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Clarke does not claim to be omniscient; plenty of things take her off-guard and challenge her ability to react to the unknown, to the unplanned. Take, for instance, the case of the three-headed bears, with claws that actually oozed acid.
No one could plan for shit like that, honestly.
She sure, she is not all-knowing. She does not know what the future holds, despite what Monty sometimes says when he’s drunk or she’s too smashed to care. However, her lack of knowledge doesn’t cause her to wallow in fear of the vague outline of fate, oh no. Clarke pointedly Does Not Cower. She’s a leader. She leads.
Or rather, she comes up with new methods. The best solution she’s devised thus far has been a shit-ton of pre-emptive preparations. Like, Clarke’s scrapped loose paper and notebooks and backs of old documents and basically whatever she can grab at and jotted down lists, step-by-step instructions for various situations. Both as they come to her in her mind (and seriously, after the bear thing, she’d written down a ridiculously large number of outlines) and as she experiences them – there’s a plan for What To Do If The Tribe You Meet With Is Friendly (steps 1 through 12 outline various methods of subterfuge) and a plan for How To Deal With Clans Who Want You To Marry Into Them For Peace (basically: no).
Clarke can rest easy at night if she’s answered the twisting anxiety in her head with actual procedures. She was always trained a scientist, and this method is the best so far. Even when she was in the midst of her rebellious years, took up charcoal and paints instead of scalpels and mother-driven devotion, she approached it in a very systematic fashion. It works; honestly, there is little else Clarke cares about.
The thing is, well – sometimes people think this a little weird. Rationally, Clarke’s aware that she can’t plan for everything. Logically, she understands that life throws you curveballs, and it is how you react to these that defines you.
Fundamentally, she knows that the paper makes her feel better. And as camp life rotates, turns from the drop ship to Mt. Weather to the Ark and finally, finally, back to the delinquents and back to her and Bellamy and a fucking crazy amount of pressure, she seeks this solace.
Spring turns to summer turns to fall, the years flit by and this is the coping strategy she chooses. It’s fine. Everything is fine.
.
.
.
Bellamy thinks it’s ridiculous.
“What about the Sunshine Shits?”
Clarke sneers at the name, mostly because she’s realized by now that to ignore a Blake is to give it power.
“Teram Teone,” she corrects primly, Bellamy knows this, they’d actually been allied with the clan for a full year, “and I can hardly imagine what you’re implying.”
He grins. They’re in the middle of meal prep, and his lip is stained some sort of bruising purple, just in the upper left corner – Clarke wishes it was less distracting.
“No way. There is literally no way you don’t get what I’m implying.”
She peels back the skin of a nearby fruit, plops it gently into one of the big pots. “Nope,” she says, and turns around to grab for some seasoning, “no clue.”
He tosses something at her – rice, which. Wasteful.
“First there was Tanga,” he says, “who wanted to just get in your pants. Then Loila, who wanted to get in both our pants.”
“Not true. The Toene only met with us if we wore skirts.”
Bellamy sighs, “Yeah,” it’s wistful, “most comfortable negotiations of my life.”
She laughs, grudgingly. One thing the years have taught them – give in on the little things. Clarke has had her head shaved, been temporarily coated in blue dye, has gotten an eyebrow piercing, all in the name of peace.
(Bellamy had gone two whole weeks with lime green hair, but they’re only allowed to bug him about this after a particularly successful hunt, when his ego could use, and withstand, the kick).
He persists, “Still – my point is, you didn’t have a plan at the time for how to deal with overly sexual tribesmen.” He blinks into his own pot, a mixture of spices that are probably better than Clarke’s, she’s never been a good cook, “Er. Tribespeople.”
Clarke thinks back to Sisa, and nods. “Maybe not then. But I do now.”
“That’s what I’m saying!” He cries. “You can’t keep planning, because there’s an infinite amount of situations in the world that you won’t ever think of!”
“I planned for that muck-up with the luau.”
Bellamy sighs over his dinner. “Obviously. Anyone who saw Jasper’s face when he was handed the machete would’ve expected that dinner to fuck up eventually.”
“Bellamy,”
“There isn’t anyone near us princess.”
She scowls, “It’s the principle of the thing.”
They stare at each other for a long moment, and seriously, does he not even consider wiping the stain off? Honestly, it’s like she’s the only one here with a mind for hygiene.
“Fine,” he grumbles at length, “would expect things to degenerate, eventually.”
She doesn’t understand how someone who can whip out words like philosophaster and desiderium (which she definitely had to ask about) on the fly also chooses to inject the word fuck into half of his sentences.
“You have your method and I have mine,” she announces, when the silence stretches too long again, and wipes her hand.
“Mine is less stressful,” he argues, but follows her when she leaves the pots to simmer.
It’s mid-winter, so pretty much every move they make is extremely calculated, to save energy. The adults, those who followed them from the Ark, when the Mt. Weather shit-storm passes, go out to collect large pieces of fallen logs, taking some of the bigger kids with them. Those who opt out of this are stuck in the temporary tents, entertaining the babies, because wandering around in the cold is a stupid-ass decision, and this is where Clarke heads to.
Bellamy pushes the tent flap open for her and she glares at him in gratitude.
“What,” he says, smiling.
She resists the urge to stomp on his smirky, smarmy toes, “What,” she hisses back, and regrets how juvenile it sounds.
To escape this, she strides into the tent, Bellamy at her heels. In the small enclosure, sat around a dwindling fire that’s putting only a token effort at producing heat, is a small collection of people, mostly teenagers who are avoiding the oncoming bite of snow, alongside parents who have actual experience with the wayward running of babies.
It’s Miller’s dad, Jordan, who she approaches first – for a guard he’d shown unexpected propensity and skill for the childcare sector of camp. Clarke shouldn’t have been surprised though, since, after all, he’d mostly come along with them to stick with his son.
“How’s everything going?” She asks, taking a seat closest to him.
Jordan’s smile is slow and sweet, just like Nathan’s. “Perfect,” he says, “Theo and Lena were getting into some sort of scuffle earlier, but I believe Lena’s asserted her dominance and we’re back to peace.”
Bellamy, who sits down on Jordan’s other side, snorts. “That’s all Clarke’s influence.”
Clarke glowers and Jordon turns in place, shifting a baby who’s crawled between his knees with him. Clarke’s pretty sure the baby is Aspen and Spica’s, which would make him…Appa. Or possibly Apple. Names here are weird, half inspired by the world around them, half drudged up through clashing cultures and near-forgotten history, and c’mon, how is she expected to differentiate one wrinkly face from the next?
(Side note: Bellamy is supernaturally good at this, to the point that she sometimes looks for tags on the babies that would identify them to a discerning eye).
Jordan barely gets out the, “What do you mean,” before Bellamy launches into the story of how Clarke had toted Lena around with her in the early days of fall, taken her from meetings to scolding’s with barely a thought for the effect it might have on her psyche.
Personally, Clarke thinks one-year olds are too young to have psyche’s at all, but this has been disputed often enough that she doesn’t say it out loud anymore.
“ – and then she’d plop her right back here, go to medical as if nothin’ was odd or – “
“First off,” she interrupts, because he has this backwards, the ass hat, “Jordan knows this, he has been helping with the child care stuff for years now. And secondly,” she says, because Bellamy is grinning like he plans on disputing this all, “infants do not learn by diffusion, she hasn’t somehow picked up my mannerisms just because I carried her around a little.”
Jordon is the one to scoff at the little, which – fair, Clarke had been using human contact as a crutch and the babies freaked her out, so she forced herself to face that fear. Bellamy is the one to laugh.
“Environment is half the battle,” he quips, only because Clarke is known to say this to whichever kid is lamenting his particular lot in life (should it be “But I’m too short for someone like Baile to notice me,” or even, “My arms are too weak to carry the packs and the canteens, it’s a genetic thing,”)
“Rude,” she huffs.
“But true.”
“She wasn’t even twelve months old.”
“Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan for the possibility that’s she’s only snarky because you –“
“Oh my god, are you going to toss that in my face –“
He snickers, “Yes, yes I am –“
“Am I to assume,” a new voice pipes up, and Clarke shifts her gaze from Bellamy’s dumb face to the frowning one attached to Harper – which, whoops, “that because you two are bickering in here like newlyweds, that means dinner is done?”
Clarke blinks, diffusing the small bomb in her head, and nods once. She can’t seem to get actual words out however, only because newlyweds is jumping around behind her eyes. That isn’t her fault.
“Uhm,” she squeaks, eventually, “yup. Dinner it is. Er, ready, that is. Dinner is ready.”
“Right,” Harper drawls, picking up the baby closest to her (Fern, a part of Clarke distantly supplies, which she’d normally be more pumped about remembering).
Her face flushes, burns all the more when Harper starts talking to the baby as she leaves the tent, voice pitched high as she goes, “Mom and Dad are just ridiculous, aren’t they? Aren’t they? They’re so, so silly, they should just make out and save us the trouble? Can you say sexual tension? Sexual tension?”
Clarke’s honestly worried that Fern might parrot some bastardization of that back at them, and weakly raises a hand in objection – even as the tent flap closes behind Harper.
Bellamy leans across Jordan and jostles her knee, smirking.
“Didn’t plan for that either, did you princess?”
Clarke hits him.
.
.
.
(On her birthday, or the nearest approximation of it, Bellamy gets her a brand new notebook from gods know where. At the top of the first page, in alarmingly neat writing, is the title What to Do When My Co-worker Makes out with Me;
Underneath it is written: accept the inevitable (if it so pleases Mother Dearest)
Clarke scowls and simpers and then smiles way too much, even as Bellamy leans down and captures her lips, nips at her nose when she starts giggling.
“Admit it,” she says, breathless, after tugging Bellamy back with the hand that’s somehow threaded itself through his hair, “plans are great.”
Bellamy avoids responding, and Clarke only accepts it because as it turns out, kisses are an effective way of distracting her. Plus, it’s in the book. Who is she to argue?)