A/N: MERRY CHRISTMAS TO THE BEST #GIRLSQUAD EVER: marinablack99, persepholily, and lucawindmover. Ladies, we kick Taylor Swift's squad's ass. Nicely, of course.
A/N2: I am not going to lie, half this story is inside jokes for my girls. But I thought others might still enjoy the tale.
A/N3: I am aware I suck at AU. Thank you for your patience!
Borealis
Bellamy stares at his holiday shopping list, a holdover habit from happier days. Shakes his head at his own stupidity. Crosses her name off the list with a bit more anger than he wants to admit he still carries, and sighs at the now-ripped scrap of paper.
"Whatever," he mutters as he crumples the forlorn, damaged thing and tosses it toward the trashcan in the corner. "I'll be the Grinch."
Miller will be getting into town tonight, which is a blessing since the tiny basement apartment they share just off Dupont Circle is looking increasingly apocalyptic. Bellamy shrugs into his favorite leather jacket, flicks off the lights, and heads out into the chilly, rainy December afternoon.
This weather matches his mood as if custom-ordered: grey and cold and wet. Sidewalks are a stained mess, black sooty remnants of snowdrifts and the white lacy shadows of road salt. Streets, by contrast, are sleek. Wet-black. Glistening. Bellamy tugs his collar higher, shrugs his shoulders up and tucks his head down, and heads to the bookstore.
"You're late," Octavia announces from just inside the large front window display, before he has even shaken the water from his curls.
"I'm the owner. How the hell can I be late if I'm the owner?"
"I don't know, but you do it all the time," she complains as she jumps down. Steps back to examine her work. "I'm heading out. Lincoln and I are buying the last of the gifts today."
"…But not from your own family's bookstore…?"
"No. That's your thing, not mine, Big Brother."
"Bah humbug," Bellamy mutters, sliding out of his jacket and into his spot behind the register.
"What's that?"
"What's what?"
"What did you just say to me?" Octavia presses, as if looking for the fight. She's been itching for another chance to do battle over this issue, his pervasive melancholy and general anger at the world. He knows that. He knows he has managed to thwart her efforts so far, but today the world sucks.
"Sorry, O," Even though he isn't, not really, "This year I'm the Grinch."
"That's not even the Grinch, you dumbass. That's Scrooge."
He frowns. She's right.
"You've read more books than anyone I know. You spend every waking minute hidden inside a book. And you can't remember the difference between Dickens and Seuss?" Incredulity beats out anger and her sudden pity – visible in the crease at the corner of her frown, the curve of her eyebrows – makes him want to grab her and shake her and point out that she is. Not. Fucking. Helping.
"Enough, O," he manages in curt warning just as Monty wanders in from the back room, staggering under a tower of the new soft-cover editions of Quiet & Cold. Bellamy curses and looks down at the beat-up two-year desk calendar beside the cash register.
They all tell him it's time to retire the god-awful thing – time to admit his cell phone would do a better job of keeping him on track, with alerts for things like, say, book signings – but he will not get rid of the planner and its sentimental coffee stains and its penciled in appointments and its secret collection of cryptic notes from her to him and back again, scrawled along the edges.
Not yet.
"When is Ms. Lilly getting here?" he asks the room in general. Monty pants out the answer – "six o'clock" – and goes back to the business of stacking books. Bellamy escapes to the kitchen; Octavia, through the door and into the outstretched arms of her just-a-bit-older-than-Bellamy-likes boyfriend.
It would be nice to say he is happy for her – and there was, briefly, a time when he found that generosity easy – but these days he just resents the speed with which she has transitioned from his kid sister into someone else's romantic partner. Resents it the way any single parent would, maybe: I've sacrificed all my own chances at love so that you would never have to. Maybe. Or maybe not, maybe those people are better than he is, maybe they can do it without feeling the sting.
Jaha and Murphy are in the kitchen prepping for dinner and giving Alie, the new server, a hard time. On any other day he would stop them but Alie has always rubbed him the wrong way and hey, if she can't deal with it she can always quit. People beg to work at Borealis. Because who wouldn't want to spend all day strung out on mountains of novels and too much coffee at the front half of the bookstore, and all night soaking in the heady blend of the café-cum-bar's carefully-curated wine selection, Jaha's small but elegant menu of Asian-inspired Creole cooking, and an increasingly prestigious list of guest speakers?
And there it is.
He misses Clarke, suddenly and eye-wateringly, and Bellamy steadies himself against a stainless steel shelving unit overflowing with lemongrass and ginger and coconut milk.
The other men don't notice, thank fuck, and the moment passes leaving only a small lingering soreness in his chest and he checks on Jaha to make sure everything is ready for dinner service before forcing a smile for Alie and grabbing the nearby clipboard with its printout of the week's work schedule.
What the hell? "Who scheduled Jasper to wait tables tonight?" That's practically a guaranteed headache, one he doesn't need on a night when a bestselling author is going to be bringing in the crowds and half the seats are already reserved for the evening.
"You did," Monty calls from just beyond the kitchen door – a line he has always refused to cross. "You said it'd be good for him."
Bellamy follows his best clerk back out to the sales floor. "Monty. You gotta do it. Just for tonight."
"No! You promised me I'd never have to wait a table. That was the deal when you hired me."
Bellamy fumes but gives up because he can't afford to piss off Monty, too, the only one who isn't annoyed by the desk calendar and has never tried to make him talk about her and has, in general, been a better friend than Bellamy has deserved.
Instead he waits until Jasper shows up, reassigns him to the coffee counter – less crowded at night, and nobody minds a surly barista – and as soon as C.C. Lily (younger and prettier and quieter than he expected) arrives with her agent (a blonde woman named Marina who smiles easily but hovers protectively over the talented author) Bellamy hands them off to Monty and grabs a black half apron and joins Harper and Alie to wait tables for the night.
When his father bought the place almost thirty years ago, it was a used bookstore boasting more spider webs than customers. He named it Borealis Books and pronounced it a wedding gift to Aurora, and worked too many hours for too many years trying to make the place successful. When he killed himself and left Aurora and their preschool-aged son with nothing but debt and a shitty little bookstore, Aurora sold the inventory to a dealer for far less money than it was worth and changed their last name to Blake and opened a café in the space and almost made it work, until Marcus.
Marcus the Sperm Donor. It has always been easier to think of him as that than as the man who walked out on Aurora and her son and an unborn child. Because nowhere in Bellamy's mind is there space for someone who could do that… to count as a "man" at all.
So Bellamy Blake, abandoned by two fathers in the space of three years, grew up fast. Started bussing tables at seven. Waiting at ten. Closing up and cleaning up and opening up at thirteen, and would have kept going after high school except Aurora – with a kiss and a smile and a hard crack in her voice – threatened to kick him out if he didn't do something more with his life. She couldn't afford to send him to college, couldn't pay for him to travel the world, but the military could…
He was with the Rangers in Iraq when he got the call about his mother. After thirty-seven hours of travel and too many transfers to count, Bellamy arrived in Fort Benning at three in the morning, rented a car, and drove eleven hours to the tiny apartment Aurora and Octavia shared two blocks from the coffee shop. There he found his teenage sister balled up on the sofa under her favorite quilt, ignoring hundreds of messages from funeral parlors and lawyers and accountants and the landlord. With two panicked shots to the chest, a junkie in an alley trying to steal her purse had ended Aurora's life.
And Bellamy's.