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[5]
The first time it happens, Bellamy doesn’t understand.
Then it happens a second time, then a third.
By the fourth, he’s going through the motions; he takes the equipment from the sergeant, Anya, he can name his squadmates by name – Murphy, Harper, Jasper, Finn – yells and yells at them that the invasion’s going to fail, and all for nothing. They don’t listen, never do – Murphy is taken out by falling debris, Jasper is stabbed in the back, he never knows where Harper and Finn go but he can tell it’s never good.
It starts the same way every time – Bellamy waking up on his bed the day before the invasion.
It ends the same way every time – the Mimics know they’re coming. They attack the ship and everyone falls to the beach to be slaughtered. He dies, slightly different each time, but it’s endlessly inevitable – and it’s always death. Repeat.
On the fifth run, he sees Clarke Griffin on the battlefield, burned to death by an exploding ship, and he gets an idea.
[13]
It takes a lot of tries and a lot of dying, but somehow, he avoids all the things thrown at him and makes it to her. She’s every bit as beautiful as she is on the publicity materials – her blonde hair falling in wisps around her face, her eyes steely as she shoots Mimics with deadly accuracy. Absently, he thinks that the Angel of Verdun nickname is well-deserved.
And then she’s in his space, hissing, “What are you doing, Private? Focus on the battle.” She turns and blasts an attacking Mimic.
“I have to save you,” he says, the words stumbling over each other in his haste to get them out. He puts his hands on her shoulders. “This ship – this ship is going to explode. You have to get us off this beach. You’re the only one who – Wait.” He pulls her to the side to avoid falling debris, and sticks his arm out to shoot at the Mimic on the roof.
Her eyes grow wide with what he hopes is understanding, and he feels a surge of hope – that she knows what’s happening, that she can save him and all of them –
Then she stops walking. “Find me when you wake up,” she says.
“What?”
A crease appears between Clarke Griffin’s eyes. “Find me when you wake up,” she says again.
Then the fire engulfs them both.
[15]
He finds her, finally, in the elite soldier’s training room. “Sergeant Griffin!” he calls, aware of her squad gathering around her. She ignores him, continuing to shoot at the robotic training equipment spinning around the room. “Sergeant Griffin!” he calls again.
Then he runs into the room. The alarm goes off as soon as he crosses the red line, and her squadmates raise their voices – he hears alarmed cries of “Stand down, Private!” and “Clarke!” before she finally stops her exercise and looks behind him, then at him. She frowns, and his heart sinks at her lack of recognition.
“Who are you?” she says, her voice low and silver, and he shrinks a little under her stare.
“Sergeant Griffin,” he says hastily, putting his hands up. “My name is Bellamy Blake, I’m a Private in the UDF – tomorrow, at the beach – you told me –” She’s looking at him curiously now, her posture relaxing, and he feels calmer at this. “You told me to find you. When I woke up. And here I am.”
Her eyes widen. She steps out of the exosuit. “Stand down, Lexa!” she calls to someone behind him, and he sees a longhaired woman lower a gun aimed at him. “I know what’s happening to you,” she whispers, her voice harsh. “God, it’s a slaughter tomorrow, isn’t it?” Her lip tightens at his answering nod. “Come with me.”
Once they’re out of the training facility, he asks her, “What’s happening to me?”
“I had what you had then I lost it,” she mutters. “Don’t make a big deal out of it. Trust me for a bit.”
He follows her to one of the science labs, where she murmurs a few words to a couple of scientists who drop what they’re doing and follow her to a back room.
“Private Blake,” she says, “This is Doctors Monty Green, with Mimic biology, and Raven Reyes, with engineering. Tell them what you know.”
He’s surprised by her bluntness, but he tells them what they know anyway. “The Mimics know we’re coming,” he starts. “The invasion tomorrow – it’s doomed to fail. They attack the ship we’re in, and just kill everybody once we land on the beaches. It’s terrible.”
“How do you know this?” Monty asks, but there’s a look in his eyes that suggests he’s only asking for confirmation.
“I – I’m not sure,” Bellamy starts. “My first day, I – I killed a Mimic. Then when I died – I woke up on Heathrow again, the day before.”
“Describe it,” says Clarke.
“It was…different. Burned blue. It was bigger.”
“An Alpha,” says Raven with a grim look in her eyes. “Clarke, tell him.”
“That happened to me,” Clarke explains. “How did you think I managed to kill a hundred Mimics on my ‘first day?’” She scowls. “More like hundredth day.”
Monty says, “Okay.” Bellamy’s struck by how young the guy suddenly looks – the guy’s probably around five years younger than he is. “You have your standard Mimic, then you have your Alphas – they’re the ones the mooks answer to, they’re the big ones on the frontlines. The Alphas only answer to the Omega, the mother mimic – we know enough about Mimic neurobiology to know that they basically act like one giant nervous system. If we destroy the Omega, we’ll take out all the lesser ones.”
Clarke adds, “The one that you killed – it’s an Alpha. It has the power to reset time. What happened to me – I got the time-resetting ability when I got its blood splashed over me.”
Bellamy’s head is spinning. “Why?”
“The Mimics want a flawless victory against us,” Raven says. “If anything goes less than according to plan – boom. Repeat. We’d never know.”
“Wait,” he begins. “If the Mimics can reset time so everything goes according to their plans… how did we win at all before?”
“If you say they know we’re coming and smash us there – then they wanted to lure us into a false sense of security,” Clarke says, clearly disgusted. “They let us win, all those other times – Rome, Brisbane, Verdun…” Her fists clench, but she keeps talking. “The plans are in – we’re supposed to throw everything we have into the invasion tomorrow. If they can take all of it out, then there’s nothing standing between them and everything else.”
Bellamy feels a hollow pit in his stomach. “Okay. So how do we take out the Omega by tomorrow?”
Clarke looks at him, all business. “Not just yet.” She, Monty, and Raven share a look.
“What now?” he asks, his mouth dry, and he’s starting to have a very bad feeling about this.
Raven pats him on the soldier. “Buckle up, Blake. How many tomorrows do you have in you?”
[62]
It’s slow work, but he gets better.
It becomes an infuriating routine – wake up, find Clarke, tell her what they’ve already accomplished. Then Clarke trains with him in the elite training room, where he shoots at manmade robots and pretends it’ll help at all. She’s always cold with him at first, professional and precise. Then it’s a four-hour fitful sleep, where he memorizes the way of attack and tries, fucking tries his hardest to get them across the beach – but it never works.
He’s getting visions, too – a dam, in Bavaria – he doesn’t know where they’re coming from, but he brings it up with Monty in one run, who suggests that they’re sent by the Omega, and that Bavaria is probably their next course of action. It becomes the goal, the reason he schools Clarke on the beach routine – two steps to the left, then duck, then eighteen paces forward – to get to it and then destroy it.
Bellamy’s raised his sister since he was seventeen, and that did a number on him; he’s felt older than his age before. But this is nothing compared to that – dying comes naturally to him now, as easy as sleep and waking up, and it should be horrifying, that if Octavia were here she’d say that this is an entirely new level of old; he’s living the same day over and over and having to deal with nobody remembering. He doesn’t even know if she’d even believe him.
(But, he thinks, dully, Octavia’s tucked away in California, away from all the fighting in Europe; she’ll be fine, she told him in her last letter that she and Lincoln are trying for a baby, if he survives this he could be an uncle? He’s done fighting her about him. This – this is bigger than any brother-in-law conflict he can squirm out of, and if shit hits the fan, he knows Lincoln will be there for her when he can’t – which is looking more and more likely.)
He decides to chip away at Clarke, then – he’s learned to see through her sharp barbs and harsh criticism, knows that the Angel of Verdun front is a façade she puts up as well. He learns different things about her in all the runs – in the 37th, he learns her favorite color is blue, in the 42nd, that her father was a military engineer and her mother was an army medic, in the 49th, that she and the other woman in her squad, Lexa, had had a fling the year before, in the 61st, that she paints in her spare time.
Sometimes, she dies before he does, and it’s painful – she’s young and she’s good at what she does and maybe if he’d run a bit faster she’d survive, but she’s always approached it clinically – “I volunteered,” she says, her voice clipped. He doesn’t buy it, works to save her –
(He counts the runs where she teases him, where she talks about her life, and in which he makes her smile. He counts the runs where he outlives her. And his heart clenches when he inevitably dies and has to find her again, the familiar scowl of unfamiliarity on her face.)
Bellamy begins to lose count of the runs, but Clarke Griffin becomes the one constant.
[98]
It’s one of the runs where they make it past the beach and into the roads and fields. The beach itself went flawlessly; he thinks he even managed to save Jasper and Harper (a thought that, so long ago, would have been sickening to think).
“You don’t talk much,” he tells her when they’ve managed to nail that annoying Mimic in the trailer and are driving along an abandoned highway.
“Not a fan of talking,” she says, keeps her eyes on the road.
“You do eventually talk to me,” he says, almost teasing. “Bout your dad. He taught you about art. You told me about your first trip to the Louvre.” (Run 74.)
At that she glances at him, the look on her face half surprised and half delighted. “Maybe I made it all up just to shut you up,” she replies, but there’s a smile in her voice.
“What’s your middle name, then? You look like an Elizabeth.” He’s smiling at her. He can’t help it.
She rolls her eyes, a gesture as youthful as it is endearing. For a moment, she looks like the happy twentysomething she could be and not a hardened soldier. “It’s not Elizabeth.” And as if she remembers, her fingers tense on the wheel and her mouth straightens. “Seriously, Blake, I don’t need to get to know you. And if you knew what was good for you, you wouldn’t want to get to know me either.”
His voice is quiet. “Is this about Wells Jaha? Did you get to know him?”
She stills on the wheel. “Under what circumstances did I ever mention his name to you?” (Run 67; they were talking about dead partners. He’d told her about Miller.)
“Is he why you won’t talk to me?” he asks, his voice gentle.
Clarke looks away from him, her eyes steely. “Don’t ever mention his name again,” she says, her voice distant. “He’s dead,” she adds shortly. “I watched him die a hundred times and I remember everything, and I loved him, and I don’t need for you to bring that up again. I don’t need to talk about it.”
He feels a pinprick of shame for wondering if Jaha loved Clarke back as she reset, too, or if he was only following her lead.
They leave their suits in the middle of a field when the van, then the suits run out of juice, and they take up camp in an abandoned farmhouse. Clarke makes a noise of distress when she inspects the helicopter and insists that they fly over to the Alps, and he begs to please see her arm. She acquiesces with a lingering smile, and there’s a lump in his throat as he cleans her wounds, and if his touch lingers on her skin a second too long she doesn’t say anything about it.
“My mother was an army medic,” she says. “I learned how to do that sort of shit from her. It’s weird – because of the time loop thing, I’ve never had to perform anything like that on myself. At least nothing that stuck.”
“Glad to be of service, Princess,” he says. He knows, of course, she’s told it to him before, but it warms his heart all the same. “See. You do eventually talk to me.” He pats down the bandage. “Coffee’s ready,” he says, moving towards the press. “One cream, two sugars, right?” He found that out three loops ago, but it’s still nice to confirm.
She actually laughs at that. “Yeah. I can’t believe you managed to find coffee.” Absently, he notes it’s the first time in the endless loops he’s ever heard her laugh. Then her face stills as she watches him, and he knows she’s found him out.
“How many times have we been here, Bellamy?”
He doesn’t answer. (Fourteen.)
Her face is beautiful and cold. “How many times? Bellamy – Bellamy, where are the keys?”
And of course, because he can’t deny her anything, he hands them over.
“I don’t believe this,” she’s saying, her voice accusatory. “What are we still doing here? We’re wasting time!” She’s already moving, gathering her things, putting on her jacket, and Bellamy feels the familiar pit of despair in his stomach.
“Clarke,” he says, reaching up to grab her arm and hating the way his voice breaks over her name. “Clarke, please. You start that engine you die, no matter what I do. There is no scenario where both of us make it out. Please, can we please just take the long way?”
And because she’s a soldier who can’t know how much he knows about her, she just scoffs and shrugs him off. “I volunteered,” she reminds him, getting into the helicopter cockpit. “Dying’s one of the occupational hazards.”
He knows that he could let her sacrifice herself as she’s already done so many times, that he can keep going anyway, that there’s nothing stopping him from carrying on without her. But to do so and succeed would be to live in a world where Clarke Griffin bled out by the hand of a single Mimic in an abandoned farmhouse, and he doesn’t want to do that when he knows they can do so much better.
She deserves better.
(He’s already died thirteen times trying to find a way out of this, what’s one more?)
(He wonders when saving Clarke became just as important as saving the world.)
“It’s Artura,” she says when all’s said and done and she dies like he knew she would next to the debris of a shattered helicopter, staring up at him with glassy eyes. “My middle name.”
It’s not the first time he’s had to watch the light go out of her eyes, but his heart clenches, and he’s almost grateful for the subsequent Mimic onslaught.
[99]
The next run, he tries without her. He doesn’t try to escape Anya’s drilling, doesn’t find her in her ivory tower, doesn’t escape the drop and falls to the beach like everyone else. Her training manages to get him across the beach mostly unharmed; he’s bleeding from a gash on his shoulder but it’s nothing that he (or she) can’t patch up. He makes it past the roads and the fields and the Mimics that tail them; he can predict their movements as easily as any other run. He takes the helicopter and flies it over the Alps, and feels choked.
He hears the news on the radio – Beach invasion fails, Clarke Griffin among thousands dead –
(It’s almost comforting – at least he didn’t cause her death this time around. It’s doubly comforting when he finally – finally – makes it to the dam, and finds several murderous, non-Omega Mimics instead, and chokes down the urge to cry. When he holds the gun up to his head, that this is the first time he’s had to take his own life doesn’t escape him, and he lets himself embrace the dark.)
[100]
Bellamy glosses over it as much as he can – I got visions showing a dam in the Alps, we thought that was where the Omega was but turned out to be a lie, ha ha – and tries not to hold it against Monty. They’re trying. Clarke looks at him, her brow furrowed, but she doesn’t know the half of it. Raven shows them a device she’s been tinkering with, something that can trace Mimic signals and, if a live Alpha is present for study, could be used to trace the Omega. (She and Monty have discussed that it might not have been safe for him to use, but he’s past the point of caring.)
(He tries not to hold it against her, either.)
Clarke pushes back his hair while she practically stabs him with it with clinical precision – “stop being a baby about this, Private” -- and his forehead burns with her touch. Suddenly, the visions come like tidal waves – Europe, then France, then Paris, as if the signal is zooming on a GPS – then the Louvre. He sits bolt upright.
Raven only smiles, baring teeth. “Who’s ready to blow up a museum?”
There’s only one problem: driving back from the science labs, Clarke swerves to avoid a kid crossing the road and the van topples over to the side, shrapnel and broken glass flying everywhere. Bellamy sees her knocked out cold before he looks down and sees that he’s bleeding out, and – fuck.
It’s an easy mistake, should be avoidable in the next run – except he doesn’t die straight away.
He wakes up and sees the blood transfusion tubes, and feels sick to his stomach.
“This is it,” he says when she comes to break him out. “They gave me blood. I’ve lost it.”
Her face pales, but her mouth straightens and he can see the gears turning in her head. “This is it, then, Private,” she says, her voice clipped and professional as it always is. “Looks like we’re in it for the long haul.”
----
His squadmates are easy enough to convince, he feeds them information he’s picked up on them in previous runs and they’re good to go. Clarke gets a couple of people from her squad to come, too – her ex Lexa and a huge, imposing guy named Gustus – and they go off to war in the dead of night. Most of them are killed in the ensuing battle, but they get Bellamy and Clarke below the Louvre, and “It’s all that matters,” Clarke says, distant anyway, “We did what we had to do.” Bellamy turns away; it’s not like he had time to get attached. They lie in wait, pressed against a wall.
“Sorry we have to blow up the Louvre,” he says, if only to break the tension. She looks at him curiously. “You, uh – you told me about your dad taking you to it,” he explains, suddenly blushing. “In – in another loop. Time.”
Clarke’s face softens and she looks away, and for a second he thinks she’s about to cry, but then she swallows and looks at him. “I’m sure he’d be fine with blowing it up to save the world,” she says, her voice very soft. Her eyes don’t leave his.
Bellamy’s breath catches. He takes in the blood and grime covering Clarke, of her messy hair and tired puffs of breath, and thinks, if his life were literally anything other than this, it would be so easy – Clarke, I love you. But she will never know him as well as he knows her, it’s always going to be weirdly onesided, and they’re going to die soon –
Then she kisses him. It’s quick and rushed but it feels right, and Bellamy’s heart leaps and his fingers tangle briefly in her hair when he kisses her back. She’s the one who breaks it, too, pulling away with a strange look in her eyes.
How do you love someone who doesn’t remember the war you fought together?
He thinks of Wells, and realizes she knows how it feels.
“I wish I could have gotten to know you better, Bellamy Blake.” Clarke’s breath ghosts over his lips. (It’s the first time, in all the countless runs, that she’s ever just called him by his full name, and he wonders if deep inside, some part of her knows, or if some part of her has seen how he looks at her, and understands.)
He presses his forehead to hers, briefly, then his lips to the crown of her head. “This is enough,” he finds himself saying. “You’re always enough. Every time.” He feels a rush of warmth at how true it is. You were worth it.
Her eyes widen, and he knows she understands.
"We do this together," she says firmly.
They both go down fighting the Alpha that lies in wait for them, and he thinks, as he throws the grenade into the Omega’s center, that it’s only fitting.
Bellamy Blake is – finally – going to die saving the world and loving Clarke Artura Griffin, and the thought is almost comforting. He thinks that all the time he's died, going to hell and back for her would hardly be a problem.
(He falls through a cloud of the Omega's blood, and all he can see is white.)
[0]
He’s on the plane when he hears the broadcast – the Mimic Omega was downed by a power surge at the Louvre, the war is over – I’m supposed to be dead, is all he can think, we won. How am I alive – what am I doing at Heathrow? – “Bell, are you okay?” and he turns and Octavia’s next to him, her brow furrowed, and his heart stops because holy shit, why is she here –
Bellamy walks through the airport almost in a daze. Octavia keeps after him, picking up bags he misses and reminding him to go to the bathroom, all with a worried look on her face, until he reaches the arrival section and –
“Clarke?” is the first thing out of his mouth.
She looks up, and her light eyes are wide and shocked with recognition. “Private Blake,” she says, her back ramrod straight, but she’s smiling. “Welcome to Heathrow.”
He drops his bags.
And then she’s running towards him and her arms are around his neck and her head’s buried in his shoulder, murmuring you made it and you’re alive and you remember and his heart fucking stops before he remembers to put his arms around her neck, and he’s vaguely aware of Octavia’s teasing voice – “Now there’s something I thought I’d never see” – and he sets her down and she’s staring at him, wide-eyed and cheeks flushed, and –
He kisses her and her arms curl around him and he tangles his fingers in her hair like before, and she smiles into his mouth and fuck the Mimics, fuck the United Defense Force, fuck if they’ll never go down in history – this is victory.