke isn’t sure if this last, slightly muffled exclamation is because she elbowed Raven or because of the burning hot cheese the engineer just crammed in her mouth. “Rae! She can probably hear you.”
“So?” Raven selects another loaded chip and blows on it briefly. “It’s true. Maybe you should tap that.”
“I’m not gonna sleep with my roommate!” Clarke whispers. “I’m not ready to sleep with anyone right now, and anyway, that’s a bad idea!”
Raven shrugs. “Could be missing out. You know the quiet ones are always kinky.”
“Raven!!”
“Guess she’s not your type though, is she?” her incorrigible friend says. “When it comes to women, anyway.”
“Oh yeah? I have a type?”
Raven wiggles a hand vaguely in the air. “Y’know, long dark hair, soft butch, seems broody but is really a cuddly puppy underneath, wants you to top sometimes.”
“That’s not--I don’t--” Clarke stammers, blushing a little.
“Remember rugby captain Niylah in college? And that marine biology major, what was her name, Luna?” Raven speaks around a mouthful of nachos. “Though Niylah was blonde, come to think of it…”
“She dyed it,” mumbles Clarke. “Her real color was brown.”
Raven laughs.
“Rae’s right. You totally have a type,” Octavia pipes up from the living room. “Now where are those nachos?”
***
Some weeks she does better, some weeks worse. Having Anya around does help, even if their busy schedules rarely align, because it gives Clarke someone to talk to and forces her out of her own head. This week she manages to do both laundry and meal prep and gets out of the house beyond just work shifts. She even goes to bed at a more reasonable time, instead of watching whatever show will keep her brain occupied right up until she falls asleep gritty-eyed on the couch. Then one morning Finn texts her while she’s at work.
This time of year reminds me of you. Of us. Our 1st date
I miss u
Clarke stares at her phone during a brief lull on her shift, re-reads the words trying to dissect the tone and intentions behind them, but doesn’t send a reply.
A patient needs her attention, and it’s another two hours before she has time to check her phone again. She has three new messages.
Guess you don’t miss me at all, huh. You’ve really moved on
That was fucking fast
You’re just gonna turn your back on everything I did for you. Typical
Clarke can hear his contemptuous snarl even through the letters on the screen, as if he’s in the room with her, and a chill cascades down her spine. She gulps a breath, then another, and throws her phone in her locker.
She’s fine, she’s really fine, until her fellow resident Maya drops a sterile instrument she’s about to use. Startled by the clatter, Clarke yells “What the FUCK!” at her so loudly everyone in the operating room stares.
Dr. Jaha’s expression is hidden by his facemask, but his dark eyes are shrewd. “How many hours this week, Clarke?”
“I’m fine. Sorry,” she adds in a mumble to Maya.
“How many hours?”
Clarke huffs, meets the doctor’s gaze. “Fifty-five.” It isn’t that much, given it’s almost the end of the week; she’s worked longer weeks and he knows it. But he’s a smart guy, Thelonious Jaha, knows when something’s up in his OR.
“Go home. You’re done for today,” he says calmly.
In the locker room Clarke swears under her breath, kicks the lockers with the side of her foot, then strips out of her scrubs. She makes it home in record time, since it’s just before the evening rush hour. She has a vague plan of ordering something greasy and plonking herself on the couch to watch TV and NOT look at her phone. But when she gets in the apartment she’s surprised to find Anya there, and she has company.
Clarke’s simmering anger must show on her face or in her step, because Anya raises an eyebrow at her from where she sits on the couch.
“Whoa. You all right?”
Clarke grunts, toeing off her sneakers. “Been better.”
“Okay…” Anya clearly doesn’t believe her. “This is my cousin Lexa, by the way. Lexa, this is Clarke.”
Lexa occupies the sleek Scandinavian-designed armchair that’s the only living room furniture Anya had brought when she moved in. She sits like it’s a throne, her back ramrod straight, and she’s gorgeous , all jawline and big eyes, dark brown hair partly pulled back in braids. For some reason it irritates Clarke even more.
“Hi,” she bites out.
Lexa doesn’t seem perturbed by her rudeness. “So you’re the roommate.”
“Yep.” Clarke pops the ‘p’ just to be annoying. Restless, she goes to pour herself some juice in the adjoining kitchen.
Anya’s still watching her. “Something happen at work? You’re never home this early.”
“I got...angry at a co-worker. They told me to go home.” She shrugs, taking a sip of juice, then has a sudden urge to explain a little more. “My asshole of an ex texted me some stupid shit, and it kinda messed with me.”
“Ah.” Anya nods. “You should come with us, then.”
Clarke’s surprised by Anya’s marginally warmer tone as much as the offer. “Why, where are you going?”
“This one--” Anya lifts her sharp chin in Lexa’s direction, “--wants me to use my precious comp time to check out that place where they let you drink beer and throw axes into the wall. Because she’s basically a Viking warrior reincarnate.”
Lexa rolls her eyes. They’re light green, bright enough for Clarke to see even from across the room. “Don’t pretend you haven’t been excited to go since before they opened, Anya.”
“Okay, clearly you two need a medical professional to chaperone you around these axes,” Clarke says. Her tension dissipates a little at their familiar banter, and maybe more of that is what she needs, instead of lonely takeout and TV.
So she goes with them to the place where they let you drink beer and throw axes into the wall, as long as you sign a waiver first. Turns out Clarke’s not as terrible at throwing axes as she would’ve thought, though she’s not as good as Anya and nowhere even close to Lexa.
Lexa, who slings an axe one-handed right into the bull’s-eye on her second attempt and impresses the burly, bearded bartender-slash-axe instructor Gustus so much that he buys her next round. Lexa, who it turns out has geometric tattoos covering slender yet toned biceps and another piece peeking above the ringer neck of her T-shirt. Quiet, self-confident Lexa, who teases Anya like they’re sisters and glares sternly when Clarke steals fries off her plate but then pushes the plate closer to her...and fuck, maybe she *does* have a type.
Clarke’s irritation vanished, she’s enjoying herself so much she almost doesn’t notice her phone buzzing. When she finally does, there are five unread texts and a voicemail message, all from Finn. She takes a hard breath in through her nose and lets it out, turns her phone face-down on the table without unlocking it.
“Everything okay?” Lexa asks her, softly as she can over the thunk of axes into wood, as Anya perfects her two-handed throw.
Clarke nods automatically, then catches herself and shakes her head. “It’s my ex. Mostly I want him to leave me alone, but a part of me doesn’t. He could be really great sometimes, he’d get so excited about things but then other times...” Words tangle in her throat. She takes a sip of water--she’d volunteered to be their designated driver--but it doesn’t help her speak.
Lexa just waits, silent. Watching her.
“I just--how does he still get to me like this?” Clarke finally says in frustration. “I broke up with him. He moved out.”
“Sounds like getting to you is something he’s good at.”
It somehow mirrors what Raven said about Finn--“he could be a charming, romantic bastard when he wanted to” --and reminds her that he always brought up the things she was insecure about when they were fighting. He needled into the already-strained relationship with her mom. He knew how to poke and poke and get the response he wanted out of her, pushing past any boundaries she tried to set.
“I just want to be over this already,” Clarke says. “I don’t wanna be so fucking...on edge all the time.”
“It takes as long as it takes,” Lexa tells her, and the distant look in her eye makes it seem like she’s been there before, or somewhere close. “But you’ll get there.”
“C’mon, you two. We still have fifteen minutes left to be Vikings,” Anya says, coming up and all but dragging them both away from the table. She’s clearly enjoying herself, her loose hair and eyeliner-rimmed eyes a little wild. It reminds Clarke of Raven when the engineer (and amateur mechanic) has a new car to work on.
“I think you’d like Raven, if you got to know her,” she tells Anya, picking up the axe and squaring her shoulders.
“That the one who thinks I’m hot?” Anya deadpans right before Clarke releases the axe. It thunks handle-first against the wall and falls to the floor. Anya laughs.
“Yeah, well, she doesn’t have much of a filter,” Clarke says. She wonders how much else of that conversation her roommate might’ve heard.
They toss a few more axes, Clarke’s throws varying in their accuracy. “You want some tips?” Lexa offers easily at one point, taking a sip from her beer bottle.
“Sure, Viking Commander,” Clarke jokes.
She isn’t expecting Lexa to step up right next to her, barely a foot away, and shivers unexpectedly. “You should turn your body a little more,” the woman says, demonstrating with her own lean frame. “That way you can make your hand with the axe swing like a pendulum, forward and back. Can I touch your arm?”
“Uh, yeah.”
Lexa maneuvers her right arm with a gentle pressure, demonstrating the even swing she’d described. “ It’s also easier to keep your arm perpendicular to the floor like this, so the axe flies straight.”
There is nothing straight about this, Clarke thinks loudly. Her skin is warm where Lexa’s touching her, even through her shirt sleeve.
Lexa seems to have gotten a little dazed herself, lingering next to her. Clarke could swear the woman glances down at her lips for a beat before taking a couple of steps back. Polite shutters go back over Lexa’s expression as she nods towards the target on the wall. “Try it now.”
And damned if Clarke’s axe doesn’t fly into the central circle just outside the bull’s-eye, the closest she’s gotten all night.
Her jaw drops. “You sure you’ve never thrown an axe before today?”
Anya hears this as she readies for her own throw, and laughs. “Well, Lexa does literally make a living off teaching people how to fight.”
Clarke stares at the brunette, who shrugs. “I run a mixed martial arts studio downtown. Brazilian jiu jitsu, judo, some krav maga.” Her eyes twinkle a little. “I have thrown a knife before, but no axes.”
“You should check out one of her classes, Clarke,” Anya suggests, sinking her axe deep in the wall. “Punching people is pretty good for releasing stress.”
“Maybe I will,” Clarke says. She and Lexa are still looking at each other, the hint of a smile around the corners of Lexa’s full lips. There’s a flicker of lightness in Clarke’s chest, something closer to hope than she’s felt in a while.