Work Text:
On the Ark, Octavia had never seen much red; everything was in muted shades of blue and gray and black, from the steel walls of the Ark itself to the ceaseless blackness into which her mother had tumbled, her body sucked into the abyss. She was in awe of the myriad of colors when she stepped foot on the ground: the blues that were bright and shimmering, the greens that were so vibrant and alive.
And then there was the red: the petals of the flowers that Clarke used, sometimes, as medicine; the lips of the delinquents after Monty had made a particularly sweet batch of moonshine that had stained all of their faces; the strawberries that grew in patches on the outskirts of the drop ship.
But Octavia had been on the ground for so long, now. She was no longer the little girl permanently drowned in demure tones and cold walls. Now, she had seen more red than she cared to think about. (So much of it on her own hands, caked beneath her fingernails, dribbling from her lip.)
And now, it was covering Bellamy’s abdomen in a dark, dark red, the color of rust and death.
And so she screamed.
“Bell? Oh my god, Bellamy,” she was muttering, her trembling fingers dancing over the now-exposed flesh, and she winced when she heard his grunt of pain. “Shit, sorry, oh my god.”
There were still arrows flying all around their heads, one cutting far too close to her ear for her own liking, but she couldn’t think about that, right now, because Bellamy had a spear lodged in his lower stomach and she couldn’t breathe.
“Bell? Listen to me, okay. Listen,” Octavia said desperately, “you’re going to be okay. Do you hear me? You’re going to be fine.” (She thought about the days when the tears from his eyes were red, when it was covering his hands and his mouth and she was petrified, and she wondered how things had changed so little.)
“Someone help!” she screamed. She thought she heard Bellamy mutter something about pretty fucking idiotic, don’t you think, but he was bleeding out and air was barely entering his lungs, judging by his erratic breathing, and so she pointedly ignored him.
“Help!”
“Octavia?”
Octavia whipped her head around at her own name, braids whirling around her head, and when she saw her - all blonde hair and sunken blue eyes and gaunt cheeks - she thought she might be in a nightmare. Or a dream. And then those blue, blue eyes (so many colors down on earth, and Clarke’s eyes were the color of the water on a bright day) fixated on Bellamy’s body, and Octavia thought she could pinpoint the exact moment Clarke’s heart cracked in half.
“Bellamy,” she breathed, and suddenly Clarke was on his opposite side, hands hovering over his body as though she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to be near him, to touch him. Bellamy’s eyes opened again at the sound of her voice, and Octavia saw the awed reverence in his expression, the love written into the exhausted lines of his face, and when he whispered her name, it sounded like a prayer.
(He probably thought he was dying, if he was seeing her.)
“Clarke,” Octavia said firmly, locking eyes with the other girl for the first time in months, and she pushed away the images of a village scorched to the core that were blurring her vision. “You have to save him.”
Clarke didn’t look up, her fingers quaking against Bellamy’s face where she cupped his cheek, but nodded once. When she finally met Octavia’s gaze, there was a clarity to her eyes that hadn’t been there before, a fierce determination that Octavia had once admired, and there was a tinge of relief to the sigh that left her body.
“I’m going to need a flame,” Clarke commanded immediately, giving Bellamy a tender and watery smile that Octavia tried very hard not to focus on before she poised her hand around the end of the spear and broke it in half. Bellamy groaned beneath her hands, and Octavia could hear her murmured condolences, wrapping him in them like a blanket, her voice the balm to the aching wound his heart had been sporting since she left.
Octavia readied the flame and stuck one of her knives into it, already knowing what was coming next. Clarke nodded at her, once, and then took the knife from her fingers gingerly. “I’m going to need you to hold him down,” she murmured, and Octavia swallowed thickly, but nodded her assent.
“Okay, Bell, it’s gonna be okay,” Octavia whispered into her brother’s ear as she clamped down on his shoulders.
And then Clarke ripped the spear from his body and stuck the knife immediately into the injury, and a scream erupted from Bellamy’s lungs that sounded like he was being tortured, that sounded like someone was searing the flesh from his body, and Clarke was whispering anguished apologies into the air until he finally passed out.
When Octavia let go and Clarke dropped the knife, she noticed the tear tracks cutting through the dirt on Clarke’s face, but she didn’t comment.
“I- I need you to rip his shirt into pieces for me,” she said as she regathered herself, wiping hastily at her cheeks and taking the pieces as Octavia handed them to her. “This should be good for now, but -”
“Clarke,” Octavia whispered suddenly, because her fingers were poised at Bellamy’s throat, and she felt nothing. “Clarke, fuck, he’s not breathing, he’s not breathing!”
The blonde girl dropped the pieces of fabric, shoving Octavia out of the way as she poised herself above Bellamy, her hands grabbing at his face and trying to shake him awake. She started giving him compressions, her tiny frame bobbing as she muttered the count to herself, and then she grabbed his face again and was blowing air into his lungs, quite literally feeding him oxygen.
“You have to save him, Clarke!” Octavia sobbed, her fist covering her mouth in a vain attempt to calm her cries. “He’s my brother. He’s… he’s all I have left.” The words left her in a whisper, a dawning realization, and it terrified her, a world without Bellamy Blake.
Clarke was going through the motions at high speed, but Octavia noticed that now instead of numbers she was saying something: “I can’t… I can’t lose you, remember? I told you that so long ago, but… but I meant it.” (She pushed air into his lungs, and Octavia prayed for a miracle.) “I was so wrong, Bell, so wrong about so many things…”
Octavia heard snippets of not a weakness and it wasn’t worth the risk.
And then she heard a ragged breath wrench itself from her brother’s lungs, and she nearly collapsed in relief.
(Clarke nearly did, too, judging by the absolutely wrecked expression on her face.)
Bellamy passed out again, but this time his chest was rising and falling, and Octavia watched it as though it was the single most important thing on this earth, and, in a way, it was. Clarke finished her bandaging and then leaned back against a tree, and Octavia joined her, belatedly realizing the arrows had stopped flying and that their people were going to come looking for them soon.
But instead of dwelling on that, she turned and looked at the blonde girl beside her. She looked like she had crawled her way up from the Underworld: her hair was matted and flaked with dirt, and there were now patches of blood covering her hands (Bellamy’s blood), and she was sickly thin, her bones protruding in alarming places. But where before she had ghosts lurking in her eyes and the entire world perched on her tiny, sunken shoulders, she now stood up straighter, and her eyes were clear, the same blue as they were the day they crash-landed their way onto this god-forsaken planet.
“I’m sorry,” Octavia blurted, because… because she was, all of a sudden. “For… for everything I said, and what I…”
A hesitant smile crawled onto Clarke’s lips. “I forgive you. You had a right to be angry. I…” Clarke looked away, back towards Bellamy, and Octavia noticed she was watching the rise and fall of his chest, too. “I made a lot of decisions I didn’t want to make. But I didn’t do them recklessly.”
“I know that.” Octavia paused, turned her attention towards her now-sleeping brother, as well. “And so does he.”
Clarke’s head snapped towards her, eyes widening slightly. Octavia continued on. “You should’ve heard… heard some of the fights we had about you.” She laughed humorlessly. “Me calling you a monster, and him…” She sighed. “He defended you, always. Punched a kid one time for calling you a murderer, probably almost decked me about twenty times for the same reason.”
Octavia looked at Clarke, at the tears threatening to spill over, at the slight tremble of her lip, at the way she was trying to tear off the flecks of Bellamy’s blood coating her skin. She murmured, “He loves you. And you love him. And… and maybe that’s enough, for me. Maybe that can be enough for us to… to fix this.”
Clarke let out a slightly choked sob, and Octavia smiled at her, a small one, but genuine, and she clutched her leader’s hand within her own calloused one.
And she must have fallen asleep, at some point, because when she opened her eyes, Bellamy’s head was in Clarke’s lap, the fingers of one hand running through his hair and the others entangled with Bellamy’s on his chest, and he was looking at her like she was a constellation, because she was far too bright to simply be one star, too much to be contained to one fiery being. And she was looking at him like he had built the universe, forged it from his own two hands.
(She heard Clarke mutter, “If you had died, I would have fucking killed you.”)
(Maybe it was enough.)