A/N: Happy New Year to all! Please send your love to Australia and to all those who are volunteering, giving generously and/or being affected by the bushfires. These fires are insane, there's no other way to describe the devastation.
Thank you for all the new follows and to my reviewers! Special thanks to AvengerGirl17, strangeJenny and Cherrypinkrose. And especially thank PenguinofProse for being generally awesome and amazing and coming on board to make sure I don't screw up ;P
Here's a new chapter. Don't forget, large sections of Italics are flashbacks, and I own nothing relating to The 100.
Chapter Three
The ebb and flow of brush against canvas, or in this case wall, was familiar and soothing. Her stress trying to leave her like a long exhale. Her zone of absolute calm was calling to her...but the nagging presence at the corner of her eye made her purse her lips and turn.
"Madi, please, stop hovering," it blew Clarke's mind sometimes how well Madi knew her and how much she worried.
With a pout, Madi pointed out the obvious. "You're painting walls again Clarke. When have you ever done that just because?"
"I've owned this house for four years, don't you think it's past time I painted the wall of my own bedroom?" Clarke chuckled, adding another brushstroke to the large flower she was in the process of enameling onto the wall her bed usually butted up against.
"I'm sorry I told Bellamy about you." Clarke inhaled sharply at Madi's words, her heart skipping a beat. "I got excited when I realised who he was."
"It's fine Madi, it isn't your fault."
"I hate when you say things are fine!" Madi narrowed her eyes and sprawled out on Clarke's bed with an exasperated huff Clarke still couldn't help but think looked adorable. "It's what you say when you aren't actually fine."
"He's a good teacher, right?" Clarke made eye contact with her daughter, hoping against hope she could turn her daughter's thoughts away from the object of her current underlying apprehensive state.
"The best...and not just because he's the best looking teacher we have," Madi leaned up on her elbows so Clarke couldn't miss the sly grin.
There was no way Clarke could avoid laughing at that comment. "Come over here and help me?" She requested with a shake of her head.
Madi lit up and hurried to pick up a brush as if Clarke would change her mind.
Half an hour later they heard a key in the lock and a baritone called out to them, bringing instant relief with it for Clarke. Madi announced their location so it could be heard from downstairs and a few moments later Roan appeared in the doorway.
"What happened?" his intense crystal blue gaze narrowed on the paintbrushes in their hands.
"Oh for God's sake," Clarke huffed, her hand finding a place on her hip, an action that only ended up annoying her further when she realised she had smeared paint on herself in the process. "I'm an artist. Why does everyone assume something is wrong when I paint on a wall?"
"Because we all know you Blondie, walls suffer when things get you worked up," Roan teased with a husky chuckle and moved to wrap his arms around her waist, squeezing affectionately. "Hey kid," he belatedly greeted Madi with a fist bump.
"Did you get the bad guys?" Madi tuned in excitedly, ever fascinated by Roan's job as a detective with the Azgeda Province Police Department.
"You bet," Roan winked at her. "Made our arrests last night and I've been swimming in paperwork all morning so if you want to put the brushes away maybe the three of us want to go out for dinner to celebrate?"
"What about your team?" Clarke couldn't help the concerned frown. Cops were all about celebrating with their squad - at least in her experience - much as the army had been, and Roan usually went out drinking with them as soon as a big case was finished...and Clarke was not up to dealing with a crowd of cops tonight.
"We're doing drinks after shift tomorrow night if you want to come?"
"You should go Clarke. I have soccer training and then I'm babysitting for the Sheppard's next door," Madi offered up, excited on her mother's behalf.
Roan chuckled. "You have your daughter's permission. Now, what do you want for dinner?"
"Don't say the Cheesecake Factory," Clarke waved the paintbrush to point at her in warning.
Madi pouted. "Pizza?" she asked hopefully instead.
"There's that new place serving deep dish pizzas," Roan suggested, scarred eyebrow raised at Clarke.
"Fine, fine," she sighed. "Let me pack up and change."
"But you look great Blondie."
Clarke glanced down at her paint stained overalls and shot him a glare as he retreated with a laugh. As she dropped her brushes in water and replaced the lids on her paints, Clarke's mind began to wander.
She was so focused on the silhouette of the tree she was painting that the sound of a throat being loudly cleared over her blaring music jolted her enough to smear a thick line where it shouldn't have been. Sitting cross legged on the ground didn't make for the most dramatic spin, so she twisted and sent her darkest glare at Bellamy Blake, standing in Octavia's bedroom doorway, his own murky gaze narrowed at her artwork.
"What the hell are you doing?" he demanded, switching off her tunes. With his arms crossed over his chest, legs braced apart and livid expression, Bellamy could have given any of the soldiers in her unit a run for their money in the intimidating department.
Too bad for him that she wasn't that easy to intimidate. "I might ask you the same thing," she retorted, heat in her voice. "Look what you made me do!"
"Why are you painting on my sister's wall?!" Bellamy ignored her. "I am not paying to have this repainted-"
"Chill out, we got permission from the landlord," Clarke cut him off, turning back to try to save the trees, mumbling under her breath about grumpy old men.
He was unusually silent for a few minutes and it unnerved her enough to have her peeking back over her shoulder. "Are you just going to stand there staring?"
"Sorry," he rubbed at the back of his neck with a sigh, taking in what appeared to be a misty mountain range in ombre shades starting off white and fading into a deep green at the floor, where Clarke was painting her shadowy forest. "It's nice."
"Thanks for that glowing endorsement," she muttered sarcastically, rolling her eyes even though he couldn't see it. "What are you doing here anyway? Octavia said you weren't arriving until the day before Thanksgiving."
"I managed to get a few extra days off from training and wanted to surprise O," he was still staring at the wall, now wearing a thoughtful expression, and it was making her feel defensive...Bellamy Blake always seemed to make her feel like she had to have her guard up. "Where is my sister anyway?" It was said in an offhand manner but was probably what he had really cared most about all along.
"Working on an assignment I think, she's heading out with the gang later and wanted to get a little extra done first,"
Bellamy eyed her suspiciously. "What kind of going out?"
Clarke just shrugged and turned away from him.
"You aren't going with them?"
Her entire body went tense and she froze for a few seconds before she shoved the tidal wave that was her emotions back down and started painting again.
"Not today," she responded curtly. "Can you turn the music back on on your way out?"
Music filtered back through the speakers, turned down more than she would have liked, leaving her acutely aware of Bellamy shuffling around in the room next door. "What are you listening to?" he called through the wall.
"The Goo Goo Dolls."
"The who?" he popped his head back around the door frame. "Never heard of them," he confessed after she had repeated herself.
Clarke was on her feet in seconds, switching the song to Iris.
"Oh," his eyes lit in recognition. "I know this song."
"Everybody knows this song," she sniffed, changed the song again at the same instant they heard the door fly open and she looked up in time to see Octavia basically fly through the air and into Bellamy with such force he stumbled back a couple of steps.
"Hey O," Bellamy's chuckle and the sudden softening of his features sent a strange shiver down Clarke's spine.
If she had ever been in doubt of how much the Blake siblings actually cared about each other, this moment absolutely shot it to hell. But her friends were her family now, Clarke reminded herself, trying not to slip into a dark place and went back to her spot on the floor, dipping her brush back into the paint, praying for the calm she normally found when she painted.
Slipping back into the zone caused her to lose her sense of time, so when she set her brush aside and stretched out her back, she was surprised to notice that dusk had fallen outside.
Quiet noises from the kitchen filtered through to her and she went to investigate, finding Bellamy stirring one pot while another covered pot bubbled away. He spotted her from the corner of his eye and looked up, pushing the glasses back up his nose causing Clarke to freeze for a moment again as a stray thought noticed how cute he looked with glasses before she forcefully shoved it away.
"Are you going to stand there and stare, Princess?" he paraphrased her earlier words with a smirk, causing Clarke to roll her eyes at him.
"If you don't want food poisoning you'd better not let me anywhere near your food," she commented dryly.
"You'd poison me?" he looked startled.
"It's not optional, or personal," Clarke snickered. "I can't cook, and if you tell me it's just a matter of following a recipe I might actually help, just to prove to you how untrue that is."
The smirk widened to a grin and then he was chuckling. "Fine, fine, give me ten minutes and I'll serve you like a true princess."
Clarke huffed - she should have known he'd continue to be an ass - and made to leave.
"Clarke, wait," it was strange how much it startled her to hear him use her name. He always seemed to call her Princess in that snarky tone of voice that set her teeth on edge. "I'm sorry, it was supposed to be a joke," the genuine note in his voice gave her pause and she glanced back.
"I'm really not in a joking mood today."
"Yeah, sorry," Bellamy ran his fingers through already messy curls and rubbed at the back of his neck. "When I decided not to go out with the gang, O told me to just leave you be...but I figured you still had to eat. Right?"
Clarke's eyes widened a little as the bottom of her stomach dropped out. "She told you what today was?"
"No," Bellamy frowned at her, shaking his head.
"Okay," she let out a little breath of relief, hand hovering over the erratic fluttering in her chest.
While he finished cooking, she set out two places at the tiny dining table and soon enough they were sitting down to eat.
Clarke hadn't been hungry, but when the sauce through the pasta hit her tongue she gave a little moan of appreciation and Bellamy's eyes widened on hers, food halfway to his mouth. "It's good," she mumbled around her food.
One corner of his lips quirked up and he bashfully lowered his head. "It's just Bolognese," he muttered, bringing the pasta to his own mouth.
"Well, some of us only get home cooked food when Murphy binges Gordon Ramsay, so just take the compliment," at her snarky comment, Bellamy huffed out a laugh and they ate in silence for a while.
After the meal Clarke took over the washing up and just as she was scrubbing the pot, she felt the sudden urge to talk to Bellamy Blake, someone who, on a normal day, she could barely stand to be in a room with. She shook her head at herself and scrubbed harder, glancing at him from the corner of her eye where he was wiping down the table. It was a moment of weakness surely? Brought on by seeing the care she had seen in his eyes when he had greeted Octavia earlier.
"It's my Dad's anniversary today," she told him, dropping the objects into the sink to lean more heavily at the side. "Six years."
Bellamy turned to face her, sorrow in his eyes and his lips twisted into a sympathetic frown. "I'm so sorry Clarke. I can't even imagine what that's like."
"Everyone told me it was supposed to get easier," she confessed. "And day to day does. But today, today I always just need to be alone and distracted."
He nodded, sympathy visible in the twist of his lips and the furrow of his brow. "Do you want to talk about it?"
She shook her head and went back to the dishes. Talking about it meant risking breaking down.
There was a moment of quiet and then Bellamy spoke hesitantly. "O and I have different fathers. We didn't know either one of them. I was the product of our mum sleeping her way through Asia on a backpacking tour before she started her Freshman year of college," he tugged on a curl awkwardly and then leaned back against the side of the table, crossing his arms over his chest. "And I've never told O but hers was our mum's boss at the time, he was older, married and had four kids. The closest I ever had to a father figure was our maternal grandfather, he and our grandmother were responsible for me until our mum finished college, then they retired to Florida. O never met them."
"And your mum?" Clarke wondered. "Octavia has never said anything about her."
"She loved us, and when she was around we had her undivided attention. But we were left alone more often than kids that age should have been," Bellamy scratched at the back of his neck, staring blankly at the floor. "She wanted to be a fashion designer and having two kids at home got in the way of that. I can't pinpoint when it started but I noticed her alcohol abuse while I was in high school. She took off sometime around O's eighteenth birthday and the worst part about that statement is that O didn't even notice until almost a week later."
They stood in silence while Clarke mulled over what he had divulged. "What would you have done if you had gone to college?" she suddenly asked.
Bellamy froze, deer in headlights style. "I don't think anyone has ever asked me that. College was never an option for me if I wanted it to be an option for O," he admitted and Clarke's heart broke a little more. "A teacher," he finally stated. "A history or literature teacher."
"With your hot head?" Clarke snickered.
"Believe it or not I used to be a lot more patient," Bellamy rolled his eyes at her, but a little smile lifted the corners of his lips in a subtly charming way.
Clarke hesitated briefly before deciding it was unfair to leave him the only one making confessions that clearly made him uncomfortable. "I wanted to study art," she told him, squeezing the edge of the counter until she couldn't feel her fingers. "I didn't know what I wanted to do with it, just that I loved everything about it. My dad was all about supporting everything I wanted to do."
"Yet you ended up a medic in the army somehow?" Bellamy appeared adorably confused by this.
"It's a long story that starts with both my parents having come from old money. The difference being my dad didn't want to get richer, he wanted to serve his country. He was a mechanical engineer, one of the best, but Mum was a surgeon and after she had me she wanted to keep her crazy hours so Dad stopped doing tours and eventually left the army altogether to join a local Arcadian firm. Jaha Engineering."
Bellamy jolted. "As in Thelonius Jaha? Disgraced former mayor of Arkadia?"
"That's the one," Clarke nodded. "The Jaha's were old family friends."
"So you're basically actually a princess?" he seemed mildly horrified by this revelation.
Clarke's hackles rose. "Because my parents were privileged? Do you want me to keep going or not?" she stressed and Bellamy had the decency to flush with embarrassment. "Their son Wells was my best and only friend until I was thirteen and the first corruption scandal broke," she went on. "My dad went to jail for embezzlement even though he was innocent."
"I think I remember that."
"Jaha somehow pinned it on my dad and the worst part was my mum believed him enough to turn my dad in."
"That's horrible Clarke."
"Yeah well," she rubbed her fingers against her sternum as if rubbing at an old scar. To this day talking about her father's unfair end left a feeling of a knife twisting in her heart. "It ended with my dad being killed in prison a year later and my relationship with my mother continuing to spiral out of control. Especially when Jaha was found out a few years later and fled the country, too late to save my dad though."
"Did you patch things up with your mum?"
"Not even close," Clarke shook her head sadly. "I was so mad at her through my teen years, and in typical Mum fashion, anything I said or did outside of her expectations was a rebellion," she snorted. "When I came out and told her I was bisexual she actually called it part of my rebellious phase. College was the final straw in our messed up relationship. Mum had control of my college fund, and it became I go to medical school or the money would be taken away." Clarke levelled a glare at the floor. "The amount I care to receive ultimatums is microscopic. So I joined the army and I haven't spoken to my mother since."
"And so you paint people's walls," Bellamy teased, trying to ease the sorry atmosphere.
A small smile twitched at her lips. "Painting clears my head," she admitted. "It's for when I have something on my mind."
"Have you finished O's wall? You're welcome to mine if you need an outlet," he offered earnestly.
Her smile grew a little and Clarke couldn't help but soften towards him. "You aren't so bad Bellamy," she chuckled. "When you aren't being an ass."
He grinned impishly. "You aren't so bad yourself Princess."
It gave her pause, the way the nickname seemed to suddenly hold a different tone to previously, and she found she didn't mind it so much anymore.
That evening, after Madi had gone to bed, Clarke curled up against Roan on the couch with her sketchbook while he watched a basketball rerun.
When her sketch, originally intended to be of Madi while she played soccer, morphed into Bellamy back in his professional soccer days, her pulse skyrocketed and she panicked. It took seconds to tear the page out, scrunch it up and throw it over the back of the couch. Of course she then realised the overreaction was more telling than accidentally drawing him when he had yesterday moved to a more prominent place at the back of her mind. She sighed dejectedly to herself. How was she supposed to cope with seeing him again if she couldn't even control her anxiety when it reared its ugly head?
"Need to talk about what's going on?" Roan's voice broke through her silent recriminations.
"Octavia's brother moved to town," Clarke summarised, dispirited. "He's teaching Madi."
"Is he an ex?"
"No, but I was closer to him than O in the early days until we had a falling out."
"Part of the Trikru era then?"
Clarke just nodded.
"Is him being in Polis some kind of issue?"
"I just haven't spoken to him in six years. Even staying friends with Octavia and reconnecting with Murphy, the fact that we were in Polis and he was back in Arkadia meant that I didn't have to constantly be reminded of how badly I screwed up."
"Always blaming yourself Blondie," Roan heaved a sigh, resigned. "It takes two people to have a fight."
"But I wasn't myself at the time."
Roan just made a noise in his throat. "Still hurting over it?"
"I'm not sure I'll ever not hurt over it," she paused briefly. "He really got on my nerves at first but somewhere along the way I got to know him and we really connected. He seemed to understand me, or maybe he just accepted me as I was."
"Your other friends didn't?"
"It just wasn't the same," Clarke frowned at him, frustrated with herself for not being able to put the feeling into words even after so many years. "I still can't describe it, or even how it's different to my connections with other people." She let out a breath of discontent and tried again. "I used to think that it was what people meant when they talked about platonic soulmates. He just got me. Saw all my flaws and past my armour and stood beside me anyway. I'd known Raven and Murphy for years already and neither of them could do that."
"What about me then?" Roan raised an eyebrow at her, a somewhat teasing smirk taking over his face. "I think I know you pretty well."
"For starters, we may be friends, but I'm sleeping with you," Clarke returned the teasing, thankful for the instant lightening of the mood. "But mainly, you know me now. The things we've lived through have changed me and you make those changes much easier to live with. You know where they came from and don't question why I sometimes act abnormally."
"I suppose I never realised that there's more to your past then you've told me," Roan frowned thoughtfully.
"Most of those scars were hidden under the newer ones," she admitted. "So I guess a part of me felt like I didn't need to go into great detail about them. You know the basics, after all, and most of them have healed."
"Yet somehow this is the first I've heard about Octavia's brother or you being friends with him." This was the good thing about Roan, from anyone else this statement would have been a demand for an explanation, but from him, his tone told her it was simply a curious observation.
"In the last four years alone I've officially become Madi's foster mother, made up with Murphy, finally found something that resembles a stable relationship with my mother, and accepted that even if we meet again Raven and I will probably never be on steady ground again," Clarke paused for a moment, looking for the right words, her heart pinching uncomfortably.
"Octavia's brother is the exception to everything, right?"
Clarke's gaze moved sharply to his. "It was the one that hurt the most to lose and the one that will always hurt going forward because I knew the more time stretched on after our fight that no matter what it could never have been the same again. Now that I'm not going to be able to avoid him..."
"It will continue to hurt because sometimes you don't stop missing a person," Roan spoke softly.
"Sometimes I forget you're actually pretty smart," Clarke chuckled, teasing him. "And then you go and say something like that and I remember you're better at reading people than anyone I know."
Roan chuckled and shook his head at her. "Let's go," he took her hand and pulled her to her feet, leading her to the stairs.
"Where are we going?"
"Isn't it obvious?" he shot her a flirtatious look over his shoulder. "I'm going to take your mind off things for a while."
Clarke was smiling as she followed him.
A/N: Thanks for reading, and please drop a review.