Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Clarke is standing at the front of the room. A hot room, small and blue sunlight, big shadows and no drafts. Chunky wooden desks, thick mahogany and aged.

She’s done this before. It’s okay, and yes, her skin is being flayed. Yes, there are eyes on her exposed veins, exposed sinew. The blood that has come from her heart for anyone to see. And yes, she’s being dramatic. She’s only reading her work out loud. It’s just narcissistic and scary.

Her knees are wobbling but her hands are still. The back of her neck sweaty and hair sticking to it, and she plays with the corners of the paper while she reads. Reads like they’re not her words. This performing thing has always felt strange. Like she is sharing, and by sharing, perhaps it feels like she doesn’t own her work anymore. Not completely. They have it now. 

That guy tapping his feet at the front of the room, sitting back and spread, folded arms loose and expression wonky, has it now.

When she finishes, she’s met with this silent room. Oh, for a breeze. Oh, for a forgotten alarm to ring so that someone else is on the spot. Clarke looks over to Anya, but she’s typing away at her computer, and she can’t work out if she was even listening in the first place.

“Is that it?”

His voice is low and husky, remnants of last night. That or he’s a smoker. That, or he’s already putting on a character and it’s only 9am. 

Anya clears her throat before Clarke can answer him, this guy with a small smirk on his face, like the whole world is here to dance for him in this room.

He glances slightly to their supervisor, then it’s all eyes on Clarke again. There are other students in here, and some of them have just switched on.

This guy leans forward to his desk.

“I mean… no, I’m sorry-” To Anya. “I do mean is that it?”

“Yes,” Clarke says, fighting down red cheeks and more nervous jitter. He might be hot, in that ‘I don’t even have to try to make you want me and you want me’ kind of way. But it’s early and she’s on guard already. And it doesn’t matter that he has these sparkly eyes, because this is humiliating . “Yes, that’s it.”

“But nothing happened. Why the hell did you stop there?”

“Because I said everything I had to say.”

This is a workshop, and anyone in this room will have spent years in these bubbles. The essay critique and reconstruction. The prose judgements that are for the greater good. It’s not personal, she reminds herself, he’s doing what he is supposed to. He is being critical, not cruel. It’s hard though, with that smirk. It feels mean, and she’s always been a little on the defensive side. 

“But your characters didn’t. They didn’t at all. They didn’t move.”

“They don’t always have to,” she fights, and catches Wells’ eye at the back of the room. 

“Then what’s the point in everything you just said?” He asks like there’s no one else in here. Like they’re two people sitting across a coffee table and building something together. But she’s standing up here and he’s sitting down there, and suddenly the room isn’t dim. It’s a spotlight. It’s glaring.

“I…”

“Like, to sound good? If that was your aim, fair enough.” He is a big hands-talker. And a big-hands talker, Clarke notices. “Because it sounded great. But there’s no story there. And you crafted real people and just had them… pose for you. Like a painting.”

She scoffs now, having just been stripped of her skin and feeling as though this stranger is parading it around the room like a cape. She scoffs because she wants to take her skin back.

“Yes, and no painting is ever worth seeing,” she drawls, shifting her weight to one hip. “No painting is ever satisfying. You’re right. Melting clocks for… what? Sunflower fields for what? You’re right…”

“Bellamy,” he says, amused.

“Bellamy. Let’s just call this off, throw on a marvel movie and be happy because the characters are moving .”

His grins then, all teeth, and Clarke hasn’t ever had a class with this guy. She’s never even seen him in a hall or at a party, and she knows because she would remember this face. Strong, like it was built to wear a metal helmet. Like a trojan. Soft still, like he chose not to use it for that. Like he chose instead to be a mouthy post-grad.

“I’m just saying it’s…” Wavy hands, feeling out the air in the room. Maybe surprised that it is light and fits through his fingers quite easily. Hands that expect more weight. “Wasteful. Wasteful of nuanced people that you’ve built. Of words you’ve used to make us interested. Your paint. I’m saying keep going, because there’s more there.”

“I don’t want there to be more.”

“Why not?”

The obvious question but loaded now. Adding that expected weight to the air, and Clarke really looks at him. This eagerness he wears and the sense of shame he might have for it. She doesn’t have an answer for him right now. She has nothing to say, and it makes the silence in the room really, very loud.

This stupid dance she just did for twenty people, and she just wants to sit back down and let them all forget her assignment. She wants the ground to shake, and then resonate, and then break apart and eat her alive. And then she wants to go and rip this stupid short story up and flush it down the toilet. She thought it was good last night, pacing around her room and reading it over in the light of her laptop. She thought it was more than what it must be in the daylight.

Someone raises their hand and Clarke looks to the girl in the corner, and she asks a question about a specific part of the story. Like normal feedback, archaeological dig through the sand. 

Clarke recovers quick from this weird swim with Bellamy, flicking through the pages in her hand and answering the girl’s question. It’s not rude or harsh or even particularly negative. Nothing of Bellamy. She doesn’t know why she avoids looking at him again, or why the pressure of his gaze is so much stronger than that of all other twenty people in the room.

More question time, as is the whole point of this whole performance, and then she gets released, trudges through the room to get to her seat. She tries not to look embarrassed when she sits down, places the pages on her desk and stares at them to find what he saw. To see it the way he saw it, and why it took a stranger to point it out.

She’ll have written feedback in her inbox later, from her more condensed study group. There was no Bellamy in the list of people she had to send this short story to last night, and she’s glad. He has said enough.

Wells nudges her, the way he always does when he wants to make sure she’s okay. She’s a few rows behind the front, behind Bellamy, and it’s only because she wants to pay attention to the next person reading their assignment aloud for feedback that she even sees him. 

And he’s turned in his chair, hand on the back of it, watching her so indiscreetly that she could cringe. That she could genuinely question if all of the other people are actually here in this room, and whether she’s just made them up to put things in between the two of them. 

No expression on his face and it doesn’t last long either. Then he faces the front again and the class becomes boring and manual once more, and the sweat leaves her neck. 

“Clarke, it wasn’t that bad,” Wells mumbles, watching her shove notebooks into her bag at the end of the workshop and deciding it’s a little harsh, the way she’s doing it.

“He made me look weak,” she hisses back, standing and shoving the strap on her shoulder, so ready to leave. 

“I think he was complimenting you.”

“Hey Griffin,” one of the other twenty says, the guy who’s always wearing a hat inside. She has spoken to him a couple of times, only ever about books on the reading list or about pieces they’ve had to present to the group. She can’t even remember his name, and rightly feels guilt that hers rolls off his tongue so easily. “Nice work.”

Clarke suppresses the urge to roll her eyes. She doesn’t need charity compliments just because her skin is currently being wrung out of dirty laundry water. 

“You’re the guy who wrote that O’Connor review in Chalk Talk. Miller?”

“I’m the guy.”

“Heavy,” Wells says, as though it’s a compliment.

Miller is one of the guys in her new study group, and she wonders if this was his first time learning the story. If he read it last night when she sent it out or if he didn’t care.

“I read that,” Clarke says, realizing that she has spent way too much time today being self-absorbed. Wanting to give a little to someone else. Or at least something else. “Like five times.”

Miller beams, this torn up smile like he is uncomfortable receiving praise but knows it’s genuine. And knows it’s about something that means a lot to him.

“I feel like I belong to Southern Gothic,” he admits. “It’s why I really liked your story. You get that faculty to be possessed by something. You write that way.”

If she hadn’t acted so defensively already in front of everyone earlier, she’d let Miller know that it’s not really a compliment, that. She’s so prone to fighting in these workshops, and it’s one of the reasons why Anya likes her. Some supervisors don’t let their students speak when their work is being discussed, so that they don’t drive the interpreted narrative. Anya is all about an author having that voice though, that ability to defend.

Wells will say to her later, “You connected to him, Clarke. That’s the point of this.”

Wells now though, focuses on Miller and asks him more about his next article in the upcoming edition, and Clarke feels like she’s just been on a run. Like she needs to sit in a dark room and repent for something. For being possessed by something, apparently. Repent for not becoming hers only.

And then Wells and Miller are talking for long enough that there aren’t many people left in here, and Clarke feels a little awkward when she sees Anya standing by the door with her satchel on her shoulder and her hand by the light. To turn it off. To urge them out.

“I don’t have anything for a couple of hours,” Wells says. “How’s a coffee?”

“How’s a coffee?” Clarke mouths at the wall, mocking him to no one and for no one to see.

“It’ll do,” Miller says, light, probably catching on to the funny talk and the way it adds color to a blue room. 

And she isn’t expecting that Bellamy guy to be leaning on the wall outside the classroom, books and paper in his arms and head back, like he’d be happy to wait forever. Like life is amusing him all the time, even when he’s doing nothing.

“You coming for coffee?” Miller asks him, and then all of this exhausting morning gains weight for Clarke. Because something inside of her droops and wilts, some petals of a flower she didn’t know could grow in the dark. Nightshade violets or something else made up. The dying leaves because he wasn’t out here waiting to speak to her.

“Sure,” Bellamy says, clocking the two of them.

She probably would have made an excuse to leave if she’d known they were friends. She doesn’t want to go for coffee with this guy.

She keeps Wells and Miller as a buffer between them the whole way to the café across campus, hopes to one day forget the awkward five minutes of Wells running into some people he knows from one of his many societies, stopping to chat to them and leaving Clarke to linger with Bellamy and Miller as they talk between themselves.

She’s sat with a poorly made flat white, watching the brown sugar on top of too much foam as it rests like a lily pad. It breaks through the surface tension, leaving a crater and steam comes out of that hole, and Clarke has a little moment to herself. Knowing she’s the only one that saw this geological event happen.

Bellamy sits down right next to her and Clarke looks out the window. Such a bright late September day. Just orange everywhere. Amber warnings maybe. Or pumpkin spice. Or fire on its way.

“So, is it real?” Bellamy asks, and Clarke turns to him. 

“What, the glass?”

“The Golem.”

“Oh.”

“Did you make it up?”

“It’s real folklore,” she says. He looks at her like she hasn’t answered his question though, vacant eyes that could be hazel if they weren’t so warm. Vacant, like they need to be filled with something. He has reading glasses on top of his head, but they’re only visible now that she’s actually paying attention, because his hair is curly and messy and swamping them. 

She wonders if they’re the kind that make his eyes seem bigger or smaller. She wonders how someone’s eyes could possibly seem bigger than his. She swallows, slow, before carrying on. He doesn’t give her an easy out. 

“There was this Rabbi in the sixteenth century; he wanted to protect the Czech Jewish community from the pogroms. The story says he collected the mud at the bottom of the Vltava, turned it to clay, alchemised some sense of man. He’d wander the streets at night, this clay thing protecting the ghetto. He’d rest on the Sabbath. People would say goodnight to his shadow and sleep easier. But he was like a child and so scared himself, and he turned, and he became this brute. They took his sense of man and locked him in some attic apparently. Some attic in some house in Prague, on his own. Some think he’s at rest. Some think he’s still scared. I think the word comes from ‘incomplete’. Means, in a way, everything but the soul.”

“Funny,” Bellamy says, and she realizes he’s listened to every word. “A clay man is everything natural. Water and earth and fire. Makes you wonder what the soul is if it isn’t anything natural.”

“Does it?” Clarke asks, because it’s an interesting thing to cling to. 

He nods at her and drinks from his mug. China, maybe clay once; she’s not sure how the life cycle of this stuff works when it’s not legend. She feels cheap that she asked for a paper cup, one with a plastic lid, one that will allow her to run at any second. He’s here in this shop to stay. 

“It’s super interpretive,” Clarke says, not wanting to seem objective. “There’s a version of the story that says the Rabbi carved the Hebrew word ‘emet’ on his head.”

She doesn’t know why, but she grabs a pen from her bag and reaches for one of the pieces of paper in his big stack. She hopes he won’t be annoyed if she scribbles in the corner. She writes the word down, and its translation. 

“Truth,” he reads purple ink, and shoves the paper a little more towards her. Like he wants more. Like he’s expecting her to fill the page with words. 

“And supposedly that was how he was given… I don’t know what to call the Pokémon before soul. What evolves into soul? Spirit?”

“That’s a question.” Bellamy nods, and he folds his arms, and he has that same amused glint in his eyes as he did earlier. She’d call it a sparkle if she were a romantic. She’s not one. 

“’Emet’ gave him spirit then. To deactivate him, or like, de-agent him, the Rabbi removed the ‘E’.”

Met, she writes below her first line, gives it the little equals sign. 

“Death.”

“I don’t know Hebrew,” she admits. “I’ve just heard the story.”

The Golem in her story was symbolic, was a metaphor for one of the characters and one of the girls giving her feedback had said that maybe she’d been running with it too much. That it could do with a simplification, and that the character was losing himself to the idea of a Golem. That the character wasn’t that identifiable or memorable by the end. Clarke needs to figure out a way of adapting the story to turn that into the whole point. To make it clear that that is the reason behind the writing.

Bellamy does something she doesn’t expect though. He reaches for her coffee cup and looks at it, studies it. Then he swipes her pen from her hand with a smirk and scribbles on it before handing it back.

Clarke realizes then that she really likes him. Like a lightbulb being switched on, that instant fire in a filament. 

He has added a big purple ‘E’ to her incorrectly spelt name. The hasty black marker ‘CLARK’ and how used to it she has become. How she never corrects them because she’s not an asshole. How in this room, and in just this second, he has made her become Clarke instead of Clark because apparently it felt important . 

“Cute,” she tells him, and he wears a smugness that was annoying her back in that class. With the flick of some switch, with a changed world, newly lit, in some twilight, Clarke finds it sort of endearing now.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Prague. I’ve heard it’s magical.”

“So have I.”

“Let’s go then,” he says, with a massive toothy grin and like anything at all is possible. Or more than that, like anything at all is easy. 

Clarke blushes for the first time today, because Miller and Wells are taking their seats opposite them, and what must they be thinking?

She stares at her coffee with a secret, slightly shameful, smile when she says “Okay.” Like there couldn’t possibly be another answer.

And then Miller asks her another question about her piece, and then they move on to slightly less niche topics of conversation, and the clock hands spin behind her head but Clarke doesn’t look at them once because she doesn’t want to be disappointed. She doesn’t want to be finished.

“We’re heading to a friend’s frat party tonight,” Wells announces, as his goodbye. 

When Clarke tells this story, not that she will, Raven will make some snarky joke about how Wells was hitting on this guy, and they’ll both pretend it’s just a joke, and then Raven will take a shot that wasn’t really on the cards before she heard about Miller.

Bellamy falls into step beside her as Miller and Wells move to leave, both of them too caught up to notice who they’re leaving behind. 

He has his hands in his pockets, reading glasses found and balanced on his nose bridge, and they do make his eyes look bigger. Supernatural. Clarke hugs her folder closer to her chest: she’s wearing a stupid Cornetto Trilogy t-shirt, because this was supposed to just be an insignificant couple of classes. A morning to forget. 

“Are those two flirting?” Bellamy asks, absent smirk, like it has been set in stone.

“Nah, he’s usually a lot more awkward when he’s flirting.”

“Which frat?”

“Does it matter?”

“No.” He laughs, and Clarke nearly trips over. “You’ll be there?”

“Give me your phone. I’ll text you the address.”

…

She and Raven had already planned their outfits. Her dress is on a hanger on the outside of her closet and her shoes are by the door, and she doesn’t stare at them for the majority of the afternoon. She has work to do. 

She’ll never understand why Monty even agreed to join a fraternity. He’s said he wanted to stay Jasper’s roommate, and she gets that to some extent, but Clarke suspects there must be some mates’ rates for weed involved. Monty has his priorities straight, after all.

“We could stay behind,” Clarke offers, swinging around in her desk chair, her sunglasses’ arm on her lip. “Make out for a while?”

“Tempting,” Raven says, holding up two equally drop-dead dresses. “Wells says you’re gonna score.”

“Wells always says that to get you to go out.”

“And you think it’ll stop working tonight?”

“I was hoping.”

“So you’re not gonna score?” 

Clarke kicks off her sneakers and turns her desk lamp off. 

“Stop projecting.”

…

There are way too many steps up to the frat house, and Clarke has to hold on to Raven’s elbow to make sure she doesn’t fall. They pre-gamed at the dorm and she’s trying not to regret that.

Wells is already here. He helped set up, got roped into it when Monty offered up some of his homemade brownies, and it’s pretty obvious they’ve already been cashed in. Wells is with that guy Miller, both of them talking too slowly to be any kind of sober, both squashed into one arm of the couch and gesturing toward the ornamental fireplace that has yellow caution tape across it. 

There was a chimney climbing incident last month. Clarke was there. They don’t talk about it.

Clarke promises herself she won’t look around. She promises herself she won’t keep an eye out. No, the only reason she offers to go and help Raven put their beers in the fridge is so that she has a crutch for these god awful tooth pick shoes that she was conned into at the last minute.

She doesn’t even have to break her own promise. He’s in the kitchen, leaning back against the counter with a red solo cup in his hand, and he hasn’t bothered changing his clothes from this morning. It’s almost busy in here, a good twenty people between her and Bellamy and it’s a big kitchen. 

She doesn’t put up a fuss when she gets lured away from the kitchen by an almost unsteady, slightly too eager Raven. She also doesn’t look back to see Bellamy laugh at a joke made by someone Clarke faintly recognises from another party, another frat. That damn laugh.

Monty is waving a joint at them when they get down to the basement, coquettish and demure, and Clarke puts it behind her ear for later. She’s buzzed as it is; if she starts smoking now she’ll black out. And there’s beer pong to play.

She’s awful. She loses. Several times over. She’s slightly more than buzzed when she stumbles back upstairs, definitely considering yanking these stupid heels off, and she finds Wells in the living room.

She lands in his lap ungraciously, and he laughs his foreign stoner laugh, and she beams up at him, searching for warmth because her skin is like this ice wall. Her stomach is a coalpit, her best friend is another, and she has goose bumps everywhere.

“Where’s your date?” She asks him, grin betraying her attempt at detached mocking. She can be inscrutable tomorrow.

“I thought she was with you,” he says, absent, his gaze adoring in the way that it always is. 

“Nuh uh, Raven’s pissed at you tonight.”

“What? Why?”

“Don’t expect me to get involved. I fucking hate this game.”

He hums, leans his head on top of hers, and she doesn’t know how long they stay like this for. People are dancing all around them, all over them. She doesn’t know how long, but she stays until her ankles quit feeling weak and until the jumping of paper cups feels normal. Then, another drink sounds like a great idea.

“You’re here.”

Oh. Him. She knew there was something she was trying to dodge. She doesn’t almost drop her fresh bottle, and the magnet that falls from the fridge isn’t her fault. Her teeth snap shut, and she looks over the door of the fridge, uses it for balance, pushes away and catches herself on the excessively big kitchen island. 

It’s black granite and stained with cloudy rings that overlap. Clarke closes her eyes.

“You sound surprised,” she gets out.

He moves closer, leans over the island, forearms flat against it. His proud smile is still there, and she can feel a heat radiating from his body. His jacket has been lost, and his shirt sleeves are rolled to his elbows, and there is something so nice about his skin. 

She pushes away and reaches for the sink, grabbing a cold sponge and wringing it out.

“Yeah, well I looked.” 

He’s eyeing her suspiciously, like the girl in a black dress and moronic stilettos can’t help clean up. She scrubs at the rings and throws the sponge back to the sink. 

His words only land when she can see herself in the glistening surface. Her makeup is a little smudged and her hair is all on one side of her head. 

“You did?”

“You invited me.”

“No, Wells invited you. In fact, Wells didn’t even invite you. Wells invited your friend.”

“Who ditched me at the first chance he had.”

“You look like you’ve managed,” Clarke rolls her eyes, and she decides it’s best off just not looking at him. Less tempting that way. He’s fucking radiating happy, and it’s either way too early for that or way too late, depending on his sobriety.

“I googled you,” Bellamy says, moving out of the way of some blonde girl reaching for what probably isn’t her drink, his arm brushing Clarke’s.

“You’re not really one to have a casual conversation, are you?”

“And you’re hellbent on pretending you’re not charmed.”

“Does this normally work for you?”

“What?”

She won’t address it. She won’t give in. He sees that too, and he takes the opportunity.

“You really hate soulmates.”

Clarke tuts her teeth, stands straight and picks up her bottle and takes his too at the last second. She walks away from him, heels barely making a sound on the tiles of the kitchen. 

He sticks close even if they aren’t touching, even if they don’t speak a word to one another.

She weaves through the sloppy hips and the frantic hands, and when Wells calls for her attention, slouched against the back of the sofa with a giggling Raven in between his legs, she raises her drinks to the pair of them.

The stairs are awkward. They pass two couples making out, someone throwing up over the grandiose banister, and Clarke has to yank down the hem of her dress to make sure Bellamy doesn’t get an eyeful. 

She’s been in Monty’s room before. He has one of those cliché vinyl record players all modern and done up and completely lacking in any soul. Jasper is sleeping on an air mattress in here because he broke his bed a few weeks ago doing God knows what.

She slumps down on the air mattress, back against the wall, and Clarke tugs her shoes off before she makes a move to speak. Bellamy lands next to her, making her go up and down like she’s passing over a wave, and his leg is leaning on hers. She can hear him breathing over loud punk music. Music too angry for a fucking frat party.

She hands him a bottle, the emptier one, and can’t remember whose was whose before. He grins in thanks and it’s strange enough to make Clarke cock her head to the side. 

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She hasn’t seen a shy version of him yet. They’re meeting backwards. He looks more like a stranger than he has all day. A really fucking gorgeous stranger with messy hair. No glasses tonight, maybe contacts. She’s never been good at seeing those. 

He looks to the wall opposite them, knowing grin on his face like she’s being entertaining. She isn’t. She isn’t being entertaining at all. The song changes and she barely recognises it, but recognises it enough.

Clarke takes the joint from behind her ear, keeps it balanced between her fingers and unlit. Jasper must have rolled this for them; he has a signature. 

“Why the guitar?” Bellamy asks, eyes up at the ceiling. 

“It was really expensive. He didn’t want it to get broken, or stolen, so he figured he’d put it somewhere that no one could get to it. People have tried. I think it’s nailed up there.”

“That’s genius.”

“Right?”

He gets a lighter out, and Clarke takes it from him before he can reach to light the joint himself. It’s hazard control. His hand near her mouth, him leaning in more than he should, best to just cut it off at the root.

It takes a couple of tries. It’s a mostly empty light and the metal hurts the skin of her thumb. She lets the smoke sit in her lungs for a moment. He holds his hand out, probably for the lighter, but she lets him take the joint. 

“I’m not a writer by the way,” he says, tapping the filter and eyeing the joint like it’s suspicious.

“I know.”

“You do?”

“You don’t have the pretentiousness. You’re just smug. It’s different,” Clarke decides, knocking his knee with hers and taking her poison back. “And most people don’t react like you did to finding out I’m published.”

“How do most people react?”

“It’s like this cross between jealousy and anger. Like ‘why does the privileged white chick think she has anything worth saying, anything more than the rest of us?’ which I get. A lot. I have to explain it’s just about luck... So let me guess, some obscure dead language?”

He scoffs, and he lets his head fall back on the wall with a knock, and someone on the other side of it knocks back. Clarke doesn’t know if she’s imagining it.

“Close. I’m a history major but I’m specializing in Roman civilisations.”

“Latin?”

“Yeah.”

Clarke grins, all shrugged chin and hopeless. She leans her head back too. The wall feels softer than it should. 

“So, if what normally works isn’t working right now, what do I have to do? Show you my scars? I’ve got some good ones.”

Clarke winces but checks his shoulder with hers. The entire room smells stale and earthy, so does his breath, but it’s the addictive kind. 

“No thanks. I’ve had enough of scars.”

“You and Wells, you’re not together?” He asks, probably surprised that she hasn’t mentioned him yet. 

“The ten hanging from his neck wasn’t enough of a giveaway?”

“I don’t know what you’re into. You seemed coupley.”

“We’re close,” Clarke grants, dipping her head to the side. “He’s good. They’re soulmates, those two.”

“So that’s why?” Bellamy asks, still hung up on his excuse of a question. 

“Jesus, no. Wells is practically my brother. I don’t even know what coupley is.”

She probably wouldn’t admit that if she were sober. She definitely wouldn’t. It’s not something he needs to know.

The way he’s looking at her though, whatever it is he’s thinking, it makes her feel like he might need to know. 

“What do you make of souls?”

He averts his eyes, head rolling to look at the ceiling, wry smile on his face as though he’s been caught out. She’s categorizing each expression for the next time she gets stuck in a rut. It can never hurt to have one more muse.

“I avoid them when I can.” He nods, pragmatic, breathing in and expelling soft smoke, almost cartoon with how much softer it is than any other kind of smoke. “Not good for objectivity.”

“Right. I meant visually. What do you see?”

Clarke doesn’t know why she’s asking, what answer he could possibly give that would appease the rabid part of her. His voice is dark and sexy in the movie star kind of way; maybe that’s why.

“My soul?”

“Anyone’s.”

He does think, for long enough for Clarke to appropriately call it silence. Long enough for Clarke to take another drag. Her fingers catch on the lit end, and she stubs it out on the side of a mug half filled with three day old ramen. 

“I used to think I saw water,” he says, eyes caught on something in the corner of the room, caught on nothing that’s actually there. 

“Yeah?” She simpers. She allows herself to simper, for a moment, just a moment. 

Words slow. Not quite flailing. “Like, angry blue. Mad at the world saltwater.”

“Profound,” Clarke snorts.

“Oh yeah?” He looks back down at her, eyes dancing with amusement and something peaceful and dark masking them. He is wearing that small smile again, the wonky sort. “What do you see?”

“I don’t.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No seriously,” she promises, hands raised. “I don’t see souls. I don’t get them, the concept. Thinking about it makes my head hurt.”

Bellamy is still watching her, all haze and soft cloud, and she doesn’t know if it is her mind that tells her his arm raises slowly, or if his movement really is that lethargic. His relaxed fist lands on top of her head, the heel of his palm grazing her forehead, his thumb traveling along her hairline. 

Maybe it’s something that should be awkward. It doesn’t feel awkward. All she can smell is good quality weed and her lungs are hot, and he’s close, really close.

Neither of them lean in. They’ve already done all of the work: they’re already practically nose to nose. He just moves his hand down, fingers still curled in, knuckles brushing her cheek a little too clumsy to be any kind of romantic.

The air mattress wobbles, the sounds of people shrieking shoot like arrows through the open window, and Clarke tastes the same good weed, something else recognisably sharp, his lips rough and persistent as they brush against hers.

And it’s over so quickly that she wouldn’t even call it a kiss. Just a touch, like a greeting. Like a ‘Hello, it’s you. I know you now.’

“I’ve only just met you,” Clarke breathes.

“You asked me what I think of souls.”

“You googled me.”

He laughs, his lips hovering just barely above hers, the sound something a lot like syrup. She’d inject it straight into her veins to hear that again.

“I think it’s fair to say we’ve skipped the formalities.”

Someone drops a keg outside, saving them; it tumbles down the too-many stairs and she can hear Jasper make a dive for it.

“Bellamy,” she tries, voice clearer than she thought it could be. “I don’t- I am mad at the world.”

“We’re all mad at the world.” He shakes his head dismissively, an easy smile on his face as though this was a given, as though he finds it funny that she thinks this could put him off. It’s warming. It’s still fucking dangerous. “Haven’t I mentioned the scars?”

Clarke doesn’t know how to explain to him everything that she needs to explain before he takes her dress off. So the dress is staying on. She’s drunk, she’s high, she’s way too distracted by the moving lump in his throat and his glassy eyes.

She’s had hook-ups. She even had one bright blue blowtorch of an almost-relationship that burnt out before it could truly kill her off. Maybe it’s the smoke and the quiet of just the two of them right now, but Bellamy doesn’t feel like just a hook-up. She doesn’t want to just hook up with him.

“I don’t believe in glittery relationships, or slow sex and cooking together,” she says inept and heavy handed, putting her hand over his on her leg- when did that even get there?- so that he doesn’t think she’s pushing him away. Her mind is cloudy, she might be sending mixed signals.

“Can I stay here?” Bellamy asks, when they’re heavy and the world has started passing by agonizingly slowly. The music is drowning and people are still tumbling over one another, and they might not even be the only ones in this room anymore.

“Yeah. Stay.”

She doesn’t tip her head on to his shoulder, the room tips itself for her, his body tips itself for her, and she doesn’t fall asleep to the sound of his breathing because she can’t really hear it. His hand is still and warm, and makes a lot of things easy to forget.

…

Bellamy Blake: I’m buying you a coffee.

Clarke isn’t in the habit of checking her phone every few seconds, but she’s also not in the habit of leaving it on silent. She likes the wine glass taps of her text tone and she’s pretty sure that she’s at least three people’s emergency contact. 

She’s reading through the lecture notes that she missed yesterday. She was busy fumbling with Devil sent high heels and Jasper’s slowly deflating air mattress, and the hand that Bellamy- in his dead to the world state- wouldn’t quite let go of.

He grumbled when she rushed a not so apologetic goodbye, his head sliding some more down the wall. She refused to think about how cute he looked, because no one looks cute when they’re hungover. So he wasn’t cute. Thinking about that any more was just a risk.

The lecture was boring, from what she can read. And the information sounds pretty imminent.

Right now?

She doesn’t even have to put her phone down before the wine glass tries to make another toast.

Bellamy Blake: Tonight.

Bellamy Blake: Seven.

Bellamy Blake: For purely selfish reasons.

She grins because there’s no one here to see it.

Your motives are yours so long as I’m getting free coffee out of it

Bellamy Blake: Two.

Bellamy Blake: If you’re good.

What do you need?

Bellamy Blake: Advice.

Bellamy Blake: Not advice.

Bellamy Blake: Critique.

Bellamy Blake: No, not critique.

Bellamy Blake: My turn to submit a short story to the workshop. I don’t want to cast it off blindly.

Toes are for dipping

Bellamy Blake: Exactly.

Clarke chews her tongue for a moment. It doesn’t sound like anything more than a coffee. A study date- no not a date. It doesn’t sound like a date.

Wells is probably the go to. He writes fantasy and prose, I don’t doubt that’s your thing

The reply takes a lot longer this time. She supposes he must have put his phone down in the time it took her to figure out how to be normal. Or she could suppose that, if she ignored the three dots moving coyly for the minute’s silence.

Bellamy Blake: I’d really love to hear what you have to say.

Clarke waits for more but nothing follows. And honestly, how is she supposed to say no to that?

…

He chooses the late night coffee shop near her house because he knows she doesn’t drive, and she doesn’t change from what she’s been wearing all day because it’s not a date. 

It’s busier than she expected it to be, considering they’re still in their first semester and it’s a Friday night. Still, he has a table in the window, in the corner, and there is an empty seat across from him, covered in a jacket that must be his to warn off any eagle eyes.

He’s wearing his glasses and his hair is wild, and Clarke tries not to smile too wide when she sees his knee jerking violently underneath the table. He’s a newbie. He’s supposed to have nerves. She shouldn’t be so smug.

It takes a couple of awkward throat clearing coughs before he looks up from the small stack of bound pages in his hand. When he does, Clarke waves. 

She’s not exactly smooth. Especially not when she’s confused.

“You came?” His smile, as though it has never left, bounces straight back. 

Clarke brushes his jacket aside and sits opposite him, folding one leg over the other and ignoring the draft at the center of the round table.

He leans forward, and pushes his glasses up with one finger. Of all of his moves, that’s definitely one of her favorites.

“You weren’t expecting me to?”

She considers him, then checks her watch. She is twenty minutes early. 

He makes an excuse to leave her alone when he finally hands over his clean copy, shoving his own marred draft into the depths of a backpack that is falling apart more than it’s being held together. She wants vanilla today, so he wanders over to buy her the promised coffee, and she pretends that she can’t feel him looking over every few seconds to gauge initial reactions.

He arrives before she’s finished, then sits awkwardly twiddling his thumbs, and someone gets kicked out for waving a chair around by the legs. 

Here is definitely not the place to read something like this, but she does. Twice. 

He takes his coffee black, and it’s mostly gone by the time she’s done with formulating. He has a pencil behind his ear like he thinks he needs bracing for something. 

“Are you a virgin?”

She probably shouldn’t have waited until he moved his mug to his lips, but in her defense, the timing is completely coincidental. 

Clarke gets to watch him splutter quietly, gets to watch him wince from hot coffee finding a way to hit his nose, then she gets to watch a new smile drift on to his face once he’s regained composure. Definitely new. Definitely unsure.

“What makes you think that?”

“You write like a virgin.”

“You seriously think you can tell?”

Clarke shrugs. Maybe that was a misfire. 

“So are you one of those people who clings to the one negative comment they get out of a hundred others? Because if you are, I’ll waste the first hour giving you praise.”

She doesn’t know why she says that. It’s not a courtesy he afforded her, and they had an audience then. But he is new to this, is just taking this module because it was one recommended by his supervisor, and the world tastes like vanilla.

Bellamy looks tempted, the cheeky side of him spilling over whatever dam he’s been working on building over the past half hour. At his silence, Clarke takes her own answer from him.

“I can tell you’re a rookie. You’re using a lot of adverbs, the pacing is off and dragging, and that’s taking away from the real message of the piece. Plus, you’re obsessed with the word ‘repossess’ and that’s just… strange. But honestly?”

“Honestly?”

“I feel like I’m reading something that’s been around fifty years. Like it will be around for another fifty. You’re a rookie, but it adds this vulnerability, since you’re telling a story from a girl who’s never known much anyway. It works, your naivety.”

“I’m not naïve.”

“You sound it here,” Clarke says, her tongue twisted clearly, or maybe she’s taken on a whole new dialect or something. She can’t figure out how to say how she really feels and make it clear that she feels it in a complementary way. She gets Miller’s struggle now. And his. “But it’s beautiful. I think there’s something profound that comes with saying what you’re saying when it’s all you’re able to say. Adds depth to it.”

Clarke leans forward, and he’s gone sort of pale, and she can’t tell if it’s a good pale or a bad pale. 

“You’re fucking humble. When you write. No one does that; it’s like, a writer’s one chance to be obnoxious.”

He laughs, slightly startled, and then he leans in too. All four of their hands are on the table, a too small table, and Clarke doesn’t look down to them. She’ll take his if she thinks about it enough.

“I thought you were going to be hard to impress,” he admits, in a way that makes it sound as far from an insult as possible, especially when he rubs at the back of his neck. 

“I can pretend to be disappointed.”

“No, I’d rather you didn’t.”

She does go over the things she didn’t like. He asked for her opinion, and she’d feel a little useless if she didn’t give him something constructive, but they’re actually discussing the story by the time Clarke has finished her coffee.

Actually discussing what he was trying to do with it, where he came up with something that moving, and Clarke speaks to him with both hands over her copy, just in case he tries to take it back from her.

The sun sets. The café gets even busier. He buys her another coffee and this time, Clarke keeps her head down because she needs a minute to get rid of her pathetic grin. 

When Bellamy comes back, she crosses her legs, all elementary school, and she asks more about this sister. He’s mysterious, in that generic asshole way, but the way he opens up has nothing generic about it. 

And then he’s talking to her about this Greek mythology graphic novel written by some tragic Australian academic, hands moving everywhere and eyes wired, and there’s nothing mysterious about him and there’s nothing asshole about him.

The coffee shop closes at midnight, but they’re still nowhere near finished, so when Clarke picks up her bag and shoulders it with a nod, he doesn’t even look surprised.

She is telling him about her childhood dog and the time she lost him, how they had to keep it a secret for a few days and how Wells skipped school to help her look for him. 

Bellamy’s smile doesn’t fade, doesn’t weaken, he just keeps a fist on the strap of his backpack and an eye out for the dodgy characters they pass.

She takes him to Eden, the hole in the wall pizza place that Raven calls her honeytrap. She wouldn’t normally walk through the city streets at one in the morning, even with a cheese slice and nowhere to be tomorrow, but the city feels safer with Bellamy.

Neither of them suggest calling it a night. They just keep walking, talking to one another like they’re on their way home and are trying to make up for the time they’re about to lose, but neither of them are losing time. 

They’re sitting on a bench at the bottom of the bridge, the river that runs through the town all ghost and quiet. There are glass bottles and empty needles and takeout cartons at her feet, and some European drill music is playing in the distance, and the city lights are clashing cherry red and warm amber and electric blue.

Bellamy had initially got his phone out to prove that their town is on a ley line when Clarke waved him off, but now she has an earphone hanging from the wrong ear, the cheap plastic cord turned gray and some of the wires skinned.

Etta Marcus is playing, really quiet. Unexpected but definitely not unwelcome. 

“My sister likes it,” he excuses when it comes on, a tiny blush on the tip of his nose because it’s fall at witching hour.

Clarke hums, honestly doesn’t care either way. It’s cool. The song.

She’s sat cross-legged again, arm brushing his so that they can both listen. 

“So I genuinely want to know now,” Bellamy says, a couple of choruses in, nudging her. “Who’s your guy?”

Clarke sighs, but it’s probably only fair. She’d ignored his question yesterday, when he asked who her favorite writer was for the sake of conversation. It had felt too personal in daylight. Like she would lose her skin again.

“No moves?”

“No moves.”

“O’Hara.”

She doesn’t look at him to gauge his reaction. The song is getting louder on its own, and he’s oddly quiet, and looking will just make her panic.

“Say something then.” She gets impatient. Not her best trait, but surely this is a pretty good excuse.

“Sorry,” he laughs softly, and she’s suddenly very aware of his arm behind her, balanced on the back of the bench, not even touching her, just there. “I’m trying to figure out how to pretend I’ve heard of her.”

“Him.”

“Oh. Sounds feminine.”

“I have some of his stuff back at my apartment. You can borrow it if you’d like.” She doesn’t know why she offers. She doesn’t get to geek out about poetry nearly as often as she’d like to, and Bellamy has thrown himself into the deep end. Maybe a part of her wants to take advantage of that.

“Yeah.” He grins, all smug and familiar, like she has known him forever. “I’d like. No personal recital then?”

“You think I could?”

“To be honest, I think you could do anything. I’m at that stage.”

His fingers are tapping softly against the metal rail, out of rhythm and lazy. She focuses on that instead.

Clarke reads him On a Mountain . It’s nothing ground-breaking, she isn’t trying to get him to ‘understand’ something. “He was an expressionist,” she tells him, following his gaze to the pitch black river. “I don’t know. There aren’t many who were honest. Like, really honest. When I read his work, I can’t see bias. Maybe that’s my bias. Ironically.”

Bellamy laughs. She tries not to be proud of that.

He goes quiet again, mind whirring. She watches him this time, maybe with a twinkle in her eye, maybe with nothing of the sort. She really wants to make out with him.

“Humility and honesty. And you say you don’t like slow sex and cooking together.”

“I never said I don’t like it,” Clarke scoffs, folding her arms across her chest. It’s getting colder, even if the sun is starting to come up. Dawn is always colder than the witching hour. “I said I don’t believe in it.”

“In the future of them? In their value?”

“You’re sort of obsessed with soulmates, you know that?”

“Not at all,” he grins, his arm shifting a little. She can feel his body heat unraveling, seeping out over the bench and tucking her in. “I’m just curious. I’m allowed to want to know more about you.”

“Of course you are. But there’s no love. Falling into it or whatever.”

His smile doesn’t even falter, and he’s listening, and for a moment Clarke forgets that there is anyone alive left on Earth.

“Steady Clarke, we only met yesterday.”

“I don’t mean now.” She focuses on a little wooden boat pitched in the center of the river. She absently wonders how anyone could have parked it there and stayed dry getting back. It would have been bold a few years ago. “I mean ever.”

“This is your honesty, huh?” He doesn’t look offended. Maybe slightly drawn back, slightly hesitant. But his arm behind her was only his arm behind her after all. They haven’t done anything damning. 

They’re two people who click. Having scars and soulmates shouldn’t stop her from wanting to learn him, but Clarke knows her limits. And she likes him enough to warn him of them. 

He finds her little red boat in the river, breathing slow. 

“Okay. Well, you’re gorgeous, there’s no denying it.” He turns and faces her again, beaming. “But I’m not feral. I feel like I’ve known you before. So, Clarke Griffin, will you be my friend?”

She can’t help but mirror him. If she hadn’t been wired wrong, she’d haul him down to the riverbank and they’d swim out to her little red boat. They’d drift in the rising sun. 

Clarke watches his waiting eyes as her smile leaves. One more contradiction, she tells herself. One moment of strength. Seconds of bravery. She leans in and kisses him. She knows he isn’t expecting it, but she can’t tell that from his lips. The way they meet her like they have been waiting all night. His hand on her cheek, soft and sweet. The kiss stays chaste, stays peaceful. They’re both saying goodbye to something. 

Her fingers are wrapped in his shirt when they part. Her mind is empty, and his cheeks are flushed. 

She can still feel his breath when she says, “Bellamy Blake, I want nothing more,” and for now, right now, she means it.