Clarke doesn't know where she is, but even before she opens her eyes, she knows it's not somewhere pleasant. The ground is hard and kind of cold, and when she opens her eyes there's nothing to see. It's also very quiet, but she can hear slow, steady breathing a few feet away. She strains her eyes through the darkness but sees nothing. She feels around her for a wall or a ceiling, but there's nothing within arm's reach. There are old furs beneath her, or maybe old carpet. She really hopes it's not carpet. The mountain men have carpet.

She's not wearing shoes any more, and everything else she had is gone, too, except for her clothes. She's wearing socks, but like so many things from the Ark, they're too worn out to be any protection against the chill. She's getting uneasy—really uneasy, because she can't remember how she got here or what she was doing before she passed out or fell asleep or whatever. She stands up—slowly, in case the room is shorter than she is—and then stretches her arms up, trying to reach the ceiling. Even with her best jump, though, all she finds is empty air.

The breathing next to her changes. There's a sharp intake and a confused murmur which, despite being sleep-grogged, is unmistakably Bellamy's. "Bellamy?" she asks anyway, just to be sure.

"Clarke? Where are we?" Bellamy asks. Clarke picks a direction and walks, but she collides with him instead of the wall she was looking for.

"Sorry," she mutters, and walks away from him until her outstretched hand meets a wall. The floor is consistently moss or fur or carpet until it reaches the wall, which feels like cement, but might be smoothed-out stone. "Damn it!" She'd hoped their surroundings would give her a clue about their captors—grounders or mountain men?—but in the darkness everything is just so ambiguous.

She feels a hand brush against her arm, and she shies away. "It's just me. Don't move." She hears his footsteps, muffled on the floor, walking away. His fingers whisper against the wall, softer and softer, then louder and louder as he walks the perimeter of the room.

"Round. About the size of the drop ship," he says.

"Great."

"And I didn't find any doors or windows. Unless we find a ceiling, I have no idea how to get out of here."

"The same way we got in," Clarke says. "Probably that ceiling we can't reach."

"Probably?"

Clarke shrugs, and then realizes he can't see her. "I can't remember anything. Can you?"

"I remember—um. I remember…" Bellamy coughs. "Damn. I remember your mom and Kane arguing about what to do about Jaha."

"That was last week," Clarke points out. "And they weren't arguing about Jaha. Not really." She rolls her eyes, because Bellamy can't see her.

"We went out to the lake," Bellamy adds after a couple of heartbeats. "You wanted to know if it could be fished, and Lexa's people wouldn't go with you because the River Clans live near there."

"Yeah, but then we went back to camp, remember?"

"That's right. I don't remember anything after that."

Clarke heaves a sigh, wishing her annoyance could do more than just echo off the walls of the pit. "So we're just… stuck here."

"You're not going to try to escape?"

"What do you want me to do? Scale the walls like a spider? Grow rockets on the bottom of my feet and fly out of here? I don't even have shoes."

"Well, neither do I. Hey, maybe there's a light switch in here somewhere."

"I don't see one," Clarke jokes.

"Okay, fine. You don't want to find a way out of here? Maybe we'll just sit. Someone's got to come eventually, right? We'll just ask nicely, because diplomacy works really well on Earth these days." Clarke hears Bellamy flop onto the floor with a dull thunk, and both of them are silent for a very long time.


"Clarke?"

Bellamy's voice startles her out of a deep reverie, or maybe a nap; it's impossible to tell the difference in this lightless hell.

"What?"

He doesn't respond.


Hours later—judging by the hunger gnawing at her guts—there's a series of loud scraping noises to Clarke's right. Something smells different. New. Good. It's not anything like her dad's cooking or her favorite Earth foods, but it makes the hunger pangs in her stomach knot even tighter. She finds it before Bellamy does, and he runs into her before she can tell him she's already found it. He doesn't even apologize, just scoots away from her and asks what it is.

Clarke feels the area like a blind person, fingers running over the objects and painting pictures in her head like weird sculptures. "Food," she says. "Soup and water. There's only one."

"One what?"

"One everything. One pitcher, one bowl, one spoon."

"Okay, so we share."

It's awkward at first, passing the single spoon back and forth, until Bellamy points out that it would be easier to just pass the bowl. By the time they get to the bottom of the bowl, it feels less like sharing a bowl of prison food and more like some weird ritual.

The soup is filling, and when it's gone, Clarke feels like she's had a feast. They wash it down with some of the water, and Clarke starts to feel drowsy. "Good soup," she comments. She's mere seconds from total unconsciousness when she realizes that any meal, no matter how good and warm and filling, should never make her this sleepy, this fast. "Bellamy!" she snaps. She casts her hands around until one of them hits him in the face. "Bellamy!"

He mumbles something and smacks Clarke's hand away. Her panic-induced adrenaline rush fights against whatever was in the soup, and she can barely get a reply out through the haze. "No, no! Wake up, Bellamy!" she shouts, but he just smacks the floor next to him.

"'S okay," he slurs. "'S just a li'l nap."

Clarke's panic loses out to the drugged soup, and she collapses next to Bellamy, trading the black of the pit for the black of unconsciousness.


A/N: This fic can also be found on AO3.