Chapter Text
Who we are and who we need to be to survive are very different things, Bellamy says, and all she can think about is the look in Lincoln's eyes as he watched her stalk towards him in the dim light of the dropship, chained to the wall like an animal, a beast not worthy of speech. Clarke has never felt more of a monster in all her life.
-
The new moon comes upon them quickly.
Clarke and Raven rig a chain link grid in the top level of the drop ship, lining the floor with blankets and dirt to muffle the sounds of—whatever comes through. Clarke admits to Raven the night before she’s not even sure what she's like, or how long the LN4 will last split between the two of them, and Raven stares for a long moment before barking out a laugh.
“Díos,”she laughs to herself, wrapping the last chain around the beam in the wall and securing it with agile hands before turning back to the other girl. “That’s why we’re sticking with chains, Princess. It’ll be fun.” She winks. “And who doesn’t love a little bondage, huh?”
Clarke rolls her eyes with a grimace, knowing exactly why Raven feels the need to crack shitty jokes, and ignores the small quiver in the other girl’s laugh.
They only have two doses left. Without the suppressant, she’s not sure how strong she is, or when and how she’ll shift outside of the moon. Even Raven doesn’t know, having never met an alpha before. The stories conflict enough, telling tales of monstrously sized creatures, some as small as coyotes and some as large as houses, ripping apart ancient Earth villages in a single night, myths of giant beasts terrorizing cities in packs a dozen strong, even without the full mooning as a warning, decimating everything in their path—needless to say, she’s terrified. Raven hasn’t said anything, but Clarke can smell it on her, too. There’s no hiding the thick, acrid scent of fear.
(If one of them gets loose—forget about exposure. No matter how much they’ve faced, their people are still children. Still weak, human children. And all the old stories say the same thing about that.)
Clarke breathes in deep and lets her gaze drag over their makeshift containment cell. “If the door stays locked and we leave food within reach, we should be fine,” she says quietly, listening to the sound of the camp settling down for the night. “That’s what my mom used to do.”
Raven nods and stares out at the dusky sky, the faded white circle carving itself out from behind the violet-rose cloud cover. Clarke opens her pack and slides out a single dosage.
“What’d you tell Finn and Bellamy?” she asks. She attaches the needle and sets it aside in order to remove her shirt and pants, modesty lost in the midst of nerves. She snaps the chain cuff around her left leg and right arm, Raven doing the same a few feet away.
Raven gives her a strained grin. “Period cramps.”
Clarke snorts. “Well. I guess you can’t really go wrong with the classics.”
Raven giggles in reply and exhales in a burst of air. Only when they’re both standing bare in the shadows of the ship, the door locked and reinforced, do they both go quiet and look out the single window in the ceiling. The sky is stormy deep gray, moonlight beginning to soften the edges of it all.
“Here,” whispers Clarke, reaching over to the other girl first. Raven extends her left arm and turns away as the syringe needle plugs into the vein in her skin. When the silvery fluid reaches just above the halfway mark, Clarke pulls back and inserts it in her own arm, releasing the rest into her blood, feeling the effects almost immediately—her limbs growing sluggish and lethargic, mind muddling. Into something not quite dreamlike, not quite real.
The moon gazes down on them from the hole in the ship, unblinking.
She feels the burn in her eyes grow cold, the smell of the dirt and loam and metal and sweat all around her blending with the warmth of the figure at her side, not right, not hers, but…not anyone else’s either. Somewhere far away, she sinks to the floor. The heat of her blood rushes under her skin, thickening, her joints pulling and bones twisting, fingers curling inward, teeth filling her mouth, her heart bursting, bursting, bursting—waking up.
-
Bellamy is on dawn shift again, watching from the top of the gate when Clarke emerges in the morning, bags under her eyes permanently etched into the younger girl’s face. He feels a stirring of something for a moment, like a warm shiver in his spine, before he shoves it aside.
She looks different, he thinks, but he can’t quite put a finger on it. Somehow older. Somehow new. Octavia’s words wander back through his head.
Clarke stands on the ramp of the ship, head tilted up to the peak of dawn light cutting through the trees, and while he can’t see her face from this distance, he knows her eyes are closed, her face peaceful. It looks like she’s just…breathing.
He doesn’t know how long he stares at her like that, leaning back against the post, just watching as she takes it all in; her broad chest inhaling deep and long, hair a dirty golden riot down her back, soot streaked, an arched profile caught in sunlight—and he thinks, if it is true, then this is what it must look like: regal, wild, animal monarchy in motion, but then he shifts position, his guardsmen’s jacket scratching rough against the wood just enough—
and she twitches, a sharp jerk back into awareness, whipping around to stare directly at him from all the way across the camp, head tilted just so, like, like—
She blinks, and for a moment he think he sees her nostrils flare. Bellamy swallows, once, audible even to him. He’s not sure he’s breathing. He has a knife strapped to his thigh, a loaded rifle in both hands and he still feels frozen—caught—trapped in an instinct older than anything he knows what to do with—
“Hey, Griffin!” a voice calls, and the air whooshes back into his lungs. Raven makes her way out of the dropship door, her loping gate shattering the moment. Clarke shakes her head again and turns away to the other girl, smiling her normal smile, easy, strained, tired—as if nothing had ever seemed…
Bellamy gives himself a shake too, and turns his gaze back to the woods.
-
He watches from the tree line as Clarke walks towards the Grounder on horseback, back straight, legs steady, head held high in that ridiculously haughty stance she only pulls on him when she’s extra pissed. The Grounder’s horse jerks to stop at the edge of the bridge, eyes rolling.
For a second he thinks it has something to do with the creek bed underneath—
are horses afraid of water? Octavia would know, he thinks, but then he watches as the horse pulls back slightly, nostrils flaring, with the fierce Grounder woman sitting astride it looking vaguely annoyed before dismounting efficiently, and walking the rest of the to the bridge center on two feet. Her Grounder guardsmen fall in beside her, but the horse stomps nervously in place and stays put on the opposite tree line 30 yards away. The poor animal looks terrified, frozen in fear, he thinks, and then he follows its gaze to Clarke, standing unobtrusively in the apex point of the walkway.
She looks very small, very alone, but then he thinks about the look in his eyes that morning, her burning gaze and predatory stillness, the curl of her mouth when she caught him watching, and shivers once.
“Hey, Blake.” Raven cuts in harshly from his left. “Chill the fuck out. I can’t concentrate.”
He sneers at her and hunches his shoulders forward, settling back on the ridge they’re hiding behind. “I didn’t even say anything.”
Raven snorts. “You didn’t have to.” Her lips seem to pull back as she speaks, and for a moment all he can think is, hackles. Bellamy blinks, and then carefully turns back to the bridge.
The Grounder, Lincoln, is saying something, but Bellamy can’t make it out. He motions to Clarke, making a slashing sign across his chest with a curved hand, completely disregarding Finn standing behind her. He says something again, and Bellamy can’t quite make it out, but he points at his own eyes with two fingers, then at Clarke, and then steps back. Clarke steps forward, chin up. He can’t see her face, but one of the Grounder men facing them has gone white. The woman in the center bows her head, just slightly, surprisingly respectful.
Bellamy leans closer, watching. The other male Grounder is shaking, just slightly, like a cold shudder, and not out of fear. In the midst of them, Clarke and the woman speak softly. Raven is silent beside him, but for breathing.
And then the shot rings out.
-
On the bridge, Clarke hears the crack of the gunshot and Jasper’s panicked shouting, and goes to turn back— but then the younger Grounder, just a boy really, face marked in white paint and eyes wild, growls out something unintelligible and curls in on himself, shaking harshly—familiar to her in the very worst way.
The Grounder contingent is pulling back but for the youngest, and in the confusion, Lincoln has braced himself around Octavia with Finn is sprawled on the ground somewhere behind her, but all Clarke can do is stare in shock at the Grounder boy, see his panic and watch, frozen, as he lifts his head and glares out with haunting, burning, yellow eyes, and starts to fucking shift there right in front of her.
“Clarke!”
She hears Bellamy yelling somewhere from the tree line, just as an arrow flies past her face, missing her by inches. She stumbles back.
The boy—not a boy now, no, not a boy—the beast in front of her lifts its head.
She’d asked her father once what she might look like during a shift, what kind of wolf she would resemble; maybe something dog-like, maybe something more like a bear? Once, she’d asked him if she would look unnatural. He’d blinked and frowned and said, there’s no such thing.
But Clarke had seen the pictures in old data texts, pixelated ink etchings from ancient Victorian England, anatomical renderings carved into Japanese wood blocks and upon rock faces in the caverns of South America, gargantuan teeth painted on Greek and Roman vases with chipped burnished reds and black patina, wolves all so diverse and exaggerated in features, all horrifying just the same. She’d had nightmares for months.
Still, her father had always answered with the same thing every time. “Beautiful, honey. Of course you’ll be beautiful.”
What she sees now is not beautiful. The boy's face elongates harshly, the bones shifting themselves into a fluid form that doubles in size in less time than it takes her to inhale. Arms stretch and bones pull, fur bursting out from nowhere to cover his body, leather tunic and pants violently ripping apart at the seams. It doesn't look beautiful, she thinks, it looks like it hurts.
Another arrow flies by her and Clarke hears a sharp cry of pain, and suddenly she's not thinking much at all.
-
Werewolf, Bellamy thinks to himself in shock. He'd read the stories, he knew the myths, but--he'd barely blinked, and where the Grounder stood, there was, there was...
His hand was slack on his gun for just a moment, before he shook himself and charged forward over the ridge line, thinking of nothing but getting Clarke off that fucking bridge before that thing rips her apart, rips them all apart—
An arm thrown out holds him back. “You idiot, don’t you dare,” snarls Raven in his ear, shoving him to the ground and holding him in place with an impressive amount of strength, “you wanna get yourself killed?”
"What--" he starts, but her head is turned back to watch Clarke as she faces down the creature on her own, just standing there staring at it—
“Stay down.” Raven hisses at him, while he struggles in vain to push her off, grab his gun, do something. His sister is being pulled bodily back from the bridge by Lincoln, the man seemly having his own issues keeping Octavia from running and leaping onto the monster’s back with nothing to fight it but her own two hands. Raven rips the gun from his grip and throws it to the side.
“This isn’t your fight,” she snarls, tense as a bowstring, shivering just slightly. Then whose fight is it? he wants to yell back.
On the bridge, Clarke stumbles back. The huge creature—wolf, he could see now it was a wolf, straight from the legends his mother told him at night, with its charcoal black fur and glowing yellow eyes, takes it as a sign and bounds forward, mouth agape. Bellamy can’t even find the breath to shout.
He watches helplessly as Clarke steadies herself, dodging another arrow and then snatching another out of the air with her hand. Bellamy gapes, and stares in horror when instead of sprinting back toward the trees, she crushes the arrow shaft in one fist and charges forward with a snarl, the sound echoing down the dry riverbank, sinking deep into his bones. His heart stops.
“Oh shit,” mutters Raven, her too-tight grip on him going slack.
For the next few seconds, Bellamy’s mind can’t make sense of it. One moment, Clarke is running towards the beast, on two legs, and the next she's gone, a streak of white-sharp teeth and blue-gray fur taking her place, torn fabric flying through the air as another wolf leaps forward and clashes into the Grounder's form, clamping its massive jaws on the other creature’s neck in midair with a ruthless efficiency, the momentum bringing them both down viciously onto the bridge in one move, the enormous crash making the stone quake like the earth itself had shuddered.
It happens so fast, Bellamy can barely follow. The blue-gray wolf bears down on the Grounder, holding its jaws closed tight as the other wolf scrambles for purchase against the surface, snarling and twisting under her paws before the wolf bites down harder and forces the other animal into stillness. After a long moment, the animal stops moving entirely, either unconscious or dead. From the other side of the bridge, Anya and her guardsmen stare on in silence, making no move to enter the fray.
“Damn,” Raven breathes. Finn and Octavia are staring, mouths agape, from the edge of the tree line. Bellamy’s blood is pumping so loud he can feel it in his ears.
On the bridge, the massive wolf has stepped back from the body of its fallen opponent and turns towards them slowly. It blinks blood red eyes once, twice, and then the burning rage cools, its animal shape shifting like water, shrinking inwards, muscled form twisting and pulling itself back into the familiar figure of a girl, just a girl, blonde and pale under the light of the sun, breathing heavily, looking wild, and savage, and lost.
Beautiful, he thinks, heart beating like a war drum somewhere low and heavy in his chest.
Clarke blinks again in confusion as she opens her mouth, teeth red and red and red and then— knees buckling, she crumples to the ground.