basic warnings for brainwashing, torture, etc.-basically everything involved with the winter soldier storyline (nothing explicit)
There's one lead, then another. It leads them to Romania, where there is a small house with dirty furniture and a mangy, black cat that hisses at Clarke whenever she wanders too close.
"Didn't think he'd be a cat person," Raven says, eyeing the creature warily. Apparently she's allergic. "Pinned him as a dog type, to be honest. A pitbull, or one of those big fuckers that come up to your shoulder."
Clarke remembers catching Bellamy in the alleyway by Woolworths more than once, tossing apple cores to the stray cats that hung around the back door.
"You'd be surprised," she says wryly.
"I'm sure." Raven is quick, efficient. She taps around the small, sad living room in her military-issued boots, picking up clues one by one and narrating them out loud as Clarke trails along behind, floating around like a ghost. Maybe she is one, she thinks. It would certainly explain a lot. "It's been at least six months since he was here, Clarke," Raven finally says, holding up a stack of mail. Raven can read just enough to get by in every romance language there is, apparently. Clarke's grateful for it. "The past due notices start in May."
Clarke sighs and sits down on the couch. A cloud of dust explodes beneath her weight, and the springs squeak. "He probably wasn't here for that long." Clarke looks at the opposite wall, the ancient television propped up on a stack of newspapers in the corner. There's a layer of dust on it three inches thick. "Was there anything else useful? In the mail, or…?"
"Sorry, Cap," Raven says, sounding genuinely regretful. She steps over the hole in the floorboards gingerly, coming to rest one hip against the armrest of the couch. "Looks like a pretty dead end."
Eight months, they've been looking. Eight months, and all Clarke's got to show for it is a passport full of stamps, and a dumpy house in the middle of nowhere. No Bellamy.
(It was a long shot anyway, is what Raven isn't saying. Clarke hears it anyway.)
"Yeah," she says. Raven's gaze on her neck is sad, sympathetic. Clarke ignores it. "Yeah, okay. I'm gonna take the cat."
Raven grimaces. "How did I know you were gonna say that," she mutters.
Clarke shrugs. "He was a cat person, actually," she says, and Raven shuts up.
When she first woke up from the ice, she thought about Bellamy maybe once a day. It wasn't exactly surprising; she doesn't think there's been a single day in her whole goddamn life where that wasn't true, even before he died, even before the war, even when they were kids and she hadn't even liked him yet.
It only got worse, the longer she was awake. Everything's just so different now, and Clarke doesn't just mean fucking computers and aliens and bombs that can change direction in mid-air and the unfamiliar shape of the New York skyline at night. It's a change in how people think, a fundamental shift that Clarke keeps running headfirst into like a damn brick wall, expecting one thing only to find something completely different.
It makes her think of Bellamy, when they were young. Bellamy in his nice suit, his hair slicked back, walking his dates down the street beneath her ma's apartment so she could watch and give him her opinion the morning after. Making a show of pulling at her arm, playing at impatience, but always so gentle, so careful with her small, breakable bones. Laying on her bed when she was sick, turning up the radio like he didn't have somewhere better to be. In those suspenders he wore to work, the way the grime from the docks would creep up his arms, how he'd wipe them carefully on the rag Clarke kept by the front door before he touched her, sitting next to her on the playground glaring off the boys, pulling her away from a fight by the back of her dress and scolding her for it the whole way home.
Bellamy would fit in here. His ruthlessness she'd always disapproved of and admired in equal measures - that was a twenty-first century trait, through and through.
"It's natural," was what her therapist had said, the woman that Clarke is fairly sure was informing on her to the Mountain for the entire six months she'd lived in D.C. And wasn't that a pleasant thought. "You've been through something extraordinary, and you're still trying to come to terms with the world the way it is now; it makes sense that you would cling to your memories. Things that are familiar to you, loved ones that are gone now."
It was dumb. She made it sound like a line in a textbook or a medical report, like Clarke's grief was just some series of nerve endings firing in her brain, a cause and effect chain of reaction that could be quantified, tracked, laid out in a research paper or something. Like it's not earth shattering, like it just makes sense, how the world just kept spinning on without him. Like she doesn't feel so wrong, walking through it without his eyes on her back.
Maybe it was a sign. Maybe it was God or-more likely-someone from the merry cast of her dead friends and family, trying to give her a hint. Her ma or Wells or Jas, shouting down at her from heaven. Remembers a young Octavia, jumping up and down on the fire escape of that ratty old apartment, hollering at her to look sharp, honey, my dumb brother's got it in for you again.
If Clarke believed in that sort of thing, that is. Most days, she's not so sure.
Clarke decides to name the cat Dick. Raven snorts coffee through her nose when she hears, and ends up doubled over in Clarke's kitchen, coughing into a dish towel and gasping for breath.
"You're fucking kidding me," she says, when she finally gets her voice back. Clarke's not laughing at her, but it's a close thing.
"After Dick Tracy," Clarke explains. "It was my favorite."
"Right," Raven replies skeptically.
"Also it's pretty funny," Clarke admits. Dick rubs up against her leg, having significantly warmed up to her after being fed so consistently over the past three weeks, and Clarke lets her hand fall, scratching idly behind her ears. She's going to assume that it's approval.
Raven wrinkles her nose, a common expression whenever she and the cat are in the same vicinity. "Isn't it a girl?"
Clarke shrugs. She doesn't think Dick minds.
"You're real fuckin' weird, you know that?" Raven shakes her head, marveling, as always, at Clarke's weird-ass life. "Okay. Dick the cat. Way to go."
"I bought some medicine for you, if you need it," Clarke offers. "The pharmacist said it'd help with cat allergies."
Raven's gaze softens. "Hey, that's real nice of you," she says. "Not that I'd expect anything different from Captain America."
Raven's compliments sound like insults sometimes. It actually, weirdly enough, puts Clarke at ease. It reminds her of the war.
"Just common sense," Clarke says with a shrug. "Birds and cats - it's touchy, I know."
"Aw, shut the fuck up," Raven says, and Clarke smiles, pleased that she's made her laugh. "The bird jokes are gonna be a thing with you, right?"
"If the Cap jokes are on the table, then so's the bird stuff," Clarke says. Dick meows her approval from her lap and Raven sighs.
"Superheroes," she mutters, in derision. Clarke hides a smile and refrains from pointing out the obvious.
It's strange, considering how adrift Clarke had felt before, but now that A.R.K. is gone, its members scattered throughout other agencies, she actually feels a hell of a lot better than she has since she woke up.
At least she knows who she can trust now. There's the Avengers, and Raven. Abby Griffin, to a certain extent, who is supposed to be dead, and also somehow related to her in a convoluted way that Clarke hasn't really figured out yet, but whatever. Dick the cat. And-
("You have to come to terms with the idea that he's not ever going to remember," Finn had said. "You have to accept that you might not be able to save him, that the next time you see him, he'll try to kill you."
"I don't have to accept shit," Clarke had replied, and kicked him out. She was maybe still a little bitter. Maybe he had a point, but-ugh, seriously.)
She visits Octavia most days, sits by her hospital bed and holds her hand. She's barely lucid anymore, and sometimes the nurses won't let her in, tell her it'd be too much if she woke up and didn't remember. Clarke thinks of those first few visits, when they'd manage an hour or two of conversation before O's eyes would cloud and she'd blink up in surprise, grabbing frantically at Clarke's hand, speaking through her tears, you're alive, oh God in heaven, you're alive.
She's lucky to have that-so lucky, she knows. Hadn't dreamed she'd ever get to see Octavia again, let alone speak to her, sit next to her and touch her skin and hear her talk about her husband, her children, the life she'd managed after Clarke and Bellamy were gone, lost to ice and blood and a war that's never really ended.
It won't be long now, Clarke knows. She'd hoped-if she'd managed to find him, she'd hoped-but no. No time left.
"You remember that dance, Clarke?" Octavia's accent comes back thicker when she talks about their childhood. Clarke smiles and nods, because yes, of course. There'd been a lot of dances, and Clarke remembers them all. "Bell got me that mask to wear, so Pastor O'Halloran wouldn't know it was me and snitch to Ma. And you wore a red dress." O lifts a shaky hand in the air, like she's tracing a pattern in the dust. "I kept telling him to ask you to dance, but he wouldn't listen to me, the stubborn grump."
Clarke smiles a little bigger, blinking away the moisture in her eyes. "He wanted to dance with me?"
"Of course he did," Octavia said, like it was obvious. Her smile wavers, as does her hand, and Clarke reaches out and takes it, presses it to her heart. "Oh, Clarke."
"I know," Clarke soothes, reaching with her free hand to touch O's hair, soft and white against the pillow. "I know, honey."
"You were both so stubborn," O says thickly. Her grip in Clarke's hand is so weak. "Good, though. Strong. Maybe that helped get you both here."
Clarke swallows hard against the lump in her throat, determined not to waste a single second of this moment on crying. "I'm so sorry I couldn't bring him back, O," she confesses. "I'm so sorry I couldn't get him here."
Octavia laughs, a weak, wet sound, her eyes going distant. "The hell you talkin' about, honey? I just saw him the other day."
Clarke takes a deep, painful breath, and closes her eyes.
"He brought me a flower," Octavia says faintly, right as the nurse appears to quietly kick Clarke out. "Daisies-my favorite."
"Good," Clarke manages to choke out. "About time that idiot came 'round to see you."
"Isn't it?" Octavia mumbles, eyes drooping. Clarke sets her hand gently back on the bed.
(There's a lone daisy sitting in a vase by Octavia's bed.)
(Clarke won't remember this until later.)
Bellamy used to call her "princess." It was an old, tired joke from when they were kids, and the first time he'd did it in front of the Delinquents, she'd ripped him a new one right there, in the middle of camp, while the men crowded around and watched.
He hadn't seemed all that affected, she remembered. Just smirked, looking endlessly amused while she yelled, and when she was done, said: "I've called you that for fifteen years, goddamn it, you think because you got some muscles and a fancy shield now that I'm gonna treat you any different? Shit." Then he'd actually laughed, like he thought it was all a big joke. Clarke refused to speak to him for three days, after that. She regrets it now.
The men hadn't treated her any different anyhow, so it was all sorta pointless. They were straightforward, honorable soldiers with good hearts. The color of her hair or the shape of her body beneath her uniform hadn't mattered jack shit, long as she fought well and led them in the right direction. She misses them.
(The war didn't seem simple at the time, but compared to this future she's in now-oh, it was. It's funny, and also-not, at the same time.)
Some of them have family out there. She'd met Jones' grandson, who was an A.R.K. agent, before. She doesn't know where he is now, but she is certain he couldn't have been working for the Mountain. There's just no way.
Monty and Jas have grandkids too, and Miller's wife is still alive, in a retirement home in Florida. Clarke thinks about tracking them down sometimes, but thinks twice of that stilted dinner with Octavia's son, her own namesake with Bellamy's eyes and twisted smile, the unease she hadn't been able to understand nor get rid of, for days after.
(A boy and a girl, Octavia had. Clark and Bella. She'd switched the genders just to be a shit, Clarke is positive. Bellamy would've laughed for hours.)
Finn's peace offering comes in the form of an opportunity for physical violence, which Clarke appreciates. Against Mountain agents, not each other-just to clarify.
There's a base in northern Ohio that's still active, and they go in dark, attempting to infiltrate to retrieve whatever intel they can manage to get off the servers. This idea ends rather predictably badly, and Clarke and Finn end up fighting their way out and blowing the whole building to hell just to be done with it.
Afterwards, on a Kane-supplied jet back to New York, Finn ties his hair back with one of Raven's rubber bands and collapses on the bench next to Clarke and says, "he trained me, you know."
Clarke pretends not to understand. "Mark Kane? Weird, but alright."
"Clarke."
Clarke examines the line of parachutes and very carefully replies, "I don't want to talk about this with you."
"They called it the Red Room," Finn continues, unapologetic. "I didn't know him as anything but just another teacher. It wasn't until years later, after I defected, that I found out he was the Soldier, that it was the same man."
"I already know all this," Clarke says. "I'm not sure why you're telling me."
"I could go into great detail about the things he did to me in that room, when I was young. Clarke." Finn touches her arm, gently. "I don't say these things to hurt you. I say them because you need to hear them."
"So I'm supposed to just write him off, is that it," Clarke says flatly. "Ignore all the signs that say he might not be a lost cause."
"No," Finn says, "don't do that." Clarke looks up in surprise, and Finn smiles, a little exasperated. "You assume too much. If you recall, I wouldn't be sitting here right now if Raven hadn't taken a long shot chance on me."
Clarke blinks and looks away again, feeling chastised, for some reason.
"Just keep your eyes open, is all," Finn finishes. "And I do hope it ends the way you want it to. For your sake, if not his."
Clarke bites her lip and stares at the parachutes some more. "Thanks."
Another brief touch to her arm and Finn's gone, back to Raven, holding court in the pilot's seat. A year ago, it would've stung, at least a little, to see them. Clarke looks at them now and wonders how in the hell she ever thought that kind of happiness was an option.
People like Clarke aren't meant for happy endings. She's always known that, just sometimes-she forgets.
They weren't married, or anything. They weren't sweethearts, either. Everyone thought they were, back home, especially after the serum and the publicity and that damn USO tour. Clarke thinks about the hours of embarrassing footage archived at the Library of Congress of her smiling empty and pretty in her uniform, while Bellamy lurked angrily at her shoulder, resentful and surly, looking like he was one bad thought away from going after every pair of eyes in the crowd with his pocketknife.
During the war, it'd been a sort of running joke whenever Bellamy wasn't in earshot. Monty and Jas used to call them "Mom and Dad," and Miller would make lewd comments sometimes, when he was drunk. Clarke let them talk, and kept her trap shut, and made sure Bellamy never caught wind of it, for her own sake. The idea of the teasing that would ensue made her shudder, not to mention what it'd feel like to have that secret part of her heart flayed open and thrown so carelessly at his feet.
Everyone thinks the same now, so it's a wound she's become used to. There was even a movie made about it, apparently, or so Clarke's told. She's not nearly dumb enough to have looked up any of that shit.
Clarke likes to remind herself of true things, sometimes, as a way to keep the mythos tamed, to keep it all straight in her head. This was true: Bellamy was her partner, her back up, her friend. They grew up together. After their parents died, they lived together. He got drafted in 1942, and it took her five tries to enlist, determined not to be left behind. He was a sniper. He was captured by the Mountain in '43, and led the Delinquents with her for two years after that. He died on a bleak, January day in a bleak, Russian forest, four days before the Allies claimed official victory of the Battle of the Bulge.
Also true: he had dark hair that curled when it got wet, and a scar on his left foot from falling out of a tree and landing on a broken bottle when he was twelve. He listened to the radio constantly, refused to turn it off, even when the program was lousy, and he liked cats. He once drank an entire bottle of whiskey in Clarke's tent and asked her if being good at killing people made somebody a monster. He was stubborn and arrogant and had no idea how kind he really was, and Clarke loved him so much she thought she might die of it.
In another universe, she did. Bellamy stayed dead when he fell and Clarke stayed dead when she crashed, and the world went on without them and they became nothing more than an old story, two war heroes with a romantic story and some old newsreels and comic strips.
Some days, she thinks she'd rather be in that one anyway. At least then, she'd know how it ended.
Files turn up, eventually. Abby delivers them with a stern look and an admonishment to be cautious, and Clarke reads them at her kitchen table while she holds Dick, squeezing her tight every time her chest hurts, which is often. Dick is strangely content with this.
Brain damage. Scarring. The arm, designed by a Nazi scientist, only to die a month later when Bellamy woke up and murdered him with his own creation. Names, lists, locations with fuzzy surveillance photos of crime scenes, a sick laundry list of everything they used him to do. We shaped your history, they'd said. Every battle you thought you won was simply one we allowed you to have.
Clarke never thought she could truly hate an enemy, until the Mountain. Now she sits at her kitchen table and squeezes her cat and hopes that every single person that was ever involved in this died slow and ugly and choking on their own blood.
She takes a break after a while, feeling faint and sick. When she walks into her bedroom, her window is open, and she sticks her head out and lets the breeze flow down her blouse until she doesn't feel like she's about to throw up anymore.
She wants to go out looking again but she doesn't know where to start. She thinks about the house in Romania, about finding Dick holed up in the dingy little cupboard under the fridge. There'd been cat food left out on the counter. He'd rented a house and found a cat and bought it food and abandoned it all in May, and if Clarke were a gambler she'd bet anything it was probably the exact week she'd landed in Eastern Europe and started beating up every Mountain agent she could find, making as much noise as she could because she couldn't bear to keep her trap shut anymore.
If he never remembers, maybe that's just fine. They can't go back in time and she wouldn't want to even if she could. It'd be enough just to know that he was alive, that he existed in the world somewhere. That'd be more than enough, really. That's all she needs.
Clarke knows that Raven and Finn feel guilty about leaving her on her own for so long, but they're both busy-Finn with the Senate hearings that never end, Raven with Abby, trying to scrape together something meaningful in the ashes of A.R.K.'s demise. Neither of those things are something Clarke really wants to be a part of, so she's happy to stay locked up in her apartment, visiting Octavia, cloaked in her own sadness.
Raven pops in every so often to drag her out to a bar or a club, shoving brightly colored drinks in her face like Clarke didn't spend her formative years drinking moonshine out of tin cups and whiskey out of steel flasks.
"You really weren't together," Raven asks, blunt, in the same tone of voice she'd used when she'd said, he really didn't tell you about me. "But you were."
"No," Clarke says, "we weren't. Really. It was all just hype, and-"
"No, that's not what I meant," Raven says. "You were, though. You might as well been. That's what I meant."
Clarke doesn't have a rebuttal for that.
"Semantics are-" she scoffs, waving one hand. "Look. I know I've said this before and I'll probably say it again, but it's real fucked up, what happened to him. To you both. And I'm sorry." Raven knocks back the dregs of her martini and nods, like she's checking off the "comfort Captain America" box on her mental checklist. "And for what it's worth, I do think he'll come around. Eventually. Super serum's like that, eh? Turns you guys into bad pennies."
"From your lips to you know who," Clarke says, tipping her glass at the ceiling. Raven laughs, incredulous like she gets when Clarke says things like that, which is honestly the reason why she says them. "Quick question, birdie: you do know I can't get drunk right? So getting me the drink with the good tequila is pointless?"
"Watch your mouth Cap," Raven admonishes, signaling the bartender for another round. "Good tequila is never pointless."
Somewhere in-between pouring Raven into a cab and walking home as dawn breaks over the horizon, Clarke realizes it's the first time she's made a friend in seventy years, and stops next to a boarded up newspaper stand to clutch at her own knees and laugh until she's out of breath.
It's ridiculous, really, and she blames it on her long night and half-hysterical daze when she straightens up and catches a glint of metal in the alleyway across the street, out of the corner of her eye. She stares for a long moment, not daring to breathe, until a car horn honks a few blocks away and startles her back down to earth.
It couldn't be-wouldn't be, anyway. She doesn't dare to hope.
Clarke wakes up from a dream that night, about running after Bellamy on the roof. How she'd thrown her shield at him and he'd caught it like it was nothing, how she'd stood there for long, precious moments after he was gone while Abby lay bleeding out in her apartment, too arrested by the look in that man's eyes to move.
In her dream, it ends different, though. Instead of running away, he takes off his mask and kills her with his bare hands, holding her by the throat so she can't look away from the terrible pain of his face. Clarke dies and wakes up with his name on her lips, sits up in bed and pants at the ceiling and tries very hard not to cry.
Dick jumps up on the bed, purring and rubbing her head against her knee. Clarke doesn't notice; her window is open again.
Clarke never wanted to be Captain America, she just wanted to help. She hated the publicity stuff, the cheesy costume, the arrogance behind the very concept of it, the way the USO people wouldn't let her out of her room without three layers of foundation and the exact right shade of lipstick.
Bellamy just hated all of it, had nothing but disdain for the whole affair. The closest Clarke ever came to losing his friendship was the day after she'd rescued him from the Mountain, and he'd woken up in the med tent and looked her straight in the eye and said, what the hell did you let them do to you?
He never called her Cap, not even once. Princess, if anything, or just her name. He respected her, not the uniform, and he wasn't shy about letting her know it. It used to make her so goddamn angry, because she thought they were a package deal, couldn't understand that it was his way of protecting her, caring for her. There were a lot of things she didn't understand, back then, that she thinks she's got puzzled out now. She's had a lot of time on her hands, with nothing to do except think and kill aliens and Mountain agents before going straight home to think some more.
Once, in Germany, there'd been a long stretched-out month where they did nothing but fight, picking at each other over every little thing until the men stopped even trying, giving them wide berths and muttering warily whenever they were in each other's eyeline. It finally ended when he'd cornered her one night as she'd wandered away from camp, looking for privacy and-honestly, a reason for him to follow.
"You look real tired, princess," he said, edging up behind her shoulder and holding out a cup of coffee like a peace offering.
"Don't call me princess," she replied, on rote, but took the coffee anyway. It was a nice gesture, she told herself.
Bellamy just rolled his eyes-yeah sure, dollface, his face said. His face had a way of doing that-insulting her, with a varied array of condescending nicknames, without a single word uttered out loud.
They'd stood like that for awhile, shoulder to shoulder in the woods, looking up at the stars so they wouldn't have to look at each other. And maybe it was late enough and dark enough that Clarke felt brave enough to say: "you mad at me still? About...all this?"
"Yeah," Bellamy replied, easy as anything. He smiled wryly. "Probably be mad at you until we die, for that."
Clarke scowled, feeling that hit dead center in her chest. "Thanks," she snapped.
"Well, what, you want me to lie?" Bellamy asked, scoffing. "It was stupid."
"Believing in something isn't stupid," Clarke replied, fiercely and with every ounce of passion she'd seen him lose, thinking if she could just say it the right way, in the right voice, maybe he could get it back somehow and get that light back in his face, somehow, maybe. "Fighting for something real and true isn't stupid, Bellamy."
But he just shook his head, smiling without humor, an ugly slash of a grin. "You want me to say thank you? For rushing over here, offerin' yourself up as target practice?"
"I've been shot now," Clarke taunted. "Weren't you there? Healed up in a couple hours. No big deal."
"That serum didn't make you any less of a damn fool," Bellamy snapped. "Though that's not exactly a surprise." Clarke blinked in surprised hurt. "You and your ideals-Christ, Clarke."
"I've got the muscle to back them up now," Clarke said, keeping her voice calm and even. "I'm not the type of person to sit at home and worry when there's work to be done, things I can do to help. You've always known that about me." She swallowed roughly. "I thought it was something you liked. Or something you respected, at least."
"Liked it a lot more when it wasn't gonna get you killed," Bellamy said darkly. He turned away in frustration. "Let's not do this. We're not gonna agree."
"Obviously," Clarke replied, raw with hurt. Bellamy leaned against a tree, away from her, and rubbed his forehead before turning back around, that stoic mask back on his face.
"Come on, princess," he said. "I'm sick of fighting. Lemme have some of that coffee and quit lookin' at me like I just read your damn diary."
"Fuck off, I don't have a diary," Clarke replied, and shoved the drink into his hands. It was cold anyway, but Bellamy drank it anyway, smiling at her with his eyes and brushing their hands together as they walked back to camp.
He fell three weeks later.
In low moments, Clarke hopes he is still trying to kill her. Maybe they'll kill each other and finally get a fucking ending already.
Those thoughts are few and far between, though, and Clarke doesn't like to indulge them much. Instead, she lies in bed, in the early hours of morning when the birds start chirping outside her window and the sun crawls across the ceiling and imagine that he's there with her, sitting on the chair next to her bed and watching her breathe.
She can picture it so clearly: his hair, still long, tied back at the base of his neck. How he'd deliberately leave the metal arm out, as conspicuous as possible, because there's no way he'd let her get away with ignoring its presence. Maybe he'd touch her with it, grab her ankle and scare her out of a dream, make one of his insult faces and say, I liked you better when you were little. Is that weird?
There are so many things that Clarke wants, on those mornings, that she feels like she might explode from them all. So she lies there and breathes and imagines them, one by one, until the birds leave for the day and the sun reaches her headboard, and she feels ready to face the world.
She knows she's a fool. Bellamy was right about that. But fools get what they want more often than cynics do, and besides, her window is always open on those mornings, even though she shuts and locks it before she goes to sleep, every single night.
It's small, it's silly, it's probably nothing, but Clarke will take it, she'll take it and be glad.
("You do too have a diary," he'd said. "You draw in it all the time."
"It's called a sketchbook, dummy," she replied. "And it'll be a cold day in hell before you get to read it anyhow."
Bellamy just smirked. "Still can't lie for shit," he said. "What good is that serum for, anyway?"
Clarke shrugged at him, thought: yeah. Good point.)