Chapter Text
The summer had come early that year and it was an infernally hot evening, an evening to lie in a cool, dark bedroom while the twilight dimmed slowly into night and the ceiling fan whirred in the stillness. Instead, Clarke lay stretched out on her grandmother’s front porch, barefoot and damp with sweat, listening vaguely to the buzz of flies around the apple cider vinegar trap that was hanging from a roof beam nearby. It was still quite light outside and a faint breeze stirred the trees in the avenue that ran up to the house, brushing gently over her warm skin. She could hear her mother and grandmother talking in the living room, their quiet voices drifting through the open sash windows: a conversation about people she didn’t know and things that had happened before she was born. In her mind she pictured them as they often sat after dinner, her mother on one side of the brocade couch with a book held open but unread in her lap, and her grandmother in the armchair opposite. Sometimes they would argue, and then both voices would drop to just above a whisper and she would have to strain to hear them if she wanted to make sense of the quarrel, which mostly she did not.
Clarke shifted slightly, felt the loose cotton of her t-shirt sticking to the small of her back, and considered going inside. She wanted to take a long, cold shower and lie on her little twin bed in nothing but her underwear while she dried. The only reason she wasn’t there now was that her cousin was in their room with her girlfriend, the one their grandmother called the ‘Mexican’. Clarke had met her a few times the week before, and she had seemed nice enough, but she was still not sure she could muster the courage it would take to simply walk into the bedroom she was sharing with her cousin and interrupt whatever it was they were occupying themselves with.
“Well,” she heard her mother say from the living room, sounding tired but forcedly cheerful, like she was making an effort to change the tone of their conversation, “The girls seem to be getting along.”
That, at least, was true. Clarke liked O much more than she had expected she would. She was only about eighteen months younger than Clarke, and they had seen each other sporadically when they were growing up, before O’s mother had married her stepfather and things had all gone to hell. The few memories Clarke had of her were of an anxious, pale little person, mothered mostly be her older brother: broody and domineering. It had been startling to see her after nearly five years apart, but Clarke thought she seemed much safer now, and much happier.
The screen door opened with a squeak and Clarke heard the sound of boot soles on the boards of the porch. She tilted her head back to look at whoever had come out upside-down, and saw O’s girlfriend, Raven, watching her from the open doorway. She was in jeans and a baggy grey muscle shirt, and she was clean-looking and damp in a way that made Clarke think she had just gotten out of the shower.
“Yo,” she said, lifting her hand in a lazy wave, and Raven gave a small, snorting laugh. Clarke sat up and swung her legs around so that she was sitting on the edge of the top step, flashing a sharp smile at her and leaning back on her hands. It surprised her a little when Raven came and sat down beside her, but the silence between them was unexpectedly comfortable.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked after a little while, and when Clarke shook her head she dug a pack of cigarettes out of the back pocket of her jeans. She offered them to Clarke, who declined, and held one loosely between her lips while she searched her pockets for a lighter. Clarke watched her sidelong, and could not help thinking that her cousin had good taste. There was something undeniably cool about Raven, but a gentleness too, in the quiet way she sat beside her and the contented little smile that crept across her mouth while she smoked, as if she was thinking about something private and happy.
“Where’s O?” asked Clarke, taking a sly guess at what she was thinking about.
Raven glanced at her, maybe a bit shy suddenly, “She’s getting dressed. Your grandma kept checking on us, so we thought we’d get out of here for a while.”
Clarke laughed, “She caught you both in the shower?”
“The door was locked, but I mean… she knocked and it sort of ruined the mood, you know?” Raven shifted uncomfortably, “To be honest, I don’t think she likes me particularly.”
Clarke knew for a fact that her grandmother had deep misgivings about Raven, not only because of her general discomfort with O’s sexuality, but also because Raven was exactly what sprung to mind when her grandmother thought of a bad influence: a smoking, leather-jacketed foster kid, who O had met at the auto shop in town.
“Screw her,” said Clarke, “You guys seem sweet together.”
Raven ducked her head, then reached down to stub her cigarette out in the dirt at the bottom of the steps, “Thanks. You want to come with us? We’re going into Polis to have a drink.”
“Cool, yeah.”
She pulled her sneakers out from under one of the chairs on the porch, and slipped them on. Raven was lighting a second cigarette and the smell of it, freshly lit, was pleasant. The breeze had picked up a bit, but the evening was still dry and hot, and Clarke looked forward to riding in the back seat of Raven’s ridiculous, beat-up old Cadillac with all the windows down. There was a good stretch of gravel road between her grandmother’s homestead and the neighbouring town, and the drive would take them at least fifteen minutes, if Raven’s car didn’t overheat.
Clarke got slowly to her feet, feeling a little light-headed from the heat, and stretched so that her joints cracked satisfyingly, then wandered over to the open living room window and rested her elbows on the broad sill. Her grandmother stopped what she was saying and turned her head to look at her with eyebrows raised, “Clarke. You’re going to town with Octavia?”
“Looks like it. We won’t be out late.”
“There’s church in the morning,” her grandmother said, resigned and obviously displeased, “Don’t forget.”
Clarke leaned hazardously far through the window to kiss her lightly on the cheek, “Never, Nana.”
Her mother smiled wryly at her as she straightened up and turned away from the window, but Clarke did not return it. She hadn’t smiled at her mother since the accident, had barely been able to look at her for six months. Sometimes she felt guilty about it, so guilty that she lay awake at night, sick to her stomach and playing her mother’s expressions over and over: the way her face fell slightly whenever she avoided her eyes, whenever a joke was ignored or an act of affection shrugged off.
The screen door slammed open and O came flying out onto the porch, tackling playfully into Raven. She was still quite little, but the subdued indifference of her childhood was gone, and when she was near Raven she seemed particularly explosive. She kissed her hard and fast behind the ear, and laughed when Raven tried to avoid it, glancing embarrassedly at Clarke.
“Clarke’s coming?” she asked, looking from Raven to Clarke with her happy, light-coloured eyes.
“She says so.”
O grinned at Clarke and began tugging Raven by the hand towards her car, which was parked under the big oak tree in front of the house, “Let’s go then.”
They piled into the Cadillac, the worn seats uncomfortably hot, and Clarke breathed in the smell of tobacco and sun-warmed leather, reclining languidly across the back seat. The engine started up with unexpected ease and Raven straightened slowly out onto the drive before putting her foot down and sending the car speeding along the avenue in a grumble of exhaust and shifting gravel, so that the dappled shadow and early evening sunlight raced across the windows. At the end of the avenue was a sharp turn onto a broader track, which ran through several miles of cornfields and past homesteads very like her grandmother’s: old plantation-style houses on four or five acres of land, most of which had signs of small-scale farming. Horses grazed quietly in twilit pastures that were green with the late spring, some followed closely by sleepy-looking foals, and at one point they passed a girl riding bare-headed along the road, whose horse started and bucked in surprise as the car drove by. O kept pointing out houses and farms and craning around in the passenger seat to look back at Clarke and tell her about the people who lived there, although Clarke forgot the names almost as soon as she had heard them.
O had moved in with their grandmother two years before, when her mother had died and her stepfather had been arrested. Clarke remembered getting the phone call from her mother on a rainy Friday evening at her boarding school, trying to make sense of what had happened. It had all sounded like a confusion of violence and emotions she couldn’t understand, even from the little that Abby was willing to tell her. She had cried when she was in bed that night, not because she had ever really known her aunt well enough to love her, but because she had lain there, imagining what it would be like to be her cousins, and had felt overwhelmed by the alienness of it. That seemed ironic now, and a part of Clarke wondered if anyone had felt anything remotely similar when they had heard about her father’s death. She hoped not; she and her mother had agonized over it enough for everyone.
They were approaching the outskirts of Polis when they rounded a corner and Raven had to veer to avoid colliding with a figure on a very dirty off-road motorcycle, which was expelling a thick cloud of black smoke and swerving around in a way that would have been incredibly dangerous if he hadn’t been going at about ten miles an hour. Raven swore under her breath and held the horn down for a long moment before letting up. The sudden noise looked like it had knocked the motorcyclist even further off balance because his bike stalled with a judder and he only just managed to stop himself from toppling over with one foot on the ground; a balding, middle-aged man with a scowling face.
“God,” said Raven, glancing back at him in her rear-view mirror, “I guess Titus is drinking again.”
“Son of a bitch,” muttered O, and Clarke considered asking who he was, but thought better of it as they finally hit the asphalt and went rushing past the sign to Polis.
It was the smallest town Clarke had ever been to: a collection of two dozen buildings, dusty and most of them in need of repainting. There was her grandmother’s church, a general store, and the Christian high school O was attending under protest. Raven drove herself to the state school in the next town over because her foster mother was a decided atheist, and knew that forcing her to go to Good Shepherd would be tantamount to torture.
“She’s actually really nice about it,” Raven said, and Clarke could hear the fondness in her voice, “Sometimes she makes me breakfast before I leave in the morning. She’s great.”
O looked at Raven with a small smile, which might also have been a little sad, and Clarke wondered how much she knew about Raven’s previous foster homes, how much Raven knew about her stepfather. She imagined them lying together on O’s bed in the dark, O tucked into Raven’s side with her head rested on her chest, talking softly about things they wouldn’t tell anyone else, things that they needed the other to know and understand because they couldn’t make sense of it by themselves; why bad things happen to good people.
Raven parked the car in front of the hardware store and they climbed out onto the quiet street while she locked the doors manually. There was no one else in sight, but several cars and a motorbike were parked on the other side of the road, and Clarke thought she could hear soft music coming from the alley between the hardware store and the auto shop next to it. O gestured that way and Clarke followed her and Raven down the alley, the music getting considerably louder as they approached what looked like a back door into the auto shop.
“It’s a mechanic’s workshop during the day,” said Raven, as if she could guess what Clarke was thinking, “But at night it’s the Grounder, and pretty much the only place to get a drink in twenty five miles.”
She opened the door with a firm yank on the bow handle, and the smell of smoke and motor grease spilled out into the alley, as well as a cacophony of loud, nearly incomprehensible country music, and held it open for O and Clarke to step in before she followed, closing it swiftly behind her. They were enveloped by the dim lighting in the back room of the auto shop, standing on stained concrete and competing for space with what looked like large machinery covered with tarpaulins. To their right, three roller doors had been raised so that the back of the shop was open to a dirt yard behind it, where Clarke could see a collection of wooden picnic tables under some ragged-looking shade cloth. There were an impressive number of people sitting in the yard drinking and smoking, or playing pool inside at one of the tables crammed between workbenches and the hydraulic car lift, and as they maneuvered their way towards the bar to buy the first round, Clarke realised that the music coming from the yard was live.
She smirked and said, close to O’s ear as Raven ordered three beers from the bartender, “When you told Nana you met her at an auto shop, you meant the Grounder, huh?”
“I plead the Fifth,” O replied, flashing Clarke a crooked smile, “I know my rights, Griffin.”
Raven gave them their drinks and they went out into the yard, claiming an empty table under the only tree, an old pecan. The music had gotten slightly quieter and no one was singing anymore; there were two girls sitting on top of a table on the other side of the yard with their feet on the bench, one playing on a fiddle and the other on what Clarke suspected was a banjo ukulele.
It sounded like an Appalachian tune, something fast and a little sad, and both the girls were very solemn-looking, even when someone whooped as the fiddle soared. The girl who was playing it looked like the older of the two: tall and dirty blonde with heavy-set eyes, while the banjo-player was younger and smaller. Her wild dark hair was pulled back from her face in a disheveled braid and her eyes seemed intent on the sky just above where Clarke was sitting, never looking down at the quick, clever movements of her fingers over the strings and down the neck of the banjo.
“Anya’s pretty good, right?” asked O, following Clarke’s gaze and glancing over her shoulder at the fiddler, “It’s cool she has accompaniment tonight. Usually there’s no banjo on a Saturday because –”
She was cut off by a demanding thud from inside the auto shop, which was followed by three more in quick succession, each louder than the last. A voice shouted hoarsely from the other side of the back door, easily audible even over the music and the talking inside: “Alex!”
Its effect was immediate: the music stopped at once and the fiddler, Anya, took her fiddle from her shoulder and glared in the direction of the door with utter, unconcealed contempt. The girl with the dark hair put her banjo aside very carefully and got down from the table top, wiping her palms on the front of her t-shirt, which was loose on her thin frame and dirty with grass stains. Her trousers were also a little too big, men’s jeans heavily streaked with old white paint or plaster, cuffed several times to be clear of her battered canvas sneakers.
“Alex!” the voice shouted again, “Get the fuck out here!”
The girl looked to Anya, who narrowed her eyes and shook her head almost imperceptibly. Most of the people in the yard seemed more or less unconcerned and had begun to talk again once the short, surprised silence after the first bout of knocking had subsided, but a few were craning around to squint towards the door. Across the table from Clarke, Raven gave a small sigh and took a cigarette out of her pack.
“Alex, I swear to God, if I have to come in there and fetch you, you’re not going to like it!”
The next moment, Clarke heard the sound of the door being pulled violently open and someone at the table next to theirs called out calmly, “You might want to get under a table, Lexa.”
Then several things happened at once as the girl darted quickly across the yard, as far from the auto shop doors as possible and dove beneath their table, leopard-crawling her way under it until she was lying flat in the dirt on her stomach between Raven and Octavia’s feet on one side, and Clarke’s on the other. Clarke could feel her bony right elbow pressing against the toe of her shoe.
She had just stopped moving at their feet when a man came bursting out of the auto shop and into the yard. He was the motorcyclist they had almost driven into on the road, a short, thin man with a ruddy, weather-beaten face. It was the smell of him that Clarke remembered long after that evening: sour sweat and over-powering aftershave, as though he were trying to hide the stink of liquor that clung to him. He seemed sheepish for a moment, standing in the yard with many eyes upon him, and Clarke saw his chest rising and falling with heavy, angry breaths. His hooded gaze found Anya and darted from her face to the banjo lying on the table beside her, his expression changing to something triumphant and ugly.
“Alex!” he shouted, and Clarke jumped a little at the sheer loudness of it, “You think I don’t see your fucking banjo?”
Clarke felt the girl’s arm shift very slightly next to her foot. Slowly she reached down, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, and rested a hand lightly on the girl’s shoulder. She stilled instantly, but Clarke kept her hand where it was. The man was arguing with Anya now, exchanging low hisses that she could not make out, except for the occasional curse. He was gesturing wildly and several times Clarke thought he was going to knock Anya in the face with a flailing hand. Then he shoved her hard in the chest with both hands and pushed past, beginning to look under the tables in a way that made Clarke think that this was not the first time he had come here looking for the girl currently under theirs. Anya recovered her balance, swore spectacularly at the man’s back and moved purposefully into the auto shop, elbowing people out of her way.
“Fuck this shit,” said O, and Clarke saw that her face was pale and tense. Raven took her gently by the hand, but as soon as the man approached their table she leapt up, yanking free of Raven and turning to face him: small and furious.
“Listen, Titus,” she said, her voice hoarse with barely repressed anger, “Your kid is not under this table. Even if she was, there’s no way in hell we would let you drag her out, so why don’t you fuck off and leave us in peace? Lexa will come home when and if you stop being such an absolute dick.”
Titus seemed momentarily taken aback by her intensity and stood, slack-mouthed beside their table. Clarke had to struggle not to put her free hand over her nose and mouth to make the smell of him bearable. He recovered and took a slow, rather menacing step towards Octavia, and that was when Raven reached into one of her jean pockets, pulled something out and slammed it hard onto the table top: a black-handled, retracted switchblade.
“Don’t,” she said quietly, not even turning her head to look at him, “Just don’t, Mr Woods. Go home and sleep it off. You’ll regret anything else.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Clarke saw Anya come striding back out of the auto shop with a baseball bat and a towering young man just behind her. Titus looked between Raven’s knife and the bat, glowered mutely at all of them, then turned and went storming out of the yard like a thundercloud driven by a strong wind. Anya followed him, still holding the bat firmly, low down on the handle. Clarke guessed she was watching to make sure he actually left. When she heard the door to the alley slam, she patted the girl lightly on the shoulder and took her hand away.
“He’s gone,” she said, “You can come out now.”
There was a soft scuffling sound as she crawled out, straightening up and brushing yard dust off of her clothes, which were now even dirtier than before. Her face was blank and grave, but Clarke thought she saw a hint of relief in her little, serious frown, and could not help thinking that it was endearing: the dignity with which this small, rather scruffy person was coming out of hiding.
She gave up her brushing and turned to the three of them at the table, perhaps a little awkwardly. Octavia had sat down again and Raven was stuffing her switchblade back into her pocket, looking unhappy.
“Thank you,” she said, very sincerely “I’m sorry you had to do that.”
“Don’t apologise.”
Raven was gruff and clearly not going to accept any more gratitude, and the girl nodded slowly; then, incredibly, she looked straight at Clarke and said, “Can I buy your next drink?”
“Wow,” said Clarke, “Nice.”