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Fate like to mock her like this. Somewhere, lost in the haze of her dream she swore she could almost feel the rough pads of his thumbs brush against her cheekbones. Dreams were funny things. You weren’t really there, so you couldn’t feel whatever you saw. You are a partaker, an observer, but never are you able to be in touch with your other senses. It was a gift and a curse. She imagined his lips were soft; they had to be. They would warm, like the rest of him would be. She was all wrapped up in him, pressed against his chest and never experiencing the body heat but she couldn’t for the life of her imagine him being cold. When they pulled away all Clarke could see were his eyes, brown irises filled with the sadness all Incompletes had around his dilated pupils.
She sighed, leaning into his touch. Bellamy’s hands were large and it felt as if there wasn’t enough of her for him to hold. “What’s wrong?” she asked, sensing his sadness.
He groaned in frustration. “ It’s been two years. I want to feel you. Actually feel you.”
Her eyes softened. Something else was wrong, she could feel it, but she decided not to press further. “I know, Bell.”
“We will,” he promised, more to himself than to her. The dream was growing blurred and dark around the edges. It was time to leave. Time to wake up. “Soon. I can feel it, Princess.”
~
Clarke was riddled with worry as she picked at her sandwich during her lunch break. Raven was fuming beside her, ranting about Finn, but the blonde was only half listening. Her dream with Bellamy had left an uneasy feeling in her stomach, turning the sandwich she had bought from the lunch counter into something particularly unappetizing.
“Clarke, you okay?” Her friend broke through her thoughts, snapping in front of her face. The Latina frowned, her eyebrows crinkling as she stared into Clarke’s eyes, checking for any tell tale signs of sickness.
“Fine, Raven,” Clarke forced a weak smile. “What were you saying about Finn?”
Raven scoffed. “He’s an ass is what. I think this is the last time.”
Clarke’s mouth dropped, but she wasn’t all that surprised. Raven’s soul mate had been all lovey dovey in the dreams that had connected them since they were seven years old, but wasn’t much of a charmer in real life. Clarke had met the guy a handful of times. He’s openly flirted with her in front of his on again off again girlfriend. It was a sad story, but not uncommon. Some people didn’t care about soulmates. Some only kept them as best platonic friends. Others thought it was just a telepathic link that had someone had dumped a lot of unnecessary baggage on. Raven would be head over heels with him, he would fuck up, she would leave, and then someone would come back around drunk and they’d sleep together. The cycle has repeated itself for the past few years. Clarke blames her friend’s ties to him on how he was the only family she had left that gave a shit. Deep inside, Raven knows it too.
“Really?” Raven nods, a determined look on her face.
“I mean, we’ll always be family but . . . he doesn’t love me like that. Not the way I wanna be loved.”
Clarke reached across the table and pulled her friend into a hug. The small cafe wasn’t ever busy, and it became their sanctuary for the last couple years. Their friends Monty and Jasper ran the place, and didn’t mind them bringing their own food in if they didn’t have the money. Well, as long as Clarke would give them glow in the dark paint and Raven would sort out the lighting for the raves they put on every now and again.
“Now what’s wrong with you. You’ve been out of it all day.”
Clarke sighed. “I think something’s wrong with Bellamy. He won’t tell me, though.”
Raven was working at a car shop ever since she busted her knee in a street racing accident she was involved. She had apparently trusted a coworker, Murphy, to fix her breaks. Turns out he was betting on someone else to win and fucked them up even more. Clarke still could hear Raven’s screams from the waiting room of the hospital as they tried to dig out all the metal and glass that got stuck in her spine. When Clarke had burst into the garage, winded and blushing, Raven knew immediately what had happened. The blonde had been immediately bombarded with questions on what he looked like, what he sounded like, etc.
Her first encounter with her soulmate had been awkward. Clarke had always thought she didn’t have a soulmate, given how she didn’t have dreams about him until she was almost nineteen. She was destined to be alone, a NeverFind. So when the two of them had found themselves in a grassy field surrounded by tall trees that scraped the skyline, she knew that this was her Midpoint. The man looked at her warily. She eyed him, not really believing what was happening. She was imagining it, right?
“So,” he said after while, taking a moment to clear his throat. “You’re it then, Princess.”
And just like that, she was no longer a NeverFind, just another Incomplete. The problem with your soulmate was that you weren’t ever sure when you were going to meet them. It could be a decade, it could be days. For the two of them, it had been two long years of wanting to touch and feel each other.
“Are you sure loverboy doesn’t just want to see you,” Raven pointed out sympathetically. Clarke shook her head rapidly.
“That’s not it. I asked him and that was the answer he gave me, but that’s not it.”
“Well, then confront him about it,” her friend said exasperatedly. “Tonight.”
Raven had to get back to the auto shop, and Clarke o her intern job at the art studio and then to class. They shouted a goodbye towards the kitchen where they knew Jasper and Monty were probably arguing over who burnt the fries and how physics tied into it. Clarke sighed. She had her life here: friends who she couldn’t love more, a scholarship to an amazing art school, and her mom in the hospital close by. Was it so bad that she wanted more than that, just like everyone else?
~
When Clarke opened her eyes and found herself in their Midpoint, she was alone. Her blue eyes scanned the tree line, knowing there was no beyond it. She called out his name once, twice, three times. Each time was louder, more of a desperate note taking root each time. Soon she was screaming it, like a battlecry. This hasn’t happened, shouldn’t happen. Her heart rate quickened. She had heard stories of people stuck in limbo, the ones whose souls kept visiting their Midpoint long after the other had passed. No, she thought. He can’t be dead, not Bellamy.
After an hour of waiting, thinking that maybe he was late, she quit. Late, as if he had been stuck in traffic on a way to a date. Tears burned in the corners of Clarke’s eyes, and she let them fall. That was a moment she’d never get to experience with him, another “would have been”. Would have been, could have been, should have been, never was and never ever will be.
She fell to the grass, curling up into a ball. She hoped her soul wouldn’t stop visiting this place. It was all she had of him.
Oh, God. Bellamy.
A wail like no other ripped itself from her. For a second, she didn’t think it was human. The loss hit her like a tidal wave, pulling her beneath the waves. Undertow wound itself around her ankles and tossed her around under the water, and she was suffocating. She forgot how to breathe as her lungs filled with short painful reminders of his loss.
She willed the dream to end.
I want to feel you.
Bellamy . . . .
Soon. I can feel it, Princess.
Oh God. Bellamy.
~
Raven is at her house three hours past midnight, five minutes after Clarke called her. The blonde was a sobbing mess, curled up on the sofa that took up more than half of the living area. Raven had no idea what to do. How do you say “I know your soulmate is gone and that probably means he’s dead but hey, at least you got your friends”? You don’t. Fancy shrinks without consciouses say that, the type you pay fifty dollars an hour to see. Raven isn’t one of those people. She can’t pretend to know what her friend was going through, and she wasn’t going to pretend that Clarke was going to be okay. They knew she wasn’t.
~
Clarke sat in one of the uncomfortable chairs in the hospital waiting room. Raven was finishing up some work with her physical therapist, Jackson. Per usual, Clarke was here to pick her up. The blonde was well aware that she was early, but she didn’t mind. She hadn’t slept last night, afraid to go back to her Midpoint. She didn’t want to sit there alone, in the place they held each other and pretended they could feel it.
A girl with long brown hair pulled back in intricate braids suddenly sat down in the seat next to her, carrying two styrofoam cups of coffee from the machine down the hall. She held one out to the blonde, a wolfish grin taking accompanying it.
“Looked like you could use it. Rough night?”
Clarke shot an appreciative smile towards the girl. “You could say that.”
The girl laughed lightly, her head falling back slightly to reveal the edge of a tattoo inked up her neck. “We’ve all been there. What happened?”
After a pause of awkward silence, the girl looked guilty. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude, I just-”
“My soulmate didn’t turn up to our Midpoint last night,” Clarke blurted, effectively silencing the woman next to her. Sighing, Clarke shifted her blues to a spot in front of her and set the coffee on a table filled with health magazines.
“I’m sorry. I can’t imagine that happening to anyone. If Lincoln hadn’t turned up before I met him I don’t think I’d-” the brunette pursed her lips. “You still had a Midpoint? So you two never met before?”
“No,” Clarke said bluntly. “No, we never met. Look, I appreciate that you’re trying to be sympathetic but I don’t really want to talk about it so . . .”
The brunette’s green eyes widened momentarily. “Absolutely. So who are you here for?”
Clarke pointed down one hallway. “I pick up my friend from physical therapy here. She should be out any moment now. You?”
Braid girl pointed down a different hallway. “My brother was worried he was getting the freaky hemorrhagic fever that some people had been coming down with lately. He was displaying early symptoms so they gave him some weird treatments of new medicine they haven’t really given anyone yet,” Clarke winced sympathetically. Her mother had been telling her about the horrors the fever displayed when it got bad. Three people had died so far. The medicine was new and, for what they knew, effective but the symptoms were different for each person. Braid girl smiled. “He was out of it for the past day, but he’s fine now. One hundred percent healthy and I’m dragging his ass home.”
Clarke was about to reply when she saw Raven limping down the hallway in her brace, paperwork in one hand and trademark red jacket in the other. “There’s my friend.”
The woman smiled. “Okay. I’m Octavia, by the way.”
Clarke nodded. “NIce to meet you.” Still out of it, she didn’t give her name before starting off for Raven.
“Hey you,” Raven smiled, engulfing her friend in a hug. “How are you holding up?”
“Raven, you were just in therapy,” Clarke pointed out dryly. “I should be asking you that.”
Her dark haired friend shrugged. “I’m just worried.”
A squeal pulled Clarke’s attention back towards Octavia. Octavia, it was a common name, one that Bellamy talked frequently about. The roman Emperor’s sister, the fourth wife of Mark Antony. The history lessons had been drilled into her brain by the nerd. As her eyes followed Octavia as she rushed towards the brother, time slowed. The pieces fit together in her brain.
“Octavia met her soulmate. Some guy named Lincoln,” Bellamy huffed. Clarke smiled.
“That’s great!”
“Clarke,” he whined. “She got a tattoo and she started braiding her hair all weird. She’s changing.”
Blue eyes rolled. “She’s not a little girl anymore, Bell. You would want her to be happy when we meet right.”
“I can’t help it,” he sighed. “She’s my little sister. I named her, I raised her. She’s my responsibility.”
A familliar figure greeted Octavia. He was wearing a torn shirt and dark jeans. His eyes had bags under them and his hair was messy, but it was him. He greeted his sister with a smile of white teeth and a one armed hug as she hugged his side before they separated. He hadn’t noticed her.
“Bellamy,” she breathed. Raven’s jaw dropped. Clarke shared her best friend’s shock, but she was so happy she could cry. He was here, standing twenty yards away from her and her was alive. Alive and breathing and whole and she could die from relief.
“Go,” Raven said. “Go, Clarke.”
Clarke didn’t hear her friend, because she was too busy taking off down the hallway. She had done this at their Midpoint, sprinted into his arms. Their Midpoint was about to be turned into a Interface. She did not savor her last moments as an Incomplete; she would gladly be rid of them. His eyes were still on Octavia, who looked towards her in confusion in the last second but then
then
then
She threw herself at him, arms coming aroung his neck as she crashed into him. Bellamy tensed for a second, unaware of who was hugging him. The actions were familliar, and he was being smothered by golden curls that belonged to one person. Was he dreaming? No. He was here, and she was here, and it was like she was made to be holding him like this.
His arms came around her tighter than they ever have been. They two swayed back and forth, Clarke crying silently into his shoulder. One hand splayed on her back, crushing her to him. Clarke got a hold of herself a minute later, and savored every last second. His face was nuzzled into her neck, and yeah. She was right. He was warm.
“Wait a minute,” she could hear the grin in Octavia’s voice. “Clarke? Oh my god!”
Clarke pulled back slightly to stare into Bellamy’s eyes. He refused to let go of her, afraid that if he did then she’d disappear like a voice in the wind. “Bellamy.”
“Princess,” he breathed before he smashed his lips to her, and yeah. She was right about that too.
“I’m going to be an auntie!” Octavia squealed in the background. Raven came up next to the green eyes girl, and placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Dibbs on maid of honor,” Raven said. Octavia sent a glare over at the mechanic before flashing her a grin. “We are going to be great friends.”
The exchange was unnoticed by the other two. His lips were soft and tasted slightly like medicine, hers tasted like over sweetened coffee, and they couldn’t get enough of each other. When the two finally pulled back for air, Bellamy rested his head against hers.
“I thought you were dead,” Clarke voiced quietly. “You didn’t show up. You showed up when you were getting surgery that one time, but you didn’t show up and I-”
Bellamy silenced her with a kiss to her forehead. All the contact was leaving Clarke buzzing in every place he touched her, and she didn’t think she would ever get used to it. “I’m sorry. They gave me some pretty strong stuff to get the fever out of my system. I didn’t realize it would stop me from getting to you.”
Clarke sighed, closing her eyes. “Don’t leave me.”
“I’ve got all the time in the world,” Bellamy said. “I said it the first day, and I’ll say it again. You’re it, princess.”