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She doesn’t have to be alone. She doesn’t have to be alone. She doesn’t have to be alone.
The thought repeats over and over in her head as her friends surround her, the sounds of her voices and the feel of the touch overwhelming after hours, days, some indeterminate amount of time, spent alone. Raven pulls her into a one-armed hug that quickly gets overtaken by Murphy as he throws his arms around her neck.
There are here, very clearly here, but it doesn’t make sense. She’s supposed to be alone.
Alone.
As much as she hated the prospect of it, her heart breaking and her breath catching with every place she had checked with no one, she’d accepted it. It made sense after all. This was her life. Her people, Madi, would get to live forever in peace, and she would endure it so they didn’t have to. I bare it so they don’t have to has been her motto for so long she can’t even remember a time when it didn’t rule her.
After everything that she’s done, the pain she's caused, and the people she’s killed, she doesn’t deserve to get a happy ending. It wasn’t meant to be, and that was okay. She didn’t need it, even if she desperately wanted it. All of them being here just doesn’t make sense.
She squeezes her eyes shut against the images in front of her, of Murphy and Raven, of Miller and Jackson, Octavia and Levitt, Hope, Jorden and Echo, convinced that they will disappear momentarily. It’s just her grief-stricken mind projecting a last defense. She’s alone again, and this time there’s no end date; there’s no hope of everyone coming back to her, which is apparently enough to make her finally lose it. She’s hallucinating. That’s the only answer.
Still, terror grips her at the idea that they will soon disappear. She doesn’t want to be alone. Her arms wrap tightly around the body in front of her, holding as though she’ll be able to physically keep them from drifting away.
“Geez Clarke, l get that this is the moment you’ve been waiting for, finally getting to hug me, but could you loosen your grip a little. I’m not going to disappear.”
Her eyes blink open. Murphy. Good. Murphy has never once bothered lying to her. He’ll tell it all to her straight even if he’s only a figment, “You're not really here. It’s a game, a trick. Punishment for failing the test.”
“Oh god,” he mutters, pulling back to look at her more closely, “after everything, this is the that breaks you? For fuck’s sake, Clarke, get yourself together. You survived the end of the world. Twice. You defeated the Mountain and brought down the City if Light. You were alone for months. This right here is nothing in comparison.”
“But…” she starts, hesitant to believe.
“No fucking buts. I didn’t give up my chance at being a goddamn ball of glowing light for all eternity just to sit here and watch you rock back and forth, muttering to yourself.”
She blinks back at him slowly. He looks like the Murphy she knows, talks like him too, but it can’t be, “I failed the test.”
“Yes,” he responds rolling his eyes at her in exasperation, “We’ve been over that already. Fuck the test.”
“You all disappeared!” she says, letting her arms fall back down to her sides where her hands continue to shake, “I looked, and you were all gone.”
“Yes,” he repeats slowly, glancing behind her quickly and then looking back at her with the kind of concern that she rarely associates with Murphy. “We left, and then we came back.”
No one has ever chosen to come back before. That's what they had said, right? Clarke tries to remember, wishing that she had paid more attention to the conversation, that she hadn’t let her repulsion at them using Lexa’s face to talk to her override her need for answers. That's what she had said though. Transcendence was a choice.
“You came back,” Clarke realizes with a gasp, her eyes growing wide and her heart racing at the realization.
“Wow, it’s almost like that’s exactly what I just said,” Murphy says dryly. Smirk firmly in place, he holds her eyes for a long moment and then just as she starts to feel her own smile tug at her lips, he nods his head once decisively.
For one strange second, she doesn’t understand the gesture, but then a pair of arms, a very familiar set, wrap around her waist and it instantly makes sense. Madi
She buries her face in her daughter's hair, feeling the first true sense of peace since she left her back in Bardo. She’s here, and she’s safe. Hope starts to creep into Clarke’s heart until it is suddenly replaced with concern as she feels Madi’s tears soak through her shirt. “I didn’t want to leave you, but you told me to. It will like I was being tugged. I couldn’t resist. I’m sorry. I came back as soon as I realized it was an option.”
“Madi, no, no you shouldn’t have worried. You didn’t need to come back,” Clarke says fervently, crouching down so that she’s eye level with Madi and then wiping at the tears staining her cheeks, “I was going to be okay; I would have survived.”
“Surviving isn’t living,” Madi tells her, looking at her with a knowing smile on her face and wisdom in her eyes, “Besides, we weren’t living either. We were just... existing, and even if that might have been okay, it wasn’t without you. We wanted the chance to actually get to live altogether.”
Emotion threatens to consume her, the love she feels greater than the guilt over them choosing her. She wraps her arms back around Madi, pulling her close in happiness this time rather than desperation. Madi leans into her, letting out a sigh of contentment. It's perfect. Or at least almost perfect. While she's has her daughter and her friends, she doesn’t have everyone back.
Regret tugs at her stomach, the hole in her heart more apparent than ever, but she keeps the smile on her face when Madi pulls back to look at her. She tucks a loose strand of Madi’s hair out of her face and her smile begins to feel a little less forced. If by some miracle this is actually real, and she gets them back, then she isn’t going to waste the opportunity. Having all of them is already so much more than she deserves.
For one brief, hope-filled moment, she starts to believe that this is what it seems to be, to consider the fact that Murphy might be telling the truth, that they are here, she has her daughter back even if she shouldn’t, but then she hears his voice and knows that it can’t be. There’s no world where she ever gets to hear him calling out to her again.
“Clarke.”
She turns around quickly, her body reacting to the familiar voice before her mind has even fully registered it, and then there he is, dressed not in a white uniform with blood staining his chest as he looked last time that she saw him, but with his old jacket on, reminiscent of how he looked the first time she saw him again after escaping Mount Weather.
Her breath catches in her throat. Terror runs through her.
He smiles shyly at her, the smile that she never saw enough of, and the rest of her heart breaks.
It can’t be him. It can’t. She steps back hastily, her eyes still locked onto Bellamy and bumps into something. Murphy.
She changes directions quickly, repositioning herself so that she can see them both at once. If Bellamy isn’t real, then Murphy isn’t either. All of this isn’t. It's just some joke. A sick punishment. Her own personal hell. Her heart beats rapidly like it’s a few short seconds from flying straight out of her chest. Her blood rushes in her ears and each breath feels like it’s coming to her through a narrow straw.
Her feet slip, and she lands on the ground with a thump, scraping her hand and probably bruising her tailbone. Not that she pays either of those injuries any mind, all of her attention on the people around her and what they could be planning next.
“Are you okay?” Bellamy questions, taking a step towards her at the sight of blood, and she instantly shuffles back. He pauses his advance immediately, tilting his head to the side slightly as he examines her as best he can with his eyes alone.
The longer he looks at her, the deeper the concern in his eyes seems to grow, but she tells herself not the let it get to her, valiantly trying to keep the walls around her heart stable. With every second that he continues to look at her like he knows her, though, she can feel them faltering. He looks like he’s contemplating coming closer again, so she tenses up ready to run. In that instant, his eyes go from concerned to sad.
"She doesn’t think you're real,” Murphy reveals with snark, effectively breaking the tension between them as Bellamy takes one more second to watch her before turning his attention to Murphy.
“What? Why?” Bellamy asks, total confusion written across his face. It's such a good imitation; the way his eyes narrow just slightly in distrust while his jaw clenches together lightly with annoyance. The details are all right, recreated for her in a way that she never managed to do on paper during their six years apart, and yet, she knows that it can’t be.
A stray tear slips down her face. It’s not real. It’s not real.
“You were dead,” Murphy deadpans, “Or at least we thought that you were.”
She must make a noise, something that draws their attention back to her, as more tears slide down her face, memories of Bellamy lying on the ground, bleeding out as she walked away at the forefront of her mind. She shakes her head, trying to get them to leave, but they won’t. She knows that they won’t. They haven’t since it happened.
“Really Bellamy, I just got her back together,” Murphy groans before throwing his hands up in the air, “Actually, you know what? You break it, you fix it. Come on kid, maybe if we leave them alone long enough, they will finally figure their shit out.”
Clarke watches warily as Murphy swings an arm over Madi’s shoulders, pulling her away from them with a whispered word into her ear. It's not real, that girl who is wearing her daughters face is not her any more the person who had Lexa’s face was before, but it’s much harder to remember now. Now, she wants to follow after them, the thought of losing her all over again threatening to break composure she has left.
“It’s— I’m— Clarke,” Bellamy stutters, taking a step forward and then stopping, “I’m really here, I promise.”
She closes her eyes, refusing to let the hope creep in, but of course, he knows her, better than probably anyone, so he knows exactly what she’s trying to do.
“Hey, are you still breathing?” he asks, voice painfully gentle and she wants to laugh at the sheer cruelty of these beings to use that specific memory against her. You still have hope? We still breathing? Instead, she just bites down on her lip to prevent the sobs in her chest from escaping as Bellamy continues on relentlessly, “Because I am.”
“You’re not,” she finally can’t help but cry out, “You’re not real. You’re not here. I shot you. You died. You were dead when everyone transcended. It’s not possible.”
“I wasn’t,” Bellamy tells her softly, “You shot me, but I didn’t die. They put me in a cyro tank on Bardo, and I was there when everything happened. I transcended with everyone else.”
It makes sense, too much sense. She closes her eyes against it all, each breath coming out in a ragged mess. She pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms protectively around herself, “You’re not here, I shot you, you died. You’re not here, I shot you, you died. You’re not here, I shot you, you—”
A pair of arms wrap around her tightly, familiar and strong, holding her together as she falls apart. His skin is warm against her face where she has it pressed against his shoulder; she can feel his heartbeat steady under her hand where it’s clutched into his shirt. She takes a shaky breath in. He even smells right.
He’s real. He's really here. Somehow, some way, the greatest mistake of her life has been undone. If she thought that she was crying before, it’s nothing compared to what happens now. Tears stream down her face as she holds onto him with all she’s got and surprisingly, he holds on just as tightly.
“Bellamy, I’m sorry, I—” She tells him as soon as she feels capable of words, pulling back only enough for him to be able to look at her and see the sincerity in her eyes. She means to say so much more, but after that, everything else gets trapped in her throat.
“It’s okay,” he reassures her softly, running his hand soothingly across her back, the hint of tears clinging to his own cheeks too.
“It’s really not,” she argues, wipes her eyes with the back of her arm in a vain attempt to clear the tears. She knows that she should get up, leave him before she can cause any more damage. Still, she finds herself leaning into him more, taking the comfort that he offers her like a drowning man in need of air. How did she ever think she could live without him?
“If you need forgiveness,” he starts and she shakes her head, already knowing where he’s going with this and knowing that it’s not appropriate. She opens her mouth to object, but he continues before she can, raising his voice so that even if she were to say anything, he would talk over her, “I will give that to you, you’re forgiven.”
“I don’t deserve your forgiveness,” she tells him quietly, looking down.
She sees his jaw clench out of the comer of her eye, and she knows he wants to continue argue with her. She braces herself to take the anger that she knows is coming, telling herself that she will let him say whatever he needs to and then walk away, but instead of shouting, he just sighs.
“You do. I get why you did it even if I don’t,” he says, shifting until she’s forced to look at him, “but it’s not really about that. You holding on to the guilt doesn’t help either of us, and I just— we’ve been given another chance, Clarke, and we’ve had so many already. I don’t want to waste it being weighed down by things that happened in the past.”
Looking into his eyes, she can see that he truly believes what he’s saying, and it makes her want to believe it too. She wants to, her heart aches with the possibility of being able to just start fresh with him, but she doesn’t know. It seems too good to be true, and yet, they are here, Madi is here, he is here and that didn’t seem like a possibility before either.
The hope from before is still there, but this time she chooses to grab hold of it. She rests her head against his shoulder again, he wraps his arm easily around her, and she just knows it was the right choice; that having hope is the right choice.
“I’ll try to let it go,” she offers, knowing that promising anything more would be too much.
He smiles down at her, “Trying to do better is all that we can do.”
They stay like that for a while, watching the sun set over the water. The peace of the moment fills her but doubts still linger in the back of her mind. She’s been fighting for too long just to let things go, “I don’t understand how you could have survived, even long enough to get to a cyro bed.”
Bellamy shrugs the shoulder she’s not leaning against before turning to grin at her, “Your aim was slightly off. You must have had a shitty teacher.”
A burst of laughter bubbles from her chest, loud, bright and a little watery, drawing the attention of everyone else. She looks over at them for the first time in a while and her eyes are instantly drawn to Madi, sitting beside the fire watching them closely.
“We should head over there,” Bellamy says following her gaze.
“Yeah,” she agrees, both eager to see everyone else and reluctant to leave his arms.
He squeezes her shoulders once like he understands and then pushes himself to his feet. When he turns around a second later, offering his hand to help her up, she takes it, raising to her feet easily now with the promise of him by her side.