Bellamy limped beside Monty, teeth gritted against both the pain from the wound in his leg and the ache of frustration that sat as hard lump in his chest. He'd been so close to Clarke just to fail her in the end.
He hadn't been able to save her.
No matter what, things always narrowed down to something he did; a mistake that haunted him, lurking around every corner of his thoughts.
"Hey. Stop beating yourself up," Monty hissed, yanking Bellamy out of his depressed and admittedly self-blame. "If the Grounder wanted to kill her he would have by now."
"I know," Bellamy muttered, not meeting Monty's concerned face. He'd let his worry blind him, he'd given up their element of surprise. "I still screwed up, was too damn impatient."
And now the Grounder knew the weakness that Bellamy and Clarke shared: they'd do anything to keep the other alive.
Clarke raged the entire way from Lexa's throne room to the room the two Grounder guards took her to, another prison. Alternating between angry shouts and threats at Lexa, Clarke spun away from the guards when they released her and bared her teeth.
"Tell your commander she's going to have to watch me every moment if she wants me to stay here," she snarled.
The guards didn't reply, didn't even twitch a facial muscle. But Clarke saw in their eyes that she scared them. Good.
When the door was shut and locked behind her, she walked over to the high, narrow sort of window and stretched up on her toes to peer out.
Her breath rushed out in a surprised gasp; she knew the bounty hunter Roan had brought her somewhere high, but she'd never imagined just how high this building was. It was a relic of Earth's glorious past, one of the few remaining skyscrapers.
And Clarke was at the top.
Kane brought their group to a stop an hour later in a cluster of trees. Pike stood nearby, his dark face stony. He and Kane had been arguing about how to handle the Ice Nation threat, and while Kane was going to keep the treaty as best he could, Pike saw all Grounders as threats. Bellamy wasn't thinking about the treaty much, but he knew that if Pike kept his current mindset, the Ice Nation soon wouldn't be the only threat to the peace treaty.
"Why are we stopping?" he asked, switching from leaning on Monty to a tree. Pain rolled up and down his leg in sharp waves, but Bellamy didn't care. It wasn't an extremely threatening wound, and all that mattered was getting Clarke and making sure she was safe.
"Because you can't keep doing this to yourself," Kane said, shouldering his gun and walking towards him. "You're losing blood, Bellamy. You won't be any good to Clarke if you're dead."
"Tell me something I don't know," Bellamy shot back tersely, but it was through gritted teeth. He closed his eyes momentarily and then straightened, clenching his jaw against the pain. "They can't be that far; I wasn't knocked out very long, and they have to avoid the Ice Nation army too."
"Whatever," Monty said, shrugging his pack off his shoulders. He looked up at Bellamy through his bangs, his features serious. "Kane's right, okay? Just… at least let me take a better look at that wound."
"You got this?" Monty's mom asked, confused. Bellamy knew what was going on her mind: last she knew her son was a fun-loving boy who got busted for sneaking drug plants out of the greenhouse.
That was almost a year ago. The ground had changed all of them into people they never dreamed they could be.
"Yeah," Monty replied, pulling fresh bandages out of his pack. "Jasper hasn't been doing too well last few months so I've ended up hanging around Abby a bit and I picked up some useful skills. I think."
"It doesn't have to look pretty," Bellamy reassured him as he settled into a seated position on the ground and stretched his wounded leg out. He growled as the movement pulled a different set of muscles and he felt blood trickle down his leg. "I'm not picky."
Half an hour later, Bellamy was able to walk on his own, even if he was slower than he'd like to be, and they set out again. In the woods around them they could hear the echoing rhythm of Ice Nation drums, a constant reminder of the trouble they all faced.
Bellamy wondered where Clarke was, if that bounty hunter trusted her to keep her word and at least removed that gag from her mouth. He remembered the way she'd looked at him when he'd been in front of her, the way her skin felt under his fingertips when he brushed her tangled hair away from her.
In that moment, despite the threat of Ice Nation and the fact that Clarke was still tied to a cement support, Bellamy had let his guard drop because she was there. All that had mattered was Clarke.
Of course, his intense focus on her had blinded him to the presence of the bounty hunter, enabling the Grounder to wound him. If Bellamy had just waited one more hour, if he'd cut Clarke loose and ran…
I'm not making the same mistake again.
Clarke paced the room. This was after she'd thoroughly searched it, but fur bedding and floor dust wasn't going to help her escape. If the building wasn't so impossibly tall she could have squeezed out the window, but she wasn't suicidal.
And now Bellamy was out there. Wounded, yes, but Clarke knew him and that he wouldn't give up. She'd never been so relieved to see someone when he appeared in front of her, knowing that he was real and not just in her dreams.
She should have warned him about Roan earlier, and her one moment of weakness had cost him. From the angle of the knife she knew that he would survive, but it wasn't an easy wound to recover from.
Footsteps by her door caused her to stop pacing, and a moment later Indra walked in alone.
The Trikru leader held up a hand to stop Clarke's prepared rant.
"I know you have reason to hate Lexa," she said, "but she saved your life. You would be dead if Roan brought you straight to his mother."
"I know," Clarke snapped. "But Indra, please. Bellamy–"
"Is looking for you, yes," Indra replied. She glanced at the closed door, and then said quietly, "I have already sent a runner to bring them here."
A Grounder walked towards them in the evening, hands held carefully away from his weapons. He was young, about Bellamy's age, with a shaved head and dark tattoos swirling across his eyes like war-paint.
"Indra sent me," he said as soon as he was within earshot. "She told me to bring you to Polis."
"To Lexa?" Bellamy snarled. "No way, that bitc–"
"Bellamy!" Kane said tersely, and then he turned to the runner. "How far?"
"Half a day," the Grounder replied, and then looked straight at Bellamy. A mocking smile curved at the corners of his mouth. "Your Wanheda is waiting."
Clarke jumped to her feet every time someone passed by her room. She'd asked to be let out, even stooping to the level of yelling for Lexa to face her, but her shouts were ignored.
The day ended and the night slipped by just as slowly. Clarke sat across from the door and dozed fitfully, her dreams a scattered chaotic mess of past events tangled with the hazy fictional things that lurked in the dark corners of her mind.
And then…
"Damn my leg!" Bellamy's frustrated voice, the one that once infuriated Clarke beyond words, was now the absolute best thing to hear. "Where is she?"
"Bellamy!" Clarke shouted, jumping to her feet and running to the door.
"Found her," she heard Kane say, followed by Monty's, "Clarke!"
"I'm over here!" she shouted, shaking the door, listening to the sound of their feet drawing closer.
And then the door swung open and Clarke stepped back, only to be enveloped by Bellamy's arms. She sagged against him with a soft sound of relief, tucking her head against his shoulder as she hugged him back just as fiercely.
Monty stood nearby, followed by Kane and oddly enough Officer Pike, her old survival skill trainer from the Ark. But all that mattered was Bellamy, that he was here and going nowhere soon.
He had become her greatest weakness, but he was also the one person who made her the strongest.
