He sees her again two days later, after her horror-film-worthy scream wakes him up from an unplanned nap. Jumping off of his couch in drowsy confusion, he accidentally overturns a cup of tea. It spills all over his students' papers, and he spares them a brief, pitying glance before rushing out of his apartment.
Knocking on her door, he desperately wiggles the locked door.
"Clarke! Clarke! Are you okay?!"
Putting his ear against the door, he hears what sounds like the clattering of kitchen pots, cursing, and a muffled Hold on!
The door opens, and Clarke's face blanches.
"What's wrong?" he asks, searching her for injuries. "What happened, Clarke? Are you okay?"
"Where's your shirt?" she demands, pointing a wooden spoon at him.
"My shirt? Clarke, I ran over here because you were screaming bloody murder and you're asking me where my shirt is?"
Blinking, she flushes. "Sorry—I…it's just—it's a little embarrassing."
He furrows his brows, confused. That's not the typical thing girls say to him when they see him shirtless.
"Do you…do you want me to go put a shirt on?"
"No! No, that's not what I meant. The reason I screamed is embarrassing."
He resists the urge to smirk. "So you don't want me to put a shirt on?"
Rolling her eyes, she opens the door wider so he can step through it.
"You're impossible," she declares, but she's still blushing, so he figures she doesn't mean it.
"So what happened?"
She mutters something, but the only words he can catch are incompetent adult, disgusting, and unbelievable.
He follows her to the kitchen, where she shoves a box of pasta in his hands.
"That is the only box of food I could find in my apartment," she tells him with a sigh. "And apparently it 'expired' like three years ago. There were maggots in that box, Bellamy. Maggots. I was this close to eating maggots."
Bellamy can't help it. He barks out a laugh.
"Don't laugh," she mutters, but the corners of her lips are upturned the slightest amount. "Look, I've never lived on my own before so give me a break, okay?"
"How did you survive before?" he asks, shaking his head in disbelief.
"My roommates always went grocery shopping for me. I was always at work or studying when they went. I just ate at the hospital cafeteria most of the time."
He raises an eyebrow. She shrugs.
"Okay," he says, "we're going grocery shopping."
"Fine. After you put a shirt on."
It's strangely domestic, going grocery shopping with Clarke.
They bicker over whether or not to get name brand cereal (the generic ones are cheaper and bigger, Bellamy argues, but Clarke insists that the name brand ones taste better), and have a lengthy debate on whether or not watermelon-flavored Poptarts would taste good or not.
She asks him to grab her favorite ice cream from the top shelf of the freezer (she can't reach), and he slips vitamins and fruit into the cart when (he thinks) she's not looking.
It unnerves him a little, how it feels like they've been friends for years, how easily they can read each other's emotions. It feels open and vulnerable, but in a good way.
"This is fun," she says, bumping her shoulder into his. "You're good at this kind of stuff."
He shrugs. "I kind of had to be."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." He looks at the shelves stocked with peanut butter and tries to remember which brand Octavia used to love. He can't remember, and for some reason the fact makes his throat feel tight. "Yeah, uh, it was just me and O growing up. My mom…" he trails off, exhaling the weight of his memories. "She did the best she could. What she couldn't do, I did."
Clarke studies him. "You're a good person, Bellamy."
He lets out a soft exhale, an echo of a scoff. "I'm not."
She grabs his arm, pulling him back to look at her. There's sincerity and fondness and something he can't name swimming in her blue eyes.
"I'm cursed," she confesses with a grim, tight smile. He furrows his brows. The feeling of her fingers sliding down to curl around his wrist distracts him. Looking down, her voice catches. "Everyone I love dies."
It's said with such finality, such defeated acceptance that his heart aches in his chest. The middle of an aisle at a grocery store probably isn't the best place to have a conversation so personal like this one, but he recognizes something in her sadness, in her pain. Something that reminds him of hospitals and funerals and empty apartments.
You're not the only one who's cursed, he thinks.
"These past few months have been the worst of my life," she explains, holding back tears stubbornly. "But Bellamy, you introduced me to your friends. You invited me over to hang out with them. And now, now you're helping me do my grocery shopping. I haven't laughed this hard or had this much fun in forever," she pauses. "I—I don't deserve any of it. But if it weren't for you, I wouldn't be here right now. I'd be eating maggoty pasta, alone in my apartment."
He smiles at that, but there's no trace of humor on her face.
"Bellamy, you're a good person," she lets go of his wrist, turning back to the cart. "Don't ever say that you're not because you are."
He nods, drawing in a breath. It takes him a second to recover. It feels like something has shifted, like the world has tilted by just a simple degree, like everything is one step closer to being right side up again.
"Clarke," he walks beside her, the backs of their hands brushing. "You deserve to be happy, you know that right?"
"I'm starting to," she admits, quiet. She clears her throat and changes the subject, asking him whether or not she should buy the stick pretzels or the traditional ones.
An hour later, Clarke's cabinets are filled with food. Her fridge is stocked, and there's a bunch of recipes Bellamy tacked on the door with magnets.
He left them there for her to try, but he has the feeling that she'll just end up inviting him over and asking him to help her with them.
It's a little selfish of him, but he can't help but hope that she will.
(She does)
It's not until Raven points it out that he notices that his apartment is covered in evidence of Clarke's existence, of their developing friendship. There's traces of her everywhere, from the bobby pins left on his bathroom counter, to her half-sketched drawings on his napkins.
"You two should name your first kid after me," she quips with a brilliant grin, leaving Bellamy alone so he can continue staring at his apartment suspiciously, like it was its fault for hiding away little pieces of Clarke in every corner of every room.
The next time he goes over to Clarke's (they're on a LOST binge-watch), he can't ignore the fact that it's the same for her apartment as well.
His books are scattered everywhere, there's one on her coffee table, another on her kitchen counter. Half of his cooking supplies are in her cupboards, and he even finds his favorite pen tucked between her couch cushions.
His senses are in overdrive, which makes it that much easier to notice that the space between them on the couch is shrinking a little more every night. Swallowing, his heart thumps in his chest annoyingly fast, and his mind teases him with impossible, happy scenarios that he knows won't ever be anything but dreams.
Even if they were to happen, it's not the right time, he convinces himself. Clarke has told him all about her father, about Wells, about Finn, about Lexa. She's told him about how she's convinced that their deaths are somehow all her fault, that if she had just stayed away from them they would still be alive. She's told him about how she doesn't even know if she ever wants to let herself love again, because she doesn't want to risk losing another person.
The sad thing is, he understands it. He understands it because he feels the same way. His mother, Gina, Monroe, Lincoln, Octavia (she's still alive, but he's lost her all the same), their fates are his fault, and he hates himself for it.
Everything he touches is ruined with his trembling fingers, it's torn apart and destroyed mercilessly every single time.
He won't ruin Clarke, too.
She deserves better. She deserves better than a broken, shell of a boy whose scars only barely hold him together.
The next night, he tries to ignore the confused, hurt look on her face when he sits on the floor instead of the couch, muttering an excuse about his bad back that she obviously doesn't believe.
It's better this way, he tells himself when he cancels on her three times the next week.
Her pencils still litter his floor, her drawings of him are still tucked between his books, but his world is emptier than ever.
It's better this way, he lies to himself, but every time his phone buzzes with a text from Clarke, it gets harder and harder to believe his own lie.
A/N- THANK YOU TO THOSE WHO HAVE LEFT REVIEWS YOU'RE AMAZING! i'm guessing this will be three or four more chapters? i'll probably update every day. Hope you like it!
