Chapter Text
She learns about him before she even meets him.
The first person who tells her about him is Wells.
“There’s this guy in my dorm with like a massive chip on his shoulder,” He says nonchalantly, as if that’s not going to pique Clarke’s interest.
“Meaning?” She asks, as she sips on her tea.
“Meaning he’s constantly getting into fights and shit. He looks like he’s been through a wood chipper.”
The second person is also coincidentally, her first friend at college.
“There’s always one psycho in every dorm,” Monty tells her, jabbing at the buttons of his controller with practiced ease, “In our dorm, it’s this kid called Bellamy Blake. He punched this kid, Atom, I think? For like, no reason whatsoever. Just because he felt like it.”
“That’s hardcore,” Clarke manages.
Monty gives her a look. “That’s just psychotic, Clarke.” (Princess Peach crashes into a wall and plunges to her watery death with a high pitched squeal. Clarke throws down her controller and admits total defeat.)
She hears about him last from Raven.
“Shit,” She says, “How can someone so problematic be so attractive?”
Clarke looks up from her sketchbook, catches a glimpse of broad shoulders, mussed, dark hair. Raven jabs her hard, cricks her neck towards the left. He’s seated at the table next to theirs. She ducks her head back down, pretends to be absorbed in her drawing before peeking through her lashes.
Objectively, he’s attractive, she thinks grudgingly. Obscenely attractive. Clarke is a little distracted by the sharp angle of his jaw, the freckles spread across his nose. He’s all tanned skin and purplish bruises and that shouldn’t be attractive, but it kind of is. She watches the muscles of his back ripple through his tight blue shirt and her mouth feels a little dry.
“Holy shit, is he reading? I didn’t know he could read.”
“Raven, shut up.” She hisses. His jaw clenches, long fingers tightening on the spine of the book. Clarke holds her breath.
Then it’s over. He gets up abruptly, book shoved messily into his bag, and strides off. Raven exhales, thumping her head against the table. “Fuck. I thought he was going to beat the shit out of me.”
“Yeah,” Clarke says absentmindedly, her fingers flying over the page as she sketches his receding profile, “Definitely.”
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College is different. A good kind of different, Clarke tells herself sternly, but she misses home. She misses her old friends and her parents and even the shitty diner where she used to do her homework. She misses how easy everything used to be.
Nothing is certain here. She makes friends at a glacial pace and her classes are challenging. She spends a lot of time holed up in her dorm room eating greasy pizza and highlighting. (God, so much highlighting.)
By her second week, her mom is worried about her lack of a social life so Clarke decides to shake things up. Instead of crying over her essay in her room, she decides to cry over it in the library. With coffee.
She’s blearily editing her essay, glasses askew, hair greasy all the way down to the tips, when she realises who she has been sitting next to.
It’s 10 on a Friday night so there’s hardly anyone else in here, but well, Bellamy Blake. He’s pointedly not looking at her and she’s sort of, well, staring.
The bruises on his face have faded a little but she can still make out the outline of it. His shoulders are tense, but he doesn’t radiate the same hostility she felt the first time she saw him. He wears glasses too, she thinks to herself stupidly.
“What are you staring at?” He snarls, and she turns her face back to her laptop, a flush working up her cheeks. Fuck.
“Nothing,” She says curtly and she thanks all the universes and the deities that her voice doesn’t tremble.
He doesn’t say anything back, but she hears him sigh after. Weary and worn out and tired. “Sorry.” He mutters quietly, “Having a bad week.”
Clarke doesn’t trust herself to speak so she just nods at her screen. They lapse back into silence.
They don’t speak for the next few hours and it’s weird how at ease she feels with the supposed school psycho. He gets up to pee once and when he comes back, shoots her a weird look, as if he’s scandalized she didn’t steal his stuff or vandalize his notes.
She’s about ¾ done with her essay when she realises her laptop is dying. “Fuck,” She swears under her breath, scrambling for her charger in her bag. There isn’t a power outlet by her cubicle but there’s one by Bellamy’s and she’ll be damned if she loses five hours of work just because her laptop dies.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He yelps when she swoops down to his ankle.
“Charging my damn laptop,” She snaps, struggling with the tangled wire, “Jesus!” (She’s never rolling up her fucking charger again. Or she’s buying one of those clips. This is downright ridiculous.) She gives it a hard shake, hoping the wires will miraculously slip out of its knots. They stay stubbornly coiled into a heap. She tugs on one end, hard, and it snaps onto her laptop. Thank god. She’ll sort out the mess later.
“You’re kind of a mess,” He says mildly.
“Thanks captain obvious.” The corners of his mouth twitch a little, like he’s holding back a smile. She is not remotely pleased by that. Not at all.
Clarke falls asleep sometime around midnight and when she wakes, hair in her mouth, she realises that he untangled the wire for her. And also drank her coffee. Bastard.
He’s left a post-it note for her, bright orange. Get some sleep, princess. P.S you misspelled ‘machiavellianism’
He’s drawn a little crown by princess. It’s pitiful, actually. She thought it was a porcupine at first. She stares at the note, corrects the word in her essay, and sweeps it into her sketchbook.
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By some fucked up twist of fate, he ends up in her sociology class. This time sporting a fresh bruise by his left eye, raised and a little swollen. He sits towards the back and the rest of the class gives him a wide berth- not that she blames them- with his leather jacket and the bruises and the pen dangling by his teeth; he was beyond intimidating.
She forces herself to focus on the coursework structure for the next hour, taking down notes and occasionally doodling funny sketches of her friends in the margins. She’s drawing Monty with an inflated head when she hears it.
“This subject is project-based so I will need you to get into pairs and work on the assignment. Once you’ve gotten your partner, you can’t switch for the rest of the semester.” Professor Indra barks. “You have five minutes.”
Clarke’s debating between the friendly looking girl two rows down or the dark-haired guy five seats down when he slides in next to her, smooth and sure.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” She says.
“Oh come on. I did you a favour last week.”
“You drank my coffee,” Clarke mutters, “I needed that.”
He shrugs, “I’ll buy you another.”
And that’s the story of how Bellamy Blake becomes her sociology partner, and also, incidentally, the story of how she gets his number, scribbled in black ink against her palm.
(She keys it into her phone carefully after he leaves, saves the contact under ‘dipshit who drank my coffee.’ Adds in two angry emojis for effect. For some strange, obscure reason, she hopes he sees it one day.)
__________________________________
He disappears halfway through class the next week. She chalks it up to typical irresponsibleness or just one of his moods and starts drawing up a flow chart for the assignment.
She’s midway through formulating a very comprehensive chart when her phone starts blaring the old timey telephone noise. She fumbles for it, ducks under the table, and hisses, “This better be good.”
“Hey there, princess.” He says and she feels a swell or irritation at the stupid nickname.
“Where the hell are you? And why are you calling me in the middle of the class you’re supposed to be in?”
“So I kind of need to cash in on that favour now.”
She’s exasperated but okay, also curious, so instead of hanging up on him, she asks, “What?”
“I need you to bring my bag down to the parking lot by the building.”
“And you can’t come get it yourself because…?”
“I’m bleeding a little too heavily to be walking anywhere, Clarke.”
Shit fuck. “Do you, erm. Do you need me to call you an ambulance?”
“Not really,” He says, all to casual for someone who’s apparently bleeding out in a parking lot, “I just really need my things.”
“Okay,” She manages, “I’ll be there in 5.”
She gives Professor Indra some lame excuse about cramps, packs up his bag and stumbles out of the classroom. It takes her a little while to orientate herself but she eventually figures out the direction to the carpark and starts walking.
Clarke sees the blood trail first before spotting him.
He’s holding a wad of tissues up to his nose, blood slick against his fingers. He smiles crookedly at her when she crouches down next to him, reaching for his bag against her shoulder.
“So what happened here?”
Bellamy snorts, voice a little muffled with the tissues pressed up against his nose, “Got into a fight. Nothing new.”
“Don’t keep your head raised.”
“What?”
“You’re swallowing the blood back” She says, reaching to tilt his chin down, “Keep your head at this angle instead.”
“What are you, a doctor?”
“I actually considered studying pre-med,” She says dryly, staring at the stream of blood by his sneakers. There’s a lot of it but from where she’s standing his nose doesn’t look broken.
“Thanks. You can leave, you know.”
“No, no,” She says sarcastically, sinking to the ground, “I really just want to watch you bleed out. It’s pretty satisfying.”
He groans and scuffs the side of her shoes with his sneaker. It’s a surprisingly companionable gesture.
“So who’s the person treating you like a punching bag?”
“Who says I’m not picking the fights?”
“Well, I don’t think you’ll pick a fight for no reason,” She says irritably.
“I could just be that fucked up.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so.”
He’s quiet for a while and just when Clarke considers leaving, he says, “My sister.”
She laughs, incredulous, “Your sister is the one beating the shit out of you?”
He laughs at that, and she catches a glimpse of perfectly aligned teeth, stained red, “No. Her ex-boyfriend actually. He’s been trying to bother her but I’ve been, ah, dissuading him.”
“That’s, erm.” She scrambles for a word. Impressive? Psychotic? Protective. Kind of sweet, actually. She settles for, “Crazy.”
“I know,” Bellamy says, wincing as he gets to his feet, “But she’s my sister. My responsibility.”
“This feels a little beyond the usual big brother duties.”
He throws the wad of tissues into his bin, sniffing. His face is bloody, knuckles bruised and she’s suddenly overwhelmed with a wave of fondness for him, someone she barely knows.
It’s strange but Bellamy Blake makes her heart ache in a strange way she can’t entirely comprehend. She doesn’t feel sorry for him, no, not like that, but she feels for him.
She wishes she could explain it, could put it into words, tell him that she understands, tell him that she respects him, even, but the words feel heavy and wrong on her tongue. She pats his shoulder awkwardly instead.
“I hope this all works out,” She manages, right before they part ways.
Bellamy smiles at her, a real one- not a smirk, not a twitch of his lips- “I’ll see you next week, princess.”