Love, I have wounds,
Only you can mend,
I guess that's love,
I can't pretend.

Feel, my skin is rough,
But it can be cleansed,
And my arms are tough,
But they can be bent.

And I wanna fight,
But I can't contend.
I guess that's love,
I can't pretend.

Oh feel our bodies grow, And our souls they blend.

Yeah love I hope you know,
How much my heart depends.

But I guess that's love, I can't pretend.

(Tom Odell - Can't Pretend)

…

'Are you in the water?'

'Yes…'

'Are you washing it off?'

'It's cold...'

'Well there's no way it's getting any warmer Princess, not unless you wait 'till summer.'

He's standing on the ridge above the river in the aftermath of a war. A rifle is slung across his arm; not because he fears for Grounders (they have bought themselves a reprieve after all), but because he no longer knows how to hold himself upright without it. It's been over twelve hours since the Grounders fell back, admitting reluctant defeat in the face of more pressing threats to the North, and begrudging the remaining 'sky-dwellers' an uneasy safe-zone in the contested territory. So many injured, so many gone entirely. Those who remain need leadership, reassurance, direction... And yet, ridiculously, all he can think about is getting the blood off Clarke Griffin's hands.

She's been whirling through camp since the bugle of retreat sounded, manning the hospital with the ceaseless, tireless vigour of a soul too terrified to rest. There's been no time to wash the gore from her tattered clothes, and in this state she is death personified; all blood and shadows and eyes like voids, calling forth each soul she sets her gaze upon. She is not the same, this girl - woman - who returned to them from the tunnels of hell, trailing ghosts and warnings. Of course, none of them are quite the same as yesterday, but there is a deep hollowness about her that goes beyond the rest.

'Are you nearly done?'

He grows anxious easily, whenever her silence stretches. For countless, dizzying hours before she stumbled back to camp, he had thought her silenced forever. Once he might have complained at the ceaseless challenge of her voice, the uncompromising words that wouldn't leave him be. Now he fights for every syllable he can get.

'Clarke?'

'Yeah…' and there she goes again, casting out that strange empty voice that sounds nothing like her own.

The sound of splashing is suspiciously absent. No one bathes that quietly.

'I don't believe you,' he challenges, waiting futilely for a contradiction. Finally he slings his rifle strap across his chest and sighs in defeat. 'That's it, I'm coming down. Fair warning - you've got twenty seconds to get any clothes back on.'

She's kneeling by the shallows when he makes it to the beach, and he needn't have bothered with warnings; she's fully dressed and barely touching the water. Ripples lap occasionally at her knees and fingertips, leaving damp patterns in their wake, but she makes no move to meet them. She doesn't move at all.

He will never get used to seeing her this way…

Throat and cheeks spattered with arcs of crimson. Rusty flakes clotted thickly in her moonshine hair.

Scratches drip down her chin like violent tears.

And the shadows… deep as empty graves, smudged beneath her eyes.

He crouches stiffly beside her. 'You need to clean yourself up.'

Gently, he takes her nearest hand and tries to lower it the water. She rips it back with reflexive speed.

'Do you know?' she whispers, to the river, to the sky. 'Do you know how many people I killed yesterday?'

He knew that this was coming, foretold by the eerie pallor of her eyes, but still he is unprepared to face her demons.

'It's war, Clarke,' he tries, tiredly.

'No. No, but you don't understand.' And suddenly she's animated - she's pivoting and grasping at his wrists - and there is a new kind of fire in her eyes, one that burns with a dark and sucking flame.

'He didn't strike out first. I didn't kill him with a bomb, or a gunshot from afar. I slit his throat.' She presses a fingernail into his neck and drags, hard enough to yield a mark. 'Just like this, just this close. And then I held his mouth shut as he gasped for breath. I watched all the lights fading in his eyes. And he was just the first.'

'Clarke.'

It's all he can manage through the webbing in his throat; because she's meant to be the calm one, the cool one, the logic and the reason, and she's falling apart, she's bursting from her skin…. Her face tilts sharply at the word - her name - and her whole body shudders, as if to rattle free a demon.

'I don't know who I am anymore.'

Her fingers trace slow whirlpools in the shallows, and within seconds blood is dissolving off her skin, spiralling outwards. She rips her hand away with a shallow gasp.

'I am become death,' she murmurs.

And this is the final straw.

'Stop it.' He grips her shoulders tightly and tugs her back around. 'You know better than this. You did what you had to, remember? To warn us, to survive. We'd all be dead if it weren't for you; the last people from the sky, completely annihilated. You saved us, do you understand? That's who you are.'

Something in his words - words which were once hers - makes it through, clearing the fog from her gaze until she looks at him, really looks at him.

'I've lost so many people, Bellamy. My father. My mother. Wells. Charlotte. Finn.'

The deadness in her eyes decimates him far more than tears would.

'I kept going. I kept on walking. No matter the cost, no matter the pain... But if every life I've lost is a hole in my heart, then every life I've taken is a chain around my legs. And it's getting harder. And harder. To move.'

The finality of her words is a poison; churning through his stomach, his very soul. God, he can't even remember the last time he was this afraid… And yet… suddenly he's a younger man, trembling in his guard's uniform, begging Commander Shumway to look the other way... Yes. The stakes seem horribly comparable; this feeling that he's losing something - someone - that he'd promised himself he'd protect. And he's going to be alone. Again. No, she doesn't understand. She has to understand. He can't do this without her… and the words start to plummet down.

'I wasn't the same without you.' And he hates himself when he gets like this, so obvious in his needs, so vulnerable; but he could never hide this side from Clarke.

'I tried to keep on leading, to focus on the group. But when I thought you weren't coming back, Clarke, when I thought I'd be doing this alone… Jesus, I shouldn't need you. I've lived all my life without relying on anyone. But I'm just… better when you're here.' He laughs unevenly. 'Shit.'

There's both too much and not enough air in his lungs.

'Look. I know you need to be the light.' He leans forward impulsively, wrapping his palm around her knee. 'All the reason and the compassion and the goodness - it's what you're made of. So I'll be the darkness. I'll be all of it. Every kill, and merciless decision. Every war and bomb and grenade. Every whip lash in a torture room. I'll do it all, for as long as you need - for as long I'm here. I'll be the monster, so that you don't have to be. Just please.' His fingers reach, curling around the base of her neck, tangling in her hair - and even with the blood it's like running his hands through sunshine. 'Please don't give up.'

Blue eyes regard him thoughtfully.

'No one should have to do that.'

'I'll be fine.' He tries half-heartedly for a smile. 'You'll keep me in line, after all.'

But there's something shifting in the way she looks at him. And of course (yes, he sees it now), of course it's the thought of someone else's inequitable sacrifice that makes her sit up and listen. Of course it's that which brings her home.

'No.' She pushes his hands down as she says it and he doesn't dare to breathe, because with that one, short, stubborn word she's sounding more like herself than she has since she left camp with Finn and Miles. 'No, you don't get to bury yourself in the dust just to keep me from hating myself. These acts are no more in your soul than they are in mine. I can't ask that of you.'

'You didn't-'

She silences him with a raised palm; taking a deep breath, closing her eyes tight. Pale lashes glint like metal in the sunlight as he waits, and when she releases the air her shoulders flex, she sits straighter, lifting her chin in that familiar regal line.

Brave Princess.

'You're right. We do what we have to.' And this is her real voice, certain and unflinching. 'We become monstrous to save the ones we love from monsters, and we bloody our hands so that they don't have to. But…' and her hand reaches for his arm, tightening in emphasis, 'we can't be that way with each other. We don't have the luxury of protection. Whatever we are these days - whatever we have become - we are the same, you and I. We bear it together, understood?'

And just like that, she's broken down his walls once more. And he can't help but wonder how - how does she keep on doing this? Even in such a state, kneeling amongst the shards of her traumatised heart, she's offering him something no one else ever has - a promise that he doesn't have to fight the world alone.

And for every moment of pride, every day he tries to convince himself that he's exactly the same person he was before he met her, he knows that it's an utter lie.

But he can't say these things out loud… and so he swallows the sweetness of relief with a slow, jaunty smile.

'Yes, ma'am,' he murmurs, and she punches his arm and rolls her eyes. And then slowly, finally, she submerges her hands beneath the water and begins to wipe them clean.

…

It still effects her to begin with, tensing up her muscles as the billows of red dissolve, clouding the calm water like the violent memories they represent. So he takes one hand for her and rubs it with his own, searching for human flesh beneath the crust of wrack and ruin.

They make faster progress after that.

He holds back her hair as she scrubs her face, and then helps her untangle the bloody strands; rubbing the locks together beneath the surface while she presses her forehead quietly to her knees.

The tears come now too, hiding in between the drops of river water. But he doesn't mind them, they are healthier than the silence. Healing.

'I keep thinking it'll be easier to just forget,' she says eventually, 'to block it all from my mind. I can do that, you know. I've done it before. But Finn's in there, too - in those memories. And I- I can't leave him.'

He wishes he could offer more, but the warmth of his fingers on her shoulder is all he has to give.

'I'm sorry, Clarke. Finn was… well, he was a pain in the ass-'

Salty lashes flutter as she glares.

'But he was also a good guy. Better than most. Certainly better than me.'

She nods softly, not contradicting him, and he appreciates that. They don't suffer shallow untruths.

'Is Raven ok?'

'She's sleeping. I've got Jasper and Monty, even Octavia at her door to keep an eye on her.'

She nods, 'good', trying to smile and collapsing in another sob.

'Urgh,' she pinches harshly at the bridge of her nose. 'I'll be ok in the morning.'

'You don't have to be ok.' His fingers pick idly at the fabric covering her knee. 'You can take your time. You can do that.'

Steady eyes weigh his words.

'You know, there's a part of me that feels like if I lie down, I'll never move again.' She leans back on her hands and tilts her face towards the sun. 'But I know that's not true. I will get out of bed tomorrow. And I'll rebuild this camp, even if I can't rebuild myself. And I'll keep on fighting, and caring. And eventually, I will be. Ok. Because there's more than just me in all of this.'

The light dances on her skin as she turns her face away, like the words she's about to say are somehow too private or painful to be shared eye to eye.

'I've never really felt that way about the world before. Back on the Ark, everything was… colder. It made more sense too, but there was a distance between people; or the people in my sector at least. All rules and logic and protocol. We were separate entities, the ties between us dispensable for the greater good. But here, I-'

She trails off, but he knows exactly how she feels.

'You're not alone,' he finishes.

And her head turns so fast that the movement is a blur. She's looking at him with that tiny frown between her eyebrows, like he's expressed something more powerful than those simple words suggest. Almost inaudibly, she murmurs the words back to him.

'You are not alone.'

And the phrase is weighted in her mouth like a memory - like a question - like an answer.

He suspects he's missing something, but before he can say as much her lips curve and she's smiling. And it's like they've won the war all over again, this feeling she inspires.

'Who would have thought,' she says calmly, 'in those first few days on Earth, that it would be you and me sitting here - leaders of a society - soldiers in a war.'

'That's life for you,' he mutters drily, 'full of so many damned surprises. I certainly never thought I'd be rubbing shoulders with the Princess of the Ark. Or chasing my sister down to Earth, for that matter.'

'Well. I'm glad you did.'

He shrugs awkwardly. 'I'm glad you got arrested. I guess.'

He winces as her eyebrows raise.

'Smooth.'

'Shut up.'

And despite it all, they laugh.

A/N: if you enjoy my fictional ramblings in any way then please comment and let me know - it takes mere seconds! Thoughtful feedback encourages me to publish these fics instead of hoarding them on my laptop, so if you want more drabbles then you'll have to let me know :)