That first night, he can't sleep. Maybe none of them can. Maybe they're all faking it, lying curled on the ground like dead things. The fire's down to embers and no one moves to stoke it, keep themselves warm, but Bellamy still wonders.
After all, he doesn't move either.
On his back with one arm cushioning his head, a wretched tension snakes up his spine in waves. Every time his eyes grow heavy, his thoughts taking on that hazy tint of exhaustion, his stomach gives another twist and he knows that he will never sleep again.
Bellamy rolls to the side, staring at the dying glow. To think, just a few hours before, that mess of coals had been a fire that someone might actually call merry. Another twist, this one sharp as broken steel. Their first night on the ground, Octavia had called the bonfire something similar. What had she said? He couldn't remember the phrase, some meaningless piece of dead Earth lingo she'd picked up from—well, from him, of course. From his semester of Earth Studies, back when he was trying to teach her as he learned.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
She's across the fire now, as far away from him as she can be without leaving its lingering warmth. She sleeps on her side, knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped tight. She is enclosed, folded into a small knot of muscle and blood and hate.
His sister. His responsibility.
Not anymore.
It hurts.
The look on her face. Not when she'd hit him, her rage a living thing, all teeth and fists and ugly howling pain. But after. At Arkadia, outside, standing in mud stained red. Stricken. And for the first time in his life, Bellamy had been afraid to meet her gaze. The shame was so great it almost choked him.
It chokes him now.
He stares at Octavia's back and wonders if he might not throw up, right here in the dark.
Then, when he can't take another beat of his goddamn worthless heart, Bellamy turns his eyes to Clarke and everything sinks all over again. It's a never-ending funhouse, being with them both, traveling beneath the poisonous web that binds him and Octavia, Jasper and Clarke. They don't speak unless it's necessary, and the silence is weighted with something sick.
Bellamy doesn't know what to do with any of this. He's not a diplomat, not a talker. He is something far worse.
He does what he feels, on the good days. On the bad, he does what he is told.
And what kind of man is that to be? What kind of brother? What kind of—whatever it is that he is to Clarke?
But then, the anger bubbles up again and Bellamy lets it come. (It's a relief, really, to feel something other than bone-crushing self-hatred.) What should it matter what kind of man he is to Clarke? She made her choice, made it painfully clear. She left him, twice.
Who is she to complain about what falters in her wake?
And, like clockwork, it snaps back around. Murderer. Traitor. Coward. He watches Clarke's breath, the faint embers casting red into the hollows of her cheek. It looks like she's bleeding. Well, maybe she is. Emerson hit her hard. There are still marks around her throat.
He remembers the panic of the airlock, the knowledge that he was going to die with Octavia's disgust locked around him as surely as the handcuffs. That horrible thud of Clarke's head hitting the glass, her muted scream, the dizziness… and, worst of all, the gratitude as it all began to end.
When she'd opened the door and let the air back in, Bellamy had felt a punch of despair so hot and vicious he'd lost his breath all over again.
Because Clarke had not given up. She had not let them die, and though she'd left, she'd come back. Again. They'd killed the mountain together, but only one of them is broken.
And if that's not fair, well, Bellamy has no history of rational thought. Why start now?
He rolls back, stares up at the patches of sky between branches. So many stars. They look the same from here as they did from home, when home was in the sky. Tiny bright points that would be out of reach no matter how high you flew.
Something rustles, and Bellamy's hand goes to his hip. He has the gun half-pulled before he realizes that it's just Clarke, shifting on the leaves. He cranes his neck to check her, braced on one elbow, and sees the glint of eyes.
She's on her side, now, a streak of red clearly visible at her temple. Her gaze is steady, the blue lost in shadows. Bellamy relaxes his hand off the gun and settles back onto his own side, wanting so badly to roll away and close his eyes and shut her out—but he can't do it. He can't.
Clarke's expression is unreadable. She doesn't smile, but there is a give in the crease between her brows, a softening that breaks his heart like no harsh words could ever do. Bellamy holds her gaze like a lifeline. Please, he thinks, the wordless kind of thinking, the whole-body kind. Please don't leave again.
Don't leave me again.
He will never say this to her. But here, in the dark, a fine thread spun between her eyes and his, Bellamy thinks that perhaps she has heard him anyway.
He doesn't know when he slips, finally, into sleep. If he goes first, or she does. If she goes at all.
But in the morning, when he wakes to find Octavia already packing the jeep and Jasper stretching out a kink in his lanky spine and Clarke kneeling to cover the fire with dirt and leaves, she catches his eye. Just long enough to take his breath again, a different sort of weakness.
Then they're on the move. But the web that weighs them down has lost a thread. Just one. But it's a start.