Bellarke One Shots Book 1

14) Folding Pages for your paper chain

A/N not my story

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All things considered, the hospital wasn't a totally horrible place to be.

(Well, except for the guy in the room next to her who kept banging up against the wall. She was definitely going to have to get someone to talk to him about that. Or her, she realized. It could be a her. She would have no way of knowing).

"You totally could find out," her friend Raven told her when she tried to explain the situation. Clarke merely rolled her eyes at the phone and sighed. "I heard that, Griffin. Just get off your ass and tell him to knock it off."

"Yeah okay," Clarke teased back. "Super easy to just jump on up out of bed with all these tubes sticking into various parts of my body."

And there were tubes everywhere. In her nose. Her arms. Places she didn't want to talk about. It really wasn't as simple as Raven seemed to think it was.

"Clarke..."

"No, Raven, I'm fine."

Clarke didn't want to get into it. She didn't even know how. And Raven got it. Mostly. But it was different being in a hospital than it was to have a best friend in the hospital. And it was different to have cancer than to know someone who has cancer.

"Anyway, I should go, my mom is probably going to visit soon," Clarke said.

"Okay," Raven said. "I'll talk to you soon though, alright?"

"Yeah, you got it," Clarke said distractedly.

Clicking the phone off, she tipped her head back and started counting the tiles on the ceiling. Again.

***

She hated that the jokes were right about the food. There was only so much pudding she could eat. (And there was a very, very limited amount of Jell-O that she could tolerate).

She hated how it actually bothered her.

***

The nurses were nice though.

And there was this one intern, Monty, who made a point to sneak her candy bars whenever he was working.

(He didn't really have to sneak them, he knew it, she knew it, but he'd give her the goofiest smile whenever he'd slide them out from under his sleeve and she'd forget about the awkward feeling of the tube in her nose as she laughed and took it, so they pretended it was a secret).

So the people. They were good.

The banging on the wall was still annoying though. And the food still sucked.

***

It was a few days before she did anything about the banging on the wall.

Well, she didn't so much "do something" as pound her own fist into the wall and yell "You mind?" as loud (and as angrily) as she could.

It was not well received. The following thud had much more force than any of the other before and she heard a muffled "Fuck off, Princess" through the wall.

She slouched back down into her bed. Whatever.

"Asshole," she muttered.

***

"What the hell is wrong with that guy?" she asked Monty a few days later.

He looked up from the magazine he was looking through, his eyebrows squished together. "I'm, uh," he started. "I'm not really allowed to talk about the patients