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Bellamy Blake is twenty-three years old when he joins SHIELD as one of its top agents.
That’s what the records say, anyway. He’s older than twenty-three and his name isn’t even Bellamy Blake – the former, for the copy of Looking Backward gifted to him his first time in America, the latter, for Octavia’s father when he’d found her. He doesn’t want to think of Octavia as a half-anything, after all. His real name is something he and the world both want to forget, something soft, whispered to wintry Russian children by their mothers to stop them from misbehaving out of fear.
That’s all in the past. He’s a pretty forward-thinking guy, after all.
And the top agent part, at least, is true. Bellamy is good at his job. Before America, before Octavia, he’d been ruthless, focused, serious, deadly, feared; as good at hand-to-hand combat and espionage as the Russians had hoped. It had been beat into him, over and over, smothered under imperfect serums and layers of charm and charisma. But it had only taken Octavia’s unknowing kindness and the stricken look on their mother’s face, the promise of independence, self-sufficiency, family, to send all that crumbling down. He’d gone rogue, walked straight into Kane’s offer of security for him and Octavia, put the smile and inviting body language to use for protecting the world, or whatever. It’s okay. Sure, he chafes under Kane’s command, and butts heads with Reyes and some of his fellow agents, but it’s okay.
You can do good, Kane had promised. You can be your own person.
He is legally twenty-six years old when Clarke Griffin is dug out of the Arctic and aliens invade New York and the world goes to shit.
He likes her well enough, he guesses. He knows all about her, of course, has read everything on her SHIELD has available for their agents and then some, but there isn’t really much time to get to know her, the body language and social cues that make up a super soldier, but he can infer enough:
One. Righteous and morally upstanding. That one’s easy, could have been inferred from her fucking file photo, but it’s in the little things, too – the way she talks, holds open the elevator doors, brings people coffee.
Two. So damn caring. He knows she wants nothing more than to be friends with Reyes, but Collins’s hero-worship of her and resulting indiscretion had put a stop to that; when he’s killed, Clarke hugs Raven throughout the night, and the next day the two of them are a seamless, functional machine.
Two. Displaced. That one, at least, he can relate to – the stark jump from the wintry Cold War, the whispers of the KGB, to the newfound freedom he has now in the 21st century is still startling, and he recognizes the brief startle upon seeing something unfamiliar or hearing something new. It’s nice, having someone with shared life experience.
Three. Tired. That one, too, they have in common.
In the aftermath, when he’s sitting in the lounge at Avengers Tower, fiddling with some new pistol, Clarke Griffin ambles in in a tank top and pajamas. She looks vaguely uncomfortable in them, only helped by her blinking frown at the tower’s sleek interior design.
“Good morning, Cap,” he says, smirking at her raised eyebrows. “If you’re looking for Iron Woman, she went on a shawarma run. JARVIS got the place cleaned up, though, so you don’t have to worry about falling debris.”
She plops down next to him on the two-seater, despite the fact that there are eight other seats she could have easily taken. “Good morning, Agent Blake.” A pause. “Raven doesn’t want to go, does she?”
That gives Bellamy pause. “No.”
She sighs, folds her knees up to her chest. Despite the hard bulk of her body and the sharp, battleworn lines on her face, she looks like a young girl curled up on a friend’s sofa. Absently, Bellamy remembers she was nineteen when she bound her chest and followed her best friend into the army, twenty when she fell into the ice. Her birthday is in April, so he guesses she’d consider herself twenty-one now, if she was still counting.
Octavia, tucked away in a house not even on SHIELD’s records, is twenty.
Clarke’s speaking again. “I should have expected that.”
He regards her. “Do you want to go?” But he knows the answer, can see it in the slump of her shoulders, the pout of her mouth. They’ve closed an alien portal and saved the world, but the people still expect something of them, to be the balm of their losses and help close the wounds. He doesn’t like it, the spotlight, prefers the time when his name was a whispered threat.
“Agent Collins deserves it,” she says, her tone clipped. “They all do.”
He doesn’t go, but watches the footage with Jasper and Monty from Avengers Tower’s system. Clarke is in her Captain America uniform again, giving a speech that he knows isn’t the least bit rehearsed, but her confidence makes up for it. Her voice is smooth and mostly unwavering, her demeanor strong and polished as she offers condolences. Her grip on her shield is tight. She doesn’t mention Collins, but Bellamy can hear the hitches in her voice, can see her searching gaze on the list of casualties.
Reyes stumbles in later, only the slightest bit intoxicated, and sits down next to them and says nothing, keeping her eyes trained on Clarke Griffin on the podium.
“Finn’s dad was – was one of the scientists on the Super Soldier project,” she hiccups. Bellamy’s arm is around her. “Wouldn’t shut up about Clarke fucking Griffin while Finn was growing up. How could I compete with that? All I fucking did was grow up with him.”
Bellamy doesn’t say anything, just continues watching with her. He already has many ghosts of his own.
Much later, when it’s just the two of them, with Lincoln, Anya, and Raven all doing their own thing, things are different. SHIELD gets them in and out of a ship, and Clarke glares at him, her gaze stony – you have a different mission, she hisses, before she’s leaping over a table to get to him and he braces his body against hers in the explosion that follows.
He knows, of course, what Kane is up to – three more Arks, shiny and strong and for protection, Kane claims, but something doesn’t sit right with him. (He doesn’t say anything, of course. Bellamy owes him far too much for him to do that). But Clarke Griffin doesn’t, and he sees her face crumple, this isn’t freedom this is fear, she says, but duty is duty.
(Ostensibly, the KGB had used him for protection, too.)
But that’s all before someone blows up Kane’s car and everything goes to shit. (Again.)
He hears snippets of what had happened on the way to the hospital. Kane had gone to Captain America’s apartment (Jasper). Someone shot him while he was in there (Monty). Agent Lexa Woods was undercover, looking out for Clarke Griffin, but she was too late (Maya). Griffin pursued the shooter, but –
Here Harper pauses, looks warily at him, and somehow, Bellamy knows.
He bursts into the emergency room, and she’s already there, calm and composed, but he can see the hysterics in her eyes.
“Kane will make it,” he says, more to himself than to Clarke. He has to. This is Marcus Kane, director of SHIELD, who’d wiped the red from Bellamy’s ledger and kept his family safe. He has to. He doesn’t know how long the two of them stand there, hyperaware of every beep of the heart monitor through the glass.
(When they pull the sheet over his body, he cries for the first time in years. Next to him, Clarke doesn’t even sniffle, but her fingers find his and don’t leave.)
“Agent Blake. Tell me about the shooter,” Clarke says later, pressed against him in a dark hallway in the Triskelion, because she’d gotten upset with him again, stop lying, she’d accused, digging her fingers into his sides. Her bright eyes glitter dangerously. He skims his fingers along her hips.
Bellamy pauses. She’s tiny, but she’s like him, displaced and tired and vulnerable. The Winter Soldier, he explains. The myth, the legend. He’s tired. Ribs her, of course, as they go through things. It’s routine, in a way, if being on the run from Diana Sydney and her STRIKE cronies was routine at all. But he owes Kane this much, finding out why he died, and Clarke Griffin is a good person. That much, at least, he knows.
I only act like I know everything, he’d told her, earlier.
HAIL HYDRA, says the supercomputer, and that’s when he knows he was horribly, horribly right.
She drags his unconscious body out of an exploding building, only barely hesitates when knocking on Nathan Miller’s door. Bellamy trembles, can’t look her in the eye.
“Bellamy,” she says. Bellamy, not Agent Blake. Offhandedly, he thinks how lovely she is, stripped down and without pretense. “You okay?”
“Hard to be okay when you learn all you ended up doing was quitting one shady organization for another,” he says, combing his hair through his fingers. Again, he thinks of Octavia, wondering what he’s doing.
She says nothing for a while, her eyes trained on his. “You did good, Bellamy.”
He frowns. “I owe you,” he mutters, looking away from her.
She shakes her head almost instinctively, blond curls falling into her forehead. “It’s okay,” she adds, as if to drive it home.
He persists. “If it were the other way around,” he says, looking her in the eye again, “And it was down to me to save your life – would you trust me do it?”
Clarke Griffin doesn’t even blink. “I would now,” she says without hesitation, taking his hand in hers again. “I know you’re a good person, Bellamy Blake.”
It’s nice to know someone believes that.
Who the –
Bellamy Blake has looked death in the eye many times. It’s everywhere, that fight on the highway; Shumway is tossed out a car window and suddenly Clarke’s on his lap and firing at the assailant, the wheel’s ripped out of Miller’s hand.
But the man in front of them – dark haired, tall, masked, metal arm glinting in the sun, his stomach curdles, remembers the mission that went wrong, terrifying, looks like death, Bellamy tries to fire at him but the truck careens into the back of the car, and suddenly there’s a truck careening into them, Clarke says hang on, and they jump.
– hell is –
Death has a rocket launcher.
He loses sight of Clarke, and his blood thrums, but there’s no time to think, there are seven machine guns firing at him. He nicks the Soldier in the goggles, but it’s hardly any use, and he’s vaguely aware of Clarke and Miller fighting in the background as he runs.
He almost gets the Soldier, but he fucks up a twist, and suddenly it’s him running, yelling at civilians to get out of the way, before the bullet hits him in the shoulder and his vision blurs.
Distantly, he sees the launcher pointed at him, thinks of the Avengers, thinks of Kane, thinks of Octavia, closes his eyes –
And that’s when Clarke jumps in, shield at the ready.
Wells?
“Wells Jaha,” Clarke murmurs later in the STRIKE van, and he knows she’s thinking of seventy years ago. Her eyes are puffy, but he knows she hasn’t been crying. He knows, of course, he’s read the file – Sgt. Wells Jaha, a casualty in Captain America’s siege against HYDRA, thought dead in the European mountains – but evidently not. His father had been a politician, mayor or governor something-or-other, and had become the primary government ally of those who pushed to start SHIELD.
It’s hard to remember details when he’s bleeding out, but you work with what you got.
Clarke is still next to him, pensive. She’s taking the fact that her best friend ended up being a brainwashed killing machine surprisingly well, and Bellamy can see it in her eyes that if they get out of this alive, she’s going to do everything in her power to change the Winter Soldier back into Wells Jaha, because that’s just the kind of person she is.
He isn’t that kind of person, of course – the KGB had him work alone, always alone; he’d never tested well with any SHIELD operatives, leaving him without a permanent partner – to have someone on the field you trust unconditionally, to know they had your back…
He can’t help it if this train of thought leads him to blink blearily at Clarke.
Of course, that’s before Commander Cartwig pulls off the mask and tasers the HYDRA guard, and Marcus Kane steps out of the shadows, smirking.
The plan works. Bellamy infiltrates the World Security Council meeting and gets to hold Diana Sydney at gunpoint, and gets to be a keyboard press away from uploading all of SHIELD’s secrets on the internet.
“Are you ready,” Diana Sydney says, her voice hard steel. “For the world to see you as you really are?”
He thinks of the covert missions, all the dirt, all the blood. He thinks of his teammates, still unsure whether or not to trust him. He thinks of the ledger, of Octavia, of Russian winters. He thinks of lying, lying, lying for a living, and what’s the point if everyone knows every lie he’s ever told? For a very, very brief moment, Bellamy hesitates. Sydney smirks.
You’re a good person, Bellamy Blake.
He presses the button.
Kane shoots Sydney dead.
The Arks blow up or crash into rivers, but Clarke Griffin is nowhere to be found.
He visits her in the hospital as soon as it’s allowed. She’s looking worse for wear and drifting in and out of consciousness, but her face lights up when she sees him, and he can’t help but smile back. “Bell!” she greets, her smile wide.
“Hey, grandma,” he teases. “When are you getting out of bed?”
“Couple more days,” she grumbles. “Turns out even a super serum isn’t that great at fixing falling from sixty feet and then almost drowning. And you’re one to talk – you weren’t actually born in 1989, were you?”
He has to chuckle at that. “Nope. Shared life experience, you and I.”
“Join the club,” she mutters, only a tad darkly.
“Wells?” he asks quietly.
Her face falls. “Gone,” she murmurs. For a brief moment, she looks distant, touching the healing bruises on her face. “But Miller and I will find him,” she adds, determined.
There’s a pause between the two of them. Bellamy stares at the wall. Then – “I’m proud of you,” she says quietly.
“It had to be done,” he says, gruff.
“No,” Clarke says, staring at him, a half-smile on her face. “It didn’t.”
Miller arrives next, carrying Star Wars DVDs and an old iPod. “I can’t talk you out of Star Wars anymore,” he teases, and Clarke laughs.
“As long as Bell watches, too,” she says, looking at him. Despite himself, his heart warms.
“Next time, Clarke,” is what he says instead, because he has a Senate hearing to attend later, and they've saved the world again but there’s still so much to do; someone will have to rebuild their splintered organization from the ground up. And it’s because he’ll do his own thing and so will she but there will be a next time for people like them, always new threats to take down and new battles to fight – and he’s damn sure he’ll follow her into battle anywhere.