March 22: Octavia & Clarke, Cunning/Rough
Octavia & Clarke, Modern AU, from the same 'verse as Make a Lot of Money and Feel Dead Inside
~1350 words, written in about 50 minutes
For the prompt "cunning and its antonyms: simple, ignorant, blunt, rough" from my July Break Bingo 2023 card.
cw for references to sexual assault
*
They start high school with reputations, all because of a prank they'd pulled the summer before. Clarke called it a revenge plot; Octavia, getting even.
Now everybody knows Clarke to be smart, but dangerous—cunning, the kind of girl who will convince you to let down your guard around her, even when you know better, excavate your secrets and use them against you, sharp and cold beneath a mystifying surface. Octavia, her best friend, her shadow, is the rough-and-tumble sort, a hazard to one's health in a different sort of way. She gets into a scuffle out back of the school at the end of the first week of classes, which cements the whole thing. She's tough, rough, and simple, a girl unafraid of bruises, jutting out her chin to show the raw bleed where the skin's scraped off.
The origin of the legends spools back to the Fourth of July party at Dax's place in the long, hot, humid, languid interim between eighth and ninth grade. Clarke was invited because of her beauty, Octavia on the strength of her older brother's connections and because Clarke was going, and they came packaged together as a set. Octavia still had the tomboy look of her early adolescence, long and rangy and lean, proportions she hadn't yet grown into; half her wardrobe was old hand-me-down's from Bellamy. She thought she looked like something in the right light, thought maybe that might matter, to the right boy. Not many looked at her when Clarke was right next to her, round-faced and blue-eyed; she'd started wearing low-cut shirts that showed her cleavage, sundresses that made Bellamy go protective-chaperone on her if he saw, made his face get all red and embarrassed, and cut off shorts, tan lines from tank tops striping her shoulders.
At the party, all the boys looked at her.
Except for one, who caught Octavia's eye over the top of his Solo cup and didn't let go, didn't blink. Someone was waving around sparklers in the background. The air smelled of cut grass and some distant neighbor's grill smoke, pulsed with bass beats from Dax's stereo.
The boy introduced himself as Atom. They sat around for a while on the back-porch steps, the concrete cold and rough against Octavia's legs and the backs of her thighs, talked bullshit until after a while he was resting his hand on her knee. He didn't mention either Clarke or Bell. She didn't have much to say, too distracted by an awareness of his body heat, an overpowering scent of body spray, his goddamn hand.
They made out for a while in the backseat of Dax's father's car, which was parked in the driveway, so she could see the late-sunset fading through the windows and the twilight building. Through the crack in them she could smell the smoke still, lingering on the humid air, hear the same sort of chirps and buzzing that she'd hear from out in the swamp in her own backyard, back home. Such thoughts distracted her often: how distant she felt from his hands pawing at her. When he touched where she didn't want, she kicked him, weakly, right above the shin because it was where she could reach.
But he was on top of her and didn't seem overly concerned.
That was a spiral moment. She thought of it that way later, that topsy-turvy vertigo that comes from control slipping, the sick-slipping sense that anything could happen, and none of it would be hers.
She got a knee in, scrambled out backwards through the unlocked door, fell right on her ass in the gravel. Scraped up heels of her palms, the cut of a small, sharp rock. He hadn't gotten far, but the damage was the fear itself and it was done.
Telling Clarke about it in the fort, waving her fingers through sifting beams of pale sun that came through the holes in the walls, she kept so calm that her own voice unsettled her. No big deal. But it sucked. Let's send Bellamy after him—maybe he'll kill him.
"He might," Clarke answered seriously. And: "We've got to fix this one ourselves."
Dax was going to be a sophomore. He didn't have a car or a license but he knew how to drive because his cousin had taught him when he was twelve. So yeah, he’d take Clarke out on a ride down some deep-rutted back road until they found a good spot to watch the stars. It was his pleasure. He didn't know any constellations but that was all right. She pointed out a few to him, instead.
The cool thing about Clarke was that she was just shy enough to be cute, in a play-acting way that all guys basically believed, confident enough to let them know what she wanted and how she expected to get it. She wanted to know what he wanted. His daydreams, his fantasies. Her soft voice in his ear, teasing, cajoling—baby, babe—what do you really WANT? The sick-secret stuff. You're safe with me.
Octavia had hiked her way out ahead of them, was crouched in the long grass listening to the sounds of face-sucking and drawing pictures in the dirt with her stub nails, thinking about how great an actress Clarke was—fuck (a deep-forbidden word, still new on her tongue)—fuck, she really knew what she was doing.
And the tape recorder in her purse, next to them on the flatbed, picked up all of it. Confessions you could make a mix CD out of. Stuff he should have known better than to tell anyone—stuff Octavia would never tell if she was him—stuff she’d definitely never tell Clarke, if she was him, Clarke who had already distributed all of her love, or at the very least all of her loyalty, and would never gather up the crumbs of it for him.
After a while, the sounds tapered off. The familiar insect-riot grew louder in its wake. She flicked her gaze across the tall, thin stalks of burned-yellow grass, to the dark interstices, the hint of the rusty blue flatbed on the road. She could see it by its own headlights. The back, where Clarke was, dark as it was quiet.
Then she heard the click of the tape player, scratchy in the July night, like the trigger of a haunting. A sound where it should not be. Her ears were so attuned to it, waiting for it; but afterwards, she could only hear the cadences of Atom's recorded voice, not the content of the whispered, breathy words. She tuned it out to static. All static.
Sharp staccato yelling followed, empty threats and a couple of other new words, sharp-edged profanity she hasn't added to her vocabulary yet, and at last she saw a shadow-figure jump down from truck. She turned on her flashlight, finally, stood and pointed it at him, so he was caught in the beam like a deer. When he tried to rush her, she beat him to it. In her spare hand, she gripped Bellamy's knife with the blade snapped out.
He didn’t know she had it and he'd never approve.
Atom stopped up short, kicking up dust as he slid, halted: a cloud of it in the high beams. Over his shoulder, Octavia could see Clarke's silhouette, standing eerily still and watching them and waiting.
"You're fucking crazy," Atom spat out at her. But she had a knife almost to his throat so there was a tremor to the words, and she found the whole thing, that terrible blood-pounding moment, so wonderfully thrilling, so sharp and real, that she almost laughed like the deranged villain he must have thought that she was. She almost threw the knife away. She almost stabbed him. She almost ran, sprinting, yelling, cackling, like some sort of malevolent spirit in the night.
In the end, she just scared him. And Clarke never replayed the audio. Eventually she even unspools the tape and crushes it beneath her heel. But still their reputations precede them, for the rest of their days stuck in the deep-sucking mud of Arcadia Falls, and in some ways even after, because this is how they know each other and themselves.
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