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The trek back from Mt. Weather is a long and weary one. The sun beats down the survivors’ necks only to disappear behind looming clouds over the treeline.
Bellamy frowns at the sky before glancing back at Clarke with worried eyes. His gaze darts back to the injured travelers they lead to camp, and Clarke understands his unspoken concern.
She closes the distance between them, shielding their conversation from the others with their brushing shoulders.
His voice comes out in a low rasp. “They can’t get caught in the rain, we’re too exposed out here. We won’t make it to camp before it starts. We need to find shelter.”
“We’ll never find it at the pace we’re moving,” Clarke sighs.
“Then let’s scout ahead. Just you and me. We look for someplace safe and radio Kane when we find one.”
Just you and me. That’s precisely what Clarke has been avoiding since pulling that lever. Being alone with Bellamy will only make it harder to walk away when they reach that gate, and Clarke will lose her mind if she gives any thought to why that specifically might be her undoing.
But he’s right: their people aren’t safe. Even if it makes Clarke’s life harder, she’ll bear it so they don’t have to.
“Okay,” Clarke relinquishes. “But we should send out another team just in case we don’t find anything.”
Bellamy glances back at the group, and Clarke looks with him, searching for able-bodied people like she knows he is too.
“Lincoln and Octavia,” she offers. “If anyone else can find shelter, it’s Lincoln.”
Bellamy’s jaw ticks as he nods, an air of reluctance about him until his eyes fall on the sword on Octavia’s hip. “You’re right.”
Together they fall into step with Marcus, Clarke trying hard to avoid looking at her mother on the stretcher beside them. She did this to her, if she had just acted faster—
“Sounds like a solid plan.” Kane interrupts her thoughts. His gaze turns to Abby asleep, to her hand hanging loosely in his. At least her mom will be taken care of; that alone makes leaving easier. “You better get moving,” Kane sighs, eyes flitting at the stormy sky.
They nod and make their way to where Lincoln and O walk together. Lincoln agrees to scout, and Octavia takes the radio Bellamy unclasps from his own hip to press into her palm.
Bellamy looks between the two of them. “Be safe.”
Octavia rolls her eyes and smiles. “You too, big brother.”
Clarke stands by Bellamy’s side as his sister disappears into the woods. She nudges his arm and adjusts the pack on her shoulder. “They’ll be fine.”
Tension fades from Bellamy’s shoulders at her touch. He turns to her with a slight smile. “Let’s get a move on.”
With just the two of them setting the pace, it isn’t long before they’re out of view of the rest of their people. Thunder rumbles in the distance, a slight breeze rustling the fallen leaves at their feet. Clarke is struck by the beauty of Earth even in its most destructive moments. In another life, she’d whip out a sketchbook and try to capture the rolling gray of the sky before the water reclaimed the image.
Instead she curses the weather and trudges alongside Bellamy, her eyes scanning the land in front of them hoping to find enough shelter to protect their people.
The breeze picks up to full blown wind by the time the two of them find a small cave system in the mountainside. Panic takes over Clarke’s chest at the realization that the caves are too small to fit more than a few people per opening, and there aren’t enough to fit everyone.
Bellamy seems to realize the same thing. He looks at Clarke with worry and determination etched into the lines of his face.
A gust of wind nearly knocks Clarke off her feet, bringing a few scattered droplets with it. More follow, coming in waves that bend the trunks of tree saplings and make it harder to walk forward.
Octavia’s voice comes through the radio, staticky from the storm. “We found shelter Northeast of where we left you. It’s a big cave near a ravine. I’d move fast.”
Just as Clarke moves to radio that she and Bellamy are on their way, a wall of rain breaks through the treeline on their left. Kane’s response is lost to her ears under the roar of water falling through the canopy of leaves to hit the ground as it advances.
“Bellamy, we gotta go,” Clarke calls out. She doubts that they can outrun the rain, but they might make it to their people if they run fast enough.
Just as Bellamy nods and moves to follow her, the wall of water catches them, soaking them to the bone. Clarke’s hair falls in her face, blocking her vision along with the raindrops streaming into her eyes, but she keeps running. They can make it, they just have to stick together.
But Bellamy isn’t beside her when she reaches out. Or behind her when she turns.
A shiver runs up Clarke’s spine from the cold and the prospect of being alone. Her eyes search the ground, the trees, the caves, looking for any sign of life.
She finds him frozen on his knees in the same place she took off from, one hand on the side of his head while the other wraps around his throat. His eyes are wide with panic, but he’s frozen.
“Bellamy!”
No response. He doesn’t even look at her. Clarke sprints and falls to her knees in front of him.
“Bellamy?! Bellamy, we gotta go. We gotta get out of here.” She searches him and finds only fear on his face among the torrent of water running down it. “Everything is okay, but we gotta go.” Without a response from him, Clarke moves to grab his arm and haul him to his feet.
Except the moment their skin makes contact, Bellamy flinches like he’s been hit. That slows Clarke, distracts her from the cold water seeping into her bones. She takes in his distant eyes, the way he’s shrunken in on himself, and speaks as gently as she can over the roar of the rain.
“Hey, I’m not gonna hurt you, but we aren’t safe here.” She surveys their surroundings in search of the best place to take shelter. “There’s a cave to your right. Do you think we can make it there?”
Only then does Bellamy move to risk a glance. He sees the cave she points to and nods, albeit hesitantly.
When he moves to stand, his foot slips out from under him, sending him careening into Clarke. He’s a lot of weight all at once, all solid muscle, but she manages to keep him upright.
“Can you walk?” she asks, scared for him.
He nods, but keeps an iron grip on her hand where she hauled him up. Together they make their way through the onslaught of rain, fighting to stay upright in the sheer force of the downpour.
Water assaults every one of Clarke’s senses. It blocks her sight, distorts her hearing, numbs her touch. She can’t open her mouth to talk to Bellamy without drowning.
All Clarke senses is his arm around her shoulders, the way his weight sags when the rain intensifies even more. She isn’t sure why this is happening, but every instinct is telling her to go after whatever the fuck caused this. She knows one thing: this isn’t natural. Whatever caused Bellamy to have this reaction was done to him.
The wall of water gives way to the forgiving dryness of the cave, which has enough of an upward slope to keep out the water gathering at the lip of the rock.
“Easy,” Clarke sighs as she lowers Bellamy to the ground, keeping a steady grip on him even as he slides down the wall of the cave. His eyes dart around, assessing potential danger, and it kills Clarke to know that the reaction is habitual. That, at least, isn’t new , she thinks bitterly.
Bellamy’s eyes are glassy when she kneels to inspect him. A world of hurt lives in them, alongside a fear Clarke wishes to never see on him.
“Hey,” she starts, extending her hand to his shoulder—
Bellamy flinches away from her touch.
Clarke retreats into her own space, guilt beyond what she thought possible clenching around her heart.
Burning, all-consuming anger soon follows.
“They did this to you.” She tries to keep her voice level, for his sake, but even Clarke can hear the fire in it. It’s a statement, not a question, but Bellamy nods anyway.
For a moment, Clarke lets herself feel her anger. It careens through her bloodstream, setting her body alight at the thought of the trauma that could reduce Bellamy Blake to a statue in the middle of the forest. Grounder attacks, getting left for dead at the dropship, and trekking through the forest on a warpath hadn’t hurt him, but one trip to Mount Weather was enough.
But Bellamy sits shivering before her, and Clarke has to help him before she lets her emotions get out of hand. She doesn’t know what role she plays that he needs—doctor, friend, or co-leader—but she’ll offer whatever piece of her that can support him best right now. She looks at his shaking torso, his sopping wet hair, and decides that doctor needs to come first. The cold seeping into her bones tells her as much.
She tries for a lighter tone and offers a slight smile. “I’ve got a blanket in my pack. Raven was working on waterproofing them before we left. Let’s see how it held up.”
If nothing else, her goal is distraction. Right now she’s just praying she can keep him from freezing.
Clarke rummages through the pack, thanking the goddess that is Raven Reyes when the bright orange blanket inside is still dry. She eyes Bellamy as she holds the soft fabric, unsure of where to go from here. Ideally, she could strip off his wet clothes and wrap him up in a cocoon, but she isn’t sure how to do that if she can’t touch him. The last thing she wants to do is make this worse.
“What do you need?” she asks. “What can I do?”
“Cold,” he all but stutters. “It was so goddamn cold.”
A beat passes as Clarke considers her limited options.
“Can I touch you?”
He nods shakily, clenching his fists in a way that isn’t at all comforting.
Still, he needs her, and Clarke will do everything in her power to get him through this.
It’s easiest to narrate her actions as she eases the white button up off his shoulders, grateful that he unbuttoned it earlier. Clarke moves with steady hands—doctor’s hands—as she works to unstick the fabric from his skin with minimal contact. Every time their skin brushes, Bellamy tenses, the skin on his knuckles turning white. The whole time, Clarke punctuates her narration with soothing words, hoping to do some good for once.
“A few more seconds and then it’ll be off. Everything is okay. You made it out. There you go, you’re free.”
She doesn’t say I’m here. That’s what caused this mess. Clarke was the one to send him into the Mountain. Clarke was the reason his hand was on the lever too. If she’d been stronger, he wouldn’t have that burden to bear.
What good is I’m here when she’s going to leave him the moment they get to camp?
She feels so weak in the wake of her destruction looking at her through the teary eyes of Bellamy Blake.
Guilt brews in the form of a lump in Clarke’s throat that refuses to be swallowed, but she tries as she reaches for the hem of his tank top. It’s soaked, same as his shirt, and all she can allow herself to focus on is keeping him safe now. It doesn’t make up for the fact that she couldn’t then, but it’s something .
“This okay?” she checks in with him, trying to ignore the urge to let her hands shake.
Still no response past a nod, but she’ll take it for now. Clarke inches the wet fabric off his body, peeling it from his torso with as much care as she can muster. Bellamy lifts his arms for her, and she notes how much the movement costs him. Ten seconds spent unfurling his limbs from his chest just for two shaky ones of him holding them above his head for her to remove the shirt.
She hurries for him, setting it beside her once she’s done to avoid sudden movements. Her balance wavers, and her hand lands on his knee to steady her for a brief second. His cargo pants are thick, soaked, and freezing to the touch.
“Pants?”
“Off,” he chokes out. “Can’t feel my legs.”
Clarke nods, approaching this as clinically as possible. “Okay, let me know if you need me to stop.”
Again, she tells him what she’s doing, averting her eyes once she deals with the buttons and zipper holding the pants in place, leaving him in his underwear. Bellamy lifts his hips to make her job easier, which she’s grateful for.
The pants are heavy in her hands as she stands to lay them out onto the rocks behind her hoping they’ll dry somewhat. She does the same with his other clothes and boots before rushing back with the blanket.
“No.”
His words stop her in her tracks. “Bellamy, you’re freezing.”
“Clarke.” Bellamy takes a moment to compose himself, and Clarke doesn’t miss the way his hands shake too violently to be from cold alone. “You are too.”
He ducks his head and rubs his throat, bunching his knees into his chest as soon as he’s done talking. There’s no room for Clarke to ask what he means—as if she didn’t understand the first time.
Debating is a waste of time. Bellamy is right: Clarke is freezing, and the pack only holds one blanket.
She shrugs off her massive jacket and gloves, then sets to work on removing her boots, shirt, and pants. Bellamy’s eyes are shut as he wraps his arms around himself.
Clarke lays her clothes out next to his and hurries to his side, sitting next to him on the floor while situating the blanket around her shoulders.
“I’m going to put this around you, okay?”
After Bellamy nods, Clarke eases her arm around his shoulders, bringing the blanket with it. The skin of his back is cold against her arm, and he shudders at her touch.
“Hey, it’s okay. You’re drying off. It won’t last forever,” she tries to soothe him.
Bellamy turns to give her a withering look, and Clarke is thrown by how close he’s allowed her to get. Judging by the tick of his jaw, it isn’t easy.
“What can I do?” she asks, clueless as to how she can help. Her job as a doctor is done, leaving her a mess of emotions she can’t sort through.
Bellamy’s teeth have stopped chattering, but his hands still shake in his lap. “Just stay. You were—you talking, earlier. It, uh, helped.”
“I can talk.” Clarke gathers herself, curling her arm tighter around his shoulders. “You know what I think about a lot?” She pauses, but she isn’t really waiting for an answer. It just feels easier to ask instead of launching straight into a ramble. “Those flares we sent up from the dropship. You said you wouldn’t know what to wish for, but I think I do now.”
Clarke laughs almost bitterly when she thinks back on her silent wish, the way her eyes flickered over to Finn and Raven when she had Bellamy standing right next to her.
“I wish I had listened to you when the Grounders came. I wish we had barricaded the dropship, that the Mountain Men never came. I never thought I’d miss that camp, but I do. I miss when it was just a hundred kids on the ground, and not everything we did was for survival. We lived . We were messy and scared and had way too much access to Monty and Jasper’s moonshine—” Bellamy huffs in a way that Clarke thinks is a laugh “—and we did our best. No adults. No politics. Just…” she pauses, trying to find the right words. “Freedom. Just freedom. That’s what I’d wish for.”
Clarke should continue talking like he asked, but she’s struck by her own words. It had never occurred to her that life on the dropship might’ve been the happiest she’s been in a long time, but it’s true.
In her silence, she looks at Bellamy’s hands, which shake less violently in his lap. Clarke runs her hand along his skin, connecting his freckles with her fingers. He sighs, his breath shaky on the exhale, but he seems to be calming.
“I think I’d wish for the same,” he manages. Clarke wasn’t holding out for a response, but she’s hopeful despite the way his voice wavers.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Don’t worry about me, Clarke.”
“I’m going to,” she says, turning to face him. Their knees brush under the blanket, his skin like ice against her own. She scoots closer for warmth. “I’m going to worry about you no matter what, so keeping this in won’t help at all. If you don’t want to talk about it, I understand, but don’t hold it in for my sake.”
Bellamy’s mouth opens as he looks at her before dropping his gaze to the rock in front of them. A gust of wind blows through the cave, sending a shiver down both of their bodies.
“You’ll feel responsible,” he breathes. “You shouldn’t, but you will.” His eyes darken like he’s trying to bore a hole into the floor instead of meeting Clarke’s eyes.
Clarke’s voice comes out fond when she responds. “Just let me take care of you, dammit.”
“You take care of everyone but yourself,” he counters. “Who’s taking care of you?”
A voice in Clarke’s head screams it isn’t true. She kills everyone. The Grounders. Finn. Everyone in Mount Weather. Their deaths are on her.
But one look at Bellamy in the dim light of the cave, and Clarke can’t speak. He’s hurting more than she is right now. She can stay silent a little longer if it means he’ll let her take care of him. All she lets herself do is drop her head onto his shoulder.
Bellamy doesn’t budge. His shoulder shifts as he looks at her, and Clarke almost can’t bring herself to meet his eyes.
Curiosity wins out in the end, though, and she lifts her head only to have the breath knocked out of her. Despite his shaking hands and slumped shoulders, Bellamy looks at Clarke with as much resolution as she’s ever seen on him. It makes her head spin.
“Okay,” she answers, not sure what she’s granting him permission to do. “But you first.”
He manages a scoff at that, but his panic must get the best of him. With one last cautionary glance at the downpour outside, Bellamy shifts and lowers his head into Clarke’s lap.
The blanket tugs downward as he moves, and Clarke works to keep it around him while he settles. Bellamy’s cold, wet curls chill her thigh, but she can’t bring herself to care as he lays on his side, still curled into a ball to stay under the blanket.
Clarke’s hands act of their own accord, sliding into his hair to massage his scalp. The last thing she wants to do is push Bellamy and make him uncomfortable, so she runs her hands through the wet strands until he finds it in himself to open up.
“The decontamination was…” he sucks in a sharp breath, “brutal. They put collars on us, powder that burned, pressure washed us and scrubbed us down. Water was—it was everywhere. People were drowning while they screamed. We were in chains while they stuck us with needles, shoved shit down our throats…”
Clarke’s hands tighten in his hair involuntarily. She forces them to relax, but her body burns with a rage she didn’t know she was capable of. For a moment, Clarke is almost glad they irradiated that mountain. She’d do it again, alone, if it meant Bellamy never had to go through this.
Ever perceptive, Bellamy notices the shift in the air and rolls onto his back to look up at her. He’s put his mask back on, a light smile gracing his lips. “Hey, Princess, it’s o—”
“If you say it’s okay, I’m going to lose my mind,” Clarke warns. “What you went through, that’s not okay. That wasn’t supposed to— You don’t deserve—”
Bellamy reaches for her hand that rests on his shoulder and covers it with his own. His mask cracks somewhat as he looks up at her with those big brown eyes. They shine pleadingly, like Clarke continuing that sentence might be the thing to break him, but she has to get the words out. Judging by his desperate grip on her hand, he needs to hear them more than he knows.
“I gave that order,” she whispers, horrified. “I told you to go into the mountain.” Bellamy’s brow furrows in anguish, and Clarke knows she can’t make this about herself.
“I would’ve gone whether you said to or not,” he tries, and he shouldn’t be comforting her right now.
“No, you wouldn’t have. When I said I couldn’t lose you too…” Clarke trails off, trying to picture his face then and how it compares to the way he looks at her now. “You wouldn’t have gone. It would’ve broken me, and you knew it.”
He looks away from her, staring at the ceiling instead of her face.
“I meant it, Bellamy. I still do.” She reaches for his face gently—not with a doctor’s hands, but with a lover’s. The moment her fingers slide over Bellamy’s cheeks, his eyes search hers almost frantically. “I can’t lose you. This wasn’t supposed to happen to you. You don’t deserve it. You’re a good person, Bell.” Her voice cracks on the nickname she’s never dared use. Tears glisten in his eyes as he looks up at her, like he wants to believe her, but can’t.
“I need you,” she breathes, forcing back tears of her own.
Bellamy closes his eyes like the words hurt, tears escaping down his temples and into his hair. “Even like this?” he asks, voice pained and small.
Clarke moves the hand he holds to his heart, resting it there to feel it racing. “Yes. Always.”
He sits up, taking the blanket with him as he retreats into his own space. His elbows brace against his knees and he buries his head in his arms. “I had a panic attack in the fucking rain, Clarke. It’s Earth. It’s never going to stop raining.”
The wind rushes out of Clarke’s lungs at how utterly broken he sounds.
“No, but it won’t always be this bad,” Clarke promises. She looks at Bellamy collapsed in on himself and knows she can’t leave him to bear this alone. With gentle, careful hands, she reaches for his arm, sliding her fingers to his wrist to pull it away from his head. She dips into his line of sight, still holding on. “And I’ll always be here when a storm rolls in, okay? I’m here for you.”
Bellamy holds her gaze for one, two, three seconds as the weight of her words sinks in. Then, without warning, he grabs hold of her opposite wrist and tugs her into his lap.
Clarke tries to hide her surprise as Bellamy buries his face in her neck, his nose brushing against her bare collarbone. She wraps her arms around his shoulders, holds the back of his neck, and lets him take whatever this is at his own pace.
The reality of what she’s promised him doesn’t come lightly to Clarke. Her fantasy of running off into the woods after delivering her people back to Camp Jaha will remain just that: a fantasy. She can’t leave Bellamy alone in this knowing what they had to do is tearing him apart in more ways than one—knowing the burdens he took on to make their survival possible. For the first time, Clarke considers that Bellamy might need her as much as she needs him, and that punishing herself by denying herself of Bellamy would only punish him too.
His tears register only once they fall to Clarke’s skin, and that’s when she notices the way his shoulders shake.
“It’s okay, Bell,” she says, pressing her lips to his hair. “You don’t have to bear it alone. Together, right? We’re going to do this together.”
A sob wracks Bellamy’s body as it tears loose from his throat, shaking him in Clarke’s arms. All she does is hold him tight, playing with his curls and whispering in his ear.
She recalls the story he told the younger kids one night by the fire, a smile resting on her lips at the memory of his face lit with a youthful golden glow while they stared at him with adoration. He told them about Atlas forced to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders as punishment. In the moment, Clarke thought she understood the feeling. There were worries of survival, of keeping all hundred and two of them safe, but she had no clue what she was talking about. Now, after doing terrible things in the name of survival, after seeing the person war made of her, Clarke understands. And now, with her knees pressed against the cold, hard Earth, she feels that weight press into her shoulders and accepts it as her punishment.
She mentions none of this as she recalls the story to Bellamy, not caring that he’s heard and told it infinitely more times than her. If her voice helped him earlier, it certainly does now. Clarke had only just reached the punishment itself when his sobs slow to shuddering breaths, several times calmer than he was just minutes ago.
“... and he was forced to kneel at the Eastern edge of the Earth,” Clarke says, knowing she’s wrong.
“West,” he croaks into her neck, his lips ghosting over her skin. “It was the Western edge of the Earth.”
Clarke takes a moment to hide her smile before pulling back, holding his bare shoulders to push away and look at him. Bellamy fights her, clutches tighter at her waist and hiding his face like he doesn’t want to be seen.
She slides her fingers along his cheeks and makes him look her in the eyes. His face is so open, teary-eyed, vulnerable. He looks like he wants to disappear.
“See?” She says softly. “I do need you.”
Bellamy’s eyebrows knit together, and he takes a deep, unsteady breath as Clarke wipes his tears with her thumbs, tracing circles into his cheeks after. She holds him in front of her, lets him see how much she means the words.
His adam’s apple bobs in his throat, and at last Clarke sees the panic leave his eyes. He looks up at her, eyes clearer, body warmer.
“I think I’m good,” he sighs, loosening his grip on Clarke and glancing at her nervously.
She stays put in his lap, her hands still on his face. “You don’t have to be though.”
He struggles with that, and Clarke watches as he fights to stay vulnerable, to keep the mask off. “I feel like I do,” he admits, looking past her.
“Not with me, okay?” Clarke moves into his sight. “You don’t have to be good with me. And I—” she takes a deep breath. “I’m not good either. But we can be that together, too.”
They don’t speak for a while after that. Bellamy pulls Clarke back to him, wrapping his strong arms around her back. Now that the crisis is averted, Clarke realizes that she’s in Bellamy’s lap in her underwear, and he’s stripped down too. And oddly enough, she’s comfortable. The blanket drapes over his shoulders, held in place by Bellamy’s arms around her. It’s warm here—safe, even. Lightning crashes and thunder rolls outside, but within the walls of this cave is a haven Clarke didn’t think was possible. People like her don’t get to feel this kind of comfort. It’s only a matter of time before it gets taken away.
She wraps herself around Bellamy, daring the universe to try. One hand buries itself in his curls, which have dried to the point of dampness, while the other clutches at his shoulder blades.
What little sunlight reached the cave from behind the dark rain clouds fades alongside the dwindling downpour. The sun recedes, pulling the clouds with it to reveal a brilliant midnight blue sky full of stars. Bellamy’s breathing steadies with the approach of the night, syncing to Clarke’s until they’re one body breathing.
“It’s too dark to find the others,” he sighs into her shoulder.
Clarke’s gaze lingers on what little bits of sky she can see through the mouth of the cave and the treeline. “Any chance the radio survived the rain?”
“I don’t know, it’s in my pocket. Probably not though.”
Slowly, Clarke extracts herself from Bellamy, stretching out her stiff joints as she stands. Cold air assaults her, making goosebumps erupts along her skin as she hurries to rifle through the many pockets of his cargo pants, which are only slightly less soaked than they were when Clarke laid them out.
The radio splutters and screeches when Clarke attempts to turn it on, and she doubts it broadcasts her voice when she speaks into it.
She plops down next to Bellamy with a sigh. “Raven is gonna kill me for that.”
“Pretty sure she’s got other priorities,” Bellamy reminds her. Clarke winces.
Bellamy takes in the way she shivers and wraps his arm around her, bringing the blanket and the warmth of his embrace with it. Unashamed, Clarke leans into his touch, resting her head on his shoulder.
His voice rumbles against her temple when he speaks. “Thanks.”
“You don’t have to thank me for that—”
“Let me. Please.” He waits for her to protest and takes her silence as acceptance when she doesn’t. “The last twenty-four hours have been… well, shit. I’m sorry for throwing more on you, but I appreciate what you did for me all the same.”
“Don’t apologize. I think… I think I needed to help somebody after everything. I’m glad that somebody was you,” she admits.
Bellamy’s arm tightens around her, and she feels him shift to look at her. “Me too,” he says, his voice close to her ear. “Do you want to talk about it?”
He keeps his voice light, but they both feel the weight of it fall over the small cave. The mountain. The Grounder betrayal. The bullets. The bodies.
“Not tonight,” Clarke sighs, the weight pressing into her shoulders a stark contrast to the comforting pressure of Bellamy’s arm around her. “Unless you need to,” she adds, afraid he asked her out of fear of bringing it up himself.
His body sways as he shakes his head. “I think it’s best we let the dead rest tonight.” A heavy silence falls over the cave as the conversation stalls. “Speaking of rest,” he starts. “We should get some.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to,” Clarke admits, her voice quiet and hollow. She’s terrified of what she’ll see when she closes her eyes.
“Neither do I,” he says. “But we have to sleep at some point.”
There’s something unspoken hanging off the end of his sentence that makes Clarke think he doesn’t want to do it for the first time alone. She slumps against him, taking in the warmth of his skin for as long as she can before she agrees and the cold comes rushing in.
They set up for the night, laying out the blanket on the cold stone floor. Bellamy lays on his back while Clarke offers him her pack to use as a pillow.
“What about you?” he asks, taking the pack hesitantly.
Clarke doesn’t answer with words, instead finding it easier to slot her body against Bellamy’s, sighing as his skin warms hers. She rests her head on his chest, tucking under the arm he lifts once he realizes what she’s doing. Once she’s settled, he brings the leftover blanket over their intertwined bodies, warming them once more.
Clarke doesn’t know what to do with her hands. The cave is silent except for their breathing and Bellamy’s fast heartbeat in Clarke’s ear. It has to be the anxiety surrounding sleep, or maybe the cold. That’s how she writes off her own racing heart, at least.
Bellamy huffs out a laugh when she tries to adjust herself every few seconds to avoid disturbing him. “Just get comfortable, Princess. I’m not falling asleep that fast.”
Clarke mocks him under her breath, but she listens. Her arm slides hesitantly around his waist while her other stays trapped between them, but she angles her body so that it’s no longer uncomfortable. Or rather, it’s as comfortable as she’ll get on the cave floor.
Sounds of the surrounding wilderness seep in, echoing in the silence of the damp, dark cave. Clarke counts her breaths, tries to calm the beating of her heart, focuses on the feeling of Bellamy’s skin against hers and the sensation of melting into him, but to no avail. Sleep is an elusive, tempting thing. Clarke isn’t sure she wants to chase it.
Bellamy’s tentative voice cuts through her thoughts.
“Did you mean what you said earlier? About doing this together?” he asks, vulnerability tingeing the edge of his voice.
“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t,” she breathes.
Bellamy’s breath hitches. “I meant what I said, too, about you taking care of everyone but yourself.” His arm wraps around her, pulling her closer into his warmth. Tendrils of sleep creep around the edges of Clarke’s consciousness. “That’s another thing we’re gonna do together, alright?”
Before Clarke can respond, she’s pulled to the darkness of her subconscious.
Nightmares are tricky things.
Clarke has experienced her fair share of nightmares, from her dad’s death to the year in solitary, not to mention the fresh horrors of Earth.
Tonight is different though.
She’s back in Mount Weather, watching Raven being tortured and drilled for marrow on the screen in front of her. She turns to see Dante Wallace with his hands up, a desperate, animalistic look in his eyes she’s sure reflects her own.
That doesn’t stop her from putting a bullet in him.
It’s not a quick or merciful death. The bullet tears through his chest as blood leaks onto his pristine shirt. The old man sinks to the ground, eventually slumping onto it as the life drains out of him.
Then the scene shifts. Clarke stands in the same place with the same gun weighing in her hand, but now facing a line of people that winds out the door. She doesn’t recognize most of the faces, but her hand raises anyway.
Her mother cries out on the monitor before her, and Clarke’s eye catches on the footage of the door. Every resident of Mount Weather lines up outside, and Clarke’s heart sinks when she realizes what’s about to happen.
She puts a bullet in the first person.
Each falls the same way as Wallace, slow and undignified. The people behind them in line are unblinking until they reach the front of the line, at which point they become trembling, human.
One after another, they shuffle forward only to be shot, piling forward into a mass of bodies. Teachers, school children, innocent people. Maya. The people who rebelled to help her friends. Clarke kills them each with one pull of the trigger.
It takes ages, but she reaches the end of the line, and when she does, she feels her body turn. Panic overtakes Clarke as she tries to resist, to dig her heels in, but she isn’t strong enough to stop her gun from turning on Bellamy.
He nods sadly. “Together,” he says, but he’s unarmed.
A voice in Clarke’s head snarls, you killed him too, you know, or at least a piece of him. He told you he was afraid of becoming a monster, and you let him become one alongside you because you were too weak to do it alone.
No, she thinks. I shot those people, not Bellamy.
Tell him that, the voice says.
Just before Clarke’s finger involuntarily squeezes the trigger, she’s thrown back into the conscious world.
“Clarke?!” Bellamy’s panicked voice brings her to reality. “Hey, it’s okay. We made it out—”
If he says the word together , Clarke is going to lose it. She struggles to breathe, trapped by Bellamy’s arms and the blanket as the walls of the cave close in on her.
His arms tighten around her. “Clarke,” he says softly.
“Don’t,” she cries. “Don’t reassure me. It’s my fault you went into the Mountain. It’s my fault you had to pull the lever.”
Bellamy turns on his side, leveling his face with Clarke’s. His eyes are glassy, just as they were in her dream. She screws her eyes shut.
“Clarke, look at me.” She shakes her head. “Clarke,” he sighs, his hands sliding to cup her cheeks.
That same trust and openness lurks there, and Clarke wishes it didn’t take her breath away so she could go back to shutting him out.
“I went into the Mountain because it was the best way to save our people. I pulled that lever because it was the best way to save our people.”
“You wouldn’t have had to if I was stronger.”
His exasperated exhale fans over her lips. “I don’t care how strong you are. I wasn’t letting you do that alone. That was my choice.”
“I shouldn’t have hesitated. You wouldn’t have had to.”
“You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t hesitate.”
“What if I don’t want to be me?”
The cave falls silent for a moment.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to be me either,” Bellamy admits. “But I think we try to become people we want to be.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“You don’t have to,” he breathes. “I don’t know either. But we’ll try .”
His resolution leaves no room for Clarke to argue, and she doesn’t want to risk blaming him in her efforts to blame herself. In his eyes, they have the same blood on their hands.
Untangling their limbs is a slow, painful extraction. The cold is invasive, ridding Clarke of all traces of Bellamy’s touch. She tugs her clothes back on, hoping to keep some of his warmth to herself for just a moment longer.
The radio is fried, so they resolve to meet the others back at Camp Jaha. With so many weak and injured, the first priority would be to get everyone safe before finding Bellamy and Clarke.
So they walk side by side until that tall gate is in sight, surrounded by the wreckage of the Ark falling from the sky. Clarke surveys the damage they brought down just by coming down to this planet, just by trying to survive.
A call from the gate grabs Clarke’s attention. Octavia stands under the sign, waving toward them. It’s hard to tell from this far, but her smile looks smug. Bellamy sends her a look, and she shoos off to wait near a group of unharmed delinquents—the last of the original hundred.
Destruction be damned, Clarke is glad to see them alive. They’re bruised and shellshocked, but here . They made it to the safe walls of Camp Jaha, and they have a chance to live. Clarke has traded the world to get that for them, and in this moment, it’s worth it.
She stops in her tracks, tearing her eyes from the gate to gaze out into the woods, one last look at the road she’ll never see.
Bellamy’s hand slides into hers, giving her fingers a gentle squeeze.
He needs her. Clarke may have decided that her people don’t need her, but she learned long ago that trying to make up Bellamy’s mind for him was hopeless. He needs her .
“You don’t have to do this alone,” he says.
And maybe she needs him, too.
Clarke returns his squeeze and rises on her toes to kiss his cheek, his skin hot on her lips against the frigid air. She thinks of how he let her in last night, how much of himself he’s shown to her, and not only can she not leave; she isn’t sure she wants to.
Bellamy’s arms circle her, his breath billowing next to her ear as they embrace. He is steady, calming, and everything Clarke doesn’t deserve.
But she wants to, one day.
His lips press to her forehead, the confirmation she needs to move forward.
She stays close to Bellamy, letting her eyes drift from his lips to the waiting gate.
“Together?” she asks.
“Together.”