Bellarke One Shots Book 1

36)come one reach out touch me

She's not very good with dates. And places. And directions.

So when she ends up a ways away from the vacation house by taking the 'supposed' shortcut through the woods, and ends up standing in front of the old and tall steel gates of a gray mansion, she could not do anything but sigh in defeat. Of course.

She stands there, looking at the vines crawling everywhere, the tall gate, the walls of the mansion, the windows, the trees - she feels a little involuntary shiver running down her whole being as she stared into its windows. As if anytime, she will see a person there gazing down at her with their sunken eyes and sallow skin. And it has lots of windows.

Clarke has never been one to believe in anything she hasn't seen (or felt) yet, being a daughter of science and everything. So all her life, no matter what her friends have said, she never believed in ghosts. So this imagining of a man staring at her from a window is ridiculous and - really, it came out of nowhere.

Adventure, she thinks, as she kicks at a stone near her feet. After all, this is what she came here for. The visit to her grandparents is for her mom, she came here to forget about everything. She came here to eradicate all thoughts of Finn, of Wells, of her... dad. She came here to have something, if not fun. Just something because she's tired of having nothing.

This is definitely something, she thinks again. And something she will have.

It's not hard to break into an abandoned house, Clarke thinks as she trudges through the musky and dusty hallways, in awe of the design more than anything, really.

And at the eighth room on the second floor, she finds the largest room she has ever seen. That might be an exaggeration, but this room, with all its gloomy glory, is not painted white or grey like the rest. She notes that this room is painted the color of pink roses, and that the rest of the rooms may have their paints chipped, but this one looks like it has just been newly coated - sans the smell of new paint. This room has nothing in it but an old mirror at the corner and a big old blackboard in the middle, standing like an old man weary of life. That might be why she sees this old room as the biggest. It literally has nothing.

What makes her wonder the most is the incessant urge to run her fingers along the smoothness of the blackboard, the impossibly silky surface, the dust gathering around her fingers as if parting by her command. She retreats her hand back, gives herself a moment to realize that she has indeed moved from her place at the door to the middle of the room seemingly unknowingly, and then stares at the pattern she has created, and her heart drops to her stomach.

There on the surface, written by the absence of dust is a single word:

LEAVE.

She sucks in a breath, frozen in place. She stays there for another solid minute before she finally moves, but not away.

"No," she says determinedly. She admits that in most cases, her mind would spew a tirade of questions, maybe even be mortified, but her pounding heart gives her the bravado she has never felt before. Why now, is the strangest and most pressing question. "I'm not leaving."

Fuck, she doesn't even know who or what she's talking to.

She watches with muted fascination and equal horror as the dust clears as if being wiped by a sleeve. And then, with a non-existent chalk, there written:

BRAVE ONE

Despite her horrified disposition, she finds herself chuckling. She has just received a compliment from a... "What are you?"

The writing clears. And then:

Ghost.

She smiles.