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All things considered, Bellamy might have seen this coming. He loved museums. Clarke loved museums. Given their respective skill sets and the fact that they lived in a not-huge city, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that they’d end up in the same place, him as the junior curator and her leading the development and fundraising team.
And he probably should’ve seen her frosty resentment coming from a mile off. He hadn’t known everyone he would be working with when he moved back to the town he’d grown up in to take the job. He’d seen her for the first time at the welcome meeting with the board and the other department directors, and even knowing their history, his breath still hitched in happy surprise. She looked mostly the same at 24 as she had two years before, all golden waves and silver tongue. Somehow she managed to be polite but dismissive, then make some excuse to the board for skipping out early. Donor event, she’d said. Now it was obvious that not wanting to get stuck talking to him after the meeting was at least a factor.
Even with her general surliness, Clarke wasn’t bad to work with. She had connections with the local donor community through her parents, and she used her background in graphic design to help the communications team with new campaigns. They collaborated well-ish. (Mostly he would say something, like, “I wish there was more interest in the left wing exhibits,”; she would nod, leave, and make it happen.) The biggest problem was that she kept subtly undermining him, in front of the board and to donors.
“The museum practically runs itself,” she’d say with a smirking shrug. When he would tell the directors how they’d worked together to make a new initiative happen, she would recount what she’d done and leave him to account for his own contributions. It was nothing overt, but he knew her. Clarke wanted him gone, and he had all faith that, whether it was this year or the year after next, she would succeed. So he had to bite the bullet.
He’d tried to talk to her before, obviously. The first time they’d had to work together one-on-one, then again when they both left a benefit around the same time. Each time, she’d brushed him off, saying that they needed to stay on-task or she had somewhere else to be. In eight months, he hadn’t managed to get a cordial word out of her, much less a conversation with any warmth in it. Who could blame him, he thought a little wildly, for going to extremes?
“Extremes”, in this case, consisted of locking them both in a glass exhibit case. The “local marshes and wetlands” exhibit, to be specific; the one full of plastic flora and taxidermy’d fauna. A volunteer who had gone home sick early in the night had emailed Clarke just before closing, saying that she’d dropped her phone, probably in the wetlands case, and could she take a look for it? Clarke had swung into Bellamy’s office and said that she might be staying late so he didn’t need to set the alarm after he left. Seizing the opportunity, he’d waited a grand total of two minutes before following her.
Somehow Bellamy managed to lock the door without an audible click, so Clarke didn’t notice him until she turned around. He’d debated sitting on the big plastic stump to seem nonthreatening, but frankly, he needed to be a little threatening right now, or she’d bully him into letting them out.
After a single flicker of surprise, she ground out a flat, “What are you doing?”
He folded his arms and leaned back against the door. “Apologizing.”
Her eyes narrowed. “For what?”
“For whatever I did that made you hate me.” He shrugged. “I’m sure it’s a long list, so if you wanna start now, we can probably get home before midnight.”
Her response was Formulaic Clarke: cross arms, contort mouth into stony grimace, roll eyes, and huff through her nose. “I don’t hate you, Bellamy, and I’m sure as hell not staying here til midnight.”
It was her standard angry denial, he knew, that she only broke out when she really wanted to cop out of talking about something.
Now he did sit down on the stump. “I’d rather not either, but it’s up to you. I can wait.” When she stayed silent, he sighed and propped his elbows on his knees. “Look, I know you’re mad. I also know you probably have every right to be. So just talk to me, and we can deal with it.”
Her jaw worked for a second before she spoke, haltingly. “It’s just..too much. Okay? Too much to talk about right now. And odds are, it won’t do any good.”
Bellamy gave a rueful little grin. “I know you’re a champion grudge-holder. But come on. I’ll start, just tell me when I’m getting warm.” She made an exasperated noise of protest, but he went on. “I left.”
“You had to leave.” This she said, for once, without a hint of reproach. “I wouldn’t have stopped you.”
“Fine. I had to, but I didn’t have to do it the way I did.” He eyed her skeptically. “Come on– a letter on the counter, then not answering your texts after the two weeks? I could’ve handled things better.”
She shook her head. She just looked sad now. “No. Your mom had just died, and as much as I didn’t like it, I’m the last person to criticize how you dealt with it.”
It was more generous than he’d expected. “Fine. But I wouldn’t answer your calls. I didn’t visit. I dropped off the map completely. Sixty to zero in 2.5.”
Finally she gave a begrudging little nod, just a dip of the chin.
“It didn’t help that I kept in touch with Miller. And Monty. And Raven sometimes.”
A more emphatic nod, and a speaking glance.
“I know it doesn’t change anything, and it doesn’t really help, but just so you know, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to you. I did.”
“Then why didn’t you?” she demanded, suddenly loud in the small enclosure.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. My life had gone from shitty to amazing to shitty again. I was living with my alcoholic aunt and taking care of Octavia. Working two bullshit jobs and finishing my Ph.D part-time with awful funding. I knew Miller and everybody from before, but you were just this…iconic thing. The one thing that reminded me of how good I had it, and how good I might never have it again. I didn’t want to drag you into my new old life. It wasn’t good enough for you.”
Clarke studied his face, then her shoes. “That’s not fair. I’m not a thing, and you don’t get to decide what’s good enough for me.” She looked up at him. “Whatever your situation was, you would’ve been good enough.”
He shrugged helplessly, because as much as he wanted to believe her… “You’re right on the first count. People don’t belong on pedestals, and it just ended up hurting both of us. I made a lot of mistakes, I know I did. But the worst was how I treated you. So I get it if you’re mad, but I just don’t want you to be…hurt, I guess.”
She laughed humorlessly. “I’m not mad. I’m sad, I think, with a side of bitter. And it’s not anything you did before, really. I’m about as over that as I’m going to get. It’s just that,” she gestured broadly, “this is what we wanted. You and me, curating, fundraising. I didn’t think we’d ever get it, after you left, and now we have.”
“But it’s tainted,” he finished for her.
A grim nod. “Yeah. We got what we wanted, but not how we wanted it, so now it’s just. Wrong. It feels wrong. And I can forget about it when I’m doing my job, when I’m busy. But every time we have to meet, every time I hear my phone beep and it’s an email from you, it’s just reminds me that no matter what I do, I’m only ever going to have this fragment of what I used to want.”
“Used to want?” He kept his tone level, but it was a near thing.
“Yeah. God. Maybe. I don’t know. You spend enough time thinking you’ll never have something, and you have to make yourself stop wanting it. Just so it doesn’t hurt as bad anymore.” Clarke looked lost. Bellamy could see the words lining up behind her teeth, but she was gritting them too hard, refusing to let anything out.
He met her gaze steadily. “You don’t have to do that. You can want whatever you want. Jesus, you can probably have whatever you want, if it’s something I can give you.”
“What do you want?” she fired back, too quickly. Defensive. Too close.
Bellamy hitched a shoulder. “Something better than this. There’s no picking up where we left off, I know, but we can be…something. Friends at least. Because this sucks.”
Finally a real laugh, albeit a soft one. “Yeah. This does suck. And I can’t keep it up. God help me, I still like you too much. You’re still…” She lifted a hand and dropped it. “You’re still you.”
“For better or worse, yeah. And if that’s still someone you’re interested in being around,” he smiled, a little dopier than he meant to, “I’d like to. Be around you, I mean.”
“I think it is.” Then, “Have you eaten?”
“Nope.” It was a lie, but his dopey smile was entering grin territory.
“You wanna get waffles?” A casual offer, but she couldn’t keep the edge of her mouth from crooking up, a little hesitant and a little hopeful.
“I really do.”
“You wanna let us out of here?”
Bellamy fumbled for the key in his pocket and turned toward the door. “Yeah, let me just…” He looked over his shoulder at her, still grinning, just as awkward as the day they met. “Good talk.”
Clarke rolled her eyes, smiling too. “Yeah. Good talk.” She gave him a little thump between the shoulder blades, the first voluntary contact she’d made in three years. “Now hurry up. You know talking about deep shit makes me hungry.”