Work Text:
“Raven, we’re done arguing about this.”
Bellamy shoved his pistol into his pants at the small of his back. He arranged his shirt back down over it. Pain stabbed through his left shoulder and bands of it tightened like a vice around his chest. He ground his teeth against it and leveled Raven with a dark glare to match her own.
She stood nearly a whole foot shorter than him, but neither the height difference nor the cane she used to aid her paralyzed leg made her any less intimidating. Raven leaned against it heavily now, the handle pressed to her hip for stability. Sleepless nights had turned her normally dusky skin pale from exhaustion, but rage bloomed bright and rosy in her cheeks and brought a frightening stillness to hands that had been shaking from overuse mere hours ago.
“We had a deal Bellamy.” Her voice was icy, an accusation implicit in her tone that Bellamy didn’t bother denying. She tugged on the frayed strap of the duffle bag he’d slung across his chest and sent a fresh wave of pain through his chest. He swallowed the gasp and it came out as more of a hiss. Raven’s eyes narrowed further, but she let go. “Don’t do this.”
“Someone has to.”
“It doesn’t have to be you.”
“It does actually.”
Raven stepped forward, her arm rising and aiming for his chest. Bellamy stepped back to avoid her hand, gritting his teeth against the pain brought on by the sudden movement. Unbalanced by his unexpected retreat, Raven wavered on her feet. Before Bellamy could reach to steady her, Wick was rushing up from where he’d maintained a polite distance behind her. She shook him off moments later after she’d steadied herself. Wick let her go, but didn’t move back.
“Damn it Bellamy.” Balling her hand into a fist at her side instead, Raven tried a different tactic, her voice softer but still hard as steel. “We promised each other no more unilateral decisions.”
“This wasn’t unilateral,” Bellamy replied. “This bomb isn’t going to deliver itself and we all knew that. Someone’s walking it in and that someone is going to be me.”
Raven expelled a heavy breath. Cocking her head, she looked up at him through narrowed eyes. He was just as pale and tired as she was, if not more so, but where she’d worked up a sweat in the painful run to the gates to stop him, she didn’t think sweat beaded on his forehead for any similar reason. “Someone needs to walk it in and then run like hell to get back out. Right, Bellamy?”
Bellamy’s only response was a tight smile, his eyes refusing to meet hers. He reached over and squeezed her shoulder. He glanced over her shoulder at Wick. The two men exchanged a brief nod and Raven resisted the urge to elbow Wick in the stomach for staying silent.
She watched him leave through the gates, duffel bag tight against his side. He faltered once when his foot fell into a small hole and Raven almost hoped that it would be enough to send him back. Head falling forward, she saw him grab at his side, watched as he forced himself to straighten, to breathe, to keep walking, and when he pushed the gates open with his good arm she cursed him loudly and colourfully. The last she saw of Bellamy before the gates swung shut were his feet kicking up into a run.
Unmoving, Raven’s eyes remained fixed on the closed metal gates, reason warring with hope in her mind as she waited for Bellamy to turn back, until Wick whistled softly behind her. “So, do you want to tell Clarke or should I?”
“Raven!”
A shout from behind had both Raven and Wick turning on their heels back towards the Ark. Raven shot Wick a sideways glare before his hand made contact with her elbow when she wobbled and he swiftly readjusted his aim to smooth down his rumpled shirt.
Clarke ran towards them, blonde hair falling loose from her ponytail to fly around her face. She stopped beside Raven, but her eyes were on the gate. “Where’d he go?”
Raven ignored the question, choosing instead to ask one of her own. Her eyes flitted between the Ark and the smears of blood that still stained the front of Clarke’s shirt, concerned. “How’s Jackson?”
“Alive. Abby managed to stabilize him.” Clarke sighed tiredly. Absently, she scrubbed her hands against the sides of her legs as if to wipe off the memory of his blood.
Abby, Raven noted. It was always Abby now, never Mom. She shook off the thought and listened to Clarke’s run down of Jackson’s injury. “-stopped his bleeding before he lost more than we had to spare. It’ll be touch and go until he regains consciousness, but we’re hopeful. The dagger missed both his liver and kidney somehow. Bellamy and Miller managed to keep it from doing more damage when they brought him back.”
Now Clarke’s eyes narrowed to chips of ice and she turned fully to face Raven, her expression brooking any more distractions. “Where’d he go, Raven?”
Raven’s hands flew up in exasperation, her cane swinging out sideways wildly. “Where do you think he went Clarke? He went after the Reapers. He took the bomb and now he’s going after the Reapers because he’s got it into his head that he’s the only one who can.” Raven held up her hand in front of Clarke’s darkening face, her voice rising with every word. “No, he thinks he’s the only one who should. Let’s not mince words here.”
“That idiot,” Clarke growled in frustration. Shoving a hand through her hair, Clarke spun around to eye the gate angrily. Her hand tugged painfully on her ponytail, more hair falling loose, but she ignored it and yanked her hand free.
When the hunting party had burst through those gates hours ago with gore on their clothes and the stench of blood heavy around them, Jackson’s limp form hanging between Bellamy and Miller had pulled all of her focus. They’d rushed him to medical, her mother shouting out orders almost faster than they could be followed. After they’d stabilized Jackson, she’d left her mother to monitor him and Clarke had turned her attention to Miller. While she’d cleaned the long, deep gash across the top of his back, she’d asked him what had happened.
“They just came out of nowhere,” Miller had told her. “One moment we were watching out for deer and waiting on the doc to finish collecting his samples and in the next, four of them were on top of us before we could even raise our weapons.” He’d been so tense with anger, his muscles stiff and solid beneath her sure hands as he’d relived the attack.
Bellamy had taken out the first in a rapid succession of shots, but not before the Reaper had managed to shove his dagger into Jackson’s side. Miller’s shooting had killed another, but a third had tackled him to the ground only moments later. Between evading the Reaper’s brutal punches and trying to maneuver enough room to manage a killing blow with his own knife, Miller had missed whatever violent takedown had resulted in Bellamy being thrown bodily against the thick trunk of the nearest tree. With the Reaper pinning him down beneath his substantial weight, Miller had seized on the faint glimmer of an opportunity when the Reaper had raised his arms above his head to gather force for a killing blow. Miller had slid his knife between his arms and straight up into the man’s throat. Bellamy had been the one to pull the dead Reaper off of him, his front drenched in blood and a wickedly hooked dagger tossed at his feet.
Clarke stared out past the gates into the dense forest that lay beyond. She knew Bellamy was on his way to the Reaper caves they’d stumbled upon weeks ago that lay about half a day away from Camp. That knowledge made her blood burn and her stomach twist itself into painful knots.
Too close, they’d all decided. With the Reapers growing bolder, they’d needed a deterrent – something to show the Reapers that the Sky People weren’t easy targets or prey, and that they could fight back and draw blood. So Raven had built them a bomb with goods they’d stolen from Mt. Weather and Octavia had mapped those caves with the reluctant help of Indra’s men.
“What’s crazy is that he was the holdout, right?” Raven mused. “He hadn’t wanted to go through with the plan until we’d figured out a way to get in and out safely.”
An image of Bellamy falling back when the Ark guards had carried Jackson inside, his face contorted in pain with one arm cradled against his stomach, flashed across Clarke’s mind. With Jackson bleeding out in front of her, she’d catalogued that moment and told herself she’d find Bellamy later to check him for injuries.
Now it was later and it appeared that Bellamy figured his injuries made him the perfect choice for what was likely to turn into a suicide mission. He wouldn’t see it that way, of course. He’d weighed the lives of their people against his own and had decided risking his life for their safety was an acceptable tradeoff. Clarke didn’t agree.
“Give me your gun,” Clarke demanded, her hand extended towards Wick.
Eyes widening, Wick froze. He glanced at Raven before staring at Clarke, confused. “What?”
Rolling her eyes, Raven turned to reach around Wick’s waist.
“Whoa! Wait,” Wick exclaimed in surprise. He jumped back and away from Raven’s questing hand, but not before she’d managed to yank the gun free from his waistband. “What is happening right now?”
Raven fixed him with a look that she usually reserved for times when he’d said something she deemed to be ridiculous. He raised his shoulders questioningly at her, but she merely shook her head at him and turned back to Clarke to press the butt of the pistol into Clarke’s open palm.
Closing her fingers around the grip, Clarke tested the feel of the weapon in her hand. It was becoming an altogether too familiar a sensation – the rough grip against her palm and her finger sliding up to rest alongside the trigger as Bellamy had taught her. When she’d asked him to show her they’d been setting up a new smoke hut on the edge of Camp Jaha. Miller had been with them and he’d choked on his laugh when Bellamy had leveled him with a hard look. The look he’d given her next hadn’t been any softer, but he’d lowered the wooden beam he carried to the ground, wiped sweat off his forehead with the short sleeve of his shirt, and had stopped to look at her.
“You’re pretty handy with that knife, you know.” His eyes had gestured to the small knife she kept tied to her waist.
Shrugging, Clarke had straightened and shook the hair out of her eyes. “I’d also like to be handy with a gun.” When he hadn’t responded, Clarke’s eyes had narrowed in suspicion; her ire had risen, but she’d stopped the retort that had been quick to fall to the tip of her tongue. Bellamy stood with his arms crossed across his chest – a normal enough stance for him – but he’d been shifting from foot to foot and had refused to meet her eyes.
Suspicion had quickly turned to amusement and she’d raised her eyebrows at him, hands coming up to rest on her hips. “Bellamy Blake, is this your way of telling me I’m a lousy shot?”
He hadn’t quite been able to hide his grin at her disbelief. The corners of his mouth had crept upwards, his jaw working to prevent a full blown smile. He’d ducked his head at the last minute, but she’d caught the flash of teeth nonetheless. It had warmed her to see it. He didn’t do it often enough. None of them did anymore.
“What I’m sayin’,” Bellamy had replied after he’d gotten his face under control, “is that we should all play to our strengths.” He’d smoothed his face back into a stern mask, but he couldn’t hide the laughter lighting up in his dark eyes.
Clarke had scoffed at him. Cheeks warm and growing hot, she hadn’t tried to hide the smile tearing up the corners of her mouth. It had felt foreign on her face, she remembered. It had felt good, standing there with him, the sun warm and bright, and a joke playing lightly in the air between them. Foreign, but good.
That had been only a week ago. Clarke blinked against the fading light of late afternoon, cold wind biting at cheeks flushed with anger, and gripped the gun with a sure hand. She fixed it securely into her waistband, safety on, and adjusted the strap of her small shoulder bag securely across her torso. She’d grabbed a few things from the medical bay before she’d run out in her attempt to catch Bellamy. She hoped she wouldn’t have to use them.
“What’s the range on the remote detonators?” Clarke asked Raven quietly.
Raven’s ponytail swung as she shook her head, an apology written plainly across her face. “Not awesome.” Clarke reached out and squeezed her shoulder.
“So, Clarke?” Raven’s eyes hardened and she gestured with a jerk of her head towards the darkening forest outside their camp and the direction Bellamy had taken. “You run like hell, ok?”
Clarke found Bellamy setting up the explosives. Injured as he was, she thought she’d catch him long before he made it to the Reaper’s caves, but she’d made it all the way to the hidden entrance point they’d marked on a map before she’d found any sign of him. A smear of blood on the small rocky outcrop let her know that he’d already passed through, and she cursed him to hell and back before squeezing past the rocks herself and following him into darkness.
Alone, Bellamy didn’t bother to hide his injuries. She watched him from the mouth of the deep alcove they’d chosen to be the bomb site. Heart in her throat, her stomach roiling with anxiety, she stood in the shadows where the light from the one dim torch stuck perilously into a hole in the cavern wall couldn’t reach. She listened to Bellamy’s muffled groans as he pulled Raven’s carefully assembled explosives from his bag. He tried to set the first explosive down and nearly toppled to the floor from the effort. One arm braced on the alcove’s back wall he fought for breath, his body almost doubled over, and Clarke couldn’t watch anymore.
Stepping forward, Clarke closed the short distance between them with whisper quiet steps and gently removed the device from his shaking hands. Bellamy’s fingers grazed along the backs of her hands like icicles scraping across her skin. She couldn’t stop herself from shivering at the touch. He was too cold, too clammy, and too consumed by pain to have even heard her come up behind him. It was that last realization that re-ignited the anger inside of her and began to melt through the icy licks of fear in her gut.
Bellamy wasn’t surprised to see her. He probably would have been more outwardly furious at her inability to leave him to his own devices if he’d had any energy at all to spare. As it was, the effort to see past the black dots swimming in his vision and to breathe when every breath felt like it would cleave his chest in two took all of his remaining reserves.
"No," Clarke snapped at him in an angry whisper when he leaned heavily against the wall of the cave. His legs shook and threatened to give out from beneath him at moment. "We did not come all this way to die in some dark and dank cave with murderers and cannibals."
"Not ‘we’, Princess," Bellamy wheezed, his voice wry and wracked with pain, "just me. It was supposed to be just me. No one else. Get out of here"
Shaking her head at him, Clarke carefully arranged the first device on the floor along the back wall. “You’re doing that thing again.”
“Enlighten me,” he gasped brokenly. “What thing?”
“That thing where you think you can tell me what to do.” Clarke cursed as she untangled wires and prepared the second device, her ears straining for any sound of oncoming footsteps. She squeezed her eyes shut against the sound of Bellamy’s labored breathing. "If I'd wanted you dead, Bellamy, I would have let you run off into the wild that first time you tried it, but I didn't. What makes you think I'm going to let you do something as stupid as getting yourself blown up for no good reason now?"
"Clarke," Bellamy’s voice was tired - more tired than she'd ever heard it even after months of running, fighting, and screaming. It was the tinge of fear that crept along the edges of his strained voice that had her spinning around just in time to catch him before he slid to the ground. Her muscles clenched with the effort of bearing his weight without hurting him further. She didn’t know how to hold on to him without her hands hitting cracked ribs and bruised skin, so she settled for wrapping one arm gently around his waist and propping her shoulder under his good arm.
"Clarke," he repeated into her ear. One hand rested lightly on his stomach and he wrapped his fingers tightly around her wrist, his face grim. "I know you think you can save everyone, but there's no way I'm making it out of this place on my own two feet."
"I know." She pressed her forehead into his chest for barely a moment. Clarke took a second to breathe, to suck in one deep lungful of air. It helped to smooth the ugly mess of knots in her stomach before she pushed herself away to catch his eyes with her own. "That's why you're going to make it out of here on mine."
Bellamy frowned at her in confusion, but she dug for the syringe she’d tossed into the small satchel hanging across her torso. Before he could respond she uncapped the needle and pushed it into his upper arm. Her thumb pressed down on the plunger before he could jerk away in surprise.
"I brought some help though," she told him and tossed the used needle to the ground. She clarified when it still didn't register with him, "Adrenaline, Bellamy. I'm pumping you full of adrenaline and dragging you out of here if I have to. I'd really appreciate it if I didn't have to, but I will."
She watched his pupils blow wide open. Felt his chest heave huge breaths against her and she knew he felt the effects. She carried less of his weight when he straightened, but when a small bubble of satisfaction worked its way into her heart, she mercilessly pushed it away. Later, she might have time to feel something other than desperation, but she needed to get them out of the caves in two whole pieces first.
"I'm going to kill you, Princess." He ground out the words between gritted teeth, but they lacked real venom.
Clarke stood straighter, the heaviness in her chest lifting slightly despite her mind screaming in vain against hope. She'd never been happier to hear him call her that stupid name than right at that very moment. "Aren't you glad I've given you the opportunity to live long enough to do that?"
Bellamy’s response was a choked laugh into her hair. "So what's the rest of your plan?"
Clarke reached back to pull the handgun out from where she'd pressed it against the small of her back. She wrapped his fingers around the grip, hooked his other arm over her shoulder and faced them towards the exit. He still leaned heavily against her, but this much she could handle. "The plan is for you to kill them before they kill us and for me to get us out of here before we explode. Deal?"
Bellamy looked down at her like he'd discovered her for the first time all over again - dark eyes wide and shining with pain, but alert. His brow lowered in a slight crease right between his eyes and his tongue darted out to wet his dry, cracked lips before Clarke tore her gaze away from his face. It was too familiar a look - the soft, sad way he had of seeing beneath her cracked surface. Clarke breathed past the knots in her stomach. She was in the process of trying to lessen the squeeze on her heart when she felt his fingers tighten on her arm, drawing her attention back up to him.
A softer version of that smug look she’d first hated was back on his face and she didn’t know whether to cry, laugh, or punch him. He lowered his head to hers, their foreheads almost touching. He breathed his words against her cheek, "Just couldn't live without me, could you, Princess?"
Clarke knew they needed to move, but the question kept her rooted to the spot, her breath caught in her throat. Gut tightening against the thought, she fixed Bellamy with a hard look and stood up on her toes, so he couldn’t mistake the look in her eyes for anything other than pure determination. Their foreheads bumped and Clarke’s voice was steel wrapped in softness when she replied, “We’re not finding out today.”
Bellamy’s breath mingled with hers. “Does this plan of yours happen to mention what we do when this place starts falling apart around us?”
Raven’s face flickered in her mind. Blue eyes bright with fire, Clarke looked up at Bellamy, so close to him now that she could see herself reflected in the blacks of his eyes, a wicked smile growing on her face. “Run like hell.”