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chasholidays · 7 years

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It IS too early, but I look forward to these from you every year so I'll just mumble to myself about where the summer has gone and isn't it June still... I would love a time stamp of East, West. Anything goes, but for a one word prompt: Spring.

Original fic here!

spring.

“Well, he really did it.”

Clarke looks up from her needlepoint and immediately stabs herself with the needle. She’s not good at sewing, and she doesn’t know why her mother is trying to change that.

“Who?”

“Marcus Kane really is bringing an orphan home for his father.” Her own father squints, eyes narrowing. “Two, maybe.”

“Orphans?��

Her father pats the chair next to him, and Clarke joins him. It’s early evening and not quite warm enough for them to be outside, but her father loves the new spring weather and she loves being with him.

“Mr. Kane is getting too old to handle the place by himself. I thought Marcus might come back to help him, but I heard he was going to the orphanage to get him a boy.”

Clarke makes a face. “A boy?”

“To help out with the work. It looked like there might have been a girl too. I wonder where she’s going.”

He doesn’t have to wonder for long. By the next morning, the whole town is wild with the story. Mr. Marcus Kane returned from the city, and instead of staying to help his father like he ought to, he went back to the mainland and came back with a pair of orphans. The boy is fourteen and his sister is nine, and the boy is from somewhere foreign, maybe, so gossip wonders what Mr. Marcus Kane was doing, bringing someone like that to the island.

At twelve, Clarke is stuck between the two siblings in age, which is irritating. If only the girl were fourteen, and the boy nine. The Kane farm borders theirs, and it would be nice to have a friend close by, nearer to her own age. But nine sounds very young, and the only boy she’s friends with is Wells, and she only sees him at Christmastime, when her mother takes her back to the city to visit her grandparents.

But of course she’s still curious. Most of the children on the island, she’s known for her entire life, and having new ones come in is novel. She doesn’t think they’ll be friends, but she does want to know what they’re like.

“We need to give them time to settle in,” her mother says, when she asks when they’ll go and call on them. “I’m sure it’s a big adjustment for Mr. Kane. He hasn’t had children around since Marcus was a boy, and he had his wife then.”

“You weren’t here then, how do you know?” Clarke asks, frowning.

“Because I talk to people. We’ll go next week.”

Clarke doesn’t exactly disobey her, but it’s not hard to walk home from school on the road past the Kane farm, and on the fourth day, the boy is out there, already hard at work.

She gets the chance to look at him before he sees her, and she’s not quite sure what to make of him. He’s not so very large, taller than she is without being tall, but he looks strong. His skin is darker than her father’s even in summer, and his hair is an inky black tangle on his head.

When he looks up, she can see freckles dotting his cheeks, and it’s only then that she realizes she’s been staring.

“Are you Mr. Kane’s orphan boy?” she asks.

“I’m Bellamy,” he says. “Who are you?”

“Clarke Griffin.”

He blinks a few times, squints at her. “You’re Clarke Griffin?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

He shrugs. “I thought you’d be a boy.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demands.

“It sounds like a boy’s name.”

“Well, it’s not.”

He inclines his head, accepting that. “Good to know. Was there anything else? I have work to do.”

It’s not much to develop a grudge over, but Clarke doesn’t have much trouble developing grudges. Just because she was disappointed he wasn’t a girl doesn’t mean he gets to be disappointed that she is. There are plenty of boys around. He’ll be fine. She’s the one who doesn’t have any girls living nearby, except for his unknown, nine-year-old sister.

“That’s all. Nice to meet you, Bellamy,” she adds, because she was raised to be polite.

“Nice to meet you too,” he says, and goes back to work.

So they aren’t going to be friends. It’s decided.

summer.

“So, you’re leaving.”

Clarke startles at the unexpected voice, but relaxes again as Bellamy sits down next to her. Of course he’s already heard; he was in town, he probably asked at the post office on his way back. And of course he knew where to find her, even out here in the woods. Bellamy probably knows her better than anyone, somehow. He knows all her favorite places to hide.

“Not right away,” she says. “But I did get into university.”

“Congratulations. I knew you would.”

“You would have to,” she points out. “If you’d tried.”

“I would have. But if I left, Mr. Kane would have to sell the farm.”

“Mr. Kane,” she repeats, and he cocks his head. “I don’t know. It’s been six years, I would have thought you’d call him something else by now.”

“He never told me to.” He wets his lips, looking over at her, nervous. Part of her feels as if there must be something inappropriate about this, about being alone in the woods with him, but it’s only because she’s become so aware of him, recently. Sometimes, she tells herself they aren’t even friends, not truly, but others, she thinks there’s no one in the world she trusts so much.

Sometimes, she’s sure if she was staying, he’d ask her to marry him. She knows that if he did, she’d say yes.

“I’m really happy for you,” he says. “The first girl on the island to go to university.”

“I almost can’t believe it. My mother’s saying she’s going to come with me.”

“Is she?”

She stretches her arms out, sighing. “I think she will. The island never suited her, if we’re being honest. She’s always happier when we leave for Christmas.”

“But your father will stay?”

“He loves it here.”

“I’ll check on him for you.”

She smiles. “I’m not leaving today, you know. Not until the fall.”

“I know.” He clears his throat. “Still, you’re going to be busy. You have a lot to get ready for.”

“I do.” She worries her lip. If she wasn’t going, she feels sure she’d marry him. Even now, if he asked her, she would say yes. But it doesn’t feel right, to bring it up herself. She’d be asking him to wait years for her, until she was done with her schooling, and that’s not fair to him. If he wanted that, he could ask her. “I’ll miss you,” she says instead.

He smiles, a little sad. “You’ll know where to find me.”

Her own expression mirrors his. “I suppose I will.”

fall.

Of course, she’d been expecting Bellamy’s engagement. Even before Gina Martin had entered the picture, she’d thought he’d marry someone, someday. He’s too good a prospect to stay unattached forever, and she wouldn’t have wanted that. He deserves a good life, a wife who loves him, a big family, everything he wants. If he can’t become a doctor or a teacher or a scholar, at least he can have the home he wants.

But she can’t help noticing that he tells her he’s engaged only after she told him that she’d be staying in school for a few more years, to become a nurse. It feels as if she’s being egotistical, to even think she’d have any influence on his plans, but–it’s not as if she couldn’t. Maybe, if she’d written him that she’d be coming back home once she was done with school, he wouldn’t have proposed.

She did think about it. She loves the island, but there’s so much more she wants to do, so many things she hasn’t done yet.

“Bellamy Blake is engaged,” she tells her mother, with a smile. It’s even a real one.

“Send him my congratulations,” says Abby. “Who is the bride to be?”

“No one we know. Gina Martin. She’s the new school teacher. He’d been mentioning her more, I’m not surprised he proposed to her.”

“Do you think you’ll have time to go back for the wedding?”

She looks back down at the letter, sees the words, accepted my less-than-inspired proposal, and makes herself smile. “No. I doubt I will.”

winter.

Clarke never reads her letters from Bellamy when she’s with Lexa, although she knows she could. Lexa knows about Bellamy, and almost certainly knows that Clarke had feelings for him. It’s not the sort of thing that bothers either of them, these days. Lexa has her own lost loves, the same as Clarke has. It’s foolish to pretend they don’t have separate pasts of their own. But reading Bellamy’s words with Lexa nearby always makes her feel strange and a little guilty. It’s not that she’s still in love with Bellamy, far from it. But he feels like one of the last vestiges of a life that doesn’t belong to her anymore, a life she can’t imagine Lexa in. Lexa is a city girl through and through; being out on the farm would make her miserable.

Octavia has never written her before, though, and it’s amazing how panicked it makes her, to see that Blake’s name as the sender, and not Bellamy’s.

“What’s wrong?” asks Lexa.

“I don’t know. It’s from Bellamy’s sister, we don’t usually correspond. Something might have happened to him, let me–”

“Of course,” she says. “Do you need to sit?”

Clarke’s already ripping the envelope open, eyes roving over the letter, looking for the explanation. I’m sure Bell will write soon, but I don’t know when he’ll have time, and I know you’ll want to hear this soonest. Gina took a sudden chill, and she passed away last night. She went in her sleep, which is a blessing, and the doctor said she didn’t suffer too much.

It’s the guiltiest, most awful form of relief, her gladness that he’s alive coupled with her sorrow for him. The two of them were happy, and now it’s over, and Bellamy will have a whole new life to figure out.

“Is everything all right?” Lexa asks, gentle, and Clarke realizes she’s blinking tears out of her eyes.

“His wife passed away,” she says. “I never met her, but–I know how much he loved her. I need to write him right away, let him know–” She lets out a hollow little laugh. “There’s nothing good to say, but I need to say it.”

“Of course. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

It’s the first time it occurs to her that Lexa knows this too, that Lexa is as aware of Clarke keeping her separate from Bellamy as Clarke herself is. It’s not as if she thought she was being sneaky, keeping it to herself or anything like that, but–she didn’t mean to be obvious about it.

“Yes. I’m sorry, it’s just–”

“There’s nothing to apologize for. Give him my condolences, if you think it’s appropriate.”

“I will. Thank you.”

It takes her the whole afternoon to manage a letter, and it still feels like a failure, like she should have come up with something better.

It feels as if she should be there for him, for all she hasn’t seen him in years. For all she doesn’t even know if it would even help him. It’s still where she should be.

Let me know if I can do anything, she writes, an empty offer, but when he writes back, he thanks her for her condolences and the offer.

She might not have done the right thing, but she could have done worse.

spring.

It’s a bright day in early spring when Clarke, walking back from the post office, sees Bellamy in his sister’s fields, working on a fence repair. It’s a big project, too big for Lincoln alone, and Bellamy’s been helping out for the last week.

So it’s no surprise, but it is striking, seeing him back on the old land. He doesn’t help out so much anymore, with so much to do for their own home, and it feels a little like stepping back in time.

She leans on the fence and he looks up at the sound, smiling. It’s easy to still see the boy she first met in him, the same messy curls and freckles, the same tan skin and broad shoulders.

But she likes this version of him better.

“Heading home?” he asks.

“I want to have tea ready for Reese when she’s done with school.” She cocks her head. “You know this is where we first met?”

He stretches, looks around. “Is it?”

“I saw you on my way home from school. You were expecting me to be a boy and I decided we were never going to be friends after that.”

That makes him laugh. “That was why?”

“That was the first thing. You did plenty of other things later to make me dislike you too.”

“You gave as good as you got.” He cracks his neck, checks his progress on the repairs. “I think I can be done with this for the day. Can I walk you home?”

“We’re married,” she teases. It’s been less than six months, and she still feels as if she’s not used to it. But it’s the nice kind of not being used to it, the kind where it still feels too good to be true. “I didn’t think walking me home was very exciting these days.”

“It’s still exciting that it’s our home.” He hops over the fence, offers her his arm. “Shall we?”

Clarke accepts the arm and leans her head against his shoulder, just for a second. “Yes,” she agrees. “Let’s.”

#ofcourseitstrue

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