Sorry if I'm late with the update. School is crazy right now! I hope everyone is doing well and that you all enjoy the chapter though!

Raven's POV

Raven spends her whole shift absolutely fuming. She snaps at co-workers and glares at her manager and doesn't bother asking a single damn customer if they want paper or plastic.

Her leg screams and her head aches and her heart splinters apart with just the slightest prodding.

The worst part about the whole terrible exachange? Wick was right.

Saturday night had been entirely unfair for him. While she'd been off running away from the only place she'd truly had to run to, he was just trying to run towards her. As she'd been busy posing for a friend and learning about herself and forgiving for the both of them; he'd been worrying. He was worrying about her and her mom and her safety. She offered him a text message with no promise of a later or a more. She kissed him like she knew he wanted and then she took off because she couldn't deal. Not with the hurt from her mom and certainly not with the look in his eyes and the static in his hands and the flushing of his face. (And most definitely not with the guilt coming from a boy who was six feet under.)

But he'd been ready to deal with all of it. He would have dealt with all of her right then and there if she'd asked him to. God she was a shattered mess and he was just constantly there, waiting to put her back together with the sort of precision she'd forgotten could even exist.

The problem was that maybe she didn't want to be put back together. So much of her would have to be broken all over again, like a bone that had healed the wrong way, that the pure velocity of the project left her feeling naked and empty and completely bare to him.

He said he loved her and she repaid him by breaking his heart.

But then she forgets to consider Wick and she just gets mad at what he had said to her all over again. Who cares if he was right? She might be fierce, but she was also weak. He didn't have the right to break her down without her permission.

Of course today is the day that Bellamy decides to show up, and not even with food at that. "Shouldn't you be in school?" she growls as soon as he's close enough to hear. The customer she's scanning groceries for looks up in surprise and she waves them off with the can of soup in her hand.

"It's Presidents Day, Raven," he tells her leaning obnoxiously against her counter. "We've been given the day off to reflect on how so many old white men before us have managed to oppress the minorities and make the dumbest damn rules that have caused our country to be not only the most hated, but also the most mocked. It's a joyous occasion."

The lady she's checking out shoots him an obscene look and Raven bets her entire life savings (yes, it may be about twelve dollars at this point) that she's a God fearing Republican who had a pro-life bumper sticker on the back of her car and a husband with a poorly locked away gun. "Ignore him," Raven says, offering her first smile of the day to prevent getting reported. "He's a democrat," she whispers it and rolls her eyes as if she thought he was insane.

It smooths things over well enough. "I just had to play Republican to save your ass," she says, pointing an accusing finger in his face once the lady is gone.

He laughs, "It was your own ass you saved." He's right but she doesn't acknowledge it. For a minute she suspects that somehow word has gotten around already that her and Wick had gotten into it. Be it Saturday night, Clarke was sure to have told Bellamy about their impromptu sleepover, or today. Maybe Wick had gone home and group messaged the guys, bitching about how much she used him. Her rage flared again "You could have warned me, you know."

"What?" Raven asks, leaving this morning behind yet again as she directs her attention to Bellamy. Thankfully there was a lull in customers. She wasn't up to multi-tasking today. The look on his face answers the question. "She told you?" Raven wasn't exactly upset that Octavia hadn't waited for her to be present.

With a heavy sigh Bellamy says, "Yeah," his body heavier than a minute before. "I guess I should have seen it coming. She's too damn much like our mom."

"Don't say that," Raven whispers. Octavia's mom was better than hers, not that it took much, but there had always been so much resentment. Octavia blamed her mom for a lack of a father. She hated how much the woman worked and how often she was away. Octavia wanted nothing more than to be just what her mother was not in every way possible. It would break her in two if she thought her brother considered her no better than the mother who always tried so hard but was always seen as a failure through her daughter's eyes. "You don't mean that."

He shakes his head, looks to the floor for answers that he doesn't seem to have. "Maybe I do." A shrug, a quirk of his head as he looks back at her. "I remember our mom in ways she doesn't. I remember the way she used to look at the world with excited eyes and sing and dance to all of the songs on the radio. I remember how she used to blow on Octavia's belly to make her laugh and read to me every night. She loved us so damn much." He clears his throat and his smile is bitter and she remembers not for the first time that she isn't the only friend in their group who was let down. "But we stopped being so new and shiny and there were men to keep her company and a bottle to hold her hand. I don't want…"

Raven nods because she knows what it's like to come to the realisation that love isn't always enough.

"Octavia hasn't used in over a year now," she reminds him, steely determination in her voice. "Almost two for Lincoln." She fixes Bellamy with a stare as she turns away and leans against the empty station. He stands up straight to meet her gaze. "You don't get to pin her past mistakes on her like they'll make up her future. And you definitely don't get to use your mom as a blue print for the person Octavia is going to be."

He shakes his head and she's reminded of his weariness right now. It was news he wasn't prepared for, one more thing he now had to protect and worry about. "I just wanted things to run smoothly for like a year. Was that so much to ask?"

She covers his bare hand that was splayed against the cool metal with her own. She'd learned a long time ago that things didn't run smooth, especially not when you wanted them to. "Yes," she says, her voice and tone as serious as she could make them, holding her gaze just a little too close against his until he cracks a smile, the heaviness getting to be too much.

"Damn it, Raven," he says as he pulls his hand out from under hers and runs it through his hair. "I'm trying to sulk and you look stupid when you make that face."

With a shrug she turns back to the belt, greeting the customer with a smile and trying not to groan out loud at the pile of coupons he was pulling out. "Get over yourself," she says. The moments between them never stayed heavy for long. They had other people for that sort of stuff. They needed each other to find some light. "Besides, you know you're excited to be an uncle."

With a bit of effort Bellamy doesn't smile. "I'm gonna be mad a while longer before I enjoy the idea of being an uncle to my teenage sister's illegitimate child."

She smirks. "You're just jealous you aren't the one having an illegitimate child…with Clarke." She laughs really hard when his expression goes from contemplative to furious. He shoves his middle finger high in the air as he walks from the store. "I'm sure she'd be game!" she shouts before he disappears through the automatic doors. He throws up his other middle finger for good measure.

Four pm finally rolls around and Raven genuinely hopes that Wick knows better than to be sitting outside the door when she gets off. As far as she was concerned, he could go to hell and fuck himself in the ass on the way there.

She walks outside and her eyes automatically go to the fire zone where he always sat and waited for her. It's empty and she's walking away, eyes having completely skipped right over the fact that he wasn't in his truck, but standing outside in the cold with his hands in his pockets and a pathetic look on his face.

"Listen, Raven-" he's starting before she's totally registered that he's even there.

"Save it," she barks out, her footsteps rushed and her hands shoved in her pockets. It wasn't even that cold but it was better than punching him in the face which is what she wanted to do with them. "You must not have gotten the memo. I cancelled my membership with Douche Taxi."

"I was an ass," he says and Raven is glad that at least he's self-aware. "I know that, okay? And I-"

"No!" she shouts, stopping dead in her tracks and turning the best she can on him. The snow is slippery and she would be so pissed if all her angry momentum was lost by her falling on her ass right now. "It's not okay, Wick. Not one damn thing that happened this morning was okay."

"Fine! I get that!" he yells back and now they're just two crazy people shouting on the sidewalk outside of a grocery store. "But what happened Saturday night wasn't okay either. What happened was fucked up, Raven."

"Did you get your feelings hurt?" she asks, her tone mocking and cruel and unfair. "'Cause guess what, Wick? I don't care."

"That's hardly fair," he says in a bitter tone.

She huffs a sigh and makes a point to look away, staring off at the line of cars driving by and biting the inside of her cheek. "Fine, you want to talk about the damn kiss? Go for it!" She pulls her hands out of her pockets for the first time, throwing them in the air to signal he should go right ahead.

"Raven…"

"No. No, what do you want to talk about, Wick? Do you want to talk about how I used you as a shoulder to cry on beforehand? Or maybe how you were spouting out love confessions that you didn't mean. Or how I ran away afterwards. Or maybe you want to talk about how it tasted like fortune cookie and felt like fire in your lungs and ice in your veins and how it seemed right but it wasn't." She shouts through clenched teeth and with words that break the more she says them. She goes from fierce to broken in seconds. "Do you want to talk about how I'm too fucked up to love someone and how my dead boyfriend was the last person I kissed before you and the only thing I could think about afterwards and how I thought you were my friend, but now you're acting like I owe you something." She swallows the lump in her throat and fixes her stare on him, trying to remember what it was like to have fire in your heart instead of a pit in your stomach. "Friends don't keep score."

"I didn't mean it," he finally says, looking like he was bleeding out from her words alone. "It's not even true!"

She shakes her head and shoves her hands back deep into the pockets of her jacket. "But you still said it." That was all that really mattered. He knew what it would do to her. He knew exactly how those words would strike and reverberate and destroy. And he had said them anyway. "You were trying to hurt me and it worked. Deal with it."

This time when she starts walking off he lets her go.

She tries to convince herself that she doesn't want him to stop her one more time.

She's crying before she's even hit the one mile mark. Kyle fucking Wick.

Octavia's room is warm. Ever since they were kids Octavia has always hated the cold. She wore two sweatshirts under her winter coat and knee high socks in the spring. She took showers that were like molten lava and was always that girl who stuck their freezing cold hands on someone's warm back in an attempt heat them.

Even so she's still huddled in a pile of blankets, her books open around her but none actually being used. "Hey," Raven says, pulling off her jacket and laying it over the computer chair. "Your mom let me in."

A smile brightens her face and she gathers the books together, throwing them unceremoniously to the floor. "I'm tired. Lay in bed with me."

Raven smiles and works to get her boots off. She sits on the edge of the bed and quickly unstraps her brace. It had been caged up for way too long and the pain was getting less instead of more. She lays down on top of the covers and stares up at the ceiling, the fan above her was motionless, though Raven thought maybe some circulation might be nice. "Is the tired a baby thing or a normal thing?" she asks as Octavia nudges herself closer.

She lay on her side and her face was mere inches from Raven's cheek. "I think it's a, I finally told my big brother I got knocked up and now all my muscles are like jelly without all that tension holding them together." Raven smiles and lets her head fall to the side so that Octavia's forehead pressed against the hairline by her eye. "I think this is the most I've seen of you since I came back." Since Finn died. Since Raven had to get a second job. Since she'd dropped out of school. "It's nice."

Wick had reminded her how nice it was to have people that care about you. She remembered all of the people who already did. "Yes," she agrees, eyes slipping shut as the warmth embraces her and Octavia throws an arm across her. "It's really nice."

When she wakes up it's dark and Octavia is snoring in her ear, a leg thrown over her and half of her hair in Raven's face. She'd always been a clingy sleeper.

She thinks about getting up and going home. Her mom was all alone or in danger or freezing or…

But then she remembers what used to make her happy when she was younger and she wonders how she ever forgot. It was these people and their homes and their warm hugs and gentle jokes. For whatever reason she had run away from it all like it had never been hers to begin with. She's relieved to discover it was still there now that she wanted to come back.

With a light shove she pushes Octavia off of her and rolls onto her side. Sleep pulls her back under with ease and she sleeps until mid-morning. The sunlight streams through the upstairs window and Raven's skin is sticky with sweat. Someone had apparently thrown a blanket over her at some point in the night. The first thing she notices is that Octavia is gone. The next is that there's a glass of water next to her.

She drinks it happily and then moves to strap her brace on once again. She bends and stretches her leg in every exercise she can remember first before hooking it back in and then she goes to Octavia's bathroom, using the toilet and splashing water on her face in an attempt to wake up more.

On the counter she notices little things, like hair ties and the same shade of lip gloss Octavia has religiously stuck to ever since tenth grade. She notices a calendar with days crossed off (in four days Octavia will reach thirteen months sober). She gurgles some mouthwash to make up for the lack of toothbrush and undoes her ponytail to put it up again in a less haphazard manner.

She grabs her jacket off the chair and opens the door, listening closely for any signs of life. It's silent but she still attempts to be quiet on the stairs.

There's little need seeing as the house was empty, a note left on the front door.

No one will be home until late. Help yourself to whatever and feel free to do my laundry in return!

xx O

Raven smiles, taking off her coat in favour of some toaster waffles. There were a million and one reasons why she should probably leave. For the first time in too long she just listens to the one that's saying why she should stay.