Chapter Text
Bellamy hesitated with a grimacing sigh, his fist poised above the apartment door and ready to knock. Apartment 32B: underneath his 42B. He’d never thought he’d miss the old tenant; a balding, greasy ex-con who habitually stared at his sister and sold illicit drugs even though that’s what he’d done time for fifteen years ago. But, at that embarrassing moment, Bellamy would’ve appreciated the old creep’s incapability of curiosity and indifference to his need for access to his fire escape.
Bellamy could only hope the new resident of Waldenside Complex would be as uninterested as he let his knuckles rap against the red door.
His heart hammered with impatience in his chest. His hands were lightly placed on his hips and his right heel bounced as he waited for some response. Bellamy stared down without actually focusing on the grime build-up of the hallway’s baseboards.
After it felt like his heart had beat a hundred times, Bellamy sighed and resorted to pulling up the frayed cuff of his jeans. Assuming no one was inside the apartment, he procured the small switchblade he kept constantly in his boot.
As he set the blade to the lock and began to work it open, Bellamy didn’t really pause to think about it. He’d done the same thing when Greasy wasn’t there. He’d picked plenty of locks before that. Growing up in Walden, a riverside town that was only a half-step up from the slums, meant acquiring a colorful skill set of useful tricks that weren’t always legal.
He and Octavia had moved out of one of the worst areas of the city after their mother’s suicide. They’d gone into a foster program, Bellamy counting down the days until he turned eighteen and could get his little sister out of the seemingly straight system. Who could imagine that a city-run program was actually as corrupt as the rest of the city?
Now that he was twenty and Octavia sixteen, they lived about a mile from Ark University, Bellamy’s school and the local college of the suburban, well-to-do town of Pheonix. They were still just within Walden city lines, but it was the safest and cheapest place Bellamy and Octavia could afford. They were even close enough for Octavia to continue her junior year at Pheonix Academy, the better high school alternative to Walden High where he’d gone. If anything, Bellamy was determined to give his sister the best he could and keep her as safe as possible.
Thank God for financial aid and sympathetically lenient landlords.
Nevertheless, that was the reason he needed to get into 32B; legally and with permission or not.
The lock clicked and Bellamy cautiously opened the door, shaking his head at the lack of deadbolts the new tenet had on it. He closed the door silently behind him. Turning the lock just as it’d been before, he marveled at how neat the apartment looked without Greasy covering it in pizza boxes, cigarette ash, and a haze with a smell more unpleasant than the cigarettes.
For the things that weren’t in boxes, everything was clean and organized despite perhaps the open books and half empty coffee cup on the table. Bellamy glanced down, surprised to find the floors were actually made of wood and not dirty laundry and adult magazines.
The layout of the apartment was identical to his own, he knew from previous experiences, so Bellamy headed toward the right hand doorway and the small kitchenette beyond. There was a window there with the fire escape just outside it.
The stairs of the escape were just in sight when his heart stopped with the text tone of a phone. Bellamy turned around; his blood turned to ice, thawed by the skin-deep heat of his shock before it coursed through his body in heavy beats. His fingers chilled by the process, he saw the light of the phone on the table beside the open books. The sound of running water reached him from behind the cracked door opposite him. He hadn’t noticed the sound before over the blood rushing in his ears.
Light and steam filtered from the opening to the bathroom and Bellamy knew he should run to the kitchen window. However, the mind’s commands and the body’s responses are often not quite the same thing.
It was this failure to react that caused him to still be standing statuesquely like the inexperienced, first-time-trying-a-B&E criminal that he wasn’t when a girl with wet blonde hair walked out of the bathroom.
She froze, her azure eyes staring owlishly at him and a toothbrush stuck in her mouth. Her cheeks were flushed from the steam of the bathroom. They made her pink, mildly-covered-in-toothpaste lips all the more bright against fair skin most people would consider a minority in Walden. She wore dark jeans that hugged her legs and hips, coupled with long navy blue socks bunched around her ankles, and a grey v-necked shirt. The girl couldn’t have been much older than eighteen.
Gathering something resembling control over his body, Bellamy made to lift his hands in a gesture of harmlessness. He knew it couldn’t be a sign of innocence; he had broken into her apartment.
That small movement sent her running forward, toothbrush falling from her mouth in a successful rush to grab the bat she had leaning against the wall. She took a defensive stance; her blue eyes turned to hardened steel in an accusatory and intensely furious glare. Whatever soft color that had brushed her cheeks was replaced the strain in her jaw.
The girl raised the wooden bat as though to swing at him and Bellamy was finally freed from his icy paralysis.
“Hey! 42B! My name’s Bellamy Blake!”
“What the hell are you doing in my apartment, 42B Bellamy Blake?” The girl twisted her grip around the bat and gave no sign of relenting.
“I just need to use your fire escape!” Bellamy raised his hands higher as she gave a slight movement of the bat. He tried to keep his voice calm, but it was difficult when his pulse was drumming with adrenaline. “I’m locked out of my apartment right above yours.”
“My apartment was locked, too. Why don’t you just break into your own, then, ass?”
Bellamy narrowed his eyes, his anxiety and fear giving way to a steadily building frustration. He didn’t like having a weapon, no matter what it was, trained on him and the girl seemed in no way willing to even loosen her grip let alone lower it.
“Deadbolts, Princess,” he quipped. “You might want to consider getting some of your own.”
“Deadbolts lock from the inside,” she tilted her head in feigned amusement. “What, did you manage to lock yourself outside with inside bolts? That’s really amazing. Tell me more while I call the cops.”
Bellamy clenched his jaw, “My sister, Octavia, locked me out. We had an argument. Now I need to get back inside. Your fire escape leads right to our window. That’s all I want.”
“If that’s all you want why didn’t you just try knocking, Bellamy Blake?”
“I did.” Anger smoldered in his chest. The longer he spent dancing around pointed insults with this girl was longer Octavia spent alone and upset. “Can I go, now? You can walk me to the fire escape, if you’d like.”
Bellamy paused, glancing at her open books on the table and seeing a notebook and pen beside them. He looked back at the girl, motioning with his eyes to where he slowly sidestepped to the table. She moved oppositely, just as slow and forever vigilant with her raised bat.
“Look,” Bellamy implored, picking up the pen and writing, “this is my phone number, my name, my address, where I work, where I go to school; anything you could use to tell the cops if you do decide to call them. But, I need to get to my sister.”
He dropped the pen when he was finished and for the first time hesitance accentuated the girl’s unforgiving expression. She twisted her grip on the bat again, but in a looser way. Her blue eyes traveled his body and Bellamy got the distinct impression she was memorizing what he looked like. Only more information for the police, he thought.
“Can I go?” He asked.
The girl caught his eyes again and gave a slight nod, jerking her head to the kitchenette window.
Bellamy sighed with relief and dropped his hands, moving to the window after breathing a quick, “Thank you.”
He didn’t stop to look back at her after his feet hit the metal of the fire escape, three stories above the alley flush with the Walden River. He needed to get to Octavia and he hoped beyond anything she hadn’t locked the window, as well. Even still, Bellamy continued to see the girl’s wide, blue stare turned confidently hard as his heart raced against himself.