Chapter Text
“Space!”
Lexa slams on the brake at Aden’s outcry, a move so sudden that it would perhaps propel them both out of their seats and through the windscreen of her car if they weren’t crawling around a busy car park at walking pace looking for somewhere to park.
“Aden, you can’t tell me there’s a space after I’ve already driven past it,” sighs Lexa.
“Yeah, well I didn’t bloody see it until after you’d driven past it,” complains Aden, folding his arms across his chest as he slumps back into the passenger seat in a teenage sulk.
Finding a parking space at Heathrow Airport, it turns out, is actually harder than trying to figure out and put a stop to a nefarious global plot masterminded by a bitter and power hungry old woman. Lexa would much rather face down the former Azgedan royal family once again than to have to spend any longer driving in circles around the car park getting directions from a grumpy thirteen year old who seems to think he could do a better job at finding a space.
“I tell you what, Aden,” says Lexa, her voice laced with sarcasm. “Why don’t you drive next time?”
“I wish,” replies Aden, taking his phone out of his pocket and tapping away at the screen. “We would have been here like twenty minutes ago if I’d been driving. You drive like a grandma.”
“Oh, piss off.”
Aden glances up at Lexa, eyebrows raised, “I’m telling the dads you swore at me.”
“Do it, I dare you,” Lexa challenges him.
Aden falls silent and Lexa knows that she’s won. There are advantages to being the oldest child, and one of Lexa’s favourites is that ever since she’s moved out, she gets away with a lot more than she used to. At twenty two, she’s hardly going to get grounded for swearing. The same, however, cannot be said for Aden.
“Space!”
Aden’s outstretched finger points dead ahead, where another car is reversing out of a parking space. Spotting another driver eyeing up the same space, Lexa accelerates forward and swings into the empty bay almost as soon as the previous occupant has left it, then cuts the engine.
“Finally,” grumbled Aden, opening the passenger door and manoeuvring his lanky limbs out of the car, before leaning against the side of Lexa’s car, his phone still in his hand.
“Come on,” Lexa calls out to him, as she climbs out of the driver’s side and starts looking around the car park for signs to the lift. “Clarke’s plane touched down ten minutes ago. We really should get moving.”
Aden looks up from his phone and starts following Lexa.
“Oh, so now you’re in a hurry?” he snorts, though he stays close behind as Lexa speedwalks across the carpark to the lift that will take them down to the arrivals hall.
Lexa presses the button to call the lift, then takes her own phone out of her pocket. There’s a text from Clarke announcing that she’s landed and is making her way through customs, and Lexa’s heart starts fluttering in her chest with the knowledge that Clarke is so close. It’s been three months since they saw each other and Lexa has been counting down the days until their reunion since her own flight back to England from Washington D.C.
Lexa doesn’t realise that the lift has arrived until Aden gives her a nudge with his elbow.
“I thought you were in a hurry,” he teases her, eyes flickering down to the phone in Lexa’s hand.
“Shut up or I’ll just leave you at the airport instead of taking you back home.”
Lexa sees Clarke straight away, as if her eyes are magnetically drawn to Clarke as soon as she emerges from around the corner. Lexa’s heart starts doing somersaults the very moment she sees Clarke, who squints and scans the crowd waiting at the arrivals gate. Clarke’s features relax as soon as she finds Lexa’s face, and she speeds up into a faster walk, weaving in and out of the other passengers with her suitcase trailing behind her as she races to get to Lexa as fast as she can.
Clarke lets go of her suitcase as soon as she’s close enough to touch Lexa, which is exactly what she does, flinging her arms around Lexa’s neck and wrapping her legs around Lexa’s waist. Lexa staggers back a couple of steps under the weight as Clarke jumps into her arms, putting a hand under each of Clarke’s legs to support her, and buries her face into Clarke’s neck so that she can inhale Clarke’s scent.
“God, I missed you so much,” Clarke half sobs. “Come here, I want to kiss you.”
Lexa lifts her face from Clarke’s neck and lets Clarke place a hand on either side of her head as she swoops down for a kiss. Clarke’s lips are softer than Lexa remembers, yet more insistent too, kissing Lexa with an urgency that seems far too indecent for such a public place.
Not that Lexa is bothered by that. It’s been nearly three months since she last saw Clarke back in D.C. at the end of her mission in the States. Nearly three months of having to make do with texts and phone calls at strange hours that never seem quite long enough. Nearly three months of only seeing Clarke’s face through a grainy webcam or in the photo of the two of them that Lexa has set as her phone wallpaper. Nearly three months of daydreaming about Clarke at every possible moment, and of having wildly inappropriate dreams about Clarke at night, and of crying out Clarke’s name into the darkness of her empty bedroom in the dead of night as she touches herself over and over again.
Nearly three months without touching Clarke. And now that Lexa has Clarke in her arms, she wants to whisk her away somewhere secluded and only stop touching Clarke when both of them are too exhausted to be able to keep going.
Except that she can’t, because they’re in public, and Lexa’s thirteen year-old brother is right there next to them.
“Gross!” exclaims Aden. “I didn’t come here to watch you two get off with each other.”
Lexa reluctantly pulls back from their kiss and Clarke untangles her legs from around Lexa’s waist so that Lexa can lower her to the ground again.
“Why did you even come here?” Lexa asks Aden, her hand grappling for Clarke’s and knotting their fingers together. “You’ve done nothing but complain so far.”
“Because I wasn’t sure if I should believe you when you said you had a girlfriend, and I definitely thought you were lying about her being Clarke Griffin.”
“Hi,” says Clarke, greeting Aden with a smile. “You must be Aden.”
Aden stops bickering with Lexa as soon as Clarke addresses him, wide-eyed and apparently speechless now that she’s looking at him. His gaze drops, ogling the low ‘v’ of the loose t-shirt Clarke travelled in without even a trace of subtlety.
“Her eyes are up here, pervert,” says Lexa, giving Aden a prod with one of her fingers.
“Sorry,” mumbles Aden, glancing away as a pink flush of embarrassment glows on his cheeks.
“No need to say sorry,” says Clarke. “I think it’s cute.”
Aden’s head snaps up and a slow, almost dumbstruck smile spreads across his face.
“She thinks I’m cute,” he says breathlessly. “Clarke Griffin thinks I’m cute.”
“Okay, stud,” says Lexa, rolling her eyes. “She’s just saying that to be nice.”
“Oh, are you getting jealous?” teases Clarke, her fingers squeezing Lexa’s reassuringly. “You’re pretty cute too, you know.”
Lexa smiles bashfully, then says, “Right back at you.”
“Guys, I’m right here!” complains Aden, startling them both to attention before they can even think about leaning in for another kiss.
“Aden, make yourself useful and grab Clarke’s suitcase,” Lexa instructs her little brother. She turns to Clarke and presses a tender kiss to Clarke’s cheek, then whispers, “Let’s get you home.”
“I’m terrified,” admits Lexa.
Parked on the driveway of Lexa’s family home in rural Oxfordshire, they sit in the two front seats of Lexa’s car, neither one making any move to get out.
“You’re terrified?” Clarke asks surprisedly. “I’m the one meeting your parents.”
“Yeah, my parents,” explains Lexa, reaching across the central console to rest her hand over Clarke’s. “I’ve never brought somebody home to meet them before. What if they completely embarrass me and scare you away? Oh my god, what if Maxwell doesn’t like you?”
“Your dog? Is that … is that likely?”
Clarke completely forgets that they aren’t the only two in the car until Aden speaks up from the back seat.
“Can you two, like, have your gay panic after you’ve let me get out?” he complains, tapping Lexa on the shoulder from behind. “Also, Maxwell likes anybody who gives him treats and belly rubs.”
Lexa opens the door on the driver’s side of the car and steps out, pulling the switch that tilts her seat forward far enough for Aden to be able to awkwardly maneuver his long limbs through the gap and out of the car. Getting out of her own side of the car, Clarke shuts the door behind her and moves round towards the trunk to fetch her suitcase.
“Okay,” she says, as Lexa pops open the trunk and reaches inside to haul out Clarke’s bags, “so treats and belly rubs for Maxwell. Any tricks for winning over your dads?”
“Just be yourself,” says Lexa, placing Clarke’s suitcase down on the gravel driveway with a gentle thud, before she seeks out Clarke’s waist with both of her hands and pulls her in close. “If I like you, then they’ll like you too.”
“Do you like me?” Clarke asks coyly, already knowing the answer but wanting to hear it from Lexa’s lips anyway.
Lexa’s mouth curls up into a shy smile, and she answers, “A little.”
“Only a little?” Clarke mock gasps, pretending to be offended.
“Okay, a lot,” concedes Lexa, pulling Clarke in tighter, as if afraid that she might run away. “Let me show you how much.”
Clarke leans in and meets Lexa halfway, only too happy after months apart to spend as much time as she can kissing those beautiful lips. She drapes both arms around Lexa’s neck and lets herself fall into the kiss. There aren’t the words to explain how much Clarke has missed Lexa, missed this, while they’ve been apart, but they have the next three weeks in England to make up for all that lost time.
Starting right now. Clarke pulls Lexa impossibly closer and briefly wonders if it would be wildly inappropriate to push Lexa against her car to make out with her properly.
Clarke doesn’t get the chance to make that decision because they’re interrupted by an amused voice calling out from the direction of the house.
“Hey, Peanut! Do we not get to meet your girlfriend before you kiss her on our drive?”
As Clarke detaches her lips from Lexa’s, though she keeps her arms draped loosely around Lexa’s shoulders, her heart does a nervous little flip at the word ‘girlfriend’. It’s not that they aren’t together - or at least as together as two people can be when there’s an ocean and a five hour time difference between them - but that they haven’t yet had that conversation. It’s much easier to let the ‘I miss you’s devolve into steamy bouts of phone sex than to try and have a real conversation about putting labels on a relationship that sometimes feels like it must be too good to be true.
Now doesn’t seem like the right time for that conversation either. Not when there are two dads waiting to meet Clarke and an impatient thirteen year-old lurking on the other side of the car. So Clarke chooses to deflect things away from the word ‘girlfriend’ and onto another word that whichever one of Lexa’s dads heckled them from the front door decided to use.
“Peanut?”
“So embarrassing,” whines Lexa, a pretty pink flush decorating her cheeks.
“It’s cute,” counters Clarke, before she asks, “Are you going to introduce me?”
Lexa nods and disentangles herself from Clarke’s embrace, reaching for one of Clarke’s hands before she starts leading Clarke around the car and towards the front door.
Lexa’s family live in adorably quaint cottage that looks like it’s stepped right off a postcard. Clarke didn’t realise that homes like this actually existed - a rustic stone exterior, vines creeping up the sides of the house and curling around windows and drainpipes, with a lush green garden that seems to be sprouting every flower that could possibly exist. It’s so far removed from Clarke’s own life, from both the bustling college campus where she spends most of her time and the high fences and armed security guards of the White House, but it’s so incredibly British and Clarke loves it.
Clarke nearly trips over her own feet when she sees the two men standing in the front door, awaiting her arrival. Because the house may not have been what she expected, but it still makes sense, whereas Lexa’s dads are the absolute opposite of what she ever imagined they might be.
They’re both huge, is Clarke’s first impression. Two veritable giants of men, with hulking figures and thick tattooed arms and some very impressive facial hair, and it all has Clarke thinking that they could both have just stepped off a Viking longboat, if it were not for their complexions that are too dark to be Scandinavian.
“Clarke,” says one of the dads. “Come on in and make yourself at home, pet.”
“This is my Pops, Nyko,” says Lexa, gesturing to the man who has just spoken, then turns to the other of her dads. “And this is Gustus - or Dad.”
“It’s so nice to meet you both,” says Clarke, offering out her hand.
“We don’t do that here,” says Gustus. “You’re part of the family, come and have a hug.”
Clarke finds herself being swallowed up in a hug, with two pair of muscular arms wrapped around both herself and Lexa. The dads hold them both for a few seconds and it’s a little weird to be embraced by two men that she hardly knows, but she knows that it’s with good intentions and she does immediately feel like she’s welcome in their home.
As they drop their arms and release the two girls from the hug, Aden drags Clarke’s suitcase up to the front door and hauls it up the steps and over the threshold into the house.
“There you go, Clarke,” he says brightly.
“Thanks, Aden.”
Both dads look surprisedly between Aden and the girls, but it’s Nyko who addresses Lexa.
“Did you leave your brother at the airport and bring home somebody else’s thirteen year-old?” he asks.
“He’s got a schoolboy crush on Clarke,” explains Lexa.
“Bore off!” growls Aden.
“And there he is!” grins Nyko.
Nyko reaches out and ruffles Aden’s hair, and Aden ducks out of the way with an incoherent grumble, lifting his hands to fix his hair. His cheeks are pink, and Clarke can’t help but smile to herself as she is immediately reminded of Lexa, and the flush that rises to her cheeks when Clarke catches her off guard with a compliment or a flirtatious comment. It amuses Clarke that she seems to have had both Woods siblings wrapped around her little finger within moments of meeting them, but she finds it nothing more or less than plain sweet that Aden has a soft spot for her.
“Come in, girls,” says Gustus, stepping aside so that they can enter the cottage.
They’re immediately greeted by another member of Lexa’s family. A dark mass comes bounding down the hallway, which Clarke quickly realises is Lexa’s dog Maxwell, and he jumps up in front of Lexa, barking excitedly.
“Whoa!” says Lexa. “Steady, Max. Down, boy.”
Maxwell stops trying to jump up, but he still runs back and forth in front of Lexa, tail wagging with excitement.
“Maxwell!” says Lexa, her voice a little sterner. “Sit!”
Maxwell’s ears prick up as soon as he hears his name, and he obediently drops into a seated position, head tilted slightly to the side and tongue hanging out of his mouth as he pants noisily.
“Good boy!”
Lexa drops to her knees and rewards Maxwell with a good scratch behind his ears. He immediately rolls over onto his back, his paws brought up to his neck, exposing his long torso for a rub. Lexa indulges him, using both hands to scratch lovingly at his belly.
Lifting her head to look up at Clarke, Lexa says, “So, this is Max. He’s basically a giant puppy.”
Clarke crouches down beside the German Shepherd and tentatively offers out a hand. Maxwell tilts his head enough to be able to sniff Clarke’s fingers, curious about this new stranger in his home, but he almost immediately relaxes again, resting one of his paws over Clarke’s hand and using it to try and drag her hand onto his stomach, as if Lexa’s two hands treating him to a belly rub just aren’t enough.
“Aww,” says Clarke, gently scratching Maxwell exactly where he wants her to. “He’s very clever.” Clarke softens her voice, and coos, for Maxwell’s benefit, “Such a good boy.”
“He’s very spoilt,” Lexa corrects, with a glance up at her dads, though she continues to smile and reward Maxwell.
“Just look at his eyes,” says Nyko. “How can you say no to those?”
Lexa stands up again, much to Maxwell’s disappointment, and Clarke gives him one final scratch out of sympathy for the whine he gives out before standing too.
“I’m going to show Clarke to my room and get her settled in,” Lexa explains to the rest of the family.
“It’s lovely meeting you, Clarke,” says Gustus. “Give us a shout if there’s anything you need.”
“Thank you so much,” smiles Clarke.
She makes to reach for her suitcase, which Aden has brought into the hallway, but Lexa steps forward and gets there first.
“Let me.”
“How chivalrous of you,” teases Clarke.
In the end it takes both of them to get Clarke’s huge suitcase up the narrow stairs leading to the upper floor of the cottage. Lexa does most of the work, hauling it up by it’s handle, while Clarke stands below and helps guide it around the corner and up onto the landing.
“How much stuff have you brought?” jokes Lexa, dropping the suitcase with a thud when they get to the top of the stairs, before she wheels it across the landing and towards a door with a crooked handmade sign reading Lexa’s room.
“Stop it,” replies Clarke, rolling her eyes playfully. “Do you want me to run out of clothes while I’m here? Wait -” Clarke could kick herself as soon as she realises what she’s just said, especially when Lexa shoots her a suggestive smile, “Don’t answer that.”
Lexa’s bedroom is just as quaint as the rest of the house, if not more so. There’s a slanting ceiling from where the roof meets the house, supported by wooden beams that stretch from one end of the room to the other. The room looks like it belongs to a teenage girl, and Clarke imagines a younger Lexa trying to make her room just perfect. The bedcovers are a soft blue colour, with a string of fairy lights hanging above the bed and a selection of candles littering the top of both the dresser and the corner of the desk under the window. There’s a tall bookshelf in the corner, crammed with so many books that some have had to be piled up in front of the others, too many to fit in neat rows on the shelf.
Clarke’s eyes are immediately drawn to a large photograph that hangs in a frame on the wall. At first, Clarke thinks it’s a photo of Lexa and a young toddler, but then she starts to notice the differences. The woman’s eyes are too light, greyish-blue instead of green, her face is slightly rounder than Lexa’s, her hair a shade lighter, and it’s only when Clarke’s eyes drop to the little girl in the photo and recognises her immediately, that she realises who the woman is.
“Your mom?” asks Clarke.
She phrased it hesitantly, caught between not wanting to pry into a relationship that Lexa probably hardly remembers, and wanting Lexa to feel able to open up to her about anything.
“Yeah,” replies Lexa.
“She’s beautiful,” Clarke tells Lexa. “She looks just like you.”
Lexa’s eyes widen, full of hope, and she says, “You think so?”
“Yeah. Do you miss her?”
Lexa hesitates before she answers, just long enough for Clarke to start regretting even asking, but when she does reply she doesn’t seem upset or angered by the question.
“I think that sometimes I miss the idea of her,” Lexa admits honestly. “It’s hard to miss her when I barely remember her, and especially when I’ve got two such amazing dads.”
“They really are great!” agrees Clarke, latching onto the opportunity to steer the conversation away from Lexa’s mom before she pushes and pries too far.
“Aren’t they just?” says Lexa, with a content sigh.
“They’re … they’re not at all what I expected,” admits Clarke. “I feel so bad - in my head I was expecting one or both of them to be a stereotype. But they both look like they’ve stepped right out of a motorcycle gang.”
Lexa grins, and then says, “They actually met at a biker rally. But they’re both huge softies. Dad keeps bees and Pops has a chihuahua that he crochets sweaters for. They’re like a pair of grandpas, honestly.”
Clarke can feel her heart melting just a little bit more with each word that Lexa says.
“I love them already,” confesses Clarke, making a mental note to express her appreciation of the dads to their faces later tonight. “And they’ve been so welcoming.”
“I think they love you too,” Lexa tells her. “I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them pulls me aside tonight and begs me to propose to you right now.”
“After knowing each other for three months?” gasps Clarke, feigning shock. “I’m pretty sure that would make us the stereotypes.”
It’s a whirlwind of an evening.
Clarke takes a shower to freshen up after her transatlantic flight, and then Lexa’s family jump right into making sure she feels at home. She meets Delilah the chihuahua, who wears a hand-crocheted sweater and is by the far the biggest diva in the house, then gets led out into the garden so that Gustus can show her the fruit he’s growing in the greenhouse as well as his four beehives. And after turning down a third helping of spaghetti and homemade meatballs, somebody produces a board game from seemingly nowhere and Clarke finds herself trying to reign in her competitiveness while Maxwell sits at her feet and Lexa’s thumb traces patterns across the back of her hand.
It’s so far removed from Clarke’s normal life as the First Daughter of the United States, but she thinks she could get used to this, to being a permanent fixture in Lexa’s life, to domesticity and dogs and dads.
Aden triumphs and is declared the winner of the game (both Lexa and Gustus make accusations of cheating and Clarke is struck by their obvious similarities, only falling more in love with this odd little family with each second she spends in their house) and then Lexa excuses them both to bed, yawning exaggeratedly to fake her own tiredness to give Clarke a reason to bid her goodnight and head upstairs too.
Clarke doesn’t realise how tired she actually is until she makes it to Lexa’s room. The time difference means that it’s still the afternoon back at home in America, but after an overnight flight with very little sleep on the plane, Clarke is starting to feel the effects catch up with her. Her eyelids are heavy and her entire body aches with exhaustion, and now that she can see Lexa’s bed, Clarke wants nothing more than to lose herself in that mound of pillows and wake up in twelve hours time feeling refreshed.
But it’s been nearly three months apart, and there’s also a really gorgeous girl at her side that Clarke would quite like to lose herself in too.
“I didn’t think it possible, but you’re even prettier than I remember you being,” says Clarke, wrapping her arms around Lexa’s waist to draw her closer.
Lexa takes the bait and dips her head, capturing Clarke’s mouth in a soft kiss. And it’s nice, more than nice, but Clarke hasn’t been waiting three months to be kissed softly. She wants Lexa to kiss her like she means it, and then throw her down on the bed and make her moan until she can no longer remember her own name.
But when she tries to deepen the kiss, flicking her tongue against Lexa’s in a silent request for more, Lexa is having none of it.
“You must be exhausted,” Lexa mumbles against Clarke’s mouth.
“Not too exhausted for you,” replies Clarke, lifting one of her hands up to cup the back of Lexa’s head in an attempt to bring Lexa’s lips back to her own.
“Baby, I want this, but I’m still going to be here in the morning,” says Lexa, hands squeezing Clarke’s hips in a reassurance that she isn’t blowing her off because she doesn’t actually want this. “You’ve been suppressing yawns since dinner. You need to sleep.”
Clarke is disappointed, but she understands, and her body betrays her with another lurching yawn.
“I think you’re seriously underestimating how much I’ve missed you because I’m pretty sure I’d be done in less than two minutes,” jokes Clarke.
“Three months,” says Lexa. “We can wait twelve more hours.”
“I’m going to be all over you the second you wake up,” promises Clarke, extracting herself from Lexa’s arms and bending down to rifle through her suitcase for a pair of sleep shorts and an oversized college tee.
“Can’t wait,” grins Lexa.
As it turns out, they can’t wait until morning.
They do manage to get a little bit of sleep. Lexa gets woken by Clarke rolling over to face her in the middle of the night, and when she blinks her eyes open to find Clarke’s face inches from her own, sleepily peering at her through the darkness, it takes them all of about five seconds before Lexa’s mouth is on Clarke’s and her hand is between Clarke’s legs.
When they’re finally done, after two orgasms apiece, Lexa tucks herself into Clarke’s side and drapes an arm across Clarke’s stomach.
“Is it a cliche for me to say that I’ve missed you right after sex?” says Lexa, as she tries to catch her breath back.
“Probably,” says Clarke, laughing softly. “But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be true.”
Clarke wraps both of her arms around Lexa and holds her tight, and Lexa has to try really hard not to cry at how nice it is to be held like this after three months of only being able to imagine it.
“You know what Dad shouted at us when we were kissing on the drive earlier?” Lexa mumbles against Clarke’s collar bone. “When he called you my girlfriend?”
“Mmm?” hums Clarke in response.
“Are you my girlfriend?”
Lexa’s heart pounds against her ribcage as she asks her question, and the way that their bodies are tangled together surely means that Clarke can feel it too.
“Are you asking me to be your girlfriend?” Clarke asks, a hint of amusement in her voice.
“Well, I wasn’t sure if we already were, or not,” admits Lexa. “Because we agreed to be together and to not see anybody else but we also never put a label on it. And part of that was because I was scared that we weren’t going to make the distance thing work, but we are making it work and I would really like to have permission to refer to you as my girlfriend…”
“Permission,” laughs Clarke, pressing a kiss to the top of Lexa’s head as her arms squeeze her a little bit tighter. “You have my permission. I’d really like to be your girlfriend, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Okay,” Lexa exhales in relief and pushes herself up on one arm so that she can look at Clarke’s face. “Good. I’d like that.”
“You are really bad at this whole seduction thing,” Clarke teases her. “Like completely useless.”
“Hey!” pouts Lexa, flopping down onto the pillow next to Clarke. “You fell for me, so I can’t be that bad.”
Clarke considers this for a few moments, then replies, “True. And I’m so glad that I did.”