A wild one (Ooh yeah I'm a wild one)
Summary:
Raven and Clarke and some girl time in the beauty salon. Raven uncovers a secret.
Notes:
Set in the 'Her hair is shiny and bright' verse.
All mistakes are mine.
"Dude, seriously," Raven says, nudging Roan on the knee with her free leg. "I have to know. How did you two meet?"
Clarke is taken aback by the question. She's horrified. It's really not a nice memory she wants to pull out of the darkest, deepest corner of her mind she'd labeled 'we never talk about this again', let alone to dwell on it now — years later.
She knows she pulls a face, which Raven notices, of course, with a sly smile, never mind that most of Clarke's body is covered behind the canvas.
To be honest, her making faces is not exclusively due to the most unpleasant question she could've imagined, but also to the fact that the cosmetician on call today is Annabeth Byrne, who apparently finds extreme pleasure in doing Clarke's bikini wax.
No one knows it better than Clarke, that waxing, especially down there, is a painful experience — and she still voluntarily opts for the procedure every third to fourth week during the summer. And Byrne, somehow, always makes these treatments special, for her.
It's not only the lascivious smirk, which is technically her trademark whenever she's ripping the strip of wax off her intimate body parts. Or the steely stare. Byrne is the best and she knows that. Everyone knows that. And that's the only reason why she's willing to suffer in this chair every time, when she's repulsed by her hardly visible but very much existent baby hair, as Raven calls it, and that's the reason why she's leaving a generous tip every single time.
Byrne is really that good.
This time, though, she brought Raven with her. Because her friend needed a mani-pedi after her breakup and where else to get the best mani-pedi than Roan's beauty salon.
Unfortunately for her, Roan, the owner and star of the salon is on a break, so he's keeping them company.
She doesn't mind, not really, she likes spending time with Roan most of the time, but something is telling her that now, this time is not really about her, but her companion.
So if her spidey senses are right, Roan standing nearby and small talking is more to the fact that her chatty mechanic friend had finally decided to come with her.
It sure doesn't sound or look like a regular chitchat.
There's still a chance, albeit a very weak one, she argues with herself, that her senses are playing her today, because today's bikini waxing hurts so much more than it did any other occasion before.
She really shouldn't have planned this a few days before her period.
But. Roan seems to be all glinting eyes and smiles, and she'd only noticed this earlier, whenever her mechanic friend seeped into one of her stories.
Not that Roan and Raven are friends. This is the second time they've met.
And here she is, gritting her teeth again, as Byrne rips off another strip of wax, while Raven continues to happily dangle her good leg. She's already sporting the shiny teal blue paints with tiny black monkey-wrenches painted on her toenails, the exact replica she looked up online the day before. Her toenails are still glistening, not completely dried, and she's eating one of the cucumber slices she ditched on a plate, when they started to slide down from her face.
Looking at the amused face of Roan, he's so ready to spit — one of her darkest secrets he swore never to talk about. Well, she didn't know that one happy toothy smile from Raven is all it would take. Stupid past self.
Sure enough, not three minutes later, and the man is worse than Jasper's mom, the local gossip mill.
"It started in kindergarten," Roan starts, ignoring the small growl rumbling out of Clarke's chest, that kind of animalistic rumble which is only partly due to the still lingering searing pain.
Damn Byrne!, she curses internally.
She swears the woman enjoyed ripping off toenails or execute shock-lashes in another life.
She's the best, she's the best, she's the best, she repeats the thought in her head like a mantra, silently, like she did countless time before, and then takes a long deep breath and holds it for a long minute before letting it out.
Just like they were taught in yoga class.
By the time she composes herself enough to be able to listen in on the surrounding babble again, Roan is in the middle of the story about her high school years, when Lexa dared her on that stupid bet.
Roan is a few years older than her, and technically, he'd been out of high school by then, but he was called in as a temp soccer coach, when Mister Pike was suspended for a few months for making one of the kids cry in practice over and over. So Roan was the new temp coach, next to setting up his then tiny corner barber shop — which has grown into to be his current business, GrounderLocks many years later.
She was young, true, but she still feels so stupid about it, and that's the exact reason she'd made Roan pinky swear not to talk about this, ever, or never ever to think about the incident again. Apart from Lexa, he was the only one who knew, since he was the one left with task to handle the mess (including her hair).
Apparently, she should've known better.
"Wanheda there…" Roan says, slightly tilting his chin towards the torture table she's currently splayed across over.
"Wanheda?" Raven laughs, and pops the other cucumber slice into her mouth.
At least Roan has the decency not to join Raven in her laughing, but clearly not chivalrous enough not to smirk. Friends. Is this really where they came to? You cannot even trust your friends anymore?!
"The Mountain Slayer," he clarifies and throws a wink at Raven, which triggers another growl from Clarke. "She'd earned that title, when she'd dyed her hair this bright wildfire red", and as if to give more emphasis to the story, he holds up the colour catalogue he picked up from one of the empty chairs and points under sample #B00265HEZ6 in the booklet.
Raven throws her a questioning look, then at Roan, and then she's cocking an eyebrow to accentuate the question behind that. So Roan adds:
"She made the twelve year olds cry from Mount Weather." And then he also adds "All of them," with a mixture of smugness and seriousness in his voice.
"Oh my… " Raven resumes her breathing, although very briefly, before her guffaws are too hard and equally too loud for her to even attempt to speak.
Clarke decides, finally, this is about the right time to interrupt; there's really no point in denying or keeping this secret from Raven any longer. So begrudgingly, but she resigns herself to speak up.
"Lexa dared me that I wouldn't dye my hair red before our stand-off against the Mountain, so I proved her wrong. "
Mountain, as in Mount Weather High, and the kids Roan was referring to were the members of Mount Weather High's debate club, who arrived to Arkadia to compete against the Arkadian high schoolers.
Once Raven's hyena laughs start to ebb, she spectacularly wipes a tear away from under her eyes.
"Griffin," she says, unexpectedly soft. "You never cease to amuse me."
Yeah, she mumbles silently, mostly to herself.
Truth is that Lexa should have dyed her hair, too.
She doesn't know why she's never told the full story to anyone. Point is, in the end, Lexa had backed out of it and conveniently forgotten to tell her about her decision.
So when it came to the big reveal that Lexa was moving to Mount Weather with her family by the end of school year, she wasn't the least surprised.
And the two weeks detention she got for this? Totally worth it.
Clarke Griffin is a woman of her words, who isn't afraid and never steps down from a dare.
Clarke Griffin, the Wanheda, who's making children cry.
(Not that she's proud of that last part.)
It could be worse, she thinks, like Bellamy Pain-In-The-Ass Blake finding it out.
But, it's only Raven, and as she begrudgingly notes, the better part of the beauty salon as well, including her torturer Byrne, the manicure, Maya and there is a slight chance, although very slim, that the new salon assistant, Murphy also heard.
There's no way in hell that Murphy would talk about this to anyone, she argues, let alone talk to Bellamy. Last time she heard they weren't exactly friends. And your beautician is bound by some kind of attorney-client-like privilege. Right?
For now, Clarke thinks, she has every reason to be optimistic.
By the end of their beauty trip, she's still in pain and she's slightly embarrassed, but despite everything she still leaves a generous tip behind.
(Hell, if she hasn't seen Byrne's smug smile out of the corner of her eye.)
She learns a week later that Murphy is moving in with Bellamy, when his sister moves out.
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Notes:
Please roll with me on this and pretend that this is completely normal to do bikini line waxing, etc. while someone else is getting another beauty treatment, like mani-pedi, next to you. There definitely is some kind of canvas covering Clarke's private body parts from the rest of the salon. I was pretty cruel with subjecting her to waxing, but I'm not that cruel to expose her lady parts to Murphy's wandering eyes. Roan is a bro, he wouldn't watch ;oP
Let me know what you think.