Chapter Text
“So we were having a real conversation. Like, an actual, legitimate conversation with words and everything, not just me stuttering and rambling,” Monty explains as Clarke steers him down the corridor on the left, nodding her head as Monty continues to explain exactly why he was late meeting her for breakfast in the Great Hall, and exactly why they were currently rushing to History of Magic, one of the few classes the Slytherins and Ravenclaws even shared together.
“And I couldn’t just say ‘Hey Nate, you know, this is great and all, but I have to go write a paper.’ So, I didn’t. And we talked, Clarke, for hours, and it was amazing,” he sighs at what Clarke is sure was a fantastic moment for Monty. But right now, they’re going to be late if he doesn’t get his love-struck, exhausted self moving faster than her dragging him along is.
He huffs as she grabs a hold of his arm, directing him through a crowd of second-years.
“But then I had to go back to the common room after and write that damn paper on goblin riots for Pike. I went to bed two hours ago.” At this, Clarke stops in her tracks and whirls around to stare at him, causing Monty to walk right into her. “Hey Clarke, what the–”
Clarke doesn’t respond, too busy running through every assignment that needs to be done this week, knowing there’s no way she forgot an essay. Her planner would have reminded her when she opened it yesterday.
“Monty, that paper isn’t due for another week,” she tells him with a laugh, realizing he stayed up all night for nothing.
But Monty just stares at her.
“Clarke,” he says in the tone he only uses when trying to keep her calm, “Pike’s assignments are always due the first Friday of the month. It’s the sixth of May, and a Friday, the paper’s due today,” he tells her while eyeing her warily.
And if it was anyone else, anyone but Monty, Clarke would call them a liar, but she knows she’s been ridiculously busy lately with studying for her O.W.L.s and of course Pike would be one of the few professors still assigning homework at this point in the year. And she knows, she knows she’s royally screwed up.
“Oh my god Monty,” she says while moving to grip his arm, dragging him to the side of the hall as she tries to maintain some semblance of calm. “Monty. Oh my god! I forgot about the paper!” She yells at him as her grip only tightens to the point she sees him wince.
“Okay, ow, OW!” He exclaims while trying to pull away from her flustered form. Meanwhile, Clarke can feel herself beginning to panic. Cheeks burning, hands sweating, stomach tying in knots. History of Magic already isn’t her top class, and she needed this paper to give her a final boost to her grade.
“How the hell did I forget about that paper!” She asks him, knowing completely well he doesn’t have the answer. “Oh my god, Pike’s going to fail me and it won’t matter how much I’ve studied the stupid International Confederation of Wizards or wand legislation or–”
She stops her rant as suddenly as it starts with a thought racing in her mind. She looks to Monty, who looks like he might run if she reaches for his arm again. “Please tell me you have your Skiving Snackbox with you,” she demands as she starts reaching for his bag.
He jerks back out of her reach, trying to look scandalized as he scans the crowd for professors. “What even– why would I own such a thing?” He asks in what she thinks is his attempt at sounding appalled.
Even if he hadn’t told her about his recent buy, him and Jasper are already making names for themselves at Hogwarts as the creators of knock-offs of the brand-name candies. She knows he has the originals, still trying to figure out the properties to some of the trickier ones.
So, Clarke gives him the most unimpressed look possible.
He lasts all of three seconds before rolling his eyes. “Fine,” he admonishes as he slips his hand into the back pocket of his bag, pulling out a small, colored candy.
As she reaches for it, he pulls it out of her reach. Clarke looks up to glare at him, but he just stares back intently. “For the record,” he says matter-of-factly, “I think this is a bad idea. I’m sure he’d give you an extension.”
To that, Clarke merely rolls her eyes. “Oh yeah, I can totally see him doing that. Along with admitting he hates me because I call him out on his muggle-born bigotry.”
“Fair point,” Monty concedes, “though he does like Bellamy,” he adds as he drops the candy into her waiting hand.
“Everyone likes Bellamy,” she mutters stubbornly as Monty’s eyes spark with what looks like triumph.
“Right,” he nods, “everyone except you.” She ignores the meaningful look he gives her.
For the rocky start she and Bellamy had, the terms they were on now worked just fine for her. Acquaintances, maybe even tentative friends. A whole lot of bickering, not much else. Nothing else.
Having made his point, Monty points at the candy. “Puking Pastille.” At Clarke’s scrunched nose, he just shrugs. “Sorry, I’ve pretty much dissected everything else.”
Now knowing what it is, she examines it closer, half of it orange, half of it purple. “So, I just eat it?”
“The orange part,” Monty clarifies. “Eat the orange, you pretty much have insta-puke. Eat the purple, and you stop. Perfect to walk into class, puke out the breakfast you just ate, get dismissed from class, and get that paper done.”
She closes her own hand around it, gripping it tightly. “This is a terrible idea,” she says.
Monty nods his head with a smile. “Yep, this is simultaneously terrible and awesome. I never thought I’d see the day Clarke Griffin skipped a class, even an awful one with Pike.”
“Yeah, well desperate times call for desperate measures,” she tells him as they start towards the classroom again, Puking Pastille now in hand. When they’re almost there, she sneaks the bite of the orange, tucking what’s left into her robes. For something that’s supposed to make her nauseous, it has a pretty nice citrus-y taste.
“Well it’s not awful tasting,” she says as they make their way past the Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors waiting to get into the Potions room. At her words, Monty whips his head to her, eyes wide.
“You didn’t eat it yet, did you?” He asks with more concern than she’s comfortable with.
She opens her mouth to respond, but immediately closes it with the awful clench that her stomach gives, one hand instantly going to her stomach, the other covering her mouth. “Holy crap Clarke! It’s instant,” he whispers urgently to her as she tries to focus on what he’s saying and not on the horrible waves her intestines are apparently doing. To make matters worse, not seconds later, she hears the last person she wants to see at the moment approaching.
“Princess, just the person we need to set the records straight,” she hears Bellamy say from behind her. But all she can see is the dread forming in Monty’s eyes as he sees her lose her battle with her stomach and intestines. “Can you please tell Miller here that–”
And as for what Bellamy had wanted Clarke to clarify, unfortunately or not, will never be known because as soon as she turns around to face the two Gryffindors, that little orange candy does its job in disposing all of the contents of her stomach across the hall where all of the fifth-year students are standing for History of Magic and Potions.
Thankfully, she avoids Miller and Bellamy by mere seconds, but the corridor isn’t so lucky. Her stomach churns and churns as everyone moves to give her room and to avoid the vomit. That is, everyone but Bellamy, who looks at her with alarm and immediately comes to her side to pull her hair out of her face.
“Holy shit Clarke, are you okay?” He asks with a concern that shakes her as much as the dry heaving she’s currently doing.
But she can’t speak through trying to catch her breath, and she’s truly starting to wonder if failing History of Magic wasn’t the better option. So Monty replies for her.
“Maybe she ate something bad at breakfast?” He says smoothly. Never let it be said that Monty Green could not lie his way through anything. “That pumpkin muffin she ate did look kind of funky looking. She said it tasted like oranges.” And though she’s currently hunched over, groaning through the pains reverberating in her body, she swears she can hear a smile in his voice. She whips her head up to glare at him fiercely.
But then she looks to Bellamy, and the concern in his brown eyes has only grown. “Oranges? What the hell, I ate one of them and it tasted fine. Did you eat anything else?” He asks, but then realizes as she groans that talking about food at the moment is not helping her whatsoever. “Shit. Alright,” he says while wrapping his arm around her to support her. “Miller, tell Sinclair that I’m taking Clarke to the hospital wing,” he orders as he starts to steer her in the right direction.
She tries to pull away, she really does. He does not need to be doing this. One bite of that purple candy and she’ll be as good as new. But every time she opens her mouth she starts to dry heave again, and it takes everything in her to stand upright, let alone try to fend off his support.
It doesn’t help to hear Monty chuckle as Bellamy practically carries her down the corridor.
Next time, she’ll take the failing grade.
Because this is absolutely mortifying.
“Mr. Blake, I assure you that I can take care of my own daughter,” Clarke hears her mother say as she wakes up in a haze. She looks around, only to notice that she’s laying in one of the patient beds in the hospital wing, Bellamy with his hands crossed on Clarke’s right, her mom with her hands on her hips on Clarke’s left.
She looks to see Bellamy’s curls tussled, a clear sign he’d been running his hand through them and her mom’s lips in a fine line.
“I get that Dr. Griffin, but one second she was fine, and the next she could barely breathe. She literally passed out coming here. What’s the matter with her?” He asks, and her chest tightens at the tone of his voice. Fear. Concern. For her?
But as she wakes up completely, the uncomfortable roll of her stomach tells her that the stupid candy isn’t done with her yet. She gasps out a breath before rolling over to the side of the bed and dry heaving for what feels like the hundredth time. Both her mom and Bellamy are at her side in a second. Her mom hands her a bucket as Bellamy rests his hand on her back, rubbing soothing circles.
And oh god, this just keeps getting worse.
“Clarke honey, what in the world did you eat?” Her mom asks after she’s calmed down again.
“Um,” Clarke says, exhausted as if she had been actually sick from something. “Oranges?”
At this, Bellamy looks at her confused. “You mean the muffin?”
Right.
“Yeah,” Clarke says tiredly, “must’ve been a bad muffin.”
Clarke’s mom runs her hands over her clammy face, seemingly satisfied that the only symptom is constant vomiting. “Did you get hit with a hex?”
At this, she can feel Bellamy tense beside her. She shakes her head.
“Well, nothing else seems to be wrong. No fever or anything, so I think it’ll pass in a few hours. You should go to class Mr. Blake, I’m sure you don’t want to miss with those O.W.L.s right around the corner. Thank you for bringing Clarke here, you’re efforts are appreciated.”
Clarke catches Bellamy’s scoff, his jaw tighten, but he schools his expression when he looks back at her mom. “Whatever you say Dr. Griffin,” he tells her as he pulls away from Clarke. He gives her hand a squeeze, a look on his face she’s never seen, before grabbing his bag from the ground and heading out the hospital wing doors.
She stares at the doors longer than she’d like to admit.
Her mom hands her a glass of water and smooths her hair out of her face. “Okay?” She asks, to which Clarke silently nods. She’s just as tired as she would be if she really was sick.
Clarke can feel the effects of the candy starting to wear off though, as her mom turns to tend to other patients. But just to be safe, she pulls the purple piece of the Puking Pastille out of her robes and pops it in her mouth.
The grape flavor makes her stomach roll over again.
She closes her eyes, willing the nausea away.
Clarke wakes what must be hours later, if the sunset is anything to judge by.
It takes her a moment to realize someone’s next to her bed. Someone hunched over a book.
“Bellamy,” she grumbles in a scratchy voice.
His head jerks up at his name, an unguarded smile gracing his face. It takes her by surprise, this side of Bellamy that’s rarely shown.
“Hey,” he whispers while scooting closer, “how are ya feeling?”
She takes a moment to actually assess how she’s feeling. And, she’s fine. Totally, perfectly fine.
“I feel good,” she tells him, which leads him to sigh in relief.
He goes to bend down beside where he’s sitting, pulling a bag from the ground and plopping it on the bed beside her. “Good, cause I brought you some soup.”
For a moment, Clarke just stares. At him. At the bag. At what in the world is currently happening. Staring for so long, that Bellamy’s calm exterior starts to falter. “Soup?” She asks dumbly. “You brought me soup?”
“Uh, yeah,” he answers uncertainly. “Three kinds actually,” he chuckles nervously.
Instead of looking at her, he pulls out three to-go containers, presumably filled with soup. “I, uh, didn’t know which kind you liked? So I got pumpkin, but then I remembered the whole pumpkin muffin thing. So then I got onion, but I thought that if you’re still nauseous, that might be too strong. So then I figured good old muggle-style chicken noodle would work if the other two didn’t.” He rambles on and Clarke can’t help but feel… shocked? Touched?
She doesn’t really know what to say, so instead she focuses on the logistics. “Where’d you get to-go containers?”
“What?” He asks surprised, staring at the containers.
“Bellamy,” Clarke says with a laugh, “we’re at Hogwarts. We don’t have to-go containers.”
At realizing what she’s asking, he laughs too. A bright, startled sound. “Oh those. I bring a ton of them back from my Gram’s restaurant when I visit home. I don’t know what this school has against take-out, but Miller and I smuggle food out of the Great Hall all the time,” he explains, and if she didn’t know better, she’d say his ears are turning pink.
“Well,” she says picking up a spoon from the bag and grabbing the chicken noodle, “this was very nice of you.”
So, so nice. When she’s not even sick. Cause she’s faking it. And he doesn’t even need to be worried.
She’s going to rot in hell.
But the smile he gives her is small and genuine, and she can’t help the smile she gives back.
“Just eat your soup Griffin, you need to get some fluids in your body,” he mutters grumpily, though the glint in his eyes ruins the effect.
“You got it Blake,” she says through a mouthful of noodles.
And yeah, Bellamy Blake will never find out she was faking it.
The next day, Clarke plans on spending her Saturday writing a paper on the goblin riots.
She’s sitting in the library, trying not to fall asleep, when someone places a Skiving Snackbox on top of the book she’s trying to read. Alarmed, she looks up to see Bellamy smirking down at her.
“So,” he starts, “you’ll never guess the story that Monty told Miller.”
His smirk holds for another second before a smile takes over his face.
All Clarke can do is mentally curse Monty, very colorfully, and hope by some magical power that he can hear her.
But that comes to a halt when Bellamy slides into the seat next to her, closing her book and taking her hand. He tugs on it until her eyes meet his.
“Next time you're faking sick, tell me first, so I don’t flip out when you pass out,” he says so earnestly guilt tugs at her.
But he squeezes her hand again, telling her it’s okay. “You just thought you were next because you had eaten one of those muffins,” she teases, aiming to get another smile from him.
She gets it. And a roll of the eyes.
“Or you can just let me help you with the damn paper next time. Come on Griffin, own up to your faults.”
She shoves his shoulder as he begins to laugh, all happy and carefree. It’s a good look on him.
She wants to see a whole lot more of it.