Build Some Bridges
Disclaimer: Anything you recognise belongs the folk that make 'The 100' TV show.
Part Two
The days go by: Clarke throws herself into her medic training with her mom and Jackson, gives her best effort to Council business and works on re-building relationships with the friends she has left. Injury and sickness is easy to come by, living the way they are, and her days in the med-bay are full of infections, pulled muscles, cuts and sprains. She knows winter is going to be even worse. She's learning a lot from Abby and Jackson, and she's followed up on the knowledge she gleaned from Lincoln about how the Grounders use herbs and plants to heal. Sometimes Raven accompanies Clarke on her forages down by the river or in the hedgerows. She asks Jasper once or twice, but he declines. The hot white fire of his rage seems to have cooled, but Clarke isn't sure Jasper will ever be able to look at her as a friend again. She accepts it because she has to. Before she knows it, Clarke has been back at Camp Jaha for two months.
She thinks about Octavia, wondering if she is continuing training with Indra, wondering if she is still happy with Lincoln. She thinks about Monty, Miller and Harper—what are they doing now? She knows they will protect Bellamy with their lives. She hopes they are protecting themselves too. She hopes they are happy.
She tries not to think about Bellamy. It's better that way. Sometimes, when she wakes up shivering, sweat cooling on her skin in the small hours of the morning, it is Bellamy's face that fades with her dream. It's the faint ghost of Bellamy's hands trailing goosebumps across her flesh, and she forces her eyes open, forces herself to focus on the grey, metal paneling of her Ark compartment, until she's firmly rooted in reality again. She never knew his hands, except as they grasped her to haul her across the terrain, or help her run faster from danger. She never felt them trace her skin like a lover. She never knew she wanted too until… Well, it's too late for that. Clarke sits up and goes to get a headstart on the day.
Fall is coming to an end and the Camp is busy making preparations for the cold weather ahead when two unexpected arrivals disrupt the proceedings, in quick succession.
First, John Murphy comes back. Skittish, and brittle, and hard-eyed as ever—his eyes dart, mistrusting, around the group of guards until they settle on Clarke, striding toward the main gate with Kane at her side. If the full blown hug she pulls him into startles him he hides it with his usual swagger and, dammit, she is glad to see him, even after all the shit they've been through. Perhaps because of it. Murphy tells them his story, about finding the City of Lights with Jaha. About how Jaha had finally flipped his lid and started talking to hallucinations and Murphy just left him in a big empty house, came home because he didn't know where else to go.
'You did the right thing, John,' Clarke says. 'You came home.' She's not sure if she's telling Murphy or herself, but he flushes, pleased, all the same. They still don't trust each other completely but he feels like family and that's something she's short of around here. Some of the delinquent kids are still here, and she looks out of them, she always will, but—But she had a circle of peers and they all carried the weight together and that's gone now. She left that, and now they've left her.
Murphy doesn't seem to know what to do with himself now he's back. (She knows how he feels.) He's taken to hanging with Clarke, Raven and Wick. Clarke's the only authority figure he will recognize, and even then his feigned indifference lies thick on his every action. The four of them are in Raven and Wick's cabin—one of the newest huts on stilts that they've built for the winter, small but with a fireplace and some measure of privacy— when the second interruption arrives.
The unexpected delegation from TonDC is small; just four of Lexa's warriors and, to everyone's delight, Miller.
'Hell, girl,' Miller says, grinning as he takes in the sight of Clarke for the first time in a long time. 'You had us scared with that disappearing act. Bellamy's going to do that tight-lipped, arms crossed, staring thing when I tell him you're alive—you know, the thing he does when he's all relieved as fuck and trying to stay tough.'
'Yeah,' Clarke says, weakly. She knows the thing. She knows all of Bellamy's things.
'You should have sent word.'
'I know,' Clarke says, because she should have. Would have, if she wasn't too scared of Bellamy coming to visit and having to be in the same space as him and pretend she hadn't realised she was hideously jealous of him touching his own wife. Or even more scared that he wouldn't come. Eurgh. Whatever. 'You've all had a lot going on though, I hear.'
With that, Miller launches into an update on their friends, the state of the alliance and all things TonDC, that lasts well into the evening meal. He's got a separate list of discussion points for the Council's ears only, that Clarke gets to hear the next day, after the nice evening of pleasant torture as Miller regales them with the state of Bellamy's relationship ('that Commander's one tough chick, y'all, but, hey, Bellamy's been used to dealing with Clarke here, right? Right? Ha.') and Raven subtly squeezes Clarke's hand under the table.
The lieutenant Lexa has sent with Miller to carry her message is a physically dense, hunk of a man called Rand. Rand of the Tree People doesn't say a lot, but can silence the Ark Council with a glare and is apparently totally immune to Abby's eyebrows of doom. Clarke is, frankly, impressed.
At the end of a long day of negotiations, the situation can be summarized as this:
TonDC needs to borrow a healer. Nyko's out working in some of the more outlying villages and Lexa doesn't want the capital to be without a healer over the winter months. Now, Jackson is the perfect choice to go, but his girlfriend is five months into a difficult pregnancy and there's no way she can travel until the spring, after the kid is born. Also no way Jackson is leaving her. Abby and Jackson have recently taken on two trainees from among the Arker population, but they are too green to go it solo just yet.
So this is how, several months after returning to Camp Jaha, Clarke finds herself packing to leave to spend winter in TonDC.
While Rand and the other Trikru seem suitably impressed that the Sky People will send their own heda to serve as healer—there's no convincing them, even after all this time, that Clarke is not the leader or at least the war general of her people—Clarke is having to take deep breaths as she neatly rolls her meager supply of clothing and personal belongings into a travel pack. It's not that she particularly feels attached to Camp Jaha, but she is attached to Raven, and her mom, and the remaining delinquents. She feels a little better at their chances of a comfortable winter after clapping eyes on the shit ton of animal pelts and extra bags of grain that Lexa has sent in fair trade for borrowing one of the Skaikru healers.
All of that aside, Clarke is both excited and terrified to see Bellamy. While the sensible part of her knows that seeing him and Lexa together is last thing she wants and will only lead to all the pain she's been trying to avoid thinking about these past months, there's an undeniable idiotic part of Clarke that longs to see Bellamy's face again and to hear his rich, lilting voice speak her name.
Murphy is coming with them. Miller seems confident the Trikru will make room for him and he'll be welcome in the little community of ex-pats living in TonDC. There's nothing keeping him here, even less that there is keeping Clarke. Her heels are digging into the ground of Camp Jaha but she can feel the promise of Bellamy, Octavia and her other family pulling her onwards. There's nothing for it—Clarke has learned the hard way that there's no point fighting the tide and right now it's dragging her back to Bellamy Blake. She hugs Abby, Raven, Wick and forces a brief goodbye on Jasper, because you never know when it might be the last time you see someone and that hard way also taught her not to leave on an angry note. Then they're off, and there's three days of hard horse riding ahead to think about the myriad of ways in which this is a very bad idea.