i will go down with this ship

“No,” she breathes.

Nia’s answering smile drips with condescension. “Yes.”

And then all rationality flees Clarke.

She sees red, yanks against her bonds and struggles to loose herself from Roan, lurching forward and twisting her arms and jerking from side to side. But the Prince’s hold on her is firm, and she finds that all she’s managed to do is add another layer to the grin on Nia’s face. The cruelty in it almost doesn’t seem possible, like she’s some caricature of a person, a villain Clarke’s only read about in stories. But this isn’t some nightmare, some horrible dream that Clarke can just wake up from. It’s real. All too real.

“You bitch! What did you do to him!?”

Nia only laughs. “Guess.”

And then Bellamy is moaning and lifting his head, and the blankness in his expression is like a blow to the gut. His eyes are glazed over and unseeing, and a bolt of pure panic is shooting down Clarke’s spine until she feels almost as unsteady as he must. But then he’s blinking back his grogginess and his lips are moving around the shape of her name, once, twice, until it’s filling the chamber, its edges hoarse, ragged.

“Clarke?”

His face is covered in bruises and sallow skin, features gaunt, dried blood caked into his hairline. His entire body is quaking, as fragile as she’s ever seen him, and it looks like it’s taking all of his energy to not crumble into a heap on the floor. It’s as if he’s a hastily drawn sketch of himself, blurred at the edges, lines jagged, no care taken in his making (unmaking). And that terrifies her. Bellamy has always been the strong one, stalwart and unbreakable in the face of all that they’ve fought against, all that they’ve done (when she’s done nothing but run away). To see him reduced to this, to what looks like days of torture at the hands of someone as sadistic as the Ice Queen, is making her sick to her stomach, nausea winding through her and a coil of fury coursing through her veins.

Nia’s mocking voice pierces through the rushing in Clarke’s ears, sets her blood boiling. “My son told me all about your weakness. And when we found this one roaming our territory dressed as one of our warriors… Well, you can figure out the rest.”

Clarke snarls, positively feral.

Nia cocks her head, the smile on her face hiding none of the depravity behind her mask. “You know, your precious little Lexa once stood in the same spot you’re standing now. Because of her own weakness. What was her name again?”

Ontari speaks up from over her shoulder. “Costia, my Queen.”

Nia’s smile morphs into a sneer. “If you say. But it doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

And then she kicks Bellamy in the back of the knee, shoves him down until he’s kneeling on the cold ground, hands braced against the floor. Bellamy grits his teeth, but when he tries to rise up through his pain (he looks like he’s in so much of it that Clarke can feel it like it’s her own), Nia brandishes her sword, lowering it until it rests on the back of his neck. And in that moment, Clarke imagines it swinging down just a little faster, cleaving into his skin and spraying the floor in red and no—

Nia angles the blade until it catches the light. “I always hate this part. They never beg—too much pride.” She fixes Clarke with a malicious grin. “But you’re different, aren’t you? Skaikru is weak. That’s why they’re so easy to kill.”

Clarke surges forward again, jerking to a stop only when Roan reins her back in. “Please… please! I’ll do anything!” she cries. “I’m begging you—take me.”

Bellamy’s head snaps up (Clarke can see blood dribble its way to the ground as skin meets blade). “Clarke, no!” He looks frantic, a mirror of herself, his eyes wild and pleading in a way she’s never seen before. She’s never seen him so unhinged, so distraught, and she wonders how many times he’s looked exactly like this in the past few days (while the Queen beat him, tortured him—) before she slams the door on that line of thinking.

Despite the gravity of the situation, she distantly wonders what sort of luck they must have for them to be reenacting the same roles they played in a cave not so long ago. (no—please! please don’t! i’ll do anything! i’ll stop fighting, just please don’t kill him.) When he brushed her hair back from her face and it was like she was home again, and that smile, that smile—

But then Nia is shoving his head down, and Clarke can only catch a flash of gritted teeth before all she sees is black curls and matted blood and all-consuming terror again. Nia barks out a laugh. “What happened to that golden tongue of yours? Don’t know how to talk your way out of this one?”

Now tears are sliding down Clarke’s face in a way that they haven’t since she hardened herself all those months ago. She rarely ever lets anyone see her this weak, this vulnerable, but she doesn’t care because it’s Bellamy. “Please, just… just don’t. I’m the one you want,” she sobs.

But it’s like Nia is only feeding off of her hysteria, letting it fuel her until Clarke sees nothing of this woman besides her unfettered hubris. “You’re more use to me alive than dead. The great Wanheda. Subdued and mine to command at last,” she purrs. “His death will serve as your motivation. You will not cross me. Because there are plenty more where he came from.”

“No, I—if you kill him, I’ll never do what you want. Never.”

The Queen appraises her and Clarke thinks that maybe she’s getting through to her, maybe she’ll let Bellamy go— But then Nia is sighing in annoyance. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we? Enough of this.” She fists a hand in Bellamy’s hair and yanks his head up, shifting her sword to his throat. “Any last words, boy?”

His eyes are closed (in pain or acceptance, Clarke can’t tell), and she can’t help but think that that’s what they’ll be like when he’s gone for good, when he’ll never open them again. She wants to beg for that to never become a reality, to get down on her hands and knees and grovel at the Ice Queen’s feet. But Roan’s hands on her wrists and the image of the sword at Bellamy’s neck are freezing her in place, clogging her throat and narrowing her field of vision until all she can see is a man who means more to her than anything else. A man she owes so much to.

A man she can’t live without.

Bellamy opens his eyes and lowers his gaze from the ceiling until it settles on Clarke. And for that one furtive moment, it no longer looks panicked, frightened. Instead, it looks resolute. When his voice (full of one last desperate plea) finally rings out and Clarke hears what he has to say, her heart stops beating and plummets to the floor.

“Run.”

And then he jerks out of Nia’s grip, the metal edge of her blade digging into his skin, cutting a slit across his throat (that looks entirely too deep). He sways and nearly collapses, but he manages to just scramble out of the way when her sword chases his movement.

“No…!” Clarke screams.

This time, when she lurches forward through the chaos, it’s surprisingly easy to escape Roan’s grip. As she staggers forward, she doesn’t have time to wonder why her hands are suddenly unbound before a blur of dark hair and palpable rage is intercepting her. Ontari tackles her to the ground, a solid weight preventing Clarke from tearing into the Queen and saving the one person who matters most—

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Nia rear her leg back and kick Bellamy in the head, sees him hack red onto the tile. When he tries to push himself up through his daze, she traps his chest under the heel of her boot and raises her blade above her head, about to plunge it downward. Clarke wants to cry out—she can see the next moments play out like a silent film, grim and terrifying, leeching all color from her surroundings. But she can’t because Ontari’s hands are at her throat, digging into her windpipe, blurring her vision in and out. Clarke claws at her arms, bucks her hips, but Ontari is a trained warrior and she’s been fighting since she was a child and Clarke knows that she has no chance against her and—

And suddenly, Clarke hears the sound of metal clanging against tile. Ontari’s grip loosens and Clarke thinks that maybe she hears her shriek in outrage, but she’s not paying attention because when she finds the strength to turn her head and drag her eyes up from the ground and the instrument that would’ve been Bellamy’s death, she sees an arrow protruding from Nia’s shoulder. The look on her face is murderous, but Clarke doesn’t have time to cower away because she’s focused on the Queen’s sword, lying useless at Bellamy’s side (he’s not moving, oh god he’s not moving—).

Clarke doesn’t care how it happened. She’s about to run to him, to do whatever it takes to keep him breathing, when out of the corner of her eye, she sees Ontari lunge for her again. But then the Queen is biting back a scream as another arrow finds its way into her thigh. Clarke turns to look at its source, and a wave of confusion barrels through her when she finds Roan still standing where she escaped him only moments ago, this time with a bow and arrow in hand and disgust marring his features.

“Move an inch, and I put one through her eye,” he tells Ontari.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Nia hisses.

“Don’t think I won’t, Mother.”

He cocks his arrow and the three of them stare each other down, an eddy of tension whipping around the room and coiling Clarke’s nerves into an even more tightly wound ball. She spares their standstill one more second, waits to see if any more arrows will go flying, and then her attention is snapping back to Bellamy. She doesn’t wait for Roan’s okay; she scrambles to her feet and barrels forward, stumbling over herself, frantic. (the distance between them suddenly seems staggering, and for every step she takes, Bellamy’s crumpled form seems that much farther away.) She finally skids to a stop on her knees beside him, pushing her hands into the bloody mess of his neck, blanching at all of the red that coats her fingers.

But when Bellamy groans, when she blinks back the haze of panic, she sees that it’s not as deep as it looks, thank god. His eyes are fluttering open and darting up and down, back and forth, until they finally settle on her face and soften. There’s pressure at her elbow, Bellamy’s trembling fingers flitting across her skin, and he’s scanning her face, her arms, her shoulders. And it just kills her because he’s checking to see if she’s injured while he’s covered in bruises and lying in a pool of his own blood on the floor.

The sudden urge to laugh (in a deranged sort of way) wars with all of her worry and lingering terror, all of her frustration because why does he have to be so goddamn selfless all the time—

Everything else falls away until it’s just the two of them, dumbstruck with relief, his name a breathless sob on her lips. He tries to return the favor, but blood only bubbles up from beneath her hands; he gags until Clarke snaps out of her reverie, turns his head while rivulets of crimson wind their way toward the floor. She rips off the end of her shirt (she doesn’t have time to worry if it’s sterile or not) and threads it under his neck, knotting it at the side. Blood immediately begins to dot the makeshift bandage’s surface, but it’ll have to make do for now.

She lifts a shaking hand and brushes the curls from his forehead, runs soothing circles over his temple with the pad of her thumb until his breathing steadies and he’s turning back to look at her. When his eyes meet hers, she laces her next words with a courage she hasn’t felt in months—because nothing has felt quite so important, so fundamentally right, in months.

“I’m going to get you out of here, Bellamy. I promise.”

Bellamy’s bound hands find her knee and squeeze, and the look on his face reminds her so much of that day they first opened up to each other, when he called himself a monster: raw and vulnerable and lost. In need of a lifeline. Some hope. Her. As she watches the awe wash away the hopelessness, she stares in awe right back. She hopes he knows just how much she needs him, because as many times as she’s told him, shown him, she doesn’t think he believes it.

Roan’s gruff voice cuts through the calm. “Time to go, Wanheda.”

Clarke takes one more second to bask in the rightness (amidst all the wrong) of this moment, and then she nods. She leverages an arm under Bellamy and tries to readjust when he hisses in pain, but it’s like no matter where she touches him, it hurts. She throws all of her strength into lifting him up, doing her best to shoulder his weight as they slowly struggle to standing (she’s trying, but she can tell that he’s still doing most of the work). When they finally make it to wobbly legs, he slumps into her side and chokes down heaving breaths, skin slick with sweat and body shaking like a leaf.

Each tremor sends a new wave of determination coursing through Clarke, sharpening her dread and uncertainty into a steely resolve until her willpower alone is dragging Bellamy farther and farther from the Queen and her bloody blade, from Ontari and her bared teeth. They stumble to Roan’s side and the refuge afforded by his still nocked arrow, and only have a second’s rest before Roan is shuffling backward and ushering them behind him.

“Traitor,” Ontari spits.

Roan doesn’t slow his retreat. “If that’s what you want to call it.”

“Lexa was right to banish you,” Nia sneers. “You are no longer my son.”

“Can’t say I’m too broken up about it.” (but Clarke can see the way his jaw tightens.)

She thinks that Nia snarls something else, but she barely registers it because as soon as they clear the room, Roan is veering sharply to the right, leading them down a narrow corridor. As they rush ahead, Clarke hears shouts coming from the throne room behind them, and it’s like they can’t move fast enough. They make another right and come to a dead end and Clarke wants to scream at Roan because isn’t this his palace? doesn’t he see that Bellamy can’t go back there—?

But then Roan is yanking aside a faded tapestry, revealing a hidden passageway carved into the stone of the wall. He pushes them through, and out of the corner of her eye, Clarke sees him set something on the ground. But she doesn’t have time to examine it because he’s suddenly shoving them down and folding himself over them. There’s a loud boom, and dust and chunks of debris rain down around them, caking her in a thick layer of soot and confusion.

All Clarke can hear is a ringing in her ears, and everything is blurry, out of focus (everything hurts). The only thing tethering her to reality is her arm around Bellamy’s back, his face turned into the crook of her neck. She doesn’t move until she feels him stir, his harsh breaths fanning across her skin, and then she fists a shaky hand in his shirt and drags herself to sitting.

When Roan shifts away, Clarke sees the entryway behind him, now blocked by piles of blackened stone and a cloud of heavy smoke. He catches his breath and readjusts his armor. “That should slow them down.”

“Where did you get a bomb?”

“Under the Mountain. The other clans wouldn’t touch any of the technology they left behind, but my Mother’s never been one to play fair.”

“Neither were they,” Bellamy groans.

Clarke’s attention whips back to him. “Bellamy! Are you all right?” (she knows that it’s a stupid question, because of course he’s not.) Her fingers run frantically up and down his arms, over his chest, and she finds herself wishing that her touch alone could heal him, wash away the blood and clean up the cuts and bruises until he’s as fresh-faced as he was that first day at the Dropship. When they were all so naïve. When the only casualty of her weakness was her Father (instead of the hundreds that litter the graveyards of her conscience now).

Bellamy lifts his still bound hands and wraps them gently around one of her own, stilling its frenzied movements. “I’m fine,” he whispers.

(she’s never heard a bigger lie in her life.)

She’s about to tell him as much, but then Roan is shouldering her out of the way. “You can fuss over him later.” He unsheathes a blade at his belt and cuts through the ropes binding Bellamy’s wrists together. She’s grateful, because why didn’t she think of that, but she can’t help but blanch at the mangled skin they leave in their wake.

Roan leans forward and slings an arm under Bellamy’s torso, grunting as he hauls him to his feet, and wastes no time in hurrying farther into the passageway. When Clarke stands to follow, it takes a second to get used to the sensation of no longer having Bellamy’s weight at her side (the sudden loss of contact is like a phantom limb; it’s been three months and she doesn’t want to stop touching him now—), but then she’s gaining her bearings and hastening after them.

As they make their way forward, she keeps one eye on the path ahead and the other on Bellamy’s hunched form, the arsenal of weapons strapped to Roan’s back. She distantly wonders how he can see so well when the only light comes from the occasional grate in the ceiling. “I spent a lot of time down here as a child,” he explains when he notices her stare. “These tunnels are a labyrinth—she won’t catch our trail until we’re long gone.”

“Not to sound ungrateful,” Bellamy says, voice so gravelly Clarke has to strain to understand him, “but if it was always your plan to escape down here… why did you wait so long?”

“You were always too heavily guarded. And then when they brought her in”—he shoots a look at Clarke—“I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone. Fewer chances to get caught.”

“But how did you know Nia wouldn’t have guards swarming the place?” Clarke asks.

“My Mother’s always been arrogant. I knew she’d eventually try something—slip up and think she could handle you by herself.”

Clarke grits her teeth. “I’ve been underestimated by more than my fair share of people.”

“If I hadn’t been there, you wouldn’t have made it out,” Roan says, matter-of-fact. “For someone who’s supposed to command death, you really aren’t all that dangerous.”

Clarke feels a pang shoot through her chest as she remembers just how useless she was (when it mattered most, when it was more than her life on the line, when Bellamy might’ve—). She mulls over his words, and even though they’re meant as an insult, she finds that they don’t bother her much at all. “Not in the traditional sense, no,” she sighs.

Roan glances at her out of the corner of his eye, expression rife with understanding and something else she can’t quite place, and then he picks up the pace and doesn’t say anything else. They make the rest of their way in silence, turning down crumbling corridors and dodging curtains of cobwebs until the darkness slowly fades into light and the sounds of a forest replace Bellamy’s choking wheezes and her rapidly pounding heart. They make one last turn, and then they’re outside, a single thought coursing through her and leaving a bout of renewed energy in its wake.

(freefreefree)

As soon as their feet hit packed earth and frozen grass, Roan eases Bellamy off of his shoulder and helps position him around Clarke: her hand wrapped around his waist, his arm thrown across her shoulders, sides pressed up against one another. He’s leaning heavily against her, muscles tense beneath her fingers, and he’s shivering so violently that it’s all she can do to keep hold of him.

“My Mother doesn’t know about this exit,” Roan says. “You’re in the clear for now.”

Clarke angles toward him. “Why? You must’ve been the one who told her about us in the first place.”

“I shouldn’t have done that. I wanted to get back in her good graces. I didn’t know she’d have occasion to actually do anything about it.”

“But she did. And she won’t stop trying.”

Roan appraises her for a moment, studying the blood trickling down the length of Bellamy’s torso and onto the hand she has wrapped around it. And as she follows the path of his gaze, the furrow of his brow and the stark line of his mouth, Clarke knows that he means it. She’s not easily inclined toward trust, but she recognizes something in his expression that screams sincerity.

“I haven’t agreed with my Mother in a long time. There’s no honor in this—it’s barbaric,” he says. “You and I have a lot more in common than we originally thought, Wanheda. You’re not the only one who’s lost someone you care about to my Mother’s schemes.”

Clarke is about to ask who he means, but then Bellamy is suddenly stiffening at her side. She jerks her head toward him, assuming the worst. But she’s only greeted with the sickly sheen of his skin, the gauntness of his cheeks, and she’s drowning in a new swell of guilt because she knows that standing around is only making his condition worse.

“We need to leave. Now.”

Roan nods. “Here.” He unlaces a pouch from his belt and loops it over her neck. “Medical supplies. Figured you’d need them after I helped you escape.”

“Where are we going?”

“There’s a cave not too far from here—head due east and you’ll hit a wall of ivy. It’s hidden behind. I don’t imagine you’ll make it much farther than that.” He shoots Bellamy a knowing look when another shudder wracks his body.

Clarke narrows her eyes. “What about you?”

“I’ll meet you in a couple of hours. I need to wrap up a few loose ends before we leave.”

Clarke searches his expression, trying to find any hint of a lie (that this is some elaborate ruse, that he’s planning to drag them back to the Queen to string them both up this time—). But then she remembers the pain in his words (someone you care about), and the last of her suspicion leaves her. She musters all of her gratitude, all of her joy at Bellamy being alive, and looks up at Roan. “Thank you.”

He simply nods and unsheathes the blade at his back. “Don’t thank me yet.” And then he turns on his heel and disappears into the black.

For a moment, she watches him ago, already missing the blanket of his protection and his cool-headed certainty. But then Bellamy groans. He’s barely conscious—head lolling onto his chest, eyelids fluttering open and closed. Clarke shuts out the incessant voice telling her that this is all her fault (even though it is, dammit) and instead focuses on the fact that, right now, Bellamy needs her. Because even when he’s angry with her, doesn’t agree with her, he’s always been there for her when she needed him most (when Dax’s body lay at their feet, standing in the shadow of Finn’s funeral pyre, in Dante’s control room, even after she abandoned him at the gates—), and it’s finally her chance to be there for him.

So she shoves aside her guilt, her insecurity and fatigue, and puts one foot in front of the other: left, right, left right. She focuses on Bellamy’s harsh breaths, the weight of his arm across her shoulders. The fact that he’s right here. That she’s never letting him go again.

“I’m getting you out of here, Bellamy. I’m not going to let her touch you again.”

“Us...” he mumbles.

Clarke furrows her brow. “What?”

“You’re getting us out of here,” he says. “Because if someone finds us… and you try to pull some self-sacrificial crap? I’m not leaving you… and then we’re both dead.” His words are halting, labored, but his intensity comes through all the same.

Warmth spreads through Clarke’s chest despite it all. “You’re starting to sound delirious.”

Bellamy makes a noise, and Clarke’s not positive, but it almost sounds like a laugh. “I’m still not sure if I’ve lost it… and this is all a dream.” And his voice is so quiet, she’s not sure if he meant for her to hear him at all.

They make their way east through the dawning light of the forest for a while, Clarke mumbling meaningless words of encouragement as Bellamy’s hold on her grows weaker and weaker, his faltering steps slower and slower. She finally spots a copse of ivy, the sight of it cutting through her exhaustion. They stumble through the vines and are greeted by a small cave, mossy walls lit by a natural skylight above their heads. When they clear the entrance, all of Clarke’s adrenaline leaves her and she deflates right along with it, both of them collapsing to the dirt in a tangle of heaving chests and tired limbs.

As soon as they hit the ground, Bellamy hisses in pain and curls into a ball, arms wrapped tightly around his torso and teeth drawing new blood from his cracked lips.

Clarke is immediately chastising herself and her useless limbs and her stupid fatigue and how could she be so careless— She darts forward until she’s hovering over him, hands just shy of landing. “Shit. I’m sorry, I—let me see—”

“Just gimme… a sec,” he moans.

He lies there, trembling and trying to bite back the pain, looking more vulnerable than he ever has before. She places a hand over one of his and squeezes, lending him all the strength she wishes she felt. When the tension finally leaves his body, he rolls onto his back and Clarke scoots forward so that his head lands in her lap. His eyes drift to Clarke’s, and they stare at each other in disbelief, a burgeoning sense of relief overriding all of Clarke’s anxiety and her single-minded drive to escape.

They drink this moment in until Bellamy raises a hand to the blood on his neck. “It’s funny…”

Clarke frowns. “What is?”

“Jasper.”

“What?”

“A few weeks ago, Ice Nation slit Jasper’s throat too.”

Clarke stares at him, incredulous. And then her mouth betrays her, quirking up at a corner. “I’ve never met anybody with such a morbid sense of humor.”

Bellamy’s answering chuckle dissolves into a fit of coughing and culminates in a “… fuck, that hurts.”

“Shh—shhhh. Stop talking, Bellamy,” she chides. “I need to take a look at your neck. It’s not that deep, but Nia—”

At that, he suddenly lifts his arm until he’s squeezing her elbow, grip tight in spite of how unsteady he is. His eyes dart frantically between her face and the mouth of the cave, and he looks as panicked as she’s ever seen him. “No—no. You need to get out of here. Before she finds us.”

Clarke flinches in surprise. “What?”

“She can’t—I can’t… god… What if she takes it out on you and—”

(Clarke knows that the blood loss is starting to disorient him, and in his eyes she can see what remains of the hopelessness he’s been fighting for who knows how many days.)

“Bellamy, no—”

“You need to leave. I’ll be fine on my own. I always am, so—”

Clarke lays a palm firmly on his cheek, willing him to calm down. “Bellamy. If you think that’s even an option, you really are delirious.” And she expects it to be a battle—for him to tear his eyes from hers while he works out an argument, to challenge her on this like he always does. But he doesn’t. He just stares at her in a distant sort of way that confuses her because she can’t quite tell what it means (because if there’s one thing she knows about the two of them, it’s that they’ve never needed words to communicate). His sudden hysteria is leaving him, his features softening, and when he speaks, his voice is almost as unguarded as his expression is.

“… I wonder about that myself sometimes.”

He holds her gaze, and for a moment, it looks like he’s going to say more (like he wants her to understand). But then he sighs and shuts his eyes, his breathing leveling off as exhaustion finally wins and he succumbs to sleep.

Clarke knows that it’s just the shock winding through him that’s causing the rapid swings in his emotions, that he’s not really making sense and probably won’t remember a thing he’s said since they escaped. But, sometimes, she thinks about the things she’d do (has done) for this man, and she can’t help but wonder the same thing.

For a moment, she revels in the steady rise and fall of Bellamy’s chest, and then she steels her nerves and channels all the medical training she’s avoided since she slid a knife in between Finn’s ribs. She needs to remove the tattered remains of his shirt because that’s where the worst of it will be, but she’s afraid to wake him up from what might be his most restful sleep in days (afraid to see all the damage that lies beneath). So, instead, Clarke turns to his most recent injury. She removes the pouch from around her neck, rifling through it for supplies. When she finds what she needs, she gingerly removes the fraying cloth from around his throat and sets about re-cleaning the cut, wiping away the drying blood and packing it with some sort of medicinal herb. It really isn’t as deep as it seemed, but as she takes in the state of the rest of his body, she knows that it’s too soon to be thankful.

Once she’s done, she starts on the rest of his visible wounds—on the mangled skin of his wrists, the cuts littering his face, the open sores of his bloodied nail beds. With each dab of her medicine-soaked cloth, each layering of gauze, she dives deeper and deeper into her own guilt—now that she’s no longer running on anything but adrenaline, now that they’re safe (for now), it all comes crashing back over her, dragging her down into its depths until it’s all she can taste, hear, feel.

The last three months have done nothing to dampen it, the burden of so much death, so many lives extinguished by her hand (i am become death, destroyer of worlds). Ever since she pulled that lever all those months ago, incinerated an entire army of Grounders, she’s been the linchpin of so much destruction and suffering that “Wanheda” seems less like a stranger and more like an old friend. She’s like a ticking time bomb: wherever she goes, she detonates, decimating the people around her and leaving only rubble in her wake. Bellamy is only the latest victim to be buried under the consequences of her good (selfish) intentions, but somehow, seeing what she’s done to him hurts worse than anything else has.

Clarke brushes the curls from his forehead and tries to find the man beneath all of the blood and bruises, tries to focus on the constellations of freckles that paint his cheeks, the chronic downturn of his brow, the scar on his upper lip. If she pictures it hard enough, it’s almost as if she can see through all the marks the war(s) carved into his skin, the unwanted burdens this world has dumped on his shoulders. And it takes her back to a simpler time, when Mt. Weather was nothing but an abstract idea, when whatever the hell we want was their greatest enemy. But then she remembers what she told him then (we don’t decide who lives and dies—not down here), and she can’t help but sneer at the irony of what she’s become. She’s not sure if she wants to go back to that time or if she wishes they had never made it to the ground in the first place.

She blinks back the sudden wetness in her eyes and is surprised to find Bellamy staring back at her.

“Hey,” he breathes.

Clarke tries to smile down at him, but all she can manage is a slightly less severe frown. “Hey.”

“I fell asleep?”

“Not too long ago.”

Bellamy swallows. “Are we…?”

“Safe as we can be. Roan said he’d meet us here in a few hours.”

Bellamy cocks an eyebrow. “And you trust him?”

“Right now, he’s the only option we’ve got.”

Bellamy looks like he maybe wants to argue (Clarke distinctly remembers when Roan was the one holding a sword to his throat barely a week ago), but then he’s nodding his head and struggling to a sitting position.

“Easy,” Clarke mumbles, laying a hand on his shoulder for support, the clinical part of her cataloguing how his muscles twitch and shudder, which parts of him seem to hurt the worst. She bites down on everything she wants to say to him in an attempt to appear rational, level-headed. Bellamy doesn’t need a sniveling mess of tears and apologies—he needs a doctor, and right now, she’s as close as he’s going to get.

“I’ve already taken a look at your face and arms, but I need to see what else they did.” She swallows the dread coating her throat. “Can you lift your shirt up?”

Without meeting her eyes, he starts to raise his arms, but then he winces and jerks to a stop. When he tries again, he makes it only half as far before he shrinks back again and grits his teeth in frustration. “I don’t think I… fuck—”

Clarke digs her fingers into her thighs, tries to redirect all of her anger at the monsters who did this to him. But if the concern in his expression is any indication, it’s not working.

So she releases her tension on an exhale. “Here. Let me.” She rises to her knees and grabs the back of his shirt, slowly draws it over his head and down the length of his arms. When she finally tugs it off and casts it aside, comprehends the full extent of his torture, all her attempts at rationality desert her and she can barely contain the bile that rises in her throat.

Bruises of various shapes and sizes mar his skin, painting him in a macabre array of purples, blues, and blacks. There are lacerations scabbing over with dried blood, sores and masses of ruined skin where it looks like he’s been burned (blistered and oozing like the bodies in Mt. Weather, and she doesn’t even want to know how—). Over top of it all is a maze of gashes and whip marks that bleed into one another until she can’t tell where his injuries begin and end. She tries to concentrate on what little of him remains untouched, but the patches of clear, tan skin are so few and far between that she can’t help but remember that day she slid a knife into Atom’s broken body a lifetime ago—except, this time, her role is not one of mercy, but of fault (she may as well have slit Bellamy’s throat herself).

She knows that what she sees is only a snapshot of the agony Bellamy must have felt (must be feeling), and it sickens her, sends nausea roiling down to her very core. She wants to do nothing more than rush out of the cave and suck in mouthfuls of fresh air, bury her face in her hands and scream at the sky about how unfair it all is (about how he doesn’t deserve this and how it should’ve been her—why couldn’t it have been her?).

But that won’t solve anything.

So she raises an unsteady hand and lets it hover just shy of a burn on his abdomen, tracing the space above it with her fingers.

“How are you not dead?”

“Strong-willed,” he grunts.

“I need to clean this before it gets infected.” Clarke clenches her hand into a fist. “It’s going to hurt.”

Bellamy just shrugs and breaks eye contact, shifting his body so that she has easier access.

But Clarke is still riding the wave of emotion threatening to overtake her. Even though she knows that he needs her to keep it together (that she’s failing, miserably), she doesn’t want to hear his groans, the sounds he must’ve made while the Queen laid into him. She doesn’t want her hands to be yet another architect of his destruction. And maybe that’s selfish of her, but she can’t cause him any more pain—because she knows that, ever since she sent him into the Mountain all those months ago, watched his face fall and his gaze harden, that’s all she’s done.

(iwasbeingweak

it’sworththerisk

ibearitsotheydon’thaveto

maywemeetagain

i’msorry)

“I’m serious, Bellamy. I—I don’t want to hurt you any more than you already have been.” She starts rummaging through Roan’s medicine bag at her side. “Maybe there’s something in here that can knock you out for a few hours. At least then you won’t be awake while I—”

Bellamy catches her wrist in his fingers and lowers it between them. “Clarke,” he breathes. “It’s not the same.”

Shame wells up inside of her and radiates outward until it feels as tangible as the air around them. “I may not have wielded the blade, but it’s me they were after.” He can’t argue with her, because they both know it’s true.

But Bellamy only tightens his grip on her and runs a thumb over the erratic beat of her pulse. “Please don’t blame yourself.”

Clarke hears the lifeline in his words, hears how badly he wants her to just grab hold and believe him (how much it reminds her of a quiet homecoming, of the shadow of the Ark over their heads, of a quavering voice and a heartfelt plea—please come inside). But she also hears the hoarseness in his voice, scraped raw from god knows how many days of screams. She hears the sound his body made when Nia slit his throat and he crumpled to the ground like a rag doll.

She hears her silent screams when she thought he was dead.

She knows that she doesn’t deserve his forgiveness, not when she threw it away so easily last time; not when, were it not for her, he’d be whole and safe and leading his people far away in Arkadia. Where he belongs. Where he thrives. Not bleeding out in a cave in the middle of nowhere. She fixes her gaze pointedly on the fingers he has wrapped around her wrist. “I should get started so you have time to rest before Roan gets back.”

Bellamy shoots her one last wary look, but then he sighs, releases her and lets his arms drop to his sides. She leans forward until she’s in the circle of his bent knees and gets to work. She dabs at his injuries, disinfecting them, wiping off the dried blood covering his chest, cutting away the dead skin and prodding his bruises for broken ribs. With every touch, he flinches away from her, but he stays mercifully silent. It kills her that it’s partly for her sake, and she wants to scold him for holding back, for pretending that he’s alright. But then she reminds herself that this is probably as in control as he’s felt in days, and she knows that she can’t take that away from him.

So she simply pulls out a suture kit when she’s finished cleaning away the worst of it and begins to stitch him back together. This time, he can’t muffle his winces or the way his breathing has picked up again, coming out in fits and bursts, a harsh staccato made worse by how feverish his body feels, how his skin throbs beneath her touch. She works her way down his torso until her needle lingers on a particularly grisly cut, lined with jagged edges and spanning the width of his stomach. She thinks that it must’ve taken a while to make.

“My guards got bored pretty quickly,” Bellamy says, voice so quiet she has to strain to hear him. “Moved from one… method to the next, but nothing ever lasted long.”

Clarke grinds her teeth. “What were you doing in Azgeda territory in the first place?” she asks, trying to distract him (both of them) from both the memories and the steady rhythm of her needle through flesh.

“Got intel that they had you.”

“You think it was a trap?”

Bellamy nods.

“And you didn’t take anybody with you?”

“No time. I was by myself when I found out.”

Clarke frowns. “Reckless.”

“Always have been.”

Unbidden, a corner of her mouth quirks up, but she quashes it down as soon as it comes and gets back to work.

For a while, only their breathing penetrates the heavy silence in the air, harsh and unsteady in tandem. When she finishes with his front, she crawls out from between his knees, studiously avoiding his gaze, and sidles behind him. And when she sees what awaits her, she gasps.

“Bellamy, your back…” she whispers.

Bellamy hunches his shoulders and scoffs. “They said they didn’t want to attack a man who had his back turned. That it was dishonorable.”

Clarke takes in the smooth expanse of skin, the only signs of his ordeal a fine sheen of sweat and stray smudges of dirt. She can’t reconcile how undamaged it is from the rest of him, how if he doesn’t turn around, she can almost pretend that there’s nothing wrong.

The harsh juxtaposition is what finally breaks her. She places a trembling palm in between his shoulder blades and sucks in a shaky breath that causes everything she’s been holding back to mutiny, rebel against her crumbling defenses. The words come tumbling from her mouth, shattered and miserable and rife with every emotion she’s been battling since it all began but hasn’t been able to voice until now.

“I’m sorry this happened to you, Bellamy. I’m so, so sorry.” And she feels like she’s suffocating on it.

“Clarke…” Bellamy starts.

But she just shudders. Feels the shame down to her very core, clawing its way through her and taking root. Grounding her to a reality she wants nothing more than to be free of. Bellamy must sense the storm of her emotions because he’s suddenly softening his posture and leaning into her touch, the bitterness in his voice smoothing away its sharp edges.

“It’s nothing I can’t handle. I’ve already been through this—at Mt. Weather.”

Clarke is reminded of another time she sent Bellamy to his suffering. “I’m sorry about that too,” she whispers.

“No, Clarke… I didn’t mean—” He huffs out a harsh breath. “Stop apologizing all the time!”

She grits her teeth. “I told you you wouldn’t be by yourself, but I—I sent you into the Mountain to die. You came here because you were looking for me. How can you ever forgive me?”

But Bellamy just shakes his head. “That wasn’t your fault, and neither was this. I made my own decisions. I told you, I—” He cuts off, swallows and tries again, this time an undercurrent of levity in his words. “I told you before—I don’t take orders from you.”

But that just makes Clarke angrier. “Bellamy, stop. Stop trying to downplay this, it’s—” (why does he insist on trivializing his pain, why can’t he just be selfish sometimes?)

“It’s not that I’m downplaying it, Clarke,” he says quietly. “It’s just that… talking about it will just make it more real.” He takes a deep breath. “You’re the only thing I’ve wanted to be real for days.”

From her vantage point behind him, she can see the outline of his jaw as it twitches in that way that it does when he’s angry with himself, unsure. He’s clenching his fists to stop them from shaking, and it’s slowly hollowing her out where her heart should be, carving into her chest cavity and filling it with such dread, such knowing, that she starts shaking as well. She knows what he’s going to say next with the kind of certainty that comes when you’re free falling and you can see your end racing to meet you, the kind she’s become all too familiar with since they landed on the ground and we are apogee became we’re not alone.

When Bellamy finally speaks again, his voice comes out a tattered version of itself. “They said that they’d had you for days. That what they were doing to me was nothing compared to what they’d already done to you. That they—that they liked how you screamed.”

Clarke lets out a half-sob. She knows how he’s feeling (has been feeling the same since Ontari paraded him into the throne room and her imagination ran wild). The thought of someone hurting him instead of her, in front of her, is too much to handle, and she can barely contain the revulsion that threatens to overtake her.

She wants nothing more than to hold him and soothe it all away. To remind him that she’s still here. That she hasn’t been hurt in the way he has. To tether him to the physicality of her, of them together, both still breathing. Living.

So she does.

She threads her arms under his and wraps them over his chest where she knows he’s fairly uninjured, resting her cheek on his shoulder. He stiffens in pain, but when she makes to pull away, he stops her with a hand on top of one of her own.

“Don’t,” he breathes.

(his voice is gravelly, and it rumbles in her chest, centering and unmooring her all at once.)

“I’m sorry.” Her lips whisper along his neck. “I shouldn’t have stayed in Polis. If I had just gone back with you…”

But Bellamy just shakes his head. “No—you don’t understand, Clarke. You left me—everyone—and for the longest time, I resented you for that.”

Clarke lets out a watery exhale.

“But, if you had stayed, I’m not sure you really would’ve been there anyway. So I understand why you had to leave. I get that. But that didn’t stop the fear. Every time I looked out the gates, I imagined you out there alone. Cold. In danger… And these past few days, when they told me they had you… it was like it had all come true. Strung up while those bastards—” His shoulders start to shudder. “I can’t—fuck…”

And when his voice cracks, what’s left of her composure cracks right along with it. Tears slide down her face as her lips start to tremble, as her arms tighten their hold on him.

“I don’t want to lose you. Thinking about it made me realize… it doesn’t matter why you left. Why you stayed in Polis. I don’t care. All that matters is you’re all right.”

Clarke doesn’t have time to let that sink in before she’s suddenly releasing her hold on him. Bellamy grunts in protest, but then she’s crawling back in front of him until she’s sitting in between his bent knees and enveloping his clenched fists in her hands, catching his gaze so they can’t hide from each other anymore. His features are arranged in such anguish that the hole where her heart was is suddenly mending itself back together and shattering into pieces again all at once, buoyed on a cloud of grief and gratitude and regret and, most of all, Bellamy.

She leans forward until their foreheads are touching (slowly, so slowly), and waits for him to pull away, to maintain the undefinable distance that’s always been between them. When he doesn’t, she relaxes and breathes him in.

“You won’t lose me, Bellamy. I’m right here.”

He blinks at her, eyelashes fluttering like they do when he doesn’t believe her, when she tries to tell him just how much he means to her (ineedyou—can’tloseyou—knewyouwould). He looks so much like he did that day outside of Camp Jaha. When he asked her where you gonna go? and the desperation in his eyes nearly convinced her to stay.

“It was the same for me, never knowing if you were okay. Pulling that lever… if it tormented you as much as it did me.”

Bellamy disentangles one of his hands from hers and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, fingers lingering at her cheek. “I wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay. You leaving? That killed me. It felt like… like I was missing a part of myself. I know we’ve only been on the ground for a few months now, that we led entirely separate lives on the Ark… but I feel like I’ve known you my whole life.”

Clarke nods her assent and lays a palm over the one he has on her cheek, needing to feel the warmth of him against her, wanting him as close as possible.

“You always say how much you need me, but… I don’t think you’ve ever realized how much I need you too,” he says.

She’s surprised when there’s no niggling feelings of doubt. When she sees the certainty, the weaknesslove, in the set of his features. Sometime over their time at the Dropship, her self-imposed isolation, the nightmare of the past few hours, what i did to get them here has truly become what we did. And while the guilt and grief will never entirely go away, she looks at Bellamy and she knows that she doesn’t have to bear the weight by herself anymore.

“I wasn’t ready to face my demons before,” she says. “I was scared that you would all look at me and only see a monster. That I’d look in the mirror and not know who I was anymore.”

“Clarke…” Bellamy says, “I know who you are.” (and his voice is soft, so soft.)

Clarke smiles. “I know you do.”

“You don’t have to do this alone.”

And instead of the response that used to come so easily (i bear it so they don’t have to), she leans deeper into the curve of their bodies and vows, “Neither do you. No more running away. Whatever happens next, we face it. Together.”

He nods. “Together.”

With that promise, Clarke thinks she could sit like this for hours, basking in their faith in each other, the knowledge that they’re both safe and here and real. Marveling at just how much she missed this. Them. Because for the first time since she escaped the Mountain and ran into his arms, she feels pure joy.

Bellamy’s voice is what finally breaks the spell.

“I guess this makes up for Roan stabbing me in the leg.”

Clarke lets out a half-sniffle, half-laugh. She reluctantly lowers his hand from her face, pulls back and wipes away the lingering tears (but she leaves her fingers clasped over his—she doesn’t want to stop touching him. she can’t, not when she was so close to losing him). “But he’s also the reason we were even there in the first place.”

“True. But it’s not like we can be picky right now.” He sighs. “So what now?”

“Now, we wait.” Clarke shrugs. “You can tell me what I missed. How everyone is doing.”

Bellamy fingers a lock of her hair, still pink with fading red. “Why don’t you tell me about this first?”

“I think I’m making up for skipping over my teenage angst phase.”

“Princess with a rebellious streak—all you need now is a tattoo. What will your mother think?”

Clarke snorts. “Nothing good.”

Bellamy winces as he chuckles, but the pang of guilt she expects is instead a pang of relief. She takes in his battered body, but instead of focusing on the pain carved into his skin, she focuses on the smile playing at his lips, the feel of his hands in hers, the steadiness in his gaze. They’re both broken, damaged in different ways. But no matter how many times they shatter, lose the pieces of who they used to be, she knows that they’ll always be there to glue each other back together. Instead of running away from their pasts and the responsibility chasing their every step, they’ll face it. Because you don’t ease pain—you overcome it.

Together.

For the first time in a long time, Clarke feels free. Centered. And as she looks into Bellamy’s eyes, she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt: Nia was wrong. Her friends—Bellamy—aren’t her weakness. They’re her strength.

And she’s not planning on leaving them ever again.

Miller and Harper are the only ones who seem as confused as he does by just how thoroughly everything’s changed since they were last surrounded by fresh air and trees instead of concrete walls and lies. They’re the only ones who were imprisoned in the Mountain alongside him, who can really understand the horror of what he’s been through. And even then, they can never truly understand because they weren’t in that control room when he pulled up those access codes and flooded Level 5 with an influx of death. Because, when they returned to Arkadia, their parents were waiting for them with open arms and smiling faces. Because, when they walked through the gates and he scanned the crowds, the gnawing truth set in: his parents weren’t the ones who made it down.

He’s happy for them, he is. But sometimes, it feels like he’s under a constant barrage of Miller and his Dad patrolling the walls together, Miller and his Dad grabbing a drink together, Miller and his Dad existing together. He sees the two of them, and he can’t help the jealously he feels bubbling up from within, can’t help how, in the darkest corners of his soul, he wishes that it was his parents alive instead, David Miller a comet of burning debris in the atmosphere. He knows that all of the Ark stations that fell from the sky aren’t accounted for, that there’s still a chance his parents could be alive, but it’s been a month and, every day, his hopes dwindle. Just another mark to add to the growing list of people he’s lost since the Dropship landed all those months ago.

He’s been trying to focus on all of the people he does still have with him, but it’s not as easy as it sounds, and he’s found that throwing himself into the work of rebuilding Arkadia is one of the easiest ways to shove the memories from the forefront of his mind. Planting vegetables in what arable land they do have (he’s one of the few delinquents left from Farm station), helping Sinclair wire electricity through the debris of the Ark, assisting the rest of the engineers with odds and ends around camp.

Which reminds him about that loose panel in hangar bay two that Sinclair asked him to fix.

Monty stuffs his hands farther into his pockets and makes his way toward the Mess Hall, hoping to grab something quick before he starts (hoping to avoid the path that takes him directly adjacent to the wall and the guards that man it). As he approaches and the doors part with an audible hiss, Monty lifts his eyes from the floor and then stops dead in his tracks.

Sitting at a table directly across from the bar is a mess of hunched shoulders, disheveled hair, unkempt stubble. Of course, of course, he’s got a cup of moonshine in hand, alcohol dribbling off of his chin.

Monty’s hands fidget in their pockets.

He tries not to dwell on how early it is and how Jasper looks like he hasn’t left his seat all night. But he knows that that’s an impossible task—that he can’t just shut all of his worry away—so he counts the number of empty bottles that litter the table and he immediately knows that today is going to be even worse than usual. If that’s even possible.

Lately, Jasper’s entire being has become a veritable minefield of hostile glares, drunken arguments, reckless behavior, and Monty doesn’t know where to step to avoid the rubble that remains of his broken best friend. It’s like Jasper doesn’t even care what happens to himself (to anyone) anymore. He’s constantly picking fights with the guard, Lincoln, Bellamy. His name has become synonymous with “provocation,” his presence followed by hushed whispered and nervous glances whenever he enters a room. And when he does, everyone looks to Monty as if he’s Jasper’s keeper, as if he can just wave a wand and magically make him better.

But Monty can’t perform miracles, especially when they have no interest in even trying to be performed.

Honestly, Jasper’s complete and utter disregard for his own well-being is really starting to piss Monty off. So he decides that he’s not going to be cowardly about it; he rallies his courage and starts forward, planting himself in the seat across from Jasper and setting his gaze on the man who used to be (still is) his brother.

“Hey,” he says, and he means for it to come out confident, sure of itself, but it only comes out as a pathetic whisper.

Jasper’s eyes flick over to him for the briefest of moments, and then he’s staring down into his glass again. “Hey.”

At least it’s not the silent treatment.

Monty leans forward and laces his hands together in front of him. “Did you sleep at all last night?”

Jasper ignores him, circling a finger along the edge of his glass with a quiet but constant screech.

“When was the last time you were in your quarters?”

“Have you been eating lately?”

“Have you talked to Abby lately?”

In between each question, the screech of the glass continues. And more than Jasper’s sullen glares, his quiet scorn, the guilt that will never stop gnawing, it’s that sounds that breaks through all of Monty’s carefully laid defenses. His hands begin to shake in a way that he’s immediately ashamed of because Jasper hasn’t said anything yet but he knows, he knows, how this is going to go. So his voice quavers when he finally chokes it out. “Talk to me. Please.” So much for confidence.

Jasper’s finger finally halts its movement. “What do you want, Monty?”

“I—I want you to understand. I want you to get better.”

Jasper laughs (a mangled sort of sound that grates on Monty, taunts him). “Not possible.”

“I don’t know how many more times I can tell you ‘I’m sorry.’”

Jasper’s gaze is stony when he finally drags it up to Monty. “You can start with 381 times. One for each one of the people you murdered.”

That hits Monty like a punch to the gut, almost knocks the wind out of him. He knows that he had no choice, that he had to do it, but he’ll do anything to get back to some semblance of normal, to patch Jasper back together. “If that’s what it takes.”

His best friend doesn’t bother to hide his contempt as he rips his eyes away and goes back to circling his glass. After a moment of heavy silence (that is suffocating Monty, that’s louder than anything he’s ever heard before), he finally says, “You and Clarke should have just let me die.”

Monty goes hollow all over. “You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t I? Death by spear certainly seems a lot faster than death by heartache.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Monty scoffs (it comes out more like a plea).

“It seems like a pretty dramatic situation to me.” Jasper shoots Monty a pointed look. “I wonder what it felt like when you melted her. How long it took for her skin to liquefy and her heart to stop beating.”

Monty opens his mouth to speak but no words come out.

Jasper takes another swig of his moonshine. “Still swimming in excuses, I see. Like always,” he sneers. “If you don’t want anything, then leave me alone.”

Monty swallows his explanations and clenches his hands into fists, trying to keep his temper under control. “I want you to—I want you to snap out of it. I want you to acknowledge that you have a problem and get help. I want you to see that losing Maya is not the end of the world.” (i want my best friend back.)

And then Jasper explodes.

He surges out of his seat and slams his fists into the table, knocking over his glass and gnashing his teeth and drawing the attention of every person in the room. “What the hell would you know, Monty!? What would you know about anything besides mass murder and betraying the people who are supposed to be important to you? Betraying me!?”

“I didn’t… I don’t—”

“You killed Maya—you killed her and you want me to just forgive you? When you have no idea how it feels!?”

And then Monty’s own anger slips out from under his tenuous control and he’s erupting right back. “You think I wanted to do that? You think I wanted to kill—to end an entire civilization!? That I don’t know what it feels like to lose somebody? You don’t get a monopoly on grief, Jasper!” he shouts, the faces of every single person who helped them in Mount Weather, every single one of his slain friends from the Dropship, his neighbors on the Ark, flashing by. The guilt clawing at his throat and narrowing his focus to all that he’s done and can never undo. His eyes water, and there’s a rushing in his ears as his new reality hits him again in full force.

“I lost—I lost my parents, Jasper. My parents,” he says, drowning in it.

And then all of his fury abandons him and he collapses into the seat behind him, stares dazedly at the overturned glass on the table.

He thinks that maybe Jasper hesitates for a second, that he’s about to take Monty’s hands and say he understands and that they can get past this, but then Jasper is yelling again, hurling accusation after accusation. Each one of them barrels into Monty and strikes true, burrowing with their poisonous roots and settling in for the long haul. His chest feels riddled with holes and Jasper must hit something vital because now he can’t feel anything at all. Which he thought was what he wanted, he thought would make him happy.

But all he feels is numb.

He doesn’t know how to fix this. If he even can fix this.  He wants to—god he wants to. He understands what Jasper’s going through, maybe not in the exact same way, but he understands loss down to his very core—he just can’t seem to communicate that to Jasper without crashing into a brick wall of bitter hatred every time he tries to escape the labyrinth of his own remorse.

It’s almost funny how ineffective his words are in comparison to Jasper’s—his meaningless cannon fodder to Jasper’s nuclear missiles. So Monty’s prepared to accept this latest volley, unsure of what else he can possibly do, when all of a sudden, there’s a slap on his back that jerks him back into awareness.

“Monty, my man! I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Wick.

Monty cranes his neck to take him in, the stark contrast between the grin on his face and the volatile storm of emotion coursing through the room a shock to Monty’s system. But any relief at Wick’s booming voice is immediately squashed by the dark look that passes over Jasper’s features. Wick charges on anyway, and Monty tries not to be jealous of his ostensible ignorance. “Didn’t Sinclair tell you to fix that faulty panel in bay two? Day’s not getting any younger.”

Monty swallows the lump in his throat. “Yeah. I was heading over there...”

“And ended up at the bar? Not quite sure booze and electrical engineering are the best combination. Or booze and eight in the morning, come to think of it…” he trails off.

Out of the corner of his eye, Monty sees Jasper’s hands clench into fists at his sides. “This isn’t your business,” he snaps.

Wick raises his eyebrows and finally looks at him, as if just realizing that he’s there. “Oh, hey, Jasper. And here I was, thinking 99 bottles of beer was just some stupid song.”

“Fuck off, Wick.”

“Only since you asked so nicely.”

And then he places his hands on Monty’s shoulders and gently squeezes until he’s supporting himself on shaky legs and an even shakier constitution. Wick steers him away from the table (from his own undoing) and toward escape, but when the doors part, Wick stops and calls over his shoulder, “You know, drunk is not a good look on you.”

Jasper takes another swig from his glass and then raises it in a decidedly derisive salute. “See you on the other side, Wick.”

“Not likely.”

And then they’re exiting the room onto Arkadia’s main thoroughfare, sterile metal walls no longer caging Monty in, the fresh air like a boon to his beleaguered soul. When they’re a good distance away, Monty shrugs out of Wick’s (comforting) touch and whirls around, shooting him a half-hearted glare. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“That did not look like an argument you were winning.”

“It wasn’t an argument.”

Wick huffs in mock annoyance. “If you’re going to be so ungrateful about it, next time I won’t be your knight in shining armor.”

“Didn’t ask you to.”

Wick only beams an open-faced grin at him in return.

Monty’s spirits lift like they do every time he’s with his fellow engineering apprentice, like they always have, even back on the Ark. In the month since everything happened, Monty can’t help but notice that, in that devil may care way of his, Wick seems absolutely fine, unbothered by the shadow of Mount Weather. (but Monty knows better. he’s known Wick since Sinclair recruited him for Engineering, and Monty doesn’t miss how he goes quiet when Raven has trouble crawling under that Rover she’s been working on, when there’s a loud bang from somewhere in camp and Wick tries not to flinch.)

But his other half? Raven’s a mess, and he’s having a hard time juxtaposing this irritable shadow of a girl with the headstrong mechanic who did nothing but save their asses all those months ago. She spends a lot of time at Finn’s headstone or prowling the cargo bay, pretending as if her leg isn’t killing her (he’s never been particularly violent, but he’s going to throttle Murphy if her ever gets his hands on him—snuffing out Raven’s fire is no easy task—). Not even Wick’s playful banter or general lack of the doom-and-gloom spell that the rest of Arkadia seems to be under can make a dent in her walls. In fact, Monty thinks that Wick’s just making it worse. The way she’s constantly snapping at everyone and everything reminds him of—

(his parents’ herb garden and goggles and secret handshakes and getting baked on the Ark’s starboard window bay—)              

“I gotta go,” Monty says, choked with sudden emotion, words stumbling over one another in their rush to get out. He lurches away, but before he can make his retreat, Wick is grabbing his arm and halting him in his tracks.

“Hey, do you need help with the job?” he asks, voice deceptively light, betraying nothing but his usual good humor. “I seem to recall teaching you everything you know…”

Monty scoffs. “As if.” And it comes out a little watery, but he’s glad for the distraction nonetheless. “If I want it to take a century, I know who to ask.”

Wick smirks. “In your dreams, kid.”

Monty offers half of a smile back, and then he’s wresting out of his grip and hurrying away. This time, he doesn’t care that he passes by the gates and David Miller waves at him (despite all the vile thoughts that Monty’s sent his way these past few weeks). Doesn’t care that he catches Bellamy forlornly staring out the gates and into the trees. That a certain thief he was hoping to see is nowhere in sight.

He doesn’t care, he swears.

After he clears his head, he finally finds his way to the hangar bay, relieved that it’s mercifully empty, and squints until he spots the loose panel, sparks shooting out from behind it. He crouches at the offending wall, unhooks the supply belt from around his waist, and palms a screwdriver, prying the panel from the wall and revealing the wiring beneath. He sighs at the mess of frayed cords and severed connections and almost bemoans how long it’ll take him, until he remembers that he doesn’t really have anywhere else to be (doesn’t have anyone to go to). So he hunkers down and lets the delicacy of the work, the concentration it takes, distract him from a chorus of images and accusations (murdererkillerbetrayer) that he’d do almost anything to forget.

He’s so engrossed in aggressively ignoring his memories that it’s only when Nathan Miller is leaning against the wall at his side and clearing his throat that Monty notices him.

Monty’s usually the kind that startles easily, but he’s afraid that one wrong move could shock him into a twitching puddle of drool on the floor, so he only cranes his neck and takes in the crispness of Miller’s guard uniform, the gun at his belt and the confidence in his pose.

“New patrol?” he asks.

“Nah. I saw you come in here and just thought you could use some company. Figured I could show you a thing or two about… whatever that is,” he laughs, gesturing at the mess of wires and circuitry in the exposed wall.

Monty snorts and then resumes tinkering with the circuit board, but this time his hands are a little less steady and his face feels about three degrees hotter than it did before.

When Miller slides into a sitting position at his side, back against the metal paneling and hands clasped over bent knees, not two feet away from Monty’s bowed head, Monty almost jerks his screwdriver into the wrong chamber and short-circuits the whole grid. He’s about to blame his fuck-up on post-Jasper jitters until he remembers that Miller knows as much about engineering as Monty knows about shooting a gun.

So he only coughs into his other hand and refocuses his efforts. “How’s the guard training going?” he mumbles.

“Fine. Though Bellamy’s been riding me hard lately, especially since the Grounders won’t let us more than ten miles outside our perimeter and the Commander placed that kill order on Lincoln.”

Monty fiddles with the jumble of wires with his free hand as he listens. The harsh reminder of the precariousness of the Sky People’s position sends a new bout of unease skittering down his spine. Like they haven’t already dealt with enough. Like the Grounders don’t owe his people their lives. Will they ever catch a break?

Apparently unfazed, Miller plows on. “Mostly, Harper and I have been helping Reyes and Wick fortify the wall, but when push comes to shove, I doubt anything can keep an army of bloodthirsty Grounders out. My Dad says—”

At that, both he and Monty still.

Monty sees him shift awkwardly out of the corner of his eye. “What?” Monty asks, if only to break the uncomfortable silence.

Miller grimaces, looks like he just swallowed a handful of jobi nuts, but then he’s setting his jaw and continuing. “He says that Kane and Chancellor Griffin are working to make things more fair—that they’ve been meeting with a Grounder lieutenant named Indra.”

Monty vaguely recalls the name from somewhere, but he finds that he’s not curious in the slightest. It’s already been a long day and he’s done hearing about politics and embargoes and death threats. So he shoots Miller some side-eye and smirks. “Maybe if Indra’s anything like Octavia, she can scare the Commander into submission.”

Miller snickers. “Yeah. Or maybe she’ll just make things worse.”

“Don’t know if that’s possible.”

Miller grunts in agreement but then heaves a weary sigh. “Bringing me down, Green. I come here to let loose and I’m honestly just feeling so attacked right now—”

“Just shut up and let me finish this,” Monty says, grinning down at his grease-covered hands. “Then you can complain at me all you want.”

“I’ll hold you to it.”

And then quiet descends over the empty hall. They sit like that, in companionable silence, while Miller distractingly bobs his head and drums to some private beat, while Monty tries to ignore the boy next to him and do his job, not frying the Ark’s mainframe in the process. They sit like that until an exasperated voice cleaves through their stolen moment of peace.

“Montgomery Green?”

Monty glances up from his work and furrows his brow when his gaze alights on the source of the interruption.

Gina Martin. She’s one of the survivors from Mecha station. They’ve exchanged a few words before, but nothing more than “get him out of my bar” or “he’s scaring away customers” when Jasper’s acting up again. He’s pretty sure she only knows him as one of the few surviving members of the original 100.

He’s also pretty sure that he saw her sneaking out of Bellamy’s room last night.

“That’s you, right?” she says when he doesn’t immediately respond, frowning in Monty’s general direction. “I don’t know why he seems to think I’m some errand girl—I have a business to run. But Sinclair is looking for you. Says to report to Agro when you finish up here.”

Monty nods at her. “Yeah, thanks. I’ll head over when I’m done.”

Gina fixes him with a long look (he hopes she doesn’t notice the gauntness painting his features), and when she doesn’t back down after what he’d normally deem an appropriate amount of unnecessary eye contact, he looks down at the pliers in his hands so fast that he knows he’ll feel a crick in his neck later. Hopes that that’ll make her go away.

But it doesn’t, and then her voice is echoing in the emptiness of the hall again.

“Also, your friend is still at my bar. If I think for even one minute that he’s going to cause more trouble, I won’t hesitate to call the guards.”

Monty tightens his grip on the pliers and grimaces. “Sorry.” After a beat of expectant silence, he drags his gaze from the floor and offers her what he knows is an artificial smile. “I’ll take care of it.”

Gina’s eyes widen, and Monty’s not sure if he’s imagining it, but he thinks that she looks a little guilty. “I know it’s not your fault… just— Moonshine is not what he needs right now,” she sighs. “Look… I may not have been there in Mount Weather with you… but he’s not the only one of you who frequents my bar.” She tries in vain to wipe the frown from her expression. “He needs his friends.”

Monty registers what she’s saying, hears the words coming out of her mouth, and he expects her to look accusatory (sanctimonious), but instead, she just looks tired. Nonetheless, there’s a rushing in his ears. Like he doesn’t know that. Like he hasn’t been trying to be there for Jasper, to get through to him— He knows that Gina’s just trying to help, to ease their collective pain in any way she can, but she doesn’t know anything about what the 100 have been through.

He’s accosted by a sudden surge of animosity. But then he’s immediately ashamed of himself because he knows himself—he rarely ever gets angry. Especially not irrationally. Especially when he knows that Gina means well, as blunt as she might be. Especially when he knows that she’s not trying to condescend to him.

But lately, it’s like every one of the Arkers who wasn’t sent down as a sacrificial guinea pig, who didn’t have to wage guerilla warfare against the Grounders, who wasn’t mercilessly drilled into in Dante’s ninth level of Hell, refuses to step down from their well-meaning soapbox. Everywhere he turns, he’s met with sympathetic (patronizing) smiles, a palpable current of pity, amicable (but ultimately worthless) advice.

In their quest to make him forget the horrors of all that he’s faced, they’ve forgotten that they can never understand what he and the other survivors of the Dropship have endured. They act as if Monty just needs to wake up one day and decide that there’s no blood on his hands (that he’s not responsible for the genocide of an entire civilization), that all of the friends he lost are in a better place and the future is just so bright, all he has to do is look—

It seems as if, every day, someone is preaching that it’ll be okay, that everything’s going to be all right.

And he’s just so. sick. of. it

But Monty’s never been confrontational, so he only plasters on a tight-lipped grin and nods.

For a second, he thinks that Gina can read every miserable thought that’s crossed his mind in the lie on his face, but then she’s straightening her shoulders and nodding back. Satisfied, she turns on her heel and leaves.

As soon as she’s gone, Miller cocks an eyebrow. “Montgomery?”

“What did you think ‘Monty’ was short for?”

“I don’t know. Montague?”

Monty laughs, a soft sound that quickly tapers off into silence. “What does that make Jasper? A Capulet?”

Miller smiles, but the pointed look he fixes on Monty erases any humor behind it. “Nah. I don’t know if ‘medieval blood feud’ is really your guys’ style.”

“No. But dead girlfriends sure are.”

For a minute, Miller just purses his lips, says nothing. But then he’s angling toward Monty until their knees are just touching and he’s fixing his stare on a spot of oil staining the metal floorboards between them. “Hey, man. I’ll be the first to say, I didn’t trust Maya. I don’t know if I ever did. And now I kind of feel like an ass, but it’s the truth. But no matter what I thought of her, no matter how much she didn’t deserve it? You had no choice. You saw what they were doing to us; they never would have stopped.”

Monty brings his hands to his lap. “Maybe, but we don’t know might’ve happened. I might’ve not had a choice, but I took theirs away too,” he says.

Miller is silent for so long that Monty wonders if that’s the end of it, if Miller agrees and has decided he’d rather not deal with the emotional wreck that Monty has become. But then his voice is ringing out and it’s steady, sure of itself in a way that Monty’s hasn’t been in a while.

“I may not like it, but I understand where Jasper is coming from. If it had been Bryan instead of Maya, I don’t know what I would’ve done. Honestly, I would probably hate you too.”

Bryan.

The name hangs between them like a tangible thing that feels like another weight on Monty’s chest (for a whole slew of reasons that he will gladly stick his head in the sand to ignore).

After a moment, Miller continues on. “A part of him will probably always hate you.”

“Well, don’t sugarcoat it.”

Miller chuckles. “Hey, jackass. I’m trying to say something profound here.”

Monty bows his head a little when he gestures for him to go on. “Sir, yes sir.”

Miller snorts and then fixes his eyes back on the floor. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sounds Fox made when they strapped her to that table.” He taps his skull. “They’ll be in here. Forever. Which is why I can understand why you had to do it. But he can’t—not right now. He’s too close to it—to you. And asking him to snap out of it is only going to make him angrier, Monty. I know it’s unfair, but he’s human—we’re all bound to act like fuck-ups every once in a while.”

Some of us more than most, Monty thinks. (and he doesn’t mean Jasper.)

“Maybe I’m just talking out of my ass, but you know him, Monty. Better than anyone. Maybe it’s as simple as not saying anything at all. Maybe it’s just about being there for him.” He pauses and then look sheepishly back up at Monty. “Am I making any sense? I feel like I’m rambling.”

“No, it’s—you’re right,” Monty mumbles. He thinks back on his (train wreck of a) conversation with Jasper this morning, of his desperation and telling Jasper it’s not the end of the world. Monty knows that, right now, words are meaningless; platitudes and apologies and false promises are the furthest thing from what Jasper needs.

His best friend might be unwilling to look past his own grief, and that might make him irrational, but feelings have never made much sense, have never been bound by logic. And in all honesty, Monty can’t really say what he would think of Jasper if his parents had died on that floor instead of Maya, Jasper the architect of their destruction. It’s a series of hypotheticals and a phantom pain that he knows words simply wouldn’t be able to solve.

He suddenly remembers that stupid argument he and Jasper got into back when they were still at the Dropship, when Jasper’s newfound infamy after the incident at the bridge on Unity Day got the better of him. He remembers how words failed them, only made the rift between them worse, and it was only when Monty found him failing to hit Raven’s homemade bomb and offered him another gun that Jasper smiled at him and whatever dumb thing they were fighting about was put to rest.

They didn’t need to talk it out—they just needed to be there for each other. It’s such a simple realization, that Monty wants to kick himself.

He’s considering attempting to do just that when Miller is catching his attention again. He’s angling himself in front of Monty until Miller is all he can see, the blue of his guard uniform, the faint smile dancing across his lips, the open honesty in his expression.

“I have no idea what you’re spacing out about, but if you didn’t hear a word I just said, just know one thing. We’re all grateful for what you sacrificed in there. If it weren’t for you and Bellamy and Clarke, we’d all be dead. You saved us all, Monty.” He doesn’t look away from Monty’s eyes, and the look in them feels more like a lifeline than anything else has lately. “Give Jasper time. It might take while, but one day, he’ll see that. He has to.” He places an encouraging hand on Monty’s shoulder that lingers for maybe a second too long, and then he offers a small smile and hauls himself to his feet.

“Profound enough for you?”

Monty feels a warmth spreading through him, and all of a sudden he feels lighter than he’s felt in weeks.

“Yeah, jackass,” he grins.

“Good. I gotta get back to my shift, but find me at the Mess later, yeah?” And then he shoves his hands in his pockets and walks away.

As Monty watches his head disappear around the corner, he thinks of their quiet moment before Gina arrived, of Miller bobbing his head and playing the air-drums to some private beat. And he suddenly knows what his next step will be in breaking down that insurmountable wall between him and Jasper. He doesn’t give himself time to second guess it because he knows Jasper, almost as well as he knows himself.

He knows that it might only make a dent, but at least it’ll be a start. So he turns to the wires in front of him and gets back to work.

The next time that Chancellor Griffin leads a supply run to Mount Weather, he volunteers to join. Their vehicles stutter to a stop outside, and he joins them as the metal doors groan open and the group shuffles into what remains of the Mountain.

The bodies have long since been cleared away, but it’s like Monty can still see the ghosts of all the people he irradiated (murdered) drifting through the concrete corridors. Like he can still hear the piano playing in the rec room, feel the children brushing by his legs as they chase a soccer ball around the corner. Like it was only yesterday.

He wants to do nothing more than curl up in a corner and drown out all of the sensations assaulting him, find another faulty panel and fix something that he’s actually capable of fixing.

But he came here for a reason.

When the rest of his people make for the supply rooms, he heads for the dorms and only blanches a little when he takes in the still unmade sheets, the bags left unpacked and the antique radio at the foot of his old mattress. He shoves down his growing nausea as completely as he can and narrows his field of vision until he’s darting forward and winding his way through the rusted metal of the bunk beds. He rummages around the room until he finds what he’s looking for. And then he races for the exit as quickly as he can.

When they return to Arkadia, he sets the package outside of Jasper’s door and returns to his quarters, where he promptly collapses onto his sheets and succumbs to sleep.

The next morning, Monty’s planting corn in the field behind the horse stables when a bead of sweat wets his eyelashes. When he lifts his head to blink it away, he catches sight of Jasper walking past, bobbing his newly-shaven head and with a spring to his step that Monty thought he might never see again.

His best friend’s steps falter, and he turns his head toward Monty, sheepishly tightening his grip on the object in his hand. Monty follows the cords of white trailing from Jasper’s ears to the small plastic rectangle that is Maya’s old music player.

Jasper looks as if he wants to say something, and he hesitates. But then he only raises his chin and offers a tentative smile.

After a moment, Monty smiles back.

First comes Indra.

He’s sitting outside of the tent where they keep the injured (hoping that maybe, just maybe, he’ll catch a glimpse of blonde and she’ll come out, because he needs someone, anyone—) when Indra is suddenly standing before him.

He looks up at her through wet lashes and the sight of her, uninjured and whole and safe when Octavia isn’t, fuels the fire that has been burning inside of him, slowly growing, feeding on his grief and slipping out of his control.

Indra appraises him, steely gaze unwavering as she looks him up and down. She seems as steady as a mountain despite the current of chaos that is whipping by around them, despite the turmoil that he feels bubbling within. Only the fists coiled at her sides reveal that she feels (felt) something, anything, for his sister.

Indra tilts her chin up and declares, “She died a warrior’s death.”

Like that’s supposed to mean something to him. Like that’s supposed to erase the fact that Indra dragged her into this, that Octavia wouldn’t have had any part of this, wouldn’t be not here if it weren’t for her.

And all of a sudden, he’s nose to nose with Indra, grabbing her by the collar and snarling in her face, the lines blurring between what he’s thinking and what he’s saying and a torrent of anger and agony ripping through his body. Everything is red, and there’s a rushing in his ears and adrenaline surging through him; he can barely think straight and he knows that this is a lethal mix, that this can only end in disaster, he knows, but he just can’t seem to stop himself. He barely registers the physical pain (how can he when everything else just hurts so much—) when his back slams into the ground, when he’s gaping into a face that he now realizes is marred by fury and a guilt that he didn’t see before, blinded by his own misery as he is.

Indra’s breathing heavily, nostrils flaring, shoulders heaving as she releases his wrist (he thinks it’s sprained, he can’t really tell) and glares him down. “Do not dishonor her memory with weakness,” she snaps in a way that sounds less like a reprimand and more like a plea.

And then she’s just gone.

And he’s reminded of his own words (down here, weakness is death), a reminder of his mother that is both welcome and uninvited at the same time. A reminder of all he has lost and all he will never get back.

The knowledge of it presses down on him, and it feels like a physical thing, like an immovable force of nature, like an inevitable fact of life that, no matter how hard he tries, he can’t budge. He can’t find the strength to lift himself from the ground, and he feels as crippled as Atom the day he lay dying in the woods. So he lies there, for how long he doesn’t know, until the last of his fury ebbs, until numbness replaces the weight of all that he knows to be true and settles over him like a murky film.  Until the clamor of people rushing around him, the sensation of dirt beneath his skin, fades, until all he can hear is a chorus of i won’t let anything bad happen to you taunting him in his ears.

He doesn’t know how he got here, but now he’s shrouded in shadow on the outskirts of camp. It’s nighttime, and the Grounders and his people have gone their separate ways (through his grief-filled haze, he can tell that they’re headed back to Camp Jaha). His knees are tucked up to his chest, head cradled in his hands, and he’s sneaking bitter glances at the loved ones sharing moonshine and swapping stories by the fire.

He’s hiding, from what (or rather, who), he doesn’t want to admit.

So he tells himself that he doesn’t want anyone to see him like this, broken and useless and miserable and spiteful as he is. He doesn’t want their pity. He doesn’t want to reminisce about dead parents, lovers, friends, about needing to move on and who has it worse.

Because they can never understand; none of them have ever had a sibling before. He and his sister are (were, he reminds himself) the only ones. And now he is the only one.

His fingers gouge deeper into his skull. He doesn’t even know who he is anymore, without his better half (without Octavia, oh god without Octavia), and he can feel himself unraveling, can feel himself losing control.

Not the kind of control he so desperately sought when they first landed on the ground, when he was only out for himself and his sis— When control meant power (when it meant dominance). Now, control means not falling apart, not breaking down in the face of this nightmare. In the face of never hearing anyone call him “Bell” ever again.

He’s about to slam his fists into a tree, to do what he does best when he feels powerless (he knows that violence is all he’s good for), but then he looks up and he sees her emerge from a tent in the distance.

She looks exhausted: face gaunt, posture slumped, lips sunk into a permanent frown. But despite the fact that she looks as tired, as haggard as he’s ever seen her, Clarke doesn’t take a seat by the fire, doesn’t let her hair down and revel in what she’s accomplished (because without her, there would’ve been no war, no Grounder alliance, no “victory,” and Octavia would still be—) He puts a stop to that train of thought, berates himself for even thinking it.

It’s not her fault, it’s not.

But he just feels so disoriented, so unhinged, that he can barely fit the pieces of the puzzle together; nothing is making sense and he doesn’t know how to turn all of these feelings off and it’s just so frustrating—

He’s about to lurch back into camp, to wrap her in his arms and apologize for even thinking it, (for her, for himself, for Octavia, he’s not sure—), to finally admit that his strength alone is no longer enough to support him.

But then he sees that her posture is straightening and she’s steeling herself, starting to scan the crowd.

His resolve crumbles into rubble at his feet, and he collapses back to the ground. He pulls the leather jacket he used to wear before Mount Weather more tightly around himself (he doesn’t quite know how, but after Indra left, after he finally broke out of his stupor, he found it folded neatly at his side) and does his best to blend into the shadows around him.

The sight of her pushing through the fatigue, looking so much like how she looked before this all began (so ready to ignore herself for the sake of others), rekindles the pit of despair in his chest, and he suddenly knows that he’s not ready to face her yet. He’s not ready for her to fix him with that steely gaze, for her to tell him that that he needs to pull through this because they need him, that she can’t lose him too.

He’s not ready for her forgiveness.

Because she’ll tell him that it’s not his fault, that he’s not a murderer. (but doesn’t she see? he is. because maybe if he had disabled the fog a little earlier, if he had just tried a little harder, if he had just been there—)

He’s just not ready.

So he shrinks back until he can barely make out his own hands in the dark. And he waits. He waits while she flits through camp, while she peers into their makeshift homes and scours the faces of the crowd. He waits until she gives up and resigns herself back to her tent.

And when the moon finally reaches its peak, when the fires are extinguished and everyone leaves, when the wind no longer carries the current of comfortable conversation and unspoken relief, he stands.

And then he staggers toward his empty tent.

He wakes up with Octavia’s name on his lips in the middle of the night.

He’s covered in a cold sweat, and chills snake their way up his spine, raising goose bumps on his flesh and setting his teeth chattering to the rapid rise and fall of his chest.

He dreamed of the Unity Day masquerade ball, of the day everything went to shit.

He closes his eyes and sees the dream, the memory, as clear as if it had happened yesterday.

But instead of his Mother getting floated, it’s his sister. Octavia’s standing at the other end of the hall, and she just looks so young, so like how he wishes things could still be, that for a moment, it’s like he’s back on the Ark again, a man (no, a boy) who wanted nothing more than to see his sister truly live.

But no matter how hard he struggles against the guards restraining him, he can do nothing but watch as they close the doors to the airlock, as Shumway pushes the button, as Octavia disappears into the black.

As she’s just gone.

He can hear his Mother wailing behind him, can hear her heaving sobs and how desperately she’s trying to catch her breath, and it feels like the sound is impaling him. But then he realizes that it’s not his Mother, it’s him, because now she’s gone too, and so are the guards and Jaha and Shumway, and now he’s all alone, surrounded by nothing but forbidding steel walls and the chronic machine hum of a ship on its last legs.

He knows that it’s a dream, but it just feels so real.

He opens his eyes and tries to slow his breathing, to calm his restless nerves as he turns to the cot at his side to check on Octavia, to make sure he didn’t wake her, to reassure himself that she’s more than a cold body floating through space.

But then he sees the empty sheets, and he remembers.

He doesn’t fall asleep again.

He’s loitering in a crowd of people at the center of their makeshift camp, the sun beating down on his face and the wind carrying the stench of the tent full of bodies past him.

He wants to gag.

But he can’t because he’s packed in on all sides by faces he vaguely recognizes, because Kane’s clearing a circle around himself and addressing them all, hands clasped behind his back. As he talks, Bellamy tunes him out. He’s been trying so hard to keep it together, to try and pretend that everything’s fine—

Some part of him hears Kane say something about the difference between winning a battle and winning a war, about needing to keep alert, to stay strong. But he doesn’t really care and now he’s shrugging out of his jacket and pushing his way to the front of the group.

Kane appraises him, and he looks like he wants to put his hand on Bellamy’s shoulder, to talk him down. But he only purses his lips and nods his head, making room for Bellamy to pass.

As Bellamy elbows past him, steps into a ring full of people lining up across from each other, lowering themselves into sparring stances, he sees that Miller is there, and so is Monroe. He stalks over to them, cracking his knuckles and steeling his nerves, ignoring the wary glances they shoot his way.

He jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “You’re up, Miller.”

Miller and Monroe only exchange a nod, and then Miller takes a step forward, fixing him with a long look (that’s full of pity, too much pity, and suddenly Bellamy feels even closer to breaking point—).

“You got something to say?”

Miller grimaces. “Hey, man. I’m sorry about your—“

“Just shut up and fight,” Bellamy snaps.

Miller opens his mouth to argue, but he must see something in Bellamy’s expression because he only nods his head and takes a reluctant step forward. Bellamy shifts into position, tightens his hands into fists, but then he sees movement over Monroe’s shoulder, and he bares his teeth.

Lincoln.

(why isn’t he with the Grounders, why is he still here?)

He was there. He was there and he didn’t protect her and now she’s—

He turns his rage toward Lincoln, surges forward with a flurry of punches and shoves and throws, all fury and no finesse. But Lincoln just dances around him, blocks each attack with an ease that Bellamy used to be envious of (now it’s only frustrating, mocking).  He grabs Bellamy’s wrists and wrestles him to a stop, tries to get his attention, but Bellamy can’t meet his eyes, he can’t. Because he’s afraid of what he’ll see there. He’s afraid he’ll see a mirror of himself.

So he jerks out of his grip, tries to slam his shoulder into Lincoln’s chest, but then Lincoln is kicking his legs out from under him, and Bellamy lands in a heap in the dirt.

Bellamy’s about to jump back to his feet, go for round two, but this time he can’t avoid it and he sees the (heartbroken, tormented) look on Lincoln’s face. And he remembers whose fault it really is (his own, dammit). All of his anger fizzles out and now all he feels is hollow. Defeated. (in more ways than one.)

Lincoln offers him a hand and, when Bellamy doesn’t respond, grabs his arm and pulls him to his feet, supporting him when Bellamy’s ankles buckle and he stumbles backward. He doesn’t fight him this time, only grimaces at the new aches and pains as Lincoln leads him away from the sparring ring. He deposits Bellamy underneath a tree and then collapses to the ground beside him, face turned toward the sky.

For a moment, they sit there in silence, and Bellamy’s not sure whose sorrow is more palpable.

“Octavia once told me, ge smak daun, gyon op nodotaim,” Lincoln finally says, picking up a twig and twirling it between his fingers. “She never gave up. And neither should we.”

He sounds certain, sure of himself, but the misery in his eyes tells another story that Bellamy knows all too well. Tells a story that Bellamy’s been reading since the day Octavia first told him i wanna see the Ark, Bell. take me out the door.

Lincoln angles the stick toward the ground, moves it back and forth, up and down, sketching lines in the mud.

“Your sister wouldn’t want this for us. She was always so—so free,” he says.

Bellamy wants to sneer at him, but he just feels so barren that his voice only comes out a whisper. “Well she’s not free now, is she?”

Lincoln stiffens at his side. “You’re wrong. She is,” he says, driving the stick harder into the ground. “I’m glad this world didn’t get the chance to turn her into a monster. Not like us. She was one of the good ones.”

His words hit home, feel like another punch to the gut, and even though they’re true (they’re definitely true), they don’t make Bellamy (either of them) feel better.

Lincoln continues to dig furrows into the ground, his movements becoming rougher, less controlled as time passes. Eventually, he drops the twig and folds his arms over his knees, staring off into the distance.

It takes him a moment, but Bellamy finally looks down, his eyes traveling to the discarded branch.

He sees Octavia’s face in the dirt.

When the tears threaten to fall, he gets up and staggers away.

He limps toward the med tent, and when he brushes his way inside, it’s mercifully empty. He stumbles over to a cot and buries his head in his hands, fisting his hair in his fingers.

Since he escaped the Mountain, since he saved 44 of his people, since he wasn’t here to protect her, he’s been running on a cocktail of fumes and misery and a disbelief that he wishes could make him forget, could make him numb to everything just as well as a bottle of moonshine could.

But it can’t. And violence is about as good of a distraction as it was back at the Dropship.

He’s about to curl up under the sheets, wallow in his solitude until Abby comes back (and he can ask if she thinks his sister suffered), but then there’s a rustling. The flaps of the tent’s entrance are separating, and a blur of blonde and blue is stepping inside.

Clarke.

She looks as exhausted as she did last night. Worse, even. Bags shadow her eyes and he’s just now realizing that there are bruises ringing her neck, blood in her hairline, white bandages peeking out of her shirt.

When she first notices him, her expression reminds him of the day she ran into his arms and he asked her how many were with her. (none.) But then the line of her shoulders is relaxing, and his name leaves her lips on an exhale.

“Bellamy.”

And then she’s moving toward him, each faltering step seeking his permission, unraveling the tension between them.

At first, he’s relieved that she’s here, she’s finally here. All he wants to do is race toward her, even if he’s afraid that his legs are too weak to support him. But then he sees that she’s wearing some sort of Grounder uniform, covered in leather straps and buckles and metal, and it reminds him of what Octavia was wearing when he shoved past Abby and went into that tent and saw her—

Bellamy’s jaw twitches. Where was she? Where was she when he needed her? When one of the only two people that mattered—

A distant part of him knows that he’s being irrational, that whenever Clarke came looking, he cowered, let his grief get the best of him. But he can’t help it, not when his tattered logic is tied so closely to his resentment toward her for sending him into the Mountain all those weeks ago, her brokering a deal with the Grounders in the first place. The knowledge of how she was at the center of it all, how a single domino set the entire war (set his sister’s death) in motion, is an ache that just won’t go away.

So he spits the words out at her like an accusation (that he immediately wishes he could snatch back, bury until he forgets he ever thought them).

“Nice of you to show up.”

Clarke stutters to a stop two beds away and the look on her face feels like another battering ram to his chest. She can’t quite meet his eyes, just looks somewhere over his shoulder. “I—I’m sorry. There’s no excuse. I should have been here.” Her hands tremble at her sides. “I’m so sorry. For everything, Bellamy.”

Bellamy sees the guilt, the shame, playing across her features, and it makes him sick that he can’t stop blaming everyone and everything around him. Not when he knows that, ultimately, it was his fault. But he doesn’t have time to arrange his glare into something less hostile before she’s wringing her hands and her words are cutting a path through the stillness of the room.

“Do you want me to go?”

(oh god please don’t.)

His voice comes out a strangled moan. “No, I’m—I didn’t mean it. Clarke, I didn’t mean it. I’m just such a mess right now, I don’t—” He cuts off. He wants to take his vulnerability, his gaping wounds, and run back to the outskirts of camp, Mount Weather, anywhere but here. He doesn’t want to face it.

But then she’s making up the space between them and, as she nears him, as he gets pulled into her gravity all over again (he can never seem to escape it), he sees the look in her eyes and he can’t run away from it, can’t hold back any longer (because one look, and she knows; she always seems to know). Because it’s Clarke.

Everything comes tumbling out in a rush of words that taste like gravel in his throat. “I’m just—I’m just… so fucking scared, Clarke. What am I supposed to do? I don’t—I don’t know how to live without her.” And he casts his eyes downward.

He thinks that he’s never been so honest in his life. He remembers life on the Ark after Octavia was arrested, after his Mother was executed for the crime of having a heart big enough to care for two. He remembers how he felt so empty, so aimless. So alone.  He would have gladly traded his cadet badge, himself, anything, to do it all again, to never go to that stupid dance. Because while Clarke may have spent a year in solitary in the SkyBox, he spent a year in solitary in Section 17, in a room full of painful reminders of a life he thought he’d never get back (of a life he never did get back).

He feels a silent tear coursing down his cheek and he whips his arm up to scrub it away because he doesn’t deserve to cry, dammit, he doesn’t deserve it.

(what did he do to deserve this?)

But more keep coming, and no matter how frantically he rubs, they just won’t stop. He’s aware that his breathing is picking up, coming out harsher and harsher, and now he’s gasping and he feels like he’s choking and he just feels so exposed—

Clarke grabs his wrist and gently tugs his arm away.

“Stop it,” she whispers. “You don’t have to hold back in front of me.”

But he just shakes his head. “I—I can’t afford to be weak.” Not in front of everybody. Not in front of you.

When she doesn’t respond, he wonders if she agrees. He wonders if she feels the same way she felt when she sent him off to die in Mount Weather (because that’s what it was, a suicide mission), when she told him that it was worth the risk.

But then she’s letting his wrist go and she’s inching closer and she’s meeting his gaze as she says, “No—Bellamy. Look at me. Bellamy.”

She reaches her arms out until her palms are hovering just above his cheeks, and when he doesn’t shrink back, they land, her thumbs wiping wetness away and her fingers brushing hair back from his eyes. And even though her voice is watery, even though her lower lip is wobbling, her hands are as steady as they’ve ever been.

“It’s not weakness. Bellamy, love isn’t weakness.”

It takes him a moment (he’s finding it hard to focus and her words aren’t making any sense; everything inside of him is screaming that she’s wrong, she has to be), but then he’s swallowing the lump in his throat and looking up at her through wet lashes.

He sees the surety in her eyes, and it’s like (one of the) yawning pits inside of him is finally closing up and she’s the lifeline that’s extending herself to him, pulling him back from the brink, from the dissipating black. So he brings shaking hands up until the tips of his fingers are dangling from her wrists, afraid to fully accept the safety in her words.

“I should’ve been there,” he says. “How can she ever forgive me?”

Clarke scoots forward again and runs her thumbs over the corners of his lips, the scrapes and bruises the battle carved into his skin. “This is not your fault. It’s not,” she tells him. “You can’t torture yourself with what-ifs. She—Octavia wouldn’t want that.” She takes a deep breath and then layers her voice with conviction. “She’d want you to live.”

(like she barely got the chance to.)

Suddenly, all Bellamy wants to do is turn his face away and bury it in his hands, but then Clarke’s fingers are smoothing his hair back from his forehead, clearing his vision. And all at once, he feels Clarke’s understanding in the firmness (gentleness) of her grip, sees it in the determined set to her jaw, in the steadiness of her gaze, and it’s so different from her Mother’s pity, from Indra’s harsh attempts at camaraderie, that he can’t think of anyone he’d want besides Clarke to help erase his self-loathing, his lingering anger (but not his heartache; that will never go away). And he knows it’s selfish of him, that Clarke’s been grieving since the day a twelve-year-old girl stabbed her best friend in the neck (he doesn’t know how she even has any compassion left to give), but Bellamy sees the refuge she’s offering him, and it seems like salvation.

“I—I needed you… I need you, Clarke.”

Her eyes soften. “I’m right here.”

And then he pulls her hands backward until they’re wrapped around his neck. He lowers his forehead to her shoulder and balls his fists into the back of her shirt, clinging on for dear life.  It’s Clarke, he tells himself. It’s Clarke.

And when she folds him into her arms, when she mumbles his name into his ear, he finally allows the sobs to wrack his body, allows all of the anger, all of the misery and pain and fear, to flee the confines of his broken soul. He gasps for air and trails tears on her sleeve and weeps and weeps until he’s sure the entire camp can hear him coming undone. Until they feel his loss as tangibly as he does.

But Clarke doesn’t shush him, just holds him. And he thinks that she might be crying too.

He doesn’t know why he didn’t do this before, why he was so afraid to admit just how much he’s suffering, just how much he needs someone. But he’s never let anyone see him like this. Ever since he helped his Mother pry that board from the floor, ever since the day his entire world changed (augustus had a sister), he’s pushed down his problems, he’s shouldered his own burdens in favor of another’s.

(my sister, my responsibility.)

But now he realizes that (for a while now) there’s been more than one anchor mooring him in place. And even though one of them is gone now, he still has one left.

So he lets her hold him until his sobs finally die down, until they taper off into whimpers and he just feels so tired, so used up, that all he wants to do is pull Clarke down into the cot and curl into her side and sleep and sleep until everything is a distant nightmare.

But he doesn’t do that. He doesn’t lose himself and give up, because the feel of Clarke’s warm body beneath his palms, her hair tickling at his chin, the way she’s mumbling soft assurances into his neck (bellamyi’msorryit’sokayyou’renotaloneyou'reokay) reminds him that he won’t have to deal with this, with Octavia never coming back, by himself. Because, be it on the Ark, back at the Dropship, during the war, they’ve all lost someone. So he can’t crumple into a pile of broken, blubbering parts on the ground at his feet. Because there are people who need him just as much as he needs them.

He heaves in a deep breath, makes sure the last of his tears have fallen, and slowly (reluctantly) releases Clarke (but she doesn’t let go of him; her palms are still on his cheeks, wiping away the last of the wetness and tracing patterns with the pads of her thumbs). He takes another moment to revel in the comfort of this moment, and then he lowers her hands from his face and covers them with his own.

“Can you—can you tell me about her? About—about how she was after I left?”

Clarke watches the interlacing of their fingers for a moment, the way they fit so comfortably together (he thinks that maybe she’s not ready yet, that she’s trying to catch her breath too), but then she’s looking back up at him, the corners of her lips quirking up in the parody of a smile. “There’s a lot to tell.”

And then she talks. She talks about the day Octavia got her ass kicked at Camp Jaha. She talks about her practicing Trigedasleng with Lincoln in their few stolen moments alone. About her never leaving the radio’s side, anxiously waiting for Bellamy to radio in. About her having a newfound purpose. About her finally feeling accepted.

And even though it’s a far cry from the girl who jumped out of the Dropship and hollered at the sky all those weeks ago (we’re back, bitches), the courage, the fearlessness behind her actions just sounds so much like Octavia, like his little sister, that if unshed tears weren’t still clogging his throat, he’d laugh.

So he tightens his grip on Clarke and listens, lets her words lull him until the tension in his body dissolves and the unknown, the what-ifs, are replaced with images of an Octavia he never got a chance to meet (but one he’s happy got a chance to finally live all the same).

TonDC looks the same as it did when he and Lincoln left for the Mountain all those weeks ago. Except, this time, instead of angry men and women screaming in condemnation, calling for the end to the truce with the Sky People, now there is only the heaviness of despair, accompanied by murmurs of yu gonplei ste odon, by strangled voices and muffled sobs.

Lincoln tells him that it’s tradition, that the only way the souls of the fallen can find peace is through fire, through a ceremony of remembrance.  He tells him that everyone who’s lost someone gets a chance at the pyre. But Bellamy finds that the thought of Octavia being laid to rest with the Grounders instead of with her people doesn’t bother him, even though he feels like it should. Because they were never really her people to begin with, were they?

So he simply stands there, eyes unfocused as the flames lick higher and higher, as the smell of rotting bodies is slowly replaced with burnt pine and cedar.

It reminds him of the day they burned Finn, when Clarke took hold of the torch and set the pile alight. Except this time, they’re all there: Jasper, Monty, Miller, Raven. Clarke.

She slips her hand into his, and when she squeezes, he stops trembling.

He takes his eyes off of the fire for a moment and looks down at her. This time, he’s not surprised that all of his lingering resentment, his anger, is gone. All that remains is gratitude (that she was there for him, that she’s still here). Ever since that day she told him he wasn’t a monster, that she needed him, she’s been his pillar, stalwart in the face of everything they’ve been through. She gives him strength, the courage to soldier on. And that’s not going away any time soon.

On his other side is Lincoln, hands clasped behind his back, not even trying to hide his tears. And when Bellamy looks at him, he no longer sees the enemy because he knows that there will always be a piece of Octavia in Lincoln. And he’s grateful for that too.

He stands there, surrounded by the people that know him and his sister best, and watches the procession, watches as some of the mourners break down and wail at the sky, as others stand stoic in their grief.

He watches as Indra nods at him from across the pyre and then takes her turn with the torch. As she lowers the flame, she says something in Trigedasleng loud enough to hear, but impossible for Bellamy to understand. It takes a moment (Lincoln looks like he’s trying to hold back a sob, like he’s choked with sudden emotion), but he translates it all the same.

“You’re one of us. Always.”

But to Bellamy, the words don’t mean that she belonged to Trikru; they mean something entirely different. To him, it doesn’t really matter who Octavia was. A Grounder, an Arker, one of the 100: none of those words can define her. Because, no matter what, she was a Blake. And nothing, not time, not distance, not death, will ever change that.

When Indra steps away and the next person takes her place, Bellamy wonders what cruel twist of fate has left him here, alone, when the whole reason he came down in the first place was to protect her. But he supposes she didn’t really need his protecting. Because it’s like Lincoln said: she was already strong.

So he takes a deep breath. He feels as light as he’s felt in days, and he’s not afraid to squeeze back when Clarke tightens her grip on his hand. She doesn’t smile (and he’s glad for that); she just looks at him in that way that she does, in that way that tells him she can read everything his expression is saying.

And he knows that no matter what happens next, he won’t be alone. They’ll have each other; they’ll have the rest of the 100, and they’ll brave tomorrow together. And one day, that will have to be good enough.

So he waits his turn, stands rigid as, one by one, those left behind take hold of the torch and pay respect to those that will never wake again. And as he watches one hand replace the next, the unrelenting chorus of iwon’tletanythingbadhappentoyouipromiseipromiseipromise starts to fade, and in its place, he can hear his sister’s voice.

And despite the bodies burning in front of him, despite the fact that everything’s going to change, that nothing will ever be the same again, his eyes dance from Lincoln to Raven to Jasper to Monty, to Clarke, and he echoes it.

“I am not afraid.”

Octavia’s been dead for seven days.

It’ll never stop feeling like it’s been an eternity, but at least he’s not alone.

His eye twitches.

“Why didn’t anyone come after us?”

“Finn and Miller took squads out a few hours ago. Miller’s not back yet,” someone says.

Bellamy fights to stop himself from asking what took them so long, from snapping at them that they should have tried harder (he might’ve been an unraveling mess of nerves for most of it, but he knows that it’s been at least a day). Something niggling at the back of his mind tells him that he would’ve made the same call in their shoes, that it was the smart move.

He’s aware that he’s being hypocritical, but he looks at Clarke’s limp body and all he feels is an unshakeable sense of betrayal.

Suddenly, Jasper pushes to the front of the crowd and brightens. “What if we go get that seaweed stuff she used on me when I—” he frowns uneasily, “y’know.”

“He’s right,” Monty says. “It has definite medicinal properties. If you bring some back, I’m pretty sure I can replicate the poultice Clarke made.”

The mood in the Dropship seems to lighten for a moment, the leaden silence replaced by the exhale of breaths held too long, by a growing buzz of relieved chatter. But then Connor says something that Bellamy doesn’t quite catch and the gloom is back, Connor the epicenter of it all.

Bellamy finally tears his eyes away from Clarke (he’s been trying to this entire time, but it’s like she’s a magnet and he just can’t stop—) and carefully turns toward him. “What did you say?”

Connor grinds his teeth and can’t quite meet Bellamy’s glare. “But Jasper didn’t end up being a lost cause…” he mumbles.

And then Bellamy sees red. In his peripheral, he sees Finn lunging at the same time, but he makes it across the room first and he’s slamming Connor into a wall, hands fisted in his shirt, veins bulging in his neck, voice dangerously low.

“Shut. Up.”

“I’m just saying that we don’t have time to waste on her! If the Grounders really are out for revenge, who’s to say they won’t be surrounding the camp any minute now? We need everyone we can get protecting us here!”

Bellamy remembers when he would have echoed those same sentiments, when he thought a single person wasn’t worth his time unless it was Octavia. But he also remembers Clarke’s determination, her doggedness, in the face of Jasper’s pain, in the face of his disapproval, and he remembers how she was right. (get Clarke whatever she needs.)

“She’s not a lost cause,” he seethes.

“Are you not seeing the same girl I am? I’m surprised she’s even still breathing—”

Bellamy slams him into the wall again and cranes his head up until their faces are mere inches apart. “Take. It. Back.”

He sees Connor stiffen, sees him about to argue back, and he’s about to lay into him, this time with his fists (good judgment be damned), when a whisper in his ear yanks him back from the precipice.

“Cool it, Bellamy. You’re scaring people,” Octavia says, laying a hand on his arm (which he’s just now realized is shaking in a way that’s less violence, more desperation). He sees the concern in her eyes, in the line of her posture, in the set of her mouth, and Bellamy knows that he’s not just scaring them, he’s scaring her, for an entirely different reason that he doesn’t even want to begin to pick apart.

He realizes that he needs to calm down. Flying off the handle is getting nothing done but setting the camp even more on edge, prolonging Clarke’s suffering and miring himself in even more guilt. He’s so furious with himself and this entire situation that he would drown himself in moonshine right now if everyone wasn’t counting on him, if she wasn’t hanging in the balance.

So he shrugs Octavia off and lets Connor go, shoving him again for good measure before turning toward Finn. “Finn, gather whatever you need and leave right now. Connor, go with him,” he snarls. “Take Jasper too.”

Finn only stares back, incredulous. “I’m not going anywhere!”

“It’s the least you can—!“ Bellamy starts, but then he checks himself. (he can’t be irrational, he needs to stay in control of himself, he needs to stay calm—). “You’re the only one who knows where to find it.”

If Bellamy’s open hostility bothers him, Finn doesn’t show it. He just looks stricken. “It’s at least six hours round trip. I don’t—I can’t… what if she, before I get back—”

“Finn, I swear to god—”

“I can’t leave her alone.”

Bellamy’s jaw twitches. And then he snaps. “What? Because we’re not good enough for her? Because you don’t trust us?”

For a moment, Finn seems at a loss for words, like he’s grappling with whether or not to say what he wants to (there’s too many people still in the room, even if they’ve all but seemed to fade into the background), but then he’s rearing up and standing his ground.

“Of course I don’t trust you. Without Clarke, you’d have led us all to our deaths already. All you do is antagonize. All you do is make things worse! Maybe if you hadn’t insisted on bringing guns to the meeting—”

Bellamy snarls. “No, this is your fault. If you hadn’t treated the Grounders like anything less than our enemy, she’d be fine! She’d be—”

(he knows he’s being unreasonable, that Finn was only trying to help in his own misguided way, but he doesn’t know how to deal with his own guilt, and out of the corner of his eye he can see the fabric of his ruined jacket and he can still hear her soft groans and if he doesn’t take his frustration out on someone, he knows that he’ll just lose it—)

The dam breaks loose and all of the anger that he’s been trying so hard to keep bottled up, everything sheer adrenaline has been suppressing, comes surging out all at once. He’s hurling words at Finn like a Molotov cocktail filled with rage and a shame so palpable that all he wants to do is pretend he never set it alight.

“Where were you earlier, huh? Where were you when they clubbed us over the heads and strung Clarke up and tortured her? When they ripped her back to shreds and left us to die!? Where were you at your so-called peace talks? Where were you!?”

He has to stop himself from lunging across the space between them and curling his fingers around Finn’s throat. He has to stop himself because he knows that he’s not talking about Finn, he’s talking about himself. Because he was there, and all he could do, all he did, was watch.

In the silence that follows, he’s breathing harshly, nostrils flaring, jaw twitching like crazy. He would keep going, keep venting everything he’s been trying so hard to shove down, but now it’s all coming back to him and it’s too much, it’s all too much.

Finn is staring at Bellamy with a hatred he’s never seen him wear before, like Bellamy’s nothing but a cancer to this camp, to their survival, to Clarke, and Bellamy can’t help but think, good. he has every right to. He’s just about to call a truce (because what is pride in the face of their princess), but then a voice, laced with exasperation and urgency, cuts in.

“If you don’t get going right now, she definitely won’t make it through the night,” Octavia says, positioning herself in between Bellamy and Finn. “You’re the only one who knows where the medicine is, and like it or not, my brother needs to walk us through what happened. So go, before she gets worse.”

For a moment, it almost seems as if Finn doesn’t register a word she said (he hasn’t stopped glaring at Bellamy) but then Jasper is breaking away from the crowd and hesitantly placing a hand on Finn’s shoulder. “She’s right, Finn. We need to go. Bellam—Octavia, Monty? They’ve got this.” He offers him a sheepish grin (Bellamy can’t comprehend how he can possibly see any levity in this situation, even if it is Jasper) and steps back. “Now let’s go save Clarke.”

Finn narrows his eyes at them all, still seething, but then he nods his head. “Fine. We’ll make the trip in five. And you’d better hope she’s all right when I get back.” And then he’s elbowing Bellamy out of his way, and he, Jasper, and Conner are just gone.

Once Bellamy manages to smother the rest of his temper, once his vision is no longer tinged with red, he turns back toward Clarke. “We need to help her. But I’m not—I’ve never—”

Octavia pushes forward. “I’ve got it. I’ve been helping Clarke in the med tent since we landed.”

“I can help too,” Monty says. “I’m an engineer. Steady hands.”

Bellamy nods at them and then addresses the rest of the crowd. “Everyone else, clear the room!”

There are a few protests, but then the group is shuffling out of the Dropship until it’s only the four of them (even if it only feels like three). Now it’s silent: no more shuffling feet, muffled tears, nervous whispers. They’re accompanied by only their own anxiety and an eddy of tension whipping through the room and disrupting any semblance of calm, of control.

But then Clarke groans, and the moment is gone.

“So how do we do this?” Monty asks.

“Before we do anything else, we need to clean it,” Octavia says. (Bellamy knows that none of them want to say what “it" is aloud.)

When he sees the bottle of moonshine that’s found its way into her hands, he can feel a dead weight burrowing its way into his gut, digging its claws in for the long haul.

And then there’s movement in his peripheral, and all of a sudden, Clarke is awake.

The situation seems suddenly infinitely better and infinitely worse. She’s awake (oh thank god, she’s awake). Her eyes are boring into his and her lips are quivering and her fingers are curling and uncurling to the pace of her rapidly fluttering eyelashes. Relief courses through him and he almost feels drunk on it, giddy with it.

She’s awake.

But that also means that she’ll feel everything.

All at once, the dead weight is back, but he doesn’t have time to fall apart again because now she’s mouthing his name, once, twice, until it tumbles from her lips.

“Bellamy…”

He doesn’t know how it happens, but now he’s kneeling at her side, her frail hand clasped in his, mumbling nonsense words and frantic reassurances (for her or himself, he doesn’t really know). you’reokayyou’reokayohthankgodyou’reokay. And then he’s saying her name and his voice sounds almost as panicked, almost as lost (no, more), as hers did.

“Clarke.”

(he feels like he’s choking on it.)

She takes in a trembling breath and then says, “Is it… is this the Dropship?”

He nods his head when words fail him.

“How—how bad..?”

Bellamy knows that anyone else in his shoes would offer her lies, meaningless words of encouragement. But as vulnerable as she is here, in this moment, he knows that she’s not some weak, breakable thing; she doesn’t need some distortion of reality, doesn’t need him to tell her that it’s not as bad as it seems (as it must feel).

So he doesn’t lie to her. “It’s not good.”

Her eyes flicking away from his and to the grisly chafing of her wrist for the briefest of seconds is the only indication that this frightens her.

Then she’s looking back at him and a small smile is curving her lips. “Figured.” Her laugh tapers off into a wheeze, and then she’s coughing violently, blood painting her chin and landing on the material of his pants. And it kills him, it just kills him, that she’s trying so hard to seem positive. Because he knows that she’s too practical to be so hopeful; she’s sure that she’s not going to make it, and she’s trying to comfort him.

“Bellamy… I need you to make sure that, when the Grounders come, everyone’s prepared. We—the camp can’t let this happen again—”

Bellamy fights to keep his voice low. “Stop it, Clarke. Just stop it.”

“No. Listen to me, Bellamy. If I don’t make it through this, I need you to—”

“No, I need you to save your strength.” His voice is cracking, laid bare, and he’s pleading (with Clarke, with himself, with Octavia, with whoever might listen), throwing all of his desperation, all of his worry, behind his words. “I need you to live.”

(please.)

Then Octavia is crouching down too, her hand on top of theirs. “Are you ready?”

Clarke looks like she wants to say more, but she must see something in Bellamy’s expression, because she only sets her jaw and nods.

Octavia grimaces. “All right. Get her something to bite down on.”

Monty disappears from Bellamy’s line of sight for a moment, and then he’s back, a small clump of wadded-up fabric in hand. He passes it off to Octavia, and they both watch as she inserts it between Clarke’s teeth and starts rummaging in a nearby box of supplies.

Just when she’s found what she needs, Bellamy feels a slight tug on his hand, directing his attention back to Clarke, and this one admission of vulnerability, this one silent plea, makes him want to do nothing more than curl into a corner and cry until all he feels is numb.

She won’t say it, but he knows. He can read it in between her harsh pants, leaving her in rapid succession. In the feel of her death grip on his palm. In the panic in her eyes.

She’s scared. Terrified.

And he thinks that he’s never seen her so afraid before. He’s never seen her so unhinged, never seen her not brimming with self-righteousness and a frustratingly unshakeable sense of conviction.

And that terrifies him.

Back on the Ark, before he even really knew her, he remembers wishing that someone would take her down a peg. One of the privileged finally knocked from her ivory tower. But now, all he feels is a burning shame. In the private recesses of his soul, he can admit that she’s one of the strongest people he’s ever met, and to see her reduced to this… it envelops him in a sense of wrongness so complete, so all-encompassing, that it runs almost as deeply as how he felt the day after his mother was floated, the day after Octavia was arrested, the day he returned to a home that no longer felt like home.

It’s almost as if he’ll look down and, in place of his clothes, covered in grime and dirt and matted blood, he’ll see the blue of a janitor’s uniform, the handle of a mop. He’ll see how everything is just off.

Wrong.

The shaking of Clarke’s hand in his own brings him back to the present. He wants to tell her, I’m gonna help you, all right? He wants to echo her past resolve. But she’s not a shake of the head and a few hummed verses from death. She’s not.

So he swallows the lump in his throat and tightens his fingers around hers (why can’t he stop noticing just how tiny she is, when has she ever been so helpless?). He brings his other hand up and brushes sweaty locks from her forehead, his thumb lingering over a patch of dried blood and muck.

“Look at me, Clarke. Look at me. It’s gonna be all right. I prom—” (but he can’t promise that, can he?) “Octavia’s got this.”

I’m here, he wants to tell her, even when he knows that it will do no good, even when he knows that, right now, she needs her Mother. She needs Spacewalker. Anyone but him.

So he doesn’t say it.

Instead, he holds her gaze and manages to not look away when, out of the corner of his eye, he sees Octavia bend over Clarke’s back. Sees Octavia pour moonshine over a cloth and start to dab.

For a second, Clarke’s hand goes slack. She stops breathing, stops trembling, stops moving. But then all at once she’s writhing, thrashing so violently that he can feel the metal planks of the floor vibrate beneath him. His hand has gone numb with the vise-like grip she has on it, and he can feel her convulsions wracking him all the way to his bones.

And the wailing, the wailing. It’s like she’s being tortured all over again, body swaying from the rafters, blood speckling the dirt, Raffe sneering, laughing, taunting.

As unbearable as it is for him, he can’t even comprehend how agonizing, how excruciating, it must be for her.

It’s like her screams have become a physical presence, weighing them all down and rendering them speechless. But then Octavia is motioning Monty over, directing him as he grabs her flailing limbs in an attempt to hold her down, grimacing as she applies more moonshine to Clarke’s wounds.

He doesn’t get up to help because, through her pain, through the mad jerking of her body, the one constant is her hand clutching at his, grinding his bones together, digging its nails in (he sees blood welling up and dripping to the floor). It’s like they’re both the only thing the other is sure of, like if either one of them lets go, everything will go spiraling out of control, and the feeling of wrongness will become even more pronounced. Like they’re both the only thing keeping the other tethered here.

And then her hand goes limp.

For a second, he stops breathing; his heart stops beating, leaves his chest cavity hollow and plummets somewhere underneath the floorboards and into the wiring of the ship.

But then he sees that she’s only passed out.

He lets out a watery breath that slowly crescendos into a relieved chuckle. (Octavia shoots him a look like, “what the hell, Bell?” but he doesn’t care because Clarke’s still alive, thank god.) He lifts her hand and lowers his forehead until they touch, until he can feel how her skin is still warm (feverish, but still), until he can wrap his thumb around her wrist and feel the (erratic) beat of her pulse. He thinks he could just sit like this, shakily laughing into the back of her palm, forever (like maybe if he stays here long enough, the next time he looks up, Clarke will be whole and happy and trying to smother a smile while she rolls her eyes at him). But then Octavia’s hip is bumping into him and she’s shooing him away, brandishing a suture kit by way of explanation.

It takes him a moment to let go, but he does (he doesn’t want to let go), and then he’s backing up and watching as Monty and a needle and thread take his place. He starts to methodically stitch Clarke’s skin back together, closing up the lacerations and cutting away anything that looks like it’s given way to infection. The only indication that she still feels any of it is the litany of soft moans that escape her and the occasional hitching of her breathing (which he swears is getting steadier and steadier).

When Monty’s done, her back looks much better than before; it’s no longer painted in a sick sheen of red, full of canyons of rippling gashes and open wounds. It no longer makes him want to turn away and gag into a corner. Instead, the damage is more muted (macabre in a less gruesome way): her skin a sea of uneven ridges, cut through with knotted wire and the purpling of bruises. He looks at her and he no longer feels an awful sense of foreboding, of abject horror; all of the anxiety is melting away, giving way to an uneasy relief. Until the absence of fear makes him realize just how spent he is and a wave of exhaustion finally washes in, sweeping his knees out from under him and bowling him over until he collapses into the chair behind him.

After that, it’s all a blur.

Octavia and Monty take turns reapplying moonshine, snipping off the ends of Clarke’s makeshift stitches, washing her bare back until all traces of crimson are gone.

At some point, he notices that Monty has disappeared and Raven is back, fingers gouging white marks into her folded arms, foot drumming anxiously against the floor; the part of him that is still operating on logic notes that they must be tag-teaming the radio. Octavia barks at her to stop just standing around (he thinks she yells at him too, but he’s such a mess that he can’t really tell, and he knows he wouldn’t be much help anyway). So, instead, he watches, steps in only when he’s absolutely needed.

He watches when Octavia and Raven roll Clarke onto her side.

He helps when they need to lift her up to feed bandages under her torso.

He grunts in acknowledgment when Raven squeezes his shoulder and leaves again.

He looks away when Octavia washes the blood off of her hands.

And all he feels is numb.

When they finally finish bandaging Clarke’s wounds, when Octavia declares that they can do nothing but wait, he stumbles out of the Dropship and wanders blindly around camp, stopping only when the fatigue becomes too much to bear.

He knows that he’s trying to escape the sound of Clarke’s cries, the sallow sheen to her skin, the underlying current of horror and the smell of blood permeating the stale air of the room.

But he’s not succeeding.

Now, he’s curled at the base of a tree, head cradled in his hands, fingers thrust into his hair.

The adrenaline has finally worn off, and he’s only now realizing just how desperately he needed a break. He doesn’t know exactly how long it took to get back to camp, but judging by the soreness in his muscles and the way the wound on his temple has caked over with dried crimson, it must’ve been hours. All he remembers is a foggy haze, the feel of blood slithering down his pant legs, a whimpering in his ears, a jumble of half-coherent words and desperate pleas tumbling from his lips. All he remembers is Clarke wailing, Raffe’s cold sneers, how useless he was.

He digs his nails into his scalp and grinds his teeth. Useless. Sitting there and watching as those monsters—

His nails dig deeper. He’s spiraling; he knows that. But between his fear and his anger and his revulsion at himself and the entire situation, he feels like he’s losing his grip on himself. It’s like he’s a top that’s been set spinning, and his emotions are running in haphazard circles and he can’t control anything anymore when, before, control was all he had. It was all he was good for. But now, how is he supposed to lead these kids to safety, to not being tortured and killed, without the only person who understands him, who’s forgiven him—

Octavia is suddenly crouching at his side. “Bell. Are you alright?”

He grinds his teeth together. “I’m fine.”

“Bullshit. You’re covered in blood,” she says, reaching her arm toward his face.

Bellamy knocks her hand away. “It doesn’t matter.”

Octavia hesitates for a second but then lowers her hand to her side, fixing him with a long look. “Bell, you have to let somebody help you. You can’t just sit out here and sulk. We need you to pull through whatever this”—she gestures at him in a vague way—“is and get in there and start telling people it’s gonna be okay.”

He whips his face toward hers and only regrets his anger a little when Octavia’s eyes widen. “What if it’s not going to be okay? What if we’re just fighting the inevitable and in a few hours Clarke is—Clarke will be—” He cuts off abruptly and stands up.

“I can go get Lincoln. He’s a healer. I’m sure he has something—”

Bellamy whirls on her and snarls, and Octavia takes a step back.

The look on her face tells him that he needs to get his anger in check, that he’s scaring her, but he can’t. He just can’t because that damn Grounder is the reason Clarke is fighting for her life on that table in the first place, bleeding out and in so much pain that all he wants to do is break something, smash his fists into a tree and roar at the sky that none of this is fair. That nothing is going to be okay.

“None of this would’ve happened if you hadn’t let him go!”

Octavia’s expression morphs into one of disbelief. “No, none of this would’ve happened if you’d never kidnapped him in the first place!”

The words hit home because he knows that they’re true, he knows that he’s lying to himself, but right now his anger, his need to just hurt something, is greater than his guilt. His hands ball into fists and his lips curl back and his shoulders are shaking and there goes his control again—

“I am going to hunt him down, and I swear to God, Octavia, I am going to. Kill. Him.”

Octavia doesn’t shrink back. Her eyes are blazing, and she’s shaking in outrage just as violently as he is. “You can throw blame around all you want, but you wanna know something, Bell? You can’t predict the future. You, Lincoln, neither of you knew this was going to happen. It’s nobody’s fault but the people who did this to her. So stop throwing yourself a pity party and blaming Lincoln and get your act together and just. Deal. With. It.”

She enunciates each word, and each one of them plows into him like a ton of bricks, knocking away his retort in a rush of clarity. Because even if she can’t convince him that this is not his fault, that Clarke would be whole and safe and not beaten within an inch of her life if it wasn’t for him, it doesn’t really matter why it happened. All that really matters is what happens next. There will be plenty of time for self-recrimination later, if she—when she wakes up. But right now, it’s not about him; it’s about Clarke and how none of them would’ve survived this place if it wasn’t for her. How they all need her.

How he needs her.

All of his anger deflates and he casts his eyes upward in a vain attempt to keep them dry. “I didn’t know Clarke even knew how to need help, and I don’t know how to deal with it. I just—I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, O.”

Octavia’s eyes soften (he doesn’t think he’s seen them without their edge since back in Section 17). She takes both of his hands in hers, urging him to stop staring skyward and to look at her. “How about you start by getting back in there? Hiding out here isn’t going to solve anything,” she tells him.

He finally drags his eyes to hers (they’re still throbbing with what he doesn’t want to admit are unshed tears) and takes her in, picking up on everything that he didn’t bother to notice before. There are smudges of blood dotting her forehead and caked in the crevices under her nails; bags shadow her eyes and her eyelids droop with exhaustion.

He needs to stop being so selfish, to stop wallowing in self-pity. Logically, he knows he’s not the only one Clarke’s suffering is affecting (subjectively, not so much), and he doesn’t know if his whirlwind of rapidly changing emotions is annoying everyone else or himself more.

He doesn’t know what to say to make this better, to make his sister understand that he’s just not equipped to deal with this, that he doesn’t know how to care about anyone but her. So instead, he says:

“We need her, O.”

“I know,” she says. “But if Clarke’s taught me anything, it’s how to tell when someone’s not going to make it.” She shoots him a lopsided grin. “She’s going to make it, Bell. I promise.” And then she squeezes his hands one last time before shoving him lightly in the direction of the Dropship, toward Clarke, and wandering away.

She’s right, he knows she’s right, so he rallies what’s left of his courage and forces himself the rest of the way. As he goes, he dodges the stares of the rest of the camp, a few pitying, a few accusatory, and is grateful that they seem to be mostly studiously avoiding him (he wonders what Octavia threatened them with to get them to leave him alone). When he finally rounds the corner and sets his sights on the ship that started it all, he can just make out a pile of folded limbs and black hair hunched over a bottle of moonshine.

Monty.

He lifts his head and (kind of maybe) slurs, “My shift over?”

Bellamy frowns. “What’re you still doing here?”

“What does it look like?” Monty lifts his arm and wiggles the bottle of moonshine. “Besides, Octavia said that somebody needed to be here in case she—when Clarke wakes up.”

Bellamy cringes as he’s hit with an entirely new iteration of guilt (it should be him out here, he never should have left), and Monty must read something in his features, in the gnashing of his teeth and the clenching of his fists, because now he’s standing up and extending him the bottle (he refuses it with a sharp jerk of the chin).

“Hey. It’ll be all right. If anyone can pull through this, it’s Clarke.”

Bellamy can only manage a grunt in response.

Monty scoffs. “She couldn’t have been in better hands. I mean, seriously. Have you met me?” he waggles his fingers. “Those stitches? Top-notch.”

When Bellamy doesn’t respond, when he only mimics the rest of the camp and studiously avoids Monty’s attempts at levity, the other boy sighs and turns to go. “I’ll leave her to you, then.” But before he makes it more than a few wobbling steps, Bellamy swallows the lump in his throat and lays a (only slightly) shaking hand on his shoulder.

“Thank you.”

And never before have those words meant as much as they do now.

Monty takes another swig of moonshine. “It’s the least I could do. Can you imagine you fumbling around with a needle and some wire? Pretty scary stuff.”

Bellamy would roll his eyes if he wasn’t still such an unpredictable wreck that he’s afraid the slightest movement would start him crying. So instead, he says, “All right, already. You’ve made your point. Now go get some rest.”

“You got it, boss.” He brings his hand up in mock salute and turns to go, but then stops. “And, Bellamy? Don’t get mad but… I once told Octavia you were a power-hungry jackass. For what it’s worth, I take it back.” And he offers Bellamy a sheepish grin.

The corner of Bellamy’s mouth twitches up, and he tries to tamp down a smile (he’s not succeeding). But it doesn’t matter anyway because now Monty’s walking away. When his red jacket disappears into the tent he shares with Jasper, Bellamy steels himself and climbs the ramp the rest of the way into the Dropship.

The first thing he notices (besides the acrid stench of blood and sweat permeating the air) is that someone’s covered her back; he can only see the tips of her bare shoulders poking out of the scratchy fabric. For the first time, he’s glad that those blankets he and Clarke found are an obnoxious shade of orange instead of red.

The second thing he notices is that Clarke is awake. Her eyes are flicking around the room in haphazard patterns and she’s whimpering, each tiny sound like a war drum pounding in his ears. Her fists are clenching and unclenching at her sides, and even from ten feet away, he can tell that her back is spasming.

But the worst thing, the thing he wishes he could erase from his memory, is the throbbing at her temples, the lip caught between her teeth, the red rimming her eyes: he can tell that she’s been trying not to cry.

And then her eyes settle on him and she sucks in a breath.

He surges forward and drops to his knees at the side of the table, face level with hers, hands clutching at the edge of the cool metal (he doesn’t know how close he should get—he can’t tell if she even wants him near her—). But when he settles next to her, she seems to relax a little, her movements less jerky, her breathing a little less erratic.

His voice comes tumbling out of him in a jumbled rush before he can stop it. “I’m sorry. Someone should’ve been here—you’re safe now, but you shouldn’t have been alone—”

“Bellamy.” (he’s not sure if he’s imagining it, but she seems to shift imperceptibly closer.) “It’s all right. Just tell me what happened.”

At her words (surprisingly steady and free of the pain she must be feeling), rationality takes over again, shoving aside his alarm and a whole slew of emotions he’d rather not psychoanalyze. His fingers slowly stop trying to gouge dents into the table, and he takes in a deep breath.

“I don’t know how much you remember,” he finally says.

“Neither do I,” she admits. Then her eyes travel to the whites of the bandages winding under her shoulders. “How did you…?

“Octavia was at it for hours. She’s taking a break now.”

She nods her head in understanding and then asks, “Who else?”

“Monty and Raven. Finn and Jasper left to get some of that red seaweed you and Wells—you used before.” His train of thought stutters to a stop as he mutters, “Connor too.”

Clarke’s brows draw together. “Do I even want to know?”

“Another time.”

They regard each other for a moment that stretches into the silence, that’s just a little too prolonged to be comfortable. Neither one of them seems to know what to say, and for once, the silent communication that they’re so good at, the way they seem to be able to read each other without a second thought, fails them.

And then she’s extending her hand toward him (wincing when the movement pulls at the skin of her back). It’s only shaking a little with the effort and Bellamy’s almost, almost, inclined to call that a win. It takes him a second (his hand keeps faltering as it reaches out), but soon his palm is hovering a little ways away from hers, afraid (unworthy) to take the leap. Clarke clucks her tongue and makes up the rest of the distance, enveloping his hand in her own.

“I’m glad you were there.”

Bellamy’s taken aback. He soaks in the faint bruising on her cheek, the mangled circles encasing her wrists, the stitches poking out from underneath the blanket. He can’t unsee the reminders of her pain, of her suffering, and he has to force himself from reliving the nightmare that Raffe’s will wrought. He recovers his voice and it wrenches out of him as a sort of strangled moan. “I’m not.”

Her ice-blue eyes never leave his face, and her silence makes him feel lower than low. But then she says, “This isn’t your fault.”

“But, Clarke. I—”

“No. Listen to me, Bellamy. When—when that man was torturing me, you want to know what got me through it?” The tenor of her voice is pleading with him, imploring him to listen, entreating him that this is important. “I’d like to say that it was the thought of my Mother coming down in a few days. That it was the camp. Our home… But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I don’t think I was capable of remembering anything outside of that room.” She takes in a deep breath and tightens her hold on him. “It was your voice. You kept on calling my name, and if you hadn’t been there to remind me what was happening, who I was, I might’ve lost myself.”

His heartbeat stutters to a stop.

“And afterward? When they left us in that hole to die? I trusted you to get us back safe.” Her eyes soften. “You came through, Bellamy. I knew you would.”

He’s not ashamed when he has to choke down a sob.

“I feel like shit, Clarke. You shouldn’t be the one comforting me right now.”

She arches an eyebrow. “Should I try to convince you that you’re not a piece of shit now too?”

He lets out a watery laugh. Touché, he wants to say. But instead, he only asks, “What can I do? What do you need?”

What she says next comes out as an only slightly abashed whisper. “Just—just stay here,” she says. “And keep the moonshine handy.”

“Got that covered.” He gestures to the half empty bottles scattered across the floor.          

Her eyes widen slightly, and she looks like she wants to wince at all that it took to keep her alive, but then her face is meeting his again and a corner of her lip is quirking up. “Some Unity Day, huh?”

Bellamy surprises himself when his laugh isn’t weighed down by fear, by frustration and self-loathing. It simply is. Because Clarke is joking and there’s more color in her cheeks than there’s been in hours and a smile is playing across her lips and he no longer feels like everything is just wrong.

It doesn’t feel right, per se, but he no longer feels like the ground is falling out from under him. Like he’s a powder keg overflowing with rage and panic and shame. He feels lighter than he’s felt in weeks, buoyed on a cloud of relief and pure awe that Clarke pulled through, that she’s stronger than he even thought possible, that he won’t have to do this alone.

Clarke interrupts his high with a tug on his fingers. “That reminds me. Unity Day—the truce with the Ground—”

He shakes his head. “Just stop, Clarke. You need to rest.”

“But we need to figure this out; we’ll need to start preparing—”

“We can figure it out later, Princess.”

She shoots him a disapproving glare. “When’s later?” But the way that her eyes are blurring in and out of focus, the way her body is uncoiling and easing itself down, tells him that she’s not all that eager to put up a fight.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he says, gratified when she tries to suppress a smile at the echo of what she told him on a day trip not too long ago.

She looks like she wants to protest, but in the face of what he can only surmise is his sudden good humor, she relents. “Fine. But only because you asked nicely.” And her eyelids flutter shut.

And he doesn’t know how it happened, when it happened, but as he watches the grin fade from her lips, as her breathing begins to even out, as he remembers her resilience, her compassion in the face of everything she’s been through, he wants to keep on laughing. Because he looks at her and now he knows that he’s well and truly fucked.

Not too long after, her hand goes slack in his again, but this time, he tightens his grip and keeps on breathing.

{fin.}

So she ignores the way Korra’s ceremonial dress just fits so snugly in profile when Korra turns to Varrick and says, “I wasn’t really being serious about all this, y’know. It was just an idea. You didn’t have to take it so seriously, Varrick—”

Varrick waves a dismissive hand and wraps it around Korra’s shoulder, gesticulating wildly with his other (he’s throwing his arm around so vigorously that Asami is afraid he might dislocate something, but then she remembers that it’s Varrick and she ceases to care). “Of course I did! Can you imagine the possibilities!? Future mover rights. Hordes of crazy fans. Spin-offs! Action figures!”

“Maybe we can finally bring about world peace,” Asami deadpans.

“Exactly!” Varrick shouts. “Don’t be so small-minded, Asami. Never doubt the power of good, old-fashioned entertainment. Not all of us get hot-and-heavy staring at machine parts all day.”

Asami harrumphs when Korra snickers.

Varrick shoulders Asami out of the way and fluffs up his ascot. “Anyway. Now that introductions are out of the way, we can really get this show on the road! Avatar Korra, we’ve already provided each of the contestants with a list of your favorite activities, foods, ideal date spots, yada yada. Also, your turn-ons. Which were oddly specific: lips the color of cherries, 34C, eternally purple eye shadow, hidden birthmark on—okay, now I’m feeling scandalized. Moving on!”

Varrick nudges Korra into the gaggle of people and then shouts into his microphone, “Before we really get started, I’ll give you all a few minutes to mingle amongst yourselves. Please no subterfuge”—(he shoots a thumbs up at Zhu Li)—“or maiming of other competitors!”—(and throws a pointed look at Kuvira)—“Go crazy, kids!”

Kuvira scoffs. “Let the wildebeests attack all at once, why don’t you. I don’t see why I must even participate in this silly game when my victory is already assured. This is an affront to my dignity. This one,” she sneers, jabbing a finger at Mako, “isn’t even in it to win it. What is he even doing?”

Mako looks up sheepishly from his handheld telephone (which, if she squints, Asami swears is decorated with a backdrop of a particularly annoying royal personage) and mumbles, “Just a… bodyguard… thing.”

Kuvira scowls at him as if he is a particularly offensive sunburn on a particularly cloudy day.

“Kuvira. If you would please lower your glare to stun instead of annihilate, I’m sure we could all just get along,” Bolin interjects.

“No, no. This will be great for ratings! Zhu Li, do the thing!”

“Oh god. What does that even mean? I mean, really?”

“I promise, all I do is protect Wu from his own idiocy. That’s it. I swear!”

“Where’s Pabu when you need him? Party tricks would be a good distraction from all this negativity!”

“My metal-bending in your face would be a good distraction from all this negativity.”

When it seems as if the bickering will never stop, and Asami is afraid her eyes will permanently roll to the back of her head, she sidles up to Korra and fixes her with what she hopes is her most unimpressed frown.

“This is what happens when you get ‘his-royal-tediousness’ involved in anything. Now do you see why I never get anything done at work—?” Asami starts…

… when Zhu Li promptly slams a chair in between Korra and Asami and shouts something that sounds suspiciously like obstacle! “Am I doing this right,” she asks in a way that is maybe probably a question.

Asami rolls her eyes (she really is worried about what this is doing to her vision) and sinks down into the chair, straddling its back with her arms. “You realize that by kidnapping me from my office, you’ve just prolonged my work day. I still have to go back and finalize plans on that new series of mech suits. Plus, Varrick—excuse me—our good, kind host here has been breathing down my neck about those arena specs—“

“Uh uh. No work talk here. Here, you are supposed to woo me.” Korra brings a finger to Asami’s lips and quirks up one side of her mouth in what she thinks is maybe probably a seductive smirk. And Asami doesn’t think about tracing the line of Korra’s dimple with her tongue, she doesn’t, because Bolin is in the room and he has the emotional disposition of a five year old. And she doesn’t feel bad prioritizing her company first, she really doesn’t, because it’s not like she misses Korra working out and just forgetting to put a shirt on every morning or the way Korra does this little snort-laugh thing when she hides the keys to Asami’s vespa down her pants, she swears. She doesn’t think about it at all. She doesn’t.

Asami makes a note to add vehement denial to her résumé’s list of skills.

And then she raises an eyebrow.  “Woo? Really, Korra?”

Korra blushes and looks down, scuffing her boot along the floor. “I just mean that, y’know. Ever since you started working at Sato Industries again, you’re never home. Is that weird? To say home? I mean, I know we only moved in together, like, a few weeks ago, but that punching bag you got me can only keep me entertained for so long. Not to mention it’s completely shapeless. Not like y— Anyway. I just miss you. So. Bad. You know I can’t cook for shit, and the faucet in the bathroom keeps breaking, and I barely even know the proper way to hold a wrench let alone—” Asami stops listening, because Korra just looks so desperate and unsure and so like that girl Asami first met all those years ago.

All of a sudden, she is up and less than a foot in front of Korra (where did the chair go, did it spontaneously combust or something—) and she’s pushing back Korra’s hair-loopies and maybe probably blushing too.

“I didn’t realize—I didn’t know— I’m sorry, Korra. It’s just been so hectic ever since we got back from the Spirit World, and it’s really not helping that someone at work won’t stop looking over my shoulder every five seconds—but actually, stop doing that Varrick—  but I promise that I will try harder,” Asami assures her, shooing away the six feet of man-child eavesdropping at her back.

It takes a second, but then Korra brings her eyes to Asami’s and tries not to smirk. “Will you try hard to woo me soon? Because I hate to say it, but you have some pretty stiff competition here. Kuvira certainly thinks she’s giving you a run for your money,” she says to a shout of of course I am, you imbecile!

Asami tries to pretend like this wasn’t Korra’s plan all along. “Fine. I promise. I’d also like to say that I’m kind of distressed that you felt the need to actually say that the punching bag wasn’t an adequate substitution—“

“You know that punching things is my second love—”

“Yes, yes. You’ve threatened to leave me for it on many occasions,” Asami chuckles. And then her eyebrows turn down in what she is proud to call her ‘alluringly devious you-can’t-mess-with-me-because-I-will-mess-with-you-right-back’ look (named by Korra, Asami is not that full of cheese, she promises). “But I know you won’t. Because apparently your turn-ons include purple eye shadow, red lipstick, and a birthmark that sounds suspiciously like the one I have on my—”

“Geez! Enough already! That’s a secret for just you and me.”

“And me…” Mako mumbles.

Asami cocks an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah. That happened, didn’t it.”

“So now that Asami and I have made up—which was kind of the whole point of this thing in the first place—can I just…?” Korra snatches all of the roses from the table at Varrick’s side and steps toward Asami.

Which sends Varrick into what Asami likes to call his ‘code-red emergency annoyingly-intolerable mode.’ “No, that’s not how this works. There’s a process! Elimination rounds. Superficial dates. One-on-one time. You can’t just give the entire bundle away!”

Korra frowns. “I mean… Asami has a motorcycle, so...”

“I have nice hair!” Mako cries.

“I have the entire Earth Nation underneath my thumb. I can end who I want, when I want, if I want. I can destroy this silly little host-man with a snap of my finger if you so desire,” Kuvira declares.

“Oh, please pick me. Please.” Zhu Li examines her nails.

Bolin snuggles Pabu in a corner.

Asami smiles. “I know where your sweet spot is when we’re alone at home and in bed and—”

Korra’s face is suddenly positively crimson, and Asami is almost worried she’ll collapse right there on the spot. So she puts a hand on the back of Korra’s neck and scratches a nail lightly behind her ear. Which she knows will make matters worse, but in the best possible way. She extracts the roses when Korra’s fingers start shaking like crazy (the stems have been near strangled to death), satisfied at her victory (take that, kuvira).

“How about we start making up for lost time?” She breathes into her neck.

Korra looks like her brain is short-circuiting. “I think we need to get out of here. Now. Like, right now. Before I— God, your eyeshadow is just so purple today…” she mumbles.

Asami smiles. “I’m sure there’s one of these around here somewhere, so, hot tub?”

Korra smiles back. “Hot tub.”

The first twinges of trepidation begin to make their way into her voice, and she tries to hide the wobble in her words as she slowly stands up, takes a step back, says, “… Is that right?”

He mirrors her retreat with a step toward her, and his smile grows even wider. “It’s not safe, all by yourself out here.”

“I can take care of myself.” One step back.

“You sure about that?” One step forward. “Was that what you were doing when you shut the door on us? When you left all of us out there to die?”

Clarke reaches an arm out behind her, feeling for any obstruction, anything blocking her path to escape. “… Were you following me?”

Tripp leers at her. “You know, I’ve always wondered why half of the camp looked at you like you were the sun and stars. Why Bellamy followed you around like a sad, little puppy when he could’ve had us all eating out of his hand. It makes me wonder how you wrapped him so tightly around your little finger. How often did you put out for him, Clarke? Did you follow him into his tent like all of his other whores?”

Clarke flinches at his words, and she wants to do nothing more than lay into him, take out all of her anger, call him out as the pig that he is. But she’s not stupid; she’s weaponless, and she’s never been good with her fists, and everything looks so much more menacing in the dark. She raises herself onto the balls of her feet. “I think it’s better if I go, okay Tripp? I’m going to turn around and leave now,” she says, voice as steady as she can make it.

But he only ignores her, advances on her, runs his eyes up and down the length of her body. “I bet you like it rough. I bet, under all of those clothes, you’re just like every other dirty slut I’ve ever fucked—”

And then Clarke is running, darting through the trees, dodging branches and boulders and moving like she’s never moved before.

She screams for help, but she knows that she’s too far from camp for anyone to hear (why didn’t she tell anyone where she was going, why didn’t she bring a weapon with her, why?)and as she hears the frenzied snap of branches underfoot behind her, she feels an ominous sense of foreboding worm its way into her gut.

And it’s not like her at all, to be so careless, but these past few weeks have passed in a grief-filled haze, weighed down by Raven’s hostile glares, her Mother’s pity, Bellamy being so understanding (when she doesn’t deserve it, damn it), and worst of all, the sight of any weapon making her want to retch, bringing her back to a time when her hands were covered in blood (you’re going to be okay… you’re okay). But it doesn’t matter how she feels because she should’ve been smarter (stupidstupidstupid). Even though they’re in a tentative truce with the Commander, there could be any number of disgruntled Grounders lurking outside the fence. But she never expected an attack to come from her own people. She shouldn’t have to expect an attack from someone she should be able to trust.

Clarke bites back her fear and frustration and vaults over another fallen tree, and something like salvation seizes her as she sprints for a break in the trees ahead of her. She emerges into a small clearing and that means that the trees are getting thinner. She must be getting closer to camp, she must be—

But then she feels a sharp pain at the back of her skull and she’s being wrenched backward by her hair. She whirls around and rears her arm back to jab him with, to distract him with so she can get away (she’s just now started to realize that he’s twice her size and that never seemed to matter before—). But before her fist can make contact, Tripp backhands her, and her head snaps viciously to the side, momentum sending her careening to the mud.

When she lunges forward through her daze to grab at his knees, he delivers a savage kick to her stomach that launches her backward, leaves her wheezing, face pressed to the ground, blood leaking from the corner of her lips and mingling with the dirt below her cheek. She curls shaking fingers into the ground and tries to muster the strength to push herself up, but her arms are trembling and her vision is blurry and she can barely tell up from down. And then she feels pain explode in her abdomen again and she tastes mud in her mouth as she rolls over and over, rocks and twigs cutting into bare skin. She jerks to a stop when her back hits a tree and everything hurts like it’s never hurt before. She feels like her chest is caving in and her head is pounding, throbbing to the beat of her gasps for air. Every slight movement is agony. The clinical part of her, the part of her that she can just never seem to switch off, distantly notes that a rib or two must be broken (if—when she gets back to camp, it’ll be a miracle if they set right without the proper equipment). And if it was just her body that ached, just her skin that was covered in scrapes and bruises, that would be okay. That would be something she could fix, bandage up until she felt brand new. But it’s not.

She feels hands close around her ankles, start to drag her backward, but it’s not that that starts her fighting again, hurling all of her weight away from Tripp. No, it’s the way his laugh, dripping with condescension and promises of what’s to come, cuts through the ringing in her ears. It’s the way he sneers when he says: “No one’s coming to save you. One of the privileged my ass. Bellamy was right, y’know: ‘whatever the hell we want.’”

Because no. Bellamy would never—

She thrashes from side to side, tries to kick her legs up to her chest even though it feels like torture. But he responds in kind and jerks her forward, flipping her onto her back and collapsing onto her, straddling her. His entire weight is crushing her and now her ribs are screaming in agony and she can feel rocks digging into the bare skin of her back where her shirt has ridden up. She tries to push him off of her, to jerk out from underneath his touch, but he only bears down on her harder.

“Stop—! Please! Please… please don’t do this!” she screams. But her pleas fall on deaf ears.

Tripp grabs both of her wrists in one hand and forces them above her head, grip like a vise, tight enough to bruise. She throws all of her strength into bucking against him, trying to jolt him off of her, but he just laughs. He lowers his face to the curve of her neck and breathes her in, hot air like a snake slithering across her skin. And then he whispers into her ear: “This is gonna be fun, Princess.”

She starts crying in earnest now. Clarke has never thought of herself as weak, as helpless before.  She has never thought of herself as a victim. She doesn’t want to cry, to give Tripp the satisfaction of seeing her this vulnerable, this powerless, and she hates how she’s been reduced to begging. But she can feel herself losing the struggle, her attempts becoming weaker and weaker in the face of their futility and the crush of Tripp’s weight against her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees something gleam, catching the moon on its metal surface, and then, with a snap that echoes in the clearing around them, Tripp is cutting through the front of her shirt and the center of her bra. He discards his knife, and his free hand creeps upward, leaving in its wake a trail of pure revulsion; it inches underneath the material of her bra and cups her breast in its palm, rough and greedy in its exploration, scalding her wherever it touches. His tongue darts over her throat and his hips grind into her body and she’s shuddering and crying and pleading and everything starts to run together into a single image of pain and fear and hopelessness until all she can see, hear, breathe, is godnopleasestoppleasestoppleasestop, a single stream of thought that, try as she might, she cannot tune out. It collides with the litany of her sobs and Tripp’s cruel taunts, provides the backdrop to the soundtrack of this nightmare.

And she is suffocating on it, battling for air and choking in a sea of fear and humiliation and desperation and, most of all, anger. Anger at Tripp for the way his hand roams up and down her body, the way his breath feels like slime on the skin of her throat. Anger at the Ark for sending her down here in the first place. Anger at herself for getting into this situation and being too weak to do anything about it. What good are hands that save others if she can’t even save herself?

And then all of a sudden, Tripp is easing up; he releases her wrists and raises himself up, and for one glorious second, relief washes through her. But then she sees that he’s reaching for his pants. Time slows to a crawl and with a rising horror, she watches as he undoes his zipper, watches as it inches downward. And it’s like watching the Exodus ship crash to earth, like watching Charlotte plummet to her death all over again. Like something horrible and terrifying that if you had just done something differently, if you had just tried a little harder, you might’ve stopped.

nononononopleaseno—

For a second that stretches into her rising terror (the kind of terror that accompanies complete and utter despair, that follows as you watch your father get sucked into space, as you wake up and realize that you’ll never see your best friend again) she can barely breathe; she just lies there, frozen, ice cold panic shooting down her spine. But then she starts screaming, wailing, pleading with someone, anyone, to come help, that she’s here and forgodsake please! She’s flailing her arms and clawing at his chest and trying to reach his face—and then his features contort into a mask of fury and he’s punching her in the jaw and dropping onto her, knocking the wind out of her again.

“Shut up, bitch!” His hands dart to her throat, fingers snapping closed, crushing into her windpipe. She tries to drag her mud-caked nails into his arms, tries to pry him off of her, but his grip is like iron and he just slams her head into the ground, once, twice. She bites her tongue and chokes on the blood and bile that threaten to escape and barely even notices when his hands leave the skin of her neck, her vision going in and out and her throat on fire. With dim awareness she feels his hands at her hips, undoing the zipper, creeping into the waistband of her pants, and with a grim sort of certainty, she tries to prepare herself for what is about to happen. She knows she’s sobbing and that every fiber of her being is recoiling in disgust, but she can’t move; she can barely breathe and for some insane reason, all she can think about is the day they landed on earth and she breathed in the scent of the world for the first time. Thinking almost anything was possible. Thinking the worst of her troubles would be shirking Wells and tolerating Octavia.

Tripp’s hand travels even lower and Clarke whimpers; even though she feels like a limp rag doll, she lifts her arms and feebly tries to stave him off, weakly pounding her fists into his shoulders, but it’s like pushing against a metal wall. Tripp just sneers and lowers his face to her chest, trailing his tongue in between her breasts and grinding into her and fondling her and his moans are drowning out all other sounds and she can feel him against her and—

And suddenly, his weight is gone and all Clarke can feel in his place is the cool night air, light and easy across her exposed skin.

At first, she just lies there, suspended in her confusion. She knows it’s irrational, but she wonders if maybe it was all just a bad dream; maybe she’ll turn to the side and her Mom will be there, maybe she’s been home all along and there was never anything wrong with the Ark’s oxygen and she’ll live in this metal box for the rest of her life, no matter how much of a prison it seemed like before. She knows it’s irrational because her skin still burns where Tripp touched her, where his tongue left trails of saliva in its wake. She knows because she can see the moon peeking out of the canopy of leaves above her. She knows because she can hear Tripp grunting and yelling a little ways away.

And then another voice cuts through every other sensation. At first, it seems so gruff and outraged and violent that she almost doesn’t recognize it. In a daze, she musters the will to lift herself up, even though it hurts, oh god it hurts. And what she sees is almost too good to be true—

“You son of a bitch! I’m going to fucking kill you…!” Bellamy roars, his voice deadly, laced with venom. He’s on top of Tripp, grappling with him, hammering him with punches, pummeling him over and over and over again.

And again.

And again.

He’s still yelling, each word punctuated with another blow and it’s impossible to make out what he’s saying when all she can see is how frantic he is, how, with each strike, more and more blood coats his fists.  She should feel relieved, safety only a stone’s throw away, in the grasp of a boy she thought she might never see again, but all she can feel is nausea.

Clarke stares at him in a stupor. Bellamy, stop! You’ll kill him! But she can’t bring herself to say the words. Can’t bring herself to stop what she wants more than anything to happen.

When Tripp stops trying to fight back, when he can barely manage to turn his face and spit blood into the dirt, Bellamy reaches for the belt at his waist and pulls out a pistol. Clarke wants to squeeze her eyes shut; she wants to pretend that Bellamy isn’t going to be riddled with guilt for killing this boy (don’t you see what this means? you’re not a murderer), no matter how much he deserves it. But she knows him well enough to see that, no matter how angry he is, killing Tripp will only leave another permanent blemish on Bellamy’s soul. And maybe it’s incredibly selfish of her, but Clarke sees the fear in Tripp’s eyes and she just. doesn’t. care.

Bellamy levels the gun at Tripp’s head and places his finger on the trigger and steels himself for the backlash and starts to squeeze—

And then nothing happens.

His hands are shaking and his jaw is twitching in that way that it does when he’s furious at himself. He’s breathing almost as heavily as she is now and all she can see through his mask of rage and uncertainty is a boy who just wanted to protect his sister. And in the loaded space between now and what comes next, Clarke feels like he’s almost as scared as she is.

But his moment of hesitation costs him; Tripp’s arm darts out and smacks the pistol out of his hands. Bellamy watches as it sails out of sight and into the tree line, and Tripp uses the distraction to grab a rock off the ground and pound his fist into Bellamy’s head. When Bellamy lists to the side, Tripp scrambles out from under him, snatching something off the dirt as he goes. At first, Clarke thinks it’s a twig, but then it catches the light and she feels so stupid, stupid. It’s the knife; how could she have forgotten—

He lunges toward Bellamy, who’s trying to stand up through his daze, clutching his head, and she’s not sure if the blood that smears on his temple is his own or Tripp’s but she doesn’t care because Bellamy. She barrels into Tripp from the side, throwing him off balance, even though the thought of touching him again makes her sick to her stomach. He loses his footing and it’s working—Bellamy is standing up and starting toward them—but suddenly Tripp is no longer falling. She casts a furtive glance in Bellamy’s direction, watches his eyes go wide, and then Tripp is yanking her toward him by her elbows. He secures her to him, one hand wrapped around her chest, squeezing her into submission, the other pressing the knife to her throat, drawing blood. She distantly realizes that he’s shaking too, and she can’t possibly fathom why until she wrenches her eyes away from Tripp’s hands on her and her gaze locks with Bellamy’s.

His face is white, and she can’t help but see the stark contrast between it and the blood on his hands. Or the way his eyes have gone dark, filled with an emotion she can’t describe. And in that moment, everything else seems to fall away; it’s like they’re back at the Dropship again, two wide-eyed kids meeting for the first time, ready to take on the world and whatever it had to throw at them. A look passes between them that is pregnant with an unspoken plea, for him to understand that she needs him (you may be a total ass half the time, but I need you), for her to be all right, and it feels like minutes pass, even though it’s barely been a second. When they both snap back into reality, his entire demeanor changes. He’s no longer stiff as a board, swept up in his shock and guilt. Now he’s very nearly quaking with rage, and the look on his face would terrify her if it was anyone but Bellamy. But she doesn’t only see his fury, the way he’s poised to strike, the way his fists clench and unclench and his jaw twitches. She also sees the way his eyes dart up and down her body, taking in her appearance, the way his shoulders are trembling too. And she thinks that she’s never seen Bellamy so scared before.

She’s aware that, her shirt cut the way it is, her chest is on full display. She’s covered in grime, both real and imagined, her pants are sagging, and the pain that Tripp’s will has wrought is written plain and clear all over her body. She sees what Bellamy must see, and that renews her anger and nausea and humiliation all over again.

“B-Bellamy…” she stutters.

And more than anything else, it’s that single word that ends the standstill they’ve found themselves in.

Bellamy’s eye twitches. “Let her go,” he commands, voice shaking.

But Tripp’s only laughing again (that horrible, mocking laugh, and he’s on top of her again, lowering himself down again, and no—) and now it doesn’t only sound ugly, it sounds maniacal, panicked. He lets his teeth graze her ear and the hand at her chest wanders further down as he angles the knife so it catches more light. “What’re you gonna do about it, huh? Kill me? Because that worked out so well. Maybe I’ll just make you watch as I…” And he thrusts his hips forward; Clarke gags as another sob wrenches out of her.

Bellamy jerks forward and snarls, only halting when Tripp presses the knife deeper into her skin.  His clenched fists are quivering and he’s poised like a bowstring, just waiting to snap. “I swear to God, you do that again and I will fucking rip your face off,” he growls, voice low and dangerous.

“I’d like to see you try,” Tripp sneers, and if Clarke hadn’t been pressed as tightly against him as she was, she wouldn’t have felt the way  he recoiled almost imperceptibly at the fury coating Bellamy’s words, at the pure malice in his eyes, wouldn’t have felt the way the blade at her throat slackened ever-so slightly. My god, he’s scared.

And maybe if Clarke had been anyone else, maybe if the Ground hadn’t hardened her into what she is now (we are what we are) she would’ve remained a statue, rooted in place by everything she’s been through.  But she isn’t anyone else. She’s Clarke Griffin and she’ll be damned if Tripp thinks she’s too fragile to fight back.

Her fear hardens into steely resolve and, in that moment, she ignores the way her body protests at her movements, fights through the pain and shock winding through her. She takes advantage of the slack and drives an elbow into his stomach, plunges the heel of her boot into his foot. It almost scares her that she relishes in his grunt of pain, but then she remembers the feel of his clammy hands pawing at her breasts, the feel of his fists leaving bruises all over her body.

He drops the knife and she snatches it out of the air as she hurls herself away from him, not caring that its sharp edges are slicing into her palm, that her ribs are crying their disapproval. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Bellamy launch himself forward, making his way toward her.

But she doesn’t wait, can’t wait for him again. Because if Bellamy can’t kill him, then she will.

The blade slashes across Tripp’s shoulder, cutting through his jacket and leaving behind a bloody gash in its wake, and she’s distantly surprised at how much strength she has left in her. As he blanches and cringes backward, she raises her arm behind her head, determined to finish it, to just end it so she never again has to fear the way his hands scalded her body, the heat of his rough exhalations against her neck.

And then Bellamy is hovering at her side and she can feel, rather than see, him begging her to stop, bringing with him the image of when he killed Dax, eyes haunted, never the same again.

“Clarke—no!”

And she looks up into the face of her assaulter, but instead of Tripp’s face twisted into a sneer, cruel eyes taunting her, all she can see is the face of another boy, all she can remember is another time. Surrounded by the Commander’s army. The feel of sweaty skin and rough bark beneath her fingers. Raven wailing. Blood on her hands.

Thanks, Princess.

All of her mettle dissolves, and she chokes back another sob and freezes. The blade starts to slip out of her fingers, and then warm hands envelop her own and free her of the burden of holding another man’s life in her hands.

Bellamy steps between her and Tripp, shielding her from what she might’ve just done, and brandishes the knife. He’s still trembling and his knuckles are white around the hilt of the blade, but his voice doesn’t waver when he starts talking. “You leave here and you never come back. You’re lucky I’m not a disgusting piece of shit like you, because I can think of a few other ways this could’ve gone down. And so help me, if you ever step foot near camp, near her again, I won’t hesitate to end you,” he spits out, threat as jagged as barbed wire.

Tripp sneers, but he sees the blood on the knife in front of him, and he’s smart enough to hold his tongue. He spits on the ground at their feet and then pivots on his heel and into the forest. And then he’s just gone.

But it doesn’t feel like it.

After what seems like an eternity of silence, filled only with the sounds of their rapid breathing, hoarse and unsteady in tandem, Bellamy slowly turns toward her.

“Clarke... I—”

Clarke’s knees give out, but before she can crumple into a pile of broken, blubbering parts on the ground beneath her, strong hands cushion her fall and she can feel their warmth radiating through the flimsy material of what’s left of her shirt. And she knows those hands, knows that it’s Bellamy, but the rational part of her mind shuts off and she can’t separate his touch from the hands that were grabbing her not five minutes ago. She jerks out of his grasp and, as her legs hit the dirt, she desperately scrambles away from him, nails breaking against the hard ground, splinters wedging their way into her palms. Her back hits a tree and she can’t bring herself to look up at him, she can’t.

She’s shivering violently, very nearly hyperventilating. The adrenaline from before has worn off, and now all Clarke feels is a bitter cold, seeping its way into her bones, setting her teeth rattling and goose bumps racing across her flesh. But although the chill cuts straight through to her very core, although it feels like it has frozen her heart solid, it can’t erase the lines of fire Tripp scalded into her skin.

Wherever his hands pawed at her, violated her, hit her, it burns. Like a thousand tiny needles are stabbing her, like a thousand tiny insects are crawling on her, gnawing on her.  And even though she knows, she knows, that there’s nothing physically there, she wants to scratch at the marks, peel the layers of skin away until she can’t feel how much they sting anymore, until they’re scraped so raw that she barely notices the dull ache they leave in their place. But she just can’t seem to move; it’s like she’s been manacled to the tree behind her and it’s so frustrating, she just wants to make it stop—

She hears the faint snap of a twig in front of her and all of a sudden the shaking intensifies; her head is whipping up and she’s flinging herself as far backward into the tree as she can go. But then she sees the source of the sound and she remembers.

Bellamy.

She finally drags her eyes up to really look at him and manages to only flinch a little when he takes a tentative step toward her. She can see confusion play across his face, warring with anguish and fury and guilt for dominance over his features. And even though she can’t tell exactly what’s going through his head, she thinks that he’s never been such an open book before. She’s only seen him so expressive in his quiet moments with Octavia, when he lodged that bullet in Dax’s throat (my mother, if she knew what I’d done), when she felt ashamed to even be witnessing it. But now he’s a kaleidoscope of feelings, vivid strokes of emotion layering over one another, jaw twitching, eyebrows drawing together, teeth grinding, and she can see his internal struggle play out like a movie in the way his eyes track the silent tears coursing down her cheeks.

And then a gust of wind brushes over the bare skin of her chest and she’s reminded of how exposed she is. A wave of helplessness, of irrational fear (Bellamy’s here now, he’s not going to hurt her) rushes through her, and her arms snap up to cover herself as best she can. And she hates how weak she feels. She doesn’t want anyone to see her like this, especially him.

So when he starts shrugging off his jacket and shuffling toward her, each faltering step asking her, “is this okay?” she swallows her fear. It’s Bellamy, She reassures herself. It’s Bellamy. Just Bellamy.

When he’s in front of her but not too close, never too close, he lowers himself into a crouch so that his eyes are level with hers (she’s grateful he’s not towering over her anymore, she doesn’t feel so small anymore) and offers his jacket, hand hovering in the loaded space between them. He doesn’t try to get any closer to her and he understands.

She reaches out to take it with quivering hands; it’s three sizes too big, but she maneuvers her arms through the sleeves anyway, and when she can’t fit the zipper into the clasp (why won’t it stop snagging, why can’t she just stop shaking, why is it so hard) she lets out a little cry of frustration.

But Bellamy doesn’t bend forward to help her. Just watches her, eyes never leaving her face. And again, she finds herself grateful. It’s not even that she can’t bear the thought of being touched right now. It’s the fact that, no matter how tiny, no matter how insignificant, she needs some semblance of control over what’s happening; she needs to feel like she’s capable of doing something other than crying and hurting and shaking.

She fumbles with the jacket until the zipper finally catches, and when she pulls it up as high as it will go, it’s like she’s grabbed hold of a lifeline and she’s no longer drowning, no longer sputtering for air.

Until she remembers Tripp’s hand down her pants and she wants to gag and her pants are still sagging—

Her hands dart for the zipper at her waist and, this time, Bellamy does look away. And she’s grateful for that too. His jaw is twitching in that way that it does again. But he shouldn’t be mad at himself, he shouldn’t. Because he was there when she needed him and she doesn’t even know how he knew to come but he did. It’s not his fault; it would never be his fault. She’s safe now. safesafesafe

Before she even realizes she’s doing it, she’s scooting imperceptibly forward. She’s croaking out his name—“Bellamy…”— and she’s so quiet she’s not even sure if he heard her.

But then he’s turning back and his eyes are meeting hers. And when she looks at him, she doesn’t see a man, she sees a boy again, a boy who’s seen so much suffering, who’s seen how unfair the world is and wants nothing more than to stand in its way and beat it back. She sees a boy who is reckless and courageous, but is equally as powerless. A boy who is completely and utterly terrified for her.

He reaches his arm out again, movements halting, unsure. When she doesn’t shrink back, he lays a tentative palm on her cheek and grazes his thumb over the bruise that’s forming on her chin, and she can tell that it pains him when she winces. So he moves it and wipes away a stray tear she hadn’t even realized was there.

He catches her eyes with his own and, for the first time, she realizes that they’re wet too. But there’s also a question in them that she doesn’t know how to answer, can’t even really define. He’s looking at her with such a singular focus, so intently, it’s as if he’s memorizing her, as if he never wants to forget her, as if everything else around them has vanished and it’s only the two of them.

And his gaze is steady, so steady, and she feels as if he might be the only thing keeping her tethered here, like if she looks away, she might lose track of who she is and where she belongs, she might forget that she’s more than a couple of bruises and scratches, she might forget that she’s more than Tripp’s plaything. But she doesn’t forget, she can’t forget, because Bellamy’s here, and right now (no, always—) he is her anchor.

And she doesn’t want to (didn’t want to) be touched, but suddenly her vision is full of Bellamy, of the worry (worry, not pity) in his eyes, of the blood drying on the side of his temple, of the way he’s still trembling, and suddenly she can’t think of anyone else besidesher Mother that she wants to hold her, that she wants to help erase Tripp’s lingering touch.

So she leans forward, inch-by-inch, until her forehead is resting on his shoulder, until she’s balling his shirt up into her fists and tugging him toward her.

And all at once it’s like the dam holding back his uncertainty, the last of her wariness, breaks apart. She’s not sure who moves first, but suddenly she’s flinging the rest of her body into his chest and he’s wrapping his arms around her. He doesn’t realize that he’s holding her a little too tightly, that his arm is brushing one of her broken ribs and she’s still so sore, but she doesn’t care. He buries a hand into her hair and he’s guiding her face into the crook of skin where his neck meets his shoulder and he’s mumbling something over and over that sounds vaguely like her name, but she can’t really tell because she’s sobbing in earnest now, weeping into his shoulder and clinging onto him for dear life. And in that moment, she promises herself that this is the last time she’s going to fall apart like this. But for now, she revels in the shelter of his embrace, his whispered assurances, the way he’s smoothing a hand down her hair, the soothing way he’s rocking them back and forth, back and forth.

As they sway, as Bellamy cradles her to him, as his warmth envelops her, as she bares her soul into his shoulder, she knows now that she’s completely and totally safe. Words can’t express how grateful she is, how close she came to— Another sob wrenches out of her, but she just presses closer to him. She’s aware that his arms around her are still shaking, and she thinks he might be crying too.

And it’s not just Bellamy comforting her anymore, now it’s her comforting him. It’s like they’re desperately clinging to each other, each the other’s foundation, each supporting the other. And Clarke doesn’t mind, doesn’t care that he didn’t go through what she had to tonight, because she’s glad to actually be doing something other than wallowing, other than feeling sorry for herself (which she knows she’s completely within her rights to do, she knows). But she wants to feel useful, in control in any way she can, and holding Bellamy, soaking one another in, letting him know that she’s tangible, she’s still here, is giving her a sense of purpose that she’s craved since the last one involved fighting for her life.

They sit like that, for how long she doesn’t know, until the storm of her emotions finally passes, until she feels like she can support herself again. She’s very nearly cried herself dry and she just feels so tired, like she could just curl up and drape Bellamy over herself like a blanket and sleep and sleep until everything is just a distant memory. Because right now, she doesn’t see how she could ever forget.

They’ve both been quiet for so long that it surprises her when Bellamy finally mumbles into her hair, “Clarke… say something. Anything. Please.”

It takes her a moment (his embrace makes her feel so secure and she thinks she could maybe just stay here forever—), but she pulls back so she can look at him. He’s not ready to let go yet either, and he’s still cradling her cheek in his hand (his touch is so gentle, so faint, and if it was anyone but him she’d worry that it might disappear).The look in his eyes is equal parts anxious and afraid and hopeful and, again, all she can see is Bellamy.

“Thank you,” she whispers. And never before have those two words meant more to her than they do now.

But he doesn’t look relieved; he just looks miserable. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here to stop him.”

“You did stop it.” (not him, but it, because even though he didn’t get to finish, it still feels like he won). “He may have… he touched me,” Clarke stammers. “And he—” she raises the tips of her fingers to the purpling at her throat. “But you came before he… before he—”

“I don’t want— you don’t need to tell me about it, Clarke.” And in his words, she can hear a strangled plea.

But she just shakes her head. “I can still feel him, Bellamy. All over me. It’s like he’s still touching me. Like he never left.” And she shudders.

But then Bellamy is bringing his other hand up and now he’s pushing her hair back from her eyes and running his thumbs over the corners of her lips. “No—look at me, Clarke.  Look at me. He’s gone. He’s gone and he’s never coming back. You’re safe now. And I promise you, I’m not going to let anyone hurt you ever again.” And it’s like he’s trying to convince himself just as much as he’s trying to convince her.

She thinks that, no matter how earnest he is, no matter how much he means what he says, he’s not always going to be there. And even if he could, he can’t protect her from everything.

But it’s what he says next that reassures her more than anything else.

“You’re strong, Clarke. You’re so strong that… that every day, I envy you. You’ve been strong since the day I met you. And you’re strong enough to get through this.” His voice is fierce and intense and passionate, and it’s exactly what she needs to hear. And she thinks that no one has ever understood, known her so completely, as he does.

For the first time that night, she feels lighter than all of the pain and fear. And as she looks up at Bellamy, she feels more than grateful. More than safe. She feels empowered. Because she’s Clarke Griffin. She doesn’t need someone to shield her from every bad thing that comes her way, but it’s nice to know that someone will always be there to have her back, to pick her up when she falls, to reassure her that she’s not alone, that she’ll never be alone. Because there are people that need her just as much as she needs them.

So she knows that, even though Tripp’s touch will linger for many sleepless nights to come, even though she’s going to have to relive it all for her Mother, even though all of her wounds will take time to heal, she’s resilient. She knows that Bellamy will be there, and that he’s not leaving her side again.

She knows that, no matter what comes next, she’s going to be okay.

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{fin.}