His first clue is when he walks in on Clarke and Raven looking far too chummy for their well-established mutual antagonism. He and his sister have a bet going on whether their hostility is going to dissolve into murder, or sex, so seeing them interact with casual friendliness is completely out of character. (He's voting for murder, and tries not to let Octavia know how often he imagines the sex option instead.)
He scowls when he realizes they are watching his sister and Lincoln meditate on one of Raven's ever present hovering screens. Raven makes a comment in a voice just too low for him to hear and Clarke nods, her lips curved into a rare genuine smile.
"What the fuck are you doing?" he asks, stalking over to the couch to loom over them. They both look up, a complete and utter lack of fear on their faces. The intimidation factor of being large and tough, with a shady past and the best marksmanship in the world, pales in comparison to being a decades old super soldier who could knock him over with her pinky and the woman who engineered herself a prosthetic that can fly and blow up decent sized chunks of cities - he hates it.
Clarke blinks those large blue eyes that make most people either swoon, or assume she has an innocence that no one who's ever survived a war could retain. Mostly they make him want to punch things, especially when they're backed by the steel in her voice. "Is that anyway to talk to your new teammates, Blake?"
Raven smirks. "Yeah, Blake, we're supposed to be bonding and all that shit."
Bellamy fights the urge to snarl at her, undoubtedly the most fractious personality in this tower full of them, and bares his teeth in something resembling a smile as he looks at Clarke. "I don't think spying on your teammates qualifies as a bonding activity, Captain."
To his surprise, instead of rising to the bait like usual, Clarke rolls her eyes at him. "That's funny, coming from one of the two actual spies on the team."
"And after Octavia's little undercover gig at my company," Raven says, inserting herself into the conversation again. "This totally counts as turnabout is fair play. And you know she'd agree."
Bellamy grinds his teeth, well aware that Octavia would be more amused than anything else, and was perfectly capable of ruining Raven and Clarke's day if she did object to their actions. "I'd better not catching you spying on me," he warns, instead of arguing, and is not reassured by their matching smirks.
God damn it. They were far less terrifying when they hated each other.
x
His second clue is when he finds out there was a team dinner that neither he nor Wells, their resident god, had been invited too, and that Clarke and Raven had missed due to an 'emergency situation.'
Fucking bullshit.
Lincoln is a decent guy. And Bellamy certainly appreciates having him on their side in a fight, but there is no way he is okay with his little sister, his little sister who was already taken from him for almost two decades, doing anything remotely like dating a man who can turn into a giant killing machine thanks to a stubbed toe.
(He knows he's doing Lincoln, who has not had an easy life, a disservice. He really doesn't care.)
They were all each other had for a long damn time, and then he had nothing. Just guilt and terror and a gnawing pit in his stomach every waking moment of every day. He doesn't know what he would do if he lost her again.
And he knows he's being irrational to think her dating someone would take her away, but, damn it, this isn't what he'd pictured when Kane'd recruited him. It's not like he likes seeing his sister kill people, or go undercover with dangerous sleazeballs, but he'd given up that fight a long time ago and they were perfect as partners, knowing each other's thoughts and words and actions without even a second's hesitation.
This team thing. This living with a team thing:
Running into Captain America in the kitchen at three in the morning because the memories are keeping Bellamy awake, red rings around her eyes and a determined set to her mouth as she methodically scrubs every inch of the room despite the well paid cleaning staff.
The genius billionaire who randomly gropes him in the name of designing him better gear, and gives him prototype arrows that make him ten times more effective in the field.
The god who should be the strangest thing in the tower, even after he becomes best friends with the Captain two seconds into meeting each other, and who is utterly and cheerfully unbeatable at wii golf.
Even the fucking asshole making eyes at his sister and the strangely vulnerable way he holds himself after having to change, to fight for them.
This is not what he signed up for.
x
The third clue isn't so much a clue as a two-by-four to the head, and leaves him feeling just as stunned. He's just finished having his ass kicked around the ring by Clarke, whose joyful grin when she'd pulled him up from the ground at the end has him feeling unsettled and out of sorts.
He's walking into the communal showers, unease heightened by the ever-present reminder of Reyes' generosity and how easy she makes it for people to dismiss her instead of acknowledging her complexities. Octavia's there, and she's not alone.
Lincoln is sitting on one of the benches, shoulders slumped in an uncharacteristic display of emotion. Octavia is leaning over him, one hand on his face as she talks quietly. There is a rawness, an unguardedness, to her expression that he hasn't seen since he lost her in the middle of a Russian town and didn't seen her again for seventeen years. Lincoln's usually stoic face is similarly open and Bellamy stumbles back out of the room, as quiet as he can because he's an asshole, but he's not a big enough asshole to break that moment.
Back in the training room, he collapses against a wall, breathing against the irrational panic that he's losing her all over again, and barely stops himself from taking Raven's head off when she lightly touches his arm.
She's backed up by the time he processes that it's her, and is giving him a crooked smile. "I should have warned you, sorry about that."
He stares at her, anger temporarily numbed.
"If I thought he was a danger, he wouldn't be living here," Raven says, more serious, then shrugs with that dazzling grin she flashes at all the paparazzi. "Well, he probably would, but none of you would be."
Bellamy snorts. "Some day you might want to try considering your own safety." He wants to take back the words as soon as he's said them; they reveal far too much about how protective he's already come to feel for his team. Fuck. They're not supposed to be his.
Raven looks taken aback, eyes wide for a second, before they snap back to their usual confident arrogance. "Right back at you, Blake."
He snorts again, and then sighs. He is so fucked. And now that Octavia's attached, he'll never be rid of them.
Even if he wanted to be.
x
Octavia knows him, better than anyone even after so many years apart, and she brings a bottle of tequila to their next sparring match. "Spill, Bell, you are way too grumpy lately. Are you pissed because I'm totally going to win our bet?" She looks up at him through her eyelashes from her sprawl on the floor, mouth curved into a sly smile. "Or disappointed that they haven't invited you to join yet."
Bellamy drops to the floor and takes the bottle from her. He needs so much more alcohol for this conversation. "I still don't think they're fucking." Yet. "And even if they are, that doesn't rule out the possibility of them killing each other. Probably ups it actually."
She laughs, warm and free and happier than he's heard her in years. It hurts, unexpectedly, because he wasn't the one to make it happen. But it's also the best feeling he can imagine and he bites down on every word of warning he wants to give. His sister, his baby sister turned lethal warrior, is smiling like she didn't spend almost two decades being tortured and brainwashed into the perfect assassin.
He suddenly feels the need to send Clarke and Raven flowers, or maybe bake them a cake. Flowers. Definitely flowers. He is not revealing that he can actually cook until the exact right moment or he knows he'll end up being the team's personal baker and fuck that shit.
He takes a swig of tequila and then passes the bottle back to her. "New bet on whether Raven has some kind of crazy mechanical strap-on with its own AI."
Octavia laughs again, louder this time, and he feels a vicious surge of satisfaction. He caused that one, and it won't be the last. Even it means sticking around the Tower and dealing with his unexpected pleasure at seeing Clarke smile for real or Raven letting her guard down.
Besides, he needs to find out if Raven has ever turned her mechanical genius onto the sex-toy industry.
x
It's team movie night, a joint Captain-Iron Woman operation, introduced even before their recent camaraderie. Clarke had wanted something casual but regularly scheduled to build team morale, and Raven had been deeply and personally offended by Clarke's lack of knowledge regarding the past several decades of pop culture.
They'd worked out surprisingly well, although there'd been more than one blow out over certain movie choices. (Horror had been deemed too triggering for all of them unless it was the ultimate in B-movie cheese, the name Bourne is a bad word in the tower, and anything involving family dynamics was a bad idea all around.)
This week, Wells is in one of the recliners and Octavia and Lincoln are curled up on the loveseat, both drinking that disgusting tea that Lincoln cooks up in his lab. Bellamy wants nothing more than to glare holes in them for the next two hours despite his newfound attempts at acceptance, but is preempted by Clarke and Raven dragging him down to sit on the empty space on the couch in between them.
Clarke is sitting cross legged, a sketchbook in her lap, but Raven digs her sharp little feet under his thighs and grins as she steals the bowl of popcorn he was carrying. "Try not to scowl so much, Blake, it'd be a shame to ruin that pretty face with wrinkles."
Clarke snorts and Bellamy looks at her instead of glaring at Raven like he wants to. The blonde smiles at him, then looks back down at her sketchbook. She's outlined his sister and Lincoln, a simple but beautiful mess of curves and straight lines that's entirely more poignant than it should be. She taps her pencil on the page and his gaze is drawn to the top corner, where she's sketched in a cartoon like storm cloud that looks unmistakably like Bellamy.
Raven leans over him to see and then laughs, reaching out toward Clarke for a high five that is returned without the blonde ever looking up from her paper. Bellamy scowls, disgruntled again that they're bonding over his misery. Clarke raps his knuckles with her pencil as Raven moves back into her own space again. "Stop being so grumpy," Clarke says, in her best Captain voice, then grins at him. "We're watching Gladiator and I know you want to tell us every single thing wrong with it."
"You're adjusting awfully fast," he tells her, pettily.
Her eyes flicker, dark with things he doesn't think any of them will ever truly understand, before she smirks at him with an expression uncannily like one of Raven's. "Yeah, well, no point in dwelling on the past."
It's a subtle dig at his history nerdiness, and the way he's reacting to his sister's growing relationship, and he nods in acknowledgment of the hit. "Touche, princess."
She grimaces at the reminder of what he'd called her before he knew who the tiny blonde in Kane's office was, and then they both flinch as Raven pelts them with popcorn. "Hush up, losers, the movie's starting."
Bellamy settles in to watch the movie, complaints ready at the tip of his tongue, and doesn't react to Raven's wiggling toes or the warmth of Clarke at his side or to the way his sister kisses Lincoln's jaw every time she shifts.
If he's stuck with these people, he might as well settle in for the ride.
(Although he makes no promises on doing it gracefully. And he will figure out a way to threaten a man who could probably survive a nuclear strike. That's what big brothers do.)