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At the end of the day it was Clarke’s fault.
There had been a rash of disappearances in the camp: guys sneaking off to take a leak in the middle of night, couples going off to do god knows what in privacy, thrill seekers trying to catch a glimpse of the grounders. They were losing people, fast, and it was bad for morale.
So Clarke knocked on the door of Bellamy’s tent that night after dinner. He emerged after a few minutes, his hair messy and his chest bare. His jeans seemed to be undone at the top and his gun was poking out the back. Clarke admired not for the first time how solid his body seemed to be, almost as if one could build a home out of it alone.
‘Princess,’ he said when he saw her. ‘What do you want to argue with me about now?’ Clarke, determined to keep her eyes trained on his face, blinked and then sobered up and remembered why she was there.
‘Buddy system.’
‘A buddy system, really?’ Bellamy said, grimacing. ‘This isn’t summer camp.’
‘Oh really?’ Clarke said flippantly. ‘You think my best friend dying didn’t tip me off to that?’
Bellamy looked taken aback and Clarke watched as his whole body – his not unattractive chest included – tensed up.
‘I’m sorry about Wells, all right,’ he said gruffly. ‘But people aren’t going to like this.’
‘I don’t care what they like,’ Clarke said, surprised to hear herself say it and even more surprised to find that she believed it. ‘It’s our job to keep them alive down here and I don’t know about you but I plan on doing it.’
‘Fine,’ Bellamy said. ‘But you should warn whatever poor sucker you’ve assigned yourself that people are going to be pissed at you.’
‘Oh, I’m not worried about my safety, Bellamy,’ Clarke smirked. ‘I’m in good hands.’
‘Oh really?’ Bellamy said, crossing his arms and furrowing his brow.
‘I’ve got you, haven’t I?’ she said, stepping forward and tapping his gun, then leaving to go make the announcement before he had any chance to protest.
There were protests, of course. The idea of having someone required to be around you all hours of the day was annoying to most people. Some pairings showed promise – Octavia and Raven had taken to holding hands everywhere and showing up to meal times with elaborately braided hair, and Jasper and Monty were delighted to be paired up. But for the first few days, there were certain kinks Clarke had to iron out.
The first day she had shown up to Bellamy's tent early in the morning to go collect water together and he had advised her that he was already being taken care of. The exact meaning of that phrase became apparent once a girl’s head popped up from under the sheet and she kissed Bellamy goodbye for what seemed to Clarke to be longer than anyone needed to say such a simple thing.
But all Clarke had to say was, ‘Bellamy, I need you,’ and all his bravura seemed to melt away and he could be serious about helping her. Sure, there were still more jabs than necessary about Clarke’s family and they spent both the walk to and the walk back from the lake arguing about how the water was to be allocated, but they were settling into a rhythm.
The fourth day of buddy allocations a riot broke out over the supply of soap and Clarke and Bellamy were hit by the flying rocks and sticks. Clarke’s heart seemed to stop beating when she realized that Bellamy had been hit in the neck. She did what any good doctor would do, holding his neck so the bleeding would stop while sterilizing his wounds but she was more scared than she had ever been on the ground that someone would die. She realized with a sick feeling in her stomach that she couldn’t envision doing this without him.
He pulled through: the rock had missed his carotid artery by inches (probably the same inches he moved to cover Clarke’s body with his own when he realized people were throwing things, Clarke thought and ignored). He went back to his old self: disappearing on her to go hook up with girls, egging on some of the guys to fight, stealing Clarke’s food whenever she cornered him for discussions during meal times.
So Clarke decided to teach him a lesson.
She found Raven and Octavia and joined up with the berry picking they’ve been assigned for the day. They asked where Bellamy was almost immediately and Clarke quickly lied about a leg injury he had to rest. The three girls chatted for hours while gathering and tasting the fruit they could find and Clarke found herself venting about all the annoying things Bellamy did. Raven and Octavia shared many significant looks that Clarke luckily missed and Octavia cleared her throat after one particularly long rant about Bellamy’s lack of courtesy and asked Clarke what exactly was going on between her and Bellamy.
‘We’re... he’s my buddy,’ Clarke said. Bellamy wasn’t exactly her friend and she knew he still considered the buddy system to be a stupid waste of time, but there wasn’t exactly a term that meant ‘guy I have to work with otherwise we’re all going to die’.
They returned to the camp at dusk and Clarke found that Bellamy had torn apart her tent looking for her and sent dozens of patrols to search the woods around the camp. He rushed over as soon as he saw them, paying no attention to his sister or Raven but solely staring stricken at Clarke.
‘Clarke,’ he said, with no sardonic nickname or eyebrow raise. Just her name, said almost through a breath.
‘Something wrong?’ she asked, determined to have the upper hand even though him saying her name so sincerely seemed to do something to her internal organs.
‘Nothing,’ Bellamy said, shaking his head. ‘I just didn’t want to have to go rescue your ass because you were too stupid to follow your own rules.’
‘I can rescue myself, Bellamy,’ Clarke said, stepping towards him in an attempt to seem strong.
‘I have no doubt,’ he said, looking down at her, half a challenge and half a sign of respect.
Octavia rolled her eyes. ‘Can you guys stop being weird so we can put these berries in the store?’
After that, they started sleeping together. Not sleeping together – Clarke hadn’t suddenly become a participant in Bellamy’s nocturnal fuckfests – but simply sleeping together in the same tent. Different beds, Bellamy noted, like any stable marriage, and in a way, it was something akin to marriage. They would wake up together, she would bathe first, then him, they would go to breakfast together, have a strategy meeting together, eat lunch together, go on patrol together, have dinner together, then go back to their tent to sleep. The buddy system hadn’t bonded everyone on camp quite like this but there was something special about sharing your days with someone that everyone seemed attuned to now.
Bellamy had suggested she move on after Clarke had examined her virtually destroyed tent and figured it was inhabitable. Clarke was always in his tent bugging him – why not spare everyone the inconvenience of hearing her stomp across camp at all hours of the night to argue with him about rations or sleeping arrangements or work rosters? Octavia, sitting in the tent inventorying medical supplies, had laughed when he suggested it and he’d almost lied and said he was joking but then Clarke had nodded and said ‘sure’.
Clarke talked in her sleep too much and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to tidy up Bellamy’s (or, as he supposed they were now, their) quarters, but when Bellamy couldn’t sleep, all he had to do was roll over and look at her face with that forehead full of worry and her mouth primed as it always seemed for an argument, and he felt as if everything would be all right.
It was weeks later, when they were out on a night patrol and it was freezing cold and every snapped twig was a grounder coming to kill them. Clarke’s hands were cold and Bellamy watched as she held them together and then stuffed them under her jacket. Bellamy tended to do this whenever the rest of the world didn’t interest him; he’d watch Clarke. He found her endlessly fascinating in a way that would have confused him merely a few weeks ago. For her part, Clarke noticed when he was looking her way and often came up with excuses to look back.
There was something in it, something in being able to look at someone while they look at you and let your eyes explain why you are.
But this time he didn’t look at her, not even in the reflexive way he’d taken to, not in the desperate, half wild way he’d looked at her as she’d held his neck to keep him alive, nor with overwhelming relief like when she’d returned to camp that day. This time he looked forward, towards the world they’d found themselves in. He held his whole body tight, almost as if his heart had to be held in place between his lungs and he couldn’t move for fear it would fall out, but he placed his left hand within her jacket and held both of hers, his thumb snaked around the join of hers. His hands were rough, but warm and large and Clarke wanted desperately to cry out, to express something of how she felt, something akin to being drunk or having fallen from a great height to find oneself bouncing off the ground.
‘Bellamy,’ she started to say, not knowing what the rest of the sentence would be.
He interrupted, ‘it’s my job to protect you, princess. I’ve got you.’
‘You don’t have to-‘ Clarke tried to find some way of expressing how she felt, tried to explain that it was vitally important that he let go of her hand if he wasn’t ever going to touch her again.
But then he nods slightly to himself and turns himself towards her and he looks her square in the eye. He looks almost defenseless, giving her the same look from when she showed him what she was capable of doing with a knife. He takes his right hand and places it beneath her chin then tips her head up slightly. Clarke feels like her bones have turned to jelly, like he is the only thing keeping her head from falling off her shoulders. He smiles at how easily she lets him direct her and then slowly presses his mouth to hers. She presses her chest to his, almost desperately, and he wraps his right arm around her and holds her to him.
He is all warmth and Clarke is all nerve endings and they kiss until he runs out of breath and then they just stay that way, foreheads touching, everything touching.
In two hours, their shift ends and Clarke wakes up to find him still there and she looks at Bellamy next to her and she finally realizes she knew all along what he was to her. Her partner.