a/n So here's another fake dating high school AU, because the world always needs more of those. I think this started off as a prompt I saw on reddit, but I'm no longer entirely sure. It struck me as a perfect opportunity to channel a bit of early season one Bellarke, when Clarke is naive and not exactly well-liked by most of her peers, and Bellamy hasn't worked out who he wants to be yet. Happy reading!

Clarke Griffin could not remember a time when she did not hate Bellamy Blake.

OK. Maybe that was an exaggeration.

Clarke Griffin could barely remember a time when she did not hate Bellamy Blake.

There, that was better.

The fact was, she had hated him since she was seven years old and he had stolen her lunch. It was a particularly traumatic experience, partly because it was really the first bad thing to happen in her comfortable young life, and partly because it had been a really good lunch. Like, a top quality really good lunch. There had been a chicken salad sandwich and a peach and a chocolate cake with a little chocolate flake on the top. And she was destined never to eat any of those items, but to watch, heartbroken, as he placed them almost reverently in the bin, one piece at a time, whilst crowing at the top of his voice that she deserved this for being such a rich stuck up little princess.

She started crying at the chicken salad sandwich and didn't stop for about four hours. When it came to home time, she was still weeping, and her father was beyond puzzled as she stood by the school gates and managed to explain between her sobs that she intended to exact some particularly hurtful revenge on this boy. Her father, God rest his soul, was never the particularly pro-revenge type and had tried to talk her out of this plan of action, but on this rare occasion she did not heed his advice. Her mind was made up. Bellamy Blake would suffer. He would suffer painfully, and over a long period of time, and on a substantial scale.

One did not simply take Clarke Griffin's lunch and get away with it.

…...

By the time Clarke looked back at that fateful day almost a decade later she had to admit that, in fact, it was beginning to appear that their might be a decent chance that one could simply take her lunch and get away with it. She was no closer to avenging herself for the great lunch theft of '07 than she had been ten years ago, and Bellamy Blake's all-confident smirk was adhering as firmly to his face as ever. The adhesive properties of his loyal followers, too, seemed just as strong as they had been all those years ago; the crowd had changed a little, as faces came and went, but that blatantly transparently fake crowd-swaying rhetoric that he'd been demonstrating practically since he stepped out of the cradle was still alive and kicking, and thus his posse continued to grow like some kind of gross dragon gorging itself on the corpses of medieval royalty. She was quite proud of that metaphor, all things considered. It suited him, she thought, for all that it wasn't strictly relevant. It was at least a nice nod to his infuriating obsession with referring to her as "Princess", as if being the daughter of a well-to-do engineer and a successful consultant surgeon in a small northern town where unemployment was rife was some kind of offence against her peers. No, he was the offence against their peers. And he would suffer for it.

Unfortunately, though, she was no closer to seeing exactly how he would suffer. She found herself very much in need of a plan, and expressed as much to Raven, the closest thing she had to a friend, as such, who was currently sitting next to her and creating a particularly uninspiring poster on the uses of Molybdenum.

"Will you stop going on about how much you want to screw Blake over and admit that you actually just want to screw him already?"

See above: closest thing she had to a friend.

"I do not want to screw him!" She protested automatically.

"Then there's something wrong with you. Everyone wants to screw him." Her friend declared, and she briefly found herself thinking that, actually, she might have been quite interested in the idea were it not for the whole mortal enemies thing. He was, even she had to concede, annoyingly attractive. She mentally shook herself and got back to the point at hand.

"Do you actually have any solutions to anything that do not involve screwing?" She allowed her exasperation to show through in her tone. This was the resolution of a grudge which had endured for almost a decade that they were discussing here, not some teenage sexual angst.

"Now you mention it..." Raven began.

"What?"

"It is a pretty good solution. Start screwing him – or dating him, if you're about to get all prissy on me – and then break it off, in some dramatic and humiliating style. In front of the whole school, preferably. Or at least many many people."

She considered it with more seriousness than might have been expected. On the one hand, it had the obvious downside that getting him to screw her or date her or even voluntarily be in the same room as her would be such a challenge as to render the whole scheme almost impossible. Add to that the fact that she didn't really want to spend time with her arch nemesis, even if it was all in the name of exacting her long-awaited revenge.

But somehow, somewhere along the line, her mind had got stuck on an image of Bellamy Blake in the middle of a crowded dining hall with that insufferable smirk wiped clean off his face by her administration of the most thorough dumping in the history of the school. She thought the dining hall would be best – lots of people, but also a nice poetic reference to the stolen lunch that had set this train of events in motion.

And anyway, really, what did she have to lose? She'd been at this for a while now with no progress at all.

It wasn't like she had a better idea.

…...

So it came to pass that she found herself at a party. She wasn't entirely clear on who was hosting the party – she and Raven had shown up with Monty and Jasper, good sorts she shared a lot of classes with, who were socially awkward enough to be on speaking terms with her but socially competent enough to score invitations to parties – but she was assured that this didn't matter. Party protocol apparently stated that knowing who was hosting was unnecessary at best. It seemed that she just needed to drink some beer out of one of these red cups and mingle a bit, exchanging brief and repetitive conversation with strangers. If she did this regularly and successfully over the coming months, the idea was that an opportunity would present itself to get with Bellamy. The plan got a little hazy after that – it wasn't clear how she was supposed to go from ending up in bed with him (easy – he was something of a player) to ending up in a medium-term dumpable relationship (difficult – he didn't really do those very often).

She couldn't help but wonder what her mother would make of all this. She'd been surprised enough to hear that Clarke had been invited to a friend's to stay over, so she was pretty sure the truth would have sent her into a dangerous state of shock. She'd probably also have provided a helpful lecture about how partying was unlikely to get her into a university medical course, and she should stick to chess as a hobby.

To be fair, she did really love chess.

Raven appeared to be more skilled at this partying lark than her, having already taken one of the red cups of beer and started a heated discussion with a sandy-haired bloke who seemed to be rather misguided in his choice of facial hair. Ah well, she shrugged mentally. There was no accounting for taste. On the other side of the room, Jasper and Monty were already dancing in a sort of chaotic fashion which seemed to involve a lot of bobbing around and didn't much resemble anything she remembered from the ballet lessons she took as a child. She supposed she ought to start by walking towards the beer. That seemed like a simple first step.

She had made it through the crowd and was in the process of snagging a cup when an incredulous voice behind her made her jolt and spill some of her drink.

"Clarke? Clarke Griffin?" Success: being noticed by Bellamy had been achieved.

"Hey, Bellamy." She tried for a winning smile, but the expression felt unnatural on her face.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Well, that was unflattering.

"Just enjoying the party."

"Since when do you just enjoy a party?"

"I just thought that it was time to change things up, have a little fun, you know?" She tried to do that thing that she'd sometimes seen girls do with their eyelashes to make them look fun and sexy and coy and things, but she wasn't sure she was pulling it off. Bellamy was certainly gaping at her, but she didn't think she could be sure he was staring in a good way.

"What do you know? Her highness can actually party." She didn't really have a response to that, so she stuck with smiling up at him in a way that she hoped conveyed that she was available for future intimacy with him. To her surprise, she must have been reasonably successful, because as he walked past, to grab a beer and continue on his way, he bent to whisper three little words in her ear: "I like it."

She thought that would probably be it for the evening in terms of Operation: Lunch Revenge, so she decided to make the most of the opportunity to learn more about how to party successfully. It turned out it was easier than she'd feared; a couple of beers was a helpful start, and by the time she'd spent the better part of the night dancing with Jasper and Monty she had to admit she was having a pretty good time.

Perhaps she'd be spending less time playing chess in future.

She wasn't sure what she made of all the funny looks she was getting. She supposed the hostile ones were not exactly a surprise. Bellamy's crowd really didn't like her much – or at all, if she was being honest - and apart from anything else it was at least unusual to see her at any kind of social event. She was caught by surprise, however, by the number of people openly checking her out in this dress Raven had talked her into wearing. She had been worried it wouldn't be suitable, having been bought by her mother for some cocktail party last year, but apparently a little black dress was appropriate for any occasion.

She left the dance floor to grab another drink, swaying her hips to the music as she went. Hip swaying seemed to be the kind of thing a young woman dancing and attempting to be a viable future hookup at a party should practise.

"Having fun yet, Princess?" Well, clearly she had not seen the last of Bellamy Blake for the evening. Why had he felt the need to check up on her? What was she supposed to say now?

"Of course. I'm very good at fun." That did not sound smooth. She needed to practise more before she next came to one of these things.

"I bet you are." What did that mean? She thought she was probably missing something, but it didn't seem to matter as he was preoccupied with raking his eyes over her body and making her feel distinctly uncomfortable.

She wasn't sure she was going to be able to go through with all this. She already felt woefully out of her depth. She'd been introduced to the basics of sexual relationships, between a one night stand with a boy who had turned out to be dating Raven, and a heady couple of weeks with a seriously hot girl from that summer camp her mother had sent her on to make friends, but this whole flirting thing was rather beyond her.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" She hoped that sounded mysterious, and did the smiling thing again for good measure. That seemed to have worked well for her earlier. And it seemed to be working again now, because now he was smiling at her and she was pretty sure that had never happened before.

"Were you going to fetch another drink?" He asked. "Can I come with you to get one?" He took her elbow and guided her towards the table where the beer in the red cups was available, and she found herself feeling distinctly warm. And then he hung around for, like, another entire three minutes, doing that thing where they exchanged meaningless sentences about fun that she didn't really understand, and she kept doing the smiling thing, and he kept doing a staring-at-her-boobs-thing which seemed to be new, and all in all she couldn't help but feel that this could have gone worse.

Overall, she felt, reflecting on her experience as she lay on an airbed on the floor of Raven's bedroom that night, parties might be rather good fun after all.

…...

She was surprised, at school on Monday, to find that absolutely nothing had changed in their dynamic. She was disappointed, too, but obviously only for the sake of the plan. She hadn't enjoyed having a good-looking boy spend time with her on Friday for its own sake, no, not at all. She had merely enjoyed making progress towards her goal of sweet sweet revenge for the loss of that sweet sweet chocolate cake. So it was something of a setback, now, that he had reverted to jeering at her from the other side of the Chemistry lab.

"Aww, did you get the answer wrong, Princess? Even mummy's not going to be able to get you into med school at this rate."

She had to admit, that one had a good sting to it. She wanted to get into med school, dammit, and that was quite a difficult thing to do, and she wasn't going to get very far if she kept making careless errors with her mole calculations.

"Don't rise to it." Jasper hissed in her ear. "He's just confused because you were fun on Friday."

If this hostility stemmed from confusion, by the end of the day she was convinced that he must have been very confused. Before the final bell rang, she'd had a can of coke spilled down her front "by accident", found her Maths homework mysteriously missing from her locker, and been called "Princess" more times than in the entire previous week put together.

It looked like a very good supply of beer and little black dresses was going to be necessary if she was going to pull this off.

…...

He didn't let up the following day, or even the following week, and she took a certain measure of satisfaction from the thought that he didn't realise he was only galvanising further her resolve to achieve thorough and complete revenge.

"What is wrong with him?" She asked Raven at break the next Tuesday, while a certain dark-haired idiot entertained himself and his posse by flicking pellets of paper in her general direction. "He's not normally this bad, right? I'm not imagining that?"

"What is wrong with him, my dear, is that his arch nemesis or whatever the hell you two are rocked up to a party the other week looking smoking hot, and he had a fun time chatting with her, and now he's thoroughly confused."

"Jasper said that in Chemistry. Is that a thing?"

"Trust me. It's a thing."

"How do we use the thing to our advantage?"

"You show up to more parties looking smoking hot and being fun. On which note, we have plans on Friday."

"We do?"

"Yeah. Miller's hosting." That was good. She liked Miller – he was about the only one of Bellamy's crowd who wasn't an absolute arse to her. "Find something to wear."

a/n Thanks for reading!