damneliza:

“i like her.”

clarke rolls her eyes, muttering a quiet, “of course you do”, but she turns and watches raven tear the poor boy a new asshole, anyway, if only for the entertainment value. if nothing else, lexa seems to enjoy the fireworks.

having lexa in her head was…strange, at first. it still is, sometimes, to hear a voice that no one else hears. it’s not like hearing her own thoughts–those are contained, circling and bouncing around inside her own head. lexa’s voice has more substance than that; it’s a bit deeper, a bit more there. sometimes she swears she can feel the puff of lexa’s warm breath against the shell of her ear, or the ghost of a touch at her shoulder, at the small of her back, at the back of her hand or the center of her palm. 

for a while, she thought she’d officially lost it. her mom, sinclair, raven–they all had too, to some extent. saying she could hear lexa was one thing–they looked at her with something between confusion and pity when she answered lexa aloud, carrying on a conversation that remained half-unheard by anyone but her. for a while, she’d tried directing her thoughts at lexa, like some kind of ridiculous telepathy, but it wasn’t long until she realized that lexa sifting through her thoughts to find the one aimed at her out of hundreds, thousands, millions of tiny little surface thoughts bumbling around in her head was impossible, and she’d given up that venture within hours of even attempting at it. 

abby had chalked it up to wishful thinking. “it’s just in your head, sweetie,” she’d said, when clarke told her about the touches, about the weight she sometimes felt at the small of her back, about the brush of fingers through the ends of her hair. 

“lexa’s gone,” abby would say, and her voice and eyes would get all soft and sweet and plying and she’d go right into mother-mode when clarke needed her in doctor-mode. she needed answers, an explanation, a reason to believe that what she was feeling was real and not just grief acting out on her weaknesses. 

maybe she tried to push it away for a while. she still talked to lexa, still listened to her–how could she not? but she ignored the touches, the phantom of lexa’s presence around her very being. she pushed it away like she did all things, and she could swear that lexa noticed. 

and then, when she’d sleep–she’d feel it. under the blankets, facing the wall, bathed in darkness because she wasn’t well enough for candles, not yet–she’d feel the covers pull, tightening around her hips and waist, the slightest sense of the bed dipping beneath a weight that wasn’t there anymore. 

and she’d jolt awake, sitting up, and it would take her ages to light a torch and see that–no, no one was there with her. she was still alone. lexa was still gone. lexa was still–”i’m here,” lexa would say, but she wasn’t, and that was the problem. 

clarke eventually starts sleeping with the torches burning, the room bathed in light so that when she feels the bed dip again she can turn her head and look and see that no, no one’s there. the covers haven’t moved. she’s imagining things. and she’ll drift to sleep, troubled and disturbed and half-warm with the sensation of arms wrapped around her and then–

and then the morning comes, and she always wakes slowly, reluctant, because lexa is alive in her dreams, and her image never fades. clarke will never forget what lexa looks like when she smiles, or how her voice lilts when she’s amused,  because all of that is there, in her dreamworld, in stunning technicolor. 

and in the realm of the living, clarke feels the fading warmth of a body wrapped around her own and for those few moments between asleep and awake, she can pretend. for just a moment, she can make believe–that lexa is alive and breathing and the voice in her head is actually at her ears and the breath at her neck isn’t just her imagination and–

“i’m here,” lexa says, and she says this every night before clarke sleeps and every morning when she awakes. “i’m here, clarke.”

“i will always be here.”