Living with Bellamy and Octavia should be more awkward than it is.

She has a bed all to herself at first. Octavia is all but a ghost the first few days, spending her days training with Indra and the other warriors and her nights with Lincoln. Bellamy struggles with the latter, Clarke knows, because the muscle in his jaw jumps and his lips press into a line when the sun sets, dinners are served and eaten, and still there's neither hide nor hair of his younger sister. "Have you ever tried to tell Octavia to not do something?" he replies with a dry laugh when Clarke asks him about it. "If I tell her to come home, she'll stay away even longer."

Then, one morning without warning, Clarke rolls over and bumps into Octavia's shoulder. "Stay on your side," the other girl mumbles. Bellamy's across the tent, shrugging into his jacket, and the smile he sends their way when Clarke stutters out an apology in her sleep-thick voice is soft and unclouded by worry for the first time in days. He ruffles Octavia's hair, tells her to be nice, and that he'll see them both at dinnertime before he leaves.

The news reaches her mother sooner rather than later. "You're living with Bellamy Blake?" Abby asks. She looks shocked and dismayed and it takes Clarke a minute to remember that the adults that came down on the Ark weren't around when they all had to huddle together for warmth at night at the drop ship.

So-Clarke keeps herself from rolling her eyes and says, as calmly and rationally as she can, "Mom, I'm living with Bellamy and Octavia." This clarification fails to impress Abby, who reminds Clarke that Octavia's been living with the Woods Clan ever since Mount Weather and that she's not comfortable with her daughter sharing a tent with a boy.

(And now her kiss with Lexa seems almost funny, in addition to all of the other tangled emotions Clarke has attached to it.)

"I like living there," she says instead, organizing the little medicine cups on the trays in front of her. "And I'm eighteen now; I can live where ever I want. Besides, I share Octavia's bed, if that makes you feel any better. I doubt even your worst opinions of Bellamy include him trying to seduce me right next to his sister."

This caveat soothes the sharpest corners off of Abby's disdain for her daughter's new living arrangements, but Clarke never tells her mother how short-lived those sleeping arrangements would end up being.

Because Octavia is as active in her sleep as she is while awake, Clarke learns that very night, going from clinging starfish to a Nudging Nancy within the space of an hour. The third time she jolts Clarke awake (this time by rolling and taking the blankets with her), Clarke sits up and peers across the tent at the silent and still lump that she knows is Bellamy.

The dirt floor has gone chilly now that they've let the fire burn down to embers; Clarke takes bouncing leaps across it on bare toes and sits on the edge of his bed so she can poke at his shoulder. "Budge over," she whispers.

"Wha-? Clarke?"

"Octavia is fighting off the Mountain Men in her sleep over there." She pushes at his shoulder again. "Bellamy, please, it's cold out here."

With a grumble and the sound of blankets being beaten out of the way, he shimmies backwards and hands her the edge of the covers so she can slide between them. "Fuck, don't you wear socks to bed?"

"I need to wash them. Can you—"

"Ah-Ow."

"Sorry, I'm just—there's a bar right here."

"No, I know. It's fine, it's fine."

Finally, they're both arranged comfortably enough and Bellamy tugs the blankets up with a harrumph. She wiggles her shoulders down into the mattress, realizing that she's laying where he had been, so his body heat had already pre-warmed the space for her. "I don't know how Lincoln sleeps," she whispers when she hears Octavia turn over once again.

He lets out a sleepy groan. "I don't think about that. Really. And you'd better not knee me in my kidney before morning after putting up this much of a fuss," he warns, turning onto his side and giving her his back.

"Sorry, sorry."

He kicks his heel back to gently bump her shin. "Don't worry about it, just go to sleep."

When morning comes, Clarke awakens with Bellamy's arm thrown haphazardly across her stomach, his face turned away from her and pressed into his pillow. She nudges him awake, not wanting to accidentally wrench his shoulder by over-extending it should she try to slide out from underneath it. He mumbles sleepily at her and rolls over onto his back, dragging the covers with him and throwing them over his face.

Despite her lingering disappointment in Clarke, which seems to have been tempered somewhat since their march towards the mountain, Octavia apologizes profusely for being a bad bunkmate. Clarke tries sleeping with her for two more nights and ends up creeping across the ground to Bellamy's bed each time. He's the one that puts an end to it on the fourth night, giving her his back while she changes for bed as usual, but then patting the mattress next to him and telling her to just get in; you're gonna end up over here anyway.

Other than waking up with his erection against her hip or back on the rare occasion that he doesn't end up sleeping on his stomach, Bellamy's a surprisingly good and low-key bedmate. It's more to Clarke than not being kicked or jostled—it's jerking awake past midnight, heart in her throat, and having his steady breathing to listen to as she loosens her grip on the blankets. It's easing awake in the morning with the weight of him next to her, warm and solid as she steels herself for another cold and damp morning. It's the quiet conversations on the edge of sleeping and waking about crunchy dinner rolls and Miller's beard and fucking drums just one goddamn night for the love of god to ease through those times of the day that had been hardest for Clarke when she'd been all alone in her own tent.

(She still doesn't dare breathe even a hint of it to her mom.)

When the last of the grounders have been cleared for travel by Abby and Clarke, Lexa makes a second trip to meet with the Ark Council. Bellamy'd been on edge since the night before, when the notice had come that the Commander requested an audience with the Ark Council. His knee jiggled through dinner and he tossed and turned in bed until Clarke threatened to kick him over to Octavia's bed. "The alliance could collapse tomorrow," he'd explained by way of apology.

Clarke'd patted his shoulder with the back of her hand. "Lexa won't let that happen. But you can't argue on no sleep so—stop moving, please."

The Council and Lexa stay closed up in the Council chambers through lunch and well into the afternoon. With fewer patients in the clinic than she'd become used to, Clarke strips bed linens for washing, boils fabric for bandages, takes an inventory of the moonshine and medicine they have left, checks on the herbs they'd started drying in the smokehouse. "You run as tight a ship as your mother," Jackson says, and he means it as a compliment, so Clarke returns his smile instead of rolling her eyes.

Everyone seems to visibly relax when the doors to the Council chambers open. Kane and Abby are smiling, Lexa…isn't frowning, and Bellamy seems much less agitated than he had that morning. Clarke can all but see the Guardsmen loosen their grips on their rifles. Clarke leans against the wall of the Ark and pops a handful of nuts into her mouth while she watches Lexa exchange a few words with the Council before she shakes their hands and departs. Peace it is, then, she thinks, and lets herself enjoy a sigh of relief.

"She's giving us the camp and the surrounding area as our own, and hunting and fishing rights on the Woods Clan territory," Bellamy recounts later that night in their tent. Octavia has returned to the grounder camp with Indra, leaving them alone. "She wants to trade food and other supplies we're short on in exchange for medical information and technology. She wants some radios or walkie talkies, in particular. And in case shit goes sideways with those other clans, she'll help us defend ourselves. It's basically a goods-for-info sort of agreement."

Clarke watches the muscle in his jaw twitch as he pokes his spoon around in his stew. Over on his own bed, he's taken about one bite per half-dozen stirs, and his eyebrows keep twitching together. "It seems like a good deal," Clarke says from where she sits on top of Octavia's tidily made-up blankets. Bellamy stabs at a potato. "So, why are you so upset about it?"

His eyes flit between hers and his bowl a few times. "You don't have to worry about it. I know you don't want to think about this stuff anymore."

"I don't want to be in charge any more," Clarke corrects. "That doesn't mean you can't talk to me about it if you want to."

Bellamy considers this as he chews. Finally: "She just seems different. Lexa, I mean. She was this—hardcore, no-holds-barred, calculating Amazon woman who killed her own personal guard without so much as a stutter. Finn had to die before we could even think about solidifying the alliance. She nearly had Raven killed on the idea that she might have poisoned the drinks. And now she wants to cooperate? To trade? To meet half-way? When we're going to be a drain on their own food and supplies?" He shakes his head. "I just don't get it. My gut tells me that she's being genuine—she seemed honest during the negotiations—but my head is setting off all sorts of alarms and telling me to not trust her as far as I can throw her."

Clarke rolls her eyes. "She's smaller than me."

"Please. All that armor's gotta add at least thirty pounds. The eye makeup another pound." He sets his bowl aside and collapses onto one elbow, stretching along the length of his bed. "You spent all the time with her. What do you think? Is she good for her word?"

Not all of them. Not you. Clarke pushes down the memory of Lexa's soft gaze, of her mouth against Clarke's own. That is not what Bellamy is asking about. "She's not the most diplomatic, that's for sure. But," Clarke shrugs, searching for how to distill into a few words everything that she and Lexa had argued about. "She's been at war her whole life—she's been in charge of just surviving for so long that I think she doesn't know how to do anything else. So, she and I disagreed about the things we did. Obviously." Clarke thinks back again, and repeats what she said to Lexa. "I told her that we should do more than just survive, that we deserved more than that. I think she listened."

"So you trust her to keep her word?"

Clarke nods, sure of this one thing, at least. "Yes."

Lexa sends for her not too long after dinner, but late enough that the messenger surprises them. Bellamy asks if she wants company, but she turns him down. She has a feeling it's a personal invitation, not a business one.

Sure enough, Lexa's tent is empty of all advisors and shieldmaidens, and Lexa offers Clarke a small cup of wine after she dismisses the messenger who had accompanied Clarke to his heda's tent. "It's not too strong, I promise." Lexa's smile is soft, a bit nervous. Clarke takes the cup and takes a sip to put Lexa at ease.

"So, you're leaving tomorrow?" Clarke asks, once they're settled at the table, a plate of dried fruit between them.

"Ton DC needs to be rebuilt. It will be a long project through the winter and it's best we get started as soon as possible. Indra is anxious to begin the sorting for new warriors and to begin Octavia's formal training." Lexa draws her finger around the rim of her cup. "You may come with us, Clarke. If you feel your duties to your people are finished, then you could come with me."

With a small sigh, Clarke tucks her chin to her chest, taps her thumbs on the small earthen cup. Leave them? Now? After everything? "I can't, Lexa."

"I know." Lexa's hand, deceptively small, reaches out to rest on top of Clarke's wrist. "I had to ask. For myself, you understand. And you are, as you have said to me, always welcome."

She rises from the table and crosses to a small chest beside the pile of furs and blankets that make up her bed. After rummaging around for a moment, she returns with a small brass ornament threaded onto a red string. It's a near-perfect copy of the talisman she presses to her forehead before battle. "This is my sigil. I'm not sure what the future holds with the alliance fracturing, but holding it means that you have my protection." She holds it out it out for Clarke, who takes it with careful fingers. "It won't break," Lexa promises with a dry smile before she clears her throat and taps her fingertips on the tabletop. "You should keep it with you when you travel outside of camp."

"The Sky People's commitment to the alliance isn't enough?" Clarke means for it to be a light joke, but it comes out a bit flat. A muscle flexes in Lexa's jaw as she shifts her gaze across the tent to where a map hangs from the supports.

"I wish it were, and I would hope that the other clans—their resistance to a military alliance with you notwithstanding—would seek to keep peace. But I feel that the war is not yet done, and that this peace is fragile."

Lexa grinds the words out; Clarke can tell the fracturing of the alliance gnaws at the other woman. "You'll rebuild it, Lexa," she says, leaning forward and resting an elbow on the table. "They made a hasty decision, and when they see how we can all live together in harmony, they'll come back."

The candlelight flickers across Lexa's face, warm and soft. "It must be nice," she says quietly, one corner of her mouth quirked up, "to believe in the best of everyone."

Clarke shakes her head. "Not everyone, and not all the time. It's still a choice, though. You can choose to think that way, if you wanted."

Finn used to believe in the best of everyone, so someone should now, is what she leaves unsaid, but it's what she thinks about all the way back to camp after Lexa shakes her hand in farewell. Finn passing Jasper the vine to swing across the river, Finn trying to calm the waters between her and Wells, Finn cutting Murphy down from his noose, Finn arranging the ill-fated peace talks with Anya…

So engrossed in her own head is Clarke that she doesn't even notice that Octavia isn't in the tent until she's changed for bed and she notices that Octavia's bed is still made up from the morning. And that Bellamy has barely said two words to her since she returned from Lexa's.

He's lying on his bed, book open above his face. When she stops in the middle of the two beds and looks down at him, he glances up at her and arches a brow. "She's going with them, isn't she?" Clarke asks, rhetorically. "Are you alright?"

The muscle in his jaw jumps; he turns a page of MacBeth. "She's going to be training with Indra. I'll be alright." He shifts his eyes back to the page, but his eyes don't move to run along lines of text. Clarke backs up and sits down on the edge of Octavia's bed, folds her hands in her lap. After a moment, he sighs and drops the book to his chest. "I keep telling myself that she survived in the sky box without me, and she survived when we were separated, that she survived when I was in Mount Weather. Hell, I hear she got her ass kicked by grounders and got back up and got a sword for it. It's good for her to have her own life now, to figure out what she wants, but I've spent almost all of my life thinking that…keeping her still, and keeping her closed in—in the apartment, I mean—was the only way to keep her safe. And 'safe' was the only thing that mattered. Not whether she was happy, or even wanted to be there in the first place or whatever." Bellamy scrubs at his face. "It's just hard to teach yourself to think a different way."

"Well, I think you're doing a good job," Clarke announces, decisively turning down the blankets of Octavia's bed. "And she'll only be a short ride away. I'm sure you'll see her more than you think you will."

The grateful smile Bellamy sends her way as he reaches over his head to turn out the lantern leaves her chest feeling lighter than it had in days.

Tonight, though, she doesn't bump into Bellamy and jolt herself awake when her nightmares come. She has a whole bed to herself—a whole mattress to roll on; a wide, barren desert leaving her exposed to the whirlwind of her sleeping mind.

Her hands are inside Finn, now, holding his heart, knowing that squeezing it will launch the drop ship rockets and send blood pouring down the throat of Anya's guard. She starts to pull his heart out of him, to close the drop ship door, but he seizes her shoulders.

"Clarke, Clarke—"

She lashes out and grabs onto Bellamy's elbows, finishes kicking her legs and lets them fall back down in the tangle of blankets they've worked themselves into. He's just a dark shape above her right now, but she'd know that messy silhouette of half-curls anywhere. Her mouth opens but nothing coherent comes out—just a gasp and a half-cry—and he pulls her up to sit, wraps his arms around her shoulders and runs his hand over her hair.

"It's just a nightmare," he promises her, his chest rumbling against hers. "That's it. It's gone now." She clings to him, fingers going sore with the strength of her grip. Eventually, he crawls into bed with her, lets her curl up beside him like she'd done the night in her tent.

Her eyes ache the next morning. She can tell without looking in a mirror that they're puffy and red, and the delicate skin around her eyes stretches weirdly as she blinks herself awake. Salt, she thinks distantly, yawning. Bellamy is still asleep next to her, more on his side than his stomach this morning, but his eyelashes flutter against his freckled cheeks when she turns to her belly and heaves a sigh into her pillow.

"Sorry I woke you up last night," she murmurs when he drums his fingers along her wrist and hums a good morning.

"Don' worry 'bout it." He rolls onto his back and yawns widely, with the type of unconcerned abandon that only men can truly inhabit. For a few minutes, they lie in the quiet of the morning; people move past the tent outside, their hellos and how are yous coming through the plastic a bit muffled, but no less genuine. Most of the birds have flown south, meaning winter is well and truly coming, but now and then a hoot or a trill sounds from off in the woods.

Just when Clarke starts to shift her legs around, getting ready to sit up, Bellamy puts a hand behind his head and cuts her a glance from the corner of his eyes. "Since Octavia is leaving," he starts slowly, "I was thinking that you would take her bed. Otherwise, we could put a table here, if you wanted. It's up to you, really."

Clarke rests her chin on her fist, looks past Bellamy's face to the bed he'd left behind in the middle of the night. It was nice having him with her, and he hadn't once put a finger on her for any reason other than comfort or sleep-sprawling. And, "It's going to get even colder, soon," she notes. "It's probably a good idea to share body warmth." On the Ark, this would have earned a snicker or a leer, but Bellamy only nods thoughtfully, because it is true. "Having a table would be nice, I think, so we don't keep spilling food onto the blankets. And when the others come to see you, they won't keep sitting on this bed," she finishes with a sleepy wink, and Bellamy laughs. "They love you, but you still intimidate them, you know."

He nods, stretches his arms over his head, and yawns again. "I'll have to work on that, then."

At the next council meeting, Bellamy gets Monty reassigned to engineering under Wick and Harper to medical with Clarke. When Councillor Lawrence tells him they'd wanted her to go to mechanical because she was born on Factory Station, Bellamy blinks at him and says, slowly, as though speaking to a child: "She had several bone marrow extractions not even a month ago. You cannot assign her to manual labor right now."

His request for a complete list of the Delinquents' assignments also doesn't go smoothly. "How many reassignments are you aiming for, exactly, Mr. Blake?" Councillor Early asks.

"I don't know," Bellamy replies, forcing an evenness to his voice when he really just wants to tell the woman to go float herself. "'Exactly' how many of these job assignments have you made based on where these kids were born?"

He lays the list on the table for some of the kids to look over after dinner. Clarke had the table sent over from medical, where it had served as a makeshift bed back at the height of the recovery period after the sack of Mount Weather. She'd also rounded up a few spare chairs and boxes to set around it and took the lantern that had been at the head of Octavia's bed and placed it in the middle of the table. She's out now, though, working her shift at medical until it closes down for the night.

Jasper pours himself and Harper a cup of moonshine from the jar, and a half cup for Fox. "I'm fine with Agro," he shrugs. "Fox?"

"Kitchen is alright," she agrees. "Better than Construction or Agro." Fox shoots an apologetic glance at Jasper, but he just gives her a friendly nudge with his elbow.

"Well, you're only fourteen," Bellamy adds. "If you'd been assigned to anything else, I would have pulled you, whether you'd liked it or not. You shouldn't be doing so much heavy lifting or dangerous work so young."

Harper gives Bellamy a sly look over her cup. "So says the man who had us all building a wall the day after we landed on Earth."

She's only teasing, but she's right, and Bellamy's mouth thins into a line when he thinks back to the selfish and domineering leader he'd been at the very beginning. You still intimidate them, Clarke had said. "That was a different time," he says gruffly, takes a swig of his moonshine, and is grateful when everyone lets it go without another word.

Bellamy makes an effort to not be intimidating anymore, to better learn the quirks and wants and needs of the forty-odd kids they pulled out of the Mountain. He keeps the flap to the tent open when he's home and asks the kids to eat dinner with him now and then. He learns that Lauren and Mel have been sleeping on the ground in their tent, sharing their few blankets between them, so he pokes around until he finds what will pass for a serviceable cot for them. Jay's tent has a gash in the side that he's managed to patch together; Bellamy gets him a fresh tarp to replace the whole side. When Bellamy sees that one of Fox's shirtsleeves is all but detatched at the shoulder seam, he snags a needle and thread from medical and talks to her about her hours in the kitchen while he sews it back together.

The table in Bellamy and Clarke's tent becomes a popular hangout for off-duty Delinquents. Miller tutors the younger guardsmen on how to disassemble, clean, and reassemble their guns. Raven tinkers by lamplight with the radios she's building while recounting the gossip she's heard over the walkie talkies. Wick joins her now and then, one arm draped across the back of her chair, and even Clarke laughs at his ridiculous jokes in between the margin notes she jots in an old and weathered medical textbook she found.

When the Ark starts school again, Bellamy makes a show of quizzing the younger kids on their history and English. He can't help the tangents he goes down sometimes, talking about Hannibal's march over the Alps and how Leonidas of Sparta held off the Persians while vastly outnumbered at the Battle of Thermopylae. The kids love it though, badger him for more stories about Cleopatra and Nefertari and Genghis Khan, and Clarke teases that he missed his calling as a teacher.

It's when he finds out that four of the youngest kids have been staying in a tent all by themselves that he calls the first official meeting. Miller, Monty, Jasper, and Clarke are the exceptions, not the rule; the vast majority of the Delinquents' parents died in either in the Exodus crash or in the Ark's fall to the Earth's surface.

Clarke wants to look them over before any decisions are made, so he collects all four of them and ushers them through the tent flap a little ahead of time. "Take a seat," he says, and Clarke pulls out one of the chairs and pats the seat of it.

Rachel, the nine year old, goes first, turning her head this way and that as Clarke brushes her hair back, looks in her ears and down her throat, holds up fingers for her to count with one eye closed.

"Why didn't you guys tell anyone you were living alone?" Bellamy asks, crouching beside ten-year-old Jake.

The boy takes a bite of one of the apple quarters Bellamy had given to them when they'd come in. "No one really asked? Besides, we've been living alone since we got down here. We didn't think it was going to be any different now."

Erik is also nine, and the only thing that Clarke can find wrong with him is that he seems to be a bit nearsighted. He tells her that his glasses had gotten lost in Mount Weather. "We don't have any more pairs of glasses, so you'll just have to tell people when you're having trouble seeing, alright?" Erik nods dutifully at Clarke, and she looks over her shoulder at Bellamy. "Maybe the grounders have figured something out? They've been on the ground longer. Maybe there's a way to scavenge up a pair."

Bellamy makes a mental note. "I'll ask next time we talk to ton DC."

Josie is the oldest, at twelve, and when Clarke palpates her torso through her shirt and feels the sharp angles of her ribs, she admits to giving up some of her food to Erik and Jake ever since Mount Weather. "Because I'm the oldest. I take care of them," she tells Bellamy when he asks why, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

Bellamy's throat tightens, because she's only twelve, and nods in agreement with Clarke, who tells her, "Well, we're in charge of you, so you should tell us when you're hungry or tired of sick from now on, alright?" and writes her a note for rations and a half for the next month.

The kids stay at the table when the other Delinquents file in, with Bellamy sitting at the head. Clarke all but physically recoils to the back of the room, merging in with the others in the back row. She can't really hide, though, not with that blonde hair, but Bellamy does his best to not search her expression or look to her for wordless guidance as he starts talking to the group.

"Being sent down in the drop ship meant that the council thought it was fine for you all to live independently, and we all did a good job of it until the attack. We're still doing a good job. But it's something completely different for these kids to be living by themselves so young," Bellamy explains, and is relieved when most of the faces in the crowd nod along. He'd called them there to ask them to shuffle tents, he explains, for those who have space to take in these kids, keep an eye on them and take them under their wings, and hands shoot up to volunteer as soon as he's done speaking.

He aches in a good way later that night, after he's helped move beds and blankets and carried the kids' stuff for them, and his mattress feels wonderful under his back when he collapses back onto it. Exhausted from her shift, Clarke had already turned down the lantern and slipped into bed before him. She's warm and quiet when she rolls over to face him, her eyes reflecting the slight amount of light still in the tent even after he turns the lantern all the way off.

"I'm starting to think being an older sibling should be a prerequisite to being in charge," she murmurs sleepily.

Bellamy turns onto his side, too, and tugs the blankets up over both of their shoulders. "You just disqualified yourself, then."

She chuckles, and the breathy quietness of it rolls down Bellamy's spine, ending in a pleasant twist in his belly. He's glad for the darkness; it surely covers up his startled expression, because she rolls onto her back and wishes him a good night. Her breathing slowly evens out into a light and feminine snore, and Bellamy turns to his stomach, presses his face into the pillow, and thinks about counting sheep.

She wakes up curled up against his back, face nuzzled into the nape of his neck. His back is soft-solid against her forearms, folded up against her chest between the two of them, and she lets herself press closer to the heat of his body and the familiar Bellamy-smell of him for a few breaths before she pulls herself away and rolls out of bed to get dressed for the day.

(Back under the blankets, Bellamy keeps his eyes closed and swallows thickly.)

Editing post-2x15:

"So you trust her to keep her word?" | Clarke nods, sure of this one thing, at least. "Yes."

HAHAHHAH.

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA *SOBBING.*

[ps I'm on tumblr at labonsoirfemme dot tumblr dot com. Come join my circle of madness.~~]