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Clarke is bleeding from a deep slice in her back. It's really the least convenient place she could be bleeding from, seeing how there are no mirrors in the camp, and she has to contort to reach it in a way that stretches the wound uncomfortably. She's glaring at the orange wall of the tent in front of her as if it has personally offended her, and Bellamy would laugh if it weren't for the feeble way her fingers are fluttering at the inflamed skin around her cut, a wet rag clenched in her hand.
"You shouldn't have followed them," he says, crouched under the rolled up tent flap. She turns at the sound of his voice, wearing a sports bra and muddy pants and a miffed expression, blood spotting her face. "That was a dumb ass move earlier."
She scowls at him. Her hair is ratty, stuck through intermittently with leaves and twigs, tied up in a knot on top of her head to keep it out of her way. "You would know," she snaps, "you've been the king of dumb ass moves just about since we got here."
Bellamy steps inside, letting the tent flap close behind him as Clarke turns back around, still fumbling with the rag. It's dim in the tent, the sun outside setting on a very long day - they'd set out just before dawn with every intention of revising their map of the area, only to divert to tracking a group of three Grounders, since apparently -
"We need to level the playing field," Clarke says, same as she'd said earlier. "The Grounders know where our camp is, they could attack us without any warning, whenever they want. Without the same leverage over them, there's nothing to keep them from doing it, either." Her fingernail catches on the edge of her wound, and she hisses in a breath, clearly in pain. She lets her hand fall to her side, shoulders slumped like she's been living this life for years, exhausted and nowhere to go but forward, up.
Bellamy has a strong urge to make her slow down, sit down and let him take care everything. "That doesn't make it a good idea to scale a mountain, Clarke. Especially without any rope. You're lucky you're not dead."
He's pretty fucking lucky she's not dead, too - not that he'd ever say it, but she's become as integral to keeping this camp together as he is, and maybe even more integral to keeping him sane. She's got the whole thing resting on her shoulders, and maybe she's lost a little bit of that naïve optimism, but he thinks he likes her better for it.
"They're set up in literally the most strategic position possible, Bellamy. They're on top of a fucking mountain, and there's no way that we could get at them without them spotting us from miles away. How are you not more concerned by this?"
Because Bellamy has confidence in things that Clarke doesn't - in cold steel and determination and the value of tough skin and a tough skull. "They haven't attacked us yet," he says, instead of all that other stuff. "If they wanted to they could've done it by now. They could've done it back before we had a wall in place."
Clarke looks at him over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed. "When did you become the rational one?"
"When you started running off after Grounders," Bellamy counters. She's back to trying to reach the slice between her shoulders, this time reaching around her neck, and she strains it enough that a drop of blood escapes, running down her spine to soak into the waist of her pants. "Let me do that," he says reflexively.
He steps forward and tries to take the rag from her hand, but Clarke dodges him. "Don't be stupid. You don't know anything about field medicine."
"Sure I do," he takes the rag forcefully from her. "I was a guardsman, remember?"
Clarke scoffs. "Like they actually teach you anything as a cadet other than how to point and shoot," she accuses, but she lets him when he pulls the stretchy fabric of her bra out of the way to clean the wound.
Some deep part of him that can still manage genuine emotion every once and a while registers the fact that he wishes her skin were unmarred, smooth across the curve of her spine so that he could splay his fingers over it. He thinks his hand would span the entire small of her back, so he could feel the expansion of her ribcage with every inhale.
"If I remember the map correctly, there should be a stream on the far side of the mountain," Clarke is saying. "If can get around the base unseen, and we use that weird camoflauge Monty was talking about, where it only works right at dawn, and only if the light is right, we might be able to - "
"Clarke, just shut up for a minute - "
"No, but if I could just get a closer look at their camp, I think we could learn a lot - "
Bellamy turns her to face him, his hands on her shoulders. He hasn't really noticed until now how much smaller than him she is, other than to file offhandedly the fact that she'd probably be the weakest link in any fight, against the Grounders or if there were ever an uprising within the camp. "Just stop talking strategy for a minute," Bellamy says, even though his brain always seems to be calculating his - their - odds for survival. "You almost died today. You get a night off."
She gives him one of those skeptical looks that makes him want to go back and review the efficacy of what he's just said. "If we want to keep breathing until the rest of the Ark gets down here, we don't have time for any - "
Bellamy kisses her, hard.
For a long, breathless moment, Clarke is motionless, her hands pressing stiltedly against Bellamy's biceps - but then her mouth opens under his, she melts against him, and some of the tension seeps out of Bellamy's muscles. He wraps one arm around her waist and pulls her closer, his other hand already tangled in her hair, because he has this feeling like the moment he lets her go she'll float away, which is ridiculous, obviously, but -
Clarke gasps, her lips catching against his, "Bell - "
He kisses the words from her lips, murmuring, "Just stop talking, Clarke."
She doesn't answer, but her arms go up and around his neck, dragging him down more to her level, and she's so close that he can feel her eyelashes on his cheeks. They stumble until the backs of Bellamy's knees hit something - one of those cots they put together out of tree branches after the last big storm - and he sits down, Clarke pulled with him.
Bellamy thinks he could do this forever, like they were the only two people on the Ground, Clarke's lips and Clarke's knees pressed into his hips and Clarke's bright hyper eyes closed with him, her weight canted into him like she trusts him to catch her. All his peripheral senses fade to white noise, like a broken radio, and their mouths gentle, just lingering presses and quick breaths, sharing air -
Clarke's saying something, gasping in between kisses, and Bellamy zones in long enough to hear, "Gauze - "
"What?" he mutters, half-there.
She pulls away, and the air is cold against his face, even though they're through the worst of the winter. He stays close, following her face with his as she sways back slowly. "I'm bleeding everywhere, Bellamy," Clarke says. "So gauze would be a good idea."
Bellamy's eyes come open slowly, like his eyelids are stuck down. "Right. Gauze. Okay."
Clarke smiles sideways at him, bemused. Her eyes are crazily blue, impossibly like the sky.