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In her dreams, Bellamy is there. Blood-splattered Bellamy, standing there with his heart in his throat, coughing up words like monster and I ruin everything.
Clarke can still taste the dripping blood of his beating heart against her bare teeth. She wants to say you know I don’t mean this, right? You know I was saying anything to get you to stay. You know that I am terrible, Bellamy, you know that I am the Commander of Death, Destroyer of Worlds. You know there are no other words for this, for me.
Instead, Bellamy says, “if you need forgiveness, I’ll give that to you.” He means it. He is so earnest, all big bright eyes. Clarke thinks if she asked him to die for her, he would. She thinks if she asked him to live for her, he would.
Clarke is disgusted for trying to do either, for trying to play God again. Dante Wallace is still smiling at her, at a blank canvas neither of them want to paint. “Neither of us has a choice here, Clarke,” he’s still saying, and she is staring down at Mount Weather’s concrete ground. She wishes she bled out onto it, the scar on her arm to never become a scar. She wishes Mount Weather stayed underground and rotted instead of coming to the surface, crawling towards the light.
“I didn’t want this,” she says, and when she pulls the trigger, the canvas is Bellamy, his hand over her’s. She thought death was black, before, the ever consuming mouth of space, but it is red. It is Bellamy’s blood-stained cheeks, the way he tilts his head when he asks her to stay.
“What we did, Clarke,” he says, still the boy she lay against a tree with. A younger boy, not quite a warrior yet, but well on his way. What a mess she made of him, what a mess they have made of each other. “You don’t have to do this alone.”
Clarke thinks if she asked him to come with her, he would. There are some selfish wants Clarke will not allow herself, even when everything is dirt with decomposing bodies. They’re hers, all hers — not his. He has already killed too many people for her, with her, because of her.
We need each other, Bellamy, she doesn’t say. She is a girl, hallucinating with blood in her hair and ghosts at her feet, and Bellamy is still staring at her like she is everything he could’ve asked for and more. She is more. She is too much.
“Take care of them for me,” she says, and watches the way his face falls. There are still birds overhead, circling their prey, and it feels like they are the two last people in the world. Sometimes she wishes they were, if she felt like they could deserve it, if they were both terrible enough for each other.
She looks away from Bellamy. He is not terrible enough. Part of her hopes he never will be and, a selfish part, wishes he was worse.