A post s3e1 one-shot I wrote because I was desperate for a Bellarke reunion and, at the time, I was trying to write a sequel(ish) one-shot for each new episode that aired. Also, this is the first Bellarke/The 100 fic I wrote, so my characterization is a little shaky in here, at least to me . . .
Clarke stumbled along behind the bounty hunter and his companions that had captured her so easily two days ago. Her sides ached, and her hair hung in her face in a sweaty, berry-red mess. The sides of her mouth were raw from the tight gag they'd put on her, and her wrists chafed under the equally tighter strips of rawhide that bound them together.
She'd gotten herself into this mess; ignored her head and let her emotions get the best of her . . . again.
It was late afternoon when her captors stopped by a stream, and the tall one with crusted black face-paint trailing down his face shoved her to her knees at the bank.
"Wash up," he ordered.
Clarke glared at him, and he kicked her into the water. As the cold of the stream hit her skin, she gasped and the tall Grounder laughed, splashing in after her.
"No more hiding," he said, pushing her head under the swiftly flowing water and scrubbing at her hair.
Clarke flailed wildly as her lungs screamed for air. Water crawled up her nose and trickled down her throat. She screamed, helpless.
Just when she thought she was going to drown, up she came. She gasped and blinked, spinning uselessly in the Grounder's grasp.
He grinned at her and lifted a piece of her wet hair that was now back to its natural blonde color. The berry juice she'd used to disguise her bright, recognizable hair was washed out; only random bits remained a dull maroon color.
Suddenly, the Grounder's smile disappeared and he leaned in, flicking a knife out of his belt and pressing it against her throat. Clarke stiffened at the touch of the cold metal against her pulse.
"Hello, Wanheda," he said.
Wanheda, they called her: Commander of Death.
But if Clarke was the leader of death, then Bellamy was her second. Hers wasn't the only hand to pull the lever that killed Mount Weather.
Bellamy had tried to move on – past the mountain, past Clarke – and had even found a girl, Gena, who had become something to him. And then he heard about Wanheda, and Clarke came bursting into his life, shattering it apart like she always did.
Now here he was, in the middle of hostile Grounder territory because Clarke was in danger and he couldn't rest until he knew she was safe. He didn't have to think about rescuing her; it had become more than second nature. It was instinctual, something he couldn't explain, only act upon.
The four of them – Bellamy, Indra, Kane, Monty – had barely escaped one Ice Nation trap three days ago when the Grounders had cut down trees across their vehicle's path. There had been six against their four, and while Kane had tried the path of negotiation, this Grounder clan didn't want peace.
They wanted war.
After the brief, frenetic fight, Monty earning the only serious injury with a cut to his shoulder, it took the four of them a day to move the large tree out of their way.
They'd been driving straight ever since.
There weren't any more traps or ambushes, but Bellamy didn't drop his guard. If anything, the silence made him extra wary. Grounders were never silent for long.
"We should stop for the night," Kane said from the back of their vehicle. It was almost evening, that dim, misty time before darkness truly set in. "We won't be any good against an attack if we can't keep our eyes open."
"Then get some sleep," Bellamy replied tightly. He'd taken over driving several hours back from Monty, who was asleep in the passenger seat, his head resting against the blood-stained bandage on his shoulder. "The Grounders aren't going to stop until they find Clarke and neither should we if we're going to find her first."
It started to rain during the night: harsh, driving rain that soaked Clarke and plastered her hair to her scalp. Lightning sparked overhead, followed by crashing thunder. The only shelter for miles was the tall, narrow-trunked trees of the Ice Nation forest, and so her captors pressed on through the storm.
Clarke kept her head down, chunks of soggy hair falling into her eyes and sticking to her cheeks. Her clothes weighted her down and she could feel more than one blister forming on her feet.
Hours passed.
Wind whipped up and shook the trees, sending a cascade of broken branches and needles and leaves onto their heads. The rain was a torrent now, battering Clarke's face with sharp, icy fingers.
"We need to stop!" she finally yelled, planting her feet in the soggy ground. Brushing her hair out of her face, she looked up at the tall Grounder as he turned towards her, his two companions instantly flanking her.
"Is Wanheda afraid of a little storm?" the Grounder scoffed.
"Listen to me!" she said, screaming over the sound of the wind. The trees creaked and groaned, large branches now crashing to the ground. "It doesn't matter what the hell you believe about me right now, okay? I'm just trying to save our lives!"
The leader laughed and turned away-
-right as a tree snapped in the wind and crushed the Grounder on Clarke's left.
The impact of the tree's fall sent them all sprawling, and Clarke rolled away from the trunk, blinking frantically against the rain. Lightning flashed again, glinting off a fallen knife a pace from her foot, and she instantly dove for it.
Just as her fingers wrapped around the smooth bone handle, a body tackled her from behind. Clarke squirmed and twisted to the side, kicking at the Grounder. He cursed and elbowed her face before he grabbed for her wrists, but she was too fast.
Her hands came up and his eyes widened as she plunged the knife into his chest, twisting the handle to sink it in. Blood bubbled out as the Grounder gasped, thick and warm, coating Clarke's hands.
Pushing the dying man away, she sat up and, gripping the knife handle between her feet, cut away the rawhide around her wrists. Freed, Clarke stumbled to her feet, knife at the ready in her right hand.
Lightning illuminated the tall Grounder next to the fallen tree as he struggled to free his left leg from a tangled pile of branches. He looked up and as their eyes met, Clarke saw a flash of fear in his dark eyes.
For one moment she looked the part of the Wanheda: bloody knife in hand, blood trickling from her split lip and spilling down her chin.
And then she turned and ran into the storm.
Clarke ran until she couldn't, and still she struggled on into the hurricane. Lightning lit her way in intermittent glimpses of the forest around her as she ran through bushes that tore at her clothes and slogged through storm-swollen creeks. She slipped so many times she lost count, and soon she was covered in thick mud. But each time she fell, she pushed herself to her feet and kept going into the raging deluge. This storm was her chance at freedom and she wasn't going to waste it.
Suddenly, Clarke tripped and fell into the dark. She tumbled head over heels, her limbs encountering various mystery obstacles until she crashed to a stop.
She gasped for air, but there was none in her lungs. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears, throbbing through her aching body. Her eyes stung with heat as tears slipped down her cheeks to mingle with the rain. She felt like screaming.
But all Clarke did was close her eyes.
Bellamy stared at their vehicle, arms crossed. His jacket was damp and clung uncomfortably to his skin, but that was the least of his worries right now. Their vehicle's solar powered battery had died in the storm last night, leaving them stranded on foot deep in hostile territory.
"I would radio Arkadia," Monty was saying, "but seeing as we're out of range, that's not going to do anything."
"We should turn back," Indra said to Bellamy. "Wanheda has escaped the bounty on her head for three months–"
"Clarke," Bellamy interrupted, and Indra stared daggers at him. "Her name is Clarke. Your people may call her something else, but that's not who she is. Not to us."
Not to me.
"Indra's right," Kane spoke up, placing a hand on Bellamy's shoulder. "We're stuck in the middle of the territory of a clan who wouldn't think twice about killing us. If we want to help Clarke, we need to retreat and come back with reinforcements."
"Yeah, but is that what she'd do?" Monty said, all eyes suddenly focusing on him. He shrugged and then winced when the movement aggravated his wound. "Clarke never gave up on us, no matter what. The whole reason she's this Wanheda person is because she didn't give up, she did whatever it took to make sure we were safe."
Indra looked away, clenching her jaw. Kane looked at the ground, scratching the back of his head. Bellamy straightened and glanced at the soggy forest around them.
He couldn't shake the feeling that Clarke was in more danger than everyone thought or said she was, felt it deep in his gut. And how could he turn his back on her after everything she'd done for him, including saving his life more than once?
"Monty's right," he said, shouldering the strap of his gun and grabbing a survival pack from the back of the vehicle.
"Bellamy–" Kane started.
"I'm not going back," he said, buckling the straps of the pack over his shoulders, "but you should. Monty's shoulder needs Abby's attention, and you're the best chance at peace we've got without Clarke. We've got a better chance of our search for her staying silent if it's just one of us on foot."
"But how will you explain this?" Indra pointed at their dead vehicle. "This is Skaikru."
"That was one hell of a storm last night," Bellamy said with a shrug. "You got lost, the magic that makes it run escaped . . . make something up."
He felt Kane's eyes on him, judging and analyzing his decisions, but Bellamy didn't give a damn about what the Chancellor's second-in-command thought right now. He'd made his choice.
And of all of them except Indra, who didn't give a damn about Clarke, Bellamy had the best chance of navigating Grounder territory on his own. Thanks to Octavia and Lincoln, he had a pretty good grasp of the Trikru language.
"Wait," Kane said.
Bellamy glanced over his shoulder. "Yeah?"
"Just . . ." Kane paused, obviously searching for the right words. "Be careful. The truce is fragile enough without this whole Wanheda business." He grinned wryly. "So try not to start a war."
"You too," Bellamy said, and then plunged into the woods.
Clarke dreamed of her cell on the Ark, but instead of trees and skies and stars, she drew the faces of the children in Mount Weather. She drew them as she had known them: blistered and silent.
She kept drawing even as her fingers dripped blood and showed bone. She kept drawing as she sobbed and begged to stop, to make the pain leave. She kept drawing even when her hands were gone and all that were left were bloody stumps that smeared the red of her shame across the Ark walls.
Clarke woke up with a strangled scream that never made it out of her throat. Her chest heaved as she gasped for air, blinking against the sudden brightness of the sun overhead. She rolled onto her side and inspected her surroundings: green ferns, moss-draped stones, general debris blown down by the storm.
She'd slept through the storm.
Clarke sat up . . . and then realized she just couldn't. She was too weak. Her muscles tightened and tried, but there wasn't enough energy in her body.
She'd escaped only to end up at the bottom of a ditch, feverish and weak.
He found the two dead Grounders an hour or so later, one of them crushed under a fallen tree, the other stabbed in the chest. The rain had washed any leading signs away, but Bellamy suspected Clarke had had a hand in this . . . unless the Ice Nation was squabbling amongst themselves.
But Bellamy had never been one for wishful thinking.
The day dragged on, each minute like an hour to Clarke. She was burning now, every synapse in her brain on fire. She craved water, her mouth parched dry.
Night fell, cold and windy.
Clarke curled in on herself, clutching her ripped and damp clothing about herself in a feeble attempt to try and stay warm.
And as the walls around her emotions crumbled and fell, as her mind wandered, she found herself thinking about Bellamy. His was the last face from the Ark that she had seen, the person she had only realized then that was the hardest to leave behind.
Her confusion and guilt were still at war, still keeping her from the people she had become the Grounder's Wanheda to save. She'd done the right thing, hadn't she?
But the one thing Clarke knew that true on the ground, was that the lines between right and wrong were impossible to draw.
Bellamy stopped at the edge of a steep ditch. He'd barely escaped falling into it in the dark, and he took the pause it had given him in his search to catch his breath. He was tired, but he was driven. He couldn't truly rest or relax until he knew Clarke was safe.
Holding onto the trunk of a tree, he leaned over the edge of the ditch and looked down, trying to see how deep it was. And that's when he saw the body sprawled at least thirty feet down, with a halo of blonde hair.
Clarke.
"No," Bellamy murmured, the world narrowing to only the sight of Clarke's silent form. "Oh God, no!"
He started down into the ditch, grasping for balance and support at the flimsy bushes and fallen branches as he half-stumbled, half-ran towards the girl who meant as much to him as his sister Octavia. The only other person who could see past and break down his walls so, so easily… something no girl, not even Gena, was able to do to him.
When he reached Clarke and brushed the hair aside from her face, she stirred weakly, a soft whimper slipping past her chapped lips.
Bellamy let out an explosive breath of relief.
"You sure gave me a scare there, princess," he muttered, looking around. There was no way he was going to get her out of here on his own, not unless help came or she was able to walk, which guessing on the fact that she was still in this ditch, he knew she wasn't in the condition.
"Bellamy?" Clarke's voice was soft, too soft.
"Yeah, it's me," he said, focusing on her once more.
She laughed, but it came out as a raspy cough. She tried to say something, but it was too faint for him to catch. And when he touched her head again, he felt the abnormal heat of her skin.
"Shit," he growled, shedding his pack and gun as he looked around for a suitable spot the two of them could shelter from the steadily dropping temperatures that, until now, hadn't mattered that much to him.
Scooping Clarke's limp, feverish form into his arms, Bellamy headed towards a thick patch of bushes, almost thick enough to be called trees.
Clarke knew she was dreaming. Where else would Bellamy be?
But as her fever burned and what was impossible mixed with her reality, scattering her thoughts, he didn't leave. He stayed with her, wrapping his jacket around her and holding her in his warm arms, his heartbeat drumming in her ears.
And when light began to filter down from the sky, as Clarke's mind and fever began to clear, she realized it wasn't a dream. It was oh-so-real. Bellamy was there and her head was tucked under his chin and against his chest, and his Guard jacket wrapped snugly around her. When she stirred, he shifted to hold her closer against him with a sigh.
Clarke closed her eyes, basking in the presence of someone she absolutely trusted, no matter what other tangled emotions he brought into being inside her battered heart.