Work Text:
Clarke is working on some pretty impressive Frankenstein stitches, when Lincoln says “By the way, there’s a film crew coming over today.”
She smears the paint a little and swears. “What? Coming over where? To the apartment?”
Lincoln glances behind her shoulder, looking suspiciously apologetic. “No,” he says, and she shoots a glare at him before turning around.
There’s a strange man behind her, which isn’t that unusual. But it’s a little past two in the afternoon, and the haunted house isn’t even open yet. He looks sort of nervous too, like he doesn’t really want to be there. He’s got wire glasses that sit crooked on his nose, and hair so ridiculously messy he must have been running his hand through it all day.
“Can I help you?” she asks, because technically she’s still at work, and helping visitors is part of her job description.
Granted, usually she’s dressed as a corpse bride, or a zombie, or something. But she’s wearing the bright red STAFF t-shirt right now, so it’s not like she can avoid a customer.
“Uh, hi,” he says, and then huffs a little, like he’d practiced his introduction and is annoyed that he’s forgotten the words. “I heard you guys have a job opening?”
Clarke tries to glance at Lincoln as subtly as possible, to find him already looking at her with a single enormous fake eyebrow raised. She tries to say you’re responsible for this, aren’t you? with her eyes, and is pretty sure she’s pulled it off.
She turns back to the guy with a sigh—not because she doesn’t want to deal with him or anything, but it’s been a long day and her back still hurts from spending most of last night hunched over in the corn field waiting to jump out at the customers—and caps her paint before standing.
“Wells is the main supervisor,” she tells him, nodding for him to follow her down the hall. He keeps up with her easily, and she frowns at his long legs. “I’m just the floor manager, so he’ll have to vet you first. But we do need a new headless horseman, so you’ll probably be fine.”
He huffs a laugh, sliding a hand through his hair again. He’s clearly pretty nervous, even as he’s trying to play it off. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, I guess. Um, I’m Bellamy, by the way. I probably should’ve started with that.”
Clarke shakes his hand while they walk, dodging the fake cobwebs and giant rubber spiders. “Clarke.” She probably shouldn’t check out the new guy, especially when there’s a good chance he won’t last passed his first night, but—he’s wearing a pair of beat-up vans, and equally beat up Levi’s, with a simple black shirt that reads BOO in block letters. She’s sure he picked it out for the haunted house theme, which is cute. Everything about him somehow walks the line between awkward and cool, which is something Clarke hadn’t known actually existed.
“How long have you worked here?” he asks, stopping short as they round the corner and a plastic glow-in-the-dark skeleton leaps out.
“A few years, now,” she shrugs. “Since my freshman year. It looks good on resumes.” He gives her an unconvinced look and she grins, wiggling her paint-stained fingers in his face. “Art student.”
“Cool,” he nods, and she watches him worry his lip a little. It’s kind of distracting.
“So how’d you hear about the job?” she asks, mostly just so he’ll stop fucking biting his lip, which—does he have no sympathy?
He huffs a little, eyeing her from the side, like he’s trying to gauge her reaction. “My sister,” he admits, and she smiles. She can’t really help it; she’s an only child, but most of her friends have brothers or sisters, and she’s a sucker for siblings. “She knew how much I hated my old job, and I guess she knows someone who works here, and they happened to say they needed a new guy. What happened to the old horseman, anyway?”
They’ve reached the main office by now, and Clarke shrugs as she turns the knob. “He got ran off by the ghost,” she says, and tugs him inside.
Wells is crouching in the back, picking up a pile of spilled files, and glances up as they walk in.
Raven’s perched on top of his desk, wearing her STAFF shirt under a pair of camo overalls, cut off at the thigh to show off her very lean legs.
“Who’s the fresh meat?” she asks, eyeing Bellamy, and Clarke rolls her eyes, letting go of his wrist in a rush.
“This is Bellamy,” she says. “He’s applying for the headless horseman gig.”
“Oh, thank God,” Wells breathes, clearly relieved, as he snatches up the last of the folders. He straightens up and studies Bellamy a little speculatively, because no matter how desperate he is, he’d never hire just anyone.
And they are, in fact, desperate. The headless horseman is one of their biggest draws—they have a whole hayride built around it, and at forty dollars a ticket, people are expecting to see a guy on a horse with a pumpkin head, preferably scaring the shit out of them.
“Can you ride a horse?” Wells asks, which essentially means Bellamy’s in.
“I took lessons when I was a kid,” he shrugs. “I know the basics, still. Do you, uh—” he huffs a little, and digs a piece of paper from his bag. “I brought my resume?”
Wells is clearly pleased, and takes the form with a lot more enthusiasm than is altogether necessary. Raven and Clarke synchronize their eye-roll, which they’d perfected over the last summer.
“By the way, Bellamy this is Raven,” Clarke says, lazily waving a hand. Wells is still engrossed in the resume, so Raven nudges him with her foot, and then knocks the magic 8 ball off his desk, because she’s mature.
“I also go by Sound Box Goddess, and Our Lady of the Fog Machine,” she grins.
“She’s our tech expert,” Clarke adds, “In case that wasn’t clear.”
“I did manage to catch that, yeah,” Bellamy grins, and she doesn’t realize she’s smiling stupidly back at him, until Wells clears his throat.
“Everything looks good,” he says cheerily, and then glances up at the ceiling. “What do you think?”
Clarke catches Bellamy’s bewildered look, and leans in conspiratorially. Secretly—well, maybe not-so-secretly—this is her favorite part.
“The ghost gets final say,” she explains, and he makes a noise of understanding, even though it’s obvious he’s still very confused.
Across the room, the metal filing cabinet rattles, and one of Wells’s alphabet magnets falls to the floor. He likes to use them to spell out motivational messages, like U CAN DO IT, or TRICK AND TREAT, but Raven always changes them to curse words.
Wells nods, like it’s decided. “You’re hired. Can you start tomorrow?”
Bellamy shrugs, and Clarke has to hand it to him; he’s certainly taking the whole thing in stride. She’ll probably be disappointed when he inevitably gets freaked out, and runs away. “I can start tonight, if you want.”
“Perfect,” Wells says, and turns to Clarke with a slight grimace, which is never a good sign. “A group of students is going to be filming us for the month.”
“Lincoln told me,” she frowns. “But why?”
“Apparently they heard we’re actually haunted, and they want to try to get it on tape. It’ll be some sort of documentary for their film class—I don’t know. We need the publicity.”
Clarke’s about to make a snide remark about capitalism, when Bellamy clears his throat.
“Full disclosure,” he says, and she’s surprised to see he’s blushing. “One of those students is my sister.”
There’s a long pause while they all digest this new information, and Bellamy is clearly trying not to fidget. Finally, Raven says “Well that’s convenient,” and the moment is gone.
“I have some forms for everyone to fill out,” Wells says, shuffling through the papers he’d picked up off the floor. “A disclosure, giving them permission to put you in the film.”
“What happens if we don’t?” Clarke asks, but she’s just curious. She signs the form.
“I guess they can’t film you,” Wells shrugs, passing the pen to Raven, and then Bellamy. “I’ll go collect the rest of them—Clarke, can you show Bellamy the ropes?”
“Sure,” Clarke chirps, not waiting for Bellamy to catch up before she heads out the door.
He does catch up, of course, pretty much instantly. His legs are very long. It’s unfair, really.
“So I probably should have mentioned the whole—my creepily over-invested sister coming to film your place of work,” he starts, but Clarke waves a hand.
“It’s fine,” she says, and she means it. She’s not upset about the documentary, so much as confused. She loves the haunted house, but she’s grown attached to it over the years. She’s biased.
“Good,” he grins, relieved.
She still lets him fall in the rubber snake pit, but she probably would have done that, anyway. Rubber snake pits are always funny.
Clarke shows him most of the park—the corn maze, the vampire saloon, the dentist office from Hell, and the hay cart parked in the barn—before leading him to the employee locker room, tucked in the back of the haunted hospital.
“You’re a size Long, right?” she squints, studying his torso maybe a little more intensely than necessary, but—she’s an art major. She’s thorough. “You look like a Long.”
Bellamy gives her a smirk she absolutely does not know how to deal with, so she ducks down to dig around the bin of STAFF shirts, pulling out a long one to toss at his face.
She tries not to stare, when he decides to change into it right then and there, but—he has a very nice chest. It deserves her appreciation.
The shirt fits well enough, so he stuffs the black one in his bag and hooks his thumbs through his belt loops, offering a grin the same shade of crooked as his glasses. “Where to now, boss?”
Clarke kicks off the wall and marches out with a purpose. “Now I show you the murder motel.”
“Murder motel?”
“It’s where we keep the bodies.”
“You’re looking for a new job, right?”
Bellamy glances up from his game of Bejeweled, to eye his sister suspiciously. She’s a sophomore in the local university, and has recently become obsessed with all things Audrey Hepburn. She seems to have her life pretty much figured out, which means her latest hobby has been trying to fix Bellamy’s.
“If fishing around the back logs of Craigslist counts as looking, sure,” he says, resuming his game, and O huffs a little before sinking into the bean bag beside him.
“I think I found the perfect place,” she says, sounding oddly cheerful. “It’s quirky and different, like you!”
“You can’t compliment me with two synonyms for the word weird, O,” he says mildly, saving his new high score before putting his phone in his pocket. “What place is it?”
Bellamy’s been working at one of the local dive bars for the past few months, and he’s hated every minute of it. He’d thought being a bartender meant tax-free income, lots of phone numbers and free drinks. Instead he’s learned that mostly it means washing up a lot of puke in the bathrooms, and the booths, and the sidewalk. It’s been pretty miserable.
But historically, Octavia has really only ever laughed when he complained about it, so it’s natural to feel suspicious about her sudden need to help.
“That haunted house outside Arksville,” she grins. “Apparently it’s actually haunted.”
Bellamy eyes his sister skeptically. He knows about the haunted house, of course; everyone knows about the haunted house. It landed on some nation-wide list of Best Halloween Haunts a couple months ago, and the article focused on the fact that the place itself seems to have a poltergeist.
He’s never actually been there, because the tickets are overpriced, and he’s never had that much Halloween spirit, anyhow. Usually if he’s not working, he just watches the Tim Burton marathon on AMC and gives out quarters when the trick or treaters show up at his door, because as someone with a pretty intense nut allergy, he knows how much it sucks to have a pillowcase full of stuff he can’t even eat.
“How do you even know they’re hiring?”
Octavia shrugs, trying to seem nonchalant about it, but Bellamy can read her like a book. “My film studies group wants to make a documentary on their ghost,” she says, and he’s surprisingly sure it’s the truth.
“So you want me to—what, exactly? Wear a hidden camera at work?”
O rolls her eyes, but it’s a little too quick, so he knows she probably thought of that. “No, but I thought you could be our inside man, or something. We already got permission from the manager to film them for the last week of October, but only while an actual employee is with us.”
“And you thought I could be the actual employee?” All things considered, it definitely makes more sense than her just mentioning the job opening, out of the goodness of her heart.
“Well, yeah,” she says, like it’s obvious, which it kind of is. “Plus the hours are less shitty than your current gig, and they pay the same.”
“I’ll have to factor in income tax,” he grumbles, but it’s not really necessary. He’s definitely going to apply, at least—he really hates his job.
Two days later, he’s at the house—although it’s more like a Halloween theme park, with several dozen different buildings, and a corn maze out back. Octavia had burst into his room that morning, tossing a black t-shirt that said BOO at his face, because she thinks she’s funny. She’d said she’d talked to a friend who works there, and that they’d be expecting him later that day.
Except he doesn’t see any informative signs pointing out the front desk or main office, or anything. Mostly there’s just a lot of fake blood all over the walls and a creepy doll-head wind chime.
The park isn’t open yet, so he wanders around planning to ask the first person he sees, which happens to be a cute blonde painting some guy’s face green.
Her shirt says STAFF in bold letters, so he’s pretty sure he’s on the right track.
Her name is Clarke, and she has very blue eyes, which he only notices because he’s an observant person. She’s also almost always smirking, like that’s her default expression, and he wasn’t really aware that was a thing he’s into. She also keeps frowning at his legs, like she’s annoyed he’s so much taller, which is adorable.
Bellamy decides he’ll try to keep her from Octavia for as long as possible, because his sister will take one look at Clarke, and then mock him for the rest of his life.
He wasn’t really expecting to get the job that easily, to be honest, and he’s a little thrown by it.
Octavia and her film crew—which consists of Jasper and Monty, plus Miller because he’s a sucker for his boyfriend—are already at the murder motel when he and Clarke show up, because that’s just how his life works.
He doesn’t actually get to dress up that night, and instead spends his shift collecting tickets at the door. Octavia and the boys mostly just mill around, getting a few clips from different angles, and interviewing employees and customers when they can. They keep having to drop their cameras whenever Murphy, their executioner, walks by, because he’d refused to sign the forms, and they keep grumbling about it.
Clarke shows up by his window during a slow hour, while he’s indiscreetly texting O on his phone under the counter. She keeps sending him snapchats of all the horror decorations, which she’s drawn dicks on in the app.
“Trick or treat,” she says, and Bellamy whips his head up so fast his neck cracks and he winces.
Clarke’s dressed as a zombie bride, he’s pretty sure. There’s some rotting on her face, and fake blood all over her tattered old wedding dress. She might just be a corpse, but she’s wearing a contact lens in one eye that makes it look all cloudy, so he’s betting undead.
“Nice costume,” he grins, and even under her impressive fancy makeup, he can see her blush. “I’m a little disappointed, you know—I was promised a real ghost.”
“The ghost does what it wants,” she shrugs, and then nods back towards the graveyard, coated in thick fog from the machine. “I should get back to my post.”
Bellamy waves her off, and tries not to watch her leave, fails at it, then decides it’s okay to watch her leave so long as he’s not obvious about it.
He’s very obvious about it.
Clarke has barely disappeared into the graveyard, and Bellamy’s just about to pull his phone out again, when suddenly all the lights in his booth go out at once.
“What the fuck,” he says to no one. It must have been a surge problem, so he goes to find Wells, or maybe Raven since she’s supposed to be the technology genius, but when he tries to open the door, he can’t.
“What the fuck.” The doorknob doesn’t even lock from the inside, and it’s not budging an inch no matter how hard he turns it.
He’s about to just climb out the ticket window, when he sees a word being written in the dust on the glass.
C-R-E-E-P, it spells, and then all at once the lights come back on. The door creaks open. Bellamy stares at the word, unable to really even think.
“I’m not a creep,” he says, finally, when his mouth starts to work again. And then he frowns at the room in general for good measure.
He spends the rest of the night with his phone’s camera ready, just in case, sitting on the edge of his seat while pretending he’s calm and collected. He wedges the door open with a rock, though. It just seems like a good idea, all things considered. He really doesn’t want to break the door down on his first night at work.
Nothing happens, and he’s almost disappointed. He takes a few pictures of CREEP, though, as evidence, before wiping the window clean.
Bellamy finds Clarke in the employees’ lounge, where she’s changed back into her jeans and t-shirt. Her makeup’s started to run a little, but if anything it just makes her look more convincing. He tries not to think about what it means, that he finds her hot even when she looks like a dead person.
“So, about that ghost,” he starts, casual, and she grins.
“I did warn you,” she says. “What did it do?”
Bellamy shrugs; he’s had a few hours to get past the initial shock (terror) of it, and now he’s just really confused. “It called me a creep,” he admits, frowning, and really hopes she won’t ask him why.
“Wow, you got off easy,” she teases, and tosses him a kit-kat from the plastic cauldron on the table. It’s filled with candy, but when he’d poked around it earlier, he saw most of them were reece’s, kit-kat’s, snickers, and other things he can’t eat. All the name brand stuff, too, which just makes it more disappointing. “He must like you.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” he grins, catching the candy bar easily. He’ll just give it to Octavia when he gets home. She always eats the shit he can’t; she’d loved trick or treating when they were kids, because she always ended up with three-fourths of his candy.
Clarke shrugs, bending over to scoop up her bag. “I told you about the last horseman—Cage, and he was a prick. Anyway, the ghost chased him off. It haunted him so much he had a stress dreams.”
“Wow,” Bellamy says, helping with her mountain of makeup bags. “Guess I should feel lucky he just thinks I’m a creep, and not an asshole.”
“Hey, don’t sell yourself short,” she beams up at him, and he has to look away. He probably shouldn’t ask his coworker out on their first day working together. It’s unprofessional, or something. Either way it’s a bad idea. “It might think you’re a creep and an asshole.”
Bellamy huffs a laugh, and walks her to her car. It’s a shitty sedan of some sort that he doesn’t recognize, because he doesn’t actually know all that much about cars. But it’s definitely shitty.
“Hey do you have my number?” Clarke asks, after they’ve stuffed all her bags into her already overly packed backseat.
“Uh, no,” Bellamy admits, a little hesitant. He might have decided not to ask her out, but he’s not going to say no if she does.
“Okay, give me your phone.” He does, and she puts in her information before handing it back with a grin. “See you tomorrow, Bellamy.”
Octavia has pulled the recliner over to the front hallway so as soon as he walks in, he sees her perched in it, looking smug.
“What,” he grumbles, tossing his keys on the soap dish by the door and walking towards the kitchen.
She turns the chair and plants her feet on the narrow hallway’s wall, so he can’t get by. Which turns into an impromptu wrestling match while he tries to slide over her lap without breaking the chair, and she starts kicking him in the face.
“Admit it,” she crows, bare feet flat on his cheek while he debates biting her. “You like the job! You like Clarke—”
All pity forgotten, he bites hard on the heel of her foot, and instantly regrets it because it tastes disgusting. But it gets her off him, so.
“Clarke’s cool,” he says, shrugging, and pulls out the leftover squash casserole. “The job’s okay. You’re annoying, and weird, as usual.”
Octavia ignores him, fetching a hot pocket from the freezer, because she has a personal vendetta against leftovers. “Lincoln said you’ll have to dress in drag at some point, and I’m gonna get it on camera.”
“Go ahead,” he says, mild. “I bet I’ll look hot.”
He thinks about telling her the ghost is real, but. All things considered, he’d really prefer her finding out on her own, while he’s watching.
When he shows back up the next day, Clarke looks surprised, and even a little proud—so he doesn’t tell her that it’s mainly just because he wants to prove the ghost wrong. The whole CREEP thing sort of felt like a challenge, and he refuses to let some weird phantom beat him.
Bellamy doesn’t actually play the headless horseman until his second week, after a couple days spent with the park’s horse they rent for the season, Nightmare, which is the most tragic name he has ever heard.
“What?” Clarke asked, when she saw him eyeing the horse a little skeptically. It’s just very—big. And it’d been years since he last rode one. “Did you think you wouldn’t be riding a horse?”
“No. But I thought, I don’t know, it’d be mechanical or something. Isn’t this a hazard? Won’t she get spooked?”
Clarke grinned a little wryly, petting Nightmare’s flank like it was the easiest thing in the world. “Raven’s good, but she’s not that good. And Nightmare is very professional. Way more than you are.”
Bellamy stretched a palm out so the horse could nose at him. “Why don’t you be the horseman, then? I’d make a really good corpse bride.”
Clarke rolled her eyes and took his wrist, moving his hand to stroke down Nightmare’s face, soft and smooth. “I’m not big enough to be the horseman,” she admitted, sounding a little bitter about it. “The costume doesn’t fit. And I’m a corpse widow, obviously. I ate my husband’s brain.”
“Oh, obviously,” Bellamy agreed.
Bellamy works the horseman shift roughly four times a week, only on non-family nights, because the costume scares the kids. The first night, he nearly falls out of the saddle half a dozen times, but it’s easy to get used to. He never has to outright gallop, just trots along beside the hay cart so the patrons can get a few cool pictures.
His first night, he’d just managed to fit the costume, which was mostly a bunch of black leather and heavy wool, on when Clarke cleared her throat from the doorway.
She was flushing a little, which probably meant she’d seen him shirtless while he was changing, and he couldn’t help feeling smug. She held up a makeup bag. “I’m here to transform you,” she said primly, and he frowned.
“But I’m wearing the chest plate, so my head doesn’t show.”
Clarke rolled her eyes, shoving him into the nearest seat, before pulling up a stool to straddle in front of him. “Yeah, but you’ll have to take it off eventually, to breathe, and then what? The whole illusion is shattered, unless you look like a monster, and not just a nerd in a cloak.”
“Hey, I look good as a nerd,” he said mildly, closing his eyes so she could paint his eyelids. He had to start wearing contact lenses for the costume, which is probably the worst part about the job, even worse than the ghost. He hates contacts, because he has different measurements for each eye, and the right one always pinches a little.
Clarke just hummed, painting away, transforming him as promised. When she was done, he had to blink a little so the contacts could slide back in place. They’re the ones he found under the sink, and he was pretty sure they were like six months old or something, but he didn’t feel like paying for new ones.
She took out her phone to show him his face, and he had to admit—she definitely knew what she was doing. He didn’t even recognize himself. It was the best work she’d done, and two days earlier she’d made him look passably female.
“Wow,” he said, because he couldn’t really say much else. He looked awesome.
Clarke smirked. “It’s almost like I’m in art school for a reason.”
She packed up her supplies, probably so she could go change into her costume for the night. “Don’t sneak up behind any of the frat guys,” she warned. “Murphy got a black eye because of that, once.” Then she tossed him another chocolate bar—Nestle Crunch, this time, which was thoughtful but ultimately still unnecessary. He’d learned from Raven that Clarke’s the one who refills the candy cauldron constantly. But he’s pretty sure she doesn’t actively hand it out like she does for him, which he’s trying not to read into.
Octavia and Miller were waiting for him when he got to his post, each holding a camcorder.
“Knock em dead, Bell!” O crowed, and then seemed to think better of it. “Not literally. Nice makeup, by the way. Your girlfriend’s really good.”
“Shut up O,” Bellamy grumbled, marching up to where Nightmare is tied to her pole. “I’ll try to look cool for your movie.”
“You should flip us off at some point,” Miller suggested. “For the aesthetic.”
Bellamy huffed and untied the horse before swinging his leg over in the stirrup. “I’ll see what I can do.”
He’d assumed having his sister and her weird film friends constantly filming him at work would be awkward, but mainly it’s easy to ignore. They got bored with him pretty quickly, and the only staff member who really seems to be concerned with rules is Wells, and mostly just for the documentarians’ safety.
“I just don’t want them to get stuck out in the maze or something, and starve to death,” he explained over lunch in the lounge.
“Considering we go through the maze every day in case of that exact scenario, I think they’ll be okay,” Raven pointed out, but they could all tell he was still worried.
Murphy still refuses to sign the forms, and has taken to walking in front of the cameras at every opportunity, just to ruin their shots. Bellamy’s pretty sure he’s only doing it to piss off Octavia, and it’s working.
Everyone else is mildly excited about the movie—Raven managed to hold Monty hostage in her light box for most of the first three days, raving on about all of her equipment, to the camera. Even Clarke, who even after two weeks still manages to look nervous and surprised whenever she sees they’re filming her, likes to talk about her trade, explaining the differences between her concealers, and when exactly she decides to just say fuck it and use magic marker instead of black face paint.
Bellamy’s taken to looking at the cameras silently, like he’s in The Office. Octavia keeps having to cut, to tell him to stop.
Even the ghost seems to have accepted its role as a film star, showing up in the background of most takes, knocking things off of shelves, and making Clarke’s hair stand on end until she notices and laughs. Bellamy still finds the word CREEP written on his stuff sometimes, but he’s pretty sure it’s a term of endearment by now.
Three weeks into his job at the park, Clarke tosses a bag of jelly beans at his face in the lounge. He’s just found CREEP <3 written in magic marker on his locker, and was trying to decide if it was put there by Clarke or the ghost. He’s pretty sure it was the ghost, but Clarke’s the one with all the markers. There’s a red one stuffed in her braid, right now.
“No Butterfinger?” he asks, and to his surprise, Clarke flushes.
“You’re allergic to nuts,” she shrugs, like it’s obvious, which it isn’t. Bellamy doesn’t really advertise his allergy—not because he’s embarrassed or anything, it just doesn’t come up a lot. And Octavia’s been enjoying his supply of Clarke’s candy, so he didn’t see the need to tell her, and make her feel bad about giving him food. “I thought it was maybe chocolate, but you were eating one of Lincoln’s cupcakes the other day, so. Nuts.” She tucks a wayward curl behind her ear, looking shy. “You could have told me, you know.”
“You were giving me free stuff,” he says, mouth dry because—this definitely means something, he’s so sure. She’s blushing and got him jelly beans because he’s allergic to all her expensive name brand candy. “I didn’t want to be a dick.”
Clarke snorts. “You’re still kind of a dick,” she grins, shifting her bag on her shoulder. It’s nearly dawn, and they’re done for the night. Raven and Wells are still searching the maze for any lost wallets, phones, or small children, but he’s pretty sure they just use that as an excuse to have sex in the corn.
“Yeah,” he agrees, and there’s a long stretch of silence where neither of them seem to know what to say. “Anyway, see you tomorrow.”
Her face doesn’t fall, but it does go neutral. “Sure. Goodnight, Bellamy.” He walks her to her car again, which he does every night, but tonight it feels off, somehow. He doesn’t like it—they’ve never felt awkward, before. He’s sort of awkward, just in general, but things with Clarke have always been easy.
He slides into his own car with a sigh, to find IDIOT smudged across the windshield. “I know,” he says, hoping the ghost hears him.
Octavia’s still up when he gets home, on her ancient laptop’s Windows Movie Maker, which is what she’s using to edit the documentary, because she likes to make things difficult. She turns to look at him with eyes so puffy they look bruised.
“You need to sleep,” he says, gruff. “You’re looking way too pale. Is your iron low? I’ll cook us some broccoli.”
O just waves him off, which isn’t what he’s expecting. Usually when he goes full Mother Hen mode, she fights him on it.
But instead she just pats the couch cushion beside her. “Come look at this,” she orders. He sighs, letting his bag fall to the floor. He’s just finished working eight hours at the park, letting kids pull on his costume, and irritating teenagers flick stuff at his chest plate, trying to find where his head was.
“What is it?” he asks, leaning over to see the screen, where Clarke’s staring back at him, mouth open and about to speak.
Octavia studies him and once she’s sure he’s paying the appropriate amount of attention, she hits play.
It’s Jasper interviewing Clarke, his voice audible behind the camera. “Okay, final question; which of your coworkers would you save, if the ghost suddenly went evil?”
Behind Clarke, one of the jack-o-lantern lights falls off a shelf and shatters. Bellamy grins—the ghost can be pretty sensitive sometimes, and gets indignant.
Clarke grins too, in the video. “Now you’ve offended it,” she chides pleasantly. “Who would I save? Hm,” she’s clearly pretending to think about her answer, even though it’s obvious she already knows. “Probably Bellamy.”
Bellamy stares at the screen. He’d known Clarke liked him, of course; they tend to gravitate towards each other while they were working, and even after, they’d send quick texts back and forth throughout the day.
But Clarke was close with all her coworkers, even Murphy, who apparently she’d get together with to shout about European football. She actually lived with Lincoln and Maya, the quiet girl who worked in Dracula’s Blood Bank, and she’d known Raven and Wells since high school. He’d expect her to choose any of them over him.
Apparently, video-Clarke seems to have the same thought, because her eyes go wide, and she tries to backtrack. “Listen, I know that sounds shitty, since Lincoln’s my best friend, but—Octavia’s always with him, so I figure he’d probably be okay. And Wells and Raven would be together, and you’re usually hanging around Maya, and Murphy wouldn’t want me to save him, anyway, so—and Bellamy is so clueless when it comes to horror tropes, honestly. You know he’s never even seen Evil Dead? He definitely wouldn’t survive on his own.”
After that, Jasper splutters about his crush on Maya for a while, and Octavia clicks pause again, before turning to study his reaction.
“Oh,” he says finally, and she heaves an impressive sigh.
“Oh—she basically just said she’s in love with you,” she frowns, and he shrugs, partly because he’s too dazed to really do anything else, and partly because he knows it’ll annoy his sister.
“She said she’d save me from the evil ghost,” he corrects, and Octavia huffs a little. “But I am going to make fun of her about it. You know, just in case.”
Octavia promptly kicks him off the couch and holes up in her bedroom, so your idiocy won’t taint my video.
An hour later Clarke texts him a master post of dog Halloween costumes, and it takes everything in him not to mention the interview. He really wants to see her face when he asks about it—he’s hoping there will be a lot of blushing.
He finds her the next day, early enough that neither of them are in costume yet, still just getting their stuff put away, making their rounds through the park to make sure the ghost hasn’t switched around the decorations and signs, again.
He finds her patting Nightmare in the barn, as usual, and leans against the wall to watch.
“The ghost was right,” she chirps without looking at him. “You are a creep.”
“Yeah,” he agrees, and then, because he can’t really help himself, “But you’d still save me from the evil ghost, so I guess you’re into it.”
“Oh,” Clarke says, hand stalling, and he’s pleased to find she’s going all pink. She’s still not looking at him, though. “I should have known they’d show you that. Nepotism, and all,” she shakes her head solemnly and he laughs, walking over, putting a palm beside hers on the horse’s flank.
“You could have just told me,” he says, fond. “That you wanted to be my knight in shining armor.”
“Princess in shining armor,” she corrects mildly. “I’m zombie Sleeping Beauty tonight.” She worries her lip a little, glancing up at him. “Everything I said was true, you know. You’d be totally useless in a horror movie.”
“Hey, I’ve read Dracula,” he argues, but it’s hard to put any real heat into it, because now she’s stretching her fingers over to rub against his. “I’ve seen Shaun of the Dead. I can totally swing a baseball bat.”
“You can be the one nerd in the group,” she agrees, “That knows all this seemingly useless information, which ends up helping them all in the end.”
“Exactly.” He leans down, slow enough for her to stop him, which she does. He freezes—he’d been so sure that this was what she wanted—but when he looks at her, she’s smiling. She reaches up to take off his glasses, and then kisses him on the mouth.
“I’ll be the badass with the machete,” she says against his lips, and he laughs. Then she presses her tongue against his, wet and slow, and he groans.
Across the barn, the lights start to flicker, and one of the poppers they use to scare patrons, blows up, showering them both with confetti.
“That ghost is a total wingman,” Bellamy laughs, plucking the colorful shreds of paper from Clarke’s hair as she grins.
“I still want a machete.”
He walks her backwards until she’s pressed up against the wall, and slides his knee between her thighs so she whimpers. He hopes the ghost has left by now—he really doesn’t want to be a part of some weird paranormal porn.
But that thought’s not going to stop him.
He runs his mouth against her neck while she grinds shamelessly against his leg, and giggles until he pulls back to kiss her.
“I’ll see what I can do.”