She's going to go insane down here, sitting silent in the creepy dark pit. It's some kind of horrible grounder punishment, or it's a twisted experiment from Mt. Weather. Bellamy's going to go crazy, too, if his sleep talking is any indication. He's been muttering for the last couple of minutes, and Clarke thinks maybe she should wake him up.

She feels her way across the floor until her fingers land on his hair. He doesn't seem to notice; it sounds like a bad nightmare. "Bellamy," Clarke says, shaking his shoulder. "Bellamy, wake up."

"No," he murmurs, his limbs twitching, trying to fight through the sleep-paralysis so he can defend himself. "No... don't..."

She jostles him some more, but he's deep in the nightmare. She shouts his name louder, and after another minute of trying to wake him up, he starts awake with a gasp. "Clarke! Clarke?"

"Bad dream?"

Bellamy sighs deeply. "Yeah. Something like that." His jeans rustle against the floor as he sits up. Clarke can practically feel the weight of all the things he's not saying.

"You okay?"

"Huh? Yeah." He yawns loudly. "I blame the soup."

There's a long silence again, filled with things neither of them will say. Clarke listens to Bellamy breathe next to her. She's trying to find something to talk about, but everything she thinks of—parents, grounders, who's keeping them captive, is anyone going to come get them—is stupid or depressing or not likely to be something Bellamy will talk about.

"Clarke?" Bellamy asks, and this time it's quiet, hesitant.

"Yeah?"

A pause. "Never mind."

"What?"

"Nothing. I just... wanted to make sure you were still there."

Clarke snorts. "Like I have somewhere to go."

Silence.

"Sorry. That was mean."

More silence.

"Bellamy?"

He doesn't answer. Clarke only knows he's there because she can hear him breathing.

"Say something. We're both going to go batshit if we don't figure something out."

"There's no way out of here," he points out, like he's not stating the painfully obvious.

"So? We're no use to anyone who rescues us if we've gone completely bonkers down here."

"Okay, fine. So, what? Do you have glow-in-the-dark cards in your back pocket or something?"

"You want to sit in the dark and quietly go crazy?" she snaps. "I'm sure there's a perfectly good patch of floor over on the other side of the room for you to lay down and go back to your nightmares."

He's quiet for a while, and Clarke is about to give up and start reciting every word she knows in the grounder language when he says, "No. Look, I just... I don't like it. I really don't like it in here."

Clarke feels along the ground until she finds his knee, and then she scoots hers right up against it. She sits cross-legged, facing him, and when he mirrors her, their knees are pressed together, a reminder that, even if they can't find anything to say, neither one of them is going to go crazy alone down here. "I don't like it either."

There's another silence before Bellamy says, "Do you think someone will come after us?"

"Someone will." Someone has to.

They sit in silence and Clarke realizes that she doesn't know what happened, how they got into this pit. Maybe the whole camp was raided, or no one has realized they're gone, or they're all locked up. Maybe no one's coming for them because she and Bellamy are the only ones left.

She shivers and then she can't stop shivering, even though she tells herself it's not true, she and Bellamy aren't the only Sky People left. She has to believe they'll get out of here. She has to be strong; she's the fearless, unwavering leader of the Sky People.

"Clarke?" Bellamy's voice is soft, gentle, and as tentative as the hands resting on her knees.

I'm fine, she wants to say—has to say—but the words that come out are small, fearful, shaky things: "I'm scared."

"We'll get out of here," Bellamy says, and Clarke knows he has just as much faith in the truth of it as she does. His hands are warm, comforting on her knees, and she puts hers on top of his. He thinks she's pushing him away like she always does, but she holds onto his hands when he tries to take them back, and they sit in the dark like that for a minute or two, knees pressed together, hands clasped between them.

"Thanks," she says. The shaking is gone, but the terror that they're stuck here alone isn't. "Do you remember anything?"

"No. You?"

"Nothing." Clarke takes her hands away from his and folds her arms tightly across her chest.

"Clarke."

"What?"

"We're gonna be okay."

"We're stuck in a pit with no light and no food."

"There's soup," he suggests.

"There's drugged soup."

"Could be worse. They could have put us in separate dark pits."

Clarke frowns. "Why didn't they?"

"Maybe there's only one super dark pit. Or all the others are full."

"If I wanted to torture someone like this, I'd put them in the room alone." There's an epiphany just out of her reach, but it floats away, and Clarke slouches miserably. "Probably just ran out of space," she agrees.

Bellamy nudges her knee with his. "Come on, princess. I can't be that bad a cell-mate."

Clarke huffs. "I'd rather be stuck here with someone else," she mutters.

There's a pause, and then Bellamy's incredulous, "What."

"No, I mean—" and she's embarrassed to say it because it's childish and stupid— "If you weren't in here with me, I'd know someone was looking for me."

"Camp Jaha needs its leader," Bellamy says by way of answer.

Clarke glares at him through the darkness and says tersely, "Right."

"You're mad?"

"No," she lies, and the lie is transparent even in the dark.

"You are."

"Forget it." Clarke pulls her knees up to her chest, isolating herself. She glares coldly into the darkness, cursing it for taking away one of her greatest and most formidable powers.

After a few minutes, Bellamy says, "We are going to get out of here, one way or another."

"Maybe when we're dead," Clarke mutters.

Bellamy moves to sit next to her, shoulder to shoulder. "I would," he offers. "Come look for you, I mean."

"Yeah," she says dismissively.

"You're a good friend, and those are getting really hard to come by lately."

Clarke snorts.

"Not to mention you're pretty good at keeping me out of trouble." He sways a little, like he's considering something. "There was that time you let me get kidnapped by mountain men, though."

"I had my reasons," she answers, and remembering it makes her cold with rage. He'd gotten out—and so had the others—but the mountain men had done some horrible things, things some of them wouldn't recover from, things that couldn't be stitched or splinted or salved.

"I know," he says. "We would have only found bodies if you hadn't." He squeezes her arm. "You did the right thing."

Clarke doesn't move, even though part of her wants to lean into him, to find strength in him instead of in herself for once. "Yeah." She doesn't think about what might have happened.

She wonders, though, about what did happen. She had seen Bellamy when they were rescuing the 47 and the grounders, but only briefly, and when she finally got a chance to talk to him later, her mother had already patched him up. He refused to talk about what had happened to him in Mt. Weather.

"Bellamy... what happened in Mt. Weather?"

"Clarke—"

"No. I need to know what they did to you." What I did to you.

Bellamy lets out a long, slow breath. He tells whole tale from the morning he and Lincoln left to the first time he saw Clarke again. His storytelling is slow, halting, but he tells it all the way through, and at the end Clarke doesn't say anything, just leans against Bellamy and puts her arms around him. If she'd known—

No, she thinks. If she'd known, she'd have floated the plans and probably gotten everyone killed in her attempt to save him from the mountain men. And they had done more and worse to the others... Clarke shudders, her shoulders tense with rage.

Bellamy's hand skates across her shoulders. "It's okay. It's over," he says, and he's trying to comfort her, even though he was the one at the mercy of the mountain men, and it's just so wrong.

Clarke's nails dig into her palms. "I'm sorry," she mutters.

"No." Bellamy's hands on her shoulders turn her toward him. "We saved our people, Clarke. Don't be sorry about that."

Clarke grips his forearms with her hands and hangs her head. "Bellamy..."

"What's done is done," he tells her, and his hands move from her shoulders to her neck to her jaw. "You saved our people. You made peace with the grounders. Nobody else can do what you do."

"I know. I know." Clarke shakes her head. "I just—never mind." She lets go of him, and he lets go of her, and she lays down on the floor, curling into herself. "I just want to sleep for a while."

Bellamy lays down, too, and he presses his knees against hers, and she sleeps without dreaming.


A/N: Might be worth noting that this fic was written right after 2x09.