#cachekakusu

And if Miller thinks Bellamy knows it’s about Clarke Griffin, sitting just across the dance floor from exactly where he is, he’s wrong. Besides, Clarke and him – they’re done. They were eight months into their relationship and then she – he wanted to do the long distance thing, but she didn’t. There was a whole lot of fighting, not the kind that he knew they’d come out of fine. Whenever they fought during that whole month apart, he felt his heart break piece by piece. And then, there was radio silence.

So no.

The thing is that Bellamy knew Clarke would be invited. She and Octavia have been friends ever since college, and she and Lincoln shared that one class with that one horrible professor. Meeting Clarke was an inevitability, he’s discovered. Meeting her again also feels like an inevitability, an inevitability he’s pushed to the back of his mind because thinking of it would make him panic.

So yes. He knows.

“You’re an idiot,” Miller tells him, taking a sip of the good champagne that Octavia snuck into their table. There’s silence as the band switches to a pop song, and then Miller scoffs again. “She asked about you.”

“She did?” he says, taken aback. And then regrets it immediately, because of course. Miller smirks. “Fuck you, Miller.”

“Yeah,” Miller says, grinning at Monty, dancing with Yuri, Bellamy’s little nephew, from across the room. “You better get your shit together, Blake.”

He stands and pats Bellamy on the back, and then goes to dance with Monty and Yuri. They’re all very adorable and he’s glad they’re both here, but for the meantime, he hates Miller.

He gets distracted for a while, watching as Monty tries to teach the three-year old the Electric Slide and failing spectacularly because, well, he’s three.

Which is probably why he didn’t see Octavia marching towards him. She grabs him by the arm onto the floor, puts her arms on his shoulders and glares, sways under the pretense of dancing. He’d feel terrified if he had not known her since birth, but since he had, he knows this is her ‘you’re doing something wrong and you’re gonna have to figure it out by yourself’ glare.

“You know you can just tell me, right?” he says, giving her wry smile.

She juts a stubborn chin and continues to sway.

“If it’s something I did –

“Of course it’s something you did,” she finally says, eyes softer than just a minute ago. “But not – look, I did not invite her just to, I don’t know, taunt you or anything. She was – still is my friend and we talked and she said yes. You did, too, remember?”

He doesn’t. Or he does, but doesn’t want to. He may have been scrubbing the dishes far too hard when his sister asked. It was the stupid marinara sauce. But he said yes because he knows they still talked and it’s her wedding.

“Yes, okay,” he nods slowly. “So… what did I do?”

“Nothing!” replies Octavia, exasperated. It’s the most confusing thing he’s ever received as an answer, and he’s memorized over thirty codes in his decade in the SWAT team.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing, and this is exhausting.” She slumps on his shoulders and he huffs a laugh. Of course.

“Don’t tell me you got married just to set us up again,” he says, softly.

Octavia lifts her head and looks him straight in the eye. “No, dummy. This is for Lincoln and Yuri. But… she’s for you.”

He nods again, at a loss for words.

Octavia was there when they broke up, and there might have been a few murderous threats. But they were friends first, Octavia and Clarke, and they still obviously have Lincoln as a common thread. He’s not just going to force his sister to hate every Clarke aspect of his life just because they split.

“She broke you for a while,” Octavia continues, and her voice is less angry than whenever they talked about it before. “But you’re still not over her, clearly. And she’s the same.”

“She disappeared for a while, remember?” he says, because that last statement doesn’t make sense to him. “She dropped off the face of the earth. And when she resurfaced, she didn’t –

“Yeah, I know.”

The song fades into some slow version of Call Me Maybe and he shifts on his feet, his eyes sweeping over the crowd for that familiar face, but doesn’t find her. They stay like that for another minute, and when she disentangles from his embrace, she kisses him on the cheek and goes. When she’s gone, he looks up and Clarke’s there.

She looks unsure at the edge of the crowd, but she’s smiling at him and the light’s hitting her like some kind of immaculate sign. God, Octavia’s right about him. He should have said no, but then again Clarke wouldn’t be here.

His heart started pounding, every memory of them rushing to the forefront of his mind like a tidal wave, crashes him back with overwhelming nostalgia. Fuck, he’s missed her. A part of him is screaming to run the other way, a stronger part of him roots him to where he stands.

He smiles back.

She starts walking towards him, gaining confidence the closer she gets and it feels like coming back to something he’s never actually left. And when she’s close enough, she says, “Hi.”

He scoffs at himself, at the sweaty palms in his pockets. “Hi.”

“Nice wedding,” she says next and his hands itch to reach out to her.

“I had nothing to do with that.”

She snorts and shakes her head. “Don’t sell yourself short. Octavia told me all about it.”

“Yeah well, she’s as much to blame as I am.”

Clarke ducks her head and grins. “Typical.”

He spends the next five seconds debating in his head, the next ten to ask her to dance, and a whole half hour talking with her, catching up, teasing – like old friends, like old best friends. She notices his new tattoos and the pinprick of a hole at the corner of his lower lip where his ring would have been if he thought it would go well with his suit. He tugs at her braids and guesses how long it took her to make it.

And then spends all of the way home thinking about the night, how they never for just one moment touched the whole subject of their break up. It’s fucked up, he knows, and he’d wanted to break the subject into the conversation but she’ll always smile up to him and her fingers would flex on his shoulders and he’d basically – god, Octavia’s so right.

His phone buzzes in his pocket.

wednesday at 3 okay? Clarke asks.

Yeah, he replies and then leans on his car. “I’m so fucked.”

The night breeze doesn’t say anything.

*

Wednesday is paperwork day at the station, and he couldn’t wait for it to be over. And if he’s being honest, he may have spent a little too much time thinking about 3PM, rehearsing lines in his head over and over again. Not that he’s anticipating some things to go down – he’s just careful.

He didn’t tell Octavia, but he did tell Miller because at least Miller will just think he’s stupid. Octavia would be insufferable.

The thing is, from the night of the wedding up until today, he’s cycled through so many emotions that by the time he’s sitting behind the desk at 9, he’s already exhausted.

Clarke’s only staying in California for a couple of days, and then she’s going back to wherever she was before the wedding and they’re not going to see each other again. That’s how it goes. Still, he’s – not nervous, he’d like to think – just wary.

Miller has shot him several saucy eyebrow raises whenever he passes his desk and he’s returned every one of them with an equally childish expression. Monty, who is actually working his shift at the station, unlike Miller who’s just lounging around waiting for Monty to finish his shift, at least gave him a cup of coffee and a stale bagel from the pantry with an apologetic, maybe a little bit wry smile. He’s the kindest one about this yet.

“You look like a nervous freshman going on his first grown up date,” says Monty, and Bellamy retracts his previous opinion. Monty is also a dick.

When he gets to the café, Clarke’s already there fidgeting with her phone. She doesn’t look up when he enters so he takes his time remembering why he’s actually there: to hash things out.

Clarke still looks the same – not that he’s expecting her to look different. Two years don’t really warrant a lot of changes but she looks up at him and waves and his heart stops for a few seconds.

When her father was rushed to the hospital following a very serious heart attack, she got on a midnight plane to Washington DC without anyone knowing. Bellamy remembers 10AM of the day following that when his phone rang and it was Clarke on the other side, telling him she’s in DC and that her father died. And then told him she might stay there for the mean time.

It was hard to feel any kind of hatred for Clarke for that – one is because she was his best friend and they know everything about each other. She’d do whatever needs to be done. And two, he understood.

“Where are you staying?” he had asked, and she laughed weakly. He knew that if she stayed with her mother in the house where her father died, things would get ugly.

“Wells has a room for me,” she replied.

“Okay,” he breathed, feeling his heart sink. “Alright. If you return and your lease is up, you can stay with me or Octavia. If they’re not married by then. But if they are, I have a room. Monty will probably also let you crash in their apartment –

“Bellamy,” she had said, exasperated but chuckling. He was already missing her, but she didn’t need to know that.

“You… you come home when you can.”

She didn’t answer to that, but she promised she’d keep in touch. She promised she’d be safe and that she would just need a little time. She didn’t promise as much her return, but he’d always thought she would.

She didn’t.

He sits across from her and he thinks he should be angry, and he is maybe at the back of his mind, but they were best friends before they were together. A big part of him is just glad to see her again.

Still, his brain works in mysterious ways when all he could say to her was, “How was life?”

She looks amused which, he doesn’t think it’s better than anything else, but it’s alright. It’s familiar. “It’s good, actually.”

“Still a doctor?”

“Yeah. Now a secret spy agent?”

He ducks his head and laughs. “No, but I think we’re getting there.”

“See, I think that’s something a secret spy agent would say,” says Clarke, teasing.

“If I were a secret spy agent, I wouldn’t be here.”

She nods. “Yeah, you’d be in some foreign country, wearing a fake mustache –

“ –which I would probably rock.”

“And a fake accent, following a big mafia boss,” she continues, laughing. “You’d look terrible.”

“Yeah, but I’m not. So I’m clearly still not a secret spy agent.”

“Which is a bummer,” she says.

“But I’m still team leader, for what it’s worth.”

“Good.” She sips from her cup, a stalling tactic, he knows. “I actually got my residency at Standford.”

Of course. The universe, as always, is being a dick to him.

“Oh.” He swallows. “The one just down the street?”

She nods, also cautious. “Got my apartment near the hospital, too. I’m moving in in less than a week.”

He doesn’t choke, but nearly. “That’s – that’s great.”

Bellamy goes home and punishes himself with the most disgusting bottle of tequila he’s ever tasted, the one Jasper gave him as a gift for his twenty-seventh.

After an hour, his mouth is numb and there’s a message in his inbox. An address. He takes another shot.

*

It’s been three days since and he’s still reeling with the fact that Clarke’s just a few blocks from his apartment. Sure, there’s a lot of unspoken tension between them, there’s the whole “we never gave each other closure” thing, and the whole “we didn’t end the right way” thing, and so it’s a lot to take in. Not that Clarke is obligated to tell him or warn him that she’s moving close to him or that she’s taking her residency at a nearby hospital – but he’s also probably better off not having a heart attack.

Not that he’s been thinking about that all the time and not that he’s blaming it for the reason he got distracted at work but there was a fairly serious bank shootout down Hesperian: a bunch of criminals belonging to a seasoned gang. As expected, it went downhill so fast that the next best thing was to take a hostage and demand for an easy escape.

It doesn’t take long for the three of them, young guys, to figure out that they’re not going to get either and start shooting at the people around.

Bellamy gets two of them disarmed, while Harper shoots one in the foot. He’s sure there’s more of them and these are probably just some of their newer, inexperienced guys.

It’s only when they’re cleared that Monroe walks up to him and tells him he’s bleeding.

The following moments are a blur to him because the adrenaline’s dialing down and he’s feeling the pain in his side. He doesn’t really know if he passed out, but the next thing he knows, he’s in the hospital and he’s snorting at Clarke’s irritated glare.

“You know, it’s just like you to not even know that you’ve been shot,” she starts and he relaxes on his bed. It’s fine, he’s alive, and Clarke’s doing her concerned sermon, brandishing her clipboard around in annoyance. “You’re lucky the bullet did not pierce anything important or you’ll be in surgery and I wouldn’t be here lecturing you – I’ll be there sewing you up like the idiot that you are.”

He’ll blame the morphine later for the things he says next.

“You say that as if we’re still together.”

She gapes at him for a moment, at a loss for words, and he counts it as a personal win.

“Bellamy –

“No, it’s fine. I, too, still don’t know if we really ended. It’s not like you just disappeared.” He laughs weakly, tries to sit up and Clarke’s suddenly by his side, helping to prop him up a little. “You know, I made stories up in my head, trying to excuse you. Like, you’re in some foreign land doing Doctors Without Borders and got stranded on an island. Or that you were chosen for an underground government project and were not allowed to contact any of us.

“And then I felt so bad because,” he coughs and a sharp stinging pain shoots up his side. “Because I knew you were hurting and it’s so evil of me to not think that’s enough of a reason.”

“Bellamy,” she tries again, and his eyelids droop. “I – we’ll talk about this later, okay?”

She’s so close – so close, her hand on his cheek, her thumb stroking his skin, and he falls asleep that way.

When he wakes up next, Octavia’s there with a roll of her eyes while Monty gives him a non-stale bagel and Miller tries to convince all of them that he’s faking it to get out of work.

He’s there for three days and then the doctors send him home with a week off work. He grumbles about it until Octavia snaps at him.

“It’s paid leave, Bell, shut up.”

It’s another day until Clarke shows up at his apartment with take out and a bottle of cheap wine.

He’s in embarrassingly old but comfortable clothes and he hasn’t washed his hair since yesterday, and she’s grinning at him because she knows how uncomfortable he is in receiving guests like this.

But she walks in like years ago, familiar and confident, and she sets the food on his center table. She goes in the kitchen and reaches up the middle cupboard for a couple of paper plates – and frankly, his heart aches at this. That she still knows who he is, and he hasn’t a clue what changed with her.

When she sits on his shitty couch, he does, too, and gets like half of the food.

They’re halfway through an episode of Narcos when he turns to her. “What is this?”

“Narcos. We’re like three and a half episodes in,” she says.

“No, I mean this,” he gestures at her as a whole. He can see her debating in her head on whether to answer that with another joke or the truth. She goes with the truth.

“I’m – not good at this,” says Clarke, setting her plate down and facing him. Narcos is forgotten in the background.

“What exactly are you not good at?”

“Apologies,” she replies. “I know I can’t just – walk into your life again like nothing happened.”

“As opposed to what you’re doing now?” he can’t help asking. His side hurts again but he ignores it.

“I know.” She snorts and looks up at him. “I’m terrible at this. But I wanna try. Like, really try. You were my best friend more than anything, Bellamy. And I missed you.”

“You left, Clarke.” His heart doesn’t let him say anything after that. After all, that’s what it boils down to: a part of him is still stuck there the moment she said she can’t return.

She turns somber. “I’m sorry. You deserve more than a choppy phone call and a rushed apology. And this probably doesn’t change anything, but I didn’t want to leave then, too. I just – I had to do it. I’m sorry. I want to – just be here again.”

Bellamy looks at her for a long moment. He can try making this difficult for her. She’s the one who left, anyway. But not like he was the only broken one, and not like she wanted what happened. So he nods and says, “Okay. We’ll try.”

She smiles, disbelieving, and nods at him.

They finish half the bottle of wine and another episode, and he walks her to his door. The night air’s too chilly and he’s sleepy, but he gets his coat on and tells her he’s walking her home.

“Are you serious? You’re not going to walk me home in your state.”

“What – because I got shot? I get shot all the time.” He’s grinning but his side totally hurts. Still.

“Not a good thing to brag about,” she tells him, but he laughs and walks anyway. She stops him with a hand on his chest. “Seriously, Bellamy, I can make it. I’ll call a cab.”

She’s looking straight at him, and it’s probably the wine, but she’s blushing and warm and close again, and there’s a really strong feeling in his chest telling him to pull her closer and taste her lips. Her eyes are hooded, and she looks like she wants to lean in but – she pulls away with a smile and a wave, makes a show of pulling her phone out of her pocket and opening the Uber app.

He shakes his head at her and smiles back, doesn’t go inside until the cab arrives, and even after it turns around the corner.

When he does get back inside, he falls asleep quickly.

In the morning, he feels like he’s stuck in the middle of a hangover and a really good day and he can’t stop smiling.

*

He tells his sister, of course. It’s not like she wouldn’t know eventually. Better that it comes from him than anyone else – that way she can ridicule him directly.

“Did you know about this?” he asks. He’s at lunch and the pantry provides the most privacy for a phone call like this. Can’t have Miller hearing his ridiculousness. “About Clarke?”

“What about Clarke?” his sister says, distracted. She works as a tattoo artist – most of his ink is her handiwork – and is probably working on one of her clients. He’d feel bad about calling her while she’s working, but she’s a known multi-tasker. She can handle it.

“That she’s staying here in California,” he says, not even beating around the bush anymore. She probably knew, he ought to find out.

“Oh yeah, we talked about it.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

She clicks her tongue and he hears the sound of a machine whirring down. “If she wanted you to know, she’d have told you.”

He gives her silence because he knows she’s probably bluffing.

She sighs. “Okay, idiot. She probably told me because she thought I was going to tell you. But I had a lot in my mind that time. I can’t be an awesome wedding planner and an awesome mediator at the same time, you know.”

“Alright, if I didn’t know how tedious wedding planning actually is, I wouldn’t believe you. But a little warning would have been nice?”

“Okay fine, I’m sorry. I should have told you. But it’s a nice surprise, right?”

He huffs. “I’m still making my mind up on that. But okay.” And then, “she wants to be friends. Again.”

She sighs again and tells her client to take a break. When she comes back to the conversation, her voice is softer. “Look, Bell. Obviously, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. She’d probably back off. Or you can –

“I already said yes.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” he says, scrubs his face. “This might hurt me again. But I think… I – it’s okay.”

“Okay,” says Octavia. “Be careful.”

After that, it felt like an easy thing to see Clarke anywhere.

She tells him she’s coming over and he doesn’t even bother getting dressed, just like two years ago. They start TV shows but never actually finish them, and he ends up with tons of pizza left overs in his refrigerator, two out of the six pack of cheap beer, and a bunch of paper napkins with Clarke’s doodle on them stuck to the fridge.

When he gets out of his sick leave and back on the desk, he’d text her about ridiculous office stories, and updates her on Murphy’s weird cow picture collection that fills his desk up.

Five more and it crosses over to Monroe’s desk. She’d be so livid.

take a picture, she replies, and he smiles.

*

Bellamy’s on his way home when Clarke calls.

“Do SWAT members rescue poor cats stuck in trees or is that just limited to those sexy firefighters?” she asks.

“Hey – SWAT can also be sexy.” The stoplight turns red and he puts her on speaker.

“Oh yeah, I remember Miller.”

“I’d be offended you didn’t think of me if Miller wasn’t hot.” He laughs when she does. “What’s up, Clarke?”

“The cat,” she replies. “It’s stuck in a tree near my apartment.”

“Whose cat is that?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it before… I’d call the fire department but someone told me the SWAT has sexier people in them.”

He chuckles and takes a sharp turn towards Clarke’s apartment. “I’ll be over in five minutes, just stay still.”

When he arrives, he sees Clarke looking up at the tree to a yowling black cat. It’s beginning to get dark, and he almost missed the cat if it weren’t so scared and noisy. She startles when he slides next to her, but smiles and kisses his cheek. “Thanks for coming to our rescue.”

“Haven’t rescued it yet,” he tells her, mostly because he’s reeling from the kiss. He loosens his tie and loses his jacket, hands them both over to Clarke.

“If this cat scratches my face off, I’m blaming you,” he calls down to her just as he rises close enough to reach the thing.

“I’m a doctor, I can sew your face back on.”

He scoffs and stretches a hand out. “Come on, cat. I’m here to rescue you. Don’t bite me.”

Luckily it just seems relieved when he touches it, and immediately crawls into his folded arm, meows at him as they began their descent. When he reaches the ground, Clarke applauds him and takes the thing away from him.

He shoots her a suspicious look. “Don’t tell me you’re keeping the cat.”

“No,” she says, not looking at him. “Of course not. I’m going to put up flyers for a found cat, check in with local shelters and if, and only if, no one claims – him, if no one claims him, I think he deserves a nice and loving home. I have one.”

“Clarke.”

She cuts him off with another grin and says, “I have Thai inside, let’s eat.”

Of course the cat becomes his, too. The cat, which Clarke calls Dodie, stays with her as she dutifully tries to find his owner, but Bellamy’s sure he doesn’t belong to anyone. Well, at least Clarke’s trying. He tried talking her down from naming the thing to actually keeping it, but it turns out he still knows her so well.

“You gotta get him to his owner, Clarke,” he tells her after she gets off the phone with a shelter.

“I’m trying, but –

“But you’ve always wanted one ever since your dad got one in DC and your mom wouldn’t let you get one from the shelter.”

She ducks her head and smiles. “Yeah.”

He’s basically gone after that.

For all that he and Clarke live a couple of blocks away from each other, he finds himself at her apartment almost every day after work, looking after Dodie when she’s on a long ass shift. She texts him pictures of the cat doing stupid shit, and he’s basically just falling in love with her at a rate too fast for having been broken by the same person.

He knows about Lexa, of course. During the couple of years that she wasn’t in California, she tried to date. He doesn’t really hate her for it, he tried too. But she told him about Lexa one drunken Brooklyn Nine-Nine night, showed him her picture on Facebook, told him about a recommendation from the head of a hospital in DC that they both were supposed to get, and the betrayal that happened after, and she smiled at him like she would when she feels guilty about things she doesn’t really need to feel guilty about. He pulled her close to his chest and kissed the top of her head, whispered, “it’s fine” to her all throughout the night.

It should be a kind of relief to be able to talk about what they had before, but to Bellamy it just feels like he’s falling back into a pattern that only he wants. She’s pulled away from his embrace one too many times, shooting him an apologetic smile afterwards and sending his stomach into a downwards spiral.

He’d feel so stupid after.

So really, the cat is not helping his situation.

*

The truth is Bellamy would be fine with just being friends.

He has Clarke back, and except for a few things, they never really changed. He still antagonizes her sandwich choices, and she still believes he has a secret lawn where he sits and tells children to get off of it, while brandishing his wooden cane around.

Dodie now goes to his apartment when Clarke gets double shifts, and she sometimes picks him up from work to argue about what movie they’re going to see. They mostly end up not seeing anything and they’d blame each other over burgers at the nearby diner.

But she’ll put her legs up on his lap and he’d give her a foot rub while starting another TV show they both know they will never finish, and Dodie will try to fit himself in the space between them, and all he’d want in the world is to pull her closer and kiss her until everything else fixes itself, but he can’t have his heart broken again, so he doesn’t.

He’s fine.

Clarke starts going out with Octavia again like they used to in college, usually leaving Lincoln, Yuri, and Bellamy on a boys’ night in their house. Bellamy would pretend to fail at Xbox for the little boy until he falls asleep curled on the sofa, and then he and Lincoln would drink their beers in peace.

When Clarke and Octavia stumble in a little after midnight, he’d usher Clarke to his car with a quick good bye to his sister and Lincoln, and drive her home.

“You’re being so… careful,” Clarke says one night, forehead pressed against the cool glass of his passenger side window. He startles a little because he thought she was asleep, apparently she’s not. But she’s drunk and she’s probably sleep talking. Or thinking out loud.

The light turns red.

“I’m always careful,” he replies absent. And then he steals a glance at her face, eyes closed, red illuminating her face. She’s flushed and exhausted and drunk.

She’s quiet for a while and the light turns green. It’s not until they’re turning to her apartment complex that she speaks again. “We had sex, Bellamy. Sex.”

He chokes, which – it’s probably good that he’s in park because he would’ve gotten them in an accident. And he wasn’t even the drunk one. “We… did?”

“Yeah,” she slurs. “Two years ago, before I left. We had lots of sex. I miss sex.”

God, what is happening right now?

“Uh, you can still have sex. You’re – you, and you’re hot. I thought that was why you go out with Octavia. To get laid.”

She huffs a weak laugh and turns her face to him. Her eyes are still heavy-lidded and he reckons she’d fall asleep the moment she hits her bed, but she’s trying to stay awake to tell him that she misses sex and it’s basically torture. “And you, you’re being so careful around me. Driving me home when I’m drunk, taking – ” she hiccups, “ –taking Dodie when I’m in the hospital. You’re so good to me.”

She takes the hand he has on the gear shift, traces the tattoo that’s peeking out from his sleeve with her fingers, and he stays frozen. “I know I broke your heart,” she says, quiet and clear. “And I’ve regretted it every single waking moment in DC. I thought, when I got here, that you’d be mad at me. I expected at least one insult from you at the wedding.”

“Mangoes don’t belong in sandwiches, Clarke.”

“Shut up,” she chuckles. “But. Thank you, Bellamy. For everything.”

She gets up from her seat and leans in close, lips brushing the corner of his mouth – so close, but not close enough. She pulls back, but not away. “See you tomorrow,” she breathes against his cheek, and he nods in a daze. When he turns to look at her, she’s smiling at him, an inch between their faces.

And then she’s gone, stumbling into her apartment with a tired wave.

*

Bellamy wakes up the next morning to the ringing of his cellphone, and when he answers it, he hears a growl at the other end.

“Bellamy,” says his sister.

“The hell, Octavia?”

He checks his clock – it’s a little after 10:30 in the morning, his day off, as Octavia knows so well.

“You’re such an id – igloo.” Ah, yeah, Yuri must be around. Still, Bellamy couldn’t figure out what he did wrong this time.

“Why exactly am I an igloo?” he asks, rubbing his face in exhaustion.

He hears a harsh sigh and then: “I just woke up with a massive hang – headache, and you know what I remembered first?”

“No, please enlighten me. I care so much.”

“Did you tell Clarke you don’t want her?”

That wakes him up. “What – no, I – no. What is this all about, O?”

“Oh – great! You’re both id – igloos!”

“Octavia,” he warns. He’s fully awake now, sitting up on his bed.

“Alright – and this is the last time I’ll be doing this because I actually thought you’d both be better at this than the first time.

“When Clarke was falling in love with you the first time, she started living in your apartment. And you started doing the same. It was like the weirdest cohabitation set up I have ever seen. You started bleeding into every story she tells, and I had to listen as she listed all of the things she hated about you – things which everybody actually loves. It took me like a day and a half to figure out that she didn’t actually hate them.

“Last night, she started doing it again. And I told her. You – Bellamy. You should go talk to her. Like, right now.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Just go. Ask her why she’s really back in California.”

And then she hangs up, leaving him in his empty room, his heart pounding heavily in his chest.

He doesn’t actually go to the hospital until late in the afternoon. And when he gets there, the clerk on the desk’s eyes widen in recognition.

“Hi,” he starts, walking towards the desk. “I’m here for –

“Dr. Griffin,” the clerk cuts in, already reaching for the pager to his left. “I’ll ring her in.”

He doesn’t actually wait that long, but he’s nervous and the phone call with Octavia left him with a restless kind of energy. It felt like an eternity in a bottle.

When he hears heavy footsteps, he looks and there she is, practically jogging towards him.

“Bellamy?” she says, and he stands up from the uncomfortable plastic chairs. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

“No,” he laughs, anxious. “I’m actually here just to – just to talk.”

“Oh. Oh, well. Okay.”

But before he gets a word in, a young nurse spots Clarke from down the hall and comes barreling in with incessant questions. Another jogs towards them with the same purpose. It takes him about ten seconds to figure out actually how busy the hospital is and is about to back away and tell Clarke they can talk another time when she grabs his arm and pulls him towards an empty hallway with a curt goodbye to the nurses.

She pulls him into a small storage closet and switches the dim light on. She’s close again, hair escaping the practical braid she usually wears to work, cheeks flushed from the jog, and eyes wide and expectant. God, he loves her.

“I’m so sorry. Go ahead shoot.”

He’s – he doesn’t speak, just pulls her closer by the waist and kisses her. She makes this tiny noise at the contact, surprised, just as he comes to the realization that he might be wrong, but her hands come up to his shoulders to pull him down – closer. Until their bodies are pressed together, and she’s opening her mouth to him. She runs her tongue over the ring on his lip and he laughs.

She pulls away and does, too. But they stay close, breathing heavily.

“Why are you really here, Clarke?” he asks, before his courage fails him. Her fingers on his cheeks flex.

“Honestly?” she says, and then huffs a laugh again, leaning her forehead on his shoulder. She’s… she’s embarrassed. “I came back for you. Not that – I wasn’t expecting you to forgive me, but I thought I’d try for friendship.”

It dawns on him. “That’s – that’s why you – you’re –

She kisses him again, his cheek, his nose, his jaw. “Yeah. Wells, he basically told me to go mope somewhere else.”

“You were… moping?” he laughs against her neck.

“I thought you didn’t want me.”

“Oh.”

He kisses her again this time, deeper, hotter, slower – presses her up against the door. He bites her bottom lip gently and she moans – and oh god, he loves her. She threads her fingers through his hair and pulls, latches her lips on his neck, and his hips grind into hers.

“I love you,” she breathes on the skin of his jaw. “Please say something.”

“I…” he laughs, unsteady. “I really hate mangoes in sandwiches.”

“Bellamy.”

“I love you, too. Please never leave again.”

She turns at his touch and he couldn’t help staggering back. She’s – it’s the radiation. It has gotten to her. Burns on her face, her eyes unseeing and blind. She’s –

He wakes up then.

Bellamy doesn’t dream that often, or maybe he just forgets his dreams. None of them really stays that long after he opens his eyes, but he always feels the lingering dread at the pit of his stomach. Like his body recognizes that he was in there, but his mind doesn’t.

This one, though. It’s vivid, and terrifying, not because of the image of Clarke dying from radiation but because it’s a reminder. It reminded him that after all this time, she can still leave him. Maybe not because she wanted to, but because Earth is cruel, and they never catch a break. One way or another, they’re going to take her and he will not be able to do something about it.

It drops a weight on his chest and he stays pinned to his bed for a full minute before the body next to him shifts and curls around his arm.

He’s acutely aware of the time.

Most days, he doesn’t really sleep. He shuts his eyes, lulls himself into some kind of rest, but never really feels the fall from consciousness, not for as long as he’s been on the ground. So he knows it’s three in the morning, and the buzz of voices outside the cabin is from the guards on duty, trying to stay awake.

He turns his head and his nose meets soft blonde hair, mussed from sleep.

She’s here, she’s safe. For now, his mind cruelly supplies.

One cold hand lands on his chest, fingers flexing on bare skin. It makes him smile, even a little, even after that nightmare. Clarke’s still here, she’s sleeping next to him. He still doesn’t know what they are, haven’t really had the time to figure out with everything that’s happening all at once, but they sleep next to each other if the time allows. Their eyes meet at every meeting, he nods and she does the same, they reach an agreement. She seeks him out in the crowd, takes his arm and frowns whenever he admits to her incessant questions about his meal times. He tells her the same thing.

Everybody takes care of everybody, that’s how they’ve become. But nobody takes care of each other the way they do. It’s different with Clarke. Somehow.

“Is it a dream?”

Her voice cuts through the thick haze of the dark early morning, and suddenly he’s aware of the skin of his neck where her breath hits. She sounds like she has been awake for a few minutes already, the roughness in her voice every time he catches her just waking up, almost gone.

“Yeah,” he replies, just as quiet. Like the peace will shatter if their voices go above a whisper.

“Is it about me?”

He pauses. “Not everything’s about you, princess.”

She does the same, pause. Everybody knows why she pauses, it’s to think. But nobody knows what each pause means, not like Bellamy does. And this time, it’s because she’s trying to see through the wall he’s put up around himself.

He feels her lips press against his neck, linger to feel his pulse, and then she’s pulling away to sit up. His eyes follow her movements, petrified.

It’s not the first time she’s kissed him; never on the lips. But. This doesn’t feel the same as the others.

For a moment, she has her back turned to him, her shirt crumpled with sleep, her hair even worse than he thought. But she still soaks up all the meager light in the room, and he tries really hard to not tell her that he’s so far gone for her.

And then she turns her head and smiles at him over her shoulder. “I’m sorry for leaving.”

“Yeah, I know.” He sits up now, he doesn’t think he can take this conversation lying down. “You’ve told me several times.”

“You still don’t get it,” she replies, quietly. “I’m never leaving you. Again. Not if I can help it.”

Their shoulders brush and she leans against him, soft and breathing and alive. “That’s what I fear,” he admits. His hand finds hers underneath the crumpled covers, she turns her hand over and laces their fingers together. “Someday, something’s going to come and take you away from me and I – you can’t just promise that.”

He’s a little surprised when she nods. She leans her head on his shoulder and her hand tightens around his. “Yeah. I know. But I can try not to get taken, right? And you’d do the same? For me?”

It hits him, suddenly, that she needs him. Even with the words already out there in the open for a very long time now, he still hadn’t thought it was true until she’s voicing out the very same fear he has in his chest.

He loves her. It hits him, and he buries his smile in her hair. They’re so close, skin to skin, and she’s breathing him in the same way he does her. It hits him that maybe she loves him, too. The very same way he loves her. It’s hard to believe, but they’re here and his heart has never spoken this loudly before.

“I love you,” she tells the skin of his shoulder, and he huffs a laugh.

“Yeah. You, too.”

She lifts her head and smiles at him, hair a mess, sleep crusted around her eyes. But she’s looking at him – she’s looking at him the same way she has always looked at him, and it dawns on him that this has always been true.

He leans forward and kisses her, warmth flooding his chest, running under his skin. She tangles her fingers through his hair and tugs him down until she’s under him and the kiss becomes deep and slow and warm. She breathes his name and he presses closer, kisses her jaw and her neck.

Somehow, he sleeps again after that, with Clarke in his arms. And when he wakes up, it’s still the same day. Still the same problems, still the same enemy. Nothing really changed.