Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the question, you're the why,
In the ointment, you're the fly.
Though I know some things are indispensable,
Like a buck or two,
If there's one thing I can do without,
I can do without you!

In the barrel, you're a pickle,
In the gold mine, you're a nickel.
You're the tack inside my shoe.
Yeah, I can do without you!
- Calamity Jane, I Can Do Without You

2020AD, Polis Air Base, The End Times

She’d never even meant to fall for the stupid angel, and now here she was, risking her entire being for him. She supposed she should be used to falling by now, what with being a demon and all, but as she kept reminding the angel, she never meant to fall in the first place, just to poke around a bit.

“Clarke if you don’t think of something, I’ll…” the angel stared into her eyes with some degree of panic, which she supposed was fair given the circumstances. “I’ll never speak to you again.”

Aw, hell.

She flicked her wrists, putting in every ounce of energy she had left, and time swirled to a stop, until it was only the three of them left moving. The area around them stayed completely still, although the angel’s hair seemed to be dusted by some non-existent breeze.

“Angels.” She muttered under her breath, right as her legs gave out and she collapsed into his side.

His arms came up to circle her waist, holding her steady, and she refused to acknowledge how nice it felt. She didn’t do nice. She was a demon.

“Clarke? You alright?” He asked, lips practically pressed against her ear.

Armageddon was a really bad time for her to be getting distracted like this.

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

4004BC, roughly 6000 years earlier

It had all started outside the wall, watching Adam and Eve sprinting off out into the wide world. She’d been a little proud of herself for influencing them all the way out of the Garden - she’d only been intending to explain to them why living in ignorance wasn’t healthy, and they’d really taken that idea and run with it.

Quite literally.

There were rain clouds on the horizon - the first ones ever - and the air smelled wonderful on her forked tongue.

She slithered across the ground until she came across a pair of sandalled feet. Glancing up, she could see a mess of dark curls above a white robe, and whatever it was smelled distinctly of Celestial Pompousness.

She transfigured into a more human form, tipping her head at him in greeting. “Angel.”

Ah, from this angle he was a lot more recognisable - it was the angel who’d been guarding the Garden, all chiselled angelic beauty and warm brown eyes. One could get lost in those eyes, if they weren’t careful. She stared at his muscular shoulders instead. She was allowed to lust after an angel, right? It was definitely a sin, although probably not an acceptable one to the downstairs bosses. She didn’t much care.

He glared across at her, arms crossed. “So you’re the demon that showed them the tree.”

“You sound a lot less impressed than you should be,” she remarked, tossing an apple in the air and catching it in her other hand. “I just outwitted God.”

He bristled, turning back to watch the two humans stumbling towards the future. “Unless She wanted it that way.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Maybe She wanted them to leave the Garden.”

For a moment, she considered it, but soon dismissed the idea. “She’d hardly let a demon get the credit for that, would She?”

He made a face, but didn’t respond, and she observed him for a moment, thoughtful.

He turned to her, exasperated. “What?”

“Didn’t you have a flaming sword?”

“Uh.”

“I’m sure that the last time I saw you, you were holding a sword, fire and brimstone, that sort of thing. Where is it?”

He sighed heavily, glancing at her with something like guilt. “I gave it to Eve.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Not Adam?”

“She’s pregnant, she needs the close protection - Adam can attack things with his whole body, she can’t.” He frowned over at her. “You’re not going to ask me why I gave them an angelic sword?”

“I was assuming She told you to. Are you telling me she didn’t?  You chose to give away your angelic weapon?” Her eyes widened and she stepped closer. “That’s a fall-able offence, you know.”

He looked a little green all of a sudden, and she decided she liked this angel very much, despite her better judgement. He had a mind of his own, and he looked like a Greek statue - or he would, whenever those would be invented - and he seemed kind, she could feel it. Of course, Angels tended to be nice by default, but kindness was a choice. Kindness was always a choice.

“But I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she amended quickly. “Just tell the other Angels that it was Her desire.”

“I’m not going to lie.” He scoffed.

She rolled her eyes. “Fine, fall then, I don’t care. But it’s not exactly fun and games down there. Beelzebub can be a real dick. And you probably shouldn’t even look at Satan.”

“What about you? What if you did the right thing by nudging the humans from the Garden? Does that mean you get an all access pass back to Heaven?”

“God I hope not.” She hissed, scales beginning to climb up her arms defensively before she calmed down and they faded back beneath her skin. “All I got up there was judgement and misery. Besides, once you fall, you can’t un-fall. You just… exist.”

“That’s bullshit.” He said. “It shouldn’t work like that.”

“Careful - don’t say those things where She can hear.” She smirked at his fearful glance towards the sky, seemingly expected to be smited where he stood. When nothing happened, he relaxed slightly and turned to look at her. Like really, actually look. It was a little unnerving, actually. “What?”

“What’s your name?” Well, that wasn’t what she was expecting.

She could already taste the word on her tongue, and she didn’t like it, but she said it anyway. “Wanheda.”

“Doesn’t that mean-”

“-Princess of Death. Yeah. I don’t like to talk about it, and I don’t do that anymore anyway. I asked to be reassigned; that’s how I ended up here - they told me to just get up and stir up trouble. Indefinitely.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

“Nothing, it’s just… I’m gonna be here indefinitely too. So I guess we’re gonna be seeing a lot of each other.”

She laughed, already beginning to transform back into a snake, blue-green eyes getting larger as the scales flickered into existence. “Don’t count on it, Angel.”

She had slithered halfway across the wall before she heard him call out, “My name’s Bellamy, by the way.”

The word sounded like music and felt like the sun sinking into her cool blood and warming her from the inside out. She definitely didn’t want to think about what that meant.

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo 

4001BC, somewhere in the wide desert

“He just murdered his brother.”

“Well, his brother was being pretty obnoxious about the whole ‘in God’s favour’ thing.” She pointed out.

Bellamy looked over at her, horrified. “So you’re condoning murder?”

“Demon.” She reminded him, pointing at herself. “And I’m not condoning it, I’m just saying that I get it. Being slighted hurts. Being slighted by the Almighty? Nothing hurts worse.”

For a moment, it looked like Bellamy might ask her about it, or even say something comforting, but the moment passed and she breathed a sigh of relief. Cain spotted them and strode over, all resentful confidence.

“Which one of you is the angel?” He asked, sounding bored.

“How dare you.” They said in unison.

She jerked her thumb at Bellamy. Cain nodded in thanks and stood in front of him. “Apparently you’re supposed to mark me with something.”

Bellamy rested a hand on his forearm and it started glowing white and blue.

“What’s with the eyes?” Cain asked, squinting at her. “Do all demons have those?”

“No, just me. I’m a snake.” She said bluntly, flicking a forked tongue out at him for emphasis.

He looked semi-impressed, still intrigued by her blue-green snake eyes that always looked too bright, even in the harsh light of the desert. She miracled up some sunglasses to hide them from view, just to stop him from staring, and he smirked at her. Bellamy lifted his hand, and when he took it away, there was a twisted symbol burned into the skin. Cain observed it, then flashed his teeth.

“Thanks. See you around, Pretty Boy. You too, Demon Girl.”

After he was suitably out of earshot, halfway up a sand dune, she huffed. “Why do you get called pretty and I’m just a demon?”

Bellamy clicked his tongue at her sympathetically. “You’re very pretty, Princess.”

“Princess?”

“You said you didn’t like Wanheda.”

“No I didn’t, I said I didn’t like to talk about it.” She was kind of freaked out that he knew something like that about her without her telling him, but then she supposed that Angels were designed to be emotionally intuitive. Didn’t mean she had to like it though.

“Would you rather I called you-”

“-no.”

He looked like he was fighting a smile. She wanted to punch him. She also wanted to kiss him. Those two impulses happened a lot when he was around, but she chalked it up to the physical attractiveness thing coupled with the self-righteous angel thing - it definitely had nothing to do with the fact that she was beginning to really like spending time with him.

At all.

“So what did you do to the fratricidal maniac?” She asked, to cover the mixed emotions he would definitely be able to feel.

He shook his head, the smile getting wider. “You’re so not funny.”

“Stop smiling then.” She retorted, grinning. “And stop avoiding the question.”

“It’s so that no-one can ever kill him.” At her confused look, he continued. “It’s an eye for an eye type thing - he claimed anyone who saw him would kill him for what he’d done and She decided his punishment would be to walk the world as a lonely traveller, unable to die. He has to meet people and grow to care about them and then watch them wither and die while he lives on, and anyone who tries to kill him will suffer. I believe the exact wording was sevenfold vengeance, so basically he can’t die.”

“Cursed with Eternal Life.” She hummed softly to herself, thinking it over. “That’s the cruelest thing I’ve ever heard. And I’ve been in Hell.”

Bellamy didn’t say anything, and they both turned and watched as Cain disappeared over the top of a sand dune and vanished from sight.

“Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward,
may be the thing that keeps you going,
but that it's dangerous, that it's painful and risky,
that it's making a dare in the world and when has
the world ever let us win a dare?”
― Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go 

3004BC - the remains of Mesopotamia

“So that’s a rainbow?” She stared at the colourful thing arching across the sky. “I don’t like it.”

Bellamy rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, you wouldn’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s colourful.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well you’re not exactly Little Miss Sunshine, you know that, right?” He pointed out, urging another pair of mammals into the underbrush. He’d been doing that for half an hour - trying to make sure all the animals had somewhere dry to go - and she’d stumbled into him after subtly tempting Noah towards a bottle of wine, and making sure Ham saw it. There wasn’t exactly a lot of creativity in temptation when there were only a few people left in the world. Floods would do that.

“I like colours.” She said petulantly, kicking at a patch of mud and flecking the bottom of his pearly white robes with it. A small flicker of pride went through her at the sight. “I never said I didn’t like colours.”

“You’re in all black every time I see you. You even cover your eyes with those dark glasses. You’ve never been colourful.”

“Not true; sometimes my hair is red.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Well what about you?! The only thing I ever see you in is white. That’s not exactly bright and cheerful either.” She complained.

“The difference being that it’s a light colour.”

She sighed, waving a hand, and her robes turned navy blue. “See, colour.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes while Bellamy helped a rodent up a tree. She thought he might have forgotten the discussion after a while, but she had severely overestimated his ability to let things go, which he made very clear when he muttered, “Still dark though.”

Fuck.

She was in love with an Angel.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
- Socrates

399BC - Athens, before the trial of Socrates

Clarke had been pleading with him for hours. “I’m telling you, I can smuggle you out of the city. You don’t have to die for this.”

Socrates only smiled wanly. “If a man is not willing to die for his ideals then those ideals would have no meaning. Athens has closed its mind to me, Clarke, but my mind will remain open until the end.”

She groaned loudly. “That’s all well and good, but being dead doesn’t exactly help spread those ideals. Crito bribed the guards - all you have to do is walk out of here. Please, just open the door and run.”

He tutted and reached for her hand, patting it in comfort. A clear sign that he wasn’t planning to move from that spot; he was resolute. “You know better than most what it means to stick to your principles.”

“Yeah, and I was banished from Heaven, so I’m the poster child for reasons not to do that.”

“Clarke. You know why I must do this. If I do not die for my principles, what do I live for?”

Someone opened the door, and if they were surprised to find a woman sitting in the cell with him, they didn’t show it, just hauled Socrates to his feet and took him out to his trial. She followed them, watching the whole thing from a distance, watching as her friend prepared to give his life, facing death with a kind of serenity that was rarely seen.

“This is bullshit.” She muttered to herself, sniffling.

“Yeah, it is.” Bellamy materialised next to her, his arm ending up draped over her shoulder in comfort.

“This is your lot, you know. It wasn’t me.” She said angrily.

He just gripped her a little tighter. “It wasn’t me either. I promise.”

“He’s a good man.” Despite trying to hold it together, the last word caught in her throat, and she swallowed in an attempt to keep the tears down. “All he ever wanted to do was make the world good with him.”

“I know.” Bellamy said darkly.

Socrates drank the concoction of hemlock, smiling over at his friends, and past them to where Clarke and Bellamy were standing. He nodded to them, a silent goodbye, before he lay down on the ground and directed his last words at his closest friend.

“Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Pay it and do not neglect it.”

Crito laughed. And then he wept, with a great number of people in Athens joining him in his grief, and a demon, standing high on a hill with an angel at her side, cried with them.

“I have to say that although it broke my heart, I was, and still am, glad I was there.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

5BC - Bethlehem

Clarke was sitting next to Bellamy at four in the morning, outside a barn. She was still wearing her sunglasses. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken them off. Thankfully, Bellamy didn’t mention it, even if she did catch him looking at them with his brows furrowed in thought every now and then.

She’d spent the afternoon making sure all the inns were full, and he’d been guiding shepherds and kings towards the town with a well-placed star, only to get there and discover that Mary and Joseph were stuck without anywhere to sleep. He made sure one of the innkeepers mentioned his barn, and now there they were, just sitting - waiting.

“Haven’t seen you in a while.” He said, an air of forced casualness in his voice, deliberately not looking at her.

She shrugged. “I’ve been busy. This isn’t the only corner of the world, you know. You should get out more.”

“I get out plenty, Princess.”

“Oh!” She remembered suddenly. “I’m not Wanheda anymore.” She’d forgotten to mention it the last time she’d seen him, but then again, she’d been a little preoccupied.

He turned to look at her then, surprised. “Really? What did you change it to?”

“Clarke.” She said, smiling. “It’s Latin, sort of.”

“Which meaning do you prefer: scribe or scholar?”

“Whichever you like. As long as I’m not anything to do with death anymore.”

His eyes went soft, and he bumped his shoulder against hers. “You just helped bring Christ into the world. That’s life, Princess.”

“To be fair, that was an accident - I was trying to hinder you.”

“Doesn’t matter.” He said, more forcefully, and she had the feeling that he would have argued with her about the semantics for decades. A part of her wished he would. “You did a good thing.”

“Gross.” She deadpanned, but she didn’t move away, and in fact, didn’t move from that spot for the rest of the night.

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing.”
― Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

1614AD - London, a pub somewhere on the South Bank

William was writing in the corner, while Clarke and Bellamy cheers’d their cups of ale and caught each other up on their latest travels. It had been a few decades since they’d seen each other last - both busy on assignments from their respective offices.

“How’s Galileo?”

“Oh excellent!” Bellamy grinned. “He’s discovered Jupiter’s moons.”

Clarke sipped her ale. “I made those.”

“Made what?”

“Jupiter’s moons.” At his look of wonder, she suddenly felt self-conscious. “It was a long time ago, it doesn’t matter now anyway.”

His eyes were big and brown and serious and she could feel the kindness rolling off him in waves, which made her feel faintly sick. Or maybe that was what love felt like. The longer he stared at her, the worse it got, and then he said, very softly, very earnestly, “Of course it matters.”

And she felt it like a punch to the chest.

“Bellamy. Just drop it.” She muttered.

He looked put out, but he obeyed her wishes. “I heard you spent some time in the Netherlands; how’s William of Orange?”

“Assassinated for crimes against Catholicism. Speaking of which, how did restoring Roman Catholicism in Britain go?” She quipped, and he glared at her. “Alright, alright - how did you spend the Renaissance?”

“Dropped in on various artists, performed a few minor miracles, the usual. You?”

“Mostly hung out with Da Vinci.”

“Oh, what was Da Vinci like?”

“Uh, pretty grumpy, very gay. We got on like a house on fire. What was Michelangelo like?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Grumpy and gay.”

“Just how I like ‘em.” She grinned over at him and he snorted, almost choking on his drink.

When he got his breath back, he glanced over her shoulder at the man in the corner. “You seen any of his plays?”

“All of them.” She swigged her drink again. “His histories aren’t very accurate though. Especially Macbeth. I mean, witches aside, I met Macbeth once and he was nothing like the guy in the play.”

“I love that they’re fiction.” Bellamy said wistfully. “It’s kinda great to see events that we actually attended portrayed as more interesting than they were. Most of this job is really dull, you know.”

“Liar.”

“It is!”

“You love being here.” She accused. “You love the people and the music and the food - there’s nothing dull about it.”

He shrugged. “True. But my job? The places that Upstairs sends me? I promise, those are as dull as they come. I missed Da Vinci, Clarke.”

“But you met Michelangelo, so you can’t complain.”

“Yeah? Watch me.”

It was her turn to choke on a laugh, prompting a very irate Shakespeare to glare over at them and tell them to please “take your flirting, or arguing, or whatever folly it is, to a more distant table, if you intend to keep on with such violent outbursts.” Bellamy, suitably chastised and more than a little embarrassed, apologised to him profusely, but Clarke just offered to buy the man a drink and his anger was quickly forgotten. Soon, the three of them were swapping stories and drinking, and the next morning, when Shakespeare woke up, he’d have a vague memory of the strange couple he met, and some new story ideas swimming around his ale-soaked brain.

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”
― Sylvia Plath

1929AD - Wall Street, October 29th

It was chaos.

People were rioting, bankers were panicking, and rich people were feeling just a little exposed. She relished it - that slight lick of fear up a millionaire’s spine when faced with the reality that currency was a construct. But she didn’t enjoy the suffering it caused to the people without money, the people who deserved better.

Still, at least they were rioting.

She walked through the hullaballoo and made her way towards Trinity Church. She was almost at the door when something caught her elbow.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

She halted in her tracks, turning to look at Bellamy’s worried face. “Going to church.”

“You can’t do that.” He said urgently.

“You know the ‘demon’s bursting into flames’ thing is a myth, right? It’s uncomfortable, but I’ll live.”

“No, I mean, you really can’t do that. Archangel Gabriel is in there.” He winced. “He came down for a report just as Wall Street crashed and now he’s waiting for me to explain to him why I’m not doing my job properly.”

He was still holding her arm. She had a feeling he was trying to comfort himself, to become steel and marble, ready to face his boss.

She found herself becoming irate on his behalf. “You’ve got the entire world to cover, how can he expect you to deal with a few measly stock points when you’re busy with the Vatican and Trotsky and-”

-much as I appreciate your support, Princess, I really need you to go. If he sees you here, we’re both screwed.” He said, and she realised what he was actually afraid of - not of his boss’s wrath, but of something happening that forced them apart. Her heart started beating out a waltz in her chest and she had to remind herself that he didn’t love her like that, that he just thought of her as a friend.

“Okay, Angel.” She murmured, stepping back from the church door. His fingers slipped off her elbow, and she tried not to miss the contact. “See you around.”

The last thing she saw before she rounded the corner was Bellamy’s dejected face, and she had a feeling she’d missed something important. She was so distracted by his presence that she completely forgot what she’d even been going into the church for, and she wouldn’t remember for a number of months.

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

1946AD - Dresden

She walked down what remained of the street, trying to remember what the city used to look like, before the war and the destruction.

Humans had a habit of taking what little beauty they created in the world and crushing it to dust.

She wondered why God saw them as her most perfect creation - she wondered things all the time, it was why she’d fallen, for wondering things that got her into trouble - when so much of what they did was destroy. A mother was taking her child to school, holding him close as she walked, and Clarke shook her head at the absurdity of it; less than a year ago, this city had been reduced to ash, and yet the people carried on. Maybe that was why God loved them so much.

“Demon Girl?” A familiar voice asked.

“How many times do I have to tell you to call me Clarke?” She turned to find Cain leaning against a wall, lighting a cigarette.

“A few more.” He retorted, winking, and took a long drag, offering it to her. She shook her head, and he stuck it between his teeth again. “I like the new glasses.”

She shrugged. “The old ones were getting dated.”

“They’ll come back around - fashion always does.” He said, exhaling smoke towards the sky.

“Those’ll kill you, y’know.” She teased.

“Ha ha, very funny.” He said sarcastically, blowing out another puff of smoke, more aggressively. “Sure you don’t want some?”

She sighed, but she stopped and leaned next to him anyway, accepting the cigarette from his extended hand. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen him since that fateful day back in 4002BC. She bumped into him occasionally, all over the place, and he was always just as much of a cocky shit as the first time she met him. “How’s eternal life?”

“I don’t know, how’s yours?”

“I don’t know.” She answered honestly, staring around at the city. “I’m a demon. I’m not supposed to care about this. I’m supposed to cause things like this. But I just… is this what She created you for? To kill and war and destroy?”

He kicked at a piece of cobble. “I stopped asking what She wants a long time ago. Sometime around the time I changed my name. God-given just wasn’t suiting me anymore - just like you.”

“Maybe I should change it back.” She muttered, taking a drag of the cigarette. “Maybe that word is more suited to me than I thought.”

“You didn’t do this, Clarke.”

“Didn’t I?” She shook her head in disgust at herself. “Someone did. If you can’t place the blame on a demon, who else is at fault, Murphy?”

“The people who pulled the trigger. The people who sat in an office hundreds of miles away and told those people to pull the trigger. The people.”

“But why did She create them to be this?”

“Maybe it’s all some cruel joke that we’re not getting.” Murphy suggested, flashing a wry smile. “Anyway, why are you in town, did you hear that Angel boy was here or something?”

That was, in fact, exactly why she was there.

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.” He regarded her for a moment. “You should just tell him how you feel.”

“Don’t be stupid, Murphy. He’s an Angel.”

“So?”

“So I can’t feel that way towards him.” She felt an ache in her chest as she forced herself to acknowledge the truth of that statement. She’d been doing that a lot lately - reminding herself that loving Bellamy was one sin she wasn’t allowed to partake in. It hurt. It hurt worse than falling had. But she’d never admit that to anyone, and especially not to him.

“You’ve been friends for thousands of years and they haven’t caught you yet - how could loving him make it worse?”

“Because if he ever, for a single second, reciprocated, it would ruin his life. He might fall, or he might never speak to me again, or a hundred other terrible options.”

“Or you might both be fine. You could buy a cottage in Italy somewhere, so he could be close to all that boring history shit that he likes.” He tilted his head. “Take it from me, Clarke, loving someone from afar doesn’t make it better. They still live their lives. They still die. They just do it without you.”

She opened her mouth to retort, but before she could, her Angel materialised in front of them.

“I thought I felt you in town.” He said, smiling. “What are you doing here?”

She hesitated.

“I invited her.” Murphy said, and you know what, she took back every negative thing she’d ever thought about him, Cain was her new favourite human. If he even counted as a human anymore, that is. “Thought we could catch up, reminisce about the good old days.”

“Good old days?” Bellamy asked, frowning between them.

“Clarke hasn’t told you about the time we spent with Lord Byron? Or that year we hung out with Oscar Wilde?”

At his inquisitive expression, Clarke shrugged an explanation. “I told you, I like them grumpy and gay.”

“Lord Byron wasn’t-”

“She means me.” Murphy deadpanned, snatching his cigarette back from her and taking one final pull before he dropped it, putting it out beneath his boot. “How’s the miracling, Angel?”

“Slow. The world needs a lot more miracles, these days.”

“You should be getting paid overtime.”

“We don’t get paid.”

“...You should be getting paid overtime.” He repeated, more forcefully, making Clarke laugh.

Bellamy smiled over at her, pleased more by her amusement than by the joke, and she felt her heart trying to dance again, but quickly forced it back into its usual two-step. By now, she was sure he had to know how she felt; she felt it so constantly, and so much, that it was a wonder the mortals didn’t feel it. But he never said anything. Maybe that was his way of letting her down gently.

Murphy glanced between them. “Well, I’ve gotta see a man about restoring the art museum, so I’ll catch you both later.”

He waved lazily and slunk off into the heart of the city.

“He’s taking his immortality well.” Bellamy remarked. She hummed agreement. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, anxious. “So, you see him around a lot then?”

“Not as much as you, but yeah, I’d say so. We’re getting dangerously close to being friends at this point.”

A strange expression crossed his face, one she didn’t often see. She had most of his expressions mapped out by now, but every now and then there’d be a flicker of something that she couldn’t quite catch. It was always the same expression, always something similar to melancholy but not quite, and she still hadn’t worked out what it meant.

He didn’t address it though; he simply said, “Oh.”

Clarke nudged him back towards the main bit of road and they started walking together, side by side. “Uh. So I heard you were here looking for books?”

Bellamy had bought a bookshop in London sometime in the early 1800s, because his own personal collection was getting out of hand and he had nowhere to put them. He collected first editions of everything, and especially loved things of historical significance. The store itself almost never sold anything, and when it did, those books always mysteriously turned back up on the shelf within a week. Clarke didn’t mention it. Sometime in the 1890s, the shop had become so full that he opened another one in Washington, which was handy for Clarke when she wanted to visit America and didn’t feel like miracling herself somewhere to stay. Bellamy owned little apartments and things all over the world, but Clarke had never been very good at settling anywhere - the only thing she owned was a small cottage on one of the tiny islands off the coast of Scotland, somewhere no-one could bother her.

He smiled a little sheepishly in response. “Sort of. I’m actually here to help some of the bookshops that were destroyed last year rebuild their collections.”

“So you’re cheating and miracling the books to them?” She asked, raising an eyebrow.

“You know damn well I’m not allowed to perform frivolous miracles.” He said sternly. “I’d get demoted.”

She waited.

He held the severe look for half a minute longer before he caved. “Yeah, I’ve been sneaking a few miracles in here and there, removing damage to some books and rebuilding shelves, it’s nothing big enough for anyone Upstairs to notice.”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me, I think it makes you infinitely cooler.” She said, prompting his nervous expression to fall into a small smile.

He ducked his head, always embarrassed by any kind of praise, and immediately changed the subject. “Anyway, I’ve been meaning to ask but I haven’t had a chance - why were you trying to get into Trinity Church in 1929?”

Her heart dropped a little. “Uh. No reason, just… wanted to check it out.”

“Clarke.”

She sighed. “I wanted to steal some holy water while people were distracted by the stock crash.”

He froze. “You. You what?”

“I wanted-”

“-why in God’s name would you do that, Clarke, you’ll get yourself killed!” He actually looked angry with her, and she blinked a few times, trying to get her bearings with his sudden turnaround. At times like these, she was glad she wore sunglasses, because she really didn’t like the idea of facing him bare-eyed, exposed, when he was this emotional. It was already doing funny things to her chest.

“I was gonna be careful.” She promised. “I just wanted it for… insurance.”

“Insurance?”

“Look, if this,” she gestured between them, “ever gets discovered, your lot will give you a slap on the wrist, or maybe you’ll Fall. If Downstairs gets wind of our friendship, they’ll throw me in the darkest corner of Hell and torture me for the rest of eternity. All holy water can do is kill me, but they can make my existence into a constant cycle of agony. Between that and death, I pick death.”

He folded his arms, feet still planted firmly, unwilling to budge until he’d gotten his frustration across. “Clarke that’s insane. If it’s so dangerous to spend time with me, then you should stop spending time with me, not buy a suicide pill!”

It was like all the oxygen went out of Dresden. Maybe it did. She had to check that she hadn’t accidentally sucked the air out of the city before she took another breath.

“Is that what you want?” She asked, quiet.

“Yes.” He snapped.

She took a step back. “Fine. Do what you want, Angel, I don’t need you.”

She glimpsed a flash of regret on his face for barely a second before she transfigured into a snake and disappeared into the rubble.

“You build up all these defenses,
you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you,
then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person,
wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you.
They didn't ask for it.
They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you,
and then your life isn't your own anymore.
Love takes hostages.
It gets inside you.
It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness,so simple a phrase like
'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter
working its way into your heart. It hurts.
Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.
I hate love.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Kindly Ones

1991AD - Los Angeles

It had been a few decades or so since she’d last seen the angel - with the notable exception of a drunken meeting at Pride in the 70s that she didn't much care to remember - and she was coping just fine, thank you very much. After their fight, if it could be called that, she’d deliberately avoided him. Whenever she heard he was going to be somewhere, she would turn and run in the other direction, as far and as fast as she can. It was who she was - she would always be the person who ran. In her defence, Bellamy didn’t exactly try to catch her, so after a few years she decided he really was done with their friendship and pretended she’d never even met an Angel.

And now here he was, sitting in the passenger seat of her car.

“Bellamy? What are you doing here?” She asked, starting the engine but leaving the handbrake on so she could turn to look at him.

He pointedly wasn’t looking back at her, acting all broody and mysterious as he stared out the window. She tried very hard not to find it adorable, but honestly, she was a lost cause by now. If she was really honest with herself, she was a lost cause about six thousand years ago, but she didn’t want to think about that while he was literally right next to her.

He didn’t seem to notice the internal battle happening beside him, he just shrugged a shoulder and said, “I hear things.”

She made a face. “I’m sorry; you hear things? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I heard about your plan.” The ‘plan’ he was referring to was Clarke’s decision to hire someone to sneak into a church and steal ten vials of holy water, which she had only thought of that morning, and only told one person - so she was already resolving to kill Cain - and she hadn’t even had a chance to put it into action yet. He frowned. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

It was her turn to shrug. “So?”

“So?”  He finally whipped around to look at her, flabbergasted. “So?  So you could die, Clarke!”

“I’ll be discorporated, it’s not the same thing.”

“Yeah, if you get caught, maybe. But even if you succeed at stealing it, if you touch it, it’ll destroy you. Not discorporated – gone.”

“I’ll be careful. This really isn’t a big dea- why should you care?”

He fell silent. His eyes raked over her face and she felt too exposed, wished she had her sunglasses on, or something to hide behind. Maybe a small boulder. Or a small child. Or, probably more helpfully, a large child.

After a long moment, he slumped a little, and his expression shifted to something she didn’t really know what to do with, right before he pulled out a flask.

“Here.” He grumbled, handing it over. “Now you don’t need to stage a dangerous robbery and risk being sent back to Hell.”

“Is that–”

“–holy water. Yes.” He seemed sad, somehow. “Don’t thank me. I’m not doing this for that.”

“Bellamy, I…”

“Don’t. Just… don’t.” He said darkly.

She clutched it to her chest, held it like she wished she could hold his heart, and stared at him with wonder. The air in the car started to become thick with tension and gratitude and love and she felt ill again, but she didn’t care because her Angel was sitting in the passenger seat and he hadn’t moved yet.

“Does this mean you want to be friends again?” She asked tentatively.

“I never wanted to stop, Clarke. I just didn’t want you risking your life.”

“You’re worth it.” She said, biting her lip as if that could stop the words from being heard. His head whipped around, eyes wide and vulnerable, and she swallowed painfully. “You’re my best friend, Angel.”

For once, he was struck completely speechless.

They sat in silence for minutes or hours or possibly months, and still he didn’t say a word, just looked at her with that warm brown kindness she’d loved for 6000 years.

When he did speak, his voice was hoarse. “Yeah?”

She nodded and opened her mouth to say something, anything, and then her car radio crackled to life and Beelzebub used a rapper’s voice to talk to her.

“Wanheda, excellent work on the Warsaw Pact, we heard you were in Los Angeles, what are your demonic plans?”

She didn’t take her eyes off Bellamy while she spoke, completely making something up off the top of her head. “Uh, I was thinking of getting a singer to tear a photo of the pope on Saturday Night Live.”

“Perfect! Keep up the good work!”

The radio fizzled out.

Bellamy’s jaw twitched when he swallowed. “SNL is in New York.”

“They don’t know that, do they,” she pointed out, smiling hesitantly. “Want to get some food?”

He thought it over. “Maybe some other time.”

“I’ll pay.” She suggested - begged, really, which was incredibly undignified - putting the flask of holy water in the glove box.

“Some other time.” He said, and then he was gone, and she was left alone in her car, the air still thick with love and the taste of missing him, and she wondered if it would ever get easier to live with.

“Don't Panic.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2006AD - Vancouver

It was cold and wet, just how she liked it. Her snake instincts tended to seek out warmth, but she’d always preferred the dreary climates. Perhaps because a certain Angel emanated warmth and whenever she was around him, the cold was a good excuse to stand closer, as if she couldn’t just miracle herself warm.

At the moment, however, Bellamy was somewhere in Egypt or Australia, or maybe China, she wasn’t sure, and she was sitting on a bench in a cemetery, letting the rain drench her.

Hastur and Ligur emerged from the mist, carrying something between them. Both of them looked miserable, which she would assume was because they hated mixing with the mortals, if she didn’t know that their faces always looked like that.

“Hastur.” She said in greeting. “Eaten any babies recently?”

“No.” She said, looking unimpressed, as per usual.

“Ligur, you made any rich, white men commit disgusting crimes this week?”

“Ten in the last two days.” He confirmed, grinning slimily.

She hated them both.

“What do you two want? Beelzebub just said be here at dusk, so, what is it?”

They glanced at each other and then thrust the basket they were carrying into her lap. She cracked it open, only to discover what appeared to be a human baby gurgling happily inside it.

“Uh, what the fuck?” She asked, mostly politely.

Hastur made a face like she’d just smelled something terrible. Or, again, maybe it was just her face. Clarke didn’t really care enough to check. “Due to your excellent work fermenting evil for the last 6000 years, Beelzebub is entrusting you to deliver the child of Satan and to watch over her growing up, to ensure she reaches the age of thirteen and ushers in the apocalypse, as is her rightful destiny.”

Oh, so nothing huge then.

She nodded. “Yep. Okay. Deliver the Antichrist to the right home, got it.”

“Not to a home, just to the nearest Satanic Nunnery.” Ligur said. “They’ll deposit her in the right place.”

“Right.” She said, peeking into the basket at the baby again.

The Antichrist was surprisingly adorable.

“I’m not suggesting the world is good, that life is easy,
or that any of us are entitled to better. But please,
isn’t this the kind of thing you talk about in somber tones,
in the afternoon, with some degree of hope and maybe even a handful of strategies?”
― Richard Siken

2006 - Vancouver, a few hours later, in a closed down diner

“Are you shitting me?!” Bellamy burst in.

“Language.” Murphy deadpanned. Clarke was sitting, cross-legged, on a table, staring at the basket, and Murphy was draped across the counter, counting ketchup packets for something to do.

“Fuck you.” Bellamy snapped in response, making Clarke snort. He rounded on her. “What?”

She waved a hand. “Nothing. Curse words suit you, Angel.”

It might have been her imagination, but it looked like he flushed, and he quickly glanced away, sharing some kind of meaningful glare with Murphy. She miracled herself a glass of whiskey and ignored them, scrolling through twitter while they had their wordless conversation.

“-larke? Clarke.”

She glanced up from the latest celebrity engagement announcement. “What?”

“Why didn’t you tell me that you called Murphy in?”

“You didn’t ask.” She pointed out, looking back to her phone.

He yanked it from her hand and held it out of reach. “You acquired the Antichrist and thought you’d call Cain?  I thought you were smarter than this.”

"I can hear you." Murphy said, not actually sounding that bothered. 

“Shame.” Clarke mumbled, more focussed on trying to snatch her phone back. He twisted out of her way and she grimaced. “You know, I think you’ve been spending too much time with me, Angel. You’ve picked up some nasty habits. Swearing, stealing, consorting with criminals, littering–”

“–I would never litter!” He was just frustrated enough for her to grab her phone from his hand, and she smiled softly at him as she pocketed it.

“I know. You’re too nice for that.”

“Why do I get the feeling that you’re mocking me?”

“Because she definitely is,” Murphy said lazily, interrupting them. Clarke had honestly forgotten he was there. “Now, before you two flirt some more, can we work out what to do about the demon baby?”

They quietened, Clarke shooting an irritated look at Murphy and Bellamy checking on the baby, stroking her chubby little cheeks with a great deal of care and affection.

“This is the Antichrist? Are you sure?” He asked, still gazing at the little thing.

Clarke definitely shouldn’t be jealous of a baby.

“Yeah, she is. I’m supposed to drop her off with the Satanic Nuns so they can send her to a terrible family so she grows up to hate humanity, which means that on her thirteenth birthday, when she inherits her power, she can destroy the world.”

“So why are you sitting in an abandoned diner with the first murderer?”

“Because…” She faltered.

He turned to look at her, a wide smile spreading across his face as he realised what it meant. “Because you don’t want to.”

She ducked her head. “Shut up. Do you want the world to end? No more bookshops, no more history channel, no more food, no more-”

“-I’m not arguing with you.”

She wrung her hands together, nervousness trying to channel itself out through her palms. “You might, when you hear my plan.”

“Oh? What’s the plan?”

“Give her to a good family. Raise her right.” She pushed her glasses further along the bridge of her nose, instinctively putting her guard up. “You and I can watch over her, make sure she’s not too good or too evil; she can grow up a normal girl, with a normal life, and she can make her own choices. If, at the end of it all, she still wants to destroy everything, then at least we can say we tried.”

Murphy and Bellamy looked back at her, the former like she was crazy, and the latter like he was torn between panicking and giving her a hug.

Clarke scooped up the baby, bouncing her on her hip and delighting at the peals of giggles that came from the child. When she looked back at Bellamy, that indecipherable expression was on his face again, tempered with something like nervousness, as he watched her playing with the baby.

“Well?” She asked.

Bellamy didn’t answer, that look just kind of plastered over his features, like he was glitching.

“Angel, what do you say?”

Murphy clapped him on the shoulder, snapping him out of his stupor, and he shook his head a little, regaining his bearings.

“Okay.” He said, eyes serious and so full of heart she wanted to cry and kiss him and maybe punch him, just for good measure.

“Seriously?” Murphy asked, stealing the glass of whiskey Clarke had left on the table and downing the last of it. “Well, I guess if you’re both committed to this insanity, I’m in. I’m all in. This is gonna be fun.”

Clarke snorted. “Babysitting the Antichrist? What could go wrong?”

Chapter Text

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

2020AD - Polis Air Base, The End Times

Falling in love with the demon had happened quite by accident and he’d really managed to trip ass backwards into it, but now here they were, standing in the middle of the desert and waiting for the world to end. Loving was just far too easy for an angel – they were beings of love, after all. Yet it somehow took Bellamy nearly 6000 years to realise that he didn’t just love Clarke in the way he loved everyone, but in the romantic way that Greek philosophers described. The two-halves-of-a-whole kind.

By the time he realised, it struck him that he’d actually been in love with Clarke for quite some time – almost since their very first acquaintance, when they became friends – but he’d somehow managed to miss it. Oh well, it happened. He got busy. The world was due to end. He loved his best friend. They both seemed equally catastrophic, somehow.

He gripped the flaming sword tighter and looked over at her, standing determinedly in the face of their imminent demise.

They were so screwed.

“Clarke, if you don’t think of something, I’ll…” He trailed off, unsure, and she stared back at him, eyes huge and practically glowing blue. “I’ll never speak to you again.”

The brief flash of horror that crossed her expression steeled his resolve, and then she was flicking her wrists and the world felt funny, like it was being dragged through porridge or something, and then it shuddered to a stop. Or rather, time did.

She glared over at him, eyes fixated on his hair for some reason, and muttered, “Angels,” derisively, right before she dropped towards the floor.

He managed to catch her around the waist, holding her up, and he realised she was shaking slightly, all her energy spent on keeping the world frozen.

“Clarke? You alright?”

She leaned more heavily on him, nodding, and he knew he shouldn’t be enjoying their closeness so much, especially when they had Armageddon to worry about, but this was nice. It was more than nice.

He was in love with a demon and it was literally the end of days.

Fucking excellent.

She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

4004BC - roughly 6000 years earlier

He was watching Adam and Eve running away, stumbling towards the future in that stilted way that humans would come to be known for, when a large black snake slithered up to his ankles. It had enormous blue-green eyes and red patterns along its sides, and he recognised it as a demon almost immediately.

It started shifting, moving upwards, and then a short, blonde woman was standing where the serpent had been, tilting her head at him in acknowledgement. “Angel.”

She was wearing all black, and there were red streaks in her hair. Even in a more humanoid form, her eyes were slitted like a snake’s, and they seemed too big somehow, but not in an unpleasant way. She didn’t look him in the eye, too busy frowning at his shoulder, for some reason.

He folded his arms in a way he hoped conveyed his displeasure. “So you’re the demon that showed them the tree.”

She only smirked at him, pulling an apple from thin air and tossing it between her hands; taunting him with what she’d just done. “You sound a lot less impressed than you should be. I just outwitted God.”

He tried not to react, turning back to watch the humans, but he was angry at her cavalier attitude to what she’d just done. She’d changed the course of history. Unless- “Unless She wanted it that way.”

She blinked, big and wide and blue. “What?”

Eve stumbled and Adam caught her, helping her up. They were moving forward, always forward, not looking back. “Maybe She wanted them to leave the Garden.”

The woman frowned, thinking it over, but she quickly shook her head. “She’d hardly let a demon get the credit for that, would She?”

He scrunched up his nose, trying not to admit that she was right. He could feel her gaze focussed in on him, and he tried to ignore it, watching the mortals, but after a while he became exasperated. “What?”

“Didn’t you have a flaming sword?”

“Uh.” Shit.

“I’m sure that the last time I saw you, you were holding a sword, fire and brimstone, that sort of thing.” She glanced around curiously, as if it would appear from the sand. “Where is it?”

He sighed in defeat. “I gave it to Eve.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Not Adam?”

“She’s pregnant, she needs the close protection - Adam can attack things with his whole body, she can’t. You’re not going to ask me why I gave them an angelic sword?”

“I was assuming She told you to. Are you telling me she didn’t? You chose to give away your angelic weapon?” She stepped closer to him and he wasn’t sure why, or why he didn’t mind, but he didn’t, and she did. “That’s a fall-able offence, you know.”

Judging by the look on her face, he hadn’t quite managed to keep his panic about that statement internal.

She reassured him, and then they were discussing philosophy and their purpose like they were old friends, like it was easy. He’d never talked about that sort of thing with anyone else, but she was eager to ask questions, happy to poke fun at him. It was strange, but he was almost enjoying discussing moral relativity with this demon. She emanated a strange kind of power, the kind that could kill, but he sensed something softer beneath it, a heart that beat the way his did. Whether it was remnants of her ethereal being or something unique to her, he wasn’t sure, but he was fascinated.

She caught him staring at her. “What?”

He thought it over. “What’s your name?”

“Wanheda.”

“Doesn’t that mean-”

She looked sad. The big, old kind; the kind with permanence. “Princess of Death. Yeah. I don’t like to talk about it, and I don’t do that anymore anyway. I asked to be reassigned; that’s how I ended up here - they told me to just get up and stir up trouble. Indefinitely.”

He blinked. “Oh.”

She parroted the statement back at him, a question.

He shrugged. “Nothing, it’s just… I’m gonna be here indefinitely too. So I guess we’re gonna be seeing a lot of each other.”

She laughed, and it was a cheery, melodic sound, one he wanted to hear again. She started to slip back into snake form, that playful smile still on her lips. “Don’t count on it, Angel.”

He watched her slithering away, and for some reason was inclined to call out, “My name’s Bellamy, by the way.”

Her only response was an upward flick of her tail as she disappeared into the distance. He wasn’t sure what the gesture meant and he didn’t much mind - all he knew was that he wanted to talk to this demon again. And that terrified and amazed him in equal measure.

“...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars,
rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.”
― Homer, The Iliad

1184BC - The Fall of Troy

It was Odysseus’s idea.

Bellamy watched the destruction from a window, watched as the Greeks sprung from the enormous wooden horse and started attacking Troy from within its walls.

He wondered if he was impressed at their ingenuity or concerned at the Trojan’s stupidity, and he decided that it was probably safer to feel both at once.

He leaned out over the ledge and waved a hand, miracling as many civilians as he could away from the fighting.

He wanted to intervene, but it wasn’t his war.

God made it very clear that the Ancient Greeks made their own choices, independent of Her, so Bellamy was essentially sidelined for another couple of centuries, at least in Greece. He probably could head south, but the weather was nice here, and he wasn’t going to let a decade-long war ruin that. Still, he was twiddling his fingers, trying desperately to refrain from diving in and helping.

Nothing could stop Clarke though - he could see her, fighting back to back with a Greek soldier one minute and high-fiving a Trojan the next. None of them seemed to mind that she switched sides faster than the guards let the gift horse in.

She was revelling in it, in the chaos of it all.

She was the eye of the storm.

It was mesmerising.

And he couldn’t tear his eyes away.

Centuries later, when Homer wrote his Iliad, he wrote of the woman whose face launched a thousand ships, whose beauty started a war and defied the gods themselves, and Bellamy couldn’t help but think that Helen of Troy didn’t hold a candle to a fiery demon with eyes like a snake, darting through the streets and flicking a dagger deftly between her fingers.

"We're not damaged goods, maybe we're just lonely people."
 - Orla Gartland

487AD - Killeaney, Aran Mor, Ireland

Bellamy and Cain had an agreement to meet up once a century, every century. In theory, this would be the easiest way to keep in touch, but when Bellamy went traipsing across the entire planet only to find the man in a monastery on a little Irish island, it was more than a little frustrating.

“What are you even doing here, Cain?”

“Oh I changed it.”

“Changed what?”

“My name.”

He did a double take. “You can’t just change your name, Cain, it’s God given.”

“Which was exactly my problem with it, Angel Boy, get with the times.” He said, leaning back in his chair.

Bellamy sighed, throwing up a quick prayer to give himself strength in the face of Cain’s constant cocksuredness. “Fine. What did you change it to?”

“Murchadh.”

Bellamy blinked. “Sea Warrior?”

He shrugged, shifting a little uncomfortably. “It was the first thing that came to mind.”

“What?”

He groaned. “Look, I… I arrived here, looking for some peace and quiet, and I was living in this abandoned barn by the ocean, or at least I thought it was abandoned - until a woman found me. She asked me who I was and what I was doing there, and I just… panicked.”

“You panicked? You’re the first murderer, you don’t panic. What really happened?”

“No, I’m serious. I- she- look, she was kind to me, okay?” Murchadh squirmed a little in his seat. “People aren’t kind to me. It’s part of this stupid mark,” he waved his arm in Bellamy’s face, “and the weird vibe it gives off - no-one can kill me, but no-one wants to come near me either. The mark of the very first killer in history, it carries my history around, makes people wary, and I get it, but… she was nice. She offered to let me stay in her house. Offered me clothes, food, never asked for anything in return. And I wanted her to like me. I cared what she thought.”

“So you changed your name and stayed here?” Bellamy actually felt a little warmed by the story.

Murchadh made a face. “Don’t get all Sweet, Lovesick Angel on me, I’m not in the mood.”

He raised his hands in surrender, gesturing for him to continue.

“We lived together for twenty years.” A wistful expression crossed his face, softening his usually sharp features. “She was a good person.”

“Was?”

“She died, two years ago. Bolgach. It took her within weeks. She’s buried out there, in the monastic cemetery, and I visit her every day.”

Bellamy held back a wince. “I didn’t know that smallpox had made it up this far. If I’d have known-”

“-you would have done what exactly? She wasn’t a saint or a regent or a doctor. She was just an ordinary Irish woman, who showed kindness to a man who never deserved it. That’s hardly worth your superiors taking an interest.”

“I could have done something.” Bellamy said. “Whether Heaven wanted me to or not, I would have, Murchadh, I swear.”

The man regarded him, emotions flickering across his face one by one as he finally settled on a mixture of sadness and respect. “You’re not like the others, Bellamy. You’re interesting.”

“Angels were born to spread harmony and create miracles to make the world a better place. I’m only doing what I was born to do.”

“No. You’re not.” He flashed a meagre grin. “You’re one of a kind, Angel.”

If he was honest with himself, Bellamy wasn’t really sure how to feel about that.

Murchadh tossed him a roll of bread. “Now, how has your century been? What’s the blue-eyed demon been up to?”

“Here's what I think," I say and my voice is stronger and thoughts are coming,
thoughts that trickle into my noise like whispers of truth. "I think maybe everybody falls,"
I say. "I think maybe we all do. And I don't think that's the asking."

I pull on her arms gently to make sure she's listening.

"I think the asking is whether we get back up again.”
― Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

1349AD - York, St Deny’s Church

“It’s getting worse.” Bellamy said, shifting his weight anxiously from foot to foot.

“It’s a plague, it’ll do that.” Clarke said from where she was sitting cross-legged on his desk.

He set his jaw. “I could miracle it better.”

She levelled him with a hard stare which, with her eyes - even behind sunglasses - was always alarming. “A miracle of that size would kill you, Bellamy.”

“But it would save all these people.” He gestured around them, at the sick, unconscious bodies in the church, at the nurses who attended to them. “It would save millions.”

“And who are you to decide that they need saving?” She asked, tilting her head at him, like a challenge. “What if, in the throes, you save someone who’s supposed to die, someone evil, someone who, if they lived, would destroy everything. What would that make you? Would you be responsible for his actions?”

He opened his mouth to retort, only to find he didn’t have one. Clarke had a habit of doing that - saying something that completely halted him in his tracks - and half the time she wasn’t even trying. She just surprised him.

Constantly.

When he didn’t respond immediately, her gaze drifted past him, to the pile of bodies by the back door, the bodies that couldn’t be taken to the cemetery because there was no longer any room. Her eyes softened and dimmed behind the glasses, and she pressed her lips together the way she always did when she was suppressing her emotions.

She cared so much, and she never wanted anyone to know.

He’d seen her, performing demonic miracles to help people, glancing over her shoulder to make sure that neither Heaven nor Hell could see. And he was sure that she’d seen him using his celestial abilities for more petty tasks, but she never called him out on it.

They were friends, of course they were, but more than that, they trusted each other. Enough not to ask the question they knew would cause the other unnecessary strife.

“I could burn it.” She suggested solemnly.

“Burn what?”

“The church.” She said, and tiny flames began licking around her fingers. “Anywhere that the sickness has completely taken over. I could stop it from spreading any further.”

“That’s murder, Clarke.”

“Demon.” She pointed out, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was still looking at the pile of bodies. “And these people are screwed anyway. It’s the Black Plague - it’s a death sentence, it doesn’t matter if they’ll still be holding on for a few more days, they’re already dead.”

“Not all of them.”

Her eyes snapped to him, vacant. “It would be enough. The few that would have survived against the thousands, the millions, that could die - it’s worth it.”

He reached for the hand that was closest to him, covering it with both of his own. The fire barely had a chance to singe his skin before she extinguished it, but her hand was still unnaturally warm. “Clarke. You know you can’t do that.”

“Yes, I can.”

“No. You can’t.”

Her gaze dropped to their hands, and he could see her resolve wavering. Her face crumpled a little, revealing her true emotions, just for a moment. Her heart was breaking for these people, and she just wanted to end their suffering; he could feel it, churning beneath the surface of her skin, like water at boiling point, and he knew exactly how that felt.

“I can’t just do nothing, Bellamy.” She whispered.

“We’re not doing nothing. We’re doing the best we can, okay?” He squeezed her fingers reassuringly.

She withdrew her hand. “It’s not good enough.”

“It’s all we have.”

She started walking away, frustration rolling off her in burning hot waves. “It’s not good enough.”

He didn’t know where she was going or what she was planning to do, but he knew that whatever it was, it was bad. She would get herself discorporated, or destroyed, or worse, and he couldn’t let that happen.

“So let me miracle it all gone.” He said. She froze. He waited, playing his last card and hoping to God it worked.

He knew it had when she stepped back towards him just so she could jab him in the chest with her finger, rather angrily. “Not a chance in Heaven, Angel.”

He relaxed, catching her finger. “Then we do what we can, and we pray that it’s enough.”

Clarke slumped in defeat and her eyes drifted towards the pile of bodies again. She rolled up her sleeves and snapped her fingers, and the bodies disappeared. He didn’t ask where they went. Her jaw was set in determination, and she crossed her arms, surveying the church again. “I don’t pray, Angel.”

Once again, he was rendered completely speechless.

He covered it by busying himself helping the nurses, and only occasionally glancing over at Clarke as she tended to the sick and sneakily replenished supplies with a demonic snap of her fingers.

He would never get used to the myriad of feelings that swirled around his chest whenever he looked at that demon.

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words,
which laid the foundation. It is too long ago.
I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

1817AD - Bel Ami Books, London

The store opening had gone exceedingly well. He’d sold all the books he intended to, and kept all the editions he didn’t. Even Murphy had come, swanning in just before close to desecrate a few Keats volumes.

Now, Bellamy sat behind the counter, pretending to count the days takings even though he knew exactly how much money he’d earned, and also didn’t care about, just so that he could imagine he wasn’t upset about a certain demon not turning up.

The bell above the door jingled as someone entered the shop.

“Sorry, we’re actually, closed, I thought I locked that-” He said, looking up.

“You did.” Clarke was standing in his bookshop, and her hair was pulled into one of those intricate regency twisted buns, and she was wearing a navy blue dress, a package tucked under her arm, and she was smiling at him like nothing he’d ever seen. “I broke in.”

“You wasted a miracle on unlocking a door?” He asked, trying to speak over the frantic pounding of his heart against his ribs. He shouldn’t be this excited to see her, he really shouldn’t.

Her smile turned a tad wicked. “Nah, I just picked the lock.”

“Of course you did.” And that should not have made him more attracted to her, holy shit.

“Anyway, I… I’m sorry I missed it, I was busy in Germany watching Karl Drais ride his dandy horse.”

He blinked. “Uh. Is that a euphemism of some kind?”

She laughed and moved further into the shop, until she was leaning over the counter, forearms resting on his book of transactions. “No, but I kinda wish it was. No, it’s a type of vehicle - he’s going to France to patent it next year - a velocipede.”

“Huh.” He said, not really sure how to respond, considering his brain was still catching up with ‘ride his dandy horse’.  “You don’t have to apologise for missing it, honestly I didn’t expect you to come anyway.”

“What?”

“No, wait, that’s not what I meant, I just mean that I wouldn’t have been upset if you hadn’t showed.” The hurt on her face only deepened, and he wanted to bury his face in his hands or maybe for the ground to swallow him whole. “Not, not like that, I just mean…”

She stared at him expectantly.

“I’m really glad you’re here, Princess.” He admitted. “I missed you.”

Mirth sparkled in her eyes, but she didn’t tease him like he thought she might. Instead, she pulled the package from under her arm and slid it across the counter.

He inspected it, deducing pretty quickly that it was a book.

“Well? Open it!” She said, grinning at him. “It’s your present.”

“You didn’t need to get me a present.”

“Well I did, so open it.”

He pulled at the string around the brown paper and it fell away, along with the wrapping, to reveal not one but two books.

The Watsons, and Sanditon, by Jane Austen, were sitting on his shop counter, and he felt his heart just stop beating completely.

“But… but these are…”

“Her unfinished novels.” She said excitedly, watching him carefully for his reaction. “I went to visit her before she died, sat by her bed for a few weeks. She was just as wonderful as you said, and I wish I’d met her sooner, I have a feeling we would have caused a lot of trouble - the good kind. We started talking about you, about how you helped her brothers in the militia, and she said she would love for her books to be sold by you in London. I promised that you would, and then I was talking about how I wished I could give you some kind of gift to celebrate the opening and she said she wished she could see the shop. And then she… she told me where these were. She made me swear that these two would never be sold, that they were for my eyes only.”

“But these are finished.” He said, flicking through them. “I thought Jane only wrote five chapters of The Watsons before she abandoned it?”

“She picked it up again a few months ago, when she realised she was dying. She didn’t want to leave them without endings.”

“But…”

“They’re the only two copies in existence - to everybody else, they’ll be unfinished forever, but you get to hold them, to keep watch over them for her. It’s what she would have wanted.”

“But…”

A crease appeared between her eyebrows. “Do you not like them?”

She looked so worried that she’d messed up, so concerned that he didn’t like them, meanwhile he was trying to comprehend the enormity of the gesture she’d just made, and why it was making tears appear in the corners of his eyes and his cheeks warm as he looked at her.

And holy fucking fuck, he was in love with a demon.

His heart started beating, a few minutes late, but there it was, tripping over itself in his chest again.

“Clarke, I…” He took a shaky breath. “I love them.”

“Really?” She looked relieved, smile creeping back.

“This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

“That can’t possibly be true.” She said, and she was right there, he could just lean forward and kiss her now.

He could do it.

He could.

He couldn’t do it.

Instead, he smirked. “Face it, Princess; you’re nice.”

“How dare you.” She said, but she didn’t look altogether that upset, and the bookshop seemed to be humming in her presence. It liked her; or maybe it just sensed Bellamy’s love. Either way, despite how fantastically the launch of the store had gone, he was at his happiest with one single customer, leaning over his counter and making the shelves sing ancient ballads to themselves.

“I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

1929AD - Trinity Church, Wall Street, October 29th

He had finally successfully convinced Clarke to leave, and he watched her go with some level of sadness, missing her already.

He’d been struggling with it for the last century; every time they bumped into each other, or met up for lunch, or did one another a favour, he felt like he couldn’t function. Like the love he felt would swallow him whole.

She must know, by now, how he felt, but she never acted any different than normal. Even for a being of love, he emanated an abnormally high amount of it whenever she was around, and it was like she took it with her wherever she went. Like she carried his heart, without even knowing it, and he’d given it up willingly. To a demon.

It was pathetic, really.

He slipped into the church the second she rounded the corner.

“Ah, Bellamy, you’re late.” Gabriel said, clapping his hands together. “No matter. How is it out there?”

“Chaotic. I got sidetracked helping people fi-”

“-Now, I assume you know why I’ve called this meeting?” Gabriel stood in the centre of the church, and Michael, Sandalphon and Uriel stood behind him; the most intimidating celestial entourage of all time.

“Uh. No, sir?”

He tutted. “You’ve been slacking, Bellamy.”

Michael was staring at him harder than the others, and he felt uncomfortable. She was the youngest of the original angels, and he had always felt like something of an older brother to her, but it was evident that her days of feeling the same familial connection were over. She was the military angel now - the Angel of Death. She was the celestial inverse of Wanheda; but where Clarke had shirked her violent destiny, Michael had leaned into it.

“I’m sorry?” He asked, distracted.

“In the last century, you’ve been late to update us, missed certain important historical events, and have even been seen with the First Murderer.”

“That’s by God’s direction, sir, I’m to check in with him once a century.” That wasn’t strictly true - it was his idea - but he figured God wouldn’t mind.

“That may be, but how do you explain the other mistakes?”

I’m in love with a demon and it’s distracting.

I’m head over heels for an occult being and it’s hard to concentrate.

I love Clarke.

“The population has skyrocketed, and there are a lot more fires to put out now than there ever were before.” He bluffed. “It’s been a lot for me to handle on my own.”

“Ah, I see - you need help.”

“No!” It burst from his lips, a lot louder than he intended, and Michael raised one perfectly sculpted eyebrow at him, interested. He ducked his head apologetically. “No, I’ve, uh, I’ve got the hang of it now, it just took me a while.”

“A hundred years is a hell of a bell curve.” Uriel said, looking sceptical.

“And if you sent another angel down here now, it would take them five hundred to adjust to the mortal world,” he said, trying to conceal his panic. “So I’d say my results are just fine.”

Gabriel regarded him for a long, excruciating moment.

“Fine. But your reports will be on time from now on, Bellamy, or we’ll send Sandalphon to watch over you. Understood?”

He nodded, ready to thank them profusely, but he didn’t get a chance before they blinked out of the church and back up to Heaven.

He stumbled to the nearest pew and collapsed against it, breathing slowly. He didn’t really need to breathe all that often, but he found that in times like this, it helped to calm him down.

That had been far too close a call.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
but is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
but am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
take me to you, imprison me, for I,
except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
- John Donne, Batter my heart, three-person'd God

1945AD - Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico, July 16th

Clarke was in there, he knew it.

He was standing outside the base camp for the test, in the early hours of the morning, trying to decide what to do.

His superiors had told him it was necessary to let this take its course, to let the humans sow the seeds of their own destruction, but he wasn’t so sure. This felt so inhumane, so harsh, that he was beginning to question Heaven’s motives.

And he knew Clarke was in there.

They’d had lunch a few times since the twenties, and bumped into each other while on assignments, but once the war started, they’d both become more than a little swamped. But even then, she still managed to surprise him.

She’d saved St. Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz, when he was too busy in France trying to help the allies; made sure that the bomb that would have burned it to the ground rolled safely off the roof and onto the Stone Gallery. When he asked her about it, she only shrugged, like it was nothing.

And he’d seen her on the battlefield; while he was leading good men towards salvation, she was nudging bad men towards the front lines. Anyone who attacked the innocent or raised a hand to a woman, anyone who pulled the trigger after the fight was over, anyone who pushed their fellow infantrymen in front of them to save themselves, would mysteriously end up leading the pack into battle. It became something of a myth, among the soldiers - the vengeful spirit who would punish any blackhearted man.

Despite her methods, she was doing good.

Now, she was inside, watching over all the luminaries of the Manhattan Project, waiting for them to create destruction in a bottle.

He couldn’t pin her down, no matter how hard he tried - good or evil, right or wrong, kind or not - and he loved her anyway.

“Hovering doesn’t suit you, Angel.”

He turned to see Clarke leaning in a doorway, jacket pulled tight around her shoulders despite the summer heat.

“I don’t know what to do.” He admitted, glancing back towards the window where he knew Oppenheimer sat, perusing over calculations and ideas with his physicists in their final moments before the detonation.

“You don’t have any orders?” She asked, eyebrow raised.

He paced closer, always closer. “I’ve been ordered not to interfere. But I… Clarke, this is…”

“I know.” She said darkly. She held his gaze. “I know, but this is all we have.”

He cursed his own stupid mouth. “That’s not fair.”

“What, using your own words against you?” She reached for his hand. “It’s actually very fair. Watch, I’ll do it again: Bellamy, this is all we have.”

He glared at her, but there was no real annoyance in it.

“I don’t know what’s right and wrong anymore.” He said, clutching at her fingers like a lifeline. “In the last couple of millenium the lines have just blurred more and more, and I don’t know what to do.”

She stepped closer, just as an enormous explosion rocked the very ground they stood on and light filled the sky, nearly blinding. Her other hand came up to grab his arm, steadying herself, and she scrunched up her nose - slowing time down enough to get her bearings back.

They looked over at the detonation, at the slowly rising mushroom cloud, at the devastation that human ingenuity could cause.

“They did it.” She whispered, as the smoke billowed into the air.

He shook his head. “They call it the Trinity Test, Clarke. As if this could be anything holy.”

“It’s from a poem.” She said, still standing so close to him. “John Donne.”

He scowled, uncaring, and she snapped her fingers, making time return to normal again, and a shockwave blasted them, sending them back a few steps. The cloud spread faster, larger, and he couldn’t tear his eyes away.

“That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.”  Clarke recited.

“I know the poem, Princess.” He snarked. He found he couldn’t find it within himself to do anything else. He was overflowing with despair. “What do we do?”

He wasn’t really asking, didn’t really expect an answer, but she gave him one anyway. She moved closer until she was hugging him from the side, holding him tightly around the waist. “We do the best we can.”

“It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one,
like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

1946AD - Dresden

He put his foot in his mouth.

Again.

It was incredibly frustrating, how she affected him.

He was usually so good at talking, at speeches, at convincing people and influencing people and debating people - sometimes he didn’t even have to use a miracle to nudge the humans in the right direction - but Clarke always threw a spanner into his works.

It started when he asked her why she was at the church in 1929 and she responded by trying to brush him off. He should have just let her, but he foolishly persevered.

“Clarke.”

She sighed. “I wanted to steal some holy water while people were distracted by the stock crash.”

He froze, heart kicking up a few notches. “You. You what?”

“I wanted-”

“-why in God’s name would you do that, Clarke, you’ll get yourself killed!” He exploded at her, unable to contain his concern, and she almost looked alarmed at his outburst.

“I was gonna be careful. I just wanted it for… insurance.”

He frowned, unsure. “Insurance?”

“Look, if this,” she gestured between them, “ever gets discovered, your lot will give you a slap on the wrist, or maybe you’ll Fall. If Downstairs gets wind of our friendship, they’ll throw me in the darkest corner of Hell and torture me for the rest of eternity. All holy water can do is kill me, but they can make my existence into a constant cycle of agony. Between that and death, I pick death.”

He folded his arms, feet still planted firmly, unwilling to budge. “Clarke that’s insane. If it’s so dangerous to spend time with me, then you should stop spending time with me, not buy a suicide pill!”

The air shifted, like the atmosphere had changed, and everything got a few degrees colder.

He wanted to take it back.

But he didn’t.

“Is that what you want?” She asked, quiet.

The quiet hurt more than if she’d yelled.

“Yes.” He snapped, instead of saying what he wanted to say, which was that he was hopelessly in love with her and that if anything happened to her he would lose his Goddamn mind.

She took a step back. “Fine. Do what you want, Angel, I don’t need you.” Then, with one final glare, she returned to snake form.

He watched her slither through the rubble until she disappeared completely, and he felt his heart ache in his chest the further away she got.

He’d really done it this time.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

1978AD - San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade, June 25th

Bellamy watched the parade moving through the streets, at the rainbow flag being flown for the first time, at the joy on people’s faces, and his heart warmed for them all. He was keeping to the outskirts, mostly there to turn away any anti-lgbt protesters who might dare to show their faces, but every now and then someone would slap a sticker on his jacket or offer him something edible from a colourful basket, and he felt connected to them all.

It was so full of love. And Angels, created of love, could only love it back.

Which is why he was almost surprised to see Clarke in the crowds, cheering and stomping her feet and singing, a flag draped about her shoulders like a cape.

Almost.

Because, really, of course Clarke was there. The demon who’d given Adam and Eve the gift of knowledge and free will, who would defend the downtrodden just because she could. A demon on the side of whoever needed it. If being gay was a sin, then she would celebrate it louder and harder than anyone else, and he felt a stupidly wide smile settling on his face as he watched her go by, planting a messy kiss on a shy girl’s cheek mid-song. She looked happy, at home, surrounded by all that love, where any other demon would have done anything to shake it off.

He glimpsed Cain in the crowd too, kissing a grinning man and holding another girl’s hand.

He wondered if this was what all those philosophers meant by “Heaven on Earth” because honestly, this was the closest thing he could think of.

Out of nowhere, like a tear in the sky, Bellamy felt sadness. Overwhelming, heart-wrenching melancholy that stopped him in his tracks and made him look around frantically, searching for the source of the pain. Pride was always a little tainted in the pain of years past, of the suffering people endured, but not like that, never like that. That was too much grief for one person to bear. It made the air sharp and scratched the back of his throat, and he wanted to wrap it up and miracle it away.

And then, just as quickly as it had come, it passed.

He couldn’t help looking around at all the smiling faces, wondering which of them had felt such agony just moments before. Whoever it was must have moved past where he was standing, so he stepped off the street and into the procession, planning to search for them.

But the parade kept moving forward and he got swept up in it, engaged in an enthralling discussion with a Lesbian Poetry Society, accepting their invitation to accompany them back to their bookshop for a drink. When he followed the owner in, people were already sitting in there, couples curled up on armchairs, people perched on the edges of the coffee table, all trying to make room. The voices were quiet but excitable, and he caught the edges of conversations as she led him through, until he was standing in the middle of the shop with a cup of coffee in his hand and a plate of biscuits being held out to him.

It felt comfortable, welcoming, and he settled into it. His own bookshop hadn’t felt this warm since his fight with Clarke, like it knew how much he was hurting without her.

“Fancy seeing you here.” A familiar voice said, slurring a little.

He glanced around, only to see Clarke draping herself across the back of a couch, arm dangling down and playing with the fingers of one of the girls who was sitting on it. Her hair was dangling over the edge, streaks of colour in it, and there were bright stickers and paint all over her. The flag-cape was still tied around her neck, swathing her in an ethereal glow. Her glasses were askew but she didn’t look like she cared, and she was definitely more than a little bit drunk. It was more snakelike than she’d looked in a long time, and he moved closer, leaning on the bookshelf opposite her.

She must have been drunk, because if she was sober, she would never have let him get that close.

“It’s a bookshop, Princess.”

She grinned at him, harsher than she used to; a little bit mean and all teeth. “Yes it is. And you’re a nerd. I should have known.”

He laughed, catching her gaze and holding it.

He missed her so much. He wanted to tell her that he was wrong, that he desperately wished he could take his words back. He wanted to be her friend again. He wanted. It was so easy to forget that the world kept turning when he tripped into her eyes like that. It wasn’t until the owner of the store - Niylah, he was pretty sure her name was - offered him the plate of cookies again, that he snapped back to the real world, accepting one with a smile.

“What about you, what are you doing here?” He asked; meaning of course, how did she end up in this shop, but she only relaxed further against the top of the couch, gesturing lazily around at the people.

“Fight the power, Bellamy.” She said, and she was covered in rainbows and glowing like anything, blue-green eyes bigger and brighter than he’d ever seen them.

“Which power?” He asked, amused.

“Any power. Any and all power that seeks to oppress the little guy.” She said it like it was obvious, like she was annoyed he didn’t already know, and it was obvious, and God, Bellamy loved her.

His rebellious demon, who fell not because she was jealous of God’s favourite creation, but because she thought they deserved better. His demon who bore the weight of humanity’s sins so they didn’t have to. His demon who hated rainbows until they became a symbol of Pride.

His demon, but only because he loved her, not because he owned her; Clarke was unstoppable, ineffable, intangible - she could never be owned by anyone, and he would never presume to try.

His demon, whom he loved.

He opened his mouth to retort, to keep the conversation going, but a couple stumbled in the door, giggling, and one of the women on the coffee table pointed at them, and then towards the street they’d just come in from. “Excuse me, you don’t belong here.”

The girl faltered. “What?”

“This is an lgbt space today, of all days.”

“We… we are.”  She looked confused, and a little hurt, and she stepped back into her boyfriend’s arms.

He smiled nervously at them. “We’re both bi.”

Most of the people in the shop were happy and welcoming enough - or at least high enough - to nod along, beckoning them further into the store, but a few of the women perched on the coffee table continued to scoff and mutter amongst themselves.

Clarke was on her feet and halfway across the room in the time it took for Bellamy to bite his cookie.

He watched as she hauled one of the women, presumably the ringleader, to her feet. “Out.”

“Excuse me?” The woman asked, affronted.

“Intolerance isn’t welcome here.”

“I’m not being intolerant. I’m gay, and I want a space for other gay people - that’s not too much to ask.”

“It is when you gatekeep how gay someone is allowed to be to enter your space, you whiny fuck.” Clarke hissed, and Bellamy could see scales beginning to rise up her forearms.

The woman scoffed again, rolling her eyes in a deliberate display of indifference. “What, like you own Pride?”

“I do, as it happens.” She snarled, “And you don’t get to look down your nose at anyone. Not today. Not here. This is Pride, it’s not Lesbians R Us. You don’t get to judge whether or not someone is gay enough for you, and if you do, I’ll judge you to be too much of a dick to be here. Got it?”

The woman looked sullen, but she nodded, and that seemed to be good enough for Clarke, who put her down. Bellamy tilted his head at her as she returned to her spot on the spine of the couch, draping herself somehow in exactly the same relaxed position she’d been in before. But he could see it now - the tension in her frame, the way her eyes drifted around the room in a way that looked aimless but actually landed on every person. She was making sure everyone felt comfortable, everyone was included.

Niylah bustled past, her tray of food almost empty, and Clarke snapped her fingers, replenishing the tray. Niylah barely reacted, and Bellamy got the feeling that Clarke had probably done stuff like that in front of her before.

He wasn’t jealous.

Of their friendship or… anything else.

He wasn’t.

“He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There’s a niche in his chest
where a heart would fit perfectly
and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place –
well then, game over.”
― Richard Siken

1991AD - Los Angeles

He ended up caving and giving her the holy water anyway.

He couldn’t help it - he just missed her  too much.

And the look of awe and appreciation on her face as she held the flask was almost enough to assuage his misgivings about it. Almost.

“Does this mean you want to be friends again?”

It occurred to him that she didn’t know just how hard this had been for him, how much it had hurt to watch her from afar, to stay away just to keep her safe. “I never wanted to stop, Clarke. I just didn’t want you risking your life.”

“You’re worth it.” She said. His head whipped around, staring at her in shock and trying not to let his gaze drop to where she was biting her lip anxiously. “You’re my best friend, Angel.”

Yet again, he was struck completely speechless, but this time he didn’t have something to cover it with, so they simply sat there in silence, staring at each other, as love oozed from his pores and filled up the car, enveloping them both.

When he did speak, his voice was hoarse. “Yeah?”

She nodded and opened her mouth, but before she could speak, the radio crackled to life and Ice T’s voice was being used to channel Beelzebub’s call. “Wanheda, excellent work on the Warsaw Pact, we heard you were in Los Angeles, what are your demonic plans?”

She didn’t take her eyes off Bellamy while she spoke, and he refused to move. “Uh, I was thinking of getting a singer to tear a photo of the pope on Saturday Night Live.”

“Perfect! Keep up the good work!”

The radio fizzled out.

Bellamy set his jaw, swallowing. “SNL is in New York.”

“They don’t know that, do they.” She smiled hesitantly. “Want to get some food?”

Bellamy wanted that more than anything in the world, but that call on the radio was already too close for comfort, and he found himself retreating instead. “Maybe some other time.”

“I’ll pay.” She put the flask in the glove compartment without even looking, eyes still locked on his.

“Some other time.” He promised, and miracled himself back to his bookstore in London, to try and remember how to breathe when there was so much love in his lungs.

His shop started humming again, for the first time since 1946.

“Traitor.” he mumbled.

The bookstore only hummed louder.

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

2006AD - Vancouver, a small house in an inconsequential suburb

“Are you sure about this?” He asked over her shoulder.

Clarke just made a dissatisfied noise in the back of her throat and pressed the doorbell again.

He had miracled the basket that contained the Antichrist into a more modern baby carrier - really, how did any celestial or demonic creature cope with being on Earth when they were so many centuries behind - and the two of them were standing on the stoop of a rather normal looking home.

Murphy had called the residents ahead of time, and then he’d arranged a meeting with a real estate agent to buy the miraculously newly vacated house next door.

A woman answered the doorbell, smiling cheerfully at them. “Hello! Are you the people from the adoption agency?”

“We are.” Clarke said, shaking her hand. “I’m Clarke and this is Bellamy - you’re Mrs Griffin?”

“Please, call me Annie. David is in the living room, please come on in.” She said, leading them down the hallway to where an equally joyous man was settled on the couch.

“Is this the baby girl?” David asked, nervous, but clearly ecstatic. 

He was a perfectly ordinary man, and she was a perfectly ordinary woman, and they were a perfectly respectable couple. 

“It is.” Clarke gestured for Bellamy to place the carrier down beside the man. “And we think you’re going to be the perfect fit.”

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong.
No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

2012AD - Vancouver, The Griffin Residence

For six years, things had gone well.

Murphy bought the house next door, in order to keep a closer eye on the Antichrist as she grew up, able to call Clarke or Bellamy if anything happened.

They had to go about their usual jobs, occasionally doing miracles for one another if they were available, and checking in on the Griffins every few months.

They called her Madi.

She was a little terror of a child, but no more than any other toddler, and once she reached about five, she calmed down.

They were doing so well.

They were going to pull it off.

And then Bellamy got the call.

The Griffins had been heading out to the mountains to go camping, but they barely got to the edge of town before a car ran a red light, ploughing into the car. Annie and David had died on impact, but Madi was - somewhat miraculously - unscathed.

Bellamy rushed to the hospital to pick her up, only to discover that she’d already been collected by a ‘family member’ wearing sunglasses, despite it being nighttime. It was pretty easy to figure out who.

He miracled himself into the house the second he heard, only to find Clarke was already there, the sleeping child cuddled to her chest.

“Clarke Griffin, really?” He asked, refusing to sit, even when she offered.

“Well, I needed to pick her up from the hospital, they wouldn’t let me do it if I wasn’t family.”

“So you’re what, her cousin?”

“Aunt.”

“Clarke-”

“-look, I know this is crazy-”

“-it’s more than crazy! You can’t just adopt the Antichrist, Clarke!”

“Why not?” There was defiance in her gaze.

“Because she’s the Antichrist.”

“She’s a little girl, who’s just lost both of her parents, and she deserves to be taken care of just as much as any other mortal girl.” Clarke clutched her a little closer protectively.

Bellamy finally gave in and collapsed on the couch next to her. He was exhausted. “What’s the point of having all this power if we can’t stop one measly car accident?”

“It was random chance, Angel, we couldn’t have predicted it.”

“Well that’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t fair.”

“You can’t adopt her.”

She bit her lip. “I already have.”

“What.”  His head jerked up from his hands so he could glare at her.

“Murphy’s actually out at the adoption agency now, doing an interview as my reference, to prove I can be a responsible guardian.”

Bellamy dropped his head into his hands, trying to deal with the utter ridiculousness of that entire sentence. “You realise how insane that sounds, right?”

“I know, but listen - this could work! I’ll adopt her and we’ll move down to Washington, near your bookshop. That way, you can keep an eye on her too, and it’s less travel because you’d be visiting the shop anyway. I considered the London one, but I have a strong suspicion that Murphy was Jack The Ripper, so it’s probably not a good idea for him to stay there.”

“You’re not funny.” He said, despite the smile trying to force its way into his cheeks.

“Then stop laughing.” She elbowed him, jostling Madi, who snuggled closer in her sleep. Clarke glanced down at the child, genuine, earnest compassion in her eyes. “C’mon, Bellamy, we can do this.”

He wanted to say no, but looking between the two of them, he just couldn’t bring himself to. “Fine. What’s Murphy gonna do?”

“He owns real estate all over, same as you, I’m sure he’s got plenty of places in Washington - maybe he can live in the same building as us or something, a casual acquaintance.”

“He doesn’t want out?” Bellamy asked, semi-surprised.

Clarke grinned. “Actually, I think he’s grown quite attached to the little Antichrist.”

Bellamy snorted, gesturing at her. “He’s clearly not the only one.”

“Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

2016AD - Beast and Beauty Books, Washington

Madi was lying on the couch, her legs propped up on the arm, playing Go Fish with Murphy, who was draped just as ridiculously - if not more so - across an armchair. She was winning, and Murphy was a sore loser.

Clarke had dropped her off on the way to ‘work’ which is what she called it to Madi whenever she needed to go out and do something demonic. Luckily, Madi was the kind of kid who didn’t question why her adoptive mother’s job had her leaving at any and all hours of the day.

Bellamy had been watching them from the counter, intermittently serving customers and filing books.

He made them hot chocolate, and a coffee for himself, and he was mid-sip when Madi piped up with;

“Why aren’t you and Clarke married?”

He choked on his coffee.

Murphy cackled with laughter. “Oh, kid, I’ve been asking that for years.”

“Shut up, Murphy.” He glared, getting his breath back, and smiled placatingly at Madi. “What do you mean, kiddo?”

Madi frowned, deep in thought, and sat up, leaning over the arm of the chair where her legs had just been so she could address him properly. “Well, Clarke has enough books already, plus she never buys anything in here, but we come in all the time and all she does is make googly eyes at you while you make heart eyes at her. It’s gross. But usually when couples are gross like that, they’re married.”

“We’re not a couple.”

Murphy’s grin was insufferable. “Yes you are.”

“Can it.” He snapped at the man, who raised his hands in a mocking surrender, winking at him. Angels definitely shouldn’t punch people. Even if they deserved it. Bellamy folded his arms to avoid swinging one. “Madi, we’re not a couple, we’re just really good friends. We’ve known each other for a long time-”

“-and you love each other.”

He spluttered. “Well, yeah, of course, of course we do, but… it’s complicated.”

She looked over at him, wide-eyed, the question already hanging in the air.

“Look, we come from very different backgrounds, okay? My… family wouldn’t be too pleased if they found out we were even friends, let alone anything more, and her family is even worse.”

“Debatable.” Murphy deadpanned.

“Oh, I get it!” Madi said, slapping the chair. “You’re Romeo and Juliet!”

Bellamy made a face. “How many times do I have to tell you that that isn’t a romance. It’s a tragedy. It’s the opposite of a reasonable love story and Shakespeare never intended it that way, trust me, I know. Besides, me and Clarke are clearly Much Ado-”

He caught Murphy’s blatant smirk behind his mug.

“-much too busy to even think about anything like that.”

“Nice save.”

“Murphy I can send you to the middle of the Sahara Desert with a snap of my fingers.” Bellamy reminded him.

“Yeah, but you won’t.”

Bellamy was ready to do it even though Madi would see it, just to prove his point and teach Murphy a lesson, when the door jingled and Clarke strode in, moving immediately over to hug the ten-year-old. “How’s the game going?”

“I’m wiping the floor with him.” She stage-whispered.

“That’s my girl.” Clarke beamed, kissing the top of her head, and Bellamy could have swooned at the domesticity of it all. He was definitely too far gone for her, this was getting stupid now. Madi returned to the Go Fish and Clarke somehow ended up at his side behind the counter, leaning very close to him, forearms nearly touching on the wood. “She behave?”

“She always does.” He bumped shoulders with her. “You’re doing a good job, you know.”

Clarke looked over at him, a soft smile on her lips. “Thanks, Angel.”

“Now we just have to hope that this was all worth it, and that her 13th birthday doesn’t usher in the end of the world.” He said lightly.

Her gaze drifted back to the pair arguing over cards, and she hummed, contemplative. “Even if it does… this was worth it. Don’t you think?”

He watched the light hitting her golden hair and the blue-green of her eyes behind the sunglasses, and he couldn’t even remember the question. “Yeah, Princess. Definitely.”

“This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

2019AD - the night before Madi’s 13th birthday

Bellamy was sitting on the couch in Clarke’s house, the one she'd bought a few years ago when the apartment got too cramped, while Clarke paced up and down in front of him, practically vibrating with anxious energy.

It was a minute to midnight.

“Maybe we did enough.” Bellamy suggested.

“Maybe I screwed it up.” Clarke countered.

He leaned forward, catching her hands on the next pass, halting her in front of him. “Not possible, Princess.”

She had that little crease in her brow that she always did when she was worried, and she wasn’t wearing her sunglasses, which were somewhere on the nightstand in her bedroom. She was so panicked that she hadn’t even thought to put them on when she called Bellamy asking him to come over for the moment of truth. He could see every bit of emotion flickering through those eyes, and when he squeezed her fingers, he felt a tinge of that soul-crushing sadness she always kept beneath the surface. The sadness that had almost bowled him over at Pride forty years ago.

“What if-”

“Not. Possible.”  He repeated, trying to get through to her just how much he meant it, and she swayed forward a little, like she needed to be closer, needed to be comforted, but was unwilling to ask.

She glanced at the clock behind him. “Ten seconds.”

They held their breaths, completely silent, both staring at Madi’s bedroom door, behind which she lay sleeping, blissfully unaware of who she was.

“Five.” Clarke hissed.

Midnight ticked over.

Thirty more seconds passed.

A minute.

They looked at each other, relief beginning to creep across their features, and Bellamy was going to tell her, he was ready, he’d been ready for years, but he was really going to tell her how he felt this time. He could do this-

Then, the ground shook violently beneath their feet, and light started glowing underneath the crack in Madi’s door.

“Shit.”

Chapter Text

Satan's dog
Is at the front door I'm giving her a biscuit
I can't cope
With a petty modern life
You blink and then you've missed it
Everything is shit except my friendship
With you
EISEMFWY - Ball Park Music

2020AD - January 1st, and Madi’s birthday

The Hellhound arrived in the morning.

Bellamy wanted to call it Ariadne, because he was a nerd, and Madi wanted to call it Picasso, because Clarke hadn’t had time to tell Madi how much of a dick Picasso was yet, but in the end, the three of them just ended up calling it Dog.

It looked like a golden retriever and it loved them all like one too.

Dog was playing with Madi in Murphy’s back garden while the three of them sat on the back porch, keeping a watchful eye on the two omens of the apocalypse that were, well, disarmingly cute, if Clarke was honest.

“The world hasn’t ended yet.” Murphy said, leaning over the railing and watching the dog chase its own tail. “We’ve got the antichrist, the hellhound, but no apocalypse. Maybe it just won’t happen?”

Clarke shook her head. “That’s not how it works.”

“Why was I afraid you’d say something like that?” Murphy groaned.

“It takes seven days for her powers to fully manifest, so we’ll only truly know on Sunday.”

“God does love Her themes, doesn’t She? Seven days to create the world, seven days to destroy it. If I didn’t know any better I’d almost respect Her for it, but that ship has long since sailed.” Murphy’s expression darkened and he cleared his throat. “I’m going to check on the roast.”

He disappeared inside, leaving Clarke and Bellamy in a bubble of slightly awkward silence as Clarke struggled to think of something to say that didn’t sound like, “I’m in love with you.”  Unfortunately, almost everything she said lately seemed to come out sounding like that, even when she meant something completely different. The Dread Pirate Roberts had nothing on her.

Madi threw a stick across the grass and Dog barked happily and ran to fetch it.

“Isn’t it supposed to be more…” Bellamy trailed off, waving a hand in its general direction.

“Hellish?” Clarke asked. “I guess. But they’ve gotta take a form on Earth, same as us, and I guess it picked that one.”

“It’s… cute.” It was almost a question. There was a small crease between Bellamy’s brows, like he was trying to parse it out. She wanted to smooth it away with her fingers.

Clarke was struck with a strange kind of deja vu; she remembered their first meeting, standing in front of a garden and watching humans run into the future. They were in a similar position now, hovering over the future of the human race in the form of the child they adopted, but so much had changed between then and now. Then, he was just another angel and she was just a demon.

She glanced over at him, at the way his worry was written all over his face.

No, he was never really just an angel.

“Clarke!” Madi bounded up to the porch, Dog on her heels. “Can we go down to the forest? I want to take him for a run!”

Clarke hesitated. Letting Madi run around on her own made her anxious, she was always worried something would happen to her, which was ridiculous - Madi had divine protection, she would be fine. But now she had another concern on top of that; Madi’s powers were beginning to wake up. She’d seen it that morning when Madi reached for the sugar and it jumped into her hand before she’d quite touched it. If she was running around in the forest, anything could happen.

But then again, letting her breathe and make her own decisions was the whole reason Clarke had adopted her in the first place. She never wanted Madi to feel like she was forced into any particular lifestyle, she wanted to give her the power of autonomy. It was all she’d ever wanted to do, for any human.

“Sure, as long as you’re back in time for dinner. Murphy’s been working on this roast all day for your birthday and he’ll be heartbroken if you forget.” Clarke said. Madi beamed at her, happiness radiating out in that way that used to make Clarke faintly nauseous. She sprinted away down the garden and climbed through the hole in the fence, Dog bounding after her, and Clarke leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.

“You sure that’s safe?” Bellamy asked.

“How did I know you were going to ask me that?” Clarke hummed.

“Because you’re my oldest friend and I’m predictable.”

“She’ll be fine,” she shrugged, “I trust her.”

There was a moment of quiet, and she could feel Bellamy stewing in some kind of emotion she couldn’t name, and then he leaned closer to her over the arm of his chair. “We’ve got some time to ourselves. We haven’t had any of that in a while.”

“Who would have thought - wars, plagues and the whims of William Shakespeare, and the thing that really keeps us from hanging out is raising a child together.” Clarke said, dry, and Bellamy laughed. She loved that laugh.

She really was pathetic.

“We still hang out, it’s just… different now. It’s never just us,” Bellamy sighed, almost wistful. “Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade Madi for anything, but sometimes it would be nice to bump into you at major world events organically, instead of trying to organise babysitting with Murphy so we can both go to opposite ends of the globe.”

“Yeah.” She said, and the way her voice cracked slightly made her squeeze her eyes tighter, made her want to sink into one of the gaps in the patio and disappear.

“Clarke?” Bellamy asked, and he was so much closer now, nose near her cheek, hand hovering over hers on the arm of the chair, but still not touching her, and she couldn’t decide which was worse. She thought she might die if he didn’t but she was worried she might accidentally start a wildfire if he did.

Unfortunately - fortunately for the nearby trees, maybe - she never had a chance to find out.

“Angel boy, Princess, you have a visitor!” Murphy yelled.

Clarke’s eyes snapped open in time to the snap of her fingers and then they were both standing in the living room, looking at Murphy and a strange woman she’d never seen before. The woman didn’t appear fazed to see them appear from nowhere, she just took a piece of roast potato from the tray Murphy was holding and popped it into her mouth.

“Who are you?” Clarke asked, relieved that the waver in her voice from before had vanished now that Bellamy was standing a few feet away from her.

The woman raised an eyebrow, staring her down while she finished chewing. “Raven Reyes. I’m a witch.”

“I can see that. Why are you in my house?”

“The world is supposed to end in seven days, and I have a feeling you’re going to agree with me that that is a bad thing.” Raven said, matter-of-fact, like she hadn’t just exposed their biggest secret right in their living room.

Well. Clarke glanced at Bellamy. Maybe not her biggest secret.

The silence stretched out between the four of them as they all refused to admit the truth and Raven looked between them all, faintly amused. “That’s what I thought. So. Do you want my help, or not?”

“Your- your help?” Bellamy asked, incredulous.

“Look, I don’t particularly want the apocalypse to happen. I like this planet, I like my life, I like roast potatoes,” to emphasise the point she snatched another one off the tray despite Murphy’s protests, “and I don’t really feel like vanishing any time soon. If that’s even how it happens. All I know is that the end is nigh which is vague and annoying. I figured you guys had more details.”

“How did you even know to come here?”

“I’m a witch, I followed the auras.” Raven said, like it was obvious. She pointed, “Angel, Demon, and whatever the hell that is.”

“Thank you.” Murphy said, impossible to tell if it was genuine or sarcastic.

“What about Madi?”

“You mean the antichrist? Yeah, she has an aura too. It’s different to any of yours so it was pretty easy to track. I only picked up on you guys once I got closer. I almost didn’t knock because I was worried you might kill me, but I overheard your conversation on the patio, and-”

“What conversation?” Murphy interrupted, head twisting to look at Clarke, a smug smile already twisting at his lips.

“We were just talking.” Clarke muttered, feeling inexplicably guilty, like a teenager caught sneaking in past curfew.

“I figured you were both assigned here or something, because it seemed insane for an angel and a demon to be working together; I thought you must have been forced to watch over the antichrist. But when I arrived, you were both talking about how much you cared about her, and each other-”

“They were what?”

“Murphy if you don’t wipe that smirk off your face I’ll wipe your entire face off your skull.” Clarke snapped.

“Not your best threat. Off your game today?” Murphy said, and she was going to do it, she really was, she was going to just grab his face and-

Bellamy’s hand came down on her shoulder, gentle, and dragged her back on topic with just his calming energy. God, she hated him.

“You’re here to help?” Bellamy clarified with Raven, not even glancing towards the glaring match Clarke was still having with Murphy.

“Obviously.” Raven pulled out her phone and held it up. “There’s this old book of prophecies handed down to all the witches in my family. I transcribed it into a document, because books are heavy and I couldn’t be bothered travelling with it-”

“That’s-” Bellamy started, bristling with annoyance at his beloved books being besmirched, and then it was Clarke’s turn to lay a calming hand on his arm. He quietened, gesturing for Raven to continue once more.

“-and it says something about the end of the world happening when Madi comes into her full power on Sunday.”

“We knew that already,” Clarke sighed. “Does it say anything about being able to stop it?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean ‘not exactly’?”

“Well… if she never gets to her full power…” Raven waved a hand, implying the rest, and Clarke felt her blood run cold. Colder than usual.

“Are you,” she folded her arms, “are you suggesting we kill my daughter?”

Raven winced. “I wasn’t going to put it like that, I’m just saying-”

“We’re not doing that.”

Raven took a step back, flabbergasted. “She’s the antichrist!”

“She’s also my kid. I didn’t spend all this time raising her just so you could come along and kill her before she even has a chance to decide for herself.”

“You want me to ask the antichrist if I can kill her?”

Fire was starting to lick around Clarke’s fingers, and scales were rolling up her arms - something that hadn’t happened for a very long time. She couldn’t even recall the last time she’d been so angry. “No, I want to give Madi the time to deal with-”

“Once she reaches full power, there will be nothing we can do to stop her from wiping us all out with a snap of her fingers. Our best option-”

“No.”

“You’re being ridiculous. Is it just because you’re a demon? Do you actually want the apocalypse to happen? Think about this logically.” Raven said, a hint of condescension in her voice and wow, nobody had dared to speak to Clarke like that for hundreds of years. At least, nobody that didn’t end up dying under mysterious circumstances.

“Clarke’s right, we can’t do that.” Bellamy spoke up suddenly. He’d been standing quietly, watching them fight like he wasn’t sure if getting involved would make it worse, but he seemed to realise that Clarke was getting close to murder.

“Oh come on, you’re an angel, you should know better than anyone that sometimes God demands a sacrifice for the world to keep turning.” Raven tutted, unwavering.

“I’ve never liked that.” Bellamy admitted quietly.

She threw up her hands, exasperated. “One child, for the sake of the rest of the universe! It’s an easy choice. Kill the antichrist.”

“What?” A small voice crept in from the doorway.

Clarke whipped around to find Madi standing there, her hands balled into fists as she looked around at them all in horror. There were tears in her eyes, and beside her Dog started to whine and back away. The walls of the house started to vibrate.

“Madi-”

“Am I the antichrist?” Madi asked, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Mom?”

“Madi, I’m-”

“What does that even mean?!”

“Madi, I’m so sorry, we were going to tell you tonight, that’s what the dinner was for-”

“So it’s true?!” She gasped.

“It’s going to be okay.” Clarke tried, taking a single step forward, but Madi flinched back and the coffee table flew up and slammed into Clarke’s chest.

She would have gone flying, but Bellamy’s arm came back and caught her, holding her steady.

“Madi, hold on a second, okay?” He pleaded, but she was hysterical, beyond reasoning, and they all knew it. Who wouldn’t be, upon finding out that information? The house’s shaking had started getting worse, and Murphy was eyeing the glass in the windows as it started to crack from side to side.

Madi’s fists tightened and the glass shattered, sending shards flying. “You were planning to kill me!”

“NO.” Clarke said emphatically, shaking her head. “I would never have let that happen.”

“I don’t believe you!”  Madi screamed, and the ceiling started to collapse above them.

Madi’s cries raised in pitch and the house shook violently along with her.

Without warning, the entire house fell in on itself, burying all the occupants in one fell swoop.

The only thing that kept them alive was Bellamy’s quick miracling of them out of the way of major debris, but they were still disorientated enough that it took them a few minutes to climb out of the remains of the house and realise that Madi had disappeared.

Clarke was on the verge of tears and Bellamy didn’t look better. Even Murphy looked more displeased than usual, and there was something like worry in his gaze when he looked at the place Madi used to be standing.

She stomped over to Raven, who was picking plaster from her hair. “You happy with how that turned out?”

“Not particularly.” She said, looking irritated, but not guilty. Or at least, not as guilty as Clarke wanted her to feel. She considered snapping her fingers and sending her somewhere terrible, but she took a slow breath through her nose and exhaled the rage. Raven eyed her nervously. “Are you going to kill me?”

“Not today.” Clarke muttered. “We need you.”

“Why?” Raven asked, Bellamy and Murphy joining the question in unison.

“I can’t sense Madi, can any of you?”

Raven shook her head, Murphy just shrugged, and Bellamy concentrated for a moment before he gave up, looking over at her in shock. “How can she be hiding from us? That’s impossible!”

“It was impossible yesterday.” Clarke was beginning to get a headache. “Her powers aren’t fully developed yet but they’re strong enough to react for her when she’s feeling strong emotions. So if what she wants right now is to not be found, then that’s what her powers will do for her.”

“Fuck.” Murphy groaned.

“Yeah. Which means we need the witch to help. In fact, we need as much help as we can get, so the witch-” she jerked a thumb in Raven’s direction, “-is going to call in as many witches as she can get ahold of, across the globe, to keep an eye out for my daughter. We’re going to call in every contact we can find and tell them to call us the second they catch wind of where she might be, and we’re not going to stop until we save her.” Clarke said, determined, and Bellamy was looking at her with something unreadable in his gaze. “Any problems with that?”

Bellamy looked like he was going to say something, hesitating, but in the end he only smiled sadly at her and blinked away with a wave of his hand.

“Where did he go?” Raven asked, fascinated.

Clarke only frowned. “He’s gone to Europe. Murphy, which continent do you want?”

He tilted his head, thinking it over. “I’ll take Australia - you speak more languages than me, I’ll stick to the places I can communicate.”

“How many years have you lived and you still only speak four languages?”

“I’m not a quick study.” He deadpanned.

“I’ll say.” Clarke snapped her fingers and he vanished. She sighed into the empty space, turning to look at Raven. “You can stay here.”

“What?”

“In case she comes back. You can sense if she sets foot in America, yes? Besides, you just got here, no point in sending you right back out on the road.” And also Raven looked so interested in the act of disapparating that she was determined not to let her experience it, out of spite.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” Raven asked, suspicious.

“I’m not.” Clarke gritted her teeth. “I just want my daughter safe, so like it or not, I have to trust you right now.”

She took another deep breath and lifted her hand, fingers pressed together. “If you do anything to hurt Madi I’ll make your life a living hell. Trust me, I’ve had the practice.” And then she snapped her fingers and disappeared.

Taking a walk across the landmine
Changing the lock on every door
We only talk when it’s a bad time
Nothing is fair in love or war
Landmine - FINNEAS

2020AD - January 3rd - Berlin, Germany

When Clarke suggested splitting up, every fibre of his being wanted to argue. But he could see the desperation in her eyes, the fear that not only had they lost Madi, but that by losing her, they had set off the very chain of events they had spent so long trying to prevent. He would do anything to wipe that look from her face, so he disappeared to Europe without a single word, hoping that would be enough.

He couldn’t even begin to think of the right words to console her, so he opted for silence.

He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse, but it was something.

He arrived in his bookshop in England, felt the shop deflate when it sensed his emotional state, heard the groan of the shelves with the weight of his anxiety, and he almost considered resting there for a moment.

Almost.

Instead, he straightened his spine, steeling his resolve, and pulled out the old red phone he swore he’d never use. “Michael?”

His sister popped into existence in the doorway. “What do you want?”

“We have a problem.”

“You screwed up?”

“Are you going to help or not?”

“I’m assuming you want me to hide this screw-up and that’s why you called instead of just showing up to heaven yourself?” She said, leaning against the nearest shelf and looking at him with those sharp eyes. She knew she had the high ground here and she wasn’t going to let it go.

He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “We lost the antichrist.”

“We?” She said, bypassing arguably the most important part of that sentence.

“I- what?”

“Who’s we?”

“Why do you ask when you clearly know the answer?” He grunted, refusing to look at her.

She snorted. “I just want to hear my big brother admit, one time, that he fell in love with a demon. You’re supposed to be the sensible one, the one that sets the example, and it took you five minutes to fall head over ass for a literal demon. It’s funny.”

“If I admit it, will you help us without telling anyone upstairs?” Bellamy asked, knowing what a ridiculous Hail Mary he was making.

Michael narrowed her eyes and appraised him.

He fidgeted under his sister’s gaze, but he wasn’t going to be the first one to break the silence.

“Okay.”

He blinked, surprised. “Really?”

“Yeah. You know I don’t always agree with the decisions upstairs. And I already agreed to help you hide that you were the one raising the Antichrist ten years ago; this is barely worse than that. If I’m gonna get smited anyway I may as well go all in.” Michael shrugged. “So you tell me the truth, and I’ll do it.”

“I’m in love with Clarke.” Bellamy blurted out.

She flashed a grin at him. “Since when?”

“I… since the 1800s.”

One of her eyebrows twitched. “Liar.”

“I’m not. I was probably in love with her before that, but that was when I knew. Ask the bookshop,” he waved a hand at their surroundings, “I’m sure it’ll be happy to tell you.”

The bookshop hummed in response.

Michael lifted her gaze to the heavens. “Has anyone ever told you you’re an idiot?”

“Murphy does it daily.” Bellamy put the old red phone back under the desk. “So, you gonna help?”

“A deal’s a deal. I’ll help you and that traitor you love. Oh, and Clarke too.” She smirked at her own joke and waved a hand through the air, checking something. “Murphy’s in Australia, Clarke’s in Asia, you’re here - where do you need me to be?”

“Clarke left a witch to keep an eye on America, so unless you wanna get really cold, I’d say Africa.”

“You owe me so big for this.”

“I know,” he promised.

“Next time I do something stupid, you’re taking the fall.”

“Deal.”

She flipped the bird at him and blinked from existence.

The bookshop groaned and Bellamy asked it to keep an eye out for Madi in case she came near the UK, and then he vanished, reappearing in France. If he had to search country by country, city by city, street by street, then he would. As long as he got Madi back.

Time passed strangely in the week that followed.

Every day felt simultaneously too short and too long.

There wasn’t enough time, but the seconds ticked by like hours and every failed lead made Bellamy’s heart fall even further. He called Clarke every few hours, texted Murphy back and forth with updates, and occasionally checked in with Michael or Raven, but for the most part he just kept his head down and kept searching.

Raven’s witch contacts were scattered across the globe, but none of them seemed to have spotted anything.

Clarke had a few minor demons on side, and even a few humans that were willing to help despite not really knowing what was going on, and Murphy seemed to be backpacking across the entire Australian outback.

Michael was miracling herself across Africa with very little scrutiny from above, because unlike Bellamy, she’d never acted out before - at least not in any situation where she’d been caught - so they rarely deigned to even glance in her direction.

Bellamy was trying to keep his miracles small so as not to get noticed, so he started reaching out to his own contacts.

“Could you keep an eye out for her?”

“I have concerts booked every night this week and you know how hard the Europe leg of my tour is, I can’t just put it on pause because you’re bad at babysitting.”

“I know, I’m not asking you to change anything, in fact I need you to do those concerts. Just put out some feelers during the performances, amplify it through the crowds, and see if you can get anything that way.” Bellamy begged.

Billie raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m a nephilim, not a mystical radar.”

“Please? It’s important.”

She only waited a few more seconds before she broke. “Of course I’m gonna help you, dude, I’m not an asshole.”

“Thank you, I owe you one,” Bellamy sagged in relief.

“Just bring Clarke to one of my concerts sometime, I’m dying to actually meet her.”

“Does everyone know I’m in love with Clarke?” He complained.

“Everyone with eyes, yeah. And creatures without eyes. And also-”

He held his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay, I get it.”

“Don’t worry dude, I’m pretty sure the people upstairs haven’t figured it out yet. Mainly because if they had, you’d be discorporated by now. It’s only those of us who live on Earth and actually have to feel the love that constantly rolls off you whenever she looks at you. Seriously I can feel it from continents away, it’s ridiculous. So many of us noticed that we have a groupchat. It’s devolved into terrible memes about you and I’m honestly starting to get embarrassed for you both. Please just bang already.”

“Once we’ve prevented the apocalypse-”

“You’ll continue to be silently in love with each other for the next ten millennia, dude, I’m literally begging you to make a move.”

He opened his mouth to form a retort but before he could, his phone rang.

It was Clarke.

Billie laughed. “I assume you have to answer that. Don’t worry, I’ll call you the second I see anything.”

He thanked her profusely before he disappeared from Berlin and found himself somewhere in Finland. He answered the phone, “Hey, you okay?”

“Are you?”

“You haven’t found her either?”

He heard her sniffle down the phone. “Not a trace. Weird things keep happening all over the world, but it never leaves a detectable trail back to her. What are we gonna do, Bellamy? We’ve got three days left to prevent the apocalypse and our kid is out there somewhere, scared and upset, and I can’t do anything to fix it.”

The slight skip of his heart when she said “our” was slightly overshadowed by the way it dropped when he realised she was crying.

“It’s gonna be okay, Princess.”

“You can’t know that.”

“We still breathing?”

She hesitated. “Well, I mean, we don’t technically need to breathe-”

“That’s the last time I try and comfort you,” he complained, secretly relieved when she giggled at his mock-whining. “At least you still have a sense of humour. We’re not down yet.”

“We’re very much down.”

“Okay, but we’re not out.”

“Did both of you forget this was a group call?” Murphy’s voice interjected, and Bellamy nearly dropped the phone in shock.

Your silent sadness, it shakes me
In my quiet sea, waves would sometimes rise
Louder Than Bombs - BTS

2020AD - January 6th - Jabal Haraz, Yemen

Clarke hadn’t stopped moving in seven days.

She didn’t stop to eat or sleep and often forgot to breathe until she was conversing with humans and they started to give her strange looks after a few minutes.

There was no trace of Madi in Asia at all. She’d been everywhere - China, Japan, Bhutan, South Korea, India, Turkey - even right up to the top of Mount Everest, and there wasn’t a single sign of her.

Bellamy gave her the idea to reach out to Nephilims for help so she contacted as many of them as possible and asked them to scan for Madi, promising them various favours in return. One of the k-pop groups didn’t even ask for a favour, told her it was on them, and she had never been more proud to have lived on Earth among the humans and the creatures God had forsaken for so many years. Down here, you could choose to live a selfish life and still get everything you wanted, and yet people still chose to do the right thing. Every day. Nephilim, human, angel, demon - it didn’t matter.

Raven checked in with her every six hours, largely because if she didn’t, Clarke apparated next to her and asked what the hold up was. Murphy called semi-regularly, and Bellamy was always there when she needed him.

But there was never any new information.

Clarke was beginning to run out of energy; every leap into a new country took more and more out of her, and even small things like morphing her clothes to more weather appropriate attire in the desert ended up exhausting her more than it should.

She knew Bellamy was starting to get worried about her, and that Murphy was concerned too, although neither of them were saying anything.

Finally, when Saturday night rolled around and there hadn’t been a single sign, she had to admit that if Madi didn’t want them to find her, then she wouldn’t be found.

And that was when Murphy called.

“What?” She asked, out of breath and long since out of pleasantries.

“Bellamy said you should come home.”

“What?”

“He miracled me home and disappeared. I think he’s gone to check on his sister, but he told me to call you and tell you to come home.”

“What home? It’s rubble.”

“That’s what he’s bringing his sister for.”

“He shouldn’t use miracles so frivolously.” Clarke tutted, but her heart was barely in it.

“You’re one to talk, you sound like you’re on a treadmill right now.” Murphy scolded grumpily. “Anyway, get back here. If we can’t prevent the apocalypse, we might as well ride it out together in the one place we know Madi might come back to.”

Clarke couldn’t argue with that logic, largely because she lacked the energy and she needed to use whatever was left of it to disapparate from Yemen into America.

When she landed next to the house - newly restored like nothing had ever happened to it - she stumbled the second her feet felt solid ground, and a familiar pair of arms came up around her, holding her steady. For once, she didn’t shy away from them out of fear of being smited and just leaned into his embrace, letting him take her weight.

They were all going to disappear from existence tomorrow anyway. She wanted to hold onto the things she loved before she was erased.

“I’m making quesadillas,” Murphy yelled from the kitchen, “don’t make out for too long, you’ll put the rest of us off our appetites!”

Clarke opened her eyes and took back some of her own weight. Selfishly, she didn’t stop leaning on him completely. She looked up into his huge brown eyes. “No luck?”

He shook his head sadly. “I figured the best option was to wait at home in case she came back before tomorrow.”

“That’s the closest thing you’ve had to a good plan in years.”

“I resent that.” He blinked slowly down at her and his hand came up to brush locks of hair from her face. “You look tired.”

“I’m…” she didn’t bother finishing the sentence.

“Yeah.” He pulled her into a proper hug, burying his face in the crook of her neck, and she did the same, flinging her arms around his shoulders and sniffling against his shirt. For that one, brief moment, she could imagine that everything would be okay.

Michael stuck her head out the patio door, “Dinners up, lovebirds.”

The hug ended and Clarke came crashing back to reality. Sunday was barely hours away and they had failed to find her daughter. The world was going to end, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.

There is a corner of the city where the air is
soft resin. Step in and it hardens
around you. Suspended
in amber.
― Caroline Bird, Mid-air

2020AD - January 6th, close to midnight, Clarke’s house

They were pressed together on the couch, watching the clock tick over as time seemed to move agonisingly slowly but never quite slow enough.

Clarke was clinging onto Bellamy’s left hand and Murphy was gripping his right knee, and they were sitting there, just staring at the object that reminded them that time wouldn’t stop until Madi ended the universe.

Michael had taken Raven back to her hometown when she left, because everybody deserves to die at home if it’s at all possible, so it was just the three of them left in the house. The way it always had been.

The three of them against the world.

Or in this case the end of it.

Teeth-grindingly slowly, the hands finally ticked over to midnight, and they all held their breaths, waiting for something to happen.

When it didn’t, they were all reluctant to let those breaths go, in case they were wrong, but as the time ticked over to one minute past twelve, they realised that the apocalypse hadn’t come.

“Did we actually do something? Did we stop it?” Murphy asked, confused.

“I don’t think so.” Bellamy shook his head and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d blinked, eyes still locked onto the face of the clock and the tiny hands that moved endlessly forward. “Maybe it’s not a stroke-of-midnight thing.”

“God has no flair for the dramatic,” Murphy sighed.

“Why do you sound disappointed?”

“Look, I’m relieved we’re not dead, but it just… if it’s not midnight then it means that it could happen at any time. Which means I will be violently tense for every moment until it happens. Not a fun way to spend my last day on Earth, gonna be real.”

Clarke nodded numbly. “I get that.”

“Clarke!” Bellamy gasped, rounding on her.

She only shrugged. “I’m so tired, Bellamy. I just want my daughter back, I want her safe, I want us all safe. I want this to be over. I want God to stop meddling with Her creations like a child in a sandbox-”

“Hear, hear!” Murphy raised an imaginary glass.

“-I just want to know how long I need to hold my breath for before I lose everything I love.”

Bellamy felt his blood run cold at those words and he looked at her in the dim light from the lamp in the corner, at the exhaustion on her face and the resignation in her eyes, and he found himself understanding why she thought that way. He wanted to know exactly how many more seconds he’d get to see those eyes before they were snatched away, so that he could cherish every single one of them.

So for hours, the three of them sat in that dark room, listening to the ticking of the clock, holding tight to each other and waiting for the apocalypse to arrive.

Of course, when it did arrive, it refused to do so as expected.

It didn’t kick down their door and explode them into dust.

Instead, it came down the ring of Bellamy’s phone.

“I know where she is.” Raven’s voice came through the tiny speaker, loud enough in the small space for all of them to hear even without Bellamy putting it on speakerphone. “A witch spotted her aura just outside Polis Air Base in Central America less than ten minutes ago.”

“What?!” Bellamy gasped.

Clarke was already on her feet.

“The four horsemen are with her,” Raven warned. “You know what that means.”

“It means I need to have a word with my least favourite people,” Clarke growled, yanking Murphy to his feet and lacing her fingers with Bellamy’s. She looked over at him and his heart skipped a beat, as it always did. “You in?”

He smiled at her, determined. “Did you think I’d say no?”

“Do I get a choice?” Murphy deadpanned.

“Shut up, Murphy,” Bellamy and Clarke said in unison.

“Let’s go get our kid.” Clarke said, and the three of them blinked away.

“You’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not
          harmless. You are not
                    breathing.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

2020AD - January 7th, 5am - Polis Air Base, The End Times

When they arrived at the base, Madi was surrounded by four imposing figures.

War was dressed in strange clothes similar to army gear but glowing faintly red around the edges, a gun in her hand and a wry smile on her face.

Beside her, Famine was grinning slimily down at Madi, tapping his fingers like he was waiting for something.

Pollution was in his signature white robes, stained at the bottom with black sludge that seemed to ooze neverendingly from his skin and pool at his feet.

Death was wearing a black hood, living up to her image, but unlike her reputation, when she saw the trio approaching she didn’t loom over them or bellow in a deep voice or cut them down with a scythe.

No, instead, she waved.

“Clarke!” She gasped. “Oh my god, it’s so good to see you here! I was wondering when you’d show up!”

Clarke rolled her eyes.

“Don’t give me that look, you know you’re happy to see me,” Death curled a lock of hair around her finger and tilted her head at them. “She’s the one who got me this job, you know.”

Bellamy and Murphy both whipped around to stare at her, and Madi was blinking, wide-eyed with panic from behind the four horsemen. Clarke sighed, resisting the urge to roll her eyes again. “Why are you looking at me like that? You both know my old name.”

“Yeah but we thought it was like, symbolic,” Murphy said.

“It is. For death.” Clarke said, raising an eyebrow at him.

“You just got infinitely cooler in my eyes,” he professed. “If you ever get bored of Bellamy, do you-”

“No.”

“Fair enough.”

“Aw, Murphy I’ve missed you too,” Death winked at him. “If you ever get bored of following these two around-”

Murphy blanched. “No.”

She huffed. “Spoilsport.”

“Hey!” Pollution yelled. “You wanna pay attention? End of the world happening here!”

“Sorry,” Clarke and Murphy both raised their hands in surrender but Death just continued batting her eyelashes flirtatiously between them.

“You gave up being a horseman?” Bellamy asked, clearly too distracted to read the room.

Clarke squeezed his hand - whoops, she’d totally forgotten to let go of that when they arrived - and he seemed to come to, nodding in a way that told her they’d definitely be having a conversation about this later, if they got a later.

“What do you want?” Clarke asked the horsemen.

“I would have thought that was obvious.” War hummed, looking bored.

“Destruction, hunger, loss,” Famine listed off on his fingers. “The usual.”

“Don’t you get enough of that?” Clarke asked. She had barely managed being Death when there were no human souls to take; she couldn’t imagine the toll it would have taken on her to be Death in the 21st Century.

“Unlike you, I actually like my job,” Death shrugged, flashing a wolfish grin.

“Clarke? I’m scared.” Madi sniffled, clinging onto Dog, who was still loyally plastered to her side.

Clarke looked past the horsemen to where her daughter was shaking on the tarmac, tears filling her eyes and hair floating wildly around her head, held by some unseeable force. She let go of Bellamy’s hand and took a step forward, reaching out to her, and War lifted her gun into her face. Clarke was barely fazed. “Madi? It’s gonna be okay. Okay? I’m right here.”

“You were gonna kill me!” She cried, fear etched into her features, but it didn’t hold the conviction it had so many days ago - she sounded uncertain.

“I told you, I would never have let that happen,” Clarke promised. “All I ever wanted to do was keep you safe. I wanted to give you the chance to decide on your own what you wanted to do.”

Madi faltered, but before she could respond, War cocked the trigger. “You know I like you, Clarke. I don’t want to kill you.”

Clarke looked down the barrel at her. “Surely this doesn’t benefit you, at all? You’re War. No more humans means no more conflict, means no more anything.”

War raised an eyebrow. “I do what I was created for. This is one of those things.”

“Why?”

When War didn’t respond, Famine interjected with, “Because it’s foretold. It’s the end times.”

“Why?” Clarke asked again, turning the question on him.

“Enough!” Pollution bellowed, rounding on Madi and towering over her, black ooze pouring violently from his fingers and trickling from his mouth. “You will bring in the apocalypse, or you’ll die along with the precious demon who raised you.”

Terror crossed Madi’s face, and the ground started to shake.

“Clarke!” Bellamy called out, and she looked behind her to see him wrestling with Famine as Murphy and War pulled joint guns on each other, staring each other down. “This is our only shot!”

“What the hell am I supposed to do, Bellamy?!” Clarke threw up her hands, looking to the sky like Heaven would deign to help her for once. Fat chance. “We’re outnumbered, time’s running out, and I’ve got no ideas!”

“Clarke if you don’t think of something, I’ll…” the angel punched out Famine and stood over him, foot pressing against his spine as he looked up at Clarke. He stared into her eyes with some degree of panic, which she supposed was fair given the circumstances. “I’ll never speak to you again.”

Aw, hell.

She flicked her wrists, putting in every ounce of energy she had left, and time swirled to a stop, until it was only the three of them left moving. Murphy and War were frozen in a mexican standoff, Pollution was frozen with his arms outstretched towards Madi, and Death was standing to the side, watching it all with some degree of amusement. The area around them stayed completely still, although Bellamy’s hair seemed to be dusted by some non-existent breeze.

“Angels.” She muttered under her breath, right as her legs gave out and she collapsed into his side.

His arms came up to circle her waist, holding her steady, and she refused to acknowledge how nice it felt.

“Clarke? You alright?” He asked, lips practically pressed against her ear.

Armageddon was a really bad time for her to be getting distracted like this.

“I’m fine,” she muttered. She reached her arm out towards her daughter imploringly. “Madi, you’re safe now, okay? He’s not gonna hurt you. I’ve got you.”

Madi didn’t hesitate this time, she scrambled to her feet and ran full pelt towards Clarke, barrelling into her arms. She broke down in tears, soaking through Clarke’s shirt in seconds, and Clarke held her tight and never wanted to let go. Bellamy’s forearm was sandwiched between them and he let his head fall onto her shoulder as his other hand came up to stroke Madi’s hair.

“I can’t do this,” Madi sobbed.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” Bellamy swore.

“I’m the antichrist,” Madi wept, like it was an inevitability, like she didn’t have a choice.

“So what?” Clarke crouched down, holding her at arm's length and looking up at her. “I was Death. We can choose our own destinies. We don’t have to be defined by our worst moments, we don’t have to let fate decide who we are - you’re a good person, Madi. Antichrist just means you were adopted. It means you got to be raised by me and Bellamy. It means you got to rag on Murphy whenever you wanted. It means you have the power to do whatever you want, and that doesn’t mean destroying everything if you don’t want to.”

“We’re behind you a hundred percent,” Bellamy said. “No matter what choice you make.”

“Promise?” Madi asked, and she’d never looked more her young age than in that moment.

“Promise.” Clarke held out her finger in a pinky swear.

Madi eyed it, sniffling. “You’re not mad at me for running away?”

Clarke shook her head. “I was just worried about you. All I want is for you to be safe.”

“Bellamy?”

He folded his arms. “I’m mad you believed we would ever hurt you. But that’s not your fault. I’m not upset about anything else. Even if you end the world today, I’m still proud of you.”

Finally, Madi hooked her own pinky finger around Clarke’s. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“What do you want to do?” Clarke asked.

Madi looked around at the frozen air base. “I want to go home.”

A slow, weary smile stretched over Clarke’s face. “Home, I can do.”

“All that I did," she said, "everything I tried to do. All for nothing."

Nothing is done entirely for nothing, said the fox of dreams.
Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions,
and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned,
and move on.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: The Dream Hunters

2020AD - January 7th, 7am - Clarke’s House, The End Times

Convincing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that the apocalypse wasn’t going to happen was no easy feat. Luckily, it’s hard to argue with the literal antichrist, even when you’re an all-powerful ancient being, and none of them could convince her to change her mind, not when Clarke and Bellamy were backing her up.

It helped that Clarke pulled Death aside, and while Bellamy couldn’t hear their conversation, it looked pretty heated, and he was half-considering going over there when they returned and Death simply said. “Fine. Spoil my fun. We’ll do this again some other time. But Clarke - after this, I don’t owe you any favours anymore. Our debt is settled.”

“Deal.” Clarke nodded, shaking her hand. Bellamy eyed their joined hands warily until Death stepped back, and she caught his eye as she did, smirking like she knew what he was worrying about.

“Don’t worry, handsome, you can keep her. It’s not like I can take her today, anyway - the brat would kill me.” Death looked down at Madi. “Let me know when you wanna do your job, urchin.”

“That’s it?” Famine screeched, furious, but War put a hand on his shoulder.

“It is not up to our will. It is the decision of the Antichrist. She holds the gun, we are merely the bullets.”

“Softening, in your old age?” Pollution asked her bluntly, ooze roiling against the tarmac.

“I’m just smart enough to know when I’m defeated.” War hummed, lazily saluting towards Clarke. “Don’t be a stranger, Griffin. I miss getting drinks with you.”

“You still talk to War?!” Death gasped, sounding offended, right before all four of them blinked out of existence.

Bellamy slumped, relieved, and Murphy took it one step further and opted to lie face down on the ground.

“Isn’t that hot?” He asked.

“I don’t care. It’s better than getting Infinity-snapped from existence.” Murphy’s voice was muffled against the tarmac and he started banging his head lightly against it. “This has been the worst week of my life. And I was the first person to murder someone.”

“You’re Cain?!”  Madi dropped the water bottle Clarke had just handed her.

Murphy lifted his head. “Ah. I forgot you didn’t know that.”

Bellamy dropped his face into his hands. This was a mess. A Goddamned mess. God was gonna be pissed.

“Don’t worry,” Clarke put a hand on his shoulder like she knew what he was thinking, “I’ll take all the blame. I’m not gonna let you take the fall for this.”

“Well I’m not letting you take the fall!” He said, frowning at her.

She shrugged, nonchalant. “I’ve already fallen once, what are they gonna do to me? Push me off a cliff?”

“They might!”

She must have realised it wasn’t the time to joke around because she wiped the half-smile off her face and squeezed his shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay, Bellamy, we just need to explain to God that the antichrist is 13 years old and shouldn’t be forced into deciding whether to end the world or not. Because that’s the stupidest idea anyone’s ever had. God can’t be that unreasonable.”

“What about Satan?”

“Oh he doesn’t care.”

“What?”

“Yeah that’s what Death and I were talking about - Lucifer only cares about punishing the evil, and if there’s no evil left to punish he’ll get bored. So will she, with no souls to take. It was a flawed plan from the beginning, really. Creating beings for one purpose and then expecting them to be excited for the apocalypse when their one purpose will be resoundly destroyed and then either they’ll die with it or continue living in eternal torment forever, bored out of their minds.”

“That’s… a good point.” Bellamy realised, thinking it all over. Who had come up with that in the first place?

“Anyway, Lucy’s on board.”

“Lucy?”

“He fell in love with a human once.” Clarke said, like that explained anything.

“So?” Murphy asked the question Bellamy wanted to, rolling over so he could eye her with the right amount of disdain.

“So he stopped asking why I liked it here so much. He still doesn’t exactly approve,” she seemed to be pointedly looking anywhere but Bellamy’s face, “but he’s not going to punish me for saving the world.”

“You ever think about how weird our lives are?” Murphy asked dryly, closing his eyes and throwing an arm over his face dramatically to shield himself from the sun’s glare.

“All the time.” Bellamy sighed, feeling the weight of the last few millenia pressing against his spine. “C’mon, let’s go home.”

He lifted Murphy to his feet - with a great deal of complaining on Murphy’s end - and interlocked his fingers with Clarke, definitely not thinking about how natural it felt to do it, about how much he just never wanted to let go. At his full strength he wouldn’t have even needed to be touching them to travel together, but after the week they’d had, he’d need at least another few days of rest before he could do that again. Plus it was a good excuse to keep holding Clarke’s hand. Madi clung to Clarke’s side and Bellamy waved his hand, disapparating them from the air base right back into the living room of their house, where he immediately stumbled against Clarke, feeling dizzy.

She let him, curling an arm around his chest and walking him to the couch, where they both flopped down, completely beat.

Murphy hadn’t even made it to a chair, he was sort of half-collapsed over the coffee table, muttering something about alcohol.

Madi climbed between them on the couch, tucking herself under their arms and snuggling in, and Bellamy patted her knee softly as he blinked over her head at Clarke, who was gazing tiredly right back at him.

“You okay, Princess?”

“It’s been a while since you called me that,” she said fondly, not answering the question.

“It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but we’ve been pretty busy.” He grinned over at her exasperated expression of amusement. “I think we deserve some time off.”

“Do celestials get paid leave?” Murphy mumbled through his fingers.

“We don’t get paid.” Bellamy reminded him.

“Oh yeah. You really need to report your boss for unsafe work practices.” Murphy groaned, lifting his head slightly to look for the liquor cabinet. “No paid leave, no weekends off, a health and safety nightmare - you should get compensation.”

“And if you call this number now,” Clarke finished the joke for him tiredly.

Bellamy snorted. “You two know each other too well.”

“We’ve been friends for thousands of years.” Clarke pointed out, snapping her fingers so that the bottle of whiskey Murphy was gazing forlornly at appeared next to his arm on the table so that he didn’t have to muster the energy to crawl over to it himself.

“I love you.” Murphy popped the lid off the bottle and took a swig. “You too, Bellamy.”

Bellamy made a face. “I didn’t ask.”

“But I know you were thinking it, Angel Boy.” Murphy winked and sent a finger heart in his direction, and Bellamy mimed throwing up.

Madi looked up at Bellamy, tugging on his sleeve. “You’re really an angel?”

He nodded.

“Is God gonna be mad at me?” She asked, looking frightened.

Bellamy snuggled in closer to his little family and kissed the top of Madi’s head. “If God’s gonna be mad at anyone, it’s gonna be me, okay?”

She shook her head frantically. “No! I don’t want you to get in trouble! What if they take you away!?”

“I’m not gonna let that happen.” Clarke said darkly, her fingers tightening around Bellamy’s hand that he hadn’t realised she was holding. “Bellamy has worked his ass off for thousands of years, doing his best, with absolutely no support from up there while he had to make impossible choices, and all he got in return was radio silence. If God wants to take this angel away, She’s gonna have to go through me.”

“I’m not taking anyone away.” A VOICE echoed in the empty space, seemingly coming from every direction at once.

Bellamy flinched, every muscle in his body tensed so hard it was a wonder he didn’t explode on the spot. “I am so-”

“Save it, Bellamy.”  The VOICE said calmly. “Wanheda is right - you have done more than enough in your time on Earth to earn some leniency. I will not discorporate you. And as Wanheda won’t be punished by Lucifer, I won’t presume to punish her myself. Cain I have no issues with - all he did was follow you around.”

“I resent that.” Murphy retorted.

“I can smite you if you wish.”

“On second thoughts, thank you very much.” Murphy said quickly, returning to his whiskey.

The VOICE continued. “You have all done a good thing here. Madi’s choice not to end existence is a testament to the care you have shown in your time here and it reflects well on you both, as well as the human race, which I had begun to believe was beyond saving.”

“So what happens now?” Bellamy asked.

“Now, you may continue as you always have. Keep an eye on the humans. Don’t let things get too unbalanced. Keep Madi safe.”

“We’re really not getting punished?”

“Do you wish to?”

“No, I just-”

“Then it’s settled.”  Silence followed, and for a long moment he thought the VOICE had left, until it said, “Oh, and Bellamy?”

“Yes ma’am?”

“Just make a move. It’s exhausting watching you from up here and the angels have started a betting pool that I intend to win. You have my permission. Just, please, for the love of Me - make a move.”

And with that, the VOICE was gone.

Bellamy untensed slowly, letting his head loll onto the back of the couch and exhaling slowly towards the ceiling.

“So that was God.” Madi nodded to herself. “I like Her.”

“She’s really got your number, Angel Boy,” Murphy agreed.

He wanted to roll his eyes but from this angle he knew Murphy wouldn’t see it, so he opted to just flip the bird at him over Madi’s head instead. “Shut up, Murphy.”

“Clarke?” Madi asked tentatively.

“Mm?” She hummed tiredly, eyes half-closed.

“It’s Monday tomorrow.”

“Yeah it is.”

“It’s a school day.”

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Bellamy cut in reassuringly.

Madi scrunched up her nose. “Oh. Actually, I was… I want to go.”

“I’m not sure about that, Madi,” Clarke sighed. “You’ve got a lot of power now, if one of the kids upsets you and you lash out-”

“I won’t.”

Madi-”

“I can control it! I didn’t destroy anything!”

“Venice went underwater for two days,” Murphy pointed out. “And Brazil turned upside-down. Literally.”

“I fixed that!”

Clarke raised an eyebrow at her, thinking it over. “The second you’re not sure, you call me, or you blink back home yourself, okay? Get yourself out of any situation where you might accidentally hurt someone else. Deal?”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Madi squealed, launching herself around Clarke’s middle and squeezing her tight. Clarke laughed, hugging her back and dragging Bellamy closer again, squishing them all right up against the arm of the couch.

“Is that not uncomfortable for you people?” Murphy asked, dry.

“Nope,” they said in unison.

“Oh, in that case,” he jumped up onto Bellamy’s other side and draped himself around him.

Bellamy groaned at the extra weight, but for once he didn’t try to shove him off. “I hate you.”

“All night I stretched my arms across
him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing
with all my skin and bone ''Please keep him safe.
Let him lay his head on my chest and we will be
like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed
to pieces.'' Makes a cathedral, him pressing against
me, his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believe
his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me like stars.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

2020AD - January 8th, Clarke’s House & Bel Ami Books

Once they waved Madi off to school and Murphy told them he was going to go get very drunk with Chris Evans - which was probably a lie. Hopefully. - Clarke and Bellamy were left to their own devices for the first time in over a week, and they were at a loss for what to do.

It was like Clarke had forgotten how to act around him, and he didn’t seem any less awkward, constantly opening his mouth as if to say something and then changing his mind.

Not to mention, they were still exhausted, powers drained, everything just a little off kilter.

That was probably all it was.

Yeah.

They were just tired.

They had unconsciously decided they would tidy the house, so Clarke started cleaning the kitchen while Bellamy reorganised the shelves in the living room, passing each other as they travelled through the house, each taking a different room as they went. When it was all done, Clarke leaned against the kitchen counter with a strong coffee in her hand, trying to remember what it felt like to have energy. Bellamy shuffled in after a few minutes and she snapped her fingers, a mug of coffee appearing in his hand. He barely reacted except to thank her. The advantage of becoming used to miracles.

They stood there in companionable silence for a stretch of time that could have been seconds or years and Clarke liked it that way. The last week she’d spent so much time watching the clock, waiting for the seconds to stop, and now she could just live in them, let the time rest on her tongue the way it always had.

As the sun started to dip towards the horizon, streaking through the window in glorious orange, Bellamy glanced at her.

She tilted her head down to peer at him over her sunglasses. “What?”

“I just… nothing.”

“Bellamy,” she pressed.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I just… I was so worried.”

“About the apocalypse?”

“About you.”

Clarke froze.

He continued, “I just… you know, right?”

“What?”

“About me? You know? You have to know, after the amount of time- I know it’s ridiculous but I can’t help… it’s just-”

“Bellamy, I love you, but what the fuck are you talking about?” Clarke put her coffee down and stared at him openly. He fidgeted under her gaze and sipped his drink anxiously.

“This is terrible coffee.” He said, instead of clarifying anything.

“It’s Murphy’s fault.” Clarke said automatically, not actually sure who had last bought groceries, but content to blame it on him anyway.

Bellamy stared into the mug, unblinking, for a long time. When he looked up, the cup vanished from his hand with no fanfare. “Why don’t we go to my shop? There’s good coffee there.”

“Which one?”

“Dealer’s choice.” He smiled softly.

She was so done for. Why did he have to smile at her like that? “Which one of your shops likes me more?”

“All of them.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Clarke said, because she never knew what to say when she felt flattered.

He shrugged. “They all love you, because I do.”

Her heart jumped into her throat and choked her out for a second. “That’s… you can’t just say things like that, Bellamy.”

He swallowed, a sad expression crossing his face. “Why not?”

“Because it makes it very hard to pretend I’m not in love with you when you say things like that.” She blurted out, before she could stop herself.

His mouth fell open slightly and his eyes went wide.

She glared at him. “Don’t look at me like that, it’s not my fault you’re so,” she waved her hand at him vaguely, “you.”

“You’re in love with me?”

“I thought angels were supposed to have like, eight million eyes?” She joked, because there was absolutely no way she could wriggle her way out of this, even if she transfigured into a snake and tried to escape through a window.

“You’re in love with me?”

“You’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, but you’re really stupid sometimes,” she couldn’t help but smile in the face of his blatant shock. “Yes, Bellamy. I’m in love with you. I thought that was obvious from the everything-about-me.”

“Since when?”

“Since about… 3004BC.” Clarke admitted.

He looked like he was about to pass out. “That long?”

“Yep.”

“All this time…”

“Yep.”

“Did Murphy know?”

“Obviously.”

“All this time, and we could have just…” Bellamy dropped his head into his hands. “I’m going to kill Murphy.”

“I think that’s impossible.”

“I’ll find a way.”

She laughed. “You’re so cute when you’re threatening people. You should do it more.”

“I’m in love with you.” He blurted out.

It was her turn to cease functioning out of surprise. “I… is that a threat?”

“No, it’s a confession.”

“Ah,” she nodded slowly, “that’ll explain why it wasn’t very threatening. Almost sounded nice, actually. Sort of like I imagined it would.”

“Am I still cute?” Bellamy asked, because apparently both of them were incapable of getting through this without deflecting their obvious panic with terrible jokes.

“Nope, feeling’s gone. 6000 years of being in love with you and apparently all it takes for me to move on is for you to love me back.” Clarke deadpanned.

“Don’t even joke about that.” Bellamy took a hesitant step forward. “You’re really in love with me? You’ve been in love with me all this time?”

“Why else would a demon hang around an angel? It’s not for your sense of style.”

“1817.”

“I’ll take, ‘the last time I bought a gift for you’ for 500, Alex.”

Bellamy snorted. “That’s when I realised I was in love with you.”

Clarke bit her lip. “I feel like I should be offended, considering I’ve loved you since the inception of humans, but honestly I’m just way too happy that you love me at all.”

He took another step forward, barely a foot from her in the sunset coloured kitchen. “That was when I realised, but I fell for you a long, long time before that. I didn’t so much fall as stumble face first into it in slow motion.”

“We’re kind of ridiculous.” Clarke pointed out.

“We are.” Bellamy acknowledged, reaching out and tangling their hands together. “Coffee?”

He didn’t wait for her response before he tugged her hand and then they were standing in front of Bel Ami Books in London. He looked exhausted from the act of taking them there so Clarke snapped her fingers to unlock the place so he didn’t have to. He shot her a grateful look and her stomach did flips.

As they shuffled wearily into the shop, Bellamy waved a hand and the gramophone in the corner slowly rolled to life, playing one of the old Aretha Franklin songs he knew Clarke liked. She smiled a little goofily over at it, annoyingly pleased that he’d remembered. Instead of telling him how much she liked it, however, she rolled her eyes at him as she elbowed past, trying to get to the coffee.

“I can’t believe you still own that thing.” She grinned. “They went out of style decades ago.”

“It’s vintage!”

“You’re vintage,” she muttered petulantly, and the slightly perturbed look on his face was probably a joke, probably just going along with their usual routine, but for some reason it made her heart ache. She’d seen enough suffering on that face to last her a lifetime and she really didn’t want to see it again, in jest or otherwise.

So, in an effort to wipe it out, she pressed up on her toes and brushed a kiss to his mouth, just briefly.

When she pulled back, his eyebrows were knitted together in an expression she didn’t recognise, and she had about half a second of doubt in which her entire 6000 year life on Earth flashed before her eyes and she was about to beg him to pretend it had never happened, when his face cleared and his own eyes darted to her lips.

He let out a soft and yet surprisingly high-pitched utter of, “Clarke!” and then his whole body was against hers, holding her to the wall.

She managed a surprised, “Mmph!” before he kissed her, and then all rational thought left her head entirely and she went totally pliant, while his lips met hers with all the ardency and fervour of a regency man in love with a gentleman’s daughter.

That is to say, while his lips captured hers with a heat rivalled only by hellfire, his hands never strayed from where they were cupping her face.

Hers, on the other hand, were roaming over every inch of skin she could find, running up under his shirt and raking her nails down his back, aching for more, selfishly, wantonly, fingers dancing over his stomach and around his neck and through the utter mess of curls atop his head.

God, she loved that mess.

“Bellamy, so help me-”  Clarke said, or maybe she was just projecting her thoughts out towards him, but either way, he took the hint.

His hands slid down her neck, curled around her waist, and then he was lifting her. Her legs automatically wrapped around his hips and he held her up against the wall with so little effort that she was pretty sure he was using some kind of miracle to do it. She wanted to scold him for wasting energy but she was hyper-aware that she was also causing latent weather patterns outside, if the sudden snow filling the window was any indication, so she didn’t really have a leg to stand on.

“I love you,” he said suddenly, voice filling her ears and her lungs and her heart and wow he should not be able to do that.

“I loved you first,” she said, just to be difficult.

Rather than arguing, he just pressed a kiss to her neck. “Guess I have a lot of time to make up for then.”

She had to concentrate very hard to make sure she didn’t literally melt herself into a puddle. She dragged his head back up with both hands so she could kiss him senseless, and the bookshop seemed to be singing around them.

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

2021AD - Springtime, The House

When they told Murphy, he laughed for a good fifteen minutes before he could even manage to form words, and that was probably as close as they were going to get to a congratulations from him.

Michael sent Bellamy a flower arrangement that spelled out “IDIOT” with her share of the angel’s pool attached and a note to “buy Clarke something nice for putting up with your stupid ass for so long”.

Madi just looked at them with a sort of baffled look on her face for a minute before she shrugged and said, “I thought you already knew that. Everyone else did.” and then went back to playing the Xbox with Raven.

Raven herself had just offered to pay for one of their date nights as an apology for almost ushering in the apocalypse. She’d also started teaching Madi about the history of witches, which gave Bellamy and Clarke more opportunities to have date nights, so he couldn’t be too mad. Plus he was an angel, so he was really supposed to be better at forgiveness than most people.

Time moved on the way it always had, and Bellamy was busy all the time making sure the world was running smoothly. Clarke travelled almost as much as he did, but at least she didn’t look tired anymore. In fact she seemed to have more energy than she ever had.

Their offices both still bothered them - neither upstairs nor downstairs seemed to really, actually know what it was like to deal with humans on a daily basis - but they handled it the way they always had.

Things were normal.

Or as normal as things could get when you were an angel in love with a demon, raising the antichrist with Cain and regularly visited by a bored witch.

Bellamy loved the quiet moments he got with Clarke, the nights he could spend learning all the things about her he’d never had the chance to before, and the way she was just as desperate to know him, inside and out. But mostly he loved that things hadn’t really changed between them, except that he had to keep an eye on the electricity when they were hooking up in case Clarke accidentally blew out every lightbulb in a 500 mile radius again. They were just… them. The way they always had been.

An angel and a demon.

A bookseller and an anarchist.

Parents of a superpowered child.

And both rabidly invested in theological and existential debates.

“Look, all I’m saying is, if you really break it all down, there are no ‘good guys’. It’s all relative.” Clarke said through her mouthful of food.

Bellamy wagged his fork at her. “You know that’s not true! There are good people everywhere!”

“I know that, but I’m just saying those people aren’t perfect - everyone’s done something bad. And people who’ve done bad things aren’t always bad guys. That’s a very binary view of the world, Bellamy.” Clarke heaped more potatoes onto Madi’s plate, who was watching them both in fascination.

“What about Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther?” Bellamy listed off.

“Pervert; refused to treat people unless they converted; antisemite,” Clarke rebutted.

“She has a point.” Murphy said, revelling in adding fuel to the fire.

Bellamy glared at him. “You’re not helping.”

“I’m not trying to help you, I’m on Clarke’s side.”

“Of course you are, you’re the first murderer!”

“In my defence, I didn’t know what would happen if I killed him. I’d never done it before.”

“That’s a terrible excuse.”

“I was the first murderer. How do you think people knew it was only safe to eat potatoes and not the leaves?”

“They ate the leaves and died,” Clarke said.

“Exactly.”

“Don’t encourage him.” Bellamy muttered. “Besides, this was our debate, you can’t gang up on me like that.”

“I’ll join your team if you want,” Madi offered.

He smiled over at her, but he knew when he was defeated, and he raised his hands in surrender. “It’s okay. I lose. Clarke’s right.”

Clarke frowned. “Huh. Just like that?”

Bellamy gathered the empty plates from the table and started carrying them to the sink, “I never really disagreed with you, I just like watching you when you get passionate about something. Your eyes start glowing. It’s cute.”

He didn’t have to look behind him to know that Clarke was blushing.

“You’re ridiculous.” Clarke muttered, mouth sounding full again.

“Coming from you, that’s certainly an interesting word choice,” Murphy said, and there was the unmistakable sound of Clarke smacking him in the back of the head. “I take it back, you’re not ridiculous at all. Totally normal.”

Bellamy started washing the dishes while Clarke and Murphy squabbled over century-long grievances in that joking way they did, and Madi finished her dinner and came over to dry up, beaming over at him in the warm spring evening.

He’d lived for millenia, seen civilizations rise and fall, had even contributed to some, and met geniuses and artists and scholars, but out of all of that, Bellamy realised that the happiest he was, the closest to human he felt, was in this kitchen with his little mismatched family. With the man who murdered his brother and was never allowed to forget it. With the Antichrist who had homework due next week and wanted to hang out with her friends after school. With the demon that fell not because she hated God’s creation but because she wanted better for them. A demon that was more human than anyone he’d ever met.

A demon so human she’d raised the Antichrist to reject the Apocalypse.

A demon so human she befriended the very first murderer.

A demon so human she fell in love with an angel.

6000 years between them and she never stopped loving him, not for a second. Bellamy glanced over his shoulder at her as she got up from the table with her plate, still chatting idly to Murphy, and came up behind him, dropping it into the sink and wrapping her arms around his waist.

Humanity lives in the biggest moments, and the smallest ones, and Clarke carried it with her everywhere she went, but Bellamy felt it most in moments like this. The sun had long since set on the day, but he felt its warmth glowing from within his chest, lighting up that little kitchen with nothing but love.

He never wanted to get used to that feeling.

He wanted to find it again, in every new second, and never let it go.