AN: prompt from tumblr kabby first hug
Clarke is the first thought that makes it out of her mouth when Jackson finishes dressing her stitched wounds. It falls on Bellamy to find an acceptable answer.
Marcus tries to give them space and a semblance of privacy, maybe, mostly because he saw that particular mix of anger and pain and confusion that goes hand in hand with loss shifting behind his eyes. He didn't want to witness any more. That's why he's waiting outside looking at the dying day while the boy – the young man, he corrects himself – explains, once again, why Clarke won't be home. But the commotion inside Medical and Jackson's voice move his legs before his brain, till he's drawing the plastic curtain aside and Abby is stumbling right into him.
He steadies her instinctively, wrapping an arm around her, and feels her struggle to keep upright, shaking her head against his chest.
"Let me go," she orders through her teeth when he doesn't, "You let her leave alone! You let her leave..."
The accusation is thrown at everyone and no one, he knows, even if she's staring right into his eyes, and Bellamy is the one hanging his head, feeling the axe grazing his neck. Raven stares, brow furrowed in concern from her cot across the room where Jackson had been stitching her up as well before Abby tried to... What was she trying to do? Follow her daughter out the gate? Order a search team to gear up and look for Clarke in the woods at night? He's not sure what reaction he was expecting but it wasn't this... frantic and disheveled and heedless.
"Abby?"
Jackson gently tugs at her elbow, softly speaking of teared stitches and hurting herself further, Bellamy shakes his head, contrite. In his arms Abby still fights his hold, and he does what both younger men have been too afraid to do before: he lifts her off the ground.
It's like picking up the pieces of a puzzle that assembles itself.
Without a grip on the floor she almost instantly stills, startled, reverting her efforts to claw at his shoulders, letting her legs dangle a few inches from the ground and the blood already soaking the bandages on her knees slowly dripping down to her bare feet.
"You are not going anywhere like this," he informs her, annoyingly calm.
Her jeans were torn and cut in different places and had been removed to help Jackson's work, so all she had on when she wriggled her way out of the cot covers were her flimsy cotton underwear, shirt, and the borrowed cardigan that doesn't cover her thighs.
Marcus lifts her up more securely in his arms and holds her gaze until finally she stops fighting, chest heaving, sobbing quietly, but her uncoordinated frenzy is gradually placating, the haze in her look washed away by the tears stubbornly gathering at the corner of her eyes.
"She can't be gone, she didn't even say goodbye," she breathes out as tears threaten to spill out of her lashes, "she didn't say goodbye..."
He opens his mouth to speak but he can only hold her tighter as she reads in his eyes what he's unable to voice.
Of course she didn't, Clarke Griffin loved her mother with the same intensity Abby loved her daughter, she couldn't say goodbye, she wouldn't have been able to leave if she'd tried. She would have been forever trapped inside her guilt.
Abby blinks her tears away as he slowly lowers her to the ground and helps her shuffle back to her cot. She still doesn't understand, he knows, but she's giving up this fight. For now.
Jackson skillfully redresses her bandages, Bellamy exchanges a few softly spoken words with Raven before retreating, and Marcus sits by Abby's bedside for a while, still feeling the weight of her sorrow in his own limbs.
As she drifts off into an exhausted, restless sleep, he tries to remember when the shape of her became so familiar to his own, but nothing comes to mind.
It must have been subtle, building up from much smaller gestures, touches his memory erased but his body cherished, collected, stored away year after year, waiting for the moment they'd fill up into a tangible presence.
He falls asleep still at her bedside that night, contemplating the imprint of her soul nestled into his.