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Clarke first sees him at the library, sat on the floor between the stacks of Ancient Mythology, with an enormous book on his lap. He isn’t looking at it, just rubbing his hands over the pages, and she doesn’t really understand until she gets a little closer and gets a good look at his eyes.
They’re paled over, and she feels an instant sense of shame for spying.
But he smiles wryly, not looking up at her, and says, “Don’t worry, I know you’re there. You don’t have to feel bad for staring.”
“I’m not staring,” Clarke blurts. “I just—why are you doing that, with the book? It’s not Braille.”
“Osmosis,” he deadpans.
He’s handsome, and she hopes he knows that, though he can’t see a mirror. All tan, freckled skin and tousled hair and sharp cheekbones. He’s wearing a black leather jacket, and she hates how into him she is without even knowing his name.
She sits down beside him without really meaning to, and awkwardly shuffles her hands together before finally just going for it. “Want me to read it to you?” She’s completely red now, and suddenly glad he can’t see her.
He pauses for a moment, face unreadable, and she’s sure she’s offended him. She’s ready to apologize, when he speaks. “Sure, that’d be—that’d be nice.” He lets go of the book, and she gently takes it from his lap.
It’s a book on Athena, and she takes pains to keep her voice steady, not stumbling over any of the words. Some of the Greek is a little hard, and he snorts whenever she reads it so she’s ninety-percent sure she’s pronouncing it wrong, but he never corrects her or asks her to stop.
Eventually her voice starts to go hoarse, and he lays a warm palm over her forearm. “That’s enough,” he says softly. “Thank you.” He clears his throat, and she hums in answer because she’s pretty sure that if she opens her mouth to speak, she’ll end up asking him to come home with her, which. Well, she’s definitely sure that’d be a bad idea, so.
He doesn’t move to leave, so she doesn’t either, instead digging through her bag for her sketchbook. She’s taking a few art classes, and she’s supposed to turn in a still life piece by the end of the week. It’s a compromise between her and her mother—art studies on the side, while she completes her residency. Not ideal, but at least this way she can afford her own rent.
That was another compromise, the apartment. It’s low-end, and fantastically shitty. There are rats in the building, Clarke’s seen some. She paid for all the furniture at flea markets and, in the case of one easy chair, found it on the street. Her mother hates everything about the space, and constantly offers to buy her a nice flat in Upper East Side, closer to her work, but Clarke refuses. She likes paying her own way, and anyway her neighbors are awesome.
She falls asleep at some point—pretty inevitable, with the hours she works, but she’s still embarrassed. The library’s twenty-four hours, which is why she chose it, but it’s AC seems to be on the fritz, or else the middle aged librarian is suffering through heat flashes and turned it all the way up. Either way, Clarke had spent most of the night shivering, and woke up to a leather jacket draped delicately over her shoulders.
She knows it’s his, of course, but it’s still surreal. He’s gone when she wakes, and she checks her sketchbook and bag for any slip of paper with a name and number, like maybe he was shy about it. There isn’t one. She turns out the pockets of the jacket, and finds a few hard candies and a cheap lighter, but that’s it. The tag has been written over—BLAKE in capital, thick letters, written in pen so they raise up a little, and she runs her fingers over them. It’s probably his name, penned the way a mom might for her child in school. It’s endearing.
She wears the jacket home because it’s a little chilly out, and there’s a slight drizzle, and.
She just wants to wear it.
She goes back to the library the next day, jacket tucked in her bag, but he isn’t there. She goes every day for a week, scouring each aisle every thirty minutes, but there’s no sign of him. She takes to carrying his jacket around, just in case. New York’s a big city, but she figures they probably live sort of close, if they were both using the same library, so.
She’s been told she’s a wishful thinker. Not such a great trait for a doctor, but what can you do?
In the end it’s Raven who calls her out on it, because that’s what Raven does. She fixes cars and builds robots in her spare time and smells bullshit from a mile away. Clarke walks into her kitchen one morning to find Raven leaning against the counter, holding the jacket up pointedly.
Raven also likes to break into her friends’ apartments. She says it’s to test the security of their locks, but Clarke suspects she just likes to play at being a criminal.
“It belongs to a friend,” Clarke tries to wave it off cavalierly.
“Which friend?” Raven asks.
“Just a friend,” Clarke snaps hotly. She hates that she gets so defensive, but Raven’s unimpressed look makes her feel like a little girl, so naturally she reverts back to one.
“Is this friend a cute boy?” Raven asks. “Cute girl? Did they leave this on your bed the morning after?”
Clarke flushes, because no matter how many times she’s had sex, she’s still ultimately a child about it. “It’s not like that—he let me borrow it one night because it was cold.”
“You’ve been carrying this thing for weeks, Griffin. When did he let you borrow it?”
Clarke sighs, and that’s when she knows she’s lost. To be honest, she’s been wanting to mention Blake to someone for a while now, but none of her friends are ideal prospects for boy-talk. Monty would just get embarrassed and change the subject, Jas would turn into a thirteen-year-old boy, and Raven would be confused as to how the whole thing didn’t just end up in sex.
“And you’re telling me you didn’t take him back to your place?” she asks, once Clarke’s done with the story. Clarke sighs.
“It wasn’t like that. It was…different.”
Raven looks wholly unconvinced. “Right,” she deadpans. “Love at first reading?”
“Something like that,” Clarke muses, pouring their coffee. She has an extensive collection of business mugs, stolen from break rooms and teacher’s lounges over the years. She has a problem, she knows, but she sort of likes that they all have a theme; stained, chipped, and covered in logos for places she’s never been.
Raven ends up with Walden Dentistry, and Clarke’s reads Phoenix Texts and Textiles in curly font around the side. Raven lets the subject drop, instead ranting about her coworker Wick for a good fifteen minutes. Apparently she’d started turning the shop’s vacuum into a Roomba-like robot, but he hadn’t known and had tried to use it manually, which fucked with her carefully placed wires, and gave his fingertips second-degree burns.
“I mean,” she says for the fourth time. “It’s his own damned fault—the idiot didn’t see the sign I made! It was the size of a sofa, Clarke. Who doesn’t see that?”
Raven’s pretty inept when she likes someone, Clarke’s come to realize. She passive aggressively flirts, and when that doesn’t get the point across, she aggressively-aggressively fights them. She threw a wrench at Wick’s shoulder, once, and knocked it out of the socket. She almost dropped a car on his foot. When she’s into someone, she basically becomes a hazard to their life.
Then she hooks up with them a lot, and tries to pretend it’s casual. As far as Clarke knows, she’s only had sex with Wick a couple of times, but there’s really no telling. There’s been a lot more ranting lately, and that usually means she’s getting laid, and liking it, which in turn pisses her off. She doesn’t like liking people.
She walks Raven across the bridge, over to 38th, where she sometimes works on police patrol cars. They come with a lot of bells and whistles, and they’re not allowed to send them out to an actual car garage, so she’s meeting Wick there to fix a few lo-jacks.
Wick meets them outside, makes polite conversation with Clarke, and then pulls Raven in for a kiss. She punches his arm after, and he ruffles her hair affectionately. Clarke watches in amused confusion. She’s still not really sure what Raven and Wick are. She doesn’t think Raven and Wick know what Raven and Wick are.
But she’s got the jacket of a blind stranger at the bottom of her bag, so it’s not like she can judge anyone.
Clarke’s figure-drawing class is in a refurbished studio apartment a few blocks down. She’s always one of the first to arrive, which gives her some extra time to set up her station. Lincoln sets down a cup of white lavender tea for her, and they talk about the upcoming showcase. Lincoln is probably the most amiable and put-together person in Clarke’s life, and she’s made it a personal goal to see more of him, hoping his well-adjustedness might rub off.
It hasn’t worked so far, but. Patience. It’s not one of her virtues—also not a good trait for a doctor—but she’s working on it.
They work for a couple of hours. Lincoln lets them work in whatever medium they choose—one girl works entirely on the rainbow scratch-off paper from as-seen-on-TV ads. Clarke mostly uses charcoal, which musses up her hands a lot, and gets absolutely everywhere, but she likes the texture and the feel and the permanence.
Lincoln keeps an extra can of hairspray by her chair for her, something she’d never known about until he showed her. It helps keep her drawing from smudging off, but her arms are still a lost cause. As everyone packs up to leave, she washes up in the kitchen sink.
“You’re getting better,” Lincoln says from behind her. He’s mopping up some spilled ink off the floor. “You were good before, but now,” he straightens and she turns off the faucet, toweling her hands. “You should consider going professional,” he advises.
Clarke scoffs. “I should also consider starving to death.” And then she feels awful, because her art teacher—and somewhat friend—is just trying to compliment her, and she insulted his profession.
Lincoln raises a brow, but doesn’t look offended. “Yes, I’m definitely wanting for food,” he says wryly, and Clarke flushes.
“It’s just,” she tries to think of an explanation he might not see through. While Raven is blunt about it, Lincoln is quietly perceptive—Clarke’s fairly sure he’ll know if she’s lying. “Art’s my only real hobby outside of work. It’s what I can do, to relax. And I can fit it in around my crazy schedule, so.”
Lincoln looks as unconvinced as she thought he would. “Or you can revolve your schedule around art,” he says. “If you want.”
Clarke sighs, because she’s had this conversation, and it’s pretty exhausting constantly having to defend her life—her past times and home to her mother, her job and family to her friends. She’s constantly feeling pulled in separate directions, and also she’s pretty sure she hasn’t slept in like two days, but she can’t really remember.
Lincoln seems to sense the discussion is over, so he helps her with her easel, and then walks her to the door.
She manages to fit in a four-hour nap before her shift that night. Small mercies. The ER is hectic, but it’s never really not, and she’s finally getting used to the pace of it all. The steady adrenaline and shitty coffee lets her forget her exhaustion, and she manages to sneak another mug before heading home. This one is black, with metallic gold lettering and the image of a rooster. It says Mt. Weather Gamecocks.
She gets home sometime after sunrise, and falls asleep in the shower before stumbling her way into bed. This is her life, now, and she’s not sure if it’s exactly what she wants, but at least she knows she’s made all the choices that got her here.
When she wakes, it’s to Raven and Wick bickering over omelets in her kitchen. She doesn’t really question their sudden appearance anymore, and just reaches for the coffee. Once she’s had enough to form coherent thoughts, she turns to Raven, raising a brow. Wick’s never slept over, as far as she knows, and he’s certainly never accompanied Raven on one of her bouts of breaking and entering.
Raven just rolls her eyes and breaks an egg on his nose. He shoots her a glare and goes to scrub his face at the sink. “Not cool, Reyes,” he admonishes. “What if I get Salmonella?”
“You won’t get Salmonella, you infant,” Raven rolls her eyes again. Clarke takes their moment of distraction to eat one of the omelets.
“I could,” Wick argues. “I have a delicate immune system. My intestines need coddling.”
Raven blows a raspberry at his face and pokes at her breakfast. “We’re going to some birthday gig for Wick,” she tells Clarke threw a mouthful of egg, cheese and onion.
Wick huffs in irritation. “It’s not a birthday, Jesus, it’s a fundraiser. For the garage. Where you work. Also it’s mandatory all employees be there, so.” He turns to Clarke. “They need a face painter. The last one got pink eye? Strep throat? Something equally contagious and annoying, so. Anyway, Reyes offered you up. No getting out of it, now. You belong to Mecha Station Car Parts for the day.”
Clarke looks at them, amused. “It sounds like I’m about to be ritually sacrificed to the car garage Gods.”
“If it gets us more customers, I’m game,” Wick says happily. “So, you in?”
“To paint faces, or be sacrificed?”
“Preferably both.” He pauses. “You should probably get the painting done first, though. We’ll save the murder party for the end. Send everyone off on a high note.”
Raven eyes the two of them skeptically. “What, are you two friends now?” Clarke and Wick give matching grins. “That’s not allowed,” she declares.
“Too late,” Clarke quips, running off to grab her paints.
She leaves the jacket.
Forty-five minutes later and she’s regretting that, as she comes face-to-face with the owner, himself.
“Clarke, Raven, this is my cousin Bellamy,” Wick introduces. “Or we think we’re cousins. Maybe. Hard to tell. Anyway, Bell’s staying with me for a couple days.”
Bellamy looks in his general direction, amused, but doesn’t reach to shake their hands or anything. Probably because he can’t see them. He’s still not wearing sunglasses, which is something Clarke thought all blind people did. And then she feels terrible for assuming something like that.
He’s not carrying a cane, either, which seems odd.
“We’ve actually met,” Clarke finds herself saying without any real conscious thought. She regrets it immediately, because Wick and Raven are absolute sharks when it comes to feelings—excluding their own—and they’re looking at her like she’s dinner.
At the sound of her voice, Bellamy’s face instantly brightens, and she tries not to let her heart flutter at the sight. It doesn’t work, and he grins even wider, and she’s pretty sure her blush has spread down to her toes by now. Raven and Wick, for their part, look like children on Christmas. At least it’s nice to see them getting along.
“Really?” Wick asks, delighted. He looks at his maybe-cousin in question, though Clarke’s not sure why; it’s not like Bellamy can see him.
To her surprise, he turns towards Wick and shakes his head good-naturedly. “At the library. She read me Athena, and then fell asleep on my shoulder. I tried not to feel offended.”
Raven eyes Clarke. “You shouldn’t,” she says. “She hardly sleeps. It’s a problem.”
“Hey,” Clarke argues, indignant. “I slept this morning—a whole five hours, and you were the one to wake me up.”
“Semantics, Griffin,” Raven waves her argument away. “You don’t sleep. Now give the man back his jacket.”
“You gave her your jacket?” Wick asks, incredulous.
To Clarke’s delight, Bellamy blushes. His skin is quite a bit darker than hers, so the pink’s a little bit harder to make out, but. It’s there, high on his cheeks, and it’s awesome.
“It was cold,” he defends. “She was shivering.”
“It’s alright,” Clarke assures him. “It was—nice. Thank you, by the way. I didn’t get to do that before you left.”
Bellamy tips his head down to the floor, a surprisingly endearing gesture. It’s not like he can look at his shoes, so the movement must just be habit. She wonders how old he was when he lost his sight. “I had to be somewhere,” he explains. “And I didn’t want to wake you. Now that I know how little sleep you get, I’m glad I didn’t.”
Clarke rolls her eyes and huffs. “I do sleep,” she swears.
“You also paint,” Wick points out. “Or, you should be. Specifically, them, over there.” He waves a hand over at a group of nearby children, pointedly staring at Clarke’s face painting station, which consists of a couple of lawn chairs and an overturned metal drum to use as a shelf.
Wick turns to jab a finger at Bellamy’s shoulder. “And you should be helping with the bounce castle,” he accuses.
Bellamy sighs long-sufferingly, but lets Wick start to guide him over by his elbow.
Raven calls out, “What about me?”
Wick turns and smirks. “Mingle. Human interaction. You should try it.” He turns back around before Raven can flick him off.
“Want me to paint your face?” Clarke offers.
Raven eyes her skeptically. “Have you ever actually done this before?” she asks.
Clarke shakes her head and holds up a paintbrush invitingly. “First time for everything,” she says happily. “Sit down. Be my guinea pig. It’s not like there’s much for me to mess up.”
Raven snorts. “Asshole.” But she lets Clarke paint her face, anyway.
She originally tries some intricate flower design, but the paint smudges a little, so she turns them into cogs and wheels, like Raven’s skin has peeled back to reveal clockwork. It’s still a little smudgy, because Clarke doesn’t really know where to put her hands and ends up touching the wet paint a few times, but mostly it looks pretty badass. She’s proud. Raven takes a million selfies.
She doesn’t really get to do anything else like that for the rest of the day—the kids all want tiger stripes, Spiderman, or butterflies with lots of glitter. By sunset, Clarke’s sweaty, covered in paint, and shimmers wherever the sun hits her.
A few of the other adults show, too, either to appease their kids or just to be funny. One of them, a good-looking guy named Finn, is there with the bounce castle. His shirt reads Spacewalker Jumps, and he flirts with her pretty heavily. She turns his face into the solar system, and paints her phone number on his arm.
She’d let one of the older girls, a shy twelve year old named Charlotte, practice her own skills on her, so she has a glittery gold crown on her forehead, and a star on each cheek. Raven takes a picture and snorts, “Cute.” Clarke just shrugs. She’s spent a whole day painting—yes, on the skin of small, wiggly children, but still—and they have free beer and funnel cakes, so she’s in a good mood.
“Finished already, Picasso?”
She turns to find Bellamy standing a few feet away. She grins, mostly to herself because he can’t see it. “A princess’s work is never done,” she says haughtily. He snorts and reaches a hand out, pausing just inches from the skin of her jaw.
“May I?” he asks. She swallows hard, nods, then remembers he can’t see it, and so instead leans forward until he’s touching her.
It’s surprisingly intimate. He runs his fingers first over her jawbone, and then up one cheek, hesitating over the painted star. He continues on to the skin above her lip, and then the arch of her nose, the hair of her eyebrow. He skims over the crown and grins, feeling the shape of it. She closes her eyes so he can gently press her eyelids. His hand drops and he clears his throat.
“Don’t suppose I could get a paintjob?” He’s grinning, and so Clarke grins too, quietly ordering her stomach to stop turning.
“What’s your poison?” she asks, guiding him to the lawn chair. He probably could have managed on his own, but she likes having an excuse to touch him.
He grins boyishly. “Make me a superhero,” he demands. She paints a ninja mask over his eyes, and makes it pink just to be a dick.
Eventually she has to leave for work, and Raven decides to go home with Wick, and so does Bellamy. She promises to give his jacket to Wick in the morning.
“Or you could give it to me, tomorrow afternoon,” Bellamy suggests, cavalier as anything. Clarke stutters.
“Yeah,” she finally says. “Sure. Okay. Uh, when?”
Bellamy shrugs, grinning smugly, clearly knowing how flustered she is. “Maybe I’ll just sneak in and make you breakfast,” he teases.
Clarke pokes him in the chest threateningly. “You joke, but I’m holding you to that,” she swears. “I prefer pancakes, but omelets will do. No mushrooms, please.”
He ducks his head with a smile, softer this time. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
She wakes up to the smell of pancakes, but when she walks into the kitchen, it’s empty. He’d put them in the microwave, to keep them warm, and there’s a fresh pot of coffee on the counter, but no Bellamy. His jacket, which she’d laid carefully on the table, is missing. She tries not to feel too disappointed.
So instead she makes herself angry. She scowls at the nurses at work until they’re too nervous to go up to her, and she feels appropriately guilty. She buys them all cupcakes in apology, and also because she never gets anything done when all the nurses are mad at her.
She shows up on time but not early to her art class, and when Lincoln kindly asks about it, she snaps at him. She apologizes later, poorly, and he waves it off, but.
She glowers heavily around Raven for three days, before her friend finally cracks. Frankly, Clarke’s surprised she’s lasted this long.
“What?” Raven throws her hands up in exasperation. They’re walking down the street, and a few people turn to glance at them, but Raven doesn’t seem to notice. “Did he walk out after you screwed or something?” she guesses. “I mean he’s blind—how good at sneaking can he be?”
“You’d be surprised,” Clarke growls, feeling all the anger leaking out of her until she’s just left with the disappointment, and a little self-pity. “He snuck in and out while I was sleeping.”
Raven freezes, and Clarke turns to find her friend positively boiling. “He did what?” Her voice is low and scarily calm, which in Raven-language means she’s two seconds away from homicide.
“Not like that,” Clarke explains. “Or, I don’t think. He made me pancakes, and left them in the microwave. And he took his jacket. That’s all. While I was asleep.”
Raven opens her mouth to speak, but then pauses, and Clarke realizes that she’s at an actual loss for words, which. Makes sense, really. The whole thing’s a little outrageous.
“I’ll talk to Wick,” Raven promises, in a rare show of sympathy. Clarke shakes her head.
“Don’t,” she pleads. “He obviously doesn’t want to date, or whatever, which is fine. It’s okay. Really. I just want to forget about it.”
Raven nods and they keep walking. After a minute she says, “I can still kick his ass, if you want me to. I don’t care if he’s blind.”
Clarke snorts. “That can be the backup plan,” she agrees.
Finn calls that night. She’s not working until later, so she agrees to meet him at some all-night coffee place he knows. She likes having work as an excuse to end a date, in case it’s going poorly, or they want something she isn’t ready to give.
The coffee’s nice—more of a lounge bar than café, but it’s affordable, and the music’s some sort of modern-Jazz-age fusion, which is great. Finn is also nice, but if she’s being honest, that’s all he seems to be. He’s nice, he holds out her chair for her, he offers to pay—she turns him down, but it was nice of him to offer. He shares a few work anecdotes, and she shares some from med school, and a few about her neighbors.
He offers to drive her to the hospital, but she says she prefers to take the bus, which is true. He kisses her on the cheek, careful not to press too close or get too handsy.
Clarke goes over the date in her head, and can’t help feeling a little let down, which is ridiculous. Finn is nice. He’s nice, and comfortable, and kind, and—
Not Bellamy.
She doesn’t necessarily think it’s the fact that he’s not Bellamy, but instead that she felt something for Bellamy so instantly, and strongly, and she feels pretty much nothing for Finn. He’d kissed her, lips pressed to her cheek, and all she can think is that it wasn’t half as fantastic as Bellamy’s fingertips.
She wants to be mad about it, but she doesn’t have the energy, so she just sort of mopes through her shift, and then wanders home to mope some more in the bathtub and not sleep.
She stays up half the night painting—she does prefer charcoal, but she needs colors for the things that she’s feeling right now—and texts Lincoln at seven AM that she wants to be in the showcase. It’d been a little touch and go for a while, and she wasn’t sure she’d have enough time to put together a whole collection, but she’s staring at three finished paintings, and she desperately wants someone else to see them. She wants someone to see them, and feel what she feels, which is pretty new. Clarke doesn’t share her work often—a few art courses in college, and now with Lincoln, but that’s about it. Raven knows, and has seen a few pieces, but for the most part Clarke keeps her work to herself.
Raven has texted her a few times through the night, asking to talk, which is also new. Clarke ignored the first few, lost in the frenzy of art, but she’s finished rinsing her brushes and hanging up the canvases, and she’s about to call her back, when there’s a knock at her door.
She opens to find Monty, looking nervous and pale and shaky—none of which is typical for Monty.
“What is it?” she demands, worried. “Is it Jasper? What’s wrong?” Jasper is Monty’s roommate—equally lovable, but twice as insane.
“No, I—it’s—come with me,” he stutters, running back down the stairs. Frowning, she follows him out the front door and around the building, to the alley in the back. The building dumpsters are back there, and sometimes a few homeless people sleep in the edges, but it seems pretty empty. The sky is still dusty gray, and everything’s a little dark around the corners.
Monty nods over to the first dumpster without a word, and Clarke takes a moment to hope she’s not about to find a dead body.
Well, she finds a body, but he’s not dead. He’s pretty much there, but he groans when she prods at the knife wounds in his side, so that’s a sign of something, at least. He’s dressed completely in black, like some sort of mummy with cloth wrapped around and around in layers. There’s a mask over the top of his head, pulled all the way down to his nose. There aren’t any sight holes that she can see, which is strange, but no stranger than the fact that he’s in her dumpster.
She waves Monty over. “Help me get him inside,” she orders. It’s the doctor in her, she knows, that can’t leave a stranger to bleed out in the garbage. “We’ll call 911 once we’re upstairs,” she huffs, pulling him up by his shoulders.
“No,” he groans, voice hoarse and cracking. “No hospitals,” he tries to order, but it comes out more as a plea.
Clarke bites back an angry retort, and just focuses on getting him up. Monty is barely any bigger than her, and the man is tall, and heavy—all muscle and dead weight. It’s a struggle, and she’s profoundly grateful she only lives on the second floor.
They manage to drag him over to her shitty sofa, and then heave him up on top of it. He grunts each time they jostle him, but it can’t be avoided, and she’s too exhausted to feel bad. He’s too long for the sofa, and his feet dangle off the edge.
“Monty, get my phone,” Clarke orders, digging her First Aid Kit out from under the kitchen sink.
The man on the couch stirs, coughs, and groans. “No cops,” he mutters. “No hospitals.”
Clarke grits her teeth and shares a look with Monty, clearly torn between who to listen to. He looks about ready to cry.
“It’s alright,” she sighs, patting his shoulder blade. “I’ll take care of it. Go get some rest, and,” she bites her lip, unsure. “Don’t tell anyone about this, okay? Not yet.” Monty nods shakily and rushes off. She locks her door behind him—not that it’ll keep Raven out for long, but.
She turns back to the man, to find he’s passed out, probably from the pain or the shock or simply exhaustion. Whatever happened to him, he gave up a good fight—his knuckles are bruised, cracked and bleeding. She unwinds the cloth around his middle first, cleaning the wounds thoroughly. They’re all shallow, but she feels around anyway, searching for a sign of punctured lungs or internal bleeding. He’s got a few cracked ribs, but nothing too major—nothing that needs surgery, at least. As far as she can tell. She’s not sure she’s willing to stake his life and her job on an educated guess.
She cleans up his hands, next, and then moves to the cut on his lip. There’s dried blood under his nose, so she lifts up the mask to check if it’s broken.
At least, that’s the excuse she’ll give when he wakes up. Really, she’s just curious.
He doesn’t wake up when she pulls the cloth off, which is good, because she isn’t sure she’s ready to deal with that yet. Not when she recognizes him—his hair is sweaty and stuck to his forehead, and his skin is paler than she’s used to, but the freckles are still there.
Bellamy’s bleeding out on her sofa.
She’s still staring dumbly at him, when she hears the lock click, and Raven storms through the door, looking pissed off even for her.
“Griffin, I’ve left you fifteen text messages, and you know my limit is three so I don’t seem needy, so what the—“ she pauses, taking in the scene before her, looking between Bellamy, unconscious and bloody, and Clarke kneeling beside him. “What the fuck,” she hisses.
“Yeah,” Clarke agrees, unable to look away from him. “Pretty much."