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They wait in trees and set up minefields of traps, stealing war tactics from the people they were supposed to ally with.
The 100 is the 82, is the 132 combined with the Ark, the hundreds of civilians-turned-guard in an army that could barely feed themselves a month ago. Vengeance, Clarke thinks, is the most powerful weapon she knows now, and here they are trying to stake a claim on land they thought they couldn’t touch.
This is war.
This is smoke in their lungs and callouses on their hands.
-
Abby as a Chancellor is power-hungry and just. Hints of traits Clarke remembers from their rooms on the Ark weathered by hurt, pulled out of her mother with hands on her throat, ripening meanly and cruel. She won’t give the position up for all of Clarke’s pleading, and so she leaves Abby at the lake with dirty hands and a hospital full of wounded.
It’s not a question if she’s going with Bellamy. A long time ago he told her he’d never leave without her, and she’s learned his words are the few that bend and don’t break.
They hop trees and raid village food storages and hurt whoever hurts them, heading west. Bellamy’s militia, people call them, and that’s fine. She never wanted one.
His baby sister, as good with a gun as he is but never used one, she lived beneath them for sixteen years, and she was the first person to touch this ground in almost a hundred.
She left in the middle of the night two weeks ago. Someone carved out his center and put in a fake, zipped him back up with a gun slung over his shoulder and told him to never stop fighting. Every bullet fired is one open wound closer to finding her, Clarke knows.
She knows he knows they’re going in the wrong direction.
-
At night, they swing from branches on hammocks they made out of parachutes from the dropship, the things that were supposed to save them from a hard fall. Clarke lays in the one they found in Wells’ bag, watches the sky for the stars she used to live next to.
“Do you think there’s a difference?” she asks, rocking beneath Bellamy’s bed. “Between us and them?”
He grunts and she knows she’s keeping him from sleep. His long legs hang over the end of his sling, kicking at the air. A few nights ago, someone reached their hand out of their hammock for a flask and it was blown off, sniped in the trees in complete silence.
“I used to.”
-
“Yeah, this is it, I swear,” Jasper’s saying to some girl ahead of them. He’s got their map out, the one salvaged atlas from a bunker in Pennsylvania, the only one they have. “We’re on Route 66, I swear.”
Bellamy rolls his eyes, snatching the map from his hands. He scans it and flips it over, handing it back to Jasper. “It’s upside down,” he says. “Maybe tomorrow.”
Monty starts laughing behind them, calls Jasper a fucking idiot, and they walk on.
They’re ambushed in an empty Grounder camp, searching huts for food. It’s a stupid mistake, but these people are good, rushing them from skeletal houses and burnt out shacks.
Clarke takes down two, shoves a spear through one hunching over Monroe. She feels her hair move in the empty wind of a weapon that missed and a body drops to the ground behind her. Bellamy’s there, bloody and panting, still standing.
She shoots through a few more trying to wall them in and leads them forward into the night.
In the early days, one of their own pointed a gun at her and he broke their nose. She feels like she’s returned every favor by now.
He still breaks noses. He kills for her.
-
Murphy dies.
Barbed knives are the newest weapon they’ve encountered and his is inches deep into his left lung. Everyone’s looking at her and she wants to laugh, tell them she hasn’t used a scalpel for medical purposes in months. They can walk back to Abby, for all she cares.
Bellamy pulls it out. Holds his hands to Murphy’s face as he bleeds out, does what he never could before, and she gets some sick satisfaction from that as she watches, everyone else turned away.
It’s like he can’t hold himself together afterward. A few drag the body away into the thick bushes—they have to leave him anyway, but maybe no one will know they were here, no one will know this is where they lost one.
The group walks ahead of them and Bellamy’s chest shakes, standing huge and lost next to Murphy’s blood. “Jesus,” he says, says it again and again like it’s the only word he knows, a tired man searching for salvation on the ground. Sometimes you learn to love a murderer, she knows that.
“Clarke,” he says at the end and her eyes snap to his, all bloodshot and pupil. She wants to ask what the hell she can do about it, but she gets it.
Her hands have killed, too. Her head and his heart have killed.
-
Through April they pass St. Louis, down to Tulsa and through to Oklahoma City. This is all according to Jasper and it’s not like any of them know any better or care enough to disagree.
They’re out of the thickest fighting, away from Grounders that want them dead, firing weapons the second they get too close. Most this far have never even heard of sky people.
They find fields of apples and hunker down for a week. It’s better than any of the imitations she ever had on the Ark, better than the sweet water they drank from back in Illinois.
One second Bellamy’s taking a crunching bite and passing the fruit over to her and the next the kid beside her’s got his gun up and ready, safety clicking off.
He’s looking down his scope like he’s not really seeing anything. All of Clarke’s muscles are bowstring-tight and she follows his eyes, looking through the fields.
“Put your fucking gun down,” she whispers harshly and lowers the rifle out of his hands, snaps him out of it. He blinks slowly, teeth chattering in the sun, and he doesn’t look away from his target. She thinks his name is Archie.
Grounder kids play up the hill, two little girls darting around the trees where his gun was just aimed.
Before she drops off to sleep, a few feet under Bellamy’s snoring body, she hears the pop-and-creak settling of the Ark as it raced through space, all the technology whirring even as she drifted off in her bed.
She sees her mother’s face when she closes her eyes, the shape of her father’s body as it left the airlock chamber. It’s at night when she thinks she’s telling herself the truth, that this is one more war that’s not theirs to fight anymore.
But Abby told her she was going to the ground to live and she’s been fighting to ever since.
-
Bellamy takes up the lead as they walk and she follows him. They used to carry the rear in case anyone attacked from behind and she knows he was itching to take this spot back.
Somewhere between here and the Atlantic Ocean, Clarke lost the fear he has. Her legs don’t scream for her to move faster, away from danger she can’t see, and she doesn’t hate herself when she can’t see from every vantage point.
An arrow sails past Jasper’s ear in the middle of the day, arcing through the sunlight.
Clarke’s gets her own pulled back on her bow just as it thuds into the earth, shooting it off and hitting, a body falling through the trees.
Bellamy looks satisfied. “Knew you wouldn’t let that one slide,” he says, and she wonders, for the first time, if she has any secrets left that he doesn’t know.
-
When they’ve eaten enough that their stomachs won’t keep them awake, he listens to her exhaustedly whisper, babbling at the sky.
“When we begged Jaha for you to be pardoned,” she’s saying, “for no reason. Do you ever think about that? Bellamy? Do you?”
“Mm,” he answers.
“We should’ve ran, we, we could’ve ran. Like they own the Earth. Like they can rule the whole damn thing,” she laughs wickedly. Below them, she hears the creak of hammock ties on trees, quiet whispers of rocking movements. “I mean, look at us now. I don’t see any prison, do you?”
“No,” Bellamy whispers. He sounds farther away than he is.
“Did you ever think about that, Bellamy?” she asks and then there’s the ziiip of cloth against a hammock, a thud on the ground far beneath them.
Clarke leans her head over, sees others do the same, staring at the limp body surrounded by green, limbs stuck out at wrong angles. It’s Archie from the apple field, his gun next to him in the dirt.
Someone gasps, someone else’s awful oh my god breaking the silence. Clarke pulls her head back in, buries her face in the cloth of the parachute. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t see if Bellamy saw.
“No,” he whispers again.
-
It’s May, Jasper says, and they’re on the border of Texas and New Mexico. Bellamy just turned 24, he tells them, and he wants to go to Albuquerque.
Someone ahead of Clarke trips, face-planting, and she starts to laugh when she feels her knees buckle. Like someone punched into her, hot-pokered pain right through her abdomen. Whoever fell in front of her is dead.
The blood drains from Bellamy’s face and then she looks down, sees it draining from her own side.
“It went clean through,” she says. Her fingers feel at the wound, slipping in messy blood, God she can smell it. She’s never smelled blood like this before, wonders if it’s because it’s her own. This is her mom’s hoodie—this, this is—“That’s good.”
“Fuck you,” Bellamy chokes. His lips are bleeding, chapped and torn from his teeth.
She’s weaving where she stands. It’s not good. Her hands press firmly at the hole in her side and she doesn’t think it’ll matter, not anymore. She just needs to sit down.
When she blinks her eyes again, his shirt is off and he’s tearing it with his teeth. She feels a bare brush of relief because someone should be doing something, but it also might be how lightheaded she is.
This hurts, she doesn’t tell him. He already knows, she can see it in his eyes. He’s trying to pack her up, put her all back together and she’s on her back in the dirt, gulping in Earth air.
“Bellamy,” Clarke says. It’s good to do this at night or the sun would be in her eyes and she wouldn’t be able to see him. Their hands grasp at her body, like that’ll hold the blood in.
“No,” he says, “you don’t die,” so sure, and Clarke huffs, wants to ask him what else he knows about how this ends.
“Bellamy,” she says again. One of their own guns shot her, she figures, stolen and handed to some kid and Clarke hopes they got them back.
Bellamy’s yelling at someone, his face all screwed up but he isn’t crying, not like she is. He’s wiping messy tears and dirt from her face, his own just above her, still talking to her.
All Clarke hears is the ringing.
-
To hear Bellamy tell if after, the night ended in a hail of bullets and she stopped breathing a few times. Clarke doesn’t doubt that second part, because she is surrounded by children with no medical knowledge.
She comes from three generations of doctors and has a pretty good idea about exit wounds, so no, she tells some of the others around a fire, she probably wouldn’t have died.
He says he kept her alive. Clarke doesn’t doubt that either.
-
In Arizona they wear next to nothing, and that’s fine with Clarke, sweat dripping down her temples, the dips of her knees. Not one of them has died in a month and it’s more than enough cause for celebration.
At a lake surrounded by sand, it feels like they’re on vacation. The boys fashion a ball from God knows what and practice soccer drills they’ve only ever seen on TV, feet kicking hard as the sun burns in the distance. Clarke sits behind a younger girl and tries to braid her hair, getting an ecstatic thank you when she declares it finished and lets her run off. It looks like what her father used to pass off as braiding, when he’d do her hair before school.
Bellamy is golden at sundown. He kisses her first in that sand. It doesn’t surprise her, when he steps back and it feels like something they’ve always been doing.
He doesn’t look sorry, not about any of it. She can’t say she doesn’t feel the same.