Title: let me occupy your mind (as you do mine)
Word Count: 2,854
Characters/Pairing: Bellamy/Clarke
Rating: T (for language and mild sexual situations)
Disclaimer: The 100 does not belong to me, too many of my faves are dead.
Summary: Getting semi-naked just to spite each other was, in retrospect, probably not the smartest move.
Note: Special thanks to Rita, who is ever my muse, and Meagan, who kindly agreed to beta for me and also re-invigorated me to actually finish this damn thing. Sorry this turned out more angsty than I had initially intended, but that's probably not really very surprising.
He wouldn't say it out loud, but Bellamy's actually pretty proud of the little scale model he'd built of the camp and their surrounding woods; having a visual representation of every angle to consider makes him feel more confident, more in control. He likes to study it while he's alone, considering where their defenses need to be improved, what resources they'll need and where they can get them.
He'd made the thing half on a whim, and liked to fancy that maybe this is what the leader of Earth had once felt like as they'd plotted the survival of their people. He never actually intended to show it to anyone else, but he probably should have expected someone would catch him at it one day; things like 'privacy' and 'boundaries' were mostly just wishful thinking, on a good day. So, of course, Clarke walks into his tent with only the barest pretense of announcing herself, which basically means she starts talking slightly before she actually strides through the flap of his tent.
"Bellamy, I was thinking that we should—"
She stops abruptly when she actually catches sight of him, standing frozen with one of stash of the little toy soldiers in his hand, scavenged recently out of an old bunker.
"Oh," she says instead. "What's that?"
He can feel his face heating, though fuck if he knows why, it's just a thing he did that he didn't really talk about with anyone, so.
But Clarke is walking forward again and coming to stand right next to him, peering curiously down at this odd thing he's made.
"It's a model. Of the camp."
She arches one amused brow—and yeah, he thinks, she can see that, dumbass—but before he can come up with anything better she's already turned back around and started pointing.
"Dropship, obviously. Gate, smokehouse, water tent, rations storage, fire pit…what's that?"
"Oh." He reaches over her shoulder, scooping up the piece of scrap metal she'd pointed to. A small grin tugs at the corner of his mouth. "It's where Monty stashes the moonshine he doesn't want anyone getting their hands on just yet. A good tactician has to keep track of all the resources at his disposal, after all."
She laughs then, startling him, and keeps laughing when she sees the look on his face. He's abruptly aware of how close they actually are; her whole body lists toward him as she giggles helplessly, until her side is pressed right against his front. Clarke hardly seems to notice though as she finally quiets, and she's got her thoughtful face on now.
"This is really good, you know." He shrugs, tries not to show how pleased he actually feels in that moment. "Really, I mean it. And I was just thinking that we should try to map the surrounding forest properly, draw it out. We could mark where we find things, like edible and medicinal plants, things like that."
"You got a stash of paper and pencils lying around that I don't know about, princess?" And he means it as a joke, but she just smirks up at him, smug and satisfied, like maybe if he asks nicely enough she just might let him in on her secret.
He swallows. (He wants to know her secret.)
Without quite meaning to Bellamy finds himself leaning closer, drawn to her in that inexplicable way he always is—the way he feels constantly now, so constantly he hardly even notices it anymore. Except for in moments like these, when she's so close he can practically taste her.
He wants to taste her, he realizes, heart beginning to race now but mouth still pulled magnetically towards hers.
Clarke's head ducks suddenly, jarring him, twisting her face away as her lips force a grin that looks more like a grimace.
"Did you just try to kiss me?"
"…No?" He tries to laugh it off. His heartbeat stubbornly refuses to slow.
"So, what, were you trying to headbutt me?" Her eyebrow does that incredulous arch it's so good at, but her entire body is wound tight and tense even while she tries to play it cool. Abruptly, she all but flings herself away, putting a good few feet between them before she turns. The eyebrow remains firmly in place, by sheer force of will he can only imagine.
"No, look-"
"I would never, ever kiss you," she declares, something stubborn and fierce and slightly panicked (panicked?) flashing across her face.
(And see, that's it. That's the line. That's the moment. The moment where he's completely, utterly fucked.
He just doesn't know it quite yet.)
Bellamy turns slowly towards her, meeting the challenge in her eyes the only way he knows how: by not backing down.
"Okay. Then I won't kiss you either."
Her face hardly changes, and yeah, she's got a history of not being the least bit impressed by him or anything he does, but the way she's staring at him—puffed up with all her princess bravado, not willing to give him an inch, eyes bright and trained straight at him, and how can he resist that?
(See? Fucked. Stupid, stupid fuck.)
The impulse barely crosses into his mind before his jacket is pulled off and flung violently into some corner. His shirt follows, dragged carelessly over his head, and it's not until he holds the material bunched in his hands that all the reasons why this is probably a supremely bad idea start flooding in.
So there he is, standing bare-chested in front of the princess, Clarke fucking Griffin, and it's not that he's never been shirtless in front of a girl before, hell, not even this particular girl—he wasn't exactly shy about it—and yet here he is clutching a ratty t-shirt and unaccountably nervous. Because now is the time to hesitate, sweaty-palmed and stomach flipping over like a fucking teenager on his first date.
Those feelings don't stop when he finally forces himself to actually look at her again; Clarke's mouth has fallen open slightly, and her eyes dart back and forth between his face and his chest. That probably makes it worse, actually.
It definitely makes it worse when her eyes narrow, and suddenly there is a very shirtless Clarke standing in his tent gazing coolly back at him.
He tries not to look. Really. He just fails at it spectacularly.
And all right, it's not that he's never looked before or whatever, but her rack is kind of fantastic and actively making it very difficult for him to look anywhere else. Except her eyes, he has to look at her eyes because there she stands, skin bared in front of him and challenge written in bold letters across her face, because she's Clarke fucking Griffin and when has she ever done anything else?
It's a challenge that he'll be damned if lets go unanswered.
(And, incidentally, just how far is she willing to take—)
Slowly, he places one foot deliberately in front of the other and closes the distance between them. She doesn't back away, doesn't look away, and it sends a small thrill down the base of his spine. Her only concession in the tilt of her head as she keeps her eyes locked on his, which is funny because he rarely thinks of Clarke as smaller than him. Her presence alone takes up so much space, no matter where she is—and he always knows where she is these days.
Or it would be funny, if the sudden awareness didn't now tighten in his chest and make lightning dance under his skin.
He reaches forward, grazing his hand up her arm, barely touching, barely there at all. Bellamy watches as goosebumps follow in its wake, and her breath hitches ever so slightly in her chest (her very distracting chest, lest he forget); his hand pauses at her shoulder, hovering, when he notices her lips have parted slightly. Without thought, his whole body curves closer to her, drawn in by the hypnotic curve of her mouth.
He hesitates, just a few inches away, and lets himself linger in the way their breaths mingle. For all her dismissive words earlier, she's not pulling away; when he looks up slightly to gauge her reaction, he finds her staring at him with the exact same challenge bright in her eyes as she'd had when this had all started—and well, damned if he's going to lose.
(Whatever this is.)
So abruptly he changes course, and when his lips finally (finally) connect, it's with the corner of her jaw. He lingers there, gently, just light little brushes, even as every nerve in him screams to grab on, bring her closer, hold her tight. Instead, he carefully sweeps his lips over the skin of her neck and feels her shudder in response. (It feels like victory.) His other hand slides up to settle in the sweet dip of her waist and he continues to leave butterfly kisses wherever he can reach, and he wants—
He wants.
(But admitting that he wants something is the quickest way to being told he can't have it, so he's never been very good at asking and anyway this is all he can think of.)
And then suddenly her hands are pressing against his chest, pressing away, and there's a painful lurch somewhere in the vicinity of his ribs as she pulls back.
His skin burns in all the places she's no longer touching him.
Clarke is breathing evenly, so it appears, but her entire body is stiffly controlled, taut and wide-eyed and just a little dazed. Honestly, she looks on the verge of fleeing, and for some reason he's finding it very hard to breathe right now; it terrifies him to think what that could mean, so he lets out a sharp bark of laughter before the notion can settle and leave marks, slices a grin across his face like a knife wound just waiting to bleed poison.
"What, too much for your delicate sensibilities, princess?"
He wants to bite off his own tongue as soon as the words escape his mouth, but her eyes narrow, harden. Before he has the chance to take it back, to take it all back, she presses a firm hand to his chest and pushes him again. Utterly unprepared for the sudden contact (the warmth there shocks him into stillness for a heartbeat too long); he topples onto his back, right in the middle of his bedding. He's even less prepared for when she immediately follows right on top of him, bold as anything, knees on either side of his hips and hands on either side of his head.
He can only imagine what his face looks like now, but she tilts her head, and arches that one princess-y eyebrow at him. Then she licks her lips, which distracts him enough (as if he wasn't before) that he just about jumps out of his skin when she latches that pink little mouth onto his neck. The noise that works its way out of his throat, strangled and breathless, would probably be embarrassing if he had any room in his head for things other than oh and yes and Clarke—
His head tilts back automatically, and his hands clutch at her waist of their own accord. Without pausing, Clarke shifts her weight back onto her knees (which causes a very interesting redistribution of the pressure along his hips) and grabs both of hands, dragging them up above his head to pin them there.
He could easily fight her, but the thought barely enters his head when she works her way up to his ear and whispers,
"Stay."
Like she can just order him around. Like she expects him to just follow her commands without question. Like if he's just good enough for her, she'll give him what he—
His fists clench convulsively in the furs, and his lungs abruptly stop working while his heart races ahead—pounding, pounding, pounding—as her lips trail back down his neck to press against his pulse point, softly, like the echo of something far away and dear.
(He wants to chase that feeling, crack open his ribs and take whatever she has to give him, let it put down roots and grow, secret and safe and just for him—and maybe then he'll understand why.)
Then her mouth opens and she bites, just enough teeth to sting followed immediately by the wet warmth of her tongue, soothing it away, only to start sucking and well, if he hadn't lost his mind before he's pretty sure he has now because otherwise Clarke Griffin giving him a goddamn hickey is an actual thing that is actually happening and he doesn't know if he's ready to exist in that universe yet.
(Ready or not though, here it is.)
And her hands press against his chest, tracing the lines of his torso, his ribs, his stomach, and then one moves back up to run through his hair and of all things, that's it—that's what finally does it.
"Clarke," someone says (like it was ripped up from the center of the earth; like a final prayer for salvation; like a single moment of peace in a chaotic, unpredictable world) and it's only when she pauses that he realizes it was him.
She pulls back, pulls away so she's hovering over him again, staring at his face. He can see the confusion there, the question that he's too terrified to answer, too much of a coward to face even in his own mind. Bellamy watches his name start to form on her lips, and with a desperate sort of agony he wracks his brain for something, anything to distract her, prays to a god he doesn't believe in for some sort of divine intervention—
"Hey Bell, you had better be decent in there 'cuz I'm about to come in."
—and curses in the same breath when rescue comes in the form of his sister.
Clarke's eyes widen above him, and her confusion turns to panic almost immediately. Distantly, he wonders if this is anything like what Jasper felt, just before he got tied to that tree.
"Definitely not decent, O, you might wanna hold that parade," he manages around the painful lump in his throat. Clarke is already scrambling off of him, makes a dive for her shirt and jacket while he lies where she left him on his bed, staring at the ceiling of his tent.
Slowly, he brings his arms down to his sides, fists his fingers into his pants.
His shirt lands on top of him, and he glances down to find Clarke glaring eloquently at him. She doesn't bother to say anything, and she's already dressed again. Like it never happened.
In turn, he raises an eyebrow, tilts his head and gives her his best 'incorrigible asshole' smirk. She rolls her eyes, apparently content to settle back into their familiar roles, and walks, stiff-legged, for the tent flap.
"Your brother's just being an ass, Octavia," she calls out, and now that her eyes are off him he lets his face do whatever the hell it wants, 'cause he should have given that up as a lost cause ages ago. He tugs his shirt carelessly over his head, hears several seams pop under his arm and lets himself pretend that's why he's scowling.
"No surprises there," Octavia replies, walking in like she has every right to be there. Which: the women in his life, eh? (Abruptly decides he should not think about that.)
Clarke's at the flap now and Octavia is standing right there, but she's going to just walk out without looking back at all and somehow he just can't stop her name from falling off his tongue—and that sure as hell is gonna get him into real trouble one of these days. She pauses, hand raised, and her head turns slightly; he thinks she might—
But all he gets is a glimpse of tight lips and a furrowed brow before she disappears from his sight and when, exactly, did he stop breathing?
It takes him a few moments to notice Octavia's raised eyebrows, and the expectant tilt of her head.
"Okay Bell, what the hell was that? Spill."
Bellamy scrubs a hand over his face, if only to not have to look his sister in the eye. She'd see more than he was ready to try putting into words.
"Just drop it, Octavia. Please."
For a moment there's blessed silence, and he thinks she might, for once, just do what he asks. Then he feels his bed dip beside him, and she takes his other hand in both of hers.
"Oh, Bellamy."
A bitter smile ticks up at the corner of his mouth, against his will. Of course she doesn't need him to say anything, much less see his face; he's almost forgotten lately how well she knows him. Even if he can lie to himself, he can't lie to her.
Maybe she'll take pity on him, and let him lie a little longer.