Chapter Text
Thudthudthudthud.
Somewhere in the house, someone was definitely hitting something. Slowly and unwillingly rising out of her sleep, Clarke pulled the covers up over her head trying to muffle the noise enough to fall back into oblivion.
Thudthudthudthud.
Very close. Not somewhere else in the house, then. On her door. It had to be her mother. She scrunched her eyes tighter and curled up more as if that would drive away the sound.
“Come on, Clarke! Time to get up.”
Not her mother. “Raven?” She slid the covers down, wincing into the shafts of sunlight spearing through the half-closed blinds.
“Who else?” The door handle creaked as it began to turn, her friend’s familiar face peering through the gap as the door opened. “And I have coffee. You decent?”
Clarke glanced down at herself, seeing a t-shirt and shorts covering her. “Yeah.” She pushed herself up into a sitting position in the bed as Raven walked in and glanced around the bedroom. She shifted a jumbled pile of clothes out of the way to sit on the chair at the foot of the bed, sipping from the giant take out coffee cup she held. After a moment Clarke’s still-waking brain realised there was only one cup there. “You said you had coffee.”
“I do.” Raven said, grinning as she took another sip. “What I didn’t say was that I had any for you.”
“Not fair, Raven. At least let me have some of yours.”
“Like I’m going to let Miss ‘it’s only coffee if it’s black and capable of stripping paint’ have some of my soy latte just to spit it out. Anyway, I left yours downstairs.”
Clarke groaned. Just sitting up was giving her a headache as she recalled how much they’d drunk last night, and the thought of standing up was not appealing to her. “Why would you do that?”
“Because last night someone told me I had to make sure she got up and started work on the brilliant idea she had, and the best way I can think to tempt you is with coffee.” She stood up and headed to the door. “You coming?”
Clarke groaned as she watched her friend disappear, cursing both her ability to dodge hangovers and that she had a key to the house. Clarke paused to slip into a pair of jeans as she listened to her descending the stairs, trying to give herself time to remember just what idea she might have had last night that had Raven barging in at - what was the time, anyway? She scrabbled around and found her phone, still clinging on to its last little bit of battery life to tell her it was already past eleven. As she walked downstairs and through the house, she tried to piece together a memory of the night before. They’d headed out to open mike night, like they did every week. It was the one time the bar was busy enough they could hang out in a booth at the back semi-anonymously. With everyone focused on the acts, it meant she wasn’t getting hassled by anyone wanting to know why she’d quit the Delinquents and could focus on forgetting it all.
She walked into the kitchen, expecting to see Raven there with the coffee, but it was empty. Then she spied the door to the basement hanging ajar and it all came flooding back to her.
“Absolutely not.” She said from the top of the stairs. “This was a bad idea, and you should have talked me out of it, not encouraged me.”
“It’s a great idea, Griffin.” Raven replied from somewhere in the basement. “And I’m staying down here till this coffee gets cold.”
“Fine. For the coffee.” She walked down the stairs. “But I’m done with singing, I’m done with performing. It was a drunk idea, those are always the worst.”
“Sure, you’re totally done.” Raven said, handing over the coffee as Clarke reached the foot of the stairs. “That’s why you’ve applied for precisely zero jobs in the last three months, and the happiest I’ve seen you since you came home was when you were singing along last night.”
“I was happy because I was having a fun night out with my best friend.”
“Sure, and as your best friend I was the one who agreed that we should clear this place out so we could make music in it, just like we did in high school. That was entirely your idea, Clarke, because - and I quote - ‘damn, I miss when it was just fun’.”
“I said that? OK, yes, I did say that. I was drunk at the time, though.” She took a look round the space. Save for a coating of dust and a few more boxes of junk, it was pretty much as it had been when they’d last used it regularly, five or six years ago. Back then, she and Raven had called it their studio. It was where they’d put together their mixes of Clarke’s voice and Raven’s music and talked about publishing it online at some point. The furthest they’d got was sharing it with friends at school, some of whom had them shared it with others, which had eventually led to Finn hearing her voice and deciding he needed Clarke to front his band. While
Raven went off to college, Clarke had ended up roaming the country with the Delinquents until she’d walked out on them three months ago and come home.
“Exactly. You let your guard down when you drink, show what you really want. And what you want, Clarke Griffin, is to use that amazing voice of yours for something other than those blues-rock dirges you’ve been doing for the last five years.”
“Hey, some of those songs weren’t that bad.”
“Yeah, the ones they let you have some input on were at least aspiring to mediocrity. You can glare at me all you want, but you can’t deny it, can you?”
Raven was right. At first, she’d just enjoyed the sensation of singing for a crowd and realising how much she lived it to care about what she was singing. Then the gigs had got bigger and bigger, the label had picked them up, and she was too busy discovering what it was like to make an album to care too much that the boys’ club in the rehearsal room and the studio usually found reasons to dismiss her ideas and suggestions. Then it had been the money and the even bigger gigs that distracted her as the album started floating around the lower reaches of the charts. Then there’d been the press hailing her and Finn as a new power couple of music, and she’d let his late night promises persuade her that he really did care about her. It was only when she’d caught him sneaking off to see other women that she realised just how much wool had been pulled over her eyes.
The official statement from the label had said she’d quit because of ‘personal and musical differences’, which was much more diplomatic and printable than anything she’d actually said to him and the rest of them before she walked out of the rehearsal room, cleared out her apartment and drove away. Her mother had been too surprised to have her daughter home to restart any of the arguments they’d had when she’d left.
“Why do you want to do this? Don’t you have, you know, an actual job?”
“I do, and I know this might come as a shock to someone who’s never had a proper job, but work sucks. I spent four years at college, and now I get to sit taking notes of meetings between middle aged guys who don’t want to hear me explain that the engineering problem they’re taking hours to puzzle out is really damn simple to fix. So, when my recently-returned best friend declares she wants to do something we both find fun, I’m going to jump at the chance.”
Clarke sat down on the old couch, waving away the dust that rose up from it. “I don’t know. I mean, I loved it when it was just us two down here, making our weird little tunes. It’s just everything that came after that, and now I don’t know what I’m meant to be doing.”
Raven sat down on the wide arm of the couch, testing the strength before swinging her legs up and crossing them in front of he, somehow managing to balance on it. Clarke was reminded of all the times they’d sat like this before, throwing ideas back and forth while she wondered just how Raven managed to sit like that.
“I don’t know what you’re meant to be doing either. And I’m not saying this is it, but it’s got to be better than nothing, right? It was your idea, and honestly, you just looked so alive and happy when you were talking about it. And when you were singing along with that one act, even if no one but me could hear you.”
The memories of the night before were starting to come back now. Clarke hadn’t even been able to see who was up on stage from where they were sitting, but something about the two women’s voices had made her want to sing along to the old song they were playing. “It did feel good, but that’s the problem.”
“When is feeling good a problem?” Raven raised an eyebrow.
“When it feels so good you’ll wade through rivers of shit to feel like that.” Clarke said. “I never had those dreams of being famous everyone else in the band seemed to have, I just wanted to sing. Here with you it was just fun messing around with the music and the sounds, then Finn asked me to come sing with them and it was fun, then I did it on stage in front of a crowd and it was just the biggest rush. I just wanted that feeling again and again, and I put up with all the times they said my ideas didn’t fit with the sound, all the times they told me to ease it back or they had to fade me down in the mix, and all the crap of being ‘his girlfriend’ just because I loved singing so much.”
She paused, taking a long slug of coffee, the shaking her head to clear it. “I miss it, and I really want to do this with you but I’m just scared, Raven. I’ve spent the last three months trying to think of what I can do with my life, and it keeps coming back to this, because singing is the one thing that makes me feel right, but I worry about what mistakes I might make this time.”
“Clarke, I promise you this. From now on, if I think you’re making a mistake because of singing or anything else, I will not hesitate to tell you. So, we’re doing this?”
“We’re doing this.” Clarke leaned back on the couch, then sprang straight back up as she was enveloped by a cloud of dust. “Which means first we’re cleaning up this place. You up for that?”
“Definitely. You realise I’ve got the skills to build a whole studio down here now?”
“Can we start with just getting rid of the dust before we freak my mom out too much?”
“OK, but I tell you if we just soundproof that corner there, we’ll get some amazing results.” Clarke could see the wheels whirring in Raven’s mind, and just how to explain it to her mother, though she’d probably be happy Clarke was doing something other than moping.
A thought struck her. “While I think of it, do you know who it was I was singing along to last night? I should probably thank them, or something. Plus, they were actually good.”
“No idea, but they’ll probably be there again next time we go.”