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The thing is—Bellamy loves his sister. He would do anything for her, including jumping on top of a grenade, if that was somehow a part of the situation.
But he’d had a plan, or at least a sort of vague outline, and Octavia didn’t really fit into it. Not like this, anyway, flung at him by Social Services after their mom’s liver finally gave out.
He was going to get a promotion, buy a nicer place, one with an actual spare room where Octavia could crash sometimes if their mom was being especially hard to endure. He was going to help tutor her in literature and French and history, the only subjects he was ever really good at, and convince her to give college a chance, the way he never could. He was going to make sure Octavia got the life she deserved, the life that he’d always wanted for her. He was going to make sure she turned out differently.
But instead their mom died five years early, and now Bellamy has a thirteen-year-old ward that he doesn’t know how to raise, and a dilapidated mansion that he doesn’t know what to do with.
“This is our new house?” O asks, sniffing disdainfully at the dusty fireplace. He doesn’t really blame her for judging; the artist thought it was a good idea to sculpt tiny cherubs into the mantelpiece, with unnecessarily detailed butts. “Could you have found anything more Tim Burton?”
“I thought that was the look you were going for,” he shoots back, eyeing her chosen outfit. She looks like the lovechild of Wednesday Addams and Elvira. “I thought it’d fit your whole aesthetic.”
She just rolls her eyes and skulks off in her clunky boots, leaving scuff marks along the marble floor.
Bellamy sighs, watching her go. She’s probably exploring, searching for bodies hidden in the walls. He’s heard the urban legends about this place, the Griffin mansion. How Mr. Griffin died just two days before his daughter went missing. They never found her body, and everyone knew Mrs. Griffin probably had something to do with it. Reputation ruined, she’d put the house up on the market, and skipped town.
Bellamy was just a kid back then, barely thirteen, the same age Octavia is now, and a couple years older than Clarke Griffin was. But he remembers seeing her around town, or passing her in the middle school hallways. She was pretty, but stand-offish, popular in that untouchable way that rich kids usually are. Everyone knew her, but nobody knew her. And then suddenly she was gone.
It was a pretty big deal, back then. Her disappearance made the news. And then there was Wells Jaha, the mayor’s kid, raving on about some sort of haunted board game, and that made the news in a different way. The mayor sent Wells to some fancy boarding school up in Maine, and that was the last Bellamy heard of him. Griffin Inc. went bankrupt soon after, and the mansion began falling apart with no one left to take care of it. And within ten years, nobody seemed to remember, or care.
When Bellamy’s mom died and the bank took his childhood home, Bellamy was left with a sister and nowhere to put her. His one-bedroom apartment was more than enough for him, but after two weeks of sleeping on his old couch in the living room, and accidentally walking in on Octavia because she kept forgetting to lock the bathroom door and he kept forgetting to knock, Bellamy started reading through the classifieds.
The mansion was the cheapest option that still had working plumbing, which didn’t make much sense to Bellamy until he was standing inside.
“It’s going to collapse around us in our sleep,” Octavia declares, staring up at the crumbling plaster on the ceiling.
“At least if we die, you won’t have anything else to complain about,” Bellamy grumbles, and she shoots him an unimpressed look. Octavia’s unimpressed with pretty much everything these days.
And she keeps wearing black lipstick, which makes her lips look like two burnt sausages. He has half a mind to flush all her make-up down the toilet, and all the chains and leather too, until she looks like his Octavia again, the one he left when he went off to college. The one who wore her hair in pigtails, and smiled at everything, and collected glass butterflies.
But he knows that’s not fair—he knows she’s still his sister, and that she should be allowed to express herself. He just wishes her expression wasn’t quite so dark, and that it didn’t involve so much Hot Topic.
“I’m going into work today,” Bellamy says, loud so Octavia can hear him from the other room. She’s found a family of black widows, and he’s pretty sure she intends to keep them as pets. He’ll have to sneak into her room at night to get rid of them. “Try not to set anything on fire while I’m gone!”
“No promises,” Octavia calls back, which seems fair.
Bellamy works as an editor, which makes him sound a lot more impressive than he actually is. Mostly the job entails clicking spell check a lot, and color coded highlighters. But it pays the bills, and Octavia’s allowance which she spends on those belts made of bedazzled bullets all linked together. And that’s what matters, right?
He works school hours, which is nice, and means he gets home nice and early in the afternoon, with plenty of daylight left so he can start trying to clean the place up a bit. There are still sheets on all the furniture that was left behind, turning them into eighteenth century ghosts or those creepy old angel statues outside in churchyards.
He walks inside to silence, which wouldn’t normally worry him except Octavia’s been watching a lot of movies about teenage rebellions, and he wouldn’t actually put it past her to buy a bus ticket to Newark or something.
But then he finds her sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, staring up at the ceiling like it’s a jigsaw puzzle and she’s trying to find the missing piece.
“O?” he nudges her heavy boot with the toe of his shiny black work shoes. “What’s up?”
“Shh,” she says, not looking away from the ceiling. He doesn’t really get it; it’s just a bunch of unpainted plaster, crumbling and water-stained in some areas, which he’ll have to patch up with toothpaste. “You don’t hear that?” she asks.
“Hear what?” Bellamy frowns. On the one hand, if his baby sister is doing drugs, he’d like to know about it. But on the other, he really really hopes she isn’t doing drugs. He squats down until he’s nearly her level, and cranes his neck, trying to pinpoint the spot where she’s staring.
“The drums,” she says, completely serious. “You don’t hear the drums?”
It’s honestly starting to freak him out a little. He knows she took their mom’s death pretty well, all things considered. She didn’t even cry at the funeral. Maybe now she’s finally having her break down.
“Octavia, what are you talking about? What drums?”
She blinks and then tears her eyes away, glancing over at him. “Well they’re gone now,” she sighs with a frown. She looks sober, but he’s not sure that means much. “They’ve been going off and on all day. I think maybe there’s an old record player or something, that’s broken.”
Bellamy grins a little, relieved. It’s certainly a more plausible explanation than what he’d been expecting from her--which ranges from a cursed jewelry box, to aliens. If he’s being honest, Bellamy should probably give his sister a little more credit. Just because she’s now Goth and hates everything, doesn’t mean she’s wrong.
He ruffles her hair, like he knows she hates. “Alright, let’s start in the attic and work our way down. First one to find the record player doesn’t have to do the dishes.”
Octavia shrugs his hand off and grins, showing all her teeth like a little shark. “Deal.”
It takes a little longer than he’s anticipating, just because there are so many things. He hadn’t realized at first, just how much the Griffins had left behind when they left. Or, well, Griffin, he supposes, since there was only the one by the end.
There are towers of old encyclopedias which he does his best to not get distracted by, and plastic milk crates filled with yellowing aged papers with faded ink that he can barely read. Octavia does find a jewelry box, but as far as they can tell it isn’t haunted, just dusty. Everything is dusty, covered in a layer of gray that wipes off against their skin until their hands and arms are slathered with it, and their foreheads where they use their wrists to wipe away the sweat.
There’s old fancy dishware that Bellamy will never be comfortable with using, and paintings that look like they belong in some Scottish castle, and blankets that have been eaten away by moths and other tiny things with mouths. They find a bat in the rafters and Octavia screams, which she’s embarrassed about and tries to make up for it by helping Bellamy fish it down with an old shower rod, and then shoo it out the window.
Finally, they’re two-thirds through the attic, the sun is almost gone, and Bellamy is sifting through a bunch of tintypes from the Civil War when Octavia shouts for him to come over.
She’s pulling a box from an old leather trunk, and when Bellamy gets closer he can see it’s a board game, like the original version of Monopoly, or something.
“What’s that?” he asks, wiping his hands off on a bit of old lace doily he’s found. “Risk?”
Octavia shakes her head, running a finger through the dust on the box’s cover. “Grounder Nation,” she reads, and looks back up at him, wrinkling her nose. “Never heard of it.”
“Me neither,” he shrugs. “The Griffin’s were weird, and rich. Must be some weird, rich people game. Come on, let’s get dinner.”
“The drums were coming from inside it,” Octavia says, standing dutifully and trying to wipe the grime off of all her black ruffles.
Bellamy still hasn’t heard any drums at all, so he just smirks, steering her by the shoulders towards the stairs. “Sure they were. Nice try, but we haven’t found the record player, so you’re still helping with the dishes.” She gives an enormous sigh which by all rights is too big for her body, but she doesn’t bother arguing.
Bellamy makes tomato soup on the stove because it’s quick and easy, and he makes grilled cheese sandwiches to go with it. They eat propped up on the kitchen counters because they haven’t unpacked any tables or chairs, and it doesn’t seem like anything that’s actually useful is in the strange furniture collection that came with the house.
The mansion does have working plumbing, as it turns out, but the water pressure is pretty dismal. Bellamy washes their dishes in scorching hot lemongrass-scented water, while Octavia dries.
What seemed like an interesting, albeit weird, house in the daylight has turned nightmarish and surreal at night, all sharp angles and dark shadows at every turn. Nothing is familiar, or welcoming, about a strange new shower that Bellamy doesn’t know how to use and a strange new bed that he’s never slept in. About fifteen minutes after he’s finally retired for the night, his bedroom door creaks open, and Octavia steps into the doorway, looking suddenly small in her baggy Disney princess nightshirt and skinny pale legs.
“My room’s too dark,” she says, sounding uncertain, and Bellamy pulls back the blanket so she can slide in beside him.
“We’ll get you some fancy string lights,” he offers around a yawn as she cuddles in close, like when she was little and got horrible nightmares that only he could chase away. He always felt like such a hero around his sister, but now he knows the truth; he’s just a guy, and she just doesn’t know better.
“We didn’t have to move you know,” she says into the darkness, sticking her icy cold feet on the warm skin of his calves as Bellamy bites back a surprised shout. “I liked your apartment, and I know you did too. I know we only moved because of me.”
Bellamy rolls an arm around her shoulders, a tired half-hug. “Nah, I was pretty due for a change anyway. Plus I’m pretty sure my landlord was a serial killer, and I was the next on his list.”
Octavia sucks in a sharp breath at that. “What was this place like when you were here?”
Bellamy thinks back to the old elementary school birthday parties that Clarke Griffin would throw, lining the entire first floor with colorful streamers and balloons, back when everyone in the same class was invited.
“Warm,” he decides, remembering. “And bright, there were so many open windows. There was a table in the kitchen,” he adds. “One time we dyed eggs there, and Clarke, the girl who lived here, painted all the freckles on my arms like pink and purple polka dots.” Octavia laughs.
“Why were you painting eggs?”
“It was Easter, and that’s what weird, rich people do on Easter.”
Octavia’s quiet for a moment, and he thinks she might have fallen asleep but then she says, thoughtful, “When we have a table in the kitchen, we can paint eggs.”
“Yeah,” Bellamy agrees. “Are you nervous about school, tomorrow?”
“Only a little.”
“You’re gonna do great,” he promises. “Just remember, if everything doesn’t work out, it’s the end of the world.”
He can feel her make a face, and he grins up at the ceiling. “Thanks, Bell,” she says, dry, and then ruins it with a yawn. “But I think I can handle it.”
“Of course you can handle it,” he says. “Blakes can handle anything.”
She very carefully chooses an especially black outfit in the morning, and Bellamy watches her board the school bus at the end of their drive.
He ends up being thirteen minutes late to work, which means he gets chewed out by his boss, a very stern and firm-faced woman named Diana. And then he has to stay a full hour and a half after , for some bullshit mandatory meeting that has no business being mandatory, at all.
Bellamy should have known, then, to expect something terrible when he got home; his mother used to say trouble always came in threes. It was one of the few things she was never wrong about.
He walks in to find Octavia and two boys he doesn’t recognize, sitting on the living room floor, a board game set out in front of them.
“Bell,” Octavia says, like he’s shown up just in time. “Do you want to play? We haven’t started yet.”
Bellamy eyes the two boys, both lanky and extremely uncool -looking. One of them has a pair of science goggles on his head, that seem ready to slip down his face at any moment. The other one gives a sort of wave.
“This is Jasper and Monty,” Octavia introduces dutifully. She seems very proud of herself, which is fair. Two friends on the first day must be a record. “Guys, this is my brother, Bell.”
“Bellamy,” Bellamy corrects, automatic. Octavia rolls her eyes.
“Sit down here,” she directs, moving her school bag over to make room. She’s wearing the jeans that she ripped up with a box cutter, so little threads hang down over her knees and shed whenever she walks. He keeps finding piles of the strings in his car. It’s worse than her hair, honestly. “ hey heard the drums,” she adds, smug, and Bellamy frowns over at the two boys as he sits, folding his legs up so he can fit.
“Which piece do you want?” O asks, holding out her cupped hands, filled with little marble statues like chess pieces, and Bellamy picks up the first one he sees.
It’s a little Jeep Wrangler-like car, with wheels that actually spin. “What are the other options?”
“There’s a spear, a two-headed deer, a spaceship, a tower and a crown, but that one’s stuck to the board.” She shows the rest to him one by one. “I’m the spear.”
“Of course you are,” Bellamy grins, handing the car over for her to put in place on the board. “How do we play?”
“The instructions are on the side,” one of the boys--Monty, he’s pretty sure. He hopes it’s Monty, anyway; he doesn’t remember the other one’s name.
“We have to roll the dice first,” Octavia says, and the other boy--James? Johnny?--passes them over. They’re old, a little stained with age and the painted dots have faded, and they each have seven sides instead of the usual six.
Octavia rolls a twelve, and is clearly feeling satisfied with herself. The board itself is pretty interesting, looking more like a very old map than an actual board game. There’s a path painted across the top, coiling like a snake, carving through the different--what, counties? Countries?--of the map. The separate sections are labeled in a fragile-looking font; a forest named Trikru, a city of blurred painted buildings named Polis, a frozen northern landscape named Azgeda, an ocean off to the side named Floukru, an infinity symbol marking the end of the path labeled only City of Light.
In the center of the board sits what looks like a kind of well filled with the same sort of fluid that’s inside a Magic 8 Ball. Octavia rolls her twelve, the die stick to the board like magnets, and her piece begins to move down the path.
“Wow, I guess it’s electronic,” Monty says. “I can’t believe it still works.”
“Wicked,” Jesse adds, giving a low whistle.
Octavia’s spear stops on the twelfth square, and a message appears in the well, pretty much exactly like a Magic 8 Ball. Bellamy’s grudgingly impressed.
“They shine like stars but bite like thorns, sharp to the touch, don’t take them home,” Octavia reads out, with a frown. “What’s that supposed to mean? Is it a riddle?”
Bellamy tilts the board a little so he can read the directions printed on the side. “Grounder Nation: a game for those who seek to find a way to leave their time behind. You roll the dice to move your token. Doubles gets another turn. The first person to reach the end wins. Adventurers beware: do not begin unless you intend to finish. The exciting consequences of the game will vanish only when a player has made it to the City of Light and called out its name.” He glances back up at the others.
“Well that doesn’t sound ominous at all,” Jacob quips.
“But I still don’t--” Octavia starts, cutting herself off when something catches her eye. Bellamy looks over towards the window she’s watching, and finds it open, even though he could have sworn he’d left it shut.
As they watch, something blue and shining drifts inside, like a delicate leaf, or flower. It’s a butterfly.
“Oh,” Octavia says, barely a whisper, and reaches her hand out as it grows closer, but Bellamy snatches her wrist.
“Didn’t you read the message?” he hisses. “It said they bite.”
“Butterflies don’t bite, Bell,” O rolls her eyes, but she does seem a little more hesitant. The butterfly doesn’t take notice, instead choosing to flutter about the room, lighting for a second on a stack of half-empty boxes, before moving onto the next surface. It’s about the size of Bellamy’s hand, and luminous. He’s pretty sure that if he held a blacklight up to it, it would glow.
“They also don’t usually look like an x-ray machine, or come out of a game, but here we are,” Bellamy says, and O makes a face at him.
“What are we supposed to do with it?” Monty wonders, watching warily from the floor. The butterfly’s heading towards the kitchen now. Bellamy hopes he didn’t leave any food out on the counter again.
“It said don’t take them home,” Jack says, unsure. “Should we let it loose out in the wild?”
“It might die!” Octavia protests.
“Or kill someone,” Bellamy adds, because he doesn’t really trust a glowing blue butterfly from some mystical boardgame; sue him. “I’m gonna try and trap it in a box.”
“Don’t hurt it,” O says, as Bellamy grabs the least-full packing box from the pile. He empties out the rest of the picture frames and his mom’s wooden elephant collection, and then turns to stalk towards the kitchen, where the butterfly last was.
“I’m more worried about it hurting me ,” he admits, but in the end he worries for nothing. He finds it resting on the counter, investigating the last of some Hawaiian sweet rolls from the corner market, and Bellamy quickly slips the box over it, the way he’d trap a spider, or moth.
“Alright, I’m veto-ing the game,” he declares, marching back into the living room. Monty has the dice in hand, and looks ready to roll, so Bellamy fixes him with a heavy stare. “Seriously, we don’t know what else might show up. Just put it away, or burn it, or something.”
“We can’t stop now,” Octavia argues, pointing at where the instructions are mocking him from the side of the board. “It says the exciting consequences will only vanish when someone makes it to the end!”
Bellamy briefly considers veto-ing the game anyway and just keeping the butterfly trapped in a box on his counter forever.
He sighs. “Fine, we’ll finish it, but after that I’m chaining this thing to a cinder block and tossing it in the river, mafia style.”
“Deal,” Octavia agrees, and they shake on it.
Monty rolls the dice.
“I fucking hate this game,” Bellamy swears, arms tucked protectively around the three teenagers as they hide under a quilt. What kind of board game produces acid fog, seriously?
But then Jonathon’s turn gets them a random spear that nearly impales him in the chest, so.
Bellamy grips the dice with white knuckles, glaring down at the board like he might somehow be able to intimidate it into subordinance. Sweat drips down his face, mingling with the fresh cuts that he got from tackling Jamie to the ground before he could get shish kabobbed.
He glances over at Octavia, who’s watching him with a baseball bat in hand, looking ready for battle. He rolls a two.
The three of them each creep closer, leaning in so they can read the message that swirls out of the well.
One plus one makes homecoming, from the city she’s been waiting.
“What the fuck,” Bellamy says, tightening his grip on the fire poker, unsure what to expect. A giant gargoyle? Quicksand in the middle of his floor? Darth Vader? Anything goes.
“You swear a lot,” Monty decides, and Bellamy’s about to let out another one, when they hear a noise upstairs.
They wait a beat, holding their breath. Then there’s a second crash, and Bellamy says “I’m gonna go check it out.”
“I’m coming with you,” Octavia declares, jumping to her feet. Bellamy doesn’t bother telling her to stay put; he knows she won’t, so he just focuses on staying in front of her on their way up the stairs.
They follow the source of the noise, crashes and scurrying, like an animal locked up in a room and trying to get free, to the bathroom on the second floor.
The door is closed, and Bellamy keeps a firm hold on his poker as he reaches for the knob with his other hand.
Before he can open it, the door swings in, revealing a person. A girl, or at least he thinks it’s a girl. He’s pretty sure.
She’s around Octavia’s height, with long matted hair the color of raspberries, wearing a dozen different animal pelts all stacked over one another like a jigsaw puzzle in cloak form. Her skin looks like it might be pale underneath all the soot and grime, and she snarls at him, brandishing a hunting knife.
But then Bellamy sees her eyes, just for a second, and he knows her.
It’s been thirteen years, and they hadn’t even been friends, but. He’s so sure.
“Clarke?” he asks, and she startles, like she’s been shocked with a live wire. “Clarke Griffin?”
He sees her eyes run over his face, trying to place him. Now that the knife is limp in her hand, and she isn’t baring her teeth at them like a predator, she just looks scared and overwhelmed, and Bellamy feels a lump start to form in his throat and the sudden urge to make her some hot soup and fetch her a blanket. He needs to help her.
“It’s Bellamy,” he says, wetting his lips now that his mouth has gone dry with surprise. “Bellamy Blake? We went to school together. I lived over near the factory, on B-17, remember?”
Clarke blinks a few times, like she’s trying to clear her vision, and then speaks. “Bellamy,” her voice is hoarse and now that he can get a closer look, he sees her lips are chapped and the skin is close to breaking. He wonders how long it’s been since she’s said a word. “You brought a baby to show and tell.”
Bellamy grins without really meaning to and glances over at Octavia who’s standing uncertain, bat still up in the air and ready to strike, just in case. “Yeah, I did,” he agrees and steps closer, slowly so she won’t be afraid. Clarke doesn’t move, although her hands do twitch with every inch of distance that he closes between them. Finally, they’re standing toe to toe, and Bellamy reaches out for the knife.
“Please,” he says, only a little firm, like he used to be with Octavia when she was little and always getting into trouble. “I’m going to help you,” he tells her, and Clarke lets go of the blade with a sigh. Bellamy hands it back behind him without looking, and Monty scrambles forward to take it from his hand.
Then suddenly his arms are filled with Clarke Griffin, and Bellamy can only shift a little awkwardly and set down the poker, before wrapping her up in a hug.
She’s shaking, and clutching him like she might never let go. She smells sort of like trees and rain and other scents from nature, and sort of like a sewer. Bellamy raises a hand to cup the back of her head like he does for Octavia, to comfort her when she cries. It seems to work on Clarke too because she leans into the touch.
How long had she been trapped inside that board game? She went missing thirteen years ago; Bellamy remembers the police coming to their school, to interview everyone. He’d had to tell them about the Easter eggs, and every time he so much as waved hello to Clarke Griffin. Had she been inside Grounder Nation this whole time?
Bellamy pulls back, just a little, but it’s enough to startle Clarke back to reality, and she finally lets go, keeping hold of his arm, for support.
“What happened to you?” He studies her closer, the bruises and cuts on her face, the callouses and scars on her hands, her skin stained with mud and what looks like blood that he hopes isn’t hers, her hair dyed red and tangled up with brambles.
She ignores him. “Where’s my mom? And Wells? Wells Jaha.”
Bellamy knows there’s probably a nicer, more gentle way to let her know that her mom got run out of town by rumors and accusations that she’d killed her own daughter, and then her best friend was sent up to a mental institution and never heard from again--but Bellamy’s always been one to rip the bandaid off, himself.
“I don’t know. No one does. Your mom skipped town right after you went missing, and Mr. Jaha sent Wells to a boarding school up north. Neither of them ever came back.”
Clarke presses her lips together in a frown, rubbing them raw so he’s worried she might split them open. Without thinking, Bellamy reaches up with his thumb and soothes the skin there.
“What year is it?” she asks, sounding small, and he wishes he could do so much more for her, but.
They were never even friends. He doesn’t even really know her.
“2016,” Bellamy says, and watches her eyes grow cloudy with water, like she’s trying to hold herself back. “You’ve been gone for thirteen years.”
“What about the game?” Octavia blurts, getting impatient. Bellamy glares at her, but she just mimes a gag.
“What game,” Clarke says, sharp, clearly already knowing the answer. “Grounder Nation?” She turns back to Bellamy, eyes dry and wide open. “Please tell me you didn’t all take a turn.”
Bellamy hesitates. “I mean, I could, but it would be a lie.”
Clarke lets out a muffled noise of annoyance, and narrows her eyes at the three teens in the hall. “Who are all of you?” Glancing around, she adds “And why are you all in my house?” She turns to Bellamy for an explanation.
“Technically it’s our house now,” Octavia says, territorial. “Bell paid for it and everything. I’m Octavia, and this is Jasper and Monty. Who are you?”
She knows who she is, of course, but his sister is always itching for a fight. Beside him, Clarke bristles.
“Your house?” she demands, whirling on him. Bellamy gives a helpless shrug.
“It’s been on the market since your mom left,” he explains, and Clarke visibly wilts.
He only hesitates a little before wrapping an arm around her shoulders, and Clarke leans in against him immediately, like they’ve been doing it for years. He doesn’t remember if they’d ever hugged as children. He’s pretty sure they never did.
“Okay, I think it’s time for you two to go home,” he decides, waggling a finger at Monty and Jackson. But then Clarke straightens up, shaking her head.
“If they took a turn in the game, they can’t leave,” she says. “Not until the game is finished. Not until someone makes it to the end.”
Bellamy sighs, frustrated and without many options. Either he says to hell with it and gets rid of the game now, exciting consequences be damned, or he goes along with the plan and tries to make sure none of them end up decapitated in the meantime.
“Fine, but can the murder game wait for a bit? I mean this in the nicest possible way, but you really should take a shower. Or a bath. Anything, really.”
Clarke looks affronted just for a second before she glances down at herself, as if just now remembering that she’s literally covered in dirt.
“We’ll leave you to it,” Bellamy says, shooing the others down towards the stairs, and pulling the door shut behind him.
“You didn’t say she was your girlfriend,” Octavia whispers, wrinkling her nose at the thought, and Bellamy tugs on her hair, irritated.
“She wasn’t.” He doesn’t really feel like admitting that Clarke Griffin was his first, and longest, crush. It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal; everybody had a crush on Clarke Griffin. She was the prettiest girl in school.
Which is part of the reason why it’s so heart wrenching, seeing her like this now.
“If she wasn’t your girlfriend, then why are you making her hot chocolate?” Octavia asks, sliding up on the counter and swinging her legs back and forth as she watches him work at the stove. Bellamy eyes the box that’s still trapping the butterfly, distrustfully.
“Because I’m a nice person,” he says, and O snorts.
Bellamy calls Jason and Monty’s parents, to let them know they’d be staying over. He does his best imitation of a trustworthy legal guardian.
“Fuck,” he says, once he’s hung up. He’d been holding it in.
“I smell chocolate,” Clarke says, walking in. She’s wearing an old t-shirt and gym shorts borrowed from Octavia, and her hair is now a washed and faded pink, dripping rose-colored water on the floor where she steps. Her skin is pale just like he remembers, but a little sunburned in places and still warm from the shower. She smells like his shampoo.
Bellamy may have jumped the gun on this situation, now that he really thinks about it. His inner thirteen-year-old is freaking out.
She stands close enough that their sides are pressed together, watching as he pours the hot chocolate into separate mugs, and then fetches the discount spray can of whipped cream from the fridge.
“I didn’t thank you,” she says, quiet, once he’s finished up the last of the whipped cream, licking some spray from the pad of his thumb. It’s all starting to melt into the chocolate, forming a cloudy beige.
Bellamy frowns over at her, confused. “Thank me for what?”
“For--” Clarke pauses, takes a sip of her drink and then sets it down again. There’s a layer of cream on her upper lip like a mustache, and Bellamy reaches over, and swipes it away. She glances up at him and smiles. “For that.”
“What, moming you?” he jokes, but she seems earnest.
“Yeah. In the game, it was--it was really hard. I didn’t have anyone I could trust, because none of it was real, but it felt real, and everything felt like it was out to get me all the time, and. It’s just been a while, since anyone’s actually cared.”
Bellamy nods, takes the mug from her hands and sets it down, and then pulls her in against him. Her arms go up around his back just like last time, and it shouldn’t feel so natural, right? It shouldn’t feel like this is how it’s been for them, for years. Like this is how it should be. They barely even know each other. She’s been trapped in a fictional world for thirteen years. He has trouble doing his own taxes, and a teenage dependant. There’s currently a magical glow in the dark butterfly trapped under a box, just two feet away.
But then Clarke steps up on her toes so she can rest her head on his shoulder, and she smells nice, even if her hair s still wet and soaking through his shirt.
“Sorry,” she pulls back. “I tried cutting it in the game, but it was easier to just ignore it, honestly.” She looks like she doesn’t know what to do with it all, which seems fair, since there is a lot. She still looks like a princess, like she did when they were kids, but now it’s less Cinderella and more Rapunzel.
“Turn around,” he motions for her to spin so her back is to him, and then Bellamy runs his fingers through her hair, unknotting it as he goes, like he used to do for Octavia when she was young and still let him. He parts it into thirds, and then starts from the top and braiding it all together as his hands move down her back. “There you go,” he lets her go when he’s finished, and Clarke runs a hand over his work.
“You’re nice,” she says, finally, and Bellamy snorts. “You are. You were nice when we were kids, too.”
“That’s just because you never saw me in high school. I was an ass.”
Clarke shrugs one shoulder, and as if his brain wants to prove her wrong about the whole nice thing, he immediately zeroes in on the fact that she isn’t wearing a bra.
Of course she isn’t; Octavia’s still on the training kind--he knows because of a mortifying shopping trip to JC Penny--and there probably isn’t a Victoria’s Secret in Grounder Nation. Why would she have a bra? Why does it matter? It doesn’t, it doesn’t matter at all, Bellamy’s just a creep. He turns on his heel and snatches up two mugs of hot chocolate.
“Should probably get these to the kids,” he mutters, walking back out into the living room.
After all, they’ve decided to finish the game, haven’t they? He can only put it off for so long. He doesn’t trust the board game that sends spears and acid fog, to wait patiently.
“Whose turn is it?” he asks, and Octavia starts to raise her hand, but Clarke cuts her off, folding down on the floor beside him.
“Mine, probably. The game was already in effect by the time you all started playing. That’s how I got trapped; I rolled a five.”
“Okay, so, don’t roll a five, I guess,” Bellamy says. He could probably still get away with just setting the whole thing on fire.
Clarke takes the dice with a steady hand, shakes them around a little in her palm, and then tosses. Six dots stare back at them, and everyone breathes out collectively. The crown piece moves to its new space, and the riddle begins to swell.
Everything seems bigger in the future, including him.
“What,” Bellamy says, flat. He’s decided that riddles are bullshit.
“Grounder Nation is set three hundred years in the future,” Clarke explains. “After a nuclear catastrophe, the earth changes. Radiation affects the plants and the animals. People regress to tribal warmongering among each other.”
“So who is him ?” Monty asks, and Clarke shakes her head.
“I don’t--” she’s cut off by a sound Bellamy has never heard before in his life. It’s a roar, shaking the house around them. And it’s coming from upstairs. Clarke goes pale as he watches her. “Pauna.”
“What the hell is a pauna?”
“Basically, King Kong’s younger brother,” she says, gritting her teeth like she’s preparing for a fight.
“Awesome,” Bellamy snaps, and turns to his sister. “When this is all over, you are so grounded for getting us stuck in this game.”
Octavia frowns, looking ready to argue, but Bellamy’s already following Clarke up the stairs. There’s another roar, even louder than the last.
“Why is everything showing up in the bathroom?” Bellamy wonders, once they reach the landing and see the closed door starting to splinter from the creature’s weight.
“Do you have a gun?” Clarke asks, whispering for some unknown reason.
“What? Why would I have a gun? Do I look like the kind of guy who has a gun? I edit magazine articles!”
“My dad used to keep one in his closet,” Clarke says, ignoring him, and he follows her towards the master bedroom which he has recently claimed as his own. He tries not to feel embarrassed about the messy bed, but Clarke doesn’t seem to notice.
As it turns out, the pistol is still where Jake Griffin left it, predictably stuffed in a shoebox with a handful of bullets.
“Have you ever shot one of these before?” Bellamy asks, and Clarke shrugs, unhelpfully. She no longer looks like the startled, overwhelmed girl that appeared in his bathroom, or the soft and shy girl that she was downstairs. Now she looks ready to kill something.
“How hard can it be?” She loads the clip and racks the gun. “I watched a Youtube tutorial, once.”
“On shooting giant radioactive gorillas?”
Clarke flips him off and starts back for the bathroom, with Bellamy trailing after her. In the end, she manages to only miss four times, before shooting the animal in the head. Bellamy would feel bad for it, if it hadn’t torn his entire second floor up and nearly mauled him to death.
“Wow,” Bellamy says, when he’s caught his breath enough to speak again. Clarke is brushing drywall off of her head. “You’re a natural.”
She flashes him a grin. “Maybe that’s what I’ll do, when this is all over. Become a radioactive animal specialist. I’m sure I can find somewhere that’ll take me.”
“Yeah, you could do that,” Bellamy agrees. “Or you could stay here, when it’s all over. I mean, it was your house first. There’s more than enough room.”
Clarke stares at him and Bellamy refuses to regret the offer. After all, it was her house. It was her home, and it still could be. He wouldn’t mind, waking up to find her drinking coffee in the kitchen, or lounging around with him on the couch, or eating breakfast with Octavia. He can picture it so easily, this life with Clarke Griffin.
In the dream, she doesn’t sleep in the guest room, and instead he wakes her up by peppering kisses all over her face, but. That’s just a fantasy.
The real Clarke Griffin is standing here right in front of him, and might possibly decide to live with him, so he’ll take her in whatever capacity she wants.
“Once it’s all over,” Clarke finally says, an agreement.
“May the best one win,” Bellamy chirps, and she huffs at him.
But then they get downstairs, and Octavia’s unconscious.
“What happened?” Bellamy demands, shoving the boys out of his way so he can kneel down beside his sister.
“It was her turn,” Jenson says, miserable. “The riddle said A flower by any other name would give the same dreams, and then this vine of flowers came out of the wall, and Octavia cut her finger on the thorns, and passed out.”
“Bellamy,” Clarke lays her hand on his shoulder, comforting and warm. “Bellamy, we have to finish the game. If we finish the game, everything goes back to normal, and she’ll wake up.”
Bellamy knows she’s right, of course, and anyway, what else is there to do? He can’t exactly drive his sister to the ER right now. He’s pretty sure their paperwork doesn’t have a check box for pricked her finger on some magical flower thorns that made her fall asleep.
He takes off his sweater and bundles it up under Octavia’s head like a pillow, combing the hair off her face, making sure she’s as comfortable as he can make her, hands shaking the whole time. He keeps thinking about what he would do if she never wakes up, and he keeps coming up blank. He has no idea how to exist without his sister. He’d probably just lay down right beside her, and die.
Bellamy leans down and presses a kiss to her hairline. Then he goes back to the game.
They face another round of acid fog, Jared gets an arrow to the arm, and there’s a panther trapped in the attic by the time Monty’s piece makes it to the City of Light square, and he jumps up, shouting the name out into the universe, ending the game for good.
Bellamy catches Clarke when she throws herself at him in triumph, cheering, and pumping a victory fist into the air. Jasper and Monty high five, Jasper’s arm suddenly healed. From over Clarke’s shoulder, Bellamy sees his sister stir, blinking awake and sitting up. He no longer hears the panther growling up above them. He’s sure that if he went to check, the box on the counter would be empty and the butterfly would be gone.
Clarke pulls back so he can see her grin, eyes shining and bright, and he just has enough time to lean in, lips barely grazing hers, before the world around him slips away like water being drained.
Bellamy wakes up in his childhood bed, in the tiny childhood apartment that he shared with his mom and Octavia until he was eighteen. He’s not really sure how he got here; one minute he was kissing Clarke in the Griffin mansion, and now suddenly he’s inside a building that he knows for a fact was demolished and replaced with a shiny new Quik Stop gas station, earlier this year.
Except it isn’t that year, is it? The game was started in 2003, and now that it’s over, everything has reset.
Bellamy scrambles out of bed, feeling smaller than he has in years. He looks down to see his legs aren’t as long as he’s used to them being. There’s a mirror hanging on his closet door and Bellamy goes over to check on his reflection.
Well, he’s definitely thirteen again. No doubt about it. Everything about him is scrawny and short, just like he remembers.
He’s still checking himself out, searching for pimples, when he hears a knock on the front door, and his mom going to answer it.
“Bellamy,” she calls out a few seconds later. “Your friend is here to see you.”
Bellamy tries to think of who it might be. He doesn’t really remember who his friends were in eighth grade. He might not have had any; middle school was a rough time for him.
But then he goes out into the postage stamp-sized living room and finds Clarke Griffin waiting for him on the sunken floral couch, which seems pretty obvious in hindsight.
She beams up at him, bright and happy, happier than he remembers her ever being, before. “You’re exactly how I remember.”
“So are you,” Bellamy agrees, reaching out to tug on a loose yellow curl. “You stay pretty much the same height, actually.”
“You don’t,” Clarke says easily. “You get really hot.”
Bellamy chokes on absolutely nothing, which just makes Clarke grin wider, like she’s won something, although he has no idea what.
“Wells is going to meet us there,” she tells him, standing up. She’s wearing a pretty dress, the kind she always used to wear at school. Her hair is braided messily down her back, like she tried to do it herself without looking.
It feels strange, having twenty-six years’ worth of memories stored up in his thirteen year old brain. He’ll have to go through puberty again, which seems incredibly unfair. He’ll have to watch his mother slowly killing herself with whiskey, forgetting about him and Octavia a little more each day.
Clarke reaches out and folds her hand into his, tugging him towards the front door. It’s night, but not too late, and the air is a perfect blend of warm and cold.
At least this time, he’ll get to go through puberty with Clarke Griffin. And there are more than a few things about his time in high school, that he’s more than happy to change.
“Where is Wells meeting us?” Bellamy asks, because it’s either that, or asking why she’s holding his hand as they walk, and he really doesn’t want to ask that. He’s worried that if he brings it up, she might stop.
“The bridge,” she says simply, and squeezes his fingers once for good measure. She doesn’t let go of him, and he doesn’t bring it up.
Wells is waiting at the bridge, just like Clarke said he would be, and in his hands Grounder Nation sits, looking like a cruel joke. Bellamy glares down at it, and Clarke laughs.
“We’re getting rid of it,” she tells him. “For good.” She gives Wells a sharp nod, and he tosses the game over the edge. They watch it fall into the dark water of the river below, sending a few ripples, and then nothing.
Wells eyes their hands, still linked, for a moment, but mostly he just looks amused. “Now will you tell me why we had to drown some old board game at eight o clock?”
Clarke glances up at Bellamy for a moment, a question, and he nods just a little. He remembers how desperate Wells was, to find his best friend. How desperate he was for anyone to believe him. It doesn’t seem right, keeping him out of the loop this time around.
“Okay,” Clarke decides, as they start slowly back the way they came. “But you have to promise to believe us. I know this might be hard to believe, but in the future,” she takes a deep breath. “Bellamy is tall.”
“Oh, shut up,” Bellamy grumbles, and she turns her head to laugh against his shoulder. “Maybe I should tell the story.”
“No, I’ll tell it, I’ll tell it,” Clarke argues, and Wells puts a hand on each of their shoulders, which is easy for him to do, since he’s so much taller than them both.
“I don’t care who tells it, as long as someone explains to me what’s going on.”
They share another look, and Clarke starts over. “Okay, well, it all started when I heard these drums…”