Work Text:
Bellamy’s just shy of eighteen when his mom gets killed in a hit and run, and one week later he and O are on the plane to Forks, Washington, to move in with her dad.
Bellamy doesn’t mind Marcus—of all his mom’s ex-boyfriends, he’s definitely the best—but Bellamy was only eleven when he and Aurora divorced, and while Octavia went to visit him every other New Year, Bellamy hasn’t seen him since.
He still sent him birthday cards, though, with a twenty dollar bill or a gift card to Borders, when Octavia mentioned his interest in historical fiction. And Octavia always came home with new clothes for school, and she seemed happy enough, so Marcus is okay in his book.
But he’s not Aurora, which is pretty clear when he isn’t sure what to do about dinner, their first night there.
“I usually just go to the diner,” he admits, rubbing his neck awkwardly. Marcus had been an okay step-dad, from what Bellamy remembers, but he’d always done better with actions than words. He doesn’t really carry conversation all that well. “It’s open all night.”
Octavia shares a look with Bellamy—her eyes are still puffy from crying on the flight, but now she just looks tired. It’s hard to remember she’s only twelve, and still believed in the Tooth Fairy just a few weeks ago.
“I could use some onion rings,” he offers, and she nods, so they all pile in Marcus’s patrol truck—the cops drive enormous Ford trucks in Forks, because of the weather and rough terrain, and it’s a little disconcerting.
The diner is straight out of the fifties, with grimy fluorescent lighting and a jukebox playing Johnny Cash in the corner. There’s a bar and stools with the tops that spin, which Octavia has to hop up to reach.
A plump, cheerful woman greets them from behind the counter, where she’s rubbing a cloth over milkshake glasses. She wipes her hands on her apron and smiles. “Marcus,” she says, pleased, “And Octavia! The usual?” She eyes Bellamy, still grinning but a little confused.
“I’m the brother,” he explains, and she reaches over to shake his hand over the counter.
“And I’m the cook. Cece. What can I getcha?”
He orders a burger and onion rings, and an enormous strawberry shake to split with O. He spoons all the whipped cream onto her plate, but eats the canned cherry because she hates syrup.
It’s nice, in a mindless sort of way. He’s still not really sure how to feel about anything, now that his mom’s dead. She’d constantly worked, or slept, when she was alive, so even though he lived with her, sometimes he thinks he knew her even less than Marcus.
But she was still his mom, and he loved her.
Forks is pretty much exactly as he remembers it, which is to say; rainy. And cold. After six years in Arktown, New Mexico, he’s grown used to the desert, and droughts. He’s always thought he had straightish hair, but with all the new humidity, it coils up around his face.
The house is familiar, too; one and a half stories, with angled walls upstairs that mean he has to walk around slouching all the time. He hits his head waking up half a dozen times before it sinks in.
There’s an ancient desktop in what used to be his bedroom—he guesses it’s still his. All his old Transformers posters are still hung up, and his old twin bed is too small for him now. He’s pretty sure he used to play the Loony Tunes coloring game on that computer, when he was eight. He’s not sure why it’s still running.
Marcus got O a new tablet for last Christmas, and he’s clearly sorry that he can’t afford one for Bellamy, but he doesn’t really mind. He gets it—to be honest, he’s a little touched he even wants to.
“I do have something for you, though,” Marcus says, leading him outside. It’s early still, just nearly dawn, and Bellamy’s in a pair of threadbare flannel pajama pants and a Suns hoody. There’s frost on the lawn. He’s hoping the surprise won’t take very long.
But Marcus just leads him around the side of the house, where there’s a ’68 Ford Mustang. It’s pretty banged up, obviously ancient, and a color that might have once been cherry red—but Bellamy loves it, just the same.
“How did you…?” Bellamy reaches out to touch the hood, reverent.
“Buddy of mine on the Rez,” Marcus grins. The Rez is the Indian reservation, just outside Forks’s county line. Bellamy remembers spending a lot of time there as a kid, at Marcus’s friend David’s cabin. David had a son around O’s age, who they used to play with.
“This is—thanks.” As it is, Bellamy’s doing his best to not get choked up. Marcus was his step-dad for just five years. He didn’t even need to take Bellamy, when his mom died; the state was going to separate him and O, but Marcus stepped in. He’s already done more for him than his mom ever did, and Bellamy still isn’t sure how to take that.
“I’ll have to teach you how to drive on the ice,” Marcus says cheerily, and they head back inside.
“So when do I get a car?” O chirps from the kitchen table, where she’s eating the oatmeal with little apple chunks.
“When you can reach the pedals.” Marcus ruffles her hair a little, and the whole scene feels familiar, even though Bellamy’s never been a part of this.
He’s not really sure where he fits in, with O and Marcus. They’ve had years to get used to each other, get comfortable, and he’s still trying to get used to being somebody’s son again.
He wakes up in the middle of the night to pee, and hears sniffling coming from O’s room when he walks by her door.
“O?” he whispers, squinting at the dark. He’s not wearing his glasses, and everything’s fuzzy.
“I’m here,” she says weakly, and sniffs again, so he shuts the door and pads over to her bed. She switched her old princess bed for a futon a couple years back, so he fits comfortably on the other side. “I just miss her,” she says. “Which is dumb, right? She was barely even there.”
Bellamy rubs her back a little, the way he does whenever she feels sick. “I know what you mean. She wasn’t the best mom, but she was ours.”
“Yeah.” She shifts over to look at him. “I don’t want you to think I like Marcus more than you,” she tells him, and he just stares for a moment, confused. “I saw the legal stuff on your desk,” she admits.
He’s pretty sure she means the emancipation forms, which had been his desperate plan when he realized the system was thinking about splitting them up. He’d drop out, get emancipated, get his GED, get a shitty fast food job, and get custody of his kid sister.
Looking back on it, that probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, so it’s just as well that Marcus stepped in to take the lead.
“I like Marcus too,” he assures her. “He’s cool. He’s a good dad.”
“Yeah,” she agrees, and rolls over to cuddle. She’s really only this tactile when she’s sad, or has a fever, because she’s recently convinced herself that grown-ups do not snuggle. Secretly, Bellamy likes this cuddly Octavia best. “We can share him. If you want.”
Bellamy bites back a grin, because she’s also convinced that she is not adorable. “Okay. Thanks, O.”
Bellamy drives her to school the next day, which is technically illegal since he only has his permit from New Mexico. But Marcus had to leave early, frazzled over some sort of animal attack in the woods, and had asked if he could give her a ride, so Bellamy lied and said he has his license, and has been driving for months.
Bellamy’s driven before, in theory, but only ever in the Wal-Mart parking lot near their house in Arktown, and only when there was nobody else around. And the Mustang’s a stick-shift, which he doesn’t have a history with, so he reads up on wiki-how before starting out.
“Do you even know how to drive this?” O asks, staring at the gear shift warily.
Bellamy takes one last look at his phone before turning the key. “It’s pretty straightforward,” he shrugs, and immediately stalls.
“Right,” O deadpans as he turns the engine over.
“Shut up.” He sighs as the car purrs to life. “We’ll go slow.”
“The sign says 45,” Octavia points out. She’s grumpy from having to get up so early, and from being vulnerable last night, so now she has to be extra surly to make up for it.
“I’m aware,” Bellamy snaps, eyeing the speedometer. He’s going a comfortable 19 miles per hour, and it still feels too fast.
It’s also a little embarrassing—going so slow in a Mustang. He feels like he’s letting the car down, somehow.
Forks shares their Junior High with the next town over, so Bellamy has to inch along some of the main roads, which is terrifying. He gets stuck behind a school bus at one point, and has to brake every few minutes, and he hasn’t mastered the slow stop, so the car jerks each time he stomps on the pedal, and that’s if it doesn’t stall out. Octavia’s already whining about whiplash.
“You wouldn’t have it if you’d sat in the backseat like I said,” he sniffs, and she rolls her eyes at him.
“Bye, nerd,” she says when he drops her off, and squares her shoulders like she’s preparing for battle.
She’s going to rock middle school, he’s sure.
He’s just a mile away from the high school, when the bright yellow Stingray behind him gets fed up and roars past him, nearly giving him a stroke.
“What the fuck,” he says, even though they can’t hear him. They’re already racing into the parking lot, swerving into a parking lot, like in Fast and the Furious.
He coasts in behind them, just in time to see the driver—a tiny blonde who looks cute enough, but it’s hard to tell past the puffiness of her jacket—step out of the car. A Latina girl slinks out of the passenger seat, wearing a pair of basketball shorts and an undershirt, in fifty-degree weather, which seems strange.
The girls fold their seats forward, so three boys can slide out from the back. Only the blonde girl seems dressed for the winter, with the rest in a combination of summer and fall clothes—but maybe Bellamy’s just biased. He doesn’t do well with the cold. These people are probably used to it; fifty degrees probably is summer, to them.
He parks three spots away, so his car isn’t touching any others. He’s never had to try to back out of a parking lot filled with actual people, and he’s a little nervous about it.
He’s also sort of nervous about the actual school part of going to school, but. Mainly it’s the driving. He pretty much knows how to handle high school; keep his head ducked, try not to be noticed, take legible notes, and when someone tries to start something, punch them in the throat.
Except those were his guidelines for Arktown, which was close enough to Albuquerque to have a few hundred thousand residents. Forks has two hundred and something, which means the school is laughably small. It’ll be pretty much impossible for him not to be noticed, as the only new kid they’ve had in possibly years.
As expected, people start staring as soon as he walks through the door. What he’s not expecting is how friendly they all are. He’s barely asked where the main office is, and he’s got half a dozen kids offering to give him a tour, and another few trying to compare schedules, so they can help him out in class.
“You’re the most interesting thing they’ve seen all year,” Monty shrugs. Monty was the first to offer to be his tour guide, and the quietest, and they turned out to have nearly identical schedules, so Bellamy’s pretty much decided to just stick by the kid all day. “You’re exotic,” he jokes, but he doesn’t mean it the way people usually do, asking Bellamy where he’s from, and then asking again when he says near Albuquerque, until he finally says maybe the Philippines, but I don’t know for sure. Monty himself is Korean, and his family runs the Lotus Flower Restaurant down on Main Street.
“So, New Mexico, huh? Did you know any meth dealers?” Jasper, Monty’s best friend and opposite in every way, asks as he slides in beside them. Forks High has lunch at eleven, which is weird, but not horrible. The cafeteria’s pretty generic, except instead of the usual long rectangular tables, they’ve got little plastic booths like in Subway.
“Strangely, no,” Bellamy says, patiently. He’s gotten used to the Breaking Bad jokes by now, but they’re still a little tiring.
“Incoming,” Jasper hisses, staring at something over Bellamy’s shoulder. The whole room goes impressively quiet, as everyone stars speaking in hushed tones. Bellamy turns to see the Stingray group marching through the doors like soldiers.
Now that he’s closer, Bellamy can see them more clearly, and he realizes why everyone’s doing their best to stare subtly.
They’re gorgeous—like, Hollywood high-school-TV-show-gorgeous, the kind of beauty that no regular person can have without a makeup crew and liberal use of Photoshop. Even the blonde up front, who’s still wearing her puffy coat even though the building’s heat is on and Bellamy had shed his jacket hours ago, is stunning, staring straight ahead with impossibly blue eyes.
“Who are they?” he asks, and Jasper shushes him, flailing a little.
“Foreign exchange students,” he says, “From Iceland. They all live together in that glass house on the hill, with their chaperones, who are just as hot. Terrifying, but hot.”
“Why are they in Forks?” he asks, and then immediately feels guilty. Forks is Jasper’s hometown, and it’s a nice town; he shouldn’t look down on it.
But Monty and Jasper just shrug, clearly used to it. “No one knows,” Monty explains. “They don’t really talk to anyone. They’re nice enough, but they never come to any parties, or field trips, or anything. Clarke’s my partner in Bio-Lab, though, and she’s pretty cool.”
“She’s the blonde,” Jasper adds helpfully. “She’s basically the mom of the group.”
As he says it, Bellamy glances over to see Clarke winding a scarf around the sour-looking boy’s neck, even as he glares at her. “Yeah, I can see it.”
The exchange students sit down at one of the booths without getting any food, instead pulling out textbooks and schoolwork. Well, most of them pull out schoolwork. The boy with the scarf just starts messing with a lighter, flicking it on and off, while the faculty pretends not to see.
“They don’t eat?” Bellamy wonders, confused. Everything about them is a little confusing, to be honest, and he’s not really sure why—they just seem off, somehow. And apparently he’s not the only one that’s sensed it.
“My theory is they live on spite and secrets,” Jasper chirps, finishing what’s left of his pudding cup.
“Well,” Bellamy shrugs, turning back to his own lunch. “At least I’m not the most exotic thing in Forks.”
His next class is AP World History, which he’s actually excited about. He’d expected Forks to have a limited, generic list of classes, but they’re surprisingly varied. He’s signed up for a home economics course that he’s hoping will involve making pies.
There’s one open seat when he gets to the classroom, and it’s all the way in the back, right beside Clarke. She’s finally shed the coat, and now he can see that she’s wearing a gray Henley, dark against her pale skin, showing off some impressive cleavage. She’s watching him, clearly trying to be nonchalant about it, but there’s definitely some sort of interest there.
He tells himself it’s because he’s the new kid. He can’t afford to get his hopes up that some unreal, hot, mysterious girl likes him. He doesn’t have the energy for a crush.
So he very carefully sets his bag beside the chair and sits down, giving her a carefully neutral head nod. “Hi. I’m Bellamy.”
She gives a thin smile, clearly amused. “Clarke.” Her voice is deeper than he expected, huskier.
“I heard,” he says, and her grin widens, teeth perfectly white. He has to squint a little, she’s so dazzling. “You’re from Iceland?”
Something flickers in her expression, just for a second, and then it’s gone. “And you’re from New Mexico. It seems we’re both strangers to Forks.”
“Actually I lived here when I was a kid,” Bellamy says, decidedly not thinking about why she knows where he’s from, or if she’s been asking about him.
“But you’re new here, just the same.”
She’s still smiling at him, and it takes Bellamy a few minutes to make his mouth work. “Yeah, I guess. It’s almost the same as I remember, though.”
“Almost?”
“You’re here now,” he shrugs, feeling the back of his neck go red. He’s hoping she won’t notice, but she looks pleased, so he’s pretty sure she already has. “And there’s a new Whole Foods that wasn’t here before.”
She laughs, bright and surprised. Everyone turns to stare at them, mildly shocked, and he can’t help feeling smug. Clearly, she doesn’t really laugh that often.
“Good afternoon,” the teacher—Mr. Nyko, it says on his schedule—says, walking in. “Today you’ll be choosing your partners for the semester project—is anyone willing to work with Mr. Blake to catch him up to speed?”
Half the students raise their hands, right as Clarke says “I will,” loud and clear.
Mr. Nyko eyes her for a moment, confused, before nodding and jotting their names down on the board. “Alright, Miss Griffin. Has everyone else paired up, yet?”
Clarke leans over Bellamy’s desk, to be heard. “We can start on it after school,” she offers. “Do you know where the town library is?”
“Actually, uh,” Bellamy clears his throat, embarrassed. And then he feels like a dick, because he shouldn’t feel embarrassed about Octavia, and he doesn’t, not really. But he does get annoyed about it sometimes, that he can’t ever just hang out with friends downtown, or go on a date, or out to eat, without making sure she’s taken care of.
But Marcus said he has to work late, and Bellamy doesn’t mind too much. She’s always been his responsibility; he’s used to it.
“I have to babysit my little sister,” he explains. Octavia hates the term babysit, and would kick him in the knee if she heard him using it, but. She’s not here right now.
Clarke just shrugs, easy as anything. “So we’ll go to your house,” she says, like it’s obvious. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot after class.”
“Yeah,” he says, feeling dazed. “Sure.” He feels weird for the rest of the class; he’s never had trouble paying attention in history, but by the time the bell rings, he can’t remember a word the teacher said.
His last class of the day is gym, which is fine. Bellamy’s moderately good at sports, in that his aim isn’t shitty and he’s not afraid to jump in front of moving objects, and he did track for a bit his freshman year so he’s a pretty decent runner. They play kickball, which is expected; Bellamy’s learned that, no matter the school, kickball comprises a good seventy percent of each gym class.
Plus, Monty’s there, which is nice. He’s not the most athletic, but he catches the ball a few times, to get the kickers out.
The angry-looking exchange kid is there too, still wearing the scarf Clarke gave him. Up close, Bellamy can see that it’s not very well made, with a few straggly bits of yarn at the ends, and a muddled pattern, like the knitter forgot what they were doing halfway through.
Bellamy learns his name is Murphy—or John, maybe, but everyone calls him Murphy—and he’s basically an asshole, always aiming for the younger kids’ faces. Bellamy manages to kick the ball at his crotch at one point, but the guy barely seems to notice. He’s probably wearing a cup or something, having anticipated the attack.
The only one Murphy seems not to target is Monty, which sort of makes sense. Hitting Monty would be like hitting one of those newborn puppies from 101 Dalmatians.
“So what’s Murphy’s deal?” Bellamy asks once they’ve changed, and are heading down the hallway. Monty takes the bus, apparently, so they part at the door.
“He’s really only nice to his friends,” Monty shrugs.
“He’s nice to you,” Bellamy points out, and Monty flushes.
“That’s, uh—different.”
“Ah, I see,” Bellamy grins, starting to get the picture. But Monty’s eyes widen, and he waves his hands back and forth.
“No, it’s not like that, honestly. Besides, he’s dating Finn, so—but, uh, I’m gay, and some guys were being assholes about it, and he stood up for me. That’s all.”
“Cool,” Bellamy shrugs, and Monty relaxes a little. “Still seems like a dick.”
Clarke’s waiting by his car, tucked back into her puffy coat, wearing a knit hat with a bright pink pompom on the top, that jiggles when she moves her head.
“Get cold easily?” he teases, and she goes a little pink.
“Maybe I just like winter fashion,” she shrugs, sliding easily into the passenger seat.
Bellamy hesitates for a moment with his hands on the wheel. It was one thing to be embarrassed about driving so slowly by himself, but now he has to try to drive while his hot history partner watches.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, and she actually looks concerned, which is kind of adorable.
“Nothing.” He starts the car, and puts it in first gear. “It’s just a new car.”
“It doesn’t look new,” she smirks, and he makes a face, trying desperately not to stall out as he works his way up to second.
“New to me,” he says, and the car makes an ugly coughing noise, jerking a bit. “What the fuck—”
“You’re stripping the gear,” Clarke says, reaching over to throw the stick in park. “I’ll drive.”
“I could get it,” he grumbles, but gets out anyway so she can take his place.
“Don’t worry,” Clarke grins wickedly. “I’ll teach you everything I know.”
Bellamy is genuinely unsure if the next fifteen minutes actually happen, because he feels like his brain has shot through the back of his head. Clarke takes each turn clipped and dangerous, but somehow never swerves outside her lane, or tips the car up on two wheels. Honestly, he’s pretty sure she’s magic.
Or something.
They make it to O’s school in record time, considering it took him nearly thirty minutes to drop her off that morning.
She’s sitting on the front curb, chatting with a few kids her age, when they pull up. He waves her over, and she hops up, eyeing Clarke suspiciously.
“Since when do you know how to make friends?” she asks him, and he makes a face.
“Don’t be a brat, or we’ll leave you behind. This is Clarke. We’re gonna work on a history project.”
“Sure,” Octavia says meaningfully, and kicks the back of his seat as she slides in. “Oops, sorry,” she says, but he knows she did it on purpose, irritated at having to sit in the back.
He directs Clarke to Marcus’s—his, he reminds himself—house, and Octavia laughs each time they make a sharp, reckless turn.
“How are you still alive?” he demands, once his head stops throbbing. Clarke just smirks and tosses him the keys.
“It’s a mystery.” She helps Octavia with her violin case, without a word.
O’s very clearly enamored.
“Can you teach me to drive like that?” she asks, and Clarke smiles.
“Sure. I mean, it’d probably be safer than learning from your brother.”
“I am perfectly capable of driving that car,” Bellamy grumbles indignantly. “I drove it to school today!”
“And it only took you ten years,” Clarke chirps, and Octavia cackles.
Bellamy wants to be annoyed, but—it’s been a while, since he’s heard her laugh. Even before their mom died, because they were having a hard year already, and O was having trouble with puberty.
So instead he just makes a face at both of them. “My room’s upstairs on the left,” he tells Clarke. “I’ll be up in a minute with snacks.”
“I’ll show you,” O declares, dragging Clarke towards the stairs. “My room’s the biggest—I have this pony collection, and—”
“Octavia don’t steal my history partner,” he calls up after them.
“Too late!” she shouts back, and Clarke laughs.
He makes some microwave popcorn, and grabs a bag of the blue corn chips Marcus gets because he’s under the impression that growing kids need to eat healthy junk food, which means no more spray cheese.
When he gets upstairs, Clarke is standing at his bookshelf, thumbing through one of his beat-up books. She sets it down when he walks inside, and looks up to grin at him.
“I was thinking Norse,” she says, and he stares at her dumbly for a moment.
“What?”
“For the project—we have to pick a mythology, and explain how it effects today’s culture. Everyone’s going to pick Greek, Roman and Egyptian, so I think we should do Norse.”
“Like, Thor?”
Clarke rolls her eyes a little, and he suddenly remembers she’s Icelandic. Norse mythology is probably her mythology, and he feels like an ass.
“Thor was one of the less interesting ones,” she shrugs, leaning against his desk. “There was Tyr, who stuck his hand down Fenrir’s throat even though he knew it’d get bitten off. And Hel, the ruler of the underworld, who was literally half-girl, half-skeleton.”
“Sure,” Bellamy says. “Sounds neat. So, where in Iceland are you from?” He winces as he asks it, because he sounds like everyone who ever tried to subtly ask why his skin is brown. Plus, it’s not like he knows anything about Iceland. He won’t recognize the place.
But she smiles indulgently. “Hvergi. In the north.” She slides down to the floor, criss-crossing her legs and pulling out her notebook. “Let’s get started.”
They spend the whole afternoon working, when they don’t get sidetracked clicking on all the links in each Wikipedia article, trying to find the most fucked up Gods.
She doesn’t eat any of the snacks, which means he ends up finishing the popcorn and the chips by himself, which he regrets instantly. O comes in eventually after finishing up whatever homework twelve-year-old’s have, these days, and she sits on his bed playing Robot Unicorn Attack on her tablet, only interrupting when they find a cool myth she wants to hear.
It’s nearly sundown by the time Bellamy looks at the clock. “Shit, should you go home? Aren’t your—chaperones going to worry?”
Clarke stretches her back like a cat until it pops, yawns a little, and then smiles sleepily. She’s been dozing off and on against his shoulder for the past hour and a half, intermittently mentioning more obscure deities for him to google.
“They know where I am,” she shrugs, but starts packing her bag anyway. “But I should probably go. They should be getting dinner ready.”
“Do you need me to give you a ride?” Bellamy asks, feeling awkward. It’s getting dark, and he can barely manage to drive in the daylight. But—Clarke came here for him, even though she didn’t have to. The least he can do is drive her home.
“No, it’s just a ten minute hike,” she says, and he must look surprised, because she smiles, expectant. “It’s the big glass house at the top of the hill. You can’t miss it.”
He grins a little hopelessly in spite of himself, because—O isn’t the only one who’s had a shitty few months, and he honestly didn’t expect them to get here. He didn’t think they’d be together, safe and warm in a house they don’t have to pay for, still in school. He didn’t think a pretty, smart, mythology-obsessed girl would be flirting with him in his bedroom.
He’s not sure how it’s happening, but it is, and he’ll take it.
“So I won’t have to crash my car every time I want to visit you?” he asks, teasing, and her cheeks turn pink.
“I would rather you visit me intact,” she says primly, and waves to Octavia before she walks out the door.
“Your girlfriend’s awesome, Bell,” Octavia declares. And then, “Let’s order pizza.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” he says, grabbing the cordless phone and trying to remember which cabinet door has the Dominoes information taped up inside. Marcus left them a twenty dollar bill for dinner, but he’s not sure it’ll cover the tip. He’s not used to not having to worry about money; it’s still second nature.
“Well, get on that,” O says, serious, before heading back upstairs. “Get me when the pizza’s here!”
He doesn’t go back to his room until later, to work on some math work he forgot about, and sees a paperback resting on the floor. It’s the one Clarke was looking at earlier, and he goes to put it back in its place on the shelf. It’s Dracula, from the eighties, with a flakey front cover. He’d gotten it for free when the Arktown public library was doing an overhaul of its books, replacing them with new copies.
He looks up a map of Iceland, but he can’t find Hvergi anywhere.
Bellamy’s not really expecting much, when he shows up at school the next day. Forks High has a block schedule, which means he only has AP World History every other day, so he doesn’t know if he’ll see Clarke at all, or not.
But to his surprise, she slots right in beside him at lunch.
“Hey,” she says brightly, and he just has to stare for a minute, because she’s got her hair pulled back in a French braid, and some sort of shimmery stuff on her eyes that somehow makes them even bluer.
And she’s smiling at him like he’s the best thing she’s seen all day, which absolutely cannot be true. She looks perfect, and he can feel a smudge of mustard in the corner of his mouth that he’s desperately trying to wipe off before she sees.
“Uh, hi.” He glances over to Jasper and Monty, who are staring very obviously, sandwiches paused midway from their open mouths. “These are my friends, Jasper and Monty.”
“I know,” she chirps, smiling over at them, now. Monty at least takes it pretty easily; Jasper squeaks.
Then Monty kicks him under the table, gesturing for him to turn, and when Bellamy looks over his shoulder he finds the rest of the exchange students frowning over at them. Well, the dark-skinned guy—Wells, he’s pretty sure—is frowning, along with the one with the floppy hair, Finn, probably. The other two, Raven and Murphy, are outright glaring at him, like they wish they could set him on fire with their thoughts alone.
He turns back in time to see Clarke roll her eyes. “They’re just overprotective,” she explains, which doesn’t actually explain anything. “History project tonight?”
Bellamy frowns a little, confused. “You know it isn’t due for like, two months, right?”
Clarke shrugs, nonchalant. “Driving lessons, then?”
Bellamy ducks his head to hide his grin—he can’t really help feeling smug about this. The hot foreign exchange student wants to hang out with him, even though she’s supposedly a hermit. It’s definitely a confidence boost. “How could I say no?”
“Dude,” Jasper says once Clarke gets up to leave with the rest of her friends. “You’re dating Clarke Griffin? This is amazing—”
“We’re not dating,” Bellamy interrupts. “We’re partners in history class.”
“Clarke always works alone,” Monty says, amused. “Except for me, but only because we were assigned seats.”
“I’m pretty sure she just feels bad for me,” Bellamy shrugs. “I came into the assignment late, and I suck at driving. Like you said, she’s a total mom friend. She just wants to help.”
He says it mostly to try and convince himself to not get his hopes up, but it only works a little.
Apparently, it doesn’t convince them, either. “Sure,” Monty says, unimpressed. “Whatever you say.”
Clarke takes him to the old, abandoned parking lot of what used to be a Friendly’s, and successfully manages to get him up to third gear without stripping or stalling or jerking to the left.
“So the likelihood of you killing someone on the road is significantly lower now,” she grins, and he freezes.
It takes him a moment to get control of his breathing, and then realizes the car has stopped, and Clarke’s calling his name, with her hands on his shoulders.
“I’m okay,” he says, voice strangled. “I’m sorry, I’m—”
“Don’t be.” Clarke brushes the hair off his forehead, and he leans into her hand, even though it’s cold. She’s wearing a wool coat today, and a pair of pink ear muffs shaped like poodles. It should make her look ridiculous, but he’s not sure she ever could.
“My mom died in a car crash three months ago,” he says, and her hand goes still. “I don’t—I thought I was handling it better.”
“You’re handling it very well,” she says. “There’s no right way to handle grief, Bellamy. When my father died, I couldn’t get out of bed for three weeks. My mother had to wash me with a sponge.”
He leans his head forward, so her hand’s trapped between his skin and the steering wheel, but she doesn’t try to pull away.
They sit like that for a while, silence except for their breathing, and then they switch places so she can drive him home.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, lingering at the doorway. “It does get better. Eventually.”
“Thank you,” he whispers, and she kisses his cheek before disappearing into the trees.
After that, Clarke somehow becomes a regular fixture in his life. She goes with him to pick up Octavia most days after school, and sometimes they’ll work on their project or his driving, but just as often they’ll cue up some truly awful Disney Channel show on Netflix, or Clarke will tie O’s hair up in little tiny braids, and let her paint her toenails lavender. Usually she ends up falling asleep on him, and he’ll try not to move for the next hour. He gets the feeling she doesn’t sleep a lot, and he doesn’t have the heart to wake her, when she does.
He comes downstairs one Saturday morning and finds them giving each other manicures on the living room floor.
“O, stop stealing my history partner,” he growls, mostly to cover up the fact that he’s pretty much mortified. He’s wearing his ancient, stained pajama pants and a t-shirt that’s too small. And his glasses, which Clarke has never seen before, because he makes a point to never let anyone see him in his glasses.
“She likes me better, anyway,” Octavia chirps, and when Bellamy looks up, he finds Clarke already staring at him, cheeks heated and eyes dark.
It’s an—interesting reaction.
They hang out and work on the project a little, until Clarke has to go home for lunch.
“I wonder why she never eats with us,” O frowns, and Bellamy tugs on the fishtail braid Clarke just gave her.
“Maybe she’s gluten intolerant or something,” he shrugs.
Marcus shows up around noon, which isn’t unusual for the weekend, but he does have someone with him, which is new.
“Miller?” Bellamy asks, staring, because—god, he hasn’t seen Nathan Miller since he was a scrawny six year old kid trailing after him.
Miller smiles a little, small, like he’s not used to it. “Hey, Blake—long time no see.”
They make small talk for a bit, which is awkward and forced, until finally Bellamy shakes his head with a groan. “This is weird, right? This is weird. Wanna just go play Borderlands, or something?”
They do, and it’s surprisingly easy, settling back into their old friendship. They’re different people now, with different likes and dislikes, but they seem to have grown in the same direction, all the same.
Octavia wanders into his room that night after dinner, flinging herself face-down on his bed with a moan. “You’re getting so good at Forks,” she complains. “You’ve got a cool girlfriend, and your old best friend, and a car.”
Bellamy frowns over at her. “You are too,” he says, because she is; she’s recently made the soccer team at her school, and he’s more than ready to make embarrassing t-shirts to wear to all her games. If he asks, Clarke will probably come too, and wear matching ones.
“Not like you, though.”
“Yeah, well I’ve got a few years on you. Just wait; girls mature at a faster rate than boys. So in, like, a year you’ll have surpassed me in coolness factor.”
That gets a giggle out of her, and she rolls over to grin at him. “I still miss mom,” she says suddenly. “But. I don’t miss her, you know?”
“Yeah. I know.”
In the end, it’s definitely Miller’s fault.
“I found you the perfect costume,” he says, throwing the plastic bundle into Bellamy’s arms. They’re at the Party City down on Main, because Bellamy was invited to Jasper and Monty’s huge Halloween party that weekend, and Clarke promised she’d go.
Bellamy hasn’t actually dressed up for Halloween since he was ten, and never really put much thought into the holiday at all. Until now. He’s freaking out, a little, and Miller agreed to take him shopping, to try and calm him down.
Although, really, he’s like ninety-nine percent sure Miller just wants him to try on silly costumes so he can take a bunch of bad pictures and make fun of him.
He holds out the costume for further inspection—it’s the typical cheap black material he’s grown used to, and he can’t actually tell what it is until he notices the fake teeth, stapled to the bag in the corner.
“A vampire?” he asks, unimpressed. “Really? How’d I give off that vibe?”
Miller shrugs, flipping through the rubber mask racks. “It’s more like a smell that rubs off on you. Like a skunk, or garbage.”
“Gee, thanks,” Bellamy says dryly.
“Just try it on.”
It’s really just the cape, with an enormous bright red collar, and a pair of fake fangs too big for his mouth. But it’s also only five dollars, and it’s not like he has a lot of better options.
Plus, Clarke might think it’s funny. He can quote the original Dracula all night.
But when he finds her in the forest clearing, solo cup in hand, she mostly just looks shocked.
He can relate; she’s wearing a blue, skin-tight suit. Well, nearly skin-tight. Tight enough. She’s got the Captain America star painted on her torso, too, so her costume’s pretty obvious.
“Too much?” he asks, but because of the fangs, the words come out muddled.
She seems to understand him, though. “Just…unexpected.”
“It was Miller’s idea,” he says, and she rolls her eyes with a huff.
“That explains it,” she grumbles. He’d tried to introduce them a few weeks ago, only to find out they already knew each other, and also sort of were nemeses. The kind that talked endless shit about each other, while secretly they just wanted to be friends.
She calls him mangy mutt a lot, and once he called her garlic breath, to which she crowed that doesn’t even make sense! Their arguments are, generally, lost on Bellamy, and he ends up just tuning them out while playing Portal.
Clarke takes him by the hand to tug him away from the fire, over to an overturned log so they can sit down. He eyes her a little warily—she seems off, and she doesn’t look drunk, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she isn’t.
“I don’t want you to hate me in the morning,” she starts, and he frowns back at her.
“Why would I hate you? I l—like you. A lot.”
Clarke sighs, folding and unfolding her fingers together again and again, until he finally just takes her hand in his own. “It’s easier to just show you,” she admits.
“O-kay,” Bellamy drawls, starting to worry. He squeezes her hand. “So show me.”
“Where’s a little sunlight when you need it,” she grumbles, and then seems to reconsider, before standing up and walking over to the nearest tree. She looks at him, seriously. “Don’t be scared,” she whispers, and then rips the tree in half.
She sets the trunk down gently, like she might lay out a bedsheet, or something equally possible. It takes Bellamy five good minutes of staring between the jagged stump, Clarke, and the tree trunk, before it finally sets in.
He may have had more than a little moonshine. Reality’s getting pretty fuzzy, right now.
“Holy shit,” he breathes. And then, louder, “Holy shit.”
“Please don’t be scared,” Clare says in a rush. “I would have told you earlier, except not everyone takes it well, and it’s sort of the thing we used to get burned alive for, so we try to keep it on the down low, but I really, really like you, and I wanted to be honest with you, and—”
“Clarke,” Bellamy interrupts, reaching for her arm, to tug her down in his lap. “Are you a fucking vampire?”
She smiles, weak and a little hopeful. “Maybe?”
He brushes a hand through her hair, like he’s been wanting to for weeks. “You thought I’d be scared?”
“Are you?”
He considers for a moment. “That depends—on a scale of one to ten, how much do you want to suck my blood right now?”
Clarke makes a face. “Zero. Human blood tastes weird.”
Bellamy laughs, burying his face in her neck, and kisses the cool skin there. “How old are you?” he asks, curious.
“Sixteen,” she teases, and he rolls his eyes.
“And how long have you been sixteen?”
She worries her lip a little. “Ten years,” she admits, and he stares for a minute.
“Wow. So you’re a baby vampire.”
She shoves him, laughing. “Shut up! I’m not even the youngest in the family.”
“Wait—” his eyes go wide with the realization, because of course. “Are you all vampires?” He squints at her suspiciously. “Are you even Icelandic?”
Clarke giggles. “Yes, we’re all vampires. No, I’m not Icelandic, but Finn is, and we all lived there for a few years.”
“What else have you lied to me about?” he asks, only half-serious. Mostly he just wants to see her rip a tree in half again, for totally scientific and not-shallow reasons.
“I don’t sleep,” she says, clearly a little embarrassed. “Vampires don’t sleep, actually. They can’t.”
“So what were all those times you drooled on me?”
Clarke flushes prettily. “I don’t know why I can, around you. You’re—comfortable. You feel safe.”
Bellamy grins and surges up to kiss her. He’s expecting her to taste like blood, like copper, or cold. But mostly she just tastes amazing, and she’s kissing him back just as desperate.
When he pulls back, she’s laughing. “Done with the interrogation?” she asks, and he can’t not kiss her again.
“For now,” he says. “I’ll have more in the morning.”
Bellamy’s not really sure when they fall asleep, but he wakes up sometime just after dawn, with Clarke curled up and half on top of him, on the ground. There are plastic cups and empty mason jars littering the clearing, with teenagers sleeping wherever they managed to drop. A few had thought ahead, and brought sleeping bags.
Raven is sitting on the log, looking down at him when he wakes.
“Morning, sunshine,” she says, and he resists the urge to shush her, so she doesn’t wake up Clarke.
She’s a vampire, he reminds himself. She could probably use him as a toothpick.
Plus, she’s glaring at him. This doesn’t seem like a very good start.
“She told you?”
He nods; there’s no real point in lying, or trying to deny it. And he’s pretty sure Clarke’s dating him now, so her pseudo sister probably won’t kill him.
Raven nods sharply, glancing down at Clarke. The softness in her eyes is there and gone so quickly he’s almost sure he imagined it. “She really likes you,” she muses, flicking her gaze back to him. “Don’t fuck it up.”
“I won’t,” he says, and then corrects himself. “I’ll try not to, at least.”
“There is no try,” she says sagely. “There is only do, or do not.”
Bellamy squints up at her. From this angle, the way the light hits her makes her look like she’s sparkling. “Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of majestic, powerful creature?”
“Fuck you,” she says mildly. “I’m awesome.” She hesitates for a moment before speaking again. “Clarke was pretty messed up when she first turned. She was convinced she was a monster, and that she didn’t deserve love, or happiness. She did a lot of shit—killed a lot of bad people.” She pauses, and Bellamy realizes he’s holding his breath.
“She’s better now,” she goes on. “She mostly just holes up in her room and draws all day, or knits really badly, but. I don’t want her regressing because you’re an idiot. Capuche?”
“Crystal clear,” he says, feeling Clarke begin to shift in his arms as she wakes.
Raven must notice too, because she stands up. “You should come by for dinner,” she says, smiling viciously before stalking away to where Wells is waiting at the edge of the clearing, careful not to step on any passed out teens.
“How much of that were you awake for?” he asks, amused, and glances down to find Clarke grinning up at him sheepishly.
“Almost all of it, I think. I wanted to hear what she threatened you with. She went pretty light—she must like you.”
“Cool,” he says, breath hitching in his throat, because as she rolls over the light catches on her skin, and it erupts. She looks like she’s made out of a million drops of water, reflecting the sun. “I think I have a lot of vampire stuff to learn,” he says, and she leans up to kiss him.
“Don’t worry,” she grins, swinging a leg over so she’s sitting on his lap. “I’ll teach you everything I know.”