I came up with the idea for this fic after "Resurrection," meaning for it to be a one-shot. It quickly grew and grew until I looked at how much I'd already written and how much was left on my outline and decided to chop it into three to four chapters.
Title from "Falling" by Florence + the Machine
Enjoy! (And cry, because #ze angzt.)
It had all seemed so simple, before. Save our people – that was the goal. Clarke had known that it wasn't going to be easy but she never thought that saving them was going to be dirty.
Mount Weather was defeated, sure enough, and their people saved, but the survivors had stumbled out into the open air and back to camp in a train of bloodied, bruised, and broken souls. And the path that had led there? The calls they'd had to make?
Clarke's heart stutters, her stomach churns, and she has to turn away from the Grounder on the table in front of her to blink away the stinging in her eyes.
"Clarke, honey?" her mother asks. "What's the matter?"
With a shake of her head, Clarke turns back and makes sure that she hasn't inadvertently decreased her pressure on the as-of-yet untreated stab wound. Abby is working on a bullet wound in the man's thigh, but she's stilled her hands so she can run her eyes over Clarke's face and body. Clarke recognizes her mother's Doctor Expression better than just about anyone. "Just a bit lightheaded. I don't think I had lunch," Clarke lies. She clears her throat and jerks her chin downward, diverting her mother's attention to the slice under the linen pad in Clarke's palm. "I can get started on this one; the blood seems to have slowed."
Abby nods and gestures at the tray of needles and hemostats by the grounder's head. Abby's face is clean, her hair and clothes tidy. It's the type of cleanliness that comes from days on end of clean clothes and adequate shelter. Clarke has washed her face and neck, scrubbed her hands and arms since coming from Mount Weather, but the dank smell of its tunnels seems to have seeped into the deepest layers of her skin, alongside the choking smoke of ton DC, the stickiness of Finn's blood, the powdered ash of the incinerated Grounders at the drop ship.
Clarke threads a needle and tries to remind herself that, this time, that there's blood on her hands is good.
Three Grounder tribes leave the outskirts of Camp Jaha under the cover of darkness not even two days after the return from Mount Weather. Clarke sips on her thin breakfast porridge by the ever-burning bonfire in the center of the clearing and watches grounder emissaries hurry from tent to tent outside the Camp's electric fence. She thinks about Lexa, how livid and scared she must be to see her living legacy crumbling right on the heels of what should have been her greatest victory.
A group of grounder guards start to argue outside the tent of the River Clan's leader. Clarke hears a shout, then the sound of skin pounding into skin, then the metallic shing of weapons being drawn and more shouts of encouragement and dissuasion.
Clarke isn't hungry anymore. She rinses her half-full bowl and spoon, and heads back into the Ark to start her rounds.
Abby calls an emergency Ark Council meeting; Raven rushes to medical on the click-clack-pound of her brace and cane to bring Clarke her mother's message.
She doesn't go. The only arguments she can stomach at this point are with the patients themselves over their own pain; the only decisions she can make without bile rising in the back of her throat are whether wounds should be stitched closed or left open to heal.
There are shelves lying about, still overturned and off-kilter from the crash. With Jackson's help, Clarke hauls them to the back corner of medical and pushes them up against the wall. She's trying to create a filing system with the meager supplies she's found over the past few hours when Bellamy storms through the still-jammed-open door. "Where the hell were you?" he demands, cheeks flushed from a combination of anger and exertion.
"Be quiet, Bellamy." She shoves a few raggedy folders at the end of the row she's working on and jerks her head to where a few patients slept fitfully through their recovery.
He huffs and sets his hands on his hips, but when he speaks again, his voice is much lower. "The Council meeting, Clarke. Did Raven forget to—"
She cuts him off with a shake of her head, because Raven did do her job. "No, she told me."
"Then where were you?"
Impatiently, Clarke throws out her arm and gestures at the open room filled with patients on makeshift beds. It's been mere days since they sacked the mountain; the wounded and slowly-dying still pack the wide room from wall to wall. "Here! Where I should be!"
Bellamy glances to where she points and dismissively shakes his head. "None of this will matter if we go to war again."
She raises a brow at him. "Yeah, and when they send another wave of biological warfare I'll bet you'll change your mind. Unless you liked vomiting blood the last time." The last folder goes in between "Johnson" and "Kim," so she tucks her hair behind her ears and swings her heavy backpack up onto her shoulder.
Bellamy's looking at her with a mixture of confusion and disappointment and it's the latter that she nearly cracks under. "So that's it. You led an army to Mount Weather for our friends and now you're just gonna sit back let the Council decide everything else without even hearing what they want to do?"
"I said that I wasn't going to stop until they were safe, and I didn't—they're safe, now." Clarke shrugs, spreads her hands wide and lets them fall to her thighs with a slap. "My mom holds the Guard, Kane and Lexa are of the same mind. And you're the one that went back into Mount Weather and kept them safe while I…" she gives a little shake of her head. At the hitch in her voice, his expression shifts, his face becomes open and caring again, and she has to look from him before her vision starts blurring again. "You're the one who should be going to Council meetings now, Bellamy. I should stick to patching up the sick and the wounded."
They stand in silence for a moment, Bellamy staring at Clarke with a furrowed brow and Clarke staring back with a determined and clenched jaw. Finally, Bellamy gestures at the pack on her shoulder. "What's that?"
She hooks her thumb around strap. "My stuff. I asked for my own tent and Josephine said it would be finished by today."
"I thought you might stay with your mom."
Sometimes, she can't look at her mother without wanting to curl up in a corner. Sometimes, she thinks the feeling is mutual. "It's not a good idea to share a room with the Chancellor now that I'm not on the Council. Anyway, I want to be by myself."
He stands his ground when she strides past him, accidentally bumping his elbow, and she feels his eyes boring into the back of her head as she goes.
Bellamy shoves his hands into his pockets and weaves his way through the maze of tents and shacks at the western edge of Camp Jaha.
Just when he thinks he understands Clarke, she pulls something out of the blue like this. She had been the one to forge the alliance with the grounders, she had been the one to send him off to Mount Weather, she had been the one who had circumvented every adverse Council decision to get their friends back. He'd only gone to the Council meeting today to back her up, after all, and instead had found himself alone, arguing against Abby's suggestion to simply break the alliance with the grounders, strengthen the voltage of their electric fence, and order engineering and mechanical to make more bullets. No matter how differently the grounders view vengeance and violence, no matter how "uncivilized" they seem, Bellamy knows the Ark couldn't survive another war—not now, at least.
Jesus, when had he become the politician?
His and Octavia's tent sits on the left side of the dirt path, next to Jasper and Monty's on one side and Fox and Harper's on the other. It's a dome of dirty white and blue plastic sheeting, with a scrap of red fabric for the door that Octavia snatched from somewhere because she didn't like the feel of the plastic edge on her palm. She's with Lincoln and Indra for now, and Bellamy doesn't want to think about who she might choose when its time for Indra's tribe to leave them, too.
The air inside the tent is only slightly warmer than the outside, and that's half the reason Bellamy thinks his bed of blankets and deerskins looks extra alluring. He doesn't have to be anywhere until dinnertime, so he drops down on the edge of it and toes off his boots.
The shifting weight of the bed wakes Echo. She rolls over onto her back, brown hair slipping over her bare shoulders, and blinks up at him with a twist of a smile. "Hi," she murmurs, cups the back of his neck when he leans down for a kiss. "You're cold. Where have you been?"
He considers venting to her. Warm and naked, with her face scrubbed clean of the kohl that had lingered around her eyes in her cage in Mount Weather, he almost forgets that she's a grounder. But she is, and Bellamy doesn't much want to talk, anyway. "Out," he says instead, and kisses his way down to the pulse in her neck.
She strode into his tent like she belonged there on their first night back, swathed in a too-large tunic and loose leggings, fisted his hair and straddled his lap, and laughed when he asked, why?
Because I want to, she replied, and wrapped her legs around his waist like a vice when he flipped her onto her back.
And that's what they do—they fuck and they eat and they sleep, and she does all three voraciously, like she'll never get enough. He has no idea how long she'd been in Mount Weather, so he never comments on it. Besides, he's not had a bedmate since the drop ship first landed, and having Echo pressed warm and tight against his side while the wind howls outside reminds him of how much he'd missed it.
The Ark Council meets almost daily now. He volunteers to go with the Guard to visit the civilian survivors within Mount Weather, still locked on Levels 6 and 7 because of radiation contamination. Clarke comes with them, since the Mountain is short on medical staff after the death of Dr. Tsing and several of her associates. It's the first he's seen her up close since their argument in medical several days ago and he notices the dark circles under her eyes. Bellamy asks if she's getting enough rest, if Abby should rearrange some shifts, but Clarke shakes her head and says that it's the wind that keeps her up at night, and they're tight enough with the scheduling as it is. She's lying, he knows she is, but she brushes off his questions and picks up the pace, claiming she doesn't want rush through her examinations because they'd dragged their heels on their way in.
The radiation burns are healing nicely enough, as are the broken bones and bullet holes. Clarke breezes through the patients without problem and comes along with Bellamy to Maya's apartment to say hello on their way out. Bellamy sees the Lovejoy kid napping on her couch and his throat seizes shut.
"I told dad we needed to take him in, because of what we did," Maya says quietly. "His mom…she died a while back."
Clarke is confused. "Who is he?"
Maya's too guilty and sweet to say the words, so Bellamy clears his throat and owns up to it. "We killed his father. To get out of the pit."
Clarke's mouth makes a little o of understanding. Through his jacket, he feels her fingers slip up his arm and squeeze his elbow. "I'm sorry," she says, her eyebrows pulling together as she looks up at him.
Bellamy shrugs. "What do you have to apologize for? I'm the one that strangled him."
"It had to be done," Maya argues in his defense, but it doesn't make him feel any better about the kid curled up on the couch. Still, Clarke's fingers drop to the curve of his palm and stay there all the way back to the surface.
He's restless that night, unable to drift off into sleep. His shifting keeps Echo awake, much to her annoyance, so Bellamy placates her with a second round of fucking, palm pressed over her mouth to keep her from waking their neighbors. He brings her off with his fingers before hiking her knee up high and pushing in deep, but he feels her start to tense up again just as he's about to finish, so he squeezes his eyes shut against her ecstatic expression and thinks about Mount Weather.
Cement hallways; hazmat suits; radiation burns—
Clarke's blonde head bent over a patient; the press of her fingertips in his palm, the same one he has resting over Echo's mouth—
He yanks his hips back and spills across Echo's stomach with a surprised groan. "Sorry, sorry," he mutters when she slaps lightly at his shoulders and whispers curses at him in a language he (still) doesn't understand. He's never left a woman hanging, though, and Echo isn't about to be the first, so he slips down under the blankets and gets to work.
After, she stretches out along his side and throws a leg over his. Bellamy settles his head against his pillow and walks his fingers up her thigh. She's slender and lithe, her muscles long and wiry under her skin.
"You remember that guy I killed?" Bellamy says into the night, a bit husky since he's trying to be quiet. "You held onto his wrist through your cage."
Echo hums against his shoulder. "It was a good kill. I was surprised."
"He has a son. I met him later, wearing his father's uniform. He's living with Maya, now—the girl that freed me. He's…five years old, maybe?"
"This upsets you."
Bellamy frowns, blinks up at the hodgepodge ceiling. "I killed his father. I'm the reason he'll grow up without his dad."
"His father shouldn't have helped to bleed us dry for their benefit. War makes orphans, Bellamy. Even Sky People should know that."
He doesn't know what to say to that, because of course he knew. But knowing and knowing are two different things, right? Echo's breathing evens out soon after, but Bellamy stares up at the dome of his tent for a long time afterwards.
She's gone in the morning, her clothing, too. When Bellamy arrives at the Council room, Kane breaks the news. The River Clan—Echo's clan—has left, leaving only eight tribes with the Arkers, and, as of yet, virtually no intelligence as to whether the other four tribes plan to band together in a rival alliance.
(Well, thank god he never ended up venting to her.)
"Should it be that red?"
Clarke gives Miller a little smile and washes the bullet wound clean of the dried mud. "It's not unusual. It just means that there's increased blood flow to the area, which is good. That means it's bringing oxygen and nutrients to the healing flesh. But if you see red streaks, that when you should come get me."
Miller nods, rubs his chin, and points to the bowl of greenish-brown sludge. "And what does that do again?"
It's a mixture of herbs, mud, and honey, Clarke explains, a recipe given to her by Nyko and confirmed by reference to an old and fragile book in Abby's possession. "It'll protect the open skin and fight infection."
"It seems dirty."
Monty rolls his eyes. "It's my arm," he reminds Miller. For his part, Miller doesn't seem the slightest bit chagrined.
"She's literally rubbing dirt into it!"
"There's a reason that's a catch phrase, man!" Miller crosses his arms anyway and Monty looks over at Clarke, apparently determined to ignore Miller. "Ignore him. I trust your dirt."
Clarke hides her smile by looking jerking her chin at the fire in the middle of the tent. "Bring me the cloths I put over there earlier," she instructs Miller as she finishes smearing the paste into the bullet wound and across an electrical burn on Monty's palm. A makeshift pot of water hangs over the flame, full of clean river water. "The heat will increase circulation and will help the herbs and honey seep into your skin. And the wet heat will keep the mud moist." She speaks loud enough for Miller to hear on purpose. "You'll want to keep the hot bandages in circulation for a few hours, then you can take the pot off and just keep wet bandages on it. Make sure to wrap it with something dry and clean before bed, and keep it under the covers, alright? You don't want it to freeze while you sleep."
Monty salutes her with his good hand. "Got it, doc." Miller even nods dutifully and without complaint, having listened to her instructions closely.
Dirt, Clarke thinks to herself, watching Miller wave the steaming cloth in the air for a few moments to cool it down before folding it and wrapping it around Monty's hand with careful fingers. He's so full of shit.
"So," Monty drawls out as Miller carefully ties off the cloth. "Apparently I've been assigned to agriculture after my hand heals up."
Clarke rolls her eyes. She should have figured that the Council would want the kids to follow in their parents' footsteps. It's easy; predictable. "They think can learn from your dad."
"As if his work in Mount Weather was just dumb luck." Miller returns the glare Monty sends him. "You re-wired video cameras and overrode a radiation airlock. But they want you to plow a field." He turns his gaze to Clarke. "You can say something to your mom, right?"
She purses her lips. "You should talk to Bellamy. He's the one going to the Council meetings."
"Talk to me about what?" Bellamy asks, rustling the plastic flap aside as he walks into the tent.
Miller doesn't glance up from tying off the bandage over Monty's bullet hole. "Chancellor Griffin assigned Monty to agriculture."
"What?" Bellamy sets his hands on his hips and frowns at them. "They're already assigning details to the kids?"
Monty nodded. "Clarke said to ask you about it."
Bellamy's eyes tick down at Clarke, who gives him a sure nod, then back to Miller and Monty. "And I take it that you don't want to work in ag."
"C'mon, man, you know I'm way better at engineering and electrical than I could ever be in ag." Clarke hands Monty his shirt back and starts to pack up her backpack with the jar of salve and bandages and other supplies she'd brought to the back side of Camp Jaha that "the Delinquents," or so they self-deprecatingly called themselves, had claimed since coming back from Mount Weather.
Bellamy scuffs his boot on the floor while he thinks. "I'll talk to the Council about making unilateral assignments and see if I can get my hands on a list of open positions. With any luck, there'll be something open with Wick or Raven. Send anyone else that's not happy with their assignments to me." Monty bobs his head, satisfied. "By the way, Miller—I just left the guard station and your dad wants you to know he's eating with the Earlys tonight."
Miller looks at Monty; Monty looks at Miller. "Alright," Miller says. "I'll eat here with Monty, then."
"Alright," Monty agrees, a small smile creeping across his lips.
Bellamy cuts a bemused look at Clarke, who quirks the eyebrow at him that Miller and Monty can't see. "Alright, then," Bellamy murmurs, and hides his smirk behind the hand he lifts to rub his nose.
Clarke shakes her head at Miller and Monty, now bickering lightly over Miller's methodology for feeding the fire. Full. Of. Shit.
Clarke sees Lexa from across Camp Jaha's central clearing when the Commander arrives to meet with the Ark Council. She's surrounded by her guards and tailed by Indra and Octavia, but they all look smaller, somehow, when they're not all done up in their battle gear. The black kohl is gone from around Lexa's eyes, so Clarke can tell when Lexa looks over at where she stands in the doorway to the medical wing of the crashed ship. She slows her pace, and Clarke lifts her hand in a wave of greeting.
Even from far away, Clarke can see the way Lexa's brow furrows even as she returns the wave. One of Lexa's guards leans down to say something in her ear, and the Commander's gaze shifts ahead of her, to where Kane, Abby, and Bellamy have come to welcome her at the door to the Council's chambers. Lexa waves her hand at her guard, clearly ordering them to wait outside, and then she and Indra follow the Council inside.
Clarke would be lying if she said she wasn't curious about the discussions going on behind closed doors. But she trusts Bellamy to protect their interests, and she trusts Lexa and Kane to protect the alliance. They have clear eyes and wills of steel, and are thus much better suited to stand around the Council table than Clarke is.
Jackson calls her name from inside, and Clarke turns away from staring aimlessly at the semi-circle of grounder guards outside the Council chamber doors to help him pass out the afternoon rounds of medication.
A few hours later, Clarke hears the hails of the grounder guards as they leave, so she's surprised to find Lexa in her tent when she leaves medical for the day. The other woman looks a bit out of place in the sparse tent, because even out of battle regalia, Lexa cuts an incredibly impressive figure with her cascade of intricately braided hair and her ground-sweeping cape.
"I thought you'd left." Lexa turns at the sound of Clarke's voice, putting down the slim book she'd been flipping through. It was one of Shakespeare's plays that Clarke had snagged from the bunker the last time she was there. "How did you find my tent?"
"I asked for directions," Lexa replies, voice frustratingly even, betraying nothing. "You weren't at the Council meeting. Bellamy said that you were taking…a 'break.'"
Clarke takes a deep breath and circles past Lexa to put her backpack down on the bed. Lexa turns with her, keeps her eyes on Clarke, maddeningly steady. "Yes. We won the war, we saved your people and my people from the mountain, and we're all home safely. There's no more need for me to be butting into where I don't belong."
"You led this war, Clarke. You organized the alliance between our tribes. You should help decide what happens next."
The ties of her backpack come undone messily under Clarke's fumbling fingers. She pulls out her spare shirt and pants and sets them on the low makeshift bench that serves as her closet. The rag she uses for her daily washing that she'd laundered at medical goes beside the container she keeps clean water in. "I told you before that I never asked for leadership. And Bellamy did just as much work, probably more, all on his own inside the mountain. I trust him to take my place." Clarke pauses in her unpacking and huffs a sarcastic laugh. "'My place.' I never actually had a place on the Council. I took it without asking."
Lexa steps up beside Clarke and places her hand on Clarke's shoulder. "Yes," she agrees, eyes gleaming in encouragement. "You took it. That's what I meant before the battle. You were born for leadership, Clarke. Don't run away now because you're scared."
Heat flares in Clarke's belly and she jerks her shoulder, shaking off Lexa's hand. "I'm not 'running away,'" she hisses. "I'm making the logical decision to step back. It's the right decision. And scared? Of course I'm scared. I'm scared of myself. The things I did? The things we did?" Clarke gestures between the two of them and sees Lexa's eyes flicker. Her face begins to close off, the mask begins to slide into place, but Clarke isn't about to fall so easily this time around into whatever new round of power politics Lexa wants to play at. "Those things scare me. That I did those things scares me. My friends are safe. Your people are safe. That's what I went to war for, so now I'm done deciding who lives and who dies."
It's Lexa the Commander who returns Clarke's heated gaze now. "Someone has to, Clarke, and peace has not yet been won. Are you sure you're going to be pleased with what they decide?"
"I don't know," Clarke replies truthfully. "But given the things I've done, I won't be in a position to pass judgment."
Silence reigns for a long moment. Clarke can see Lexa thinking hard, the wheels turning in her mind, before she sighs and pulls her eyes from Clarke's. "I see I've visited at a bad time," she finally drawls, staring over Clarke's shoulder. "I'm sorry to have intruded without asking."
Clarke bites her lip as Lexa brushes past her, smelling of pine and crisp autumn air. "Lexa," she says, before she stops herself and overthinks it. "You're always welcome as a friend. But more than that—I can't."
Lexa's turned back and her eyes drop to Clarke's lips for half a beat. Clarke waits for Lexa to press her on exactly what she means—an ally? an advisor? a lover? Clarke isn't even sure she would have the answer if Lexa asked. But instead, Lexa gives a tight nod, starts to say something, stops, and starts again. "The things we did, Clarke," she says, slowly, choosing her words with care, "we did to save our friends from certain death, and to save ourselves from a similar fate the future. You're struggling, but remember that."
She ducks her head and leaves the tent without another word. Only after Clarke is certain the plastic has fallen back into place does she sit down on the bed. Lexa should be right, Clarke knows, but when she leans back and closes her eyes, all she sees is Finn's face in the bunker, smiling softly up at her, and the feel of his thumb tracing her shoulder blade.
Medical is quiet after dinner, Bellamy's learned. The patients drift off to sleep and the nurses curl up with well-read pamphlets and books during the quiet time. It's usually Clarke's favorite time to work on her filing system and to check in with the progress of patients' wounds and pain levels. But she's not here tonight, he realizes as he scans his eyes over the patients and staff.
"She lost a patient today; a baby," a co-worker tells him when he asks after her. Her eyes drift over to a bed against the far wall as she says this. The woman in it lies curled on her side, looking bereft even in sleep. "We sent her home afterwards. You should check her tent."
Outside, the sunset is nearly finished, just a smear of blood orange across the western horizon. People have started to head into their tents for the night, though a few guards fresh off duty play cards by the fire and wave to him as he passes by. He takes a left at the fork instead of a right to get to his own tent, and finds Clarke's tent with its big blue patch on the front.
He isn't sure what he expected, but ducking into Clarke's tent to find her stretched out on the ground, surrounded by colored pencils, isn't it. She's sketching furiously, but abruptly she stops, crumples the paper she's been working on, and tosses it aside. "Clarke?"
He hadn't been particularly quiet when he came in, but she startles at his voice and peers back over her shoulder at him. "Bellamy!" She pats around in front of her, rolls to her hip to sit up and wiggles a bottle at him before she takes a swig from it. "Come drink with me."
Bellamy drops onto her bed and reaches out to take the bottle from her. It's wine, not moonshine, but she's had a good three-quarters of the bottle already. She shrugs and laughs when he comments on it. "I finished off my other bottle earlier. And I have another. So drink up!"
Her blue eyes shine brightly in the light of her little fire, but they aren't quite out of focus yet, so he brings the bottle to his lips again and takes a healthier swallow. "What are you working on?"
Almost instantly, her smile drops off her face. He grabs her shoulder, tells her she doesn't have to tell him if she doesn't want to, but she shakes her head. "I'm working on Finn. But I can't get his mouth right." Her hair slides forward and covers her face from Bellamy's view as she spreads out the various half-sketches she's done of Finn Collins. "I can get his hair—well, before Raven cut it, and his nose, and his eyebrows were straight, you know? But his mouth…I keep wanting to draw him smiling, but I can't get it right."
She hands him a sketch or two in exchange for the wine bottle and they're good. He'd known that she was an artist the way he knows Monty is an electrician, but it's almost like Finn is looking up at him again, judgey eyes and all.
"…I got the grounder I killed earlier. I remembered his tattoos," she's saying now.
"Wait—what grounder?" Bellamy asks, tearing his eyes from her sketch.
She passes him the portrait while taking a swig and waves her hand dismissively. "One of Anya's men, back before even the drop ship rockets. I slit his throat so I could find Finn and get back to camp. Here's Charlotte." Clarke pulls another sketch from the pile and adding it to the two Bellamy held in his hands. "That high forehead and little nose…I didn't know her very well but I remember her face. Anya," she murmurs, picking up another sheet and running her fingers over the smudges of black around the portrait's eyes. "And now a…a baby?"
A tear falls over Clarke's lower lid when she blinks; Bellamy watches it slide down her cheek and hang, suspended, at the point of her chin. He breathes her name and sets aside the sketches she's given him so he can set his hands on her shoulders and pull her back against his knees. It's awkward, the way he's bent over, arms wrapped around her chest, but he doesn't let himself think about it. He's not quite sure yet of all the things that Clarke needs right now, but a hug has to rank somewhere on the list.
"Everything that I touch dies." Clarke brings the mouth of the bottle to her mouth and tips it upwards. The liquid sloshes inside the glass bottle; her throat bobs two, three, four times. "A woman's body is built to deliver live babies and…it still died."
Bellamy pushes himself off the bed to sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor with her. She stares into the fire, chin jutted forward in self-loathing. Well, if we're holding confession, Bellamy thinks, and takes the bottle from her hand. "I was the one to tell Charlotte to slay her demons," he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "I kicked the stool out from under Murphy. I killed Lovejoy just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"I fired our engines and incinerated over three hundred people. I let ton DC burn. I could have killed Octavia, Bellamy." She whirls on him, blonde hair flying. "I could have killed your sister."
"The mountain men would have killed her." Bellamy's thought about it, he has. If Clarke's horse had been slower, if Octavia had stayed behind to help evacuate, no matter the situation he dreams up, it's still Mount Weather pushing the button to send the missile to kill her. "You did what had to be done."
At his words, meant to be comforting, Clarke's face crumples. "Everyone keeps saying that. That I had to kill people," she sobs. "I had to? Is that what I really had to do?"
Oh, Bellamy's mind tells him. Oh.
He sets the bottle down and hauls Clarke into his chest, cupping her head when she buries her face in his neck. She ends up lying half across his lap, her fingers twisting into the fabric of his sleeves, but Bellamy doesn't care about the awkward strain it puts on his back; he just tightens his arms and rocks her side to side, side to side while she cries. It's a messy cry, too—sobs coming from deep in her chest, tears soaking his shirt, wheezing and sniffling all throughout.
He realizes that he's never seen her cry, not once. The closest she ever came was during Murphy's hanging, and when she told him she couldn't loose him after Finn. Of course, Clarke wouldn't ever cry in front of anyone, and…he can't remember the last time she was ever really alone, or had enough time to have a good cry. And that's when you get drunk and have a full-fledged meltdown, he thinks, running his fingers through the ends of her hair.
Eventually, her sobs slow until she's just shuddering and gasping now and then, but her grip on him doesn't wane, as though she needs to be tethered to something other than herself. He cards his fingers through the hair at the nape of her neck and squeezes her a little bit in reassurance.
"You're good at this," Clarke murmurs into his neck. At his questioning hum, she returns the little squeeze he'd just given her. "The comforting thing."
"Older brother," he reminds her. "Octavia had her fair share of angry cries on the Ark."
Bellamy feels Clarke smile against his neck. "Why am I not surprised?" Stiffly, because lying all twisted up on the ground can't have been comfortable for her either, she leans back and away from him, resting her weight into her palms and rolling her head on her neck. He sees her red, puffy eyes fall on the wine bottle, but he snatches it out of her reach before she gives action to the half-formed thought.
"I know you're upset, but I think you've had enough for tonight," he says as gently as he can, and she nods, but doesn't move. "Okay, then, Princess, let's get you to bed."
"Finn called me 'Princess,'" Clarke seems suddenly distant again when he grabs her hands and helps her to her feet. "That was the last thing he said to me. 'Thanks, Princess.' Because I…After I…" Her eyes start to well up again, and Bellamy guides her backwards a step or two until her knees hit the bed and she sits down.
"You kept him from a painful death." Bellamy crouches at her feet and unlaces her boots.
"I think I knew." Clarke shrugs out of her heavy hoodie after Bellamy unzips it. "When Raven put that knife in my hand, I knew I was going to have to kill him. But I still went out there."
She's staring at the opposite wall of the tent now, eyes wide but not glazed over. Bellamy knows she isn't drunk—well, not so much that she doesn't know what she's saying—and she isn't out of her mind and spouting nonsense. She's just exhausted and has probably never talked about Finn with anyone. And to whom would she have? Not her mom, and not Raven. Lexa? Maybe. Bellamy can't stop the frown from pulling the corners of his mouth down. He'd always been a bit suspicious of whatever he'd seen Lexa and Clarke talking about at Finn's pyre, particularly since Clarke had gone all ice queen on him soon after.
Still, Clarke needs him now, so Bellamy takes her hands in his and says her name, calling her back to the present. "Would you have wanted it to be anyone else? Because I don't think Finn would have. He loved you, Clarke. You were his friend. And—knowing the way he was gonna die otherwise?" Bellamy shakes his head, runs his thumbs over the backs of Clarke's knuckles. "I know what I would pick if I had that choice."
"Well, I know you wouldn't want me to have the knife," Clarke says with a bit of a watery smile, but she squeezes his hands in gratitude.
"Everyone else I hate more would have to be there for that to happen." He gives her a wink and stands up to nudge her shoulder so she lies back on the bed. "But—Octavia, I think. I think if it were a night of grounder torture or Octavia, I'd give Octavia a knife every time." She frowns at him sleepily as he helps her pull the covers up to her chest. "I'm not lying to you. So, please, don't cry anymore and get some sleep, okay?"
He turns to leave, meaning to blow out her lantern on his way, but she catches his wrist. "Stay, please, Bellamy," she murmurs, voice thick with fatigue. "I was lying before. I don't really want to be alone."
If she were not so close to the brink of unconsciousness, Bellamy probably would have said no. But she's fading so quickly into sleep that there's no doubt that she just wants the weight and warmth of another body next to hers, the reassurance that someone's there with her. So he leans down and tells her to roll over before he toes off his boots and takes off everything but his tshirt and long underwear. By the time he finally blows out the lantern, she's dozing with her mouth open on the far side of the bed.
Bellamy shakes his head. All blonde hair and fair skin—it's hard to believe sometimes that she'd forged a military alliance and led an army.
Her bed is a bit firmer than his, but he doesn't mind too much. She murmurs his name, and he shushes her, tells her he's there. She slides into his space a bit, snuggles down and curls up until he can feel the bend of her knees on the outside of his thigh and her forehead on his shoulder. One of her hands sneaks around his elbow and he lets her have it, rests that hand on his belly and works his head down into the pillow.
The wind ruffles the slack in the tent. He closes his eyes and listens for a bit to the flap of the plastic, the hum of low conversations outside, and the huffing exhales Clarke lets out as she sleeps. She smells woodsy and clean, like Echo; Clarke must have gotten her hands on some grounder soap somewhere along the way.
It's the last thing he thinks about before falling asleep, and it's the first thing he notices when he wakes up, his face pressed into her pillow and all. Clarke's rolled onto her back, and him onto his stomach, but they're still close enough that he can feel how warm she is. When he stretches out his legs and yawns, her eyes flutter open and she rolls her head to give him a sleepy smile and wish him a good morning.
The sun is bright this morning, warming up the tent a bit by shining through the plastic, so Bellamy doesn't keep the blankets all the way to his neck when he lifts his head onto his palm and peers down at Clarke. "So you haven't moved in with Raven because of the whole thing of her liking Wick's dick?" She gives a little laugh and nods. He hasn't seen her smile in a while, or at least not where it reaches her eyes and makes them crinkle in the corners. "Come stay with me and Octavia, then. I'm used to living with girls and I've got a pretty big tent. It shouldn't be too cramped."
Clarke bites her lip. "Only if you're sure." After last night, how could he not be? So he promises her he is positively sure, and she takes him up on his offer.
It takes them a grand total of two trips to move Clarke's belongings into the Blakes' tent.
Moving is a lot easier when nobody really owns anything anymore.
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