Hey I hope you all enjoy this one. AU after the Season 2 end of course. Not a Bellarke.
Disclaimer: I do not own the 100.
His skin was a little cool to the touch under her nose, a little clammy and a little sticky, and he smelled of sweat and grime and green and Bellamy. And alive.
She didn't realize until that moment how much she had come to rely on him, how much he meant to her. He was her counterbalance to make sure she didn't spin out of control. She had loved Finn then, but Bellamy had been and still was, her anchor.
He was the fire to her ice. The voice of reason to her vindictiveness. Her co-leader, who didn't take orders from her and she was glad. Glad because he was her chain in the same way she was his.
She knew that below all Bellamy's warmth and fire and charisma lay a steel sharp man, cold and hard, who saw, well, everything, now. At least that's the way it felt to her.
She knew Bellamy saw through her. Saw past the Ice Queen persona and saw her heart for what it truly was: bleeding, aching, full of love for her people, but ready to do anything to protect them.
His skin under her lips was cool, almost cold, a little stiff from the bracing air of the morning and a little sticky still. His arms were warm and his husky from emotion and his eyes both pleaded and understood. It hurt to say goodbye but it hurt to stay. She knew she could leave because Bellamy would hold them for her, keep them safe, until she could come home. He was her pillar, her anchor, the only sane point in her world.
And she needed more than one point if she was to function, if she was to lead.
So she said goodbye and walked away.
The next time she hugged him, his skin was warm under her nose as she buried her face in his neck. It was sticky from the heat, and grimy and smelled of sweat and dirt and Bellamy. His arms were warm and his eyes were happy and understanding. He had grown, become stronger, while she had just managed to fit herself back together. He was still her counterpoint though, her anchor. Still a leader in every sense of the word. Still leading and doing a damn good job of it.
"Learn to bear that burden yet Princess?" he asked her, eyebrow quirking, eyes amused but holding a frightening depth of seriousness.
She smiled because he was still recognizably Bellamy.
"Yes," she told him, "yes I have. I see you held up okay."
He shrugged. "I had help. But," he added looking around, "I think I could do with some more. Your mother's driving me crazy."
And Clarke laughed. Really laughed for the first time in months and saw the fire flare up in Bellamy's eyes and the sharp edge man, who had been coming dangerously close to the surface over the past few months, get buried beneath its flames.
"Thank you," she told him seriously, when she finally contained her laugher.
"My privilege Princess," he responded. And he meant it.
Over the years she became intimately familiar with the feel of his skin, the spaces between his fingers. She had held his hand as they lifted them in triumph, she had held it, scared out her wits and ready to escape, he's held hers, dragging her down a tunnel and they ran to escape, and pulled her across battlefields more than once.
She knew every micro-expression on his face and he had her expressions mapped down to every little twitch.
She knew him better than she knew herself because she could predict what he was going to do but still surprised herself by her own actions. Oddly enough she had stopped surprising Bellamy a long time ago.
She knew his anger, had faced up to its blistering heat and came out on the other side feeling scorched but clean. He'd withstood her own anger, ice cold and clinical. She'd bled him out a thousand times with every cut she'd make with her words. Watched him exsanguinate, and watched his eyes go dead and then watched them flicker back online again.
She'd once asked him why. Why he let her, when she knew he could stop her sometimes.
"Because you bleed the poison out of me," he'd said. And she understood even if she didn't understand how.
It was the little mundane things that she had never predicted though. The little mundane things that kept life from being unbearable, that made their life, a life and not just an existence.
It was waking up to and becoming accustomed to seeing Bellamy shave in front of the tent, (usually the command tent since both of them tended to fall asleep there midsentence) very odd day, twisting the tiny piece of mirror he had gotten from somewhere, to see better and inevitably missing a strip of stubble.
It was sometimes holding the mirror for him, blinking sleepily in the morning because she wasn't actually awake enough to make sense of much.
It was seeing Octavia and Raven do the same for Lincoln and Wick.
It was splashing in the cool river with Octavia and Raven in the morning and taking those precious few moments to really look at the earth and remember how beautiful it was.
It was chatting with her mother about something entirely mundane.
It was watching sunsets and sunrises. It was drawing again when she could. It was knowing Monroe was a bad cook but till eating her food anyway.
It was drinking Monty's moonshine and reveling in the fact that there still space in this world to do something utterly stupid, like get drunk.
It was Bellamy's smile at Octavia and his solid dependableness at her back.
It was bantering with her finds about everything and nothing at all.
It was having some thread of routine in the middle of all the madness.
It's been years and they still hadn't found their place in the world. But Clarke knew that they had found their place with each other, all of them.
Clarke knew she had found a place by Bellamy's side, clicked in like pieces of a puzzle, like counterweights which kept them from spinning out of control. Like co-leaders in the front of their band of survivors. Like family, finding home in each other.
They were Sky-people with a heritage of stars and an inheritance of trees and between them both, between them all, they had all they needed.
R&R Please guys! I love reviews.