#stealingthecrown

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She sends him into the mountain.

It’s his idea, but then again, it isn’t.  It’s a post-apocalyptic twist on the classic trope, send in a gift horse with a gun on his back and wait for him to burn Troy-Under-The-Mountain to the ground.

She watches as the forest swallows up his silhouette.  Watches until the fire at her back fades to embers, until she can force air into her lungs without tasting his blood on her tongue.  (She tastes her own instead.)

She didn’t want to let him go.  When Octavia found out, she’d screamed and bodily shoved at Clarke until she stumbled back a step.   Because it wasn’t just Bellamy walking into the belly of the beast, but Lincoln, too, who’d agreed to go all too soon in the wake of his recovery from the Reaper serum.  (And Kane and Wick, but Octavia didn’t lose sleep over them.)  She couldn’t believe Clarke had approved Bellamy’s stupid plan, screamed that she should have tried harder to make him stay.

He would have listened to you.

That was Octavia’s parting shot, spat over her shoulder as she stormed away to go try to talk some sense into her brother.

“He did,” is what Clarke didn’t say.  “I told him to go.”

This is the truth of the matter.  Bellamy Blake is going to die in Mount Weather because she told him to.

(He’s going to die because she could not come up with a good enough reason for him to stay.)

The night before, when Clarke, her mother, and Kane had returned from negotiating the terms of their truce with Commander Lexa, Bellamy caught her arm on her way to the patchwork tent currently serving as the mess hall.  He jerked his head in the direction of his own tent, a glint in his eye like the one he had during those first few weeks off the dropship.  He was restless, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, his fingers curling and uncurling at his sides.

She followed without question, knowing he had food in his tent, knowing whatever it was he had to say must have been important, if he was interrupting her from the only hot meal she’d get that day.  When they got to his tent, he held the flap open so she could duck inside, and she took her customary spot at the foot of his bed.  Back at the dropship, they’d spent late nights working out guard schedules and hunting parties and devising a way to ration out their meager stocks of food and supplies without pissing off too many people.  Clarke would spread out along the foot of the pile of blankets Bellamy called a bed and he would sit at the top, frowning at their schematics and at her in equal measure.  Here, even though this was a better approximation of a mattress, she did not lie down.  It wasn’t the time; Bellamy looked like he was about to jump out of his skin.  So she allowed the tension to drain out of her shoulders, sitting cross-legged and dropping her elbows to her knees.

Bellamy passed his tongue over his lips, opened his mouth—and closed it.

“Bellamy.”  Clarke patted the blankets beside her in invitation, but instead of siting down, Bellamy stepped forward and crouched in front of her.  He folded his hand over hers, and she saw that the frenetic look in his eyes had calmed into something like resolve.  Her stomach twisted in on itself.  Nothing good came from him gearing up for a fight.

“We need to send someone in to Mount Weather.”

Her heart did not stutter in her chest.  She did not choke on her own breath.  (Dread did not seize her stomach in a vice grip.  It did not.) Still, she waited half a beat, then two, to make sure she heard him correctly.  “We’re sending a whole squad in to Mount Weather, along with the Grounder’s army,” she told him.

(She’d heard him correctly.)

“No,” and he was shaking his head, and her heart was plummeting in her chest, “we need someone on the inside.  We need—”

“No.”

Bellamy rolled his eyes, squeezed her hand tighter.  “Let me finish, princess,” he said, with an exasperated twist of his mouth.

“I know what you’re going to say,” she snapped, jerking her head to the side to give herself room to breathe without having to hold his gaze, because she knew where this was going, “and the answer is no.”

He huffed, his breath skittering across her neck.  “Since I don’t take orders from you, I’m gonna need a better answer than that.”

She fixed him with the full force of her glare, and he had sense enough to wince, to duck his head.  “You walk in there, Bellamy, and you’re dead,” she said, heat snaking up the back of her throat, her tongue dry.  She grabbed at his elbow with her free hand.  “You walk in there, and you don’t come out.”

“Clarke,” and it was a sigh, soft and tired to match the fatigue dragging at the corners of his eyes.  He shifted to sit on the ground in front of her, twining the fingers of the hand already holding hers, the other closing around her knee, fingers pressing like needles into her bones.  “The Mountain Men know you got out, that you’ve seen more of the mountain than their own people.  But we have no idea what else they know, what else they’re doing behind the curtains.  We need to know what they’re up to.”

“So you want to do what, exactly?” she laughed, without an ounce of humor and so, so bitter.  “Knock on their door and ask politely what the hell they’re up to, ask them nicely to give us our people back?”

His face split into a grin, and for once it reached his eyes.  “Exactly.”

“No.”  Jaw locked in her outrage, Clarke looks down at their hands, at the contrast between his dirt-covered skin and hers, the blood trapped under her nails, the grass stains lining his.  She trusted this boy with so much—with her life, with the lives of their friends.   She did not trust him with his own.

“A Trojan horse, princess.”  And his voice was so, so gentle, his thumb rubbing soothing patterns against her knee.  As if he could possibly soften the blow.  Bellamy wanted to go on a suicide mission—there was nothing he could say or do to make this any easier.   “We need those acid fog machines taken out, yeah?” he continued.  “And we have to turn off the radio jammer if we want to be able to communicate, to find the other stations.  We need somebody on the inside to clear the way for the Grounder’s army, for our people.”

The backs of her eyes burned, but she still snapped her head up to catch his gaze.  Something like steel was slipping into her veins from where her hand was locked with his, and she said, “Then I’ll go.”

“No,” he snapped, too fast, too heatedly.  He’d already thought this through, damn him. “The Mountain Men already know that you don’t trust them.  But they don’t know what to expect from the rest of us.  If someone goes in—”

“You keep saying ‘someone’ like it’s not you, Bellamy, like you’re not already planning something, so out with it.”  Her mouth tasted like bile, and she wanted to scream, to flip him onto the ground and pin him there until he got it through his thick skull that she could not lose him. Clarke twisted her hand in his until she could wrap her fingers around his wrist, could press her thumb hard against his pulse point.  The pounding of his blood under his skin was the only thing keeping her breathing steady.

“Fine.”  And here his eyes closed.  He breathed through his nose once, twice, measured and heavy.  When he opened his eyes again, they sparked.  “I’ll go in, knock on the door.  Tell the Mountain Men we want our people back, and we’re willing to make a deal for it.  From what you said, they must think we can be reasoned with, since they were keeping you in a dormitory instead of in cages.  They don’t want a mutiny on their hands, right, so we’ll let them think we’re willing to cooperate.  We’ll let them think we’re playing into their hands, and then we’ll slip our people right out from under their noses.”

“You make them sound like they’re civilized, Bell, when they’ve been draining Grounders for blood because their people can’t handle the residual radiation—fuck.”

How could she have been so oblivious?

“What?” He sounded so stricken that she had to take a moment to compose herself, sucking in a long, deep breath, before she could look at him and pretend her chest wasn’t caving in.

“The Grounders aren’t the only people with blood that can stand the radiation.”  Her voice came out hoarse anyway, and when she swallowed it didn’t ease the sandpaper-feel of her tongue.

Bellamy frowned in confusion only for a moment, before his eyes widened with the same stricken realization that she’d just come to.   “Our blood.  Our blood can handle the radiation on the surface, too.”

She nodded miserably.  “We went through the ringer in orbit, with the amount of solar radiation we were exposed to.  Our blood is even better than Grounder blood at filtering the radiation.”

“Then I’ll offer them our blood.  There’s what, almost three hundred here at camp?  And possibly more survivors from the other stations?   I’ll offer our blood in exchange for our people’s freedom, or we blast their doors with bullets.  And I’ll get your map to our people, and while the Mountain Men are occupied with me, you can get our people and the Grounders out through the tunnels.  And then we’ll blast their doors with bullets.”

“You want them all to burn.”

His mouth was set in a grim line.  “Troy was destroyed, princess.”

“What if the Mountain Men don’t want to play nice?”  A sob dragged at her chest, but couldn’t make it past the dread lodged in her throat.   Clarke reached up to his face, to cup his jaw and tangle her fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck.  At the contact, his eyes fluttered, gaze shifting to rest on her lips.  Panic settled in her shoulders, and, rolling to her knees, she brought her forehead to rest against his, hoping the contact would ground her trembling bones.  “They don’t trust me,” she breathed ragged into the space between them, her eyes falling shut, “and they’re jamming our radio signals to keep us from calling the other Ark stations.  They want to keep us isolated, because we’re an unknown they can’t control.  We’re a threat to them, and they’ll let you in and they’ll try to break you.”  A ringing had started, low and sharp in the back of her head, and just the thought of what the Mountain Men would do to him had her fingers buzzing for a gun.

She would gladly watch Dante burn if he so much as thought about hurting Bellamy.  (She would set the fire herself.)

“I don’t break easy.”  His hands settled on her hips as if to anchor her there.  His voice was too warm, too rough, and she slid her fingers around to lock at the nape of his neck.  She could feel his nose brushing against hers, and it took all she had not to climb fully into his lap, to press her face into the crook of his neck.

She knows what he is made of, knows his grit, his resolution, his guilt, how fiercely protective he is of the people he cares about.  She knows the way he only allows himself to break alone in the dark, how he can be alone with her.  She knows he will sacrifice his own soul for his sister.

He was the first person to challenge her on the ground, and he was the first person on the ground to get under her skin and make a home there.  And somewhere between “I need you” and “it had to be done,” she’d memorized the shape and pattern of his breathing, had oriented herself to keep his profile in the edge of her vision.  She’d irrevocably adjusted for his presence in his life, accounted for it as part of the natural state of things.  He was with her now like the gun he keeps strapped to his back, like her father’s watch fixed permanently to her wrist.

“I’m not willing to take that risk, Bellamy.”  It came out as a whisper, a confession reserved only for the safe space they’ve built together in his tent.  This was some sort of misguided attempt at absolution, penance for his sins when they’d first landed, she was sure of it.

“But I am.”  His arms tightened, snaking around her waist to draw her closer.  The hand spanning the small of her back began to make pacifying circles over the fraying fabric of her shirt.  “Clarke, this is worth it.”

She wrenched herself out of his grip so she could get a good look at his face when she snapped, “Not if it kills you!”

He didn’t reply, but the way his gaze fell flat and his jaw snapped closed told her all she needed to know, and the agony erupting like a supervolcano in her chest was enough to drag her over the edge she’d been straddling since this whole conversations started.

“I can’t lose you, Bellamy,” she choked out, “I can’t, I can’t.”

She collapsed against him, bitter sobs wracking through her chest like warheads.  For the first time since she walked through the camp gates with a knife in her hands and her friend’s blood under her nails, Clarke let her defenses shatter completely.  She let her walls crumble to dust, let herself sink into Bellamy’s embrace.  She finally allowed herself to well and truly cry, her fingers twisting in the collar of his shirt.  While his hand knotted in her hair and the other ran up and down her spine, she dragged in heaving, sputtering breaths of air.  He pressed his lips to her forehead in a searing kiss, and she thought, with sudden clarity, that all the men who love her have died.

She inhaled sharply, sucking air into her lungs with such violence that she sat up.  As hard a she tried, she could not exhale but for small, quick pants.  She could feel her lungs filling like an air compressor, the pressure building against her ribcage with enough force to ache.

“Hey, hey,” and Bellamy was cradling her cheek with one hand, pressing his other against her sternum, catching her gaze and holding it, “breathe with me, okay?”  As he pushed air out of his nose, she huffed shakily along with him.  When she began to inhale, he pressed against her chest, forcing her to use her diaphragm, and beat out a count with his thumb on her collarbone.  She felt the pulse, filled her lungs gradually, and when he reached seven, he murmured “hold” and she did, and after another count of seven he told her to release, and she exhaled for an eight-count.

They repeated this several times, until Clarke’s breathing slowed and her heart settled, Bellamy’s fingers sifting through her hair all the while.  She didn’t want to look at him—couldn’t stand the soft tenderness in his eyes—but he caught her chin before she could duck her head down.

“You’re not going to lose me, princess.”  He sounded so unbearably fond, even when he frowned in consternation and said, “But what’s this all about?  You’re not usually this selfish.”

“No,” and it wasn’t the time to laugh, but she let out a watery chuckle all the same, “just self-righteous.”

Bellamy exhaled on a smile, tucking her hair behind her ears.  “Our friends have been waiting on us for too long, Clarke.  It’s time to bring them home.”

She nodded because he was right, because she’d known as soon as he’d taken hold of her hand that she would have to send him into the belly of the beast.  So she drew her hands back to rest on his shoulders, dug her nails lightly into the muscle there.  “The soldiers who fought at Troy,” she said, tilting her chin up and willing her voice steady, “did any of them make it home, after?”

He let his eyes trail over her face, and when they landed on her lips he murmured, “Odysseus did.  It took him a while, and he almost died—a lot—but yeah, he made it home.”

There was more to the story, she knew, but Clarke had never had patience for history in her classes on the Ark.  Maybe she could listen if it was Bellamy doing the storytelling.

She found herself saying “okay,” again and again, her hands carding up into his hair.  She didn’t resist when Bellamy pulled her into his lap this time, tucking her head neatly under his chin.  Pressing her ear to his chest, Clarke could hear his heartbeat pounding even as he squeezed her tight.  He pressed warm kisses into her hair, to her temples, the shell of her ear.

“Bellamy, you have to come home,” she whispered, so softly she hoped he wouldn’t hear.

His smile against her cheek was like a sunbeam.  “I always will.”

The next morning they presented the plan to the Council, and Clarke did not understand why their ready agreement felt like a spear through her chest.  It was brought up that Bellamy would not know how to dismantle the acid fog machine, and so he should travel with an engineer, at least.  Kane left briefly to track down Wick, who agreed with only minimal persuading.

Wick was the one to ask how Bellamy planned on getting into the Mountain.  Bellamy wanted to use the Reaper tunnels to give them the most cover.

“Not from the Reapers,” Clarke pointed out, pushing the loose strands of her hair out of her face, “and you don’t even know how to get through them.  My map—I never got a good look at the tunnels.  You’d be going in blind.”

“Then we’ll need a guide,” Bellamy said, quirking an eyebrow at her. She nodded.  This meeting was about convincing the Council to let them go, but she still had to think about contingencies—like his safety—especially when she knew that he wasn’t considering them himself.

But Abby shook her head.  “The Grounders would never agree to this.”

“That wasn’t who I had in mind.”

Clarke placed a hand on his shoulder, ran it down to squeeze his elbow.  His arms were crossed angrily over his chest, but at her touch he let some of the tension out of his muscles.  She waited until he was looking at her before she said lowly, “Octavia won’t like this.”

“Lincoln won’t go into the mountain with us.”  Bellamy was shaking his head, turning to look at the rest of the Council assembled around the table.  “He’ll get us through the tunnels, but that’s it.  The Mountain Men have already seen him, anyway, and I think we should keep the fact that we can detox their Reapers a secret, don’t you?”  He held Abby’s gaze as he said this.

But it was Kane who responded, sounding nothing if not derisive.  “So a janitor and an engineer would be our diplomatic envoy?  If these people think they are as civilized as Clarke says they do, then that’s hardly going to do us any favors.  You’ll need someone with you who exudes a little more authority than that.”

Clarke went rigid at this, rage sparking hot and hungry in her chest, but next to her, Bellamy was stone cold when he gripped the edge of the table and spat out, “I don’t give a flying fuck who actually comes with, okay?  I just want to get our people out of there, and the sooner we leave, the better.”

But the Council was in unanimous agreement after Kane volunteered, aside from Abby who was stewing in her seat as they worked out the rest of the details—including sending out a messenger to Lexa’s camp so they could plan accordingly.  When the conversation devolved into arguing about who they would send into the mountain with the Grounder army, Kane turned to Clarke and Bellamy and nodded at the door.  Clarke knew a dismissal when she saw one and she bristled, clenching her fists in preparation for a fight.  She wasn’t going to sit back and watch the Council run themselves into the ground—but at Bellamy’s hand light on her hip, she stepped backwards.  After a beat, she turned to the door, and she and Bellamy stalked from the room together.

Before Clarke could slam the door closed behind them, Kane called out, “Blake!”  Behind him, the Councilors continued to argue.

Bellamy paused in the doorway, his expression blank, but Clarke caught the way his jaw ticked.  “Sir?”

“We leave at sundown.”

Bellamy nodded and pulled the door shut with a bang.  He turned to Clarke and shrugged in the vague direction of the medbay.  “C’mon, let’s go find Lincoln.”

They found Octavia and Lincoln in the medbay, and it didn’t take much to convince him of the plan, either.  Octavia was livid, however, and stormed from the room, her brother hot on her heels and, after a beat, Lincoln too.  Clarke stayed behind, knowing Bellamy only had the afternoon to pack.  She wanted to give the Blake siblings time to say their goodbyes in private.  Mostly because Octavia wouldn’t look at her except to glare, but also—she’d had time enough alone with Bellamy.  If she got time to say much more than goodbye, there was a chance she’d admit something to him.  Something she wasn’t ready to face, not yet.

Major Byrne sought her out at sundown, with a polite “Miss Griffin” and a nod in the general direction of the gates.  Clarke nodded and set down the vials of medicine her mother had managed to save, the ones she was currently in the process of re-shelving.  Then she wiped her hands off on the thighs of her jeans, took a deep breath, and froze.

(She couldn’t go out there and watch him walk away from her.)

But Byrne moved into her line of vision, the normally hard lines around her eyes softer somehow, even though her expression was just as cool as ever.  “Ma’am,” she said, not unkindly, “you won’t want to miss the chance to say goodbye.”

And she really, really didn’t, so Clarke followed Byrne out of the medbay.  As soon as she was breathing fresh air again, as soon as she had a clear line of sight, she was hurrying across the grounds and right up to the group gathered in front of the gate.  Her mother was there, as was Sergeant Miller, giving last-minute bits of advice, words of warning, or whatever they thought it necessary to add before their Trojan Horse team left for the mountain.  Kane kept nodding at everything Abby brought up, one of his hands hovering in the vicinity of hers.  Lincoln was grim-faced, but he too was nodding, as if each bit of unsolicited advice was vital and significant.  Bellamy was scowling, his stance rigid and tight.  The others seemed oblivious to his irritation, and Clarke suppressed the urge to scoff at the adults.   Octavia had attached herself to her brother’s side, and she kept sifting through his backpack, sneaking extra rations from the bag hanging off her own shoulder.  Off to one side, Sinclair and Wick were talking in low voices.  (Raven was nowhere to be found.)

Octavia looked up and caught Clarke’s eye, her expression hardening into steel.  She tugged at her brother’s shoulder and popped up onto her toes to drop a kiss on his cheek, and then she was stepping back.  This time, when Octavia looked at Clarke, she wasn’t brimming with fury so much as anguish.

Bellamy noticed Clarke then, and he moved away from the adults towards her.  Reaching out to grasp her shoulder, he gave her a short nod, his mouth pressed into a grim line.  The corners of his eyes were soft, though, and she returned the nod with one of her own, pressing her lips together to keep from biting them.  There was a heaviness in his eyes she couldn’t place, and she knew they had to go, knew this was it. Before Bellamy could step away, she surged forward, her hands clenching around the collar of his jacket and yanking him close.  Their noses brushed, and all she could see was the brown of his eyes, all she could feel was his breath fanning across her cheeks.  She could’ve kissed him then, but she didn’t want their first kiss to taste like sorrow.

Instead, she said, “If you don’t come back from this, Bellamy Blake, I will never forgive you.”

He just smiled and pulled her fingers from their vice grip on his jacket, cradling her hands against his chest.  “May we meet again, princess,” he said, and brushed a kiss against the crown of her head.   Her eyes fluttered closed as he stepped away, and she could have been standing in an open airlock on the Ark the way the air in her lungs was sucked away with him.  When she opened her eyes again, he and Wick and Lincoln and Kane were already outside the gate, marching back into the forest, and she had to remind herself to breathe.

The deal is the boys have seventy-two hours to make radio contact, or they’ll go with Lexa’s plan to storm the Mountain through the Reaper tunnels.

Clarke spends her every waking moment tailing her mother, tailing Sergeant Miller, tailing Byrne, because the minute the council agreed to Bellamy’s plan, they got to work organizing the group of Sky People who would go with Lexa’s army to invade the mountain.  They did not finalize the list until the next morning, at which point they informed all those who are going to start packing.  Clarke is in the medbay when the memo goes out, stitching up a gash in a boy’s shoulder.  When she manages to track down her mother later that afternoon, Abby drops the bomb: Clarke is staying at camp.

“No I’m not.”

“Clarke, this isn’t up for discussion.”

“No, it isn’t.  Because I’m going with you.”

“Clarke.”  Abby stops in her tracks, right in the middle of what used to be the E-Hallway of Alpha Station, and fixes her daughter with her most obstinate glare.  “You are not going to Mount Weather.   I’m not going to let you risk your life—”

“But I already did risk my life,” Clarke spits out, and it’s like a switch has been flipped, because she starts screaming and she can’t bring herself to stop.  “You already let me risk my life.  You sent a hundred of us down to the ground to die.  We were expendable and that’s why you sent us down here.  You can’t be trusted to bring my friends back when you already proved that their lives mean nothing to you.  You’re not going to make sure that they make it out of the mountain alive.  I am.”

Clarke is breathing too heavily to slow her thundering heart, but she manages to meet her mother’s gaze and hold it with enough steadiness to add, “And Raven and Monroe and Octavia are coming too.  I know they didn’t make it on the roster, either, but if you think you’re going to get anywhere close to the mountain without Raven there, you’ve got another thing coming.  And Monroe fought at the dropship—she’s capable, and she’s fierce, and she deserves to help our friends escape.  And Octavia’s brother is in there—risking his life for, for us, for our people.  You may not know what having a brother means, but she has a right to see Bellamy survive this.  She has a right to get him out of there.”

Abby, who had remained impassively calm in the face of her daughter’s tirade, sighs now, bringing a hand up to pinch the bridge of her nose. Briefly—so quick Clarke isn’t sure it even happened—her mother’s face twists into something like agony.

Then she’s righting herself, expression cool and resigned once more. This is Chancellor Abby Griffin, Head of Medical on the Ark, and now, apparently, master of her daughter’s fate.  (Master of the fates of the Grounders trapped under the mountain, the 47, and the four men sent in to pave the way for their rescue.)

“We’re going whether you want us to or not,” Clarke says, hasty to cut her mother off before she can deliver the verdict.

But Abby only nods.  “You’ll need to be briefed,” she says, and her shoulders sag minutely.  The lines in her face seem to stretch, dragging at the corners of her eyes, her mouth.  “You should find Sergeant Miller and tell him about the change in line-up.”

Clarke feels nothing so strongly as relief, washing down her spine like the first time she stood in the rain.  She’s halfway down the hallway when her mother calls out, “Clarke, wait!”

She comes to an abrupt halt immediately, but only half-turns to look at Abby, her eyebrows hitched up to her hairline.

“Bring our people home,” her mother says, and it sounds like a prayer.

Clarke nods once, sharp and decisive, and runs off to find Sergeant Miller and tell him the good news.  He, at least, is pleased, when she manages to track him down.

For the next two days, she trains with the guard and the other assorted members of the squad—men from Alpha Station who do not know how to ground themselves, Factory workers who are all too eager to flip the Princess of the Ark onto her ass in the mud.  Clarke takes pointers on fighting dirty from Octavia—and Lincoln too when he returns—because the Reapers will show no mercy.  She wraps Monroe’s hands when the younger girl’s knuckles split open, sits with her until Monroe can pick up her sword with a sure grip.  Clarke does not speak to Raven.

At night, she curls up under the furs of Bellamy’s bed, tucked into Octavia’s side.  Clarke is only able to fall asleep because Octavia snores, soft and light in her ear, and when she closes her eyes, she remembers that this was the melody that lulled Bellamy to sleep for all those years on the Ark, and that makes it better.  Not by much, but enough that she can sleep.

Bellamy calls at sundown on the third day.  His message is four words, “the gates are open,” and then static.

The acid fog machines are down.  Mount Weather is vulnerable.  (For now, Bellamy is alive.)

Three thousand years ago, Troy burned to the ground.

They march.

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