AN: Jesus H. Christ, I catch up on the last three episodes of the season and this show just ruins me. Ruins. I've been in an achingly angsty mood lately, so I suppose that means fanfiction for all of you. Let me know what you think.
The Beauty of Repetition
Beat a staccato on my heart.
Play it sharp and play it smart.
If in the end, the world goes still,
In my chest, the beat will thrill.
He was tired of hearing things repeated. He was tired of letting the world make them into things they weren't. Mostly, he was just tired.
If you need forgiveness, I'll give that to you. You're forgiven.
He'd carried that with him for how long now? He'd needed that, once upon a time. He needed forgiveness, and Clarke had given it to him. Clarke had given him a lot of things. He'd taken a lot from her, a lot of her strength. He'd begged her silently for other options, to stay his hand so many times that it was nauseating. She'd come through for him, though, nearly every time. She hadn't needed his forgiveness. She'd needed his strength for the first time since she'd given him both her forgiveness and her spine.
I bear it so they don't have to.
He wanted to rip Wallace's throat out for that, for those words, for planting them in her head and in her heart and taking her away from everything. Because wasn't that what Wallace was doing? Wasn't he isolating himself down in that prison? Clarke had stepped into his shoes that day in Mount Weather; she'd stepped into them and they fit far better than her own.
She walked in them down from the Mountain, across the forests to Camp Jaha, and then, she'd walked in them away from him, away from Bellamy.
My sister, my responsibility.
She'd been there, on her knees, hands over her head and yet...She was so different from the last time he'd said those words. A different kind of woman. A different kind of strong. She didn't need him so much anymore, not really. Lincoln had strengthened her spirit. Indra had strengthened her body. Octavia herself had strengthened her own heart. She hadn't needed him in so long but...his hand wrapped around Clarke's on the lever. His sister, his responsibility.
Except he had other responsibilities, some laid upon him by other people, some born in his own heart. Now, now he just wanted to go to sleep, stay that way for months, and wake up to find that Clarke Griffin had returned. He wanted a lot of things. He didn't think he was going to get any of them.
The gate was open before him, and occasionally, one of the survivors would turn and look at him, as if asking what he was doing, why he wasn't inside. The sun was shining for the first time in what seemed like weeks, and he stood beneath it, head leaned back to absorb the warmth. He needed it.
"Bellamy?" He knew Harper's voice, knew that soft tone that she'd used since the Mountain had changed her. Mount Weather was a crucible for all of them. It took everything he had to remember that a crucible only broke things down to make them stronger.
"Yeah," he called, turning away from the sun and walking toward the gate. The forest was at his back. He could still hear Clarke's footsteps, the sweep of the leather she wore. "Yeah," he repeated, trying to drown out the sound.
"Where's Clarke going?" Harper asked, standing at the gate, leaning against the metal as if its strength would seep into her skin and reaffirm her backbone. He couldn't blame her, not really. He'd have liked to have done the same, but the thing that he drew strength from had gone. They'd, all of them, taken the last it had to offer.
"She's not coming in, Harper," Bellamy said, laying a hand against her shoulder. The girl's darkened eyes flickered up to him and toward Clarke. He wondered if she had disappeared into the tree-line yet, but he couldn't look. If he did, he'd follow her.
"Why?"
"Because we ruined her." It wasn't true. Not really. No one had asked Clarke to step up that day they'd landed. No one had laid responsibility at her feet at first. As time ran onward though, and she proved she could carry them—all of them—they'd started it more and more. Eyes looked to her when there was trouble. Feet followed her path. "Keep this quite for a while. Let her get where she needs to be before we let anyone know. She needs this."
"Bellamy—"
"Come on, Harper. Let's get you to medical." He let her lean on him more than she probably needed but as much as he did. He'd taken responsibility all those months ago. He thrived on it, or so he'd thought. It was time, he supposed, to see what it was like when everyone looked to him and he had nowhere else to look.
—The Beauty of Repetition—
"Bellamy?" The dark haired man sighed and rubbed his hands across his face. Octavia had been antsy since they walked through the gait. He could tell that much just by looking at her, but she'd yet to come to him. Until he was trying to catch some sleep, it seemed.
"Yeah, O," he called back through the tent flap. He was more comfortable outside than inside the Arc. He figured, since waking up beneath the ground, strung up and stuck in a metal tomb, he would always feel that way.
She was careful to zip the flap back shut and sit down next to him before speaking. Sometime during the day, she'd washed the war paint from her face, and while she didn't look like the little girl on the Arc, she looked more like his sister.
"Where is she?" Her voice was pitched low enough that no one outside would hear it, but Bellamy put a finger to his lips anyway. He sat up, knocking his jacket to the ground beside him from where he'd draped it over his shoulder and ear in an attempt to cut out the little sounds of camp.
"She's gone," he said softly. "Saw us all back to camp and then left."
"Why would she do that?" Octavia hissed, annoyance clear on her face. "She can't just leave; we need her to—"
"Because of that," he said, cutting her off before she could get a good head of steam going. "Because we all keep looking to her for things that we need without considering the strain it's put on her."
They sat in silence for a few long minutes, and thinking that the conversation was over, Bellamy rolled back down to his sleeping mat, trying to shrug the jacket back into place with a lazy hand. Just as he was about to roll over and grab it properly, it disappeared from his questing fingers and settled around his shoulders.
"You could have told me, Bell," she said softly, running her fingertips through the hair at his temple.
"So could Monty," he said. "Or Harper. We all had our reasons for being quiet about it, and before you tell anyone else, maybe you should ask them theirs."
"I'm not going to tell anyone," she said firmly, those fingers tugging just a little more firmly before soothing his scalp again. "Get some sleep, Bellamy. I'll keep watch."
"Who's going to keep watch when you fall asleep?" he asked, knowing the heaviness to her tone and the bags beneath her eyes.
"Lincoln's outside," she said simply and eased herself down beside him, using his outstretched arm as a pillow.
"I'm glad he's back, O," Bellamy murmured, the last words before sleep chased him into darkness.
"Me too," Octavia said quietly, staring up at the tent. "She'll get back up, Bel."
Dark eyes swept over her brother, and she smiled at him before kissing his forehead and slipping from the tent.
Outside, she squinted against the sunlight, catching Lincoln's eye across the short distance to where he sat silent watch. The pair met each other behind the last row of tents, between the fence and the canvas.
"She left," Octavia said simply. "He doesn't know where."
"She'll be safe from the Trikru." Lincoln's eyes were darting back and forth at the tree-line through the fence, as if looking for something. "But there's more out there than Trikru."
"You want to follow her," Octavia said, recognizing the look on his face.
"She did what she had to to protect—"
"She let people die at Tondc, Lincoln. She let a lot of people die." It was hard, swallowing the lump in her throat at that. Clarke, who had spent so much of her time defending against killing, against the taking of lives, had just let people die.
"How old is Clarke?" he asked instead of answering her.
"Maybe eighteen," Octavia said, almost dismissively.
"And how old are you?"
"You know how—"
"So, why does Jasper blame Clarke and not Bellamy for what happened in Mount Weather. Why does every adult in this camp seem to look to a girl not much older than you to make decisions for them? Why can no one else do what needs to be done?"
"They can." Octavia stared out at the tree-line, sullenly admitting that he had a point. "They just didn't."
"We try not to dishonor ourselves with our actions, but sometimes, the right thing is to dishonor ourselves so not to dishonor our people." The words made sense, but as Octavia slipped away from the fence and left Lincoln to do as he pleased, she wasn't ready to hear them.
Sing a song, in my lungs.
Teach it in different tongues.
Quiet strength lies buried in bone.
Strength to sharpen, strength to hone.
Clarke walked for a long while, just slipping between trees and skirting villages that she had no desire to see. There were endless possibilities that lay out before her, too many options and too little time. She'd wasted the first fifty some days on the ground fighting. She didn't plan to do that anymore.
There were beautiful things captured in pictures on the Arc, and she had every intention of seeking them out, of finding a waterfall that fell into a bottomless spring and swimming until her fingers wrinkled. She longed to walk until sand squished between her toes and sea-spray speckled her face with salt as it crashed against rocks. She wanted to sit silently in the forest until the creatures there knew her.
She wanted to do a lot of things, but first, she had to have a plan.
So she thought of the possibilities, of her options, laid out before her. There were bunkers out there. She knew of two of them in close enough proximity that she could keep an eye on Camp Jaha but not be found unless she wished it. But those bunkers were underground, and Clarke would die before she lived underground again.
The Trikru lay claim to the land around them, nearly all of it, but there was one place that Anya had said they would never again go, that Lexa had called a graveyard.
A graveyard it was. The bodies hadn't be laid into the soil. Some were gnawed down to nothing but shattered bones, others were beyond rotting in the sun and had started to dry out like the Arc-Station fake jerky. The whole clearing stunk like rocket fuel and death.
She welcomed it to the sterility that still stank in her nostrils form Mount Weather.
For the first five days, all she did was dig. There would be no individual graves, none of the neat little rows of markers they'd placed for their fallen before. She told herself it was because she was unable to tell the grounders apart from the last of the hundred. Mostly it was because digging a ditch was easier.
For five days she dug. For another twenty she was throwing newly found bones or rotten limbs atop the rest. She spread the dirt thickly over the top, mounding it up several feet in hopes that no scavenger would dig up the remains.
When she woke up to a raccoon gnawing on a hand and the ditch dug into completely on one side, she uncovered the bodies, doused them in flammable tree sap, and burned them until they were nothing more than a heap of ash and the thickest part of bone at the bottom. When she covered it again, the dirt lay flat against the ground.
That pyre burned for two days before she let it smolder out to nothingness, and in that time, she cleaned out the drop ship, washing away Raven's blood with buckets of water hauled by hand from the river. She threw everything out into the sun, organizing and storing it away. It had been picked nearly clean. There were no weapons, no rations, no blankets or clothing of any kind.
The earth would provide for her for a few more months, but winter was a real thing looming in the future. For another two weeks, she simply stripped the land. Berries. Nuts. Fruits. Tubers. She wove a pathetically inadequate net and left it in the river, and while it didn't bring in enough to feed her on it's own, she smoked at least a fish a day and stored it wrapped in cloth buried deep in the ground by the drop ship, where it would keep cool.
By the time the leaves turned golden and red, she'd dug out a root cellar, filled it with dried fish, potatoes, tubers, nuts and jerky from all manner of small game.
She wouldn't starve, and as the last of the leaves fell and the drop ship was almost a home, almost reminiscent of those first few days, she felt stronger than she had since before her father had been floated.
-The Beauty of Repetition-
Bellamy and Octavia had both been given positions of power without their consent. Octavia was training soldiers in grounder combat tactics, in their weapons, in their movements, and most importantly, in how to fight once the bullets ran out.
Bellamy thought at first that she'd gotten the better deal, but as he glared down at a stack of paper, darkened with his own handwriting, he changed his mind. Bellamy and three of his own chosen team—and it hadn't crossed his mind that it wouldn't be from the hundred—would start compiling data.
It was different data than the two surviving Ag workers were collating. Different than the ancient geologist was trying to magic from the ground. Bellamy Blake, Cartographer.
And Cartography came with more paperwork than he'd initially thought. When he'd agreed to venture out from Camp Jaha, scouting the positions of rivers, ponds, lakes, ravines and mountain ridges, safe passages and long forgotten bunkers, he'd thought of it as a golden ticket, a free pass away from Camp. The fact that he might stumble over Clarke never crossed his mind.
Now, as he sat in a dimly lit Arc station salvage unit and made up names for things that already had names, he thought about handing it over to someone else. Miller maybe, as Miller was always out with him, along with Monty and occasionally Lincoln.
Lincoln was the most useful, as he already knew the lay of the land, could have drawn the maps on his own, really. He told them the grounder names for things, places they would frequent and places they wouldn't, what areas were good for salmon fishing and where they could lay traps for hare or pheasant.
The problem had been that Lincoln new that the Silver River was a good place for cat-fishing after dark, but he didn't know what the old overturned steamer on the bank could do for the engineers. So, Bellamy often found himself going places that Lincoln had already drawn, making notes on what could be of use and what wouldn't, and returning to put it all on a map that already had too much information.
He was, he had to hand it to himself, doing a damn good job.
"Blake, you ready to go?" Miller was leaning against the door frame, a beanie pulled down over his forehead and a jacket making him look bulkier than he was. The chill of autumn was thick in the air, and they needed more food. During the day, Bellamy and Miller had been hunting, fishing, gathering, checking traps all while mapping new land. Most nights, Bellamy glared at the map.
It did him little good though. Because every little hole they checked out, every cave and river and bunker they explored and mapped and documented for possible use in the future, didn't have what Bellamy Blake was really looking for.
Not that he'd admit it.
Not aloud at least.
Not to Octavia at bare minimum.
His sister had taken to asking him each time he came through the gate, and the night before had been no exception.
"Did you find any sign of her?"
He was sick of hearing the words. If he'd found sign that Clarke was out there, alive and well and within reach, he'd have not come back home. Not until he'd at least spied her yet drawing breath, made sure she was well.
"Yeah," Bellamy said, standing up with a groan and cracking his back. Miller had been leaning against the wall for some time now, just waiting for his answer. Miller was a good guy like that, let Bellamy think, let him wade his way through his own mind and come out the other side.
"Where we going today?"
"Lincoln wants to show us a fishing spot up river, says that it won't freeze through in the winter, that we'll be able to set nets in the water and break the surface of the ice to pull them up."
"Sounds like a win," Miller said. And it did. There was a separate group going out every day, looking for food, and Bellamy almost demanded they swap duties. At least he was making headway. Most days there was only enough to cover what the survivors of Arc station needed on a daily basis. Some days they brought in more, but for every little addition to their surplus, there was a withdrawal not long after when they came back empty handed.
"Someone's got to bring in food," he said with a nod. The pair had been talking to Lincoln for the last week about directing their searches toward where they might stumble upon food more than building supplies or means of defense. So far, they'd come up mostly nil.
"We have nets yet?"
"Octavia and Monty have been working on them for the last three days. We have one that will work, or so Lincoln says." Miller paused a moment, as if weighing his next words.
"You ever watched what you said around me before, Miller?" Bellamy asked.
"The leaves are all fallen. The frost is staying longer every day. We need to get this figured out, Bellamy. We need food and houses and these teams aren't working." Bellamy couldn't argue with him. "Maybe we find somewhere to winter over, whats left of us?"
They'd had that discussion before, too, and Bellamy was starting to wonder if maybe they ever just had the same five or six conversations at different times and in different situations.
The remaining hundred–only about thirty-some of them after infection from the Mountain's attack had taken its toll–were skittish of the Arc-Station survivors. Right after Mount Weather, they'd come together as one cohesive unit, but in the weeks that followed, they'd started to drift apart. The Arc Survivors or Arc-Survs, had started questioning the usefulness of the ex-convicts, their worth. A couple of times Bellamy had stood toe to toe against Kane and made demands that Kane had bowed to willingly but without any real ability to back them up.
Discipline was as scarce as their remaining bullets, as their remaining power. Soon the electrified fence would cease to hum. Soon the station doors would need to be either left open or shut. Decisions had to be made, and unfortunately for the drop-ship survivors, they were outnumbered.
"Not yet," Bellamy said, even though he'd planned out where they'd go. Options.
"What are we waiting for? For them to kick us out? Lock us up? Put us to slave labor?" Miller's father had been unable to protect him three weeks ago, and both of the Miller men had been sore about it since. The younger physically, as his bruises were still healing.
"Why's he in line?" Miller ignored the not-so-quiet whisper from behind him. They'd made ration lines, controlled what they had, and everyone got the same share, first come, first served. It wasn't the first time he'd heard some Arcer that had been of the upper class whisper about how the ex-convicts should be served last, if at all. His father had told him to ignore it.
He ignored it until a rock split the back of his head and blood ran down between his shoulder blades. Dazed, he'd turned into a fist, only just managing to turn his head so it would glance off more than anything. It still made his mandible ache and his head ring, which meant he couldn't hear the shouting.
"Get off of him!"
"Miller!"
He blocked two slow punches, slipping forward on muscle memory more than thought. A fist in the solar plexus, one against the cricoid. Knee up into the gut as the assailant doubled over. Something collided with his back, bearing him to the ground in a rush and huff of air, bruising his chest and making his head boom like thunder.
Fists and feet collided with his ribs, and still he did not hear the shouting. He didn't know much until the blows stopped, and he only came back when no more came for several long seconds.
Octavia was standing in front of him when he did, holding one of those wicked grounder blades out in front of her, a warrior queen in her own right. He could hear breathing at his back, and when he rolled to look, Jasper and Monty stood behind him, both no where near as intimidating as Octavia, but holding out weapons of their own: a short dagger and a piece of pipe turned into a club.
"This is unacceptable!" Kane shouted at four men who stood in front of Octavia, their eyes wide and chests heaving with exertion. He didn't understand the grounder words that came from her lips quietly as Kane yelled and tried to regain control. He knew the tone though, and he knew the calming presence of Lincoln who ghosted up behind the men, stepping between them with a shoulder slammed harshly into a shoulder and his own blade drawn but idle.
It was a show, really. Miller only realized later. They'd have killed those four men easily, but more would follow. There were too many more to replace those four for the surviving members of the drop ship to do any real good in defending their own. So, they bluffed.
They bluffed well.
Octavia and Lincoln standing side by side wasn't something that Miller ever wanted to face as an enemy. The girl was learning more and more every day, her mind sharpening, her body growing into a weapon. They all would need to follow suit soon enough, if they wanted to survive.
Monty and Jasper helped Miller off the ground and into a tent they hadn't really shared since Mount Weather. If anything good came from that day, it was Monty and Jasper doing something together again.
"We're waiting for the right moment," Bellamy heard himself saying. The memory of what had been told to him by his sister was hot in his mind. It was past time, he realized. "And for supplies." He gave Miller a measuring glance, one that meant more than it was supposed to.
"We keep quiet about those nets?" Miller asked, a smile quirking the corner of his mouth.
"The nets and the sheep tracks Lincoln saw on that ridge last time," Bellamy said. He glanced down at the map on the table, looking for the notation that he would have made. He paused, glancing at the ridge and finding it devoid of any mention of game. He sighed and rubbed at his eyes. It had been a long night.
Scream a curse in my ear.
Use it to hide your fear.
In the end, none are pure.
Life is black, of that I'm sure.
Bellamy ran through the woods, sweat on his brow running down his nose and curling salty at the firm line of his mouth. A shot rang out behind him, and he ducked his head, vaulting over a fallen tree trunk and landing still in a sprint.
He'd been running for ten minutes, and the guards behind him were firing pot shots now more than anything. They didn't have a chance to keep up, not with the way Bellamy was running, not with the way they were weighted down by their armor and their weapons.
He'd doubled back twice now, turning them about a couple times and confusing his own trail, something Lincoln had taught him just a week ago. He could easily outrun Camp Jaha, but if all he did was outrun it, he'd be running for the rest of his life.
Hiding didn't sit well with him, but with winter so close and so many that couldn't run as far or as fast as he could, it was a necessary evil. He'd sacrifice his pride for his people, in this at least. He passed the bunker three times before he doubled back and slipped inside, pulling the cover over the hatch as he slipped into the dimly lit subterranean structure.
Huddled there in the dull flicker of candle light were his people, all of them, safe and fed. It had taken the better part of three days to smuggle them all out, but it had happened. He, Octavia and Raven had waited to the last, given they'd be missed first, but he and Octavia had only given Raven a three hour head start before the Arc caught on, locking down the camp and sequestering Octavia and Bellamy in one of the Arc station wings.
Kane and Abby had done their best to calm the people, but there were questions asked that no one could explain. Like where the hundred's tents had gone, the things they'd taken with them from the mountain and in some cases, the things they'd made or gathered since.
Mostly, there was concern that one of their only mechanics had disappeared despite her leg brace, and in her shadow had gone a third of their engineers because try as they might, where Raven went, so went Wick.
Their mistake had been in not taking their weapons or posting more than a one man guard. The fact that that guard was old man Miller was an even bigger oversight. Miller's father and Octavia had gone the quick way, leaving Bellamy to lead the chasing guards through the surrounding forest and back again before he lost them and disappeared into their bunker beneath the ground.
"Took you long enough," Octavia said, meeting him at the bottom of the metal staircase. She bumped his shoulder affectionately.
"Didn't want to make it too easy on them. As it is we'll have to move in a few days." He looked over the mass of survivors around them, squished into the space far more snugly than was comfortable. Sleeping would be of the close quarters variety until they could get further afield. If any of them could sleep beneath the ground.
"Lincoln behind you?" she asked, eyes flickering up to the closed hatch. He paused at that. It had been days since he'd last seen the grounder.
"Why would he be–"
"He was going to help draw the guards off our path," Octavia said, her forehead lining. "He said he'd meet up with you before coming back this way."
"I didn't see him." The worry on her face was clear, though she fought against it. "I'm sure he's just being careful coming back." Octavia nodded in agreement, but the quiet way she sat at the base of the ladder and stared sullenly at the wall spoke more than she did in the next several hours.
When night fell and day came without sign of her lover, neither Blake sibling could pretend any longer.
"They caught him, Bell!" Octavia said, raging against the wall her brother made between her and the ladder. "I've got to get him."
"We can't go back; he wouldn't want you to end up a prisoner again for him. They won't kill him. They won't risk grounder retaliation." Bellamy silently hoped he was right as his sister's dark eyes bored into his. She found his uncertainty there, and like the well-trained warrior she was becoming, she pounced on the weakness.
"You can't know that." Her voice wasn't raised anymore, simply the low, sure strength of someone that was done arguing. "I'll be careful."
They stared at each other for several long seconds before Bellamy nodded, stepped aside and let her start up the ladder. "Miller, you watch them. Easy on the food but everybody drink as much as they want. We can resupply that more easily." Miller nodded.
Bellamy did what he'd been doing since the drop ship fell: he followed his sister.
–The Beauty of Repetition–
To her credit, Octavia did not break her hiding spot in the tree line when she saw him. Bellamy's sharp eyes had spotted Lincoln first, and in the seconds it took his sister's to catch up, he didn't have the words to warn her, didn't know what would keep her head level.
Whatever they might have been, they were unnecessary. As she took in the metal pole driven into the ground and Lincoln's arms bound high above his head to the top, her eyes hardened, her jaw clicked to silence, and the steel resolve of her hardened.
"We take him at sundown," she whispered, eyes flickering over the camp. "The generators were running low enough that if we–"
"Raven's gate is still open," Bellamy said, cutting her off and offering a solution to the electricity that still flowed through the gate. "We don't have enough manpower to rush the fence, but if we slip in..." He tilted his head to the side, meeting her eyes firmly in the way that he'd learned as an older brother and not as a leader.
She nodded, her dark eyes locking back onto her lover.
He'd looked worse, Bellamy supposed. There were lash burns to his arms and legs, and though Bellamy couldn't see his back, he was willing to bet they were there as well. He bled from a cut over his left eye, the thick clots making him look more damaged than he was.
Octavia shifted and whistled out a low sound that rose into a trill that might have belonged to a bird. Lincoln's head did not snap around, but even from a distance, Bellamy could see his head tilt slightly, listening. The call came again, and his eyes found them, even in their hiding place. He nodded slightly before setting his jaw and looking away.
Lincoln was a strong man, Bellamy realized not for the first time.
He would recognize that strength again and again over the course of the day as a guard came out of the Arc ship and demanded the location of the survivors of the drop ship. Each time, Lincoln remained stonily silent, simply glaring out at the nothingness in front of his eyes.
As the sun set, he stood straighter, and Bellamy only knew he was aware of their movement because he allowed himself to look at where they'd been for the first time. Never during the day did his attention shift to them, hiding in the overgrowth. Now, he seemed focused on that spot, but his eyes never flickered to Raven's gate as they slunk in under the cover of the twilight hours, when the sun didn't provide enough light to see by properly but the Arc lights did little good.
Bellamy would not let himself pity the four men that met their demise at the tip of Octavia's blade. Nor would he feel bad about the woman that died by his quick hands, her neck craned at an unnatural angle.
The alarm went up long after they'd fled back through Raven's gate, far too late to do any good. Lincoln was slow moving, but he didn't complain at the pace or the run. Bellamy tried not to think of the man strung up in another location, with another set of interrogators and Bellamy's hands causing his pain.
–—The Beauty of Repetition—
Clarke was bored. Her little garden had been stripped bare before the first frost. She'd scoured the surrounding ground for fallen tree branches and had even gone so far as to sweep the fallen leaves from her camp up into a tight bundle of a tarp. It would make good insulation, and should her firewood run out, they would burn.
She'd dried as much meat as she could catch, most of it squirrel, opossum and raccoon. She'd tried to go after a deer weeks ago, but that had ended poorly. She wasn't quick enough to leap upon it when close enough, and she didn't have the ability to strike from a distance. Fish were easily enough caught and dried, but the weather had turned too cold, and they had fled her little river side for deeper water, water that wouldn't freeze in the winter months.
It was almost laughable that she had nothing to do, almost enough to bring up tears. She'd spent hours over the last few days just organizing her supplies, assuring she had more red seaweed than she'd use in a year let alone a long winter, and had gone so far as searching out other plants that could be used medicinally.
She doubted she'd ever use the store of willow bark that sat in a grass basket in the upper levels of the drop ship, but she'd be prepared for aches and pains associated with the cold and old wounds. Her mattress was finished weeks ago, and she'd gone so far as to weave dried out vines together to hang around the little bed, piled high with the furs from the small creatures that had been caught in her traps. She'd thought to turn their stomachs into water pouches but she didn't have a needle fine enough to sew them shut without puncturing the organs too much to hold water.
That hadn't stopped her from roughly sewing the furs together though. The bird bone she'd made into a rough needle was too thick for sewing a water skin but the tiny holes it made in the furs were covered by the hairs, negligible. Had she been thinking, she might have made a rug, but at the time, she'd thought a cloak and blankets more important.
As she sat on the edge of her bed, her feet bare and cold against the drop ship floor, she thought perhaps she'd throw one of the blankets on the floor during the day to protect her feet. She glared moodily over at her boots.
They'd not fit her well when they'd come to the ground, and now, worn out and damaged from daily wear, they made her feet ache. She'd the blisters to prove their treachery. Moccasins were harder to make than she'd thought they might be, and she ruined the perfectly good skins of two fat rabbits in her attempt.
Annoyed, she'd roughly sewed them into the heavy door covering she'd made of vines, overgrown grasses, and scraps of tarp. It wouldn't hold heat well, but it would keep the wind and the worst of the chill at bay, or so she hoped.
The only thing she hadn't counted on was the silence, the all encompassing lonely silence that made her want to speak just to hear a voice, just to assure herself that she still could make words.
"Alright," she muttered to herself, standing and easing her feet into her treacherous boots. "More water." She eyed her supply, wondering at the prospect of carrying more over the two mile hike to the river. Steeling her resolve, she shouldered her carrying jugs—four small bottles and two canteens that she'd salvaged and strung together with cord.
The hike was pleasant, the air crisp and just a touch too cold, warning that in a few weeks, if not days, it would be uncomfortably cold even with her rodent cloak. As it was, her body heat built beneath it and made her sweat.
She'd grown complacent, she supposed, as she was kneeling down by the river. In the shattered instant she had from realizing a new shadow had fallen across the water in front of her and the blow that sent her rolling sideways, pain exploding along her skull, she knew the pain that complacency could bring.
She'd not seen grounders or Arcers since she'd left Camp Jaha, and while she knew they had to be there, their absence had made her comfortable. The big bone club that collided with her head punctuated the thought almost with an air of finality.
Her vision swam but still she could make out the form of a single woman, lanky but strongly built, holding what looked to be the end of a large femur. She growled something in grounder that Clarke didn't recognize and swung again, barely missing as Clarke rolled sideways into the river.
The water soaked her to the skin quickly, chilling her and stealing her breath and body, carrying her along with its strength despite her desperate flailing for the shore. The grounder woman did not follow, and that, at least, was a small mercy as Clarke fought the current to keep her head above water and take stuttering breaths.
She didn't know how long she struggled against the current, failing more often than not and falling beneath the icy waves only to surface long enough to gulp air. The last time she surfaced, her vision was spotty, unclear and faded at the edges. Something firm banded across her middle and hauled her back against something that was as lost in the current as she was.
She only had a moment to wonder if the grounder woman had changed her mind before her vision greyed out for the final time and she slipped into the cold unconscious.
Tattoo a rhythm in my soul,
of a diamond made from coal.
Some will come and some will go,
but you and I, a life we'll sew.
Bellamy heard the weak shouts before he saw the figure in the water, bobbing as it came down the river. He'd been out checking their nets, frustrated at their emptiness and just about ready to turn back when the first faint sounds reached his ears and registered as something other than the churning of river water.
"Miller!" he shouted to draw back the young man that was a few steps ahead of him toward the tree line. "Follow the riverbank!"
He wasn't sure what made him shrug his jacket and the layers beneath, his boots and pants and down to nothing but boxers, but in the next few moments, he was diving into the river, trying to remember what Lincoln had taught him about swimming with the current during one of their trips earlier in the year.
He would win no awards, but he caught up to the struggling form just as it's head slid beneath the water once more. It was almost second nature to pull it to his chest and arch his back, forcing it toward the surface as he let the current pull them further down river, paddling with it instead of against it until he was close enough to the shore, where the water calmed in an eddy, to stand and pull the smaller person along to the dry ground.
He coughed and sputtered, heaving air for several seconds before he realized the other person wasn't moving.
"Hey," he called, shaking the shoulder of the form that was turned away from him. He pulled a soaked hood away from the head, shocked at the blonde hair there, braided away from a delicate, too pale face.
He knew her profile before he knew her smile or her laughter, before he knew her mind or her warmth. He knew that profile because it was often turned away from him in disdain those first few days on the ground, then in the weeks that followed, he knew it because he stood beside her, a united front against the world.
"Clarke," he said, not having the strength to say it any louder. "Clarke, please be breathing." He shook her shoulder again, turning her onto her back and brushing the hair that had escaped her braids away from her forehead before laying his hand against her chest, relieved when it rose and fell.
The sound of breaking undergrowth reached his ears, and he spared Miller an appreciative glance when he came into site carrying Bellamy's clothes and shoes.
"Clarke," he said softly, crouching down beside them. "Get dressed, we've got to get her out of this." He was tugging at her cloak and clothes, exposing skin and throwing soaking cloth away. Bellamy smothered a protest with clenched teeth, knowing full well that she'd be warmer without the wet mess weighing her down and stealing her body heat.
Bellamy tugged on his pants and two of his shirts, leaving another and his jacket to pull over Clarke. Miller was tugging off his own and wrapping it around her legs as Bellamy pushed his socks onto her feet. It would be uncomfortable walking without them in his boots, but it would keep her from loosing a toe to the cold.
He wondered idly for a moment if it was even cold enough for that, but the blue of her lips and the pallor of her skin was too real for him to question it.
"Help me get her on my shoulder and run ahead, see if Lincoln will meet me halfway. I'm not going to be able to carry her long," Bellamy said, pulling her arm up across his shoulder and heaving her middle up across with Miller's help. A hand steadied him as he stood until he could find his balance.
He didn't have to tell Miller to go again, because in the next moment, he was disappearing in the direction he'd come, leaving Bellamy to stumble his way through the dried leaves and fallen branches that caught his feet and tried to trip him.
Fatigue settling in his very bones, he timed his steps, slowed them and made them more sure. If anyone asked, he spoke to chase away the silence, not his fear.
"Don't see you...for months and I...have to pull you out of a river...Princess. Knew you'd have...struggled without me, but I...never thought you'd drown...yourself."
He ignored the way his sentences were punctuated by his need to breathe and not the natural resting place of the thoughts. She was shivering against his back and shoulders, and if he were honest with himself, his own hands were shaking with cold where they gripped her wrist and ankle to keep her in place.
He'd lost feeling in his toes and his steps became more clumsy, tipping them into a tree once and smashing Clarke's thigh against a tree. She gave a little grunt of discomfort but did not wake. It worried him more than he was willing to admit.
"Only you'd...go swimming...in the winter." He adjusted his grip against still damp skin and forced his legs to keep moving forward.
"So much's happened...you'd've done better." He wasn't sure what he was saying or really where he was going, just that he'd kept up his march vaguely toward the bunker. He didn't hear Miller and Lincoln coming toward him until the grounder had taken Clarke from him across his own shoulders and Miller'd pulled Bellamy's arm over his to help him walk.
—The Beauty of Repetition—
Bellamy wasn't worried.
He wasn't.
Octavia could take her knowing glances and stick them right up her annoying ass because he wasn't worried.
Clarke had been unconscious for rest of the day and the better part of the night despite the warmth in the bunker from shared body heat and the blankets they'd piled on her. Raven had stripped to her underwear and a tank top and pulled the blonde against her beneath the covers. She only left when she felt Clarke was warm enough.
Or because Wick had stopped worrying and started making suggestive jokes and eyebrow waggles.
Which meant, that if Wick could joke about it, Bellamy definitely wasn't worried. Despite the way he occasionally pressed a hand against her forehead to check her temperature or glanced a little too long from time to time to make sure she was still breathing.
He wasn't worried, he was showing companionable attention to a friend that had gone through an ordeal. And he'd told Octavia that despite her rolling eyes and amused smile.
He stared down at her blonde head, pressing the back of his hand against her forehead again, frowning at the feverish sweat on her brow. Raven sat beside her head on the other side, running a comforting hand through her hair every few seconds, her careful eyes taking stock, weighing, measuring, evaluating as if she was looking at a piece of machinery that needed repair.
Bellamy Blake might not have been worried, but he was appropriately concerned. Not that he'd ever tell his sister that, because her thinking he was worried over Clarke was better than her knowing he was concerned about so many other things.
Like their food stores, barely enough for the thirty-six people hiding in the bunker.
Like the fishing nets, that stopped producing far sooner than anticipated.
Like Clarke's fever and the only physician they knew in Camp Jaha.
He sighed and pushed her stubborn hair from her forehead. Sometime during the day, someone had taken her braids out of her hair, letting it fall in little knotting curls so that it would dry faster.
"You're going to wake up in the morning, Princess," he said firmly, the words more of a command than the begging of thought behind them.
"She'll be fine, Bell." Octavia had snuck up on him again. It wasn't difficult, he supposed, not when his mind was so many other places. "Jasper told me Monty knows about some plants that help with fever. We'll go in the morning."
"Okay, O," Bellamy said, letting his sister shoulder the responsibility. He was tired of it all, ready to hand it over to someone for the first time since he'd shot Jaha up on the Arc. At least before everything had gone to hell, he'd had Clarke beside him, taking up what he couldn't carry. Or had he always been taking up what she couldn't?
He didn't want to know the answer to that.
What he wanted to know was why they always seemed to be on opposite sides. They weren't the two sides to a coin. No, they saw each other in passing too often for that. Rather, they were a pair of birds, always either giving chase or fleeing, one after the other until neither knew who was leading and who following, only to reverse the pattern yet again.
He smiled at that in the early hours of the morning as sleep deprivation made him just a little bit soft around the edges.
It was Clarke that had gone away this time. Her turn in the game they played.
He'd been the first to leave, fearing for his life with the possibility of the Arc coming down upon them, wanting to hide away with Octavia from responsibility and the weight that his actions had brought, the weight of the rest of the survivors. Clarke had found him, called him on his weakness, forgiven him his sins and brought him home.
He thinks that she left next. That time when she and Finn were taken by grounders and Bellamy didn't know what to do to bring her back. She'd come back to them though, just like he'd come back.
He supposed they both left the next time, her drug off by the Mountain Men and he into the Reaper tunnels to hide from the explosion. They met in the middle after, both so happy at seeing the other alive and well that he at least had ignored the inexplicable feeling of coming home as he hugged her tight enough for her feet to leave the ground for an instant.
Finn's death chased her away from him, and it was only the weight of responsibility that brought her back, skittering into their orbit like a startled bird. She was there but not in the way that she'd always been, not like Clarke Griffin, thorn in his side. He is not too proud to admit that when he saw the opportunity to help their people and flee her half-presence, he took it.
He fled to Mount Weather. She chased him back again.
It was their thing, really. One of them ran, be it from responsibility or fear or knowledge or some combination of it all. The other brought them back, except Clarke had always returned on her own.
He'd never had to go find her until the control room, with Wallace bleeding out and a decision waiting in a lever. She ran from him again, laying her hand on it and staring up at the surveillance feed. He brought her back then, with his own hand against her.
Or he'd thought he had. She'd run again, careening back into his life half-drowned in a river.
"You're thinking too hard." Her voice was cracked with disuse but it was all Clarke's attitude. He smiled down at her open eyes, not caring if she could see his expression for what it was in that moment.
"Someone had to pick up your slack," he said, because it was the safest way to respond. Safer than—
"Thank you for bringing me back," she said. The weight of those words was blessing. Raven chuckled down at the blonde, and Bellamy realized he'd been ignoring the mechanic's presence.
"Never do that again," Raven said sternly, leaning forward and pressing a kiss to Clarke's temple. "Wick's heart won't take the strain." She smoothed Clarke's hair down and left them sitting as alone as was possible in the small bunker.
"Why are we under ground again?" Clarke asked absently as she stared up at the ceiling of the bunker.
"It's a long story, Princess," he said, settling against the wall of the bunker beside her head. He debated with himself for a long moment, and it was his sister's challenging smirk that had him scooting closer, picking her head up and sliding beneath her shoulders until she was pillowed against his lap.
"That's the best kind," she said. "Why aren't you at Camp Jaha?"
"You'd call it artistic differences." He could hear the lie in his own voice. "It wasn't safe there anymore, not for us."
"Why?" There was panic in her tone, in the sudden tensing of her.
"We are grounders, remember?" he asked, a wry smile on his lips. "We aren't Sky Crew anymore, Clarke. We're..."
"Something else," she said softly, as if it had been plaguing her mind as much as it had his.
And it had.
Clarke hadn't so much feared the reaction of her people, of the remaining hundred. She'd feared her mother, Kane's understanding, the Arcers mistrust. She'd feared that they might follow her blindly, as they'd done with so little pushing. She'd feared that what the ground had already made of her might be too much for them in the little time the Earth had worked its magic upon the Arc Survivors.
None of them were the same anymore.
Monty. Jasper. Finn. Octavia. Bellamy. Miller. Harper. Raven.
They'd all been changed by the Earth. They'd understand, given time.
Her mother...the way she'd looked at Clarke that night, smudged with soot and accusing. Her mother would never understand. She'd never see the desperation in her actions, in her thoughts. Her mother's people had never been taken hostage for the very essence of their lives. She'd never known the weight of being the only one that knew of a danger but had to run.
Had to abandon what was hers, what trusted her. Hadn't ever had to draw a line down a group of people and separate out those she would die for and those she would let die if it meant protecting the lives of what was simply hers.
So, Clarke had run. And in that time, she had realized that while the Earth had made something deep inside her turn sharp, unrelenting, adamant, it had also made it shine. She may have burned brightly before, full of hope and idealism and everything that was good, but now she was strong. There was a better beauty in that strength.
"Are you done running away, Princess?" His question startled her, and she stared up at the grey of the ceiling for a few long moments, trying to piece together an answer.
"I wasn't running," she said when one wouldn't come.
"Yeah you were," he said, and she could hear the truth in that, in his tone. "But it's alright. We've both run away before."
That she didn't know what to make of, and she found herself staring into the brown eyes of Bellamy Blake. It was a comforting thing, looking at him. She'd learned to trust him in the time they'd been on the ground, learned that when he set his mind to something, he could accomplish it, no matter the consequences.
He was like her in that regard, she supposed. She didn't expect him to keep speaking.
"You've brought me back so many times, Princess." He looked to the wall, dropping his voice low enough that only she could hear him even with the others so close in the bunker. "So I figure, this time, when you run, I can bring you back."
She didn't respond, simply stared at him as everyone around them started to wake and go about their mornings. Nearly half of them smiled at Clarke, wishing her well and saying how much they'd missed her. Even Jasper muttered a greeting on his way out of the hatch to relieve himself.
"Maybe I wasn't running," she said after a long while. "Maybe I was leading. You all followed."
The low chuckle that shook through his chest and into his legs, jarring her only slightly was worth the uncertainty in her voice and the defensive tone.
"Seems to be what we do, Princess."
"Clarke," she said.
"Finn might have called you Princess, but it was my nickname first." Bellamy knew he was being petulant, like a child that had its toy taken away.
"I don't mind the nickname anymore," she said quietly. The truth of her request that he speak her name would not pass her lips.
It would not pass her lips for four long months, until they were standing outside the drop ship, watching as their thirty-odd people set about making a home of the land that had been theirs since they fell to the earth.
She would keep that truth guarded like a jealous secret until it came unbidden.
"Damn good work they're doing, Clarke," Bellamy said, the sun beating down on their heads and lighting his skin like a golden stained glass window. His lips were loose, the corners turning up easily, not in a smirk or a cruel smile or a false thing meant to mislead. His eyes watched over like a proud father, and in that moment—after a harsh winter where he dropped a tenth of his body weight and looked more drawn than she'd ever seen him—he was like diamond.
"I like hearing you say my name," she said. The words slipped past her lips unbidden, finding their way into the world without her permission and betraying her. Since the bunker, he'd only called her Princess sparingly, mostly when he was annoyed with her, and her name on his tongue was pleasing. It had been since she'd seen him for the first time after she closed the drop ship door on him, but she only realized after he radioed in from deep inside Mount Weather for the first time.
The looseness to him disappeared then, and she nearly saw him start to run from her words. Nearly because she fled them before he could. There was work to be done, she'd tell him later, if he called her on her cowardice.
Except there wasn't a later, because he followed her. It was what they did, after all. One of them ran, the other brought them back.
Later, when her bounding pulse had settled, she realized there was a beauty in repetition.