Raven's POV

It wasn't that she couldn't have turned down Wick's apology if she'd wanted to. Though, now that she thought about it he hadn't actually said the words 'I'm sorry' this time around. From Monday morning on she had been ready to write him off for good. She was angry and hurt and betrayed in a way that felt dirty. In fact, it reminded her of the way Finn left her feeling when she realised he was fucking Clarke on the side. (And not just fucking her even, loving her.) She hardly thought she was asking for a lot from people. Was it so hard not to cheat on her or accuse her of using people? These were things that were probably the most hurtful things either of them could have done to her, and yet they both came to pass.

So she'd been angry and hurt and completely done with his dumb ass. But then he'd been standing there and he was giving her the most disjointed, useless explanation she had ever heard and she had some sort of revelation that maybe she didn't want to hate him for the rest of eternity. Because yes he was stupid and annoying and selfish every once in a while, but he was always steady and constant and someone. She missed having a someone and Octavia was having a baby and Finn was dead and Bellamy had his own damn issues. If all of that was different though, she still thinks that maybe Kyle Wick might be the someone she would choose.

In an attempt to get him to stop talking and make her stop thinking about Finn (was that seriously part of his strategy right now?) she says okay. It's the easiest thing to say because it doesn't have to mean she forgives him and it doesn't have to mean she doesn't. It was just a momentary offering of peace.

Therefore Raven is kind of surprised when Kyle does that same damn swagger through the admitting doors four minutes before either of them technically get off and he leans against the desk like nothing's ever happened and like she hadn't been plotting his death just a few hours earlier.

"Hey, you know what great idea I came up with?" he asks with eyes that were too excited for seven in the morning.

There's a biting comment tucked away somewhere in the forefront of her mind but she ignores it. "What?" she asks, boring and bland and peaceful instead.

He shoots her a curious glance but then plunges forward. "A transparent toaster," he tells her, his voice is a little bit giddy and she almost finds it endearing. Almost. He was going to have to work harder than a see-through toaster to get completely back on her good side. "Think of all the perfectly toasted toast!"

"Some people can actually manage to toast bread," she tells him with a shake of her head as Jasper comes sauntering in.

"Jasper, my man," Wick says, still hovering in Raven's space. "Tell me, transparent toaster: genius or unnecessary?"

Jasper looks between them before throwing his bag down on the floor and digging his work badge out of his pocket. "You can't toast toast, can you, Wick?"

Raven almost doubles over in laughter holding her hand up for Jasper to high five. He does so and leaves to clock in. "Shut up," Wick says, leaning back against the desk with his arms crossed in front of him. She laughs at him until Jasper comes back.

He offers for her to drive when they get outside but she waves the idea away. This morning she was eager to sit and enjoy the familiarity of the truck cabin again. She hadn't realised that in her grand plans to write Wick off forever that there would have been a lot of things she would be saying goodbye to in addition to him.

"So," he says, once their situated inside and the engine is running. He doesn't move from the spot. "I feel like a celebration is in order."

Sometimes he didn't make any damn sense. "To celebrate what exactly?" she asks.

"We had our first major blow up fight and both of us live to tell the tale." He throws the car into reverse and lets it drift back. She pays closer attention than usual. As she was eighteen the only requirements to get her license was some dumb two week long class and the driver's test. "I say this demands breakfast."

She sighs but there is no reason to argue. She was hungry and he was paying and there were no grocery stores waiting for her or even a hospital to go back to tonight. So why the hell not.

He takes her to a diner, one that she'd been to a time or two with her friends when some of them were a little bit drunk and the rest of them a lot. Their coffee was terrible but the amount of grease in everything was borderline disgusting, making it perfect. She doesn't hold back, ordering eggs and bacon and hash browns and pancakes and a side of seasonal fruit because after all the bullshit of the last few days, he totally owed her seasonal fruit.

Wick drinks coffee and she drinks hot chocolate, feeling a little bit like a child for ordering it but regrets nothing of the rich liquid and mound of whipped cream when they place it in front of her.

Things aren't exactly the same, there's a heaviness between them and bite to her words and a twinge in her chest. But Wick wipes cream off her nose and steals cantaloupe out of her fruit bowl and she tells him about her conversation with Clarke and sometimes his hand rests on hers and her foot kicks his under the table. Somewhere along the way it transitions back to easy and she forgets the pain long enough to revel in the peace.

February is drawing to a close before either of them even know what's happening. Snow is replaced by rain and Clarke starts yammering on about spring break even though it's still weeks away. Raven makes a point to try and be someone outside of a caregiver over the course of those weeks.

She goes to Octavia's on a weekend before her shift at the hospital and they take turns helping the other study. ("Okay, spark arrestor? That just sounds made up.") Someone decides that they should go bowling and they invite her along. She says yes to their surprise and lets Bellamy pick her up from the grocery store and uses ten dollars from her most recent check to just wear stupid shoes and throw something heavy along a polished floor. She beats everyone and doesn't regret her decision at all.

Wick is there, he's always there. He teaches her how to parallel park and they go to an art gallery that opened the next town over and pretend like they know what they're looking at. She steals his phone and texts Clarke about the open spaces and the search for local talent. Sometimes he buys her food and she doesn't fight him on it as much.

There are the things that stay the same of course. Her mother starts some sort of a relationship with her cocaine dealer and he's there too much and he takes up space they don't have and eats the food that's made for her. Raven works extra hours to stay out of the house and puts the extra cash toward the debt and the bills that were constantly threatening to bury them under. Her leg hurts every night and she tries to massage it like Wick does though it isn't quite the same. She falls asleep to the sounds of laughter that isn't quite right and shouts that aren't quite safe and a stomach that isn't quite full.

When she starts losing sleep because of it Jasper notices first. He tells her that her eyes are too dark and her wit too dull. Wick notices next and he brings her back to his place some days, offering his bed or his couch or whatever so she could sleep in peace. He asks if things are okay and she says they're no different than they always were.

One day when it's too cold again and her body hurts all over Wick picks her up from the grocery store and they drive around. She slumps against the seats and doesn't question him as he disappears down backroads and creeps along trying to avoid deer. His harsh words two weeks before are forgotten and she's reminded why he's her friend. She tries not to think about the kiss, which means she was always thinking about the kiss. Part of her wants more. Most of her knows that's not really an option.

"So," he says, one hand on the steering wheel and the other trying to find the right balance between hot and cold air. "Things are good, right?"

It's not like Raven thinks he's stupid. She knows he's not. "Things are fine," she answers, trying to sound bored as she looks out into the woods. She thinks about bowling and food and friends and she realises that even though they aren't totally fine (because she also thinks about drugs and fists and strangers) the good is a kind of contrast that she'd forgotten could exist.

"But if they weren't," he looks at her so she watches the road for him. "You'd tell me?"

"Wick," it's a sigh of exasperation and a little bit of exhaustion. "Things are the same they've always been. It is what it is."

For a few minutes he doesn't say anything else and they end up on a road that is a little more civilized but equally narrow and unfamiliar. "And is that what it's always going to be?" he asks her and Raven wonders if he'd been planning to take this conversation there or if it had just happened. "Are you really going to spend the rest of your life taking care of someone who-"

"Stop," she cuts him off. He asks as if she hadn't already thought this through a million times. He asks like she doesn't know that there was no visible end point. "Look, I'm learning to drive and I might have a real job within the year and yeah, things kind of suck the way they are but I can't just…she's my mom."

Maybe he already knew what she was going to say. "That doesn't mean you're responsible for her mistakes."

She wonders why he always talks about stuff like this in the car and it seems pretty simple that the answer is the fact she can't escape. "Someone has to try and keep her alive, Wick." It was bad enough that she was away like she was. It was awful enough that she didn't do anything to stop the ugly fighting at night. It was horrible enough that she handed over money to support a habit that was slowly killing her mother anyway. The fact of the matter was, either she gave the money then for her mother to use or people came knocking on their door. Asking, expecting, and very angry.

There's no doubt in her mind that he has a hundred things to say back to that but instead he just sighs and pulls something out of his pocket. "Fine," he says and holds his hand out to her. "I'll drop it if you take this."

It's a cell phone. Small and black and hardly anything fancy, but it's a phone. "You know I can't-"

"A month ago there was a robbery in your neighbourhood and I almost killed myself to check on you. Two weeks ago you took off in the dead of night and I had no idea if you were alive or not. And now there's something going on and you have no way to get help aside from walking out and finding someone. So take the damn phone and let me sleep at night, alright?"

She takes the damn phone.

It's only two days later when Wick apparently decides that he can just throw about all sorts of ideas. He has an armload of loose papers and highlighters and he drops everything onto her desk at work with a flourish. She looks up at him with some mild hatred, he just buried all of her admission orders after all. "What the hell is this?" she asks, expecting some grand plan for the rocket which, don't tell Wick, she already knew just fine how to get working by now but she'd been hunting high and low for the part she needed.

"Colleges," he says, shoving the stack a little bit closer to her and moving to sit down. She despised the grin on his face. "Top pile is NASA stuff. Aerospace engineer looks pretty promising if you ask me," he says it with a waggle of his eyebrows and a pointed look. Damn engineers. "But then there's some more low key stuff as well. Their requirements aren't that crazy and none of the colleges are super near here but commute to some of them might not be too bad and-"

"Stop talking," she instructs, holding up a hand and staring blankly down at everything in front of her. There was a lot. "How long have you been doing this?"

"A while," he admits and Raven doesn't push further for information on that. She might not even want to know if she was being honest with herself. "And I know you probably have a million reasons why you can't or shouldn't or whatever, but come on, Raven."

She shakes her head and tries to ignore the way what he's saying is affecting her. "You don't get it," is all there really is to say. If he got it he wouldn't bring up things like leaving her mom or going to college or having a life of her own. "There's no way I could pay for this to start."

"Student loans," he suggest like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

With a roll of her eyes, because really how could he think she hasn't considered that already, she shakes her head. "They want information on your parents for those. Annual income, tax information, other things that could get her in a hell of a lot of trouble." Why did he think she didn't have food stamps or welfare or fucking health insurance? There was no way to get it without calling to attention the fact that her mom owed money and they had none to give. "Not to mention where the hell would I find the time? Or the car to get back and forth from wherever you think I should go?"

"We could figure it out. Maybe you could take my truck on days you have class and if you rearranged your hours to work more weekends or-"

"Just stop," she says, lifting the stack of papers he'd slammed down to find what she needed. "I know maybe the future might seem bright and endless and filled with all sorts of magic to you, Wick, but I'm still living in reality." With a bit of exaggerated effort she pushes everything back towards him and clicks through the screens on her computer to admit a patient. "A job in a garage and more than twenty dollars to my name is the best I can hope for."

Her words might be hopeless and intended to make him feel like shit, but Wick doesn't even seem deterred. "There are places that can help your mom."

She wants to be mad and say that she does help her but she knows what he means. She knows that her help is a mere bandage on a severing limb. "They're expensive and all she has to do is turn around and walk out the door after I drop her off."

"If she doesn't have anyone to fall back on she might stay."

It would be easier to be mad at him if Raven didn't know how desperately he was trying to make things better in a world where she had already struggled to get her best. "I'm all she has, Wick. And I'm not going to leave her."

He doesn't point out that at one point Raven had only had her mother. He doesn't remind her that her mother had left Raven on her own anyway. Instead he sits with her for another hour, not saying a word.