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insideabunker · 5 years

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The Games: Chapter 4

Despite Clarke's two prior trips to the winter games, the opening ceremony had lost none of its magic for her. The significance of it all still gave her first day of school butterflies, making her feel six years old again, awestruck and overwhelmed as she drifted through a sea of unfamiliar faces. Red, white and blue-clad bodies shuffled past her, as the sprawling cluster of American athletes followed the Mongolian delegation through the tunnel leading onto the parade grounds of PyeongChang Olympic Stadium. A colorful delegation of Bermudians trailed close behind them as they made their way into the open air of the parade grounds.

From its epicenter, the spectacle radiated with an intoxicating spirit that consumed the senses, filling Clarke with a nervous energy that eclipsed even the nastiness of the chilling wind that had picked up an hour earlier. Exiting the darkened tunnel, she made her way into the multicolored splendor of the stadium; her thoughts immediately drowned out by the deafening roar of 35,000 cheering spectators.

It took a moment for her to process fully. It seemed unbelievable that thousands of people had been willing to brave the sub-zero temperatures just to catch a glimpse of their Olympic champions, but as the enormity of that fact sank in, Clarke felt overwhelmed with a responsibility to them. She forced herself to stare up into the stands, her face straining against the icy sting of the air as she smiled and waved towards the masses of fans.

"It feels like my eyeballs are going to explode," Raven growled through her forced smile. "It's fricking cold!"

"Just keep smiling." Clarke grinned at her assistant captain, her voice just as strained, as she flashed two rows of perfectly straight, snow white teeth. "Millions of people are watching, Rae. Don't spoil it for them."

"You can't be serious?"

"This has got to be a joke."

A chorus of complaints had erupted the second the Canadian athletes had learned their number in the ceremony's progression.

"We're sixty-ninth?"

"Oh g-d, as if these uniforms didn't make us look ridiculous enough." Echo looked dour as she fiddled with her long red parka and knitted cap.

"I don't know," Lexa shrugged, forcing small talk to make nice with her captain. "I mean the jackets aren't great, but some of the other stuff they gave us is ok." She waited for Echo to respond but was met with steely silence. "I mean, I like the flannels."

"Of course you do."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Lexa tensed, wondering if she should be offended, and readying herself for an argument.

Echo only rolled her eyes, looking bothered. "I didn't mean it that way," she spat. "I was referring to the fact that someone from the NWO would love that our uniform issue includes a Kenora Dinner Jacket." She turned to Lexa, exasperated with the tall girl behind her. "Obviously. I play women's ice hockey, Woods. You think I'm not used to teammates who enjoy the company of curvy, Swedish blondes with long legs?"

Echo shot her a knowing glance, noting the nervous, slightly guilty look on Lexa's face.

"How do you know about that?"

"You're not exactly discrete. I saw you coming out of that Swede snowboarder's room this morning, half dressed."

Lexa swallowed hard, her cheeks flushing a subtle rosy color. "Coach Freeman... You aren't going to?"

"Rat you out to her and get you kicked off the team?" Echo dipped her head, cocking one eyebrow. "No, not for that. I may not like you, but you're hardly the first player on this team to dip their toes into international waters. Besides, I have my own foreign diplomacy to conduct." Echo shot a glance towards the crowd behind them, piquing Lexa's curiosity.

"What sport's she in, eh?"

Echo rolled her eyes. "Woods, I'm not even a little bi-curious." She stared far back in the procession. "I've got my eyes on that scruffy, freestyle skier from France."

Lexa screwed up her face. "Ugh... Typical Queeb, going for some priggish French ponce."

Echo shoved the girl behind her with an elbow. "Toton."

"Beaver-beater."

"Lumberjack."

"Maudit sans-dessein." Lexa fumbled through the only French Canadian swear she remembered from grammar school.

"It's pronounced dé-sa," Echo growled, drawing out the final A. G-d, your French is shit, Woods."

"I'm from northern Ontario!"

"T'es pas une lumiere! Believe me, it's apparent."

In spite of their bickering, Lexa realized that the argument was probably the longest conversation they'd managed since she'd joined the team. "Well, that's something," she thought to herself, thankful that they hadn't come to blows again.

Consumed as she was by their banter, Lexa lost her situational awareness, snapping out of it only when the world around her erupted into flashing lights and noise. They'd finally reached the inside of the stadium. The freezing night air hit her in the face, and her breath caught. Lexa's eyes strained against the bright lights and icy wind as she stared up at row after row of waving fans, and did her best to wave back.

The wind picked up again, making Lexa's eyes sting and tear. The goalie shielded her brow from the cold, wiping them with the back of a gloved hand and doing her best not to smear the makeup, applied for the sake of the cameras. She checked the back of her mitten for smudges of mascara and, happy to find none, peered into the crowd in front of her. For a split second, the column of bodies parted just enough for a small figure became visible up ahead. Lexa caught a brief glimpse of golden hair and azure eyes before the crowd swelled again, and the American captain disappeared amidst a sea of taller, more substantial bodies.

"I think I saw the Team USA captain up ahead." She turned to Echo, hoping to coax a little more conversation out of her.

"What, Clarke Griffin? I would doubt it unless she's being carried on somebody's shoulders."

Lexa smirked. "Yeah, she was pretty tiny in person."

"You've met?"

"Just the other night, in passing. She seemed..."

"Like an irritating homunculus?" Echo continued to scan the crowd for her Frenchman. "That girl had been a pain in my ass for years." She stared at Lexa for a moment, her expression concerned. "You didn't notice if she was limping, did you?

"I don't think so." The question seemed odd, but Lexa thought it over, none the less. "I mean not that I could tell at least. Why?"

Echo turned back towards the procession, her expression unreadable. "We were playing an exposition game about a year and a half ago. Griffin had been a menace all night, picking up the puck before I could get to it at the point and forcing it back into our zone. She's small, but she lighting fast." She paused. "Well, she was. Anyway..."

Something about the story made Lexa feel immediately uneasy.

"Third period, I finally caught her heading up the boards on a breakout. I was going to try and pick her off, but she veered towards center ice at the last second. My leg was out, and I ended up catching her at the knee."

"You went knee to knee?"

"I told you, she veered at the last second. I was trying to play the body the best I could." Echo bit her lip. "I might have let my leg drift out a bit far to try and knock her stick off the puck..."

She glanced at Lexa for a moment, her expression barely hiding the guilty conscience of someone who knew their actions had been less than defensible.

"But, I didn't intentionally cheap shot her." She grimaced. "Anyway, I felt her leg bend back in the wrong direction, and she flipped, ass over teakettle across my thigh. The second she hit the ice I could tell it was bad. I've never heard someone scream that hard."

Lexa's stomach sank just thinking about it. In hockey, a knee to knee collision often resulted in injuries of the most devastating kind. That exact scenario had ended many a career before its time, and it made the goalie cringe thinking about the tiny blonde girl writhing in pain on the ice.

"MCL sprain?"

Echo shook her head. "ACL. Grade three at that, a complete tear."

"Holy hell."

"Yeah, honestly I'm surprised to see her back on skates at all."

"So, that's why she looked so sluggish in the game footage we watched."

Echo nodded. "To be sure. I genuinely thought she'd retire after that. I mean, she'd been playing for the national team since she was seventeen, so she was already getting up there."

They rounded the corner and slowed to an abrupt halt, nearly crashing into the Kenyan athletes ahead of them.

"That footage was from just after she was cleared to start training again. I hear she's gotten some of her speed back since then, but if you ask me, she shouldn't even be playing."

Lexa's jaw tensed at the utterance, a conviction that her Québécoise teammate seemed to hold frequently. "You seem to think that of a lot of people."

Echo sighed. "I mean because of the risk of re-injury. Not everything is about you, Woods."

With that, Echo pushed forward, disappearing amongst the shuffling mass of red and black jackets.

The ceremony had ended in a spectacle of blaring music and bursting fireworks, that latter of which still rang in Clarke's ears as her feet pounded against the whirring belt of the treadmill. Hours after the lights had dimmed in Olympic stadium she was still wide awake, to filled with excitement, and too unaccustomed to the fifteen-hour time difference to sleep. In her restlessness, Clarke turned to the one standby that faithfully calmed her down when pressure and anticipation turned her into a live wire of nervous energy.

She leaned forward into a sprint, increasing the incline on the Cybex another three degrees and watching as her numbers climbed. Time: 48:36:23, Speed: 9, Incline: 10, Heart Rate: 184. Perspiration poured from her brow, matting stray bits of flyaway hair to her forehead. Clarke's burned, her legs ached, and her heart pounded in her chest as she continued to increase the incline. Up, up, up until her hands flew to the bars to keep herself from flying backward off the machine. Just as she felt her body about give out, she punched the large red button in the center of the display, cutting the power and hopping off in a flash, careful to land with her weight on her good knee.

Fighting the urge to double over and gasp for air, she threw her hands behind her head, lacing the fingers together and forcing herself to continue taking deep, measured breaths as she paced around the room. Clarke closed her eyes and waited for her heart rate to slow, relishing the way her muscles ached and trembled with exhaustion. She wiped the sweat from her temples with the back of her hands realizing how utterly drenched she was.

After a week of buildup to the opening ceremony, fifty minutes of alone time had provided her with some much need respite from the hum of the crowds, the strings of interviews, and the exhaustion of the reassuring pep talks her more novice teammates had needed on a near constant basis. Save for an unseen weightlifter banging heavy metal plates around in another corner of the complex; the nearly empty gym had provided the forward with a silent sanctuary from the turmoil of her otherwise overwhelming week. For Clarke, there was nothing like a long, grueling run to clear her mind and ease her tension, and after an hour of beating herself down, she was finally feeling relaxed and ready to sleep.

Not before a shower though, Clarke thought as the smell of her sweat drenching clothing suddenly filled her nostrils. She peeled off her soaked Under Armour shirt and shivered as the chill of drafty gym air hit her flushed skin, giving her goosebumps. Back inside the women's locker room, she made quick work of discarding her soggy PT gear in her sports duffle, sliding her feet into flip-flops as she wrapped herself in a towel and headed for the open shower bay.

She breathed a sigh of relief as she stepped into the empty shower bay, covered from top to bottom in polished white tiles. Despite a career of dressing and undressing in front of teammates, Clarke had never been entirely comfortable with public nudity, though it wasn't the sight of others naked that unsettled her so much as it was her insecurities about her own body. A lifetime of struggling with her weight, first baby fat and then added curves, had made her shy to the point of timidity. Unlike Raven, who was a walking human hanger and had posed naked for ESPN The Magazine's body issue, Clarke grappled with body confidence. She struggled to dress for the formal events the team attended, balking at the idea of being stuffed into a dress that accentuated her cleavage and hips. Unfailingly, the captain elected for more conservative numbers, downplaying her appearance as much as possible in the hopes that she could fly under the radar and not tempt the press into present her in an overly sexualized light. The tactic had worked for the most part, though comments about her looks did surface, every now and again, internet trolls be damned.

Clarke turned on one of the shower heads lining the wall and let it run until the water turned warm. She discarded her towel on a nearby hook, stepped into the stream and closing her eyes as the warm liquid poured over her aching muscles. The blonde let it pound against her skin, relaxing her even further until finally, her exhaustion caught up with her. She yawned, running a hand through her matted mane as she pulled out the elastic that had pinned it haphazardly to the top of her head. She let it cascade over her face and filled her hand with shampoo, massaging it into her scalp.

The sound of another shower head bursting to life nearby startled Clarke out of her euphoria. She pushed her soapy hair out of her face, freezing the second she saw who occupied the spot two places down. Lexa Woods stood less than ten feet from her, eyes closed, face turned up into the steady stream of water cascading over her body. Clarke's eyes were fixed, unable to look away for the physical specimen beside of her. Even in a parka and jeans Lexa cut an imposing figure, but bare to the world, the goalie was physically alarming.

She was tall to be sure, 5'11 if she was an inch, but what was more startling was the sheer amount of muscle that hung on her frame. Every inch of her was ropey sinewed flesh that, somewhat surprisingly, held a subtle softness to it. Clarke watched as beads of liquid slide down Lexa's olive-skin, slipping over her curves and pooling at every angle on her frame. The water clung to the tawny girl like it was heartbroken at the thought of having to drip off of her.

Clarke ignored the way her pulse quickened, and her breathing slowed, too captivated by the way the impressive musculature moved, stirring underneath a visage adorned with intricate tattoos that shifted as though they were alive. A combination of body writing and black and red abstracts covered half her back, running over her shoulder and snaking down the full length of her left arm. The outside of her right thigh was similarly ornamented. The edges of the artwork wound up her hip and caressed her waist before ending just above her perfectly toned backside, which Clarke realize she was gawking at a moment too late.

"What the fuck?!"

Clarke jumped, so alarmed by the green eyes staring her down that she couldn't reply.

"Were you just staring at my ass?"

"What? No! I mean, yes but..."

"Yes, or no?"

"I was staring at your tattoos."

"The one right over my ass?"

"I wasn't staring at your ass!"

Lexa turned to face the smaller woman, her figure even more flawless from the front. Small but firm breasts sat high on her chest, perfect and round, and the lines on her tight stomach were sculpted into a frustratingly well-defined six-pack.

"You get a good look?"

"I wasn't staring." Clarke felt herself blushing as she turned back into the jet of water pouring over her, and rushed to work the remaining shampoo out of her hair.

Lexa leaned into the tiles, propping herself up on a tattooed forearm. She pushed the brown hair out of her eyes and slicked water from her face.

"You're full of crap, Griffin. Admit it; you were staring at me."

"I wasn't staring!" Clarke venture a quick glance at the goalie, too embarrassed to look for more than a moment. "I wouldn't ogle someone in a public shower. That kind of behavior is abdominal."

Lexa smirked at the Freudian slip, cocking an eyebrow smugly.

"Abominable. Shit!" Clarke screwed her eyes shut, sure that her face was now bright red. "Besides why would I be staring at you."

"For the same reasons lots of girls do," Lexa wiggled her eyebrows, turning back to the water as she lathered herself with soap. "You think you're the first person to stare at me in a shower?"

Clarke growled as she rinsed the last of the soap from her face. "G-d, you're so completely egotistical!" She shut off the water, wrapping herself in her towel as she retreated from the shower bay.

Lexa rinsed off quickly, grabbing her towel as she followed Clarke toward the lockers.

"And you're a hypocrite! You tear into me with some big feminist speech when I try to pay you a compliment, but when I catch you creeping on me, you act all innocent. What garbage!"

"I wasn't staring at you!"

In the middle of the argument, Clarke became aware of how exposed they still were. Her towel clung to her precariously, barely covering her unmentionables, while Lexa's dangled from her hand, unused. She realized she was staring at Lexa's abs again and clenched her teeth, sure that that fact hadn't escaped the brunette's attention.

"Would you put on some clothes, please."

Lexa leaned forward, grinning conceitedly. "You sure that's what you want?"

She cleared her throat, forcing herself to look the girl hovering over her in the eyes. "I'm not interested, Woods."

“In anything other than my ass, you mean?

"I was... I'm not... Your Tat... Ugh!" Clarke grabbed her sports duffle, clinging to the last shred of her dignity as she forwent undergarments and scrambled to pull on her team sweats as quickly as humanly possible. She yanked her socks halfway up, making a slapdash effort to shove her feet into her Adidas.

"I'm not having this argument with you, Woods! I have bed checks to do."

"Sounds good. Mine is in room 704B."

Lexa heard the exasperated groan all the way down the hall as Clarke stomped out of the room, failing to notice that her sneakers were on the wrong feet.

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