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He was pointing at the moon but I was looking at his hand.
— Richard Siken
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Bellamy has a gun, at the start. It’s a pistol, fits into his waistband, and he wears it around camp like it’s a badge of honor instead of a blood oath. She knows now that he thought if he could convince everyone else, he could convince himself too, but then she just thought he was all bark and no bite. Bellamy, toothless, blunt canines. He is so easy to manipulate, all it takes is one raised eyebrow and the implication he might be less than what he says he is.
He is. He falls for it: hook, line, and sinker.
Her first kill is with a knife. She sunk it into a boy’s throat like it belonged there, and it is sad that she wants to go back to those days, when she killed close and personal. She watched the life drain out of Atom’s eyes, and then the grounder she slashed the throat of next, his warm blood seeping into her skin. She wishes she still felt when she killed, had it feel like it really meant something, like something was being lost.
Something is always being lost, but Clarke is good at snapping the necks now. She picked up a gun in the dark, Bellamy at her back, and she has never put it back down. Even when he was gone, especially when he was gone, even when he was right in front of her.
Bellamy thought he killed someone for the first time up in the sky, but it was on the ground, and it wasn’t with a gun, but just a bullet. Just a fucking bullet. She remembers laying against the tree, panting, chest heaving, and thinking: just a fucking bullet. All it took, right in the carotid artery, and Dax wasn’t Dax anymore, just a body who they still call Dax anyway. Nobody home, not anymore.
Did you feel it, too? Clarke wants to go back and ask, lean herself against the bark and look at Bellamy in the night. Do you miss this too, when everything hurt and we still thought we could be better than we are?
No, Bellamy would probably say, I’ve never left. Or she wishes he would. Bellamy would probably stay behind in the dark with her, if he didn’t want to drag her clawing and kicking into the light.
Sometimes she wishes she would let him. There were kids there, Clarke, people who trusted me, and I killed them, he’d said, back at Camp Jaha when she’d come back and Bellamy had coated his hands so thoroughly in blood she couldn’t see his nails anymore. She wishes that would have been enough to sway her at Mount Weather, to let them both die aching and miserable, to die for other people to live.
Clarke has died so many times to let other people live, but not anyone who actually ended up surviving. Both physically and metaphorically.
Not even her damn self.
Clarke expects herself to pull the trigger. She has known and not known Bellamy in equal parts, but she has always known him as he stands, doing whatever it takes for his sister to live.
Doesn’t it get tiring? Always doing whatever it takes? Clarke wants to talk it out, trade their terrible life stories back and forth like they can be put on the back burner, forgotten. She doesn’t dare; the last time she talked to someone about life being more than just surviving, there was another gun, another bullet in the stomach, another love being pulled from her messy hands like she had anything left to hold.
So Lexa is dead and Bellamy is still willing to let the world fall for Octavia to stand, and Clarke is out of options. She has tried being the good guy, the bad guy, the leader, the follower, she has tried. She has exhausted all her options. She is exhausted. She is holding a gun at Bellamy and he doesn’t even flinch.
If you’re going to shoot, he says, calm as anything, better make it a kill shot. Because I am opening that door.
Clarke expects herself to pull the trigger. She thinks it will go like this again: another love lost, another blooming bloody stomach, another goodbye cut short like it meant anything at all.
She doesn’t. She crumbles, instead. Lets Bellamy doom humanity if he dares. This is not love but a weakness, not a weakness out of love but a loss nonetheless.
Clarke is so tired of holding the gun up, she lets it drop. It stays clutched in her fingers, grip like a vice. She has been holding a gun for so long, it’s a part of her now, and she wishes it wasn’t. There are so many guns she wishes she could unhold, and yet they remain anyway.
I was so mad at you for leaving, Bellamy says. He’s less than he was before, more broken, no conviction his shoulders. He is tired. He wants an ending, a solution, he wants things to be over. She remembers that. She knows that.
You still should be, Clarke should have said. Be angry. Don’t forgive me. Don’t come near me ever again.
“But we need each other, Bellamy,” she says instead. She can’t stop looking at him, the scar of his broken nose. She knows and doesn’t know Bellamy anymore. She wishes she could give him an ending, but all she has is ruination.
He takes what she offers anyway, with shaking fingers.
She wishes they both died when she pulled the lever. Two people, one awful and one slightly less awful, gone in an instant. How different would things have been then, and she and Bellamy would have been together. Awful but together. Terrible but together. Bones slotted against one another like that means anything, atoms pressing against atoms.
All her happiest memories, she is still holding a gun. This says too much about her.