#angstywritersnet

He realizes a bit belatedly that Abby is speaking to him again.

“I’m sorry, what?” he asks, and Abby smiles at him. It’s not a full smile, just the slightest twitch at the corner of her mouth, and that reminds him of Clarke, too, so he has to look away.

“We…” She glances back at Kane, who nods at her. “We think that this could be something serious.”

Bellamy stares at them, understands the brevity in their gaze. He knows, he knows, he knows, he was just hoping that his people would have had more time. That they could have been given break for once in their goddamned lives, been allowed to grieve and heal and move on before they were shoved into another life-threatening scenario. But Abby is pleading with him, her eyes insistent and warm and so Clarke it fucking kills him, and it’s then that he knows what he has to do.

“I need…” He clears his throat, standing straight up. “I’m going to go get Clarke.”

“Bellamy, I thought - ”

“It’s been three months, Abby,” Bellamy snaps, crossing his arms over his chest, thinks of the words he wants to say that are lodged in his throat. I need her, too, damn it. We need her, too. “It’s time for her to come home.”

Abby takes a deep breath, and Bellamy watches as Kane moves incrementally closer, a steady presence at her back. (He thinks of war talks and together, and it tastes like iron in his mouth.) “Fine,” she sighs, “but you have to be careful.”

“Aren’t I always?” He gives her a self-assured smirk, and she glares at him - too familiar, too real - before he saunters out of the council room to go collect the necessary items.

He goes to Raven, first.

“Are you finally going after her?” she asks the minute he walks into her workshop, and he stops dead in his tracks. She rolls her eyes and gives him a lopsided grin, the closest she’s come, at least, since they’ve come home. “I was surprised you hadn’t left the minute she walked away.”

“I was trying to respect her wishes,” he grits out, clenching his hands on the work table. It’s become a habit, since he’s been back, trying to find his grip on something solid, real - it reminds him that he’s here, he’s alive. It’s his tactic for remembering what’s a nightmare and what’s reality, because the two had been a bit murky, when he’d come back. (They’d found him half-strangling one of the guards one night, that first week. He didn’t like to talk about it.)

“Yeah, well, this is the more sensible option anyway,” Raven mutters, and it brings him back to the present. She’s assembling a motley of guns, “just to be safe, obviously,” she says. Bellamy thanks her and grabs the bag and begins to walk out the door before her small hand firmly grips his forearm. He looks down at her hand and then back to her face, sees the raw pain still carved into her clenched jaw, in the bloodshot lines of her eyes. “Bring her back, alright?” Bellamy hears the words she’s trying to say, in those four words - bring her back to me, please, bring my friend back to me - and he nods.

Together.

What did that mean to you, Clarke? What did it mean?

He goes to grab a few ration packs after that, bumping into Monty and giving the other boy the warmest smile he can manage and clapping him on the back. He flinches, a bit, and it makes Bellamy frown. “You doing alright there, Monty?” he asks, and the younger boy nods vigorously, not making eye contact. Bellamy is ready to say something else when Miller sidles up, placing a hand on Monty’s back and leading him away. He shoots Bellamy a look that says I’ve got this, and Bellamy simply nods. He stuffs a few more packs into the bag, because Christ knows when the last time was that Clarke actually ate.

He shouldn’t care. It shouldn’t matter.

But it does. Of course it does.

He glances behind him to see Abby and Kane watching him from the doors of what was once the Ark, the doors that had once meant nothing but death and devastation to him but now meant home.

He’s going to bring her back.

Bellamy never realized how much he loathed the quiet until he crash-landed to Earth in a metal deathtrap. There had never been much quiet on the Ark, everything always echoing down the metal hallways, Octavia’s laughter (or her tears) reverberating around their small compartment, the gentle hum of the ship as it drifted aimlessly through space. There was always something, but when Bellamy first came to Earth, the only sounds being those made by his own two feet, it was comforting. It was a solace he had never known before.

And so now, his boots the only sound in the entirety of this expansive forest, it feels like the peace he’s been trying to find for these past three months. The woods are his haven, his break from the reality of sole leadership and nightmares that make him tremble and the whispered legends that people tell of him, the Knight of the Sky People, the Boy King who became more.

I didn’t ask for this life, Clarke. I didn’t want any of this.

You did once, her voice in his head reminds him. You tried to own them all, Boy King.

But he hadn’t known. He had been so stupid back then, with the promise of absolution carved into the bark of the trees, the promise of a life without parameters, a life where he could be the dictator of his own world - that had all sounded so wonderful and ephemeral. But now? After having led his people with her at his side, having pulled that lever with his hand on top of hers? After trying to hand her the salvation she so craved in the palms of his quaking, blood-stained hands? He didn’t want to do it alone, anymore. He was so fucking sick of doing it alone.

You did that to me. You left us all to fend for ourselves.

He doesn’t even know where he’s going, his feet moving of their own volition, one step in front of the other. It sounds like a death march. (It feels like a funeral.)

Of what? What’s dying, here, Bellamy? she whispers to him, and he wonders why he can’t get her out of his head. Why, after all these days and weeks and months of being on his own, trying to survive without her, he’s somehow still picturing her face, broken and beaten and scarred like it was on that last day. Why is this a death, instead of a rebirth?

Because you left us, and the burden was too heavy for us to hold, Clarke. It crushed us.

He walks and he walks and he walks, and he eats little bits of the rations and drinks the water, and he has no idea what day it is, how long he’s been gone. He realizes, too late, that he never saw Octavia before he left. Really, Bell? You’re going to risk your life to bring her back? he can picture her screaming, fire in her veins and ice in her eyes and cold, hard anger biting at his flesh as her words sink in like daggers. She left, and you’re going to go running after her like a fucking dog?

His mind is a prison, and all he wants is salvation.

He hears drills and he feels the slip of a needle into his arm as they turn him upside down, as the blood rushes to his head and all he can think of is the way Clarke looked when she told him it’s worth the risk, when she signed his name on his death warrant with a blankness to her eyes that he’d never seen. He feels the life drain out of his body like sand through a sieve.

He wakes with a sweat lining his skin, and he thinks this may be hell.

(Make it stop. Please, God, make it stop.)

Why the fuck did you think this was a good idea? You’re not even cleared to be out on patrol, for Christ’s sake.

“Shut up,” he mutters out loud, shoving his pack higher on his back and moving forward. How long has he been gone? Days, weeks? Will anyone come looking, if he never returns? How would they know to come looking?

I bear it so they don’t have to, her voice rings in his head.

Bear what? We shouldered that burden same as you. We had our scars just like you did.

“Shut up,” he says louder, trying to stop the voices. He needs to stop the voices, needs to find the silence he felt those first few days back in the forest.

She left them, but she did something worse, didn’t she? She did something to you.

“Shut up!” Bellamy finally screams, stopping in his tracks and clutching at his head. It’s too much, and it’s too soon, and it shouldn’t hurt this much, still, it shouldn’t feel like someone is clawing out his lungs with their talons.

“Bellamy?”

He thinks he’s hallucinating. He thinks it’s his mind playing tricks on him again, tormenting him the way it does in his nightmares: her bloody hands wrapping around his throat, her sinister smile haunting his eyes as she digs the needle further into his arm, her standing alone with her hands dripping in the blood of the fallen and a broken-hearted promise of may we meet again falling from her lips like a goodbye instead of a see you later. But she’s coming closer, now, a halo of golden light surrounding her head - of fucking course it does - and a worried look marring her face. And then she’s right in front of him, kneeling in front of his body as she bites her chapped lips. He doesn’t remember falling to the ground, but there he is, on his hands and knees in the middle of the forest, and of course this is the way she finds him.

(And of course she finds him. It’s always been about her, hasn’t it?)

“Bellamy, are you alright?” she asks, and her voice is barely above a whisper, her hands hovering around her folded knees as though she wants to reach up and touch him, to make sure he’s real, but she hesitates. He can’t decide if he’s grateful or disappointed.

“I’m fine,” he mutters, clambering to his feet. “But it’s time for you to come home.”

Clarke is still on the ground, a bewildered look in her eye, and he realizes her hair is shorter, shorn close to her chin. And then he notices more: there’s a new scar across her cheek that doesn’t look properly healed, and a smattering of bruises below her jaw, and she’s thinner than he remembered, much thinner. And her eyes - Christ, her eyes are going to kill him. Because there’s still ghosts swarming her vision. There’s still the hesitance in her gaze that practically ripped him open when she left, all those months ago. Dark smudges stain the skin beneath her eyes, as though she hasn’t been sleeping much, if at all, and he can’t help the satisfaction that courses through him at that. None of us have been sleeping. All of us have nightmares, too, didn’t you know?

“Time - time for me to - ”

“Murphy showed up - ” He pauses, realizing he doesn’t actually know how long ago it was that Murphy came and delivered the news, and so he shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. Murphy showed up, and started ranting about Jaha going fucking ballistic and about some robot woman. So you need to come back.”

Clarke stands slowly, her legs a bit unsteady. Her eyes are roaming over him, drinking in every inch, trying to relearn and rememorize. “How… how is everyone?” she asks, and Bellamy thinks he may actually combust on the spot.

“How is everyone?” he repeats coldly, and his tone strikes something in Clarke because he catches the grimace that swipes over her face. “Well, let’s see. Monty still can’t look me in the fucking eye, and he flinches every time someone other than Miller tries to lay a hand on him. Harper has had to walk around with earplugs in all the damn time because she can’t stand the sound of drills. Jasper hasn’t spoken in weeks. Raven is too terrified to even leave her workspace most of the time, and it got to the point that Wick had to build her a fucking bed in there. And me? How am I doing?” He’s rambling, now, and he knows it, but he can’t stop himself. He can feel the words bubbling up from his throat no matter how many times he tells himself it isn’t the time nor the place, no matter how many times he tells himself that this isn’t her fault.

Because it is, damn it.

It’s hers, and it’s his, and it was supposed to be theirs, but she ruined any chance of that the minute she turned her back on them.

“I get nightmares every night, and half the time during the day, as you noticed right here,” he spits, and Clarke has her arms curled around her stomach now, her eyes clenched closed. He sees the silent tears glistening on her cheeks, and he wonders when she became this - this broken, battered shell of a girl. “And I’ve had to lead our people alone because you fucking left.”

“Don’t you dare, Bellamy!” she screams, and there she is. Her hands are now clenched into fists at her sides, and she’s literally shaking from head to foot, her lip trembling and the tears still rolling. “I did what I had to do for me. I took the burden so they wouldn’t have to.”

“No you fucking didn’t! You - you may think you were helping us or whatever, but guess what, Clarke? We were all in that damn mountain together. Monty still assembled the lever. I still helped you pull that lever. And you left.”

“I couldn’t - I couldn’t be there, I couldn’t - ”

“So you left me to do it? Alone?”

“Bellamy, God, I never wanted to! You think I would have just willingly left my people because I was feeling a little guilty? I don’t regret doing what I had to do to save them,” she snarls, moving in closer to him and jabbing a finger in his chest. “I don’t regret it for a second. But I did a lot of things that I’m not proud of. I killed a lot of people I never wanted to. Do you know what that feels like?”

“Actually, Clarke, I do, if you’ve forgotten. And I could have helped you, if you would have just let me,” he bites back, and he can see the sparks flying in her eyes. It shouldn’t make him this happy, to see the liveliness back in her demeanor, to see her alive again.

And yet.

“It’s different. You couldn’t have helped me, Bellamy. And that’s not why you’re mad, I know that’s not why you’re mad.”

“You’re damn right that’s not why I’m mad!”


“Then spit it out then, damn it!”

“I’m fucking mad, Clarke, because you didn’t just leave us. You left me,” he says, and he hates himself for the way his voice breaks at the last word. She’s staring at him, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, her shaking having intensified during their argument. Bellamy takes a step back, because their proximity is too much, it’s all just too much, and he can’t fucking breathe.

“Oh, God, Bellamy, I - ”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Bellamy, for fuck’s sake, will you just listen to me?”


“I tried, Clarke,” he whispers, and it sounds dejected even to his own ears. “I tried so damn hard, and you pushed me away. I asked - I begged you to come inside, and you still turned your back on me. I said together, and I meant it. But you - you just… you gave up.”

Clarke’s eyes are transfixed on a spot on the ground. She releases a shaky breath, and he sees the way her shoulders are stooped again, sees the way she can barely hold herself erect. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs, and it’s so quiet he almost doesn’t catch it. “I’m sorry that I was broken into so many pieces you couldn’t glue me back together. I… I tried to do it for myself, but I…” She stops and looks up, and their eyes meet again, and there’s such raw honesty in her gaze that he has to bite his lip to keep himself from saying something stupid. (I know, he wants to whisper to her. I know. I know. I know.)

He wonders if she would accept his forgiveness, now.

I want you to say that you’re with us, she had told him a lifetime ago. He wonders if she’d accept that, too.

“I… we need you, Clarke. I know… I know it doesn’t feel like you can, yet, but… but we need your help.”

“Alright, Clarke. How did you get this… cut on you arm, here?” He grabs one of the stools near by and sits down as he gently takes her arm into his hands. He notices she’s shaking. “Clarke? Are you alright?”

“I’ll be fucking fantastic if you could just stitch me up and let me go,” she mutters, and Bellamy is taken aback. He whistles lowly under his breath, but does as instructed, pulling out his necessary tools and beginning to clean and then stitch up her arm. She doesn’t cringe, or grimace, or even make any noise, to the point that Bellamy finds himself glancing up at her every so often to make sure she’s still breathing or awake or anything. It takes him ten stitches, and by the time he’s done, the girl has relaxed marginally; her shoulders are slumped ever-so-slightly, and there’s a dejected tint to her eyes that wasn’t there before, that was hidden beneath all of the fire and hardened stone lining her expression. He gives her a small smile, taking off his gloves and throwing them into the trash bin as he begins talking again.

“You need to be more careful with whatever caused this,” he tells her, gesturing to the now-bandaged wound. “That was a pretty serious cut, so it’s going to need at least a week or more to heal.” The girl - Clarke - nods once and slips from the bed without another word.

Bellamy stares after her for ten minutes before Roma calls his name with a puzzled furrow in her brow.

The second time it happens is not a week or more later, it’s four days, and along with ripped stitches she now has a cut along her eyebrow.

He raises an eyebrow when he sees her, taking the same seat he had occupied just a few days earlier, and puts on his gloves and readies his equipment. “Funny,” he says, “I could have sworn I told you you needed at least a week of rest before you did anything stupid again.”

“You never said anything stupid,” she mutters back, and it brings a smile to his lips, at least. He cleans both wounds and starts fixing up the stitches on her arm, and that’s when he sees them - a smattering of bruises just below her jawline, colored purple and blue and a sickly yellow. And once his eye has caught those, there’s more: across her collarbone, along the skin of her back before disappearing into the racerback tanktop she’s wearing, scars marring the skin of her thighs. He stops his work slowly, gaze traveling over her body and back to her face, and maybe she sees the horror there, or the confusion, because she bites her lip and glances down to where his eyes had last landed - on her thighs - and she just shrugs. “Long story,” she supplies. When she doesn’t continue, Bellamy picks up his needle and thread once more, and he finishes the stitches on her arm. He doesn’t want to push her if she isn’t ready.

(He reminds himself to mention it to Octavia, to see if maybe there’s something more going on here.)

Her eyebrow only takes about two stitches, and so by the time it’s all said and done, she has twelve new stitches in her body. He pats her leg gently, but he doesn’t miss the flash of pain that cross her face, however briefly, and it makes him stiffen. “Clarke, seriously,” he says quietly, willing her to meet his eye although she staunchly refuses. “You need to be more careful. I don’t know…” He pauses and clears his throat, because he thinks of his mother, of the scars mangling her heart and body, of the men that beat and bloodied her. (And, okay, maybe Octavia is right about the fact that he has a bit of a protective streak.) “I don’t know what is causing this to happen to you, but if you’re in a situation that’s - “

“I appreciate the concern, Doc,” Clarke snarls, standing and clenching her hands into fists by her side, “but I can take care of myself.”

He takes her in, all that blonde hair and anger boiling beneath the surface, a fire she’s trying so hard to put out but she hasn’t quite learned how. He remembers being like that, too, when he was a kid, and… and she’s not a kid. She’s twenty-seven, she can, technically, take care of herself. And he doesn’t know her. He knows absolutely nothing about this girl, and yet he sees the anguish carved into her bones and he wants so badly to help her. And so, with no malice, and a tone that’s eerily calm, he says, “Maybe you can’t.”

He watches her stiffen, and her eyes raise slightly, but they still refuse to meet his - she simply glances at his name tag and murmurs, “I’ll see you around, Dr. Blake,” before disappearing out the doors and into the cold October air.

He has to shake his head and stop himself when he thinks about how cold she must be, in just a thin tank top and shorts.

Focus, Blake. Focus.

And that’s how it begins.

She comes in at least once a week, sometimes more. Always with new bruises and occasionally with cuts that require stitches. She doesn’t really look at him, but she talks now, and he talks too, and sometimes he finds himself telling her things that definitely violate patient-doctor code, or whatever. But their relationship is weird to begin with, he rationalizes. He’s not really her doctor, just some guy that stitches her up when she gets herself into bad situations. So he tells her about Octavia, one day, about the way he’d had to put both of them through college on his own since his mom had died when he was eighteen and Octavia was twelve. He tells her about how his sister, “who’s barely your height, by the way, and weighs about ninety pounds,” he says with a quirk of his lips, wanted to be a cop so badly she signed up for the Academy without even telling Bellamy until she’d gotten in.

“She sounds badass,” Clarke says.

He’s stitching up a cut just above her knee, this time, and he grins up at her. “You remind me a lot of her, actually.” Clarke’s eyes jerk up to his own, and it takes him a full five seconds to realize she’s never actually made eye contact with him before. Her eyes are blue, blue like the Gulf, blue like the sky on a particularly warm day. There’s a spark in them, too, that seems to have fizzled but not quite died out yet, and there’s also something brokenly beautiful in the look she’s giving him, at that moment, that makes his breath catch.

“Really?” she asks.

He turns back towards her stitches and says, “Yeah. Why does that surprise you?”

She clears her throat, and his eyes flit back towards her again. Clarke is playing with her hands in her lap, picking at the skin around her thumbnail. Her voice is soft and watery when she speaks, and he wonders when she was last this vulnerable with someone, when she let the heavily-guarded walls of her heart tumble just the slightest bit. “It’s just,” she begins, “no one has ever… ever thought of me as strong or brave or… badass before.”

Bellamy scoffs, and she glances up at him again, biting her split lip. She looks like a broken little girl right now, with her hair pulled away from her face and her eyes wide and innocent and hurting, and it does things to him. Things that he does not need to be thinking about, especially when it comes to this girl - this girl he’s known for barely a month, at this point, this girl whose relationship with him consists of her getting beat up and him picking up the pieces. “You realize you come into my ER every week with new cuts and scrapes and bruises that would make grown men cry, and you don’t even flinch when I stitch you up?” She stares at him, and he gives her a small smile. “That sounds pretty badass to me.”

Clarke smiles at him - really smiles, and it’s the first time she’s ever done it, the first time she’s looked at him with anything more than a thin-lipped glare, and it lights up her whole face. She looks like the fucking sun, with that golden hair and pale skin and brillantine smile, and he wants to take a picture of this moment to stow away for safekeeping, to remember this version of her.

As she gets up to leave, he says, “Wait one sec,” and then grabs a pen and scratch piece of paper and scribbles his phone number onto it. He hands it to her with a sheepish grin, and she takes it slowly, her brow furrowing in confusion. “In case… in case you need anything.”

She smiles again, and it was totally, totally worth it.

It’s a few days later that he gets a text from an unknown number, with a screenshot of some chemical reactions and the words “HELP ME!!!!!” beneath it. He stares at the text for five whole minutes before another one dings in right underneath: “oh, this is clarke, btw.”

Bellamy smiles.

They’ve been sort-of-kind-of-basically friends for two and a half months, with them exchanging texts every day and her stumbling in to get fixed up multiple times a month, and Bellamy realizes he still has no fucking idea why she winds up in the ER every week. They’ve told each other a lot of things, it feels like - he’s told her about O, about their mother, about what a shitshow med school was, about his friends (Miller and Murphy), and about O’s friends (Raven and Monty and Jasper). He’s told her about some of the staff, how psychotic they are: “Roma followed me around for a week after we broke up,” he had lamented to her, and he’d watched as her shoulders shook with silent laughter. “A fucking week.” He’s told her lots of things, and yet - yet he still feels as though he doesn’t know her, know anything about her.

And somehow he also still gets that feeling in the pit of his stomach when she walks in, sometimes on steadier legs than others, with a shrug and a few new cuts for him to suture.

They’re at Octavia’s new apartment one night, she and Lincoln making dinner in the kitchen while Bellamy and Miller are seated at the table with their respective beers and Monty and Jasper are playing some new video game on the brand new TV in the living room.

Octavia calls from the kitchen, “Bell, have you told Miller about your new girlfriend?”

“O, I swear to God - ”

“Oh, the blonde chick? No worries, he talks to me plenty about her,” Miller calls back with a wink.

Bellamy groans. “I hate you both. And she’s not my girlfriend.”

“Yeah. you’ve just been obsessing about her for two months.”

“I have not been obsessing, why the fuck - ”

“Bell, why don’t you just ask her out?” Octavia asks calmly, leaning her hip against the counter and crossing her arms over her chest. “You obviously really like this girl, and - “

“O, I don’t know anything about her.”

“You said you talk all the time.”

“Yeah, but… but about stupid things. About every day things.”

“That’s a good start,” Octavia tries, but Bellamy simply shakes his head.

“Drop it, O.”

Octavia sighs and exchanges a look with Miller that Bellamy most certainly does not miss, before shuffling back off to the kitchen. Miller glares at him for long enough that Bellamy groans again and says, “What, Miller?”

“You’re being stupid.”

“I am not.”

“Are too.”

“Am not.”

“And you call us the immature ones,” Monty yells over the video game.

Bellamy snorts and runs a hand over his face, taking a swig from his beer. “Miller… I just…” He sighs. “I barely know her. We do talk all the time, and I’ve told her a lot about my life, but every time I get close to cracking her insanely-tall walls, she avoids the question. She changes the subject. It’s impossible.”

“Not impossible,” Miller taunts, and Bellamy kicks him under the table. “Seriously, man. If you really care about this girl… make it happen.”

Octavia chooses that moment to bring out the spaghetti and garlic bread, and so all talk of Bellamy’s love life is extinguished with the meal.

But it’s only a few days later - three, if he’s being honest, because yeah, he counts the days until he sees her because he’s a fucking moron - that his phone rings at four in the morning, and Clarke’s name is scrawled across the screen, and he shoots up so fast he fumbles twice before he actually answers it. “Hello?”

“B-Bellamy?” Her voice is croaky, and it sounds like she’s having trouble breathing, her words tumbling out in a staccato rhythm.

“Clarke? Are you okay?” He sits straight up in bed, already looking around for his jeans. He wonders why his heart feels like it’s beating out of his fucking chest right now, why he can barely breathe himself, hearing her struggling on the other line.

“I… I need y-you to come g-get me,” she manages.

“Okay. Okay, I’m coming. Where are you?” She hesitates, and so he repeats the question, slowly. “Clarke? Where are you?”

“I’m at… at 108 Highgrove,” she whispers, and he almost drops the phone.

There’s this fighting ring there, O had told him once in a rage, and every damn time we try and shut it down, it starts back up again. It’s fucking dangerous there, Bell. People die all the damn time, and they don’t… they don’t care.

“I’m on my way,” he whispers.

He’s out the door two minutes later.

The drive is frantic, and he knows the spot easily, because he’s had to pick O up from there before after a raid (I didn’t want to wake Lincoln, and I knew you’d be on night shift, she always claimed, but he sort of knew - knew that she wanted her big brother, in the aftermath of that).

And so he drives like he’s got the cops on his ass, because he doesn’t know what happened and he doesn’t want to know, really. All he wants is to make sure Clarke is alive and safe and in his car in the next fifteen minutes before he fucking herniates all over the damn place.

He pulls in to the address, and it looks abandoned, save for the five or six cars that are parked outside. Bellamy practically sprints into the building, following the voices and shouts he can hear below. He finds the door to the basement and wrenches it open. It smells like death and alcohol and stale cigarette smoke, and there’s at least thirty people down there, mostly beefed up guys with tattoos circling their biceps, guys with grisly scars marking their faces like bizarre battle medals. He scans the crowd, looking for that trademark hair, but she’s so tiny and these people are fucking massive and -

And then he sees her, curled into the fetal position on the ground, her phone loosely held in her hand. Everyone is ignoring her, looking away from her, as if she isn’t half-dying right in front of them.

Bellamy rushes over, gently tilting her face to look at him. “Clarke? Hey, Clarke, it’s me, it’s Bellamy,” he whispers, and she lets out a half-choked sob.

“B-Bellamy - ”

“I know. I know.” He slides an arm beneath her knees and the other around her neck and slowly lifts her from the ground. She’s light, so light, as though she could drift away on the wind if he just let her. “I’m going to take care of you, okay? I’ve got you.”

“Y-you’ve g-got me,” she whispers back, and it brings a tiny smile onto his lips.

He shoves his way through the throng of people who are circled around the next fight and back up the stairs into the cool December air. He tucks her into the backseat of his car, laying her down gently and taking off his coat to pillow her head.

He drives.

He drives, and he drives, and he doesn’t know where the fuck he’s even going until he’s reached the hospital. He parks in his spot and carefully extricates Clarke from the car, carrying her through the doors to the ER. Harper is working tonight, and she takes a moment to register that it’s him carrying the broken girl through the doors. “I’ve got her,” he says, and when Harper makes a move to help he repeats firmly, “I’ve got her.” Harper nods and backs away, pointing wordlessly to an empty room.

He sets Clarke gently on the bed, turning to close the door and shutter the blinds. “Clarke? Hey, hey, look at me.” He tilts her chin up with his index finger so that her watery eyes meet his, and he whispers, “I need you to tell me what happened so I know how to treat you.”

She nods and swallows heavily, and he helps her sit upright in the bed. “He… h-he, uh, he hit me about… a-about three? Three times? In the stomach, and he, h-he…” She trails off, the sobs wracking her body again, and Bellamy moves onto the bed, tugging her into his lap. She buries her face in his shoulder as he strokes her hair and murmurs nonsense syllables to her, and he fucking hates the way his throat is constricting right now, hates the fact that this girl has been doing this to herself for… for God knows how long, honestly. How many times did she simply not come to the ER? How many times did she come when he wasn’t on duty?

“Clarke,” he whispers, and he wonders how they got here, how she is able to discern so much from just her name, hesitantly murmured into the wild mane of her hair. Because she does understand, he knows. She sits up slightly, rubbing at her eyes gingerly.

She sits up, and she looks him in the eye, and she takes a deep breath, and finally, finally, he gets an explanation.

“My… my dad died six months ago,” she starts, and he can hear the brokenness still permeating her voice, the pain that lingers from a wound she hadn’t learned how to heal yet. “It was complicated, and my mom… she was involved, somehow. She was the reason he died.” Clarke takes a deep, calming breath, and continues. “And then… then a month later, my best friend Wells was shot in a mugging gone wrong, and I… and I just felt nothing. I was so numb, and so empty, and I wanted to be strong, too. I wanted to be able to take care of myself.”

“And so you started going to the ring,” Bellamy says quietly, and she just nods.

“And it fucking sucked. I have so many bruises and scars, but… they taught me how to protect myself. How to be strong again. And the only… the only time I could feel anything was when I was hurt, and it…” She sighs, and she averts her gaze. “It felt good, to feel something again. And I didn’t have anyone around, anymore, to care that it looked like I was getting run over by a bus every goddamned night, I didn’t have anyone to stop me.” Clarke glances back up at him, her head quirked to the side and so much emotion in her eyes that it nearly knocks him breathless. There are tears traipsing down her cheeks in uneven, messy lines, and her hair is untamed around her face, and she’s got a split lip and dozens of cuts and bruises marring her features and yet - yet she looks so fucking beautiful it makes him ache. “But then I met you, Bellamy, and you… you cared. You didn’t even know me, and you cared. I didn’t have a single person to stop me… until you,” she finishes.

“Clarke…”

“I didn’t want it to hurt anymore,” Clarke whispers, and her voice breaks at the last syllable. “I was so tired, Bellamy. I wanted to feel okay again. I wanted to feel something other than this pain. And with you - with you, I felt whole again. Like I wasn’t a girl who turned people to ash the minute I touched them. I felt like a person. I don’t… I don’t want that to go away.”

He stares at her, eyes flitting between hers, trying to find the meaning in her gaze. Her eyes were screaming at him, pleading with him, to simply decipher the words she was leaving dangling between the lines.

Until you.

Make it happen.

(Bellamy never much cared for words.)

And so he leans forward and touched his lips to hers.

(It tastes like blood and smoke and of broken pieces fitting back together.)