Chapter Text
When Clarke meets Bellamy Blake, it’s in the front room of her new co-op, and she’s struggling with a very heavy box of books. She’s got one foot up on a stair, and the box balanced precariously half on her thigh and half on the stairwell, while she waits for Wells to come back with the roll of packing tape, for the hole in the box’s bottom that’s growing larger with each second. She’s spent all morning carrying heavy boxes, though not all were of books, and her hair is stuck in a web of sweaty tangles on the back of her neck, and she’s pretty sure the musty gym-sock smell is from her, and she’s trying very hard not to drop this box—which is why when Bellamy strides in, takes one look at her and grins cheekily, drawling Need a hand, she snaps “I’ve got two of my own, thanks,” and decides she hates him.
It isn’t one of her best moments, but. He could have forgone the sarcasm, so it’s at least a little bit his fault.
Instead he just grins a little wider and says, “I’ll leave you to it, then,” and then actually leaves her, wobbling on the staircase, while he heads to the kitchen, and she really does hate him now.
Wells comes back, all apologetic and breathing a little hard because he’s not the most athletic, and barely manages to tape up the hole before it’s split open completely. They get the rest of their things up the stairs without running into Bellamy again, which she counts as a personal favor from the universe. Or maybe it’s taking pity on her, who knows? She’ll take it.
He’s there for the house meeting, where Wells and Clarke and the rest of the newbies introduce themselves, and it turns out that Bellamy doesn’t even live in the co-op—he’s friends with one of the members, a pretty mechanical engineering major named Raven who’s also new, and he just sort of lounges around making small talk and eating a peanut butter-banana sandwich Clarke is pretty sure he made with the supplies in their kitchen, which is more than a little rude.
Anya is the house president of Sky-Box, and Lincoln is the work manager, which seems pretty appropriate. The work manager is supposed to be a little intimidating, like a stern-faced dad doling out firm-but-fair punishments when someone forgets about or skips out on their chore hours, or skims over cleaning. To be honest, Anya’s more than a little intimidating too, but Lincoln’s a lot bigger, so he has that going for him.
There are seven bedrooms in the house, and fifteen residents, which means that most of them have to double up. Clarke and Wells had tried to get put together, but one of Sky-Box’s few rules is no roommates of opposite genders—apparently the year before they’d had an issue with one couple in particular. “They were like rabbits,” Indra said with disgust. “Nymphomaniacs, the both of them. We couldn’t get anything done, they were so loud about it. We couldn’t invite anyone over—they’d all get embarrassed, and leave.”
“Seems sort of stupid,” Wells muses while they unpack boxes. Their rooms are right across the hall from one another, and it isn’t a big deal or anything, but. They have matching bookshelves and it would have been nice to live with someone they already know how to be around. “Since I’m gay and all. I’m way more likely to get it on with this roommate, than you.” His roommate is Lincoln, and Clarke’s pretty sure he’s straight, but she also hasn’t heard him speak or anything, so maybe.
Her roommate is a serious looking girl named Lexa, a Senior majoring in Linguistics. A lot of the tenants are majoring in linguistics, apparently. She’d walked in that morning, wearing nothing but a bathrobe after her shower, and had dressed completely brazenly in front of Clarke before leaving for a seminar. “Yeah,” Clarke agrees, shelving Wells’ first edition Representable Men.
She meets Raven—actually meets, rather than waves to awkwardly as they all say their names and majors in a circle during the house meeting—in the kitchen. She’d wandered in towards the smell of spices and grease, and finds her poking at something in a pot on the stove.
“What are you making?” she asks, thinking it’s probably as good an ice-breaker as any. She doesn’t know much about Raven—she’s a sophomore, she wants to work with NASA, and she’s friends with the sandwich-thieving asshole Clarke refuses to remember by name.
“Ramen,” Raven says with a smirk, and Clarke frowns. She knows ramen; ramen has been her constant companion for years, since it’s easily microwaved, cheap, and technically constitutes as a meal. The heavenly smell currently filling the kitchen, making Clarke’s mouth salivate and her eyes water, is not the smell of ramen. She would know.
“I’ve had ramen,” she argues, creeping closer to peek into the pot over Raven’s shoulder. It’s red-brown with spices and bubbling water. “And it does not look like that.” Raven shoulders her out of the way affectionately.
“Well you’ve never had my ramen,” she argues smugly, and dishes them each up a bowl.
It’s amazing, quite possibly the most delicious thing Clarke has ever had—she has to chase it down with the Greek yogurt in the fridge to stop her mouth from burning, but it’s so worth it.
Wells wanders in some time later, and Raven gives him a bowl too, which he inhales, and then finishes off the yogurt. Clarke suddenly remembers she’d only come downstairs to use the shower on the first floor, and is forced to wear a towel back upstairs when she’s finished, having forgotten a change of clothes. Lexa is there when she walks in, and they lock eyes for a moment before Lexa’s trail down like the water on Clarke’s legs. She looks at the puddle forming at Clarke’s feet and smirks.
It’s going to be a good year, Clarke thinks.
Clarke learns several things very quickly about life at Sky-Box. The first is that, at least according to the other student co-ops, theirs is at the bottom of every list. Apparently most co-ops are run like some sort of democratic-republic country, fervently forcing political activism on anyone within range. Most are some variation of vegetarian, nearly all substance-free, and all with members majoring in either political science or women’s studies.
On her third day at the house, Clarke walked in on Nyko using their living room as some sort of impromptu clinic, administering lotions and a few pills to some frat kid with a rash he wanted taken care of discretely. He folds Nyko a wad of twenties, glances nervously at Clarke, and practically runs out the door. Nyko shrugs at her and she shrugs back; they’ve got to pay rent somehow.
So, what she’s saying is, she doesn’t think any of her housemates are setting out to win the Nobel prize, or anything. Anya wears something leather like, every day. She’d probably burn PETA to the ground if she could. Indra might help.
Clarke has also learned that Indra seems, for all intents and purposes, to somehow be a carnivore. It’s a medical mystery, and Clarke really wants to ask about it, but she’s not sure how Indra would react.
There’s a no-one-night-stands rule that pretty much goes unpunished, at least as far as Finn’s concerned. And at least three times a week, Clarke stumbles into the kitchen in search of coffee, to find a shirtless Bellamy Blake spreading strawberry jam on a bagel, so she’s pretty sure Raven breaks the rule too. That, or he’s part-time homeless and spends the night on the communal couch, but she’s not about to ask him.
He’s taken to making her coffee in the mornings after he stays over. It’s nice, and more than welcome—no one else seems to manage her preferred cream-to-coffee ratio like he can, not even Wells—but she still doesn’t like him. Sometimes they quiz each other, him on Latin declensions, her on Biology terms. It’s not like they’re friends or anything. It’s just something to pass the time.
Raven walks in on them at some point—Clarke in a bedazzled white hoody from when she was in her school’s production of Swan Lake, with hair still gnarled by sleep, and Bellamy in nothing but a pair of low-hanging sweatpants that haven’t been washed in like, three weeks, at least, and they’re laughing over some terrible pun about Oedipus Rex (“What do you call sending a dick pic to your mom? An Oedipus Sext.”) and drinking coffee out of cereal bowls because there aren’t any clean mugs.
Raven gives them each a raised brow in turn. “So is this going to be a thing, now?”
Clarke and Bellamy share a look. It’s unclear what thing Raven’s referencing specifically; them, giggling over inappropriate jokes about Greek myths? Drinking coffee from cereal bowls? Clarke’s ridiculous sweatshirt? It’s not really very clear.
“Definitely,” Bellamy decides with a grin, and Clarke grins back because yeah, they might be friends now.
Raven heaves a huge sigh and pours herself some coffee—in a travel cup, because she has standards.
Clarke sleeps with Lexa right before Halloween. She knows it’s predictable, that the entirety of her time at Sky-Box has been leading up to this moment, ever since seeing her roommate naked that first day—which, in retrospect, was probably very creepy. But when she slips under Lexa’s comforter in the middle of the night, tipsy and giddy from acing her first Genetics test, she’s pretty sure Lexa didn’t mind that she checked her out pretty excessively before she even knew her name.
When Raven comes to wake her up for their eight o’clock Chem Lab, she just sort of smirks at the pair from the doorway, saying “Hurry up, Casanova—we’re gonna be late.”
Clarke doesn’t necessarily think that’s fair; Raven has Bellamy over at least three times a week, and Clarke’s walked in on them twice now, and she’s only ever rolled her eyes or blushed furiously. She’s walked in on Finn and his conquests a lot more; he and Raven seem to have some sort of one-night-stand-warfare going on. She’s asked Lincoln about it, but he’d just gotten a stormy look on his face and gently-but-firmly told her to drop it. She’s asked Murphy about it too, since he and Raven have a weird kind-of-but-not-really friendship thing going on, plus she’s pretty sure they fuck in the first floor shower sometimes but she’s not positive, but he’d just glared and told her to mind her own fucking business, so.
Finn is a lot less subtle, and definitely surprised, when he walks in on them in the laundry room. He’d drunkenly propositioned Clarke on her second night at the house, and she’d let him down easy, but she’s pretty sure he’d been holding out hope that she’d reconsider. After seeing her with Lexa he decides she’s a lesbian, which she doesn’t bother to correct him on. At least he’ll stop passive-aggressively flirting with her by tagging her in all his Facebook posts.
When Bellamy sees them making out against the countertop, he just says “Congratulations,” and steals a pudding cup out of the fridge, giving Clarke a salute before ambling out. By then pretty much every house member has walked in on the couple in some sort of indecent position, so it’s not exactly a secret, and she’s positive Raven must have told him already, but she’s glad he doesn’t try to talk to her about it or make it a thing. She’s already had a few GSA spokespeople try to coerce her into giving a speech at their meetings or something, and it’s a little uncomfortable. She doesn’t really feel like talking about how nice and relieving it is to be out, when she never really had trouble with it in the first place. She’d told her parents she liked both girls and boys when she was fourteen, and took Lilly Brookeshire to Homecoming. They’d taken it in stride. Her private high school had an LGBT club, and an anti-bigotry department (which was basically a bunch of prefects with more specific guidelines and the overall air of FBI agents), and a unisex bathroom in case a student didn’t fall within any heteronormative gender roles. It was all very PC, and no one even batted an eye when she and Lilly slow-danced.
Clarke knows how easy she’s had it; she’s not an idiot. Lexa has told her about her first girlfriend, Costia, whose parents tossed her out of the house when they caught her and Lexa doing more than just sleeping at a sleepover. She’s read the articles, heard the horror stories. She knows she’s one of the lucky ones, and she doesn’t feel like rubbing it in anyone’s face by waxing poetic about how brave it is to finally come out. She wasn’t brave. She’d been eating a bowl of Fruit Loops at the kitchen bar, her parents reading their respective choice of newspaper, and she’d casually said “So I think I’m bisexual,” the way some kids mention an upcoming quiz in Biology. They’d sort of stared at her for a minute, and then each other, and then her mother said “How sure are you?” in a mildly curious way, and Clarke had thought about it, spoon dangling from her mouth, and said “About ninety-five percent.” And her father had said “Well, don’t think any dates of yours are getting out of a long chat just because they’re female,” and winked at her, and that was that.
Not everything in her life has been a fairytale, but she’s not naïve. She’s from a well-connected, upper class family with enough regular income that she’ll never have to worry about debt, or healthcare, or having a place to live. She’s spent the majority of her life trying to earn that sort of privilege, like somehow if she saves enough people or works in enough third-world countries, she can even out the score. She’s only ever had detention once—for throwing her shoe at some golf kid who made a crude joke about Wells (he was a golfer, which shouldn’t even be a school-funded sport, Jesus)—she’s never gotten below a C (in CAD, because she is absolutely helpless with computers), and she never stayed out late on school nights or missed a curfew or drank at parties. She wasn’t a saint, but she was the type of girl people invited over to appease their parents, saying things like Well, Clarke Griffin’s going to be there so you don’t have to worry about me having a drive home, or there being any alcohol or anything. She’ll probably call the cops herself if it gets out of control. It wasn’t true, of course; there was always alcohol, and loud music, but Clarke had to drive drunk classmates home more than a few times—and Wells, if he decided to go out, but he wasn’t usually invited since his dad was the Mayor and there was a good chance he’d just say no anyway.
Wells joins the GSA, which is to be expected because if there’s any sort of cause involving equality or social-economics rights, Wells will sniff it out like a bloodhound. He’d been the only freshman on the A-B Squad (anti-bigotry department), and Clarke knows he still has the lapel pin, stuck on his corkboard.
Lexa’s in the club too, and Anya, though Clarke’s pretty sure Anya only wants to go to the courtyard powwows so she can growl at unsuspecting students as they walk by. She usually paints her cheeks with rainbow stripes like war paint. It’d be hilarious, if she didn’t somehow make it look so intense.
In the end, Lexa badgers Clarke—as much as she badgers anyone, which is to say a lot of pointed staring was involved, and maybe a few hate-crime articles printed out and casually left around their room as a sort of guilt-tripping technique. It works—enough so she agrees to go with them to the meeting held on the day after Halloween. Which turns out to be an enormous oversight on her part, because Clarke hadn’t predicted just how much Raven would demand they drink on Halloween night. They go to some terrible party on Greek Row, where pretty much everyone is dressed as something cleverly ironic that makes Clarke’s head hurt, while she’s dressed up as the magician from Cats, which nobody recognizes. Except for the theater majors, who glare so hard she’s surprised she doesn’t catch fire.
“Dude,” Roma shakes her head, looking mildly disgusted.
“Let me guess,” Clarke says weakly. “Theater major?” Roma just nods and then walks away so no one will think they’re together.
Raven, it turns out, doesn’t really care. “Magicians are awesome,” she declares, a little slurred. Clarke squints at the drink in her hand; she’s pretty sure the color’s changed. “So are cats. Magician cats, are, like, awesome squared, so. Fuck them,” she shrugs, “Is basically what I’m saying.” She’s dressed as a sexy astronaut, which basically means the helmet from an old-fashioned, legit space suit that Clarke’s pretty sure was involved in the Moon Landing, and a set of tastefully sequined, red lingerie. She’s wearing moon shoes. It’s the best.
“I’m an asstronaut,” she’d declared when she met Clarke at the bottom of the stairs. She’d frowned. “Or sasstronaut,” she amends. “I couldn’t decide.”
“Asstronauty,” Nyko offers on his way to the kitchen. They’d decorated Sky-Box the day before, stringing fake cobwebs throughout the house, and dangling little puffy spiders with googly eyes and pipe cleaner-legs from the ceiling. There are a few roles of the super cheap one-ply toilet paper (because why waste the good stuff?) in the trees in their yard, and the back half of a witch and broom stick stuck to the wall, so it look like she flew straight into it.
“Don’t drink and fly, kids,” Indra had warned seriously while hanging it up.
Raven and Clarke—sans Roma, who went upstairs with one of the frat boys. Or maybe it was a sorority house, and she went with a girl; Clarke wasn’t sure—managed around dawn to somehow walk up the stairs like two leaning towers of Pizza, holding themselves upright, to collapse in Raven-and-Roma’s room. Bellamy’s already asleep on the couch when they walk in, and Clarke gives a single lazy drunken thought, Is he actually homeless? before promptly forgetting about him and falling asleep.
Lexa and Anya wake her bravely in the morning, just a few hours later for the meeting. They look a little smug, and more than a little condescending about it. Wells, at least, seems appropriately pitying, and hands her a to-go cup of coffee. She takes it without complaint and downs the whole thing, because she needs the caffeine, and is only a little sorry that it wasn’t made by Bellamy. He’s gone by the time they leave, which she’s kind of sad about. She’d been hoping to talk to him about the whole homeless thing. She’s pretty sure she saw a basket of boy’s laundry in the corner of Raven’s room, and while it could belong to any one of her male roommates, she knows the There’s an i in MEATPIE shirt is definitely his, because it had sparked a long and heated debate about the merits of social commentary in horror, and also which Simon Pegg film is best. She’s all about How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, but he stands firm about Shaun of the Dead.
She’s also pretty sure most of the books on Raven’s shelves are his, because Raven doesn’t really strike her as a Walt Whitman sort of person, and also because the copy of Oedipus Rex is filled with notes in his hideous shorthand.
The meeting goes about as well as Clarke expected—she nearly falls asleep in the back and spends her time doodling. Mostly she draws Raven flying a spaceship, visiting different house members on different planets, like in The Little Prince. Lexa taps her gently on the ribs a few times to make her pay attention, but other than that, Clarke keeps to herself.
She finds Raven in the kitchen when they get back—wearing her red lingerie, with an old ratty Ramones tee tossed over, probably only because Lincoln asked her to. Lincoln’s biggest fear, it turns out, is accidentally objectifying a woman. It’s great because Raven, Lexa, Roma and even Luna their resident feminist have the habit of walking around in as little clothing as possible, usually underwear, or they’ll lounge around in towels after a shower, refusing to get dressed. Lincoln will take one short look around the room and shut himself off upstairs to paint, or have an aneurism. Murphy will lurk around making dick jokes until inevitably one of the girls throws something at his head. Lexa tossed a kitchen knife at him once, a little too nonchalantly, and it left a tiny scar on the tip of his ear. Clarke wishes she could say he learned his lesson.
John Murphy is the type of person they interact with only when absolutely necessary—except for Raven and Emori, who seem to actually enjoy his company for whatever reason—and only because he signed up for the house early enough and they didn’t realize he was kind of horrible until it was too late to kick him out for anything less than criminal behavior. And while he definitely drinks underage, and Clarke’s pretty sure he smokes pot with Finn and Nyko in their room with towels stuffed under the door gap, they’re not about to call campus police for that. So instead they suffer through him, ignore him, and otherwise wait him out. Clarke’s sure that eventually he’ll get tired of Lincoln hunting him down for missing chore hours, or having to clean the upstairs bathroom, or making a house dinner twice a month. (His first dinner night, he made everyone cheese quesadillas in the microwave. They weren’t terrible, but. Emori’s first night, she made Zrazai and beer pastry puffs, and it’s sort of hard to beat that.)
Lincoln is in her studio painting class, so when he walks in to find Clarke with his arms covered in greens and reds and blues, she’s not really so surprised. She is, though, when he holds out a thick brush like an offering. “I thought you might want to help,” he shrugs, and she tugs on her boots and follows him outside.
It was Indra’s idea, strangely enough, and it’s definitely too big for Lincoln to finish alone. A mural across the west side of the house. He’s already started on the trees, but according to his sketched out plan, there’s going to be an entire solar system between the second story windows, and a river somewhere in the middle, with some trees and school buildings scattered in between. It’s a masterpiece, and he was right; she does want to help.
It takes them a week and a half to finish the whole thing, with house members intermittently coming out to help. Indra likes filling in the lines, apparently, and Lexa’s pretty good at mixing colors. Finn does well with stars, and Raven isn’t at all artistic so she mostly supervises and sets up an i-pod dock on the grass. Bellamy takes to passing Clarke her different paints and brushes so she doesn’t have to keep going up and down the ladder—if anything, he’s more nervous about it than she is, constantly holding onto the base and complaining about it wobbling. It’s endearing, but she learns to tune it out.
They eat dinner outside the night they finish, even though it’s almost Christmas and sort of freezing. They roast marshmallows and drink hot chocolate with peppermint sticks crushed up at the bottom, and maybe some Bailey’s, too. Real eggnog, the kind with bourbon, has recently turned into Clarke’s favorite drink. They all take turns, taking pictures with the mural, and pointing out their favorite parts. Near the bottom, everyone has painted their initials in different colors and handwriting, like kindergarten kids signing macaroni pictures. Even Bellamy’s are there, a bright orange BB hanging crooked near the grass. He passes Clarke a mug of eggnog, perfectly spiced, and so hot it burns her fingers.
Clarke has learned several things about living in a house with fourteen other people—she’s learned how to quadruple a recipe for lasagna, and that for every meat dish she makes, she should probably include something vegetarian, just in case. She’s learned that they should stock up on Greek yogurt whenever it’s Raven’s night to cook, or Anya who has a competition going with Raven to see whose chili will make Finn cry first. She’s learned that she should sign up for cleaning duty within the first few hours, because any later and she could be stuck with the first floor bathroom—it has the shower, which. Shower drains are basically a nightmare. With lots of human hair.
She’s learned that if the theater club is doing anything—anything at all—she has to avoid Roma at all costs, so she doesn’t get roped into helping. She’s learned that if Luna is surrounded by scraps of fabric on the living room floor, she shouldn’t ask about it unless she wants to spend her afternoon as a human pin cushion. She’s learned that if she sees Nyko turning the front room into a makeshift clinic, he’ll ask her for a second opinion on whatever he’s diagnosing. (He’d been very excited to learn she was pre-med, and she’s now seen a lot more live examples of Herpes, Crabs, and Chlamydia than she’d ever wanted.)
She’s learned that if she’s having trouble with English, she should ask Finn or Emori; if she’s having trouble with math, she should ask Anya or Tristan—and she could ask Murphy, but why would she do that?; if she’s having trouble with science, she should ask Raven, because if Raven finds out she went to anyone else, she spends a few days working angrily on a robot Clarke’s pretty sure will be programmed to kill; if she’s having trouble with French, she should ask Lexa—Anya, Indra and Gustus are all also majoring in linguistics, but only one of these options is Clarke’s kind-of-girlfriend, so. If she’s having trouble with history, she could go to Indra or Gustus, but she always goes to Bellamy instead, and usually at three in the morning. He’s always awake at their kitchen table, and she has a weird sleep schedule that’s based around when she decides to finally collapse somewhere.
They’re sitting at the table, going over the notes from her Ancient Palestinian History seminar at four-forty-five in the morning, when Raven drifts in. It’s usually Raven that finds them like this in the early morning—or at least, Raven’s the only one that ever reacts to it. The others have all wandered in at some point or another, and taken it in stride. Well, Wells thinks it’s sort of funny, “Who has a study date at four AM?,” but other than that.
Raven pours herself some water and then turns to stare down at them with a raised eyebrow while she sips from her cup. She’s wearing what used to be a The Vaccines tee, before she’d hacked at the sleeves and neckline. Her underwear is lacy, blue, and very see-through. Clarke coughs and looks away. Bellamy’s noticed and is trying not to laugh, so she elbows him in the ribs. The nice thing about taking so many different Anatomy classes is that she knows the perfect places to dig her sharp joints in.
“What exactly is so important you couldn’t save the learning until sunup?” Raven drawls, voice scratchy from sleep. Clarke isn’t really sure that’s fair; she knows for a fact that whenever Roma spends the night out, Raven stays up to tinker on her robot. She and Bellamy share a look.
“Whether or not the word Palestine came from an ancient donkey God, or some root drink,” she decides, and Bellamy snorts.
Raven rolls her eyes and sets her cup in the sink. “You two disturb me,” she decides, sitting across from them and snatching at one of Clarke’s blank index cards. She starts writing something in Spanish, and Clarke’s pretty sure it’s a death threat—not for her, but for someone. Raven seems the type to send a death threat in Spanish. She could probably follow up on it, too.
Finn finds them like that, bright and early for his six-AM jog. He hesitates a little before getting his Nalgene of water, and gives a small nod to Bellamy and Raven, a weak wave to Clarke, before leaving. Clarke eyes her tablemates for a moment, before deciding to just ask.
“So, you guys and Finn,” she starts, trying for nonchalance and probably failing. Bellamy’s trying to give her a meaningful look, but she can’t really read it. “What’s up with that?” He snorts, and Clarke ignores him.
“We grew up together,” Raven shrugs, like it’s no big deal—except Clarke hasn’t seen her and Finn ever actually speak to each other, so. She’s pretty sure there’s more to the story. “We dated for like, forever, but then at high school graduation he said he wanted a break, so we could find ourselves or whatever at college. He wanted to see other people. He, uh. I didn’t tell him I was going to his school. I’d wanted to surprise him.” Raven makes a face. “He was definitely surprised.”
Clarke just stares for a minute, because Raven Reyes is one of the most gorgeous women she’s ever seen, en route to work for fucking NASA building rockets, and she makes stupidly hilarious, dark jokes, and she knows like five different pickup lines in Klingon off the back of her hand, and Finn wanted to see other people? He should have married her. “Huh,” Clarke decides, and then shakes her head. “No, actually, sorry—what? He’s an idiot, seriously. Can I join the chili thing with you and Anya? I suddenly want very much to see him cry.”
Raven shrugs, like it’s still no big deal, but she’s smiling which is a good sign. Bellamy is silent, but he’s grinning too, so Clarke’s pretty confidant she said the right thing. “I can’t be that mad, you know? I mean, I’d rather not date if he’s not as serious about it as I am.”
“How’d you both end up at Sky Box?” Clarke can understand not hating Finn, and even going to the same school as him since it’s a great university, but it has to be hard, living just a staircase apart.
“Roma. Housing fucked me over my freshman year, and I’d met her at Orientation, and she gave me the co-op forms to fill out, so. There weren’t as many people last year, so they were kind of desperate. I didn’t know Finn was here until the first meeting, and by then I was pretty set on living here. Plus it was fun making him squirm. I think we’re both sort of waiting for the other to just get too uncomfortable and leave.”
“The one-night-stand warfare,” Clarke nods, understanding. Bellamy huffs out something caught between a cough and a laugh, while Raven just smirks.
“The what?” Bellamy cough-laughs.
“You know,” Clarke waves a hand. She isn’t really clear on whatever it is Bellamy and Raven have, so she doesn’t want to make it awkward by pointing out Raven’s other friends. But instead the pair of them just shake their heads.
“One-night-stand warfare,” Raven repeats, incredulous. “Jesus.”
“It has a ring to it,” Bellamy admits, poking a highlighter at Clarke’s cheek so she swats at him.
Clarke waits until he leaves for class to corner Raven in her room. Roma isn’t there, which isn’t unusual, so Clarke shuts the door behind her and perches on the empty bed. Raven doesn’t bother glancing up from her computer, until Clarke says “So is Bellamy homeless?”
Raven looks at her blankly, before bursting out in laughter. “Homeless? Why would you think he’s homeless?”
Clarke gives a wave to the basket—baskets, suddenly there are two—of his clothes, and a pile of Greek mythology anthologies that weren’t there the day before. Raven’s mouth makes an o of understanding.
“He’s not homeless,” she shrugs. “His apartment’s like forty-five minutes away, and his roommate’s kinda shady, so I let him keep some stuff here. Why?” She cuts her eyes at Clarke. “Does it bother you, when he stays over?”
“No,” Clarke says, probably a little too fervently, but. She’d just been worried about him; she doesn’t want Raven to think she wants him gone. Clarke likes Bellamy—she’s pretty sure he’s one of her best friends, which is a little weird since her only close friend has ever been Wells and now she has two, three if she counts Lexa which she’s not sure she should since she and Lexa don’t really do much together besides making out. “I don’t have a problem with it.”
“Yeah I bet you don’t,” Raven says knowingly, and Clarke frowns. She and Lexa haven’t really talked about what they’re doing together, what exactly they are, and she’s not sure if Lexa sees them as exclusive, but. Either way, Clarke is a one-person-at-a-time girl.
“I’m with Lexa,” Clarke says. The last thing she wants is Raven thinking she’s like Finn, and Raven seems to catch on because her smirk is gone.
“I know,” Raven says. “I was just kidding.” She adds “Sorry,” as a sort of afterthought, but Clarke waves it away. She glances down at the half-finished robot, squatting in a pile at the foot of Raven’s bed.
“Is that for a class?” she asks.
“That’s for our future, Clarke,” Raven says seriously.
Roma finds her later that day, and Clarke doesn’t manage to duck out in time. Her last class was canceled so she can’t use that as an excuse, and she’s still in her pajamas so she can’t pretend to be headed out. It was a definite oversight, on her part.
“Hey, Griffin,” Roma says. She calls everyone in the house by their last names, and Clarke isn’t sure if it’s meant to be a nickname sort of thing, or if Roma has problems with intimacy. She’s taking Psych 101, and it’s kind of hard for her to not analyze things like that now. “Are you doing anything next month?”
“Uh,” Clarke says, racking her brain. She’s pretty sure she’s doing a lot next month, but nothing special comes to mind, which is unfortunate. Roma grows more assured by the second, and waves a hand.
“Great, we’re doing Mattress, and we need a new art director.”
“What,” Clarke says, because she didn’t really understand anything Roma just told her. Roma’s a theater student, so Clarke’s fairly sure she’s referencing a play of some sort, but. One never really knows with Roma.
“The drama club,” Roma huffs, like it should be obvious. And well, she’s sort of right. “We’re doing a play, and our art director dropped out at the last minute to work with the county theater, the traitor, so we need a new one. Lincoln’s swamped with work, so you’re our best bet.”
Clarke knows for a fact Lincoln is not “swamped with work,” and she’s a little bitter that he’s put her in this position. (It’s unfair, she knows; she should have just made an excuse when she could.) She only sighs a little, and Roma pretends not to notice. “Okay,” she decides, and Roma grins like a shark.
Wells, it turns out, is another victim of Roma’s, along with Bellamy and Luna—though Luna doesn’t really count since she volunteered to do the costumes. Wells is incapable of lying, or otherwise dodging favors. Instead he just awkwardly lets himself be talked into literally all sorts of situations, and hopes either Clarke or destiny will get him out of it. Usually Clarke does, like when girl scouts cornered him at grocery stores, or when the public librarian managed to have him do her work for two weeks without pay. But in this case, Clarke’s just glad to have someone she knows at rehearsals.
It turns out the art director really only works on the props, mostly painting and rearranging plywood trees and castle towers. She gets a headset, which is cool and makes her feel like a professional something, even if the mic is a little duct taped. The tech guy is in Raven and Bellamy’s year, named Wick, and likes to do Sean Connery impressions over the headset when he’s not working the spotlights. And when he is working the spotlights, he sings ABBA off-key. Clarke doesn’t actually know what he looks like.
Mattress is the non-musical version of Once Upon A Mattress, which is in turn a version of The Princess and the Pea. Clarke reads the script, and then the Wikipedia page just in case, and then she suggests the cast and crew watch the original televised versions at Sky-Box.
“You just wanted to get out of rehearsal,” Bellamy accuses, trying to toss popcorn down the back of Wells’ shirt from their spot on the sofa. Wells is playing the role of Dauntless, and is studying the film seriously, so he’ll get it right.
“What rehearsal? I paint trees all day,” Clarke shoots back. Bellamy has to play the Minstrel, which he’s not at all happy about. Apparently the drama club is made up of eleven girls and one boy, who’s already been cast as the King. Roma is predictably Aggravain. When Clarke asks why she didn’t want to play the princess, Roma shrugs and says, “The evil queen has more power.”
“What fucked up episode of Twilight Zone is this?” Raven asks, staring at the costumed and paint-stained troupe in the living room.
“The one where you fall madly in love with me, we get married, and have two-point-five cyborg children,” Wick pipes up from his spot on the floor. He somehow looks exactly how Clarke imagined, down to the converse and mismatched socks.
Raven just rolls her eyes and leaves, which is more of a surrender than Clarke has ever seen her give, and she turns to ask Bellamy about it, but he’s following Roma out to the bathroom.
They rehearse through the month, and Clarke finishes the set just a week before the opening night, which sees her watching backstage, eating eggrolls between acts. Apparently they’re considered good luck by the club, through some convoluted inside joke she doesn’t get, but. She’s not about to turn down free eggrolls.
Things go wrong, of course. Every night. Opening night, the machine that’s supposed to play the doorbell doesn’t go off, and Bellamy-as-Minstrel is forced to improvise, saying “Ah! That must be the princess—only a princess can knock so silently.” The audience laughs, and Clarke lets out a breath.
The second night, Roma completely walks out of her shoes by accident, but she just keeps marching, decreeing a law against shoes. The third night, one of the tree’s anchor slips and it goes crashing down while the cast stares in horror. Once it’s down, Bellamy says “It’s protesting the Queen’s new law against trees.”
“The boy’s a natural,” Wick says in Clarke’s ear, and she can’t help but agree. “Think I should put the green light on him and make him look like Shrek?”
On the last night, Lexa brings her flowers and she has to bow with the rest of the cast and crew on the stage, in her paint-stained jeans and baggy plaid shirt. Raven wolf whistles from the audience. Bellamy grabs her hand and doesn’t let go.
The end of her freshman year sort of sneaks up on Clarke. She’d known it was coming, of course, but it’s different to realize in the middle of a beer pong game that this is her last week here. She’s also a little bit drunk, so she stumbles to the back porch of the frat house and sinks down on the steps to think about things, and also make the world stop shaking.
Someone sits beside her, and she doesn’t have to look to know it’s Bellamy. He uses some sort of cinnamon-scented bodywash or deodorant or something, so. “I thought you were good at beer pong,” he teases.
“I am great at beer pong,” Clarke argues, which isn’t really true. She’s pretty good, but not extraordinary. “It’s my last week,” she says in explanation.
“Yeah,” Bellamy nods, slinging an arm around her. He’s been doing this since they all got back from Christmas vacation. Well, since Clarke got back—Bellamy had spent the week at Sky-Box with Raven and his little sister, home from her boarding school. Clarke had met her briefly on her first day back; Octavia, a pretty seventeen year old in a pair of fleece pajama pants and one of Bellamy’s old shirts. “But you’ll be back next year.”
She will be, she knows. She’s already put in the paperwork to live in Sky Box, and it was approved pretty much immediately. She never missed a cleaning day, or dish duty, and she didn’t owe any chore hours and always paid rent on time. Comparatively speaking, she was pretty much the perfect housemate. The thought makes her a little miserable.
“I thought college would be more fun,” she despairs, and Bellamy frowns down at her.
“Did you not have fun?” he asks. Clarke thinks about Margarita Midnight, when she and Raven and Roma and Luna had all tiptoed downstairs to get drunk on sickly sweet alcohol and have an impromptu conga line around the kitchen island.
She thinks about Wells’ ridiculous chess party, held completely unironically when some Greek Row meathead accused them of not being able to host a good turnout. It was a terrible turnout—barely fifteen people, not including the house members, most of whom didn’t even show. Bellamy did, and he was actually pretty good at chess, but he left early to spend the night at his apartment for once. “This place is too hyped for me,” he’d teased as he’d left.
She thinks about Anya making her enormous meatloaf for the house dinner, while Luna visibly wilted from the table, asking weakly about salad. Clarke had been sure she’d just melt into the floor, until Anya smirked and explained that the second meatloaf was actually tofu and bean paste. Everyone seemed to breathe out as one, relieved.
She thinks about the play.
She thinks about Lexa. She’s been thinking a lot about Lexa lately—she’s a senior, so she won’t be back next year, and she’s moving to Costia’s town anyway. She’d been graceful about the breakup—if that’s what it was—and Clarke wasn’t even really upset about it, though she didn’t say no when Raven and Wells dragged her out for Chinese food and root beer floats.
“I had fun,” Clarke decides, leaning heavily on Bellamy because he’s warm and he smells nice and she’s still pretty drunk. “I just thought I’d—I don’t know. Get loose.”
“Get loose?” His throat rumbles against her head.
“Footloose,” Clarke mumbles, and he laughs. “I was—you didn’t know me in high school, but I was like, the good girl. The one kids would use to convince their parents to let them go out, you know? I mean, I threw a shoe at someone once, but—”
“You threw a shoe at someone?” Bellamy asks, amused.
“He deserved it,” Clarke argues. “But that was the worst thing I ever did. I thought,” she stops, trying to remember where she was going with this.
“You thought, what, college would turn you into some daredevil bank robber?” Bellamy teases, and he’s kidding, but he’s sort of right. She didn’t think she’d become a criminal or anything, but. She expected at least some changes. But she still turned in all her assignments on time, sometimes early, and always did the extra credit. She still emailed her professors if she didn’t understand something. She still color coded her notes.
“I thought it’d make me more interesting,” she decides.
“You are interesting,” Bellamy says. “You’re awesome. You don’t need to put a cow in the dean’s office to be cool.”
Clarke snorts. “You should get that on a shirt.”
“I already did,” he says, completely serious. She can’t tell if he’s kidding, and squints up at him.
“Why were you so awful on my first day?” To be honest, Clarke’s sort of wanted to ask about it since their argument about Simon Pegg, but she’s always stopped herself. She’s not even sure he’ll remember.
“I was trying to hit on you,” he shrugs, like he hasn’t just completely alter her worldview. “Badly. You were cute, and struggling, and I was going to swoop in and save you or whatever, but it kind of backfired.” Clarke can’t really find a response, so he rambles on. “It’s probably a good thing,” he decides. “I just would’ve messed it up, and this way we can be friends, so.”
Clarke wants to say, You wouldn’t have messed it up. Try again. But he’s right; this way, at least they’re friends. “Best friends,” Clarke amends, and he grins fondly.
“Best friends,” he agrees. “Feeling better?”
“Not much,” Clarke admits, and throws up on his shoes.