AN: Basically, I have no idea what the hell this is anymore and frankly, I'm tired of looking at it. This started from an idea when Bellamy said "not shooting me was the right choice" or whatever, but it kind of took a different and random turn so yeah. Also, this technically takes place in the same world as the last of us does but you needed not know anything about that game to understand this - or at least, I hope not.
Disclaimer: I obviously don't own the 100 or any of these characters - if I did, bellarke would have been canon at this point. But I digress.
Clarke's been walking through what she guesses will be another ghost town, scavenging the buildings she comes to, in hopes of finding supplies. Anything will be of use to her now – bullets, bandages, medicine, something to craft – of course bullets are higher on her list.
But she's coming up empty. Again.
Damn it.
Of course it's empty.
Everything is always fucking empty.
She can't say that she's surprised – not really. Most buildings are usually picked up, nothing left but the sorry remains of what the houses, department stores, gas stations, etc used to be before the world went to shit.
She's about to give up searching this building, deciding to move to another one, when she hears a noise. It almost sounds like footsteps and she leaps to her feet, jogging around the stack she was rummaging through to give herself some cover in case whoever it is has the same mentality as the hunters.
To shoot first and ask questions later.
This time, she won't hesitate to put one of them down. Not after everything they've taken from her. Her mother, her best friend since childhood.
Well granted I had more bullets.
As she ducks behind the display she was just rummaging through, she prays it doesn't come to that.
Let it not be a group.
Clarke takes a deep breath and pops out of her hiding spot with her revolver pointed straight at whoever's footsteps she heard. "Don't come any closer," she grits out between her teeth.
A man, who can't be that much older than her stops in his tracks and his gaze falls on Clarke. As she stares at him, she realizes that he doesn't look that deadly, he doesn't look like one of them. The curly hair and the freckles make him seem somewhat harmless - but she's made that mistake before and she won't make it again.
"Woah," the man says, slowly raising his hands as he comes to a stop. "I'm not going to hurt you."
"And I'm supposed to take your word for it."
There's a moment of tense silence between the two of them, Clarke's hand poised at the trigger, the man's eyes glancing her over. Before he speaks again.
"You're not one of them," he finally says. "The hunters."
Clarke only responds with a quirk of an eyebrow.
"If you haven't noticed, they don't really keep a lot of women around." He slowly drops his hands down to his side. "Look if you were going to shoot me, I'm assuming you would have done it already."
After a few moments, Clarke drops her arm but she doesn't holster her weapon – not yet. "I'm assuming you were going to try something, you would have already," she fires back. "Unless there's people hiding somewhere and you're planning on ambushing me."
The man shakes his head. "We don't operate like that."
"We?" Clarke responds, her drip tightening on her revolver.
The sound of another set of footsteps and a voice calling out over a nearby stack has Clarke whipping her head towards the noise, lifting her gun once more.
"Hey, Bell," the voice says as a woman comes into view and Clarke falters slightly because this girl can't be any older than Clarke is. "I'm not seeing anything useful here."
"Uh who's the chick with that gun?" the dark hair woman says coming to a stop next to the man, her hand hovering over her own weapon.
If you haven't noticed, they don't really keep a lot of women around. Clarke drops her gun, finally holstering it this time. "You really aren't one of them."
The man smirks. "What? You didn't believe me?"
"Well you never actually said you weren't a part of them – so no."
He runs a hand through his tangled hair. "We've tried to steer clear of them after – we just try to stay out of their way."
Clarke knows there's more to the story the way he abruptly stopped, but she pushes the curiosity away. He's a stranger and she's still not completely convinced he won't try to kill her. It doesn't matter anyway because his companion doesn't seem to care about telling a complete strange exactly why they don't like them.
"The bastards killed our friends," she sneers. "I mean, I'm not opposed to ending the life of any hunter I see – but mostly we try not to draw attention to ourselves. Not now anyway."
"O," and Clarke can sense that his tone is a warning."
"What? It's not like she's going to kill us or anything," the woman responds, gesturing in Clarke's direction. "I'm sure she would have by now."
The man sighs and glances away.
Okay so maybe they are harmless.
"I'm Clarke," she finally says.
"Octavia," the dark hair woman responds. Octavia nudges her head in her companion's direction. "The overly worrywart over here is my brother, Bellamy."
Bellamy shoots a look at his sister and Clarke has to stifle a laugh at the annoyance yet love she sees in Bellamy's eyes when he looks at Octavia. In a normal life it would have made Clarke want a younger sibling. In this life, she's not so sure.
Besides, in a world like this, usually the less people you had to look after – the better. And she doesn't think she could have watched a sibling die, like she had to watch her parents.
She's about to ask Bellamy and Octavia if they travel along when a voice cuts through the silence.
"Keep checking! They couldn't have gotten far."
"Shit," Octavia breaths, ducking behind a nearby display case, while Bellamy jumps behind a stack and Clarke dives for a small counter. "I thought we ditched them."
"I thought I ditched them," Clarke mutters.
There's no need for an explanation, all three of them know exactly who it is. The hunters. The group of people who brutally kill other survivors for their clothes, food and supplies.
Clarke peaks out from over the top of the counter, taking in her surroundings of the store and what she can see from outside the windows. But she sees no hunters – not yet anyway.
"I don't see anything," Octavia whispers and Clarke realizes that the girl had silently crept up next to her.
"They're out there, somewhere."
"Sorry for bringing them to you."
Clarke shrugs. "Maybe I brought them to you, who knows."
"Let's see if we can take them out silently," Octavia suggests, continuing around Clarke's other side, following the counter as it wraps around, towards the front of the store.
Clarke hopes that they can. She's not much up for a gun fight right now considering how low she is on bullets.
To Clarke's surprise – they manage to take out most of them silently – the last few being only a little problematic.
"I think that's all of them," Bellamy announces, holstering his pistol.
Clarke breathes out a sigh of relief, siding her knife back into the holster on her thigh. "Thank you – for the help."
"We could say the same to you," Bellamy tells her, closing the distance between them. "Here you go."
"What?" Clarke glances down and sees the box of ammunition in his hand.
"Well, I don't have a revolver, but you do and I swiped it over one of those bastard's."
Clarke takes the box with a smile and a thank you. She upholsters her revolver and begins reloading it all while watching Bellamy out of the corner of her eyes. To no surprise to her, he's watching Octavia as she wonders around the store.
"So are you traveling alone?" he asks, out of the blue.
"Yeah," Clarke says after a moment, dropping the now empty box. Who cares about littering in the end of the world? "I figure it was for the best."
"You sound like you've lost people."
"So do you," Clarke counters, spinning the chamber and holstering her revolver once more.
Bellamy runs a hand through his already unruly curls. "Haven't we all though…Sometimes I wonder if all of this is even worth it. Sometimes I wonder if there's even a reason to keep fighting."
A part of Clarke has wondered that herself, after she's watched so many people she's cared about die. But even through all that, she's kept fighting, kept surviving. For what? She's not sure.
"There has to be something, right?"
"I do it for my sister. She's all I have left in this world."
Clarke glance up at him. "Well that's better than having nothing. It's better than being a hunter or a bandit."
Bellamy nods. "True."
Octavia had wandered back over to them at that point, causing Clarke to turn towards her. "So are we a team of three now is that jumping to conclusions?"
"Please ignore my sister all you want."
Clarke considers their words for a moment. Yeah, she's come to believe that it was best to travel alone. To be alone meant that you didn't have to watch someone you cared for die. But it also meant that you were lonely and to be lonely held the probability of going insane.
Neither was ideal options but….
Something about Bellamy made her want to take that risk.
Perhaps she didn't want to be alone anymore.
"I guess you could say that," Clarke looks from Octavia to her brother. "If you care to have a third person."
The three of them continued traveling until they were well out of the city into what Clarke deems as a residential area. Or what used to be one anyway. Now, nature has mostly taken over most of the houses they've past, some are boarded up, while some look like a bomb exploded.
Octavia gives a low whistle. "It seems so long ago now that everything was normal. Honestly it seems like a different life – almost like – "she trails off.
"It never happened?" Clarke guesses.
"Yeah," Octavia nods, glancing around from house to house, on high alter. "I wonder if there's anything left."
Bellamy steals a glance at the sky. "Well it's going to be dark soon – we should probably try to find a suitable enough house to hole up in until morning. We can search the houses more thoroughly then."
When they find a house that is still standing and push their way through the door. Without a word, the three of them move through the house for any signs of infected. Clarke takes the upstairs, checking room after room and finds no signs of infected or spores.
She walks back downstairs and finds Bellamy walking through the doorway from the kitchen. "It's clear upstairs."
"Down here too. We should still be alert though."
"Hopefully we only have to worry about the infected," Clarke tells him, stealing a glance towards the front door. "And not hunters or bandits."
Bellamy nods. "Yeah, I'd take a hundred runners or clickers over the hunters."
"At least the infected are predictable. You never know what the fuck the hunters are going to do. At least the infected…. you know," Octavia says, walking into the short foyer. "We should probably find something to barricade the door, if we're going to sleep here and even still, take turns keeping watch."
Clarke helps Bellamy secure the door before wandering towards the living room, dropping her bag by the coffee table and flings herself on the couch, surprised when dust doesn't attack her. She watches Octavia across the room, place her own bag on a nearby chair before leaving the room.
"I guess we can relax as much as we can before we eat," Bellamy says, stepping into the room, placing his bag next to his sister's on his way to the couch.
"What made you trust me?" Clarke asks, suddenly as Bellamy eases himself into the cushion next to her, noticing his falter when she catches him off guard. "Before?"
Bellamy sighs. "I knew you weren't a hunter…and so I took a risk. I've done it a few times and it only bit me in the ass once, so my chances were okay."
"Seriously?"
"Well, you didn't shoot me." Bellamy leans back, placing his hand behind his head. "That was the right choice, by the way."
"I'm still debating that."
"I'm hurt," Bellamy tosses back and Clarke wonders how the hell this thing between them is already so comfortable – as if she's known him in a past life or something. It's weird – she's never felt this with another person before, or at least, not as quickly as she has with Bellamy.
After a moment, he adds. "What about you?"
Clarke nods towards the empty doorway Octavia had disappeared through. "Your sister…I've only just met you, but even I can tell that you care about her and you wouldn't do anything to put her in unnecessary danger. And you trusted me, so I guess I could return the favor."
Octavia comes back down and looks mostly withdrawn, dropping into the armchair that wasn't holding the two bags.
"You okay, O?"
Octavia nods, running a hand over her face. "Maybe…I just took a more thorough look upstairs and I came across a diary of a girl who I guess used to live here before. She was just a little kid, well probably, and was so hopeful to grow up and be something. Of course, the world had other plans for her, for all of us really."
"Octavia enjoys rummaging through houses we crash in, trying to learn more about the people who used to live there."
"Sometimes it's interesting," Octavia defends, tucking a lose strand of hair behind her ear. "It gives insight to who these people used to be, who they could have been. I can expect our sad little reality for a bit."
"It'd be nice if this were all a dream - or more so, a nightmare – we could just wake up from," Clarke comments, tucking her legs under her.
"I don't think we could get that lucky."
The three of them lapse into easy conversation as they rummage through the kitchen and then their packs for their dinner. Clarke finds herself being glance she ran into the siblings as they settle back into the living room, gathered around the coffee table.
They end up talking about their lives before the virus spread, ravaging town after town, turning people into those creatures and turning everyone into a panic. Apparently their mother died long before the world ended, how it was just the two of them even before.
Clarke finds herself telling them how her father was killed during the first outbreak, how hunters killed her mother and her best friend – or so she thinks they killed Wells. They got separated and Clarke never found him again; so he's either been turned or killed.
"I even thought about probably being a social worker before all this. I was even looking at colleges and everything," Octavia says, reaching for her water. "Most kids aren't lucky enough to have another family member to take them in when shit happens; they end up in the foster system or on the streets. They need – needed someone to be there."
"I kind of wanted to be doctor," Clarke tells her, leaning back against the couch. "I guess we both wanted to help people in our own ways…Funny how things turned out."
"Well this is a nice walk down memory lane and all," Bellamy starts, pulling himself to a standing position. "But I think we should probably try and get some sleep. I'll take first watch."
Clarke watches as Bellamy disappears around the corner and returns a moment later when a chair from the kitchen, placing it near the front door. He holsters his gun and drops into it.
She sees Octavia opening a chest behind the couch and is surprised that it's full of blankets. "Score," Octavia says, dragging out one and tossing it over the couch to Clarke, before pulling out another one.
Clarke settles into one side of the couch and Octavia takes the other side. "Well goodnight."
"Night."
For the first time in months, Clarke finds herself able to fall asleep quickly.