Lexa blinks so rapidly that she feels like she could take flight. The Gamer Boy and his girlfriend have inched closer, clearly trying to eavesdrop on the incredibly bizarre conversation that is taking place in the store entryway as the pair pointedly examines a red bejeweled buttplug so large that Lexa would wager a guess it would rival the diameter of her fist.
Thankfully, as the store closes at 9:30 and Lexa can see the last tails of sunset disappearing behind the horizon, she doesn’t have to customer service her way out of crazy for much longer. She can see the headlines now- aspiring bright young journalist slaughtered with sex toy by deranged blonde customer.
“I- you- orgasm?” Lexa splutters, inching backward behind the safety of the employee counter, so that two feet of speckled plastic separates them. “Miss-Ma’am-”
“Clarke,” The blonde helpfully supplies, once again waving the vibrator around in the air as if to punctuate her point.
Lexa manages to give her a disbelieving once over as the girl, noting Lexa’s discomfort with the flying handheld sex toy, gently sets it on the glass counter. Oblivious both to the gaping stare of Gamer Boy and Lexa, Clarke strokes a loving finger over the silicone curve of its frame before clasping her hands on the counter and staring expectantly at Lexa once again, bright eyes boring a hole into Lexa’s gaze
. Clad in frayed denim shorts and a threadbare cream-colored Matisse t-shirt, Lexa notes the small splotches of paint that dapple the girl’s tanned arms, the bright blue suede Birkenstock clogs that complete the outfit. She looks entirely normal, not like someone Lexa would peg as a girl to run like a bat out of hell into a sex toy shop brandishing a clit focused vibrator like it is her own personal brand of vigilante justice. “Well Clarke, I, you…wait, how do you know my name? How do you know my last name?” Lexa says as she levels an accusatory finger at Clarke, electing to ignore how breathtakingly gorgeous she’s slowly realizing her would be attacker is.
Lexa blinks so rapidly that she feels like she could take flight. The Gamer Boy and his girlfriend have inched closer, clearly trying to eavesdrop on the incredibly bizarre conversation that is taking place in the store entryway as the pair pointedly examines a red bejeweled buttplug so large that Lexa would wager a guess it would rival the diameter of her fist.
Thankfully, as the store closes at 9:30 and Lexa can see the last tails of sunset disappearing behind the horizon, she doesn’t have to customer service her way out of crazy for much longer. She can see the headlines now- aspiring bright young journalist slaughtered with sex toy by deranged blonde customer.
“I- you- orgasm?” Lexa splutters, inching backward behind the safety of the employee counter, so that two feet of speckled plastic separates them. “Miss-Ma’am-”
“Clarke,” The blonde helpfully supplies, once again waving the vibrator around in the air as if to punctuate her point.
Lexa manages to give her a disbelieving once over as the girl, noting Lexa’s discomfort with the flying handheld sex toy, gently sets it on the glass counter. Oblivious both to the gaping stare of Gamer Boy and Lexa, Clarke strokes a loving finger over the silicone curve of its frame before clasping her hands on the counter and staring expectantly at Lexa once again, bright eyes boring a hole into Lexa’s gaze
. Clad in frayed denim shorts and a threadbare cream-colored Matisse t-shirt, Lexa notes the small splotches of paint that dapple the girl’s tanned arms, the bright blue suede Birkenstock clogs that complete the outfit. She looks entirely normal, not like someone Lexa would peg as a girl to run like a bat out of hell into a sex toy shop brandishing a clit focused vibrator like it is her own personal brand of vigilante justice. “Well Clarke, I, you…wait, how do you know my name? How do you know my last name?” Lexa says as she levels an accusatory finger at Clarke, electing to ignore how breathtakingly gorgeous she’s slowly realizing her would be attacker is.
Lexa didn’t check what time Clarke actually left to get water - she doesn’t have much use for her watch while in the middle of nowhere, using the light from the sun to guide and shape her day instead of tracking the passage of time minute by minute, hour by hour. So she didn’t check what time Clarke left but she’s almost certain it’s been more than 20 minutes. She guesses it took her all of 10 minutes to collect enough wood to get them through the night and restart the fire and she’d even checked her closest trap line and still, no Clarke.
Just recently she would have been thankful for some extra time alone without her campmate. Now, it makes her anxious.
She waits another few minutes before she decides to get up and investigate, picking her way through the underbrush as gingerly as possible in an effort not to further damage her ankle. Clarke’s wrap job proves to be sturdy enough that she doesn’t feel much pain at all, the joint well stabilized, but the last thing she wants is to be stuck at camp injured while Clarke has all the fun. And after their encounter the previous evening, she feels it would be unwise for either of them to go any further than the general area of camp alone.
Given how frequently they’ve used the path to the water it’s not possible to ascertain whether Clarke came through recently or not. Lexa has to actually go all the way to the river before she can figure out if something went awry, and when she finally gets close to where the path exits the woods and starts on a slant down to the bank, she hears exactly what she doesn’t want to - splashing.
Alarmed, she rushes forward, numb to the way her ankle twinges in protest as she prepares herself to stumble into some worst-case scenario; Clarke drowning, Clarke being mauled by a bear that decided it wanted to fish in this spot, Clarke being throttled by some psychopathic maniac living out here in the bush.
When she bursts out of the trees and into the open where she has a clear line of sight of the water she realizes she was premature in assuming there was some kind of disaster occurring. It’s…definitely not a serial killer, or a bear. Clarke is not in any sort of distress at all for that matter. She’s in the water, submerged up to her chest, stroking sopping wet hair out of her face and back behind her shoulders. She blinks water out of her eyes and peers up at Lexa, who is frozen like a deer in headlights at the top of the riverbank, flabbergasted.
“Take a picture, it will last longer,” Clarke yells up teasingly, evidently not at all embarrassed to have unexpected company.
The jibe snaps Lexa out of her stupor and she whirls around on her uninjured foot to stare steadfastly into the trees and not at Clarke like she had definitely just been doing. She hears some more splashing around and then bare feet on pebbly dirt. “Clarke, are you nuts?” she calls out, staring at a tree as she talks. “It’s barely 50 degrees out. How cold is that water? How cold are you?” Then she remembers she has a right to be annoyed. “And do you realize it’s been more than 20 minutes already? If you say you’ll be back in 20 minutes you need to be back in 20 minutes.”
“Okay, please chill out,” Clarke says, sounding nonplussed. It grates on Lexa’s nerves, the blase attitude. “You can turn around, by the way. I’m decent.”
Decent isn’t the word Lexa would use to describe her, in any context of the word. Clarke is still half naked, in her bra and underwear as she fights to get her cargo pants back up over damp legs, the fabric catching on and clinging to her calves. Surprisingly toned calves, for someone who walks so slow and so loudly.
Clarke is also absolutely gorgeous. She’s known this, but it’s much easier to ignore when she’s fully clothed and with a few days worth of dirt caked on her face and in her hair. Lexa grits her teeth as she looks elsewhere, an overwhelming assortment of contrasting emotions flooding her system. She realizes she’s flustered and - she can’t have that. She isn’t allowed to feel flustered, not when she’s here to do a specific job, especially not when it’s over her campmate with whom she needs to maintain a professional relationship with to at least some degree.
Lexa hears some shuffling as Clarke finishes getting dressed, and then her voice is just behind her. “Okay, I’m ready to go. See, no big deal,” she says. She sets down the pails of water by her feet, flexing and extending her fingers before she picks them up again, waiting for Lexa to lead the way.
Lexa stalks off into the woods, picking up the trail quickly. If it weren’t for her ankle she would purposely walk faster than she knows Clarke could keep up with; even with her injury she’s able to make her annoyance clear by reestablishing distance between them every time Clarke catches up to her. “Hey, okay okay, slow down,” Clarke says after just a moment. “You’ll hurt your ankle again. I’m sorry okay? I shouldn’t have taken so long when I said I’d be back in 20.” Lexa listens and Clarke pauses. “I didn’t realize you cared,” she adds, her voice no longer indignant and defensive as it had been earlier but soft instead.
To be honest Lexa hadn’t realized, either. She sighs and slows down, letting Clarke catch up to walk by her side. “Just…don’t do that again.” She can feel Clarke’s eyes on her face but she doesn’t turn to meet them with her own, unsure of how much of the conflicting and unsettling emotions she’s dealt with over the past 10 or so minutes will be evident in her gaze.
“I won’t,” Clarke tells her. Her voice is soft. Lexa believes her but still doesn’t dare look at her.
…
…
Clarke feels kind of bad. She hadn’t meant to freak Lexa out by taking longer to get water, she’d just wanted to get days’ worth of soot and grime off of her and seized the opportunity when she saw it. And like she said, she didn’t know Lexa cared enough to actually keep track of how long she had been gone. Now that she thinks about it she figures it’s probably ingrained in her as part of her survivalist training to keep an eye out for the people she’s working with. It’s still just a new concept to her that they’re actually, really, truly working together.
When Lexa veers off the path halfway back to camp Clarke pauses, tilting her head and furrowing her brows. Lexa knows the way. Lexa is the one who doesn’t get lost.
Sensing that Clarke has stopped, she looks back over her shoulder. “My trap line. Since I’m here - it’s bad practice to let game go bad on the line,” she explains. She comes back a moment later with two hares and a triumphant little smile on her face. Cocky, almost - definitely pleased with herself. Clarke grins at the sight.
Back at camp, Clarke starts boiling their water while Lexa prepares the hares for cooking. Clarke watches curiously but from a distance - while it’s inarguably nicer to have fresh meals, she’ll still be sticking to her MREs on any and all future excursions because she does not have the stomach for that.
“Where did you learn how to do that?” she asks.
“My family was big into subsistence living. I started hunting when I was… I don’t remember exactly how old I was. Essentially as soon as I could walk.”
Clarke pictures a tiny Lexa holding a bow and arrow nearly as big as her body, gangly arms with knobby elbows trembling against the weight of the string pulled back by skinny fingers against her jaw. Then she looks at Lexa, adult Lexa, carefully and expertly dressing the hares as they sit out in the Alaskan wilderness, and suddenly everything makes a lot more sense. Clarke came into this profession later in her life after making the choice to do so. There were so many other paths she could have taken, something her mother reminds her of regularly.
But for Lexa? This has always been her life. It’s all she’s ever known. It may not be a big deal for Clarke to learn some survival skills and old-school Bigfoot hunting tricks from Lexa and incorporate them into her trip but it is a big deal for Lexa to fundamentally change the way she has always done things by agreeing to utilize Clarke’s tech. When her entire identity has revolved around staunchly avoiding just that.
It’s a humbling epiphany.
Lexa looks over and notices her staring and Clarke doesn’t look away immediately, seeing her with fresh eyes. Strong-willed, set in her ways, but somehow still willing to bend and to learn.
It’s Lexa who ends up looking away first, not without quirking a brow at Clarke probably wondering why she’s staring at her like that. She gets up and sets their dinner over the fire to cook and as the meat starts to sizzle and crackle Clarke finally speaks again. “So, I was thinking that maybe tomorrow we should just stay at camp and let you get a day of rest for your ankle. We can go through footage, and I have to film some videos for my YouTube channel. But then moving forward, I think we should relocate my cameras? Some of them, at least. Based on where you think they’ll have the best chance at picking something up. I was basically just trying to spread them out evenly but I imagine you can think of better ways to utilize them.”
Lexa looks thoughtful. She nods but then says, “My ankle is fine, Clarke. I’ve twisted it worse before.”
Clarke wonders if Lexa isn’t used to someone taking charge and helping her or if she’s just this stubborn all the time. Maybe it’s both. “That’s cool. But you’re still resting it.” She pauses for a moment and watches as Lexa turns the hares over. “So is that a yes to the rest of what I said, too?”
Lexa wipes her hands off on her thighs as she stands back up from where she had been bending over the fire. There’s a streak of black ash across one of her cheeks, which are rosy red from the heat of the flames. Her eyes glow with the reflection of the fire as she looks at Clarke who sits on the other side of the pit, a cheerfulness about her that Clarke hasn’t witnessed before.
“Yes, Clarke. It’s a yes.”
They share a smile that is only obscured by the smoke drifting high into the sky between them.
y'all ready for part 2 of Sex shop AU? Is it too late to post in an hour or so, or should I wait until tomorrow bright and early? What is the consensus here
What about a silly 3 men and a baby type fic except it's just Clexa somehow getting an infant forced on them out of the blue and then falling in love while figuring out how to care for the kid. Or maybe you could do one where one gets a letter not meant for her and it's from the other. The rest is up to you😂
I will be affectionately referring to this AU as 2Girls1Baby until I think of, or am recommended a new title.
This is a work in progress, but I wanted to give you a little snippet, Anon, because this AU is living in my head rent-free now.
A little back story. Raven and Anya have an 18 month old baby, and they have to go out of town. Their last resort for childcare is leaving their daughter, Tris, with Clarke and Lexa.
Clarke and Lexa have been roommates for a while now, really only knowing each other through Anya and Raven. Anya is Lexa’s sister; Raven is Clarke’s best friend. They live together, but don’t really associate aside from that.
