"Stop." Clarke poked Bellamy with her toe, smiling with satisfaction when he groaned in annoyance.
"You broke my concentration." He complained, tossing the controller onto the couch beside him.
"Did you die?" She wondered aloud. He sighed, and she took that as confirmation. The irony wasn't lost on either of them. "You were actually in the Second World War, I don't see how playing a video game about it could be fun." She thought back to those days, the blood falling like rainwater over the fields. They'd lived through a lot, the two of them. And while the chaos of wartime made it easier to feed without being noticed, the doctor in her still hated the violence.
"It's what the kids do nowadays." Bellamy told her, the sarcasm in his voice grating on her nerves. When had they become so bitter? He glanced over at her, reading her mind. "Probably somewhere around my 200th birthday." The smile was cold and sad, flashing his lengthened incisors in the dim lighting. Clarke pushed to her feet.
"I need some air."
He moved to stand as well, but she shook her head.
"Alone."
After five hundred years together, that hurt expression on his face could still grow guilt like weeds in her stomach. But they'd done this before. She would pull away and so would he. Space, they called it. She made it to the door, fighting her tongue the whole way there. She shouldn't ask, knew it would only open old wounds for both of them. But after half a century there were some bad habits you could never break. She turned back to look at him.
"Are you going to call Roma?" The words slipped off her tongue without consent. The look he gave her was so acidic she could swear the flesh was melting from her bones. She would know, it happened every time she stepped into the sunlight. Not waiting to hear his answer, she retreated.
The street was crowded for such a late hour, but then that was why they'd moved to New York in the first place. The clubs were perfect for feeding, their victims waking up the next day with a small scar and a hangover they wouldn't soon forget. It had taken Clarke years to come to terms with what they were, how they survived. After weeks of starving herself Bellamy had found her unconscious and shaken her awake with an anger that Clarke hadn't seen before or in the centuries since.
"We're vampires, Clarke. I know this is something you never wanted. But if you do not feed you will die."
"I don't want to."
She remembers how much those words had cost her.
"It doesn't matter. I have no plans to live an eternal life without you. So find a pirate or a priest and feed." She loves his voice. Could die listening to that voice.
"Bellamy, I'm so sorry." That she isn't strong enough, that this happened to them at all. For abandoning him.
"They will live, Clarke! As long as you stay in control they will wake up tomorrow with a second chance at life. Something you will never have!"
Her answering silence says more than words ever could.
"I need you." He says simply. Her eyes are closed now, but his voice is that of a broken man. "Clarke, I love you. I cannot do this alone."
So she'd done it. Picked herself up off the floor and seduced a pirate into letting her feed and then told herself it was no different than feeding from animals. Because it wasn't, really. And if this life was sometimes not what she wanted, she never blamed him for asking her to stay. Because she would have done the same thing.
She wandered the streets, marveling briefly at how much this city had changed since the last time they'd lived here. The twenties had been fun. For some, at least. But the look on Bellamy's face when she'd left, like he'd suspected exactly where she was going, it lingered like bile in the back of her throat. Clarke knew some who would call that bad blood, but she'd had bad blood in her mouth and this was much bitterer. She reached Finn's front door, pausing at the bottom of his steps. The building was beautiful, an ivy-covered red brick walk-up that represented some of the worst decisions Clarke had ever made. Yet here she stood.
Finn was another bad habit. There had been a couple years where Bellamy had taken off to Cambridge, leaving Clarke behind to fend for herself. He'd asked, begged actually, for her to go with him. But Clarke had been enamored with the city and in no mood for the snobby, academia obsessed crowd that hung out at the University. So they'd broken up. And Clarke, having an empty bed for the first time in centuries, had found Finn at a bar and taken him home. After two weeks of Clarke hiding every piece of her true nature, Finn had discovered the truth. And while Clarke had expected him to go running in the opposite direction, Finn had begged her to turn him. It had taken barely a day to figure out exactly why the idea appalled her so much. But eternal life was something that belonged to her and Bellamy alone, and she didn't want it with anyone else. Within eight hours she'd been on a flight to Cambridge.
Still, these things couldn't be undone and when they'd come back to New York this time around Clarke had run into Finn. He was alive, and looked only a few years older than the last time she had seen him. So he wasn't really alive at all. He had found someone else, a vampire named Raven, and seduced her into turning him. Clarke had never kept Finn a secret from Bellamy, but the tension in that moment had been suffocating, and she'd promised Bellamy she wouldn't see him again.
And so she stared up at the building she knew he still lived in, wondered how his neighbours hadn't noticed that he had lived for nearly one hundred and twenty years without aging a day. Wondered if he still cried after sex, if he still swore in French when he came. All she had to do was knock.
Bellamy was sleeping on the couch when she got home. Whoever it was that said that vampires don't sleep had clearly never actually met one. Bellamy had never grown out of that collegiate phase of sleeping whenever he had the chance, but he stayed up, most of the time, just to be with Clarke. She crouched in front of him, propping a pillow under his head and covering him with a blanket. He huffed out a large breath, one he did not need, and Clarke felt the bitterness melting away. This life was hard, she'd learned not to get close to anyone who would inevitably die and leave her behind. But she'd begun to love the stories, to revel in the patterns and the surprise in humanity. And as much friction as half a century together could create, she was grateful for her life with Bellamy. She'd gotten more time with the person she loved than anyone else on the planet. As she began to stand, his hand shot out, grabbing her wrist. She sat back down on the floor beside him.
"Hi." She said. His eyes fluttered open. Searched her face for guilt, or sweat, or any trace of Finn. He didn't find it.
"Hi." He replied.
"I'm sorry." She told him, meaning it in ways she couldn't really express in words. But he knew. He always knew. Clarke sometimes wondered if she really deserved him. He smiled.
"I love you." Even after all these years. His eyes said what his words didn't. Her lips slipped into a soft smile as she pressed them against his forehead.
"I love you, too." Even in death, even when it stops feeling like living. "Let's go to bed." She held out her hand and he slipped his fingers in between hers. His body was familiar, she knew it as well as her own. Everything changed, but this never did. His hand in hers. It was enough.