destroy the middle, it's a waste of time

[heda]

WHO: Lexa & Clarke
WHAT: Unexpected reunions
WHEN: Wintermarch 20something
WHERE: Emprise du Lion
NOTES: Mild(??) to moderate(????) violence, language, discussion of massacres, I don't know probably nothing

[ Lexa isn't looking for Clarke. Maybe she was at first, just a little. As she made her way down through the hills, circling around the Red Templars' strongholds and hunting grounds to approach Sahrnia from the west like the traveler she's pretending to be. As she trekked through the snowy trails and snuck past quarries and cages maybe she looked. Maybe she checked for blonde heads, scanned for that bright telltale hair among the dead or the soon-to-be. She doesn't expect to find anything, and she doesn't. Even if Clarke is alive-- and that is far from certain-- she would hardly linger here of all places. She is either dead or months gone.

In the village there is plenty to see. Inquisition forces arriving en masse, setting up their tents and their standards, sending out scouts here, hunters there. The tavern is packed with them, and it's there that Lexa slips into the crowd, covers her hair and changes her posture and ducks into the warmth and the noise and lets herself turn invisible. She watches and she listens and maybe she drinks, just a little. Just enough to keep warm and keep up appearances, not enough to get soft or let her tongue slip. But just enough that when she's leaving one night and shrugging her cloak more tightly around her and she sees a flash of pale hair out the corner of her eye, she thinks maybe she's just seeing what she wants to see. For a moment she thinks of what Titus would say, or Indra. She follows anyway.

As soon as she catches up enough to see her back she's sure. Through the heavy clothes, through the snow flurrying down into lashes and the edge of her hood, she's sure. It stops her heart but not her feet and she follows, sticking to corners and shadows, recalling lessons on stealthy pursuit she hasn't had to use in years. (Anya wouldn't approve of this, either.) When Clarke reaches a cookfire on the edge of the Inquisition camp Lexa hangs back well shy of its glow, watching from the gloom beneath overhanging beams, the ribs of a hollowed out building. She should turn around and leave. She has assured herself that Clarke is alive. It should be enough.

She watches, and when she is as sure as she can be that there is no one else nearby she steps out into the firelight. ]

Hello, Clarke.