September

11pm. Clarke opened her laptop. She had twelve hours to write a ten page research paper.

This should be fun.

She couldn't concentrate. Maybe that's why she was resorting to drastic, weird measures like sitting on the folding table of her floor's laundry room. Cross legged. In her sweats. Pen in between her teeth. The harsh fluorescence of the lights made everything look harsh and ugly and her eyes burned. Which was the point. No comfort. No distractions. It was just her and Karl Marx and a black space marker blinking against a blank page. What a threesome.

College was off to a great start.

By one in the morning she had exactly two and a quarter pages which was practically a sign from God to take a break to the common room for coffee. She padded back down the hall in her socks, grimacing when the the hot liquid met her tongue. It tasted like sugar and styrofoam and bitterness.

When she got back to her practically radioactively bright lair that was the laundry room, she was startled to find someone there. As if the space belonged to only her. She knew it didn't, but his presence was all at once invasive and irritating.

"Great," she mumbled.

"Bothering you, am I?" He didn't look up, but a deep and rough voice pricked at her ears as he shoveled crumpled up clothes into the washing machine.

"Who does laundry at 1am on a Tuesday?" Her bored derision slipped out of her before she could think better of herself, so she rolled with it.

The guy turned his head, all dark curls in his eyes and a smirk in his cheekbones. "Who uses a laundry room as a library?"

Clarke cocked an eyebrow and hopped back up onto her counter, folding up her legs and shoving an open textbook out of the way and behind her. She waited for him to finish loading his clothes, choose a setting, wait for the water and add his detergent so she could get a move on with her paper. She figured the rhythmic mechanical thrumming of the machine wouldn't be so bad. It might even be soothing.

But he didn't leave.

Instead, he took a seat on the one lone, out of place chair, all hard plastic and orange, and began to balance it on its two hind legs. After several seconds it'd tip forward and the metal legs would snap against the tile floor. And then he'd do it all over again.

Clarke had written exactly zero words in the last five minutes. She felt a huff rise in her chest. "Really?"

He threw her a sidelong glance as he patted his jacket, riddled with pockets, distractedly looking for something within them.

"You're just gonna wait here? Not leave and come back?" Clarke's irritation was growing. At her stranger's nagging presence. At the way his dark features and dark hair and dark clothes contrasted so strongly with the brightness of the rest of the room. At how the fluorescent lighting didn't make him look harsh or ugly.

"I wasn't aware there was only one way to do laundry," he said and pulled out a small pocket sized book and leafed through the pages until he found where he'd left off. And then he was quiet.

Well, she was officially dismal at making new friends.

At two fifteen in the morning she had only three pages, he got up briefly to switch his clothes into the dryer, and she proceeded to knock her head into the heavily coated paint of the brick wall.

"You should look at Britain."

"Excuse me?" Clarke peeled her forehead and any hopes she had at getting a decent grade on this paper up off the wall and glanced over to him. He didn't look up.

"Marx wrote his manifesto for them, not for Russia. So why didn't the revolution happen there? Look into what was going on with Britain. Then you've got a thesis. Instead of a book report."

Clarke gaped at him. Bastard had snooped around her things while she was getting coffee. But bastard sounded like he knew what he was talking about. With a flurry of movement she shuffled around to find her book on British history.

"And?" she said expectantly, flipping through pages without knowing where to land.

"Reform. They reformed," he said gruffly and then didn't say anything else for the rest of the time his laundry tumbled.

When the timer buzzed and his clothes, fresh and hot, piled into his basket, Clarke was on a roll. Her pen was back in her mouth, her brows furrowed in deep concentration. Her fingers couldn't type fast enough for all of the realizations and connections she was making with history.

"Just think. All that lost time criticizing my laundry technique. You'd be done by now," he said and she caught a slight twinkle in his eye as the corners of his mouth hitched up.

And he was gone.

xxx

Clarke had been at college for three weeks now and she had exactly one friend. And she hadn't even made that friend at college, so it was technically cheating. And maybe getting her Russia and Contemporary Euro thesis from the laundry room mystery man was cheating too, but she had gotten an A- on that and so be it.

"Hey! Are you studying to be the next Rhodes Scholar? Get out there," Raven's voice was clear and insistent even when traveling through her headphones. She smacked Clarke on the leg with a rolled up E&S magazine.

Clarke ripped out her headphones. "Go where?"

"The hallway, the common room, the convenient store. Just out." Raven was manhandling her up out of her bed now and yanking her to her feet.

"But it's a weeknight," Clarke protested weakly.

"You really have no idea how college works yet, do you?" Raven's voice softened slightly and her eyes were wide with pity and understanding. Clarke almost breathed a sigh of relief, but then she was being pushed back and whirled around, her bearings lost on her temporarily until she came to a stop outside of her dorm room door, which she heard latch and click with a resounding lock.

Clarke pounded on the door. "Raven!"

"Nope. You can't come back in. Go! Be Free!"

Clarke slumped against the drywall opposite their door. She knew better than to think she could get Raven to open the door again until she all but brought back the entire floor to prove she had met people. She couldn't even leave the floor, Raven had her keycard. And she couldn't even text Wells for a few hours, Raven had her phone.

Raven was a sophomore. She knew how this whole first month of college thing went, but she also wasn't very sympathetic to Clarke's fears. It was one of the things Clarke loved about her. Raven was fearless, and some would say she had too much gall. But for some reason Clarke had never been put off by it, or afraid of it, even when Raven came home for winter break to find her boyfriend dating Clarke. They'd had it out and somehow made it to the other side as friends, with nary a Finn to be found.

Clarke began to pad her way, clad just in her sweats, t-shirt and socks, towards her floor's common room. The bottom of her socks were scratchy against the rough commercial carpeting, the kind that's made up of blues and purples and knotted into tight little balls. She'd met a few people already and they were nice enough. It wasn't really that she was scared. It was just that she was too painfully aware that she didn't always give off the best first impression. Take laundry room mystery man. She knew could be…prickly. She also knew she could be seen as superior, and boy was she good at acting like she was too. She'd been the student council type in high school.

She entered the common room and made a beeline for the kitchenette. Their RA kept the cabinet stocked with communal coffee and she desperately needed to find a reason to be walking in there. She practically cringed as it brewed, thinking about the bitter, plastic taste of it. It was fucking cheap coffee.

She peaked around and took in the guys playing GTA5 on the couch, a few girls sitting around with their laptops or textbooks. She recognized some of them. Jasper and Monty and Miller and Harper and Monroe.

"Hey Clarke," Monty called out and she nearly knocked over her coffee.

"Uh, hey." She hoped she sounded friendly.

"Whatchya doing out here?" he asked.

She hoisted herself onto the table no one used properly and crossed her legs. "Oh, you know. I uh, got locked out of my room." She tried to wave it off like it was nothing. Casual. Super nonchalant. It was half true after all.

"Oh damn. That happened to me last week," Jasper said, not looking away from the screen. His player was getting out of his car with a bat so he could beat the guy who made him crash straight into a fire hydrant.

"Cops are coming, dude. You better run, stop beating the old man," Miller urged.

"Okay, okay!" Jasper cried and stole an old woman's station wagon. "Anyway yeah it's a bitch to get in if your roommate's nowhere to be found."

"I said I was sorry," Monty whined.

Clarke smiled into her horrible coffee.

"You've gotta go to the RD. And he is not pleasant," Jasper said.

"Hot though," Harper piped up from behind her laptop.

"Who's hot?" a voice, rich, pleasantly deep, with a confrontational edge bellowed into the room. Clarke recognized it as belonging to Octavia. Octavia was already practically the floor's prom queen.

She had made a big show at orientation and obviously relished being not only the center of attention but the center of everyone's universe. But she wasn't like any of the popular girls Clarke knew, who donned Uggs and North Faces and Marc Jacobs bags with their school uniform and talked about you behind your back. She was the kind of girl who wore ripped jeans tucked into combat boots and a checkered flannel over a lace tank top, thick brown hair piled high on top of her head. Her entire energy was as if she could be chasing butterflies barefoot in the woods one moment and then turn around and be ready to bare knuckle brawl someone the next.

"The RD," Harper answered.

Octavia's nose crinkled. "Ew. Whatever. Are we drinking tonight or what?"

Her question was met with various cheering and hollering from the boys as they quit their game and jumped up from their seats. Harper snapped her laptop closed.

"Hey," Octavia threw a nod across the room towards Clarke.

"Clarke," she helped her out.

"Yeah, Clarke. You comin'?" Octavia asked.

"Where?"

"Thirsty Thursday."

"Oh, uh," Clarke raised her coffee cup to signal her current drink of choice (a lie). "I'm good."

Octavia shrugged. "Suit yourself."

"I will," Clarke shot back. Octavia raised a sharp eyebrow before turning on her heel.

Monroe hung back with Clarke, and when the room emptied it was freakishly quiet and suddenly appeared dank and grungy when moments before she had felt at home for the first time since moving in.

"The RD's room is two floors up at the end of the hall, by the way. He's really not that bad."

xxx

When Raven was actually not there, because Clarke was pretty sure she wouldn't have been able to withstand the relentless pounding-Raven definitely did not have that much patience-Clarke found herself taking the elevator up to the fifth floor. Contrary to popular belief, she thought getting her homework done was actually important.

She knocked on the door and whatever she'd been expecting she definitely hadn't been expecting Mr. Laundry Room Mystery Man himself.

In the flesh. All bright blue henley and messy hair and freckles and sleepy eyes.

Clarke gaped at him for a moment too long so the silence hung in the air and grew weird and tense. "Hi," she finally said, surprised, slightly mockingly.

"Hi," he mimicked back.

Boy, he was surly. And she really didn't like the way his voice sounded like gravel scraping against his throat, apparently all the time and not just in the middle of night in well lit laundry rooms. She absolutely didn't like it, or the way his square set jaw and the shadow his cheekbones cast made his annoyed stance send sharp spikes of electrons or neurons or whatever they were right through her to her fingertips. She had never been great at chemistry.

"You're the RD?" She couldn't help the terrible part of herself, like a nagging feeling in her chest, that made her want to annoy him all the time so he would never stop looking the way he did.

"Who's asking?"

"You're terrible at this," she said and crossed her arms.

A muscle in his jaw jumped when he pursed his lips and crossed his arms too. Was he making fun of her? Clarke wanted to push those buttons all the way up to the top floor, wherever that might lead.

"You went to your RA first?" he asked.

Clarke faltered, her defiance slipping. "No."

He sighed. "You're terrible at this," he said and disappeared somewhere behind the door to grab a ring of clanging keys nearly the size of a hula hoop.

xxx

Clarke missed sleep. She missed her bed and lights that didn't hum in her brain and burn her eyes. Yes, she was back in the laundry room again. Every Wednesday she had some sort of writing assignment due for her Russia and Contemporary Euro class and every Tuesday she'd yet to start before ten at night. This was her life now. She had accepted the awful pattern. Her mother would be so proud of her time management skills.

And then he walked in, like clockwork.

She met his eyes for a nanosecond before darting them back to her computer screen. That was all the acknowledgment she allowed. Clarke's spine grew rigid and her muscles tensed. She felt too self aware, cognizant of every breath that was too loud and every movement she made on top of her counter when her foot fell asleep and she had to readjust. She couldn't drown out every tumble of the washing machine or every smack of his chair legs on the floor. She ducked her head further down, practically face to face with her computer screen.

But she couldn't help but look up when she heard a popping sound, like a latch, and felt a cool rush of air into the room. He'd opened the window, one of those safety windows that opened from the top and tilted inward, and was in the process of lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke out of the small opening.

Clarke snapped one of her useless books shut. "Seriously?"

"What are you gonna do, tell your RA?" He was regarding her out of the corners of his eyes, his profile towards her as he kept his right side facing the window, forearm resting along the top and the cigarette dangling casually from between two fingers. Wisps of smoke met the open air and twirled into the night.

"Funny."

"I take it you don't want one?" The corners of his mouth ticked up before taking a drag. His cheekbones grew sharper when he did.

"How generous," Clarke said flatly. "But no."

"You're awfully hung up on rules, aren't you?"

"You're awfully not for being the one who's supposed to enforce them," she said, confrontation in her voice.

"Someone has a problem with authority," he said, amusement in his.

They were getting nowhere, and Clarke was absolutely getting nowhere with her paper, though she was secretly thankful for the coarse of liquid hot anger that shot through her veins whenever he spoke. She much preferred it to his silence, which made her feel self-conscious and awkward.

Still, anticipating the pattern falling to place in front of her, she pulled her mouth into a tight-lipped smile and put on her negotiating voice.

"Look, I have a paper due for this class every week. And as I'm sure you've gathered, I'm new at this. This routine's been working out for me."

He narrowed his eyes at her, brow furrowing at her change in tone. His chair legs clicked and he tossed his cigarette outside. "You asking me to change my laundry night on account of you?" he asked with a small scoff.

Clarke was determined not to break like she did during the key fiasco. She stared him down, stony and expectant.

He shook his head. "As much as I'd love to work my schedule around yours," he said sarcastically. "I can't. Only night of the week I don't work nights."

Clarke sighed and rubbed her eyes with her palms. "Fine," she conceded and hoisted her laptop back onto her lap.

"Well, seems we're at an impasse."

"Seems so," she said, clipped.

"All right," he said and stood up. "Since neither of us is willing to pack up our territorial Tuesday night flags and go home, might as well get to know the enemy, right?"

"Excuse me?"

"I'm asking you your name."

"Didn't seem like it." She didn't look up.

He was hovering, suddenly very near. Near enough to be looking down at her by a few inches. He cast a shadow over her legs and if it weren't so cliche she might have shivered. He sighed, one of those exasperated sighs that come out through the nose like an angry bull.

She smiled under the cover of her hair cascading in front of her face before looking up.

"It's Clarke."

"Well, Clarke. It looks like we're stuck with each other. I'm Bellamy."

October

On a Tuesday in October, Clarke turned eighteen. All alone.

Raven was in a six hour lab that if she would fail if she ever skipped and she had left behind a box of cupcakes, balloons, and a stuffed gorilla, Clarke's favorite. Still, she felt the deep pit of emptiness carve itself out in her stomach and with a resigned sigh she began to pack up her things and make her way to the laundry room.

Her door burst open. It was customary to leave your door unlocked if you were somewhere on the floor in the spirit of communal college living and all that. Sometimes she felt like they were all just living in tents and the common room was the central bonfire or watering hole or whatever.

"I can't believe you didn't tell me it was your birthday. Jesus, Clarke."

It was Octavia.

"It's not a big deal," Clarke said dismissively. She had grown to develop an affinity for Octavia after more nights in the common room. She liked her from a distance. Like how Octavia would only ever sit on the couch by hurling her leg over the back and stepping on the cushions. Or how she'd snatch Jasper's pizza right out of his hands and take a bite, but she'd also sit contentedly for hours braiding the other girls' hair in intricate ways and sometimes drew butterflies on her arm.

But Clarke was absolutely not in a place with Octavia where she'd barge into her dorm room and yell at her about birthdays. In truth, she had no idea how to appropriately handle most situations like this.

"Are you kidding? What planet were you born on, of course it's a big deal," Octavia said and plopped down unceremoniously on Clarke's bed. She started flipping through one of Raven's S&E magazines that had ended up there. "So what's the plan?"

"No plan. Just the usual," Clarke said, hugging her laptop to her chest and itching to hide away in the laundry room.

Octavia popped up as fast as she had plopped down. "Uh-uh. Come on, we're going out," she said and manhandled Clarke's laptop from her hands and promptly replaced it with her own hands, dragging Clarke like a petulant child out the door. "You can raid my closet. I seriously doubt you have anything to wear."

So that was how Clarke ended up at a bar on her eighteenth birthday with Octavia Blake and most of the third floor, wearing a skin tight black dress with pointy metal studs along the collar and down one arm and a "Birthday Girl" tiara on her head. She didn't have a fake ID but Octavia insisted it wouldn't matter since she was with her. Sure enough, she knew the bouncer.

"Making a show of it at the bar on your brother's night off? You lookin' for trouble, Octavia?"

"You know it," she said and ruffled the guy's hair before stalking inside, hand still wrapped tightly around Clarke's.

It turned out Octavia was a pretty fantastic friend. Clarke had expected her to use her birthday as an excuse to party and revolve herself around it in every way possible, but Octavia was entirely focused on Clarke. She hopped up onto the pipe that ran below the bar so she could lean half of her body over it and demand drinks, which she paid for. She made sure everyone who hadn't met Clarke met Clarke. She reached down into Clarke's shell and yanked her out of it, cheering as she drank another birthday cake shot and twirling her around on the dance floor so she'd feel less self-conscious.

When they walked back to campus Clarke's cheeks were warm and her toes were cold. She felt like buzzing. Her ears were still ringing and everything sounded muffled in the absence of the loud music that had poured into her body for the past several hours.

Soon, what felt like floating came back down and the fresh air and the quiet walk home brought back the empty pit that had been there earlier. She looked around. Octavia had her arms around Atom's waist, his jacket hanging around her like a costume. Jasper was trying to point out the constellations in the sky to impress some other girl in the absence of Octavia's attention on him. Clarke wrapped her arms around themselves, suddenly cold.

By the time they were in the elevator, her world was spinning. Literally. But as Clarke Griffin was wont to do, she couldn't stomach admitting she was drunk, let alone admitting she was wasted. She hugged a sleepy Octavia weakly and urged everyone to get going, she'd be fine. And thank you so much. Best birthday ever. Really.

And it was. Which was why she couldn't understand why she felt like crying.

Clarke lived to the left of the elevator at the end of the hall, where most of the sophomores were nestled. Most of her new friends lived on the other end, so she found herself setting on her long journey towards her bed all alone. She thought she was moving in a straight line when the floor suddenly pitched up and to the side and she knocked straight into the wall. Soon she was on a ship and it was rocking violently in stormy waters and she had to sit down. Right. Now.

xxx

"Clarke?"

She opened her eyes. They were heavy, like velvet curtains. She winced at the light they let in.

"What are you doing in here?" It was Bellamy, crouching over her, looking more concerned than annoyed. Why? She looked around.

She was in the laundry room. Sitting on the floor. In Octavia's dress. Wearing a plastic tiara.

She pushed herself up so she was sitting up straight, back against a running machine. It was warm and bumpy and comforting. Her eyes began to settle and lose some of their glaze. She knew this because she could see the freckles splashed across his nose.

Clarke sighed a loud, affected sigh and pointed bemusedly to her tiara. "I'm apparently an adult now."

Bellamy dipped his head but she caught his smile anyway. "Partied like one too."

"Mmhm," she hummed through her lips.

"Then why so sad, Princess?"

Her brow furrowed at the name and he nodded to her tiara.

"You don't know me very well, so take me at my word when I say I'm a realist, okay?"

"Okay," he said soberly.

"Super pragmatic."

"Sure."

"But I couldn't help but hope for some fucking magic on my eighteenth birthday. Like…someone surprise me. Point me out constellations or throw your stupid jacket over my shoulders or kiss me just because it's my birthday and everybody's seen all of the John Hughes movies. They should know by now." She was rambling and the words were rounder and blended together in her mouth but they were real, dammit, and she hated herself for them.

"Look," he shifted his weight onto his other foot and rested an elbow on a knee as if about to impart some adult wisdom. "Bright side is you probably won't remember feeling this shitty in the morning. Because you'll feel it all in your head. Now come on, let's get you back to your room."

She grimaced and shook her head emphatically. "No. You're wrong and you know why?" Her insistence stopped him in his tracks. He leaned back. "I'm abrasive," she said after a moment, matter of fact.

He looked at her intently. "You are."

"I'm bossy."

"True," he agreed.

"And stubborn."

"Really no argument here. You're a pain in the ass."

"Exactly!" she exclaimed, like they had just agreed on some unpopular opinion, like marshmallow fluff being disgusting. "And God, I'm so blonde when…" She reached out and wrapped one of his messy brown curls around her forefinger. "Everyone around me is so…so…" Clarke lost her train of thought, equally entranced by the moment and horrified at her stupid, stupid impulsivity.

She tore her gaze away from his hair and immediately regretted it because his face had fallen and his lips were parted and she hated that even when horribly drunk she could still feel shame. All of her awareness rushed back into her body and she opened her mouth to say something, anything. But she didn't because he stopped her with a kiss.

His lips on hers, chastely at first, but searching and probing once she relaxed and her lips turned pliant, like clay, under his. Soft and delicate. Slow and sweet. But not sweet like cotton candy. Sweet like chocolate cake. Decadent.

When he pulled away, his fingertips lingered against her jaw and she opened her eyes, slow like a velvet curtain, and she didn't want to get up just yet.

"Happy birthday," he whispered.

xxx

When she settled into her place in the laundry room the next Tuesday she didn't even have a paper to write. But he never showed.