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Bellamy wasn’t sure what to think about his sister’s fiancé. Atom seemed likable enough, but he was quiet, and clearly shy, and Bellamy wasn’t sure that was what his sister needed. Octavia was wild and loud, filled with opinions on everything that she refused to keep to herself. She needed someone strong enough to drag her away from whatever bar fights she was bound to start—or at least someone who could back her up in them. Atom, as far as Bellamy was concerned, could do neither.
There was, of course, the very real possibility that Bellamy was biased; she was his only sister, after all, and had been his only family for the last ten years. He was bound to be a little reluctant to let her go—which was why he was out here, in the middle of the woods at twelve in the morning, helping the groom rehearse his lines for the wedding.
“Okay, so I stand here,” Atom says, pointing at the ground beneath his feet. Bellamy holds in a truly impressive eye-roll. “And I say—” he glances down at the paper in his hand, presumably his vows, though Bellamy wouldn’t be surprised if they were printed off the internet. He supposes it’s the thought that counts, but still.
“Octavia, you are the bluest butterfly in a field of blue butterflies,” Atom declares, and this time Bellamy can’t hold himself back.
“Maybe you should try something a little less,” he hesitates, trying to come up with the right word, and then just shrugs a little. “Just, less.”
Atom nods professionally, and marks the paper with one of the many pencils he’s constantly tucking behind his ear. As a student of architecture, he’s rarely without one.
“Octavia,” he reads, “You are a blue butterfly.” He glances up, and Bellamy gives him a thumbs up. “You are radiant, like the sun, and so full of light. So full of everything.” He sounds ready to give a Sunday sermon, than get married, and Bellamy motions for him to stop.
“How about I read it, so you can hear how it sounds?” he offers, and Atom nearly seems to collapse in relief.
It’s hard for Bellamy to remember, sometimes, how young the kid is; just barely twenty, only a year older than O. Hell, the only reason they’re getting married at all is because Atom’s mom insisted, and Octavia didn’t want to look pregnant at the wedding, so they only had a few weeks to prepare.
Bellamy’s pretty sure he should be a little more upset, that his baby sister’s having a shotgun wedding, but mostly he just wants the whole thing to be done with, and soon. At this point, he’s not sure they’ll even be married by the time the kid comes out.
He takes Atom’s paper and clears his throat, squinting down at the words in the moonlight. “Octavia,” he makes a face; it’s probably gross, saying a romantic vow dedicated to his sister, but. She’s been pushing him to be friendlier with Atom, and this is the price he has to pay. “You are a blue butterfly. You are radiant like the sun, so full of light. So full of everything. Made of all the best things out of life. Strong, like a Craftsman, elegant as a Victorian, and with many hidden depths, like a Gothic Cathedral,” he has to pause, to collect himself, and then glances over at the groom-to-be.
“Maybe not so many references to buildings,” he suggests, and Atom nods. “I don’t deserve you—that’s a good bit—and I am so glad that we get to start our life together, now. With this ring,” Bellamy digs the ring in question out of his pocket, which he’ll have to do anyway, as the Best Man. Atom offers his finger, but the ring doesn’t fit, so Bellamy glances around and finally just sticks it on an upturned tree root nearby.
“I promise to be true. With this cup,” Atom hands him a bit of tree bark, hollowed out with rainwater caught in the center, with a grin. Bellamy laughs and drinks it—it tastes like dirt. “I promise to never waver. In sickness and health, in good times and bad, I will be faithfully yours, till death do us part.”
He’s about to say the end seems a little melodramatic, when suddenly the earth begins to shake all around them.
“Is it an earthquake?” Atom asks, grabbing onto a thick birch tree, while Bellamy stumbles back into the willow behind him.
“What the fuck kind of earthquake happens in Maine?” Bellamy snaps, but to be fair, he doesn’t have a better suggestion.
And then, all at once, the shaking stops, and suddenly the willow tree opens, like a zipper seam right down the middle.
A girl steps out, wearing a ragged, stained wedding dress. She has long, mud-caked hair that might once have been yellow, and huge blue eyes that look sunken and gooey. And she’s wearing Octavia’s wedding ring.
She smiles at Bellamy, soft and bright, and if he wasn’t so freaked out right now, he might think she’s quite pretty.
“Your vows were nice,” she says with a crooked little grin. He’s pretty sure there’s a spider crawling out of her ear, but he might be imagining it. The whole thing feels like a hallucination, to be honest, and Bellamy takes a moment to hope Monty and Jasper didn’t spike the rehearsal dinner’s wine. “But the presentation could use a little work.”
Atom passes out on the forest floor.
The girl looks down at him, delighted. “I knew one of you would faint—Raven owes me ten bucks.” She turns back to Bellamy, looking proud of herself, and he can’t help feeling charmed. “Someone always faints,” she tells him.
“How many times have you done this?” he asks, waving a hand in the unzipped tree’s general direction. There’s the faint sound of music, like a Jazz band, drifting from inside it, and he’s not really sure what that means.
The girl shrugs. “You’re my first. But I’ve seen it done, and someone always faints, or screams, or pees themselves a little. I’ve been working on my entrance for months.” She frowns, thinking. “Maybe years. Living time is fuzzy.”
“Living time?”
“Anything with a pulse,” she clarifies. “The dead don’t really keep track of stuff like that; it gets depressing, after a while.”
“So,” Bellamy hedges. He should probably feel more afraid than he is, but to be honest, she seems more likely to challenge him to a drinking game, than try to hurt him. And, she’s cute, even if she is covered in mud and spiders. Plus she stepped out of a tree; he’s curious. “You’re…dead?”
“For a while now,” she nods. She doesn’t seem all that upset by it, to be honest. But then she smiles up at him, warm and hopeful, and he can’t really look away. “I’ve been waiting for this. For you.”
He wets his lips. He probably shouldn’t make out with the dead tree girl. That seems like a good standard to have. Plus, there’s the mud, and spiders. The spiders are definitely a turn off. “You have?”
She waves a hand down at her torn up dress, with a rueful grin. “Fit for a wedding,” she quips, waving the hand with Octavia’s ring, and all at once Bellamy sobers.
“Uh, about that,” he starts, but now the Jazz music is getting louder, and he can barely hear himself over the sound.
Clarke just grins and takes his hand in hers—it’s small, and pale, and cold, but he holds on anyway, because the tree is somehow growing larger and closer, like it’s being inflated, until finally it swallows them whole.
The inside of the tree is bigger than he’s expecting, and brighter, lit by what looks like hundreds of candles, taking up any bit of surface they can find, while somehow not dripping wax on anything. He and the girl are at the top of a staircase, spiraling down towards the music, and what sounds like laughter and dozens of people chatting loudly to be heard over the Jazz.
The girl leads him down, sure and steady; she’s completely comfortable in this world, and he tries to let that fact calm him down. It doesn’t.
He tugs on her hand to get her attention, and ducks low by her ear so she’ll hear. “The guy I was with, Atom—the one who fainted—” He doesn’t get to finish before she waves a hand, unconcerned.
“The ghouls will fetch him,” she promises, and he swallows drily.
“The ghouls?”
She smirks at him, and it throws him off a little. In the candlelight, she looks less eerie, and more…tangible. Less like a dream, or weird acid trip. She looks very real, very possible, and very easy to kiss. Her dress looks almost new, and it’s pretty and sleeveless, so he can see the cream of her back and neck and shoulders. There’s also an impressive amount of cleavage, which he is pointedly ignoring, and her hair looks clean, in soft yellow curls around her face.
“You have a lot to learn about the Downstairs,” she says, and sounds almost fond about it.
“There’s our princess, the lady of the hour,” someone shouts, and Bellamy looks up to find they’re decidedly no longer alone.
They’re at the bottom of the stairs, in what looks like an old speakeasy that’s seen better days. The lounge is crowded, filled with all sorts of people, who don’t really look like people. From the front, they seem altogether normal, but when Bellamy blinks or turns his head, they seem—crooked. He’s pretty sure one of the guys turned into a skeleton when he glanced away, and another one’s eye just fell out of its socket.
One grins at him, and its teeth are stuffed full of maggots. Bellamy tries not to throw up.
“Our Lady of the Underground!” another voice calls, and the room at large cheers.
Bellamy glances down at the girl sideways. She’s still holding his hand. “I take it you’re kind of a big deal, here?”
She grimaces, looking almost embarrassed, and he ducks to hide a grin. She’s cute. “They’re just glad I finally got my turn,” she explains, a little rueful. “It was an always the bridesmaid, never the bride kind of thing.”
“They called you princess, princess,” he says skeptically, and she barks out a laugh.
“Okay, so I’m kind of royalty,” she admits, trying to play it off. “Or, I was. Back when I was alive.”
Bellamy eyes her a little. “How old are you, exactly?”
She shrugs. “I’m not sure; your time is fuzzy, remember? Are there still automobiles?”
Bellamy chokes, and shoots a glare when she laughs. “You’re kidding,” he accuses, and she grins. “You know, I still don’t even know your name.”
She blanches a little, adorably. “I can’t believe I messed that part up! It’s Clarke.”
“I’m Bellamy.”
Clarke gives a shy smile. “I should probably know your last name,” she chirps. “Since we’re married.”
Bellamy winces; he probably needs to clear this whole thing up as a misunderstanding, and soon. He’s read enough Brothers Grimm to know that, above them, time is probably going by a lot faster. “Blake.”
Clarke scrunches her nose. “Clarke Blake,” she makes a face. “How awful. You should probably take my surname.”
“Why, what’s yours?” he asks, amused in spite of himself.
“Griffin. See? That’s way better.” She squeezes his hand, and he worries his lip.
He really hopes this isn’t a dream. Obviously, he doesn’t want to be married to a girl he just met—especially since she’s dead, and climbed out of a tree—but. He likes her, and he kind of wants to see where this goes.
But they should probably start with dinner.
He’s just about to mention it, when they get interrupted, again.
“Griffin!” someone—a girl, this time, he’s pretty sure—calls. “I hope you have your magic fingers ready.”
She’s pretty, the girl, in a horrific sort of way. Creamy brown skin on one half of her face, and the stark white of bone on the other. She’s wearing a trim pantsuit, so Bellamy can’t see the rest of her, but he’s willing to be it’s all half-skeleton. It’s a little disconcerting, but mostly badass.
“Raven,” Clarke says smugly. “One fainted—pay up.”
Raven sighs and eyes Bellamy so harshly he automatically tenses up, but Clarke just pats his bicep. He’s pretty sure she’s feeling him up.
“Not this one,” Clarke tells her. “This is Bellamy—my husband.”
Raven digs a handful of soggy, dead leaves from her pocket and hands them over to Clarke, who happily stuffs them somewhere in the depths of her wedding dress. “Mulch,” she tells Bellamy, “Is like currency in the Downstairs. It smells like earth, and the dead can touch it.”
“The dead can’t touch the earth?” Bellamy asks, and the girls share a look he can’t decipher. It reminds him of the ones he and Octavia are always shooting, to the constant annoyance of those around them.
“Not all of us,” Raven says cryptically. She shares another silent conversation with Clarke before his new wife sighs, and lets go of his hand.
“I should go check on the honeymoon suite,” she tells him, and drifts across the room. She’s impossible to lose in the crowd; brighter and prettier than everything else, and his eyes track her until she disappears behind a far door. When he turns back to Raven, her arms are crossed and her eyes are narrow.
“You better not be fucking with her,” she snaps, and he can’t help jumping a little. She’s half-skeleton, and is putting her all into intimidating him. It’s working, okay?
“I’m not,” he frowns, and then realizes that might not necessarily be true. “I mean—I like her. Really,” he adds, because that feels more honest.
“You better,” she says haughtily, giving him one last once-over before clapping a bony hand to his shoulder. He shudders under the skeletal hand, and she wiggles the joints a little, as an extra fuck you. “Let me buy you a drink.”
It’s not a question.
***
When Clarke gets to her room, she locks the door behind her—not because she doesn’t love her friends, she does, she just isn’t in the mood to hear them singing her praises all night long. Literally.
But almost as soon as the key’s turned, she hears a tiny voice by her ear and groans a little. They’re spiders; she really should know better, by now.
“He seemed nice,” Murphy says, and as usual, she can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic.
“Lovely, too,” Monroe adds helpfully, on Clarke’s other side.
“Definitely sturdy,” Murphy wriggles his legs against Clarke’s neck, probably forming a zip line to the other side of the room. He’s had an obsession with James Bond for the last few decades, and sometimes likes to pretend he’s a spy. Spyder, he usually jokes, because his sense of humor is awful.
“Definitely into you,” Monroe sings, a little warble of a voice.
“Now there’s just one thing left to do,” Murphy calls, sliding his way across.
“Just a few more strings to spread,” Monroe chirps.
“Though he clearly loves you now,” Murphy says before they both sing in unison.
“He’ll love you even better once the both of you are dead!”
And this was the real reason Clarke didn’t want to let them in. She lets out a heavy sigh and flops down on her bed. It’s filled with mulch, which she finds comforting, but she’ll probably have to change that now, won’t she? Humans don’t like the smell, like the dead do. Or would he prefer to sleep in whatever bed he keeps in the Upstairs? There’s a lot they have to talk about, it seems. No one ever sighs dreamily about figuring out shared taxes, or where to keep the graveyard dirt that will keep her from rotting.
Plus, there’s the fact that all her friends sort of want her to kill Bellamy. That’s probably something she should warn him about.
“You guys know I’m not poisoning him, right?” she tells the spiders.
“There’s always suffocation,” Monroe suggests. “Very calm and peaceful, once the thrashing bit is done with.”
“Or you could take a knife to his throat,” Murphy offers. “We both know you like the drama.”
Clarke makes a face. “Not when it’s murder. Look, we’re not killing him, unless he explicitly asks to be killed,” she hesitates, worrying her lip. She’s never actually done the killing part before. She’s not sure she ever could. “And maybe not even then. Okay?”
When neither spider speaks, she narrows her eyes at them.
“I need to hear you agree to this,” she says darkly, and the pair lets out a collective wispy sigh.
“Whatever you say,” Murphy grumbles. “It’s your funeral.”
“It’s her wedding,” Monroe corrects, and Murphy shrugs a pair of spindly legs.
“They’re pretty much the same thing.”
It’s the best she’s going to get, she knows, so Clarke gives them a sunny smile. She’s married. She’s been waiting for this for a while, it’s true, but in the last several years she’d sort of given up on the whole idea. Marriage was great for people like Raven and Wells, even if Raven had sworn off the notion altogether after Finn, but after so much time spent waiting, Clarke had started to think it wasn’t in the cards for her.
It had taken some time to get used to that idea; the wedding dress she wore day after day started to feel like a joke. Never a bride in the living world, and then even when she got a second chance in the Downstairs, decade after decade, it just didn’t happen.
But Clarke got used to not being married. She had Raven, and Wells when he tripped into Raven’s mausoleum on accident, and she had Lincoln, the nice grave keeper who planted flowers on all their graves, and she had Murphy and Monroe, and Miller, the bartender who could be persuaded to play a mean Jazz piano when bribed with the right drink. And she had herself, too, and her room full of flowers and mushrooms and bits of the Upstairs world. And it was enough.
But then she heard the vows, and the ring was a sudden shock of cold on her finger, and the willow was calling to her, it’s time. And it was like she was sixteen again, breathless and ready, having all her lines memorized and her dress made brand-new.
Only, she wasn’t sixteen. She was dead, and had been for some time, and she’d practiced for this day, as well. The day she would step out into the fresh air of the living, and shout the proverbial Boo! It went about as well as expected, and someone fainted, at least. It was a bit of a confidence booster, if she were to be honest.
And then there was Bellamy, and he wasn’t what she expected, at all. She hadn’t really counted on liking him so much.
Marriage in the Downstairs isn’t taken lightly—no contracts are. But usually, the second party isn’t so willing, or charmed. Usually they scream a little, or a lot, depending, and try to run away each chance they get.
Usually, it takes a lot to convince them to give things a real go; most living people don’t want to be married to a corpse, as it happens. But persuasion comes in the form of poison, which is the least messy, or a good knock on the head, and then there’s not much they can do about it.
Sometimes, of course, the dead take pity on them, and send them back to the earth in the morning. They wake up groggy, with a bad migraine, convinced everything that happened was just a very bizarre dream.
The marriage is annulled, and the corpse settles in to wait for the next unlucky partner.
That’s what Clarke was expecting. She couldn’t be so lucky, to make it work on the first try, not like Raven with Wells. Wells, who had no real connections left to the living world, anyway. Wells, who had seen something in Raven’s harsh words and constant inciting, and had fallen in love with it all.
She’d thought she’d bring the groom—or bride, if things happened to fall that way—down, have a drink together. She’d prod them to tell her about the world Upstairs, and catch her up on Murder She Wrote, which had been the last show she really knew anything about. Then she’d get Wells and Miller to help her lug them back to the surface, to sleep it all off on the forest floor.
But then she met Bellamy, and he didn’t scream, or cower. He asked her about herself, genuinely curious, and maybe a little charmed, and now she doesn’t want to let him go.
“I should probably go rescue him from Raven,” she decides, reaching out to the dead flower nearest her. It’s an iris, and when she touches its petals, they bloom in full force.
“Does he know about that?” Murphy asks, sounding like an asshole, but no more than usual.
Clarke sighs and pulls her hand back, watching the flower slowly curl open. It’ll look perfect and alive for the next few days—or maybe just hours, time is tricky down here—before withering away again. She can always bring it back, but only temporarily.
“No,” Clarke shrugs, like it’s no big deal, even though it is one. She’s the only dead girl that can touch things to life, as far as she knows. At first, everyone would show up with things for her to graze against, and sometimes she’d show off a little, kissing a crushed kitten until it purred to life in her arms. But it’s been decades, centuries maybe, since then and the novelty has sort of worn off. Sometimes the dead still come for a favor—a bouquet of crumbling roses they want to smell again, or another dead cat—but mostly it’s just something to tell newbies.
That’s Clarke Griffin, the princess; she can bring things back to life. But only for a little while.
She pokes each flower and every vine and sprig of holly until the whole room is a garden, and then heads off to find Bellamy.
He’s almost exactly where she left him, with Raven nowhere to be found. Miller’s at his table, though, refilling his shot glass with what looks like old bourbon, and the other human—Atom, she thinks—has his face pressed against the tabletop, asleep.
Miller waggles his brows at her when she sits down, and she shoos him away indiscreetly. Bellamy watches, amused.
There’s something in his expression now, that wasn’t there before, and it takes Clarke a moment to recognize it.
“How much did she tell you?” she asks, suspicious, and Bellamy shrugs, downing his drink with one gulp.
“All of it, I think. Or at least, enough. You fell in love with a poor sailor when you were sixteen, but your parents didn’t want you to marry him, so he convinced you to elope and meet him in the forest. But then he knocked you out and robbed you, and you froze to death in the night. The guy was an asshole,” he adds, irritated, and she bites back a grin.
It doesn’t hurt much anymore, thinking about Finn. Mostly she’s just annoyed with herself for falling for it, and annoyed even more for what he did to Raven.
“He killed Raven too,” she says, and he nods.
“She told me. Apparently she was going to poison his food, but he got the drop on her? It wasn’t really clear, but I got the feeling he didn’t make it out of that fight.”
“He didn’t,” Clarke smirks. “Raven’s badass.”
“I noticed. She warned me not to hurt you, or I’d end up looking like her—but without the face bit.”
He seems more amused than terrified, and when Clarke laughs, he smiles, proud of himself. She really wants to keep him.
But he has to want to stay. She can’t be like Dax, who keeps his wife in a straightjacket so she can’t keep opening her wrists up. She’s already dead, so it doesn’t do much either way, but he doesn’t like the mess.
She can’t be like Lexa, who smothered Costia while she slept, just so they could spend eternity together. And Costia left anyway, unable to look her murderer in the eye.
But then Bellamy beats her to it, looking impossibly sorry. “You know the vows, they weren’t—they weren’t real,” he stumbles through the words, and Clarke takes his hand. It’s warm, and sort of heavy. She probably feels like ice to him, but when she goes to pull away, he won’t let her.
“I know,” she assures him. “It’s fine. In the morning, we’ll take you and your friend back to the surface, to live out your lives.”
Bellamy lets out a breath, and makes an irritated noise. “That’s not—I mean, I definitely have to go back, and Atom too; my sister’s marrying him tomorrow. But—you can visit Upstairs, can’t you? Or I can come back here sometimes.”
Clarke blinks at him stupidly, letting the moment stretch until he starts to look unsure of himself, and then she reaches out for him, desperate.
“You want to come back?”
He lets her take his other hand, affectionate. “Yeah, this place is neat. Raven’s awesome, even if she is a little terrifying. I liked Wells, Miller’s cool. And—you’re here. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of your world.”
“But,” Clarke stammers; this conversation is not going at all like she’d planned. “Everything smells like old leaves, and the skull boys are nice but they’re always playing music, and loud, and Raven’s kind of an asshole, and so am I—and the spiders sort of want to kill you, and—”
Bellamy threads their fingers together and leans forward, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. It’s hopeless really; death has given her permanent bedhead. “Clarke,” he says, fond. “I like you. I like the Downstairs. I want you to come to the wedding with me. We can figure everything else out later.”
Clarke wets her lips, and he tracks the motion. “Later?”
“Whenever you’re ready,” he says, and they kiss.
***
When Clarke leads him out of the willow tree, towing a groggy Atom behind them, they find Octavia and Atom’s mother waiting at the forest’s edge, looking ready to kill.
It’s dawn, just hours before the wedding, and half of Octavia’s hair is done up in curls, like she’d found out they were missing and run out in the middle of her hair appointment. Which, he’s pretty sure, is exactly what happened.
Octavia takes in her stumbling groom-to-be, and Bellamy’s hand around Clarke’s, with a glare. “Nice of you two to show up,” she bites out.
Bellamy gives a pained smile. “Atom tripped and hit his head. Clarke let us stay at her cabin until he was well enough to walk.” It’s a weak story, and she sees right through it of course, but it’s the best he could come up with on short notice.
She takes in Clarke with narrowed, suspicious eyes. “And I suppose you want to come to the wedding, what, like some sort of reward?”
Clarke blinks, surprised, but Bellamy grips her hand firmly. “She’s my plus-one,” he says, short, and they have one of their stare-offs they’d perfected as kids. Finally, Octavia gives in with a sigh, and turns to march towards the house.
“You’ll have to find something better to wear,” she tells Clarke, who had realized her own wedding dress probably wasn’t a good choice, and had on a pair of too-big overalls, borrowed from Lincoln.
Atom’s cousin twice-removed takes him from Bellamy, to help him stumble across the field. Bellamy turns to Clarke. “Can you come to the wedding?”
He’d gathered, from Miller and Wells’s haphazard attempts at explaining life-after-death last night, that the dead can only go places they’d been while alive, when Upstairs. It was part of the reason so few ever went back to the surface; there wasn’t much point, for most of them.
Clarke hummed, thoughtful. “Since we’re married, I can go wherever you do,” she chirps. “What’s yours is mine.” She waggles her brows at him, and he kisses her.
She’d probably tried to explain that last night, but after he’d asked her out properly, they hadn’t done much talking.
He pulls back, and plucks a twig from her hair with a grin. She’d washed it in rainwater when they stepped out of the tree, and scrubbed her face too. She had a tin can filled with dirt under one arm, that he gathered kept her from looking so much like a corpse.
“Come on,” he tugs her towards the house. “You can borrow one of my mom’s old dresses.”
They’re in his room—supposedly trying on clothes, but mostly making out on his bed—when Octavia finally storms in and demands an explanation.
“The truth this time,” she adds with a scowl. “Do you have any idea how long we looked for you two? We combed through those woods—and there was not a single cabin.”
Bellamy winces, but it’s Clarke who explains. And when O scoffs at the end, and turns to Bellamy with a look that says I’m not an idiot, Clarke shoves the tin can in Octavia’s arms.
Face resolute, she takes twenty-five steps exactly, so that she’s standing in the hallway outside the open door. There’s a long pause where nothing happens, and then her skin begins to melt, and her eyes sink in on themselves. Her hand pops off with a sharp snap.
She looks embarrassed when she picks it up, jamming it back in place and walking closer and closer until she looks normal, again. “It’s kind of gross, I know,” she starts, and Bellamy interrupts her.
“It’s not,” he argues, and Octavia whirls on him, incredulous. “Well it isn’t,” he sniffs. “It’s not her fault she’s dead.”
“When I said you needed to get a life, this is the opposite of what I meant,” Octavia declares, tossing the tin back to Clarke like she can’t bear to touch it.
“Don’t be a dick, O,” he snaps, and Clarke steps between them, looking tiny and apologetic. He hates that she looks so guilty.
“No, you’re right,” she tells Octavia, with a grimace. “I’m dead, it’s weird, I get it. But, I like your brother very much. And I want to stay married to him.”
Octavia gapes at them both. “You’re not married,” she says. “It was a sham—he wasn’t even saying his own vows, for God’s sake!” She throws her hands up with a scowl. “No, I’m done. I can’t deal with this—my brother married a corpse, on the night before my wedding. I’ll see you both in the yard.” She marches out without another word.
Clarke looks ready to crumple in on herself, or even worse, call everything off, so Bellamy pulls her in against him. “I don’t care,” he says, pressing a kiss to her hair. “Please don’t just, I don’t know, go back in your tree and never come out again.” She gives a muffled laugh and pulls back.
“I’m not that selfless,” she tells him, and then frowns. “How long ago did your mother die?”
It’s a strange change in conversation, but no weirder than anything else about the day. “Ten years ago. Why? You think she’s Downstairs?”
“No, not everyone ends up there,” Clarke says. “It’s a small community; I would have heard of her. Where is she buried?”
Bellamy eyes her a little. “Why, Clarke?”
“You saw what I did to the flowers. I can do that with animals, and people, too.”
Bellamy stares for a long moment, and forgets to breathe. His mother died when he was a teenager, and O was a kid, and even when she alive, she wasn’t very present. She was always sick, or working, or sleeping off the sickness. They never had many memorable moments.
“In the family cemetery, out back. You don’t,” he frowns. “You don’t have to do this, just to win my sister over,” he says, and Clarke snorts a little.
“I’m doing this for both of you,” she tells him. “And if she happens to like me more afterwards, that’s cool too.”
Bellamy scoffs, but he leads her back behind the house, anyway. He looks around for a shovel, but Clarke shakes her head, kneeling beside the headstone. “No need.”
It turns out, dead people are apparently expert diggers.
When Aurora Blake blinks for the first time in ten years, looking healthier than she had when she was living, Bellamy starts to cry.
Clarke takes his hand, unsure, but he shakes his head, tugging her close. “Thank you,” he says, and she smiles.
“It won’t be for very long,” she warns. “Maybe just today. Time’s tricky for dead people.”
“It’s enough,” he says, and hugs his mom.
They take her to the room where Octavia’s getting ready, and she bursts into tears on the spot.
After she clutches Aurora, she holds Clarke close tightly.
“This doesn’t mean I like you now,” she says, voice too watery to really sound sharp. Clarke grins and hugs her back.
“Not yet,” she says, folding a freshly bloomed cornflower into her hair. “Something blue,” she whispers.
Octavia walks down the aisle with her mother on one side, and her brother on the other. She’s steadfastly refusing to cry, so she won’t spoil the makeup, and so she looks ready for battle instead.
Atom looks ready to faint with relief, a smile blooming across his face. He spends the whole ceremony sneaking confused glances at Clarke, in the second row, like he’s trying to place her.
He says all his vows, even the architectural bits, although Octavia claims to like those parts the best, so there’s no accounting for taste.
Bellamy spends most of the outdoor reception dancing with Clarke, and a few times with Charlotte, the four-year-old flower girl who likes to stand on his feet while they waltz.
He’s dancing with Clarke again, when Octavia taps his shoulder to cut in.
He gives her a suspicious glare, and she rolls her eyes. “Relax, Bell; I’m not gonna kill your girlfriend—wife, sorry. She’s already dead, anyway, I don’t know what you’re so worried about.”
“I don’t want you to be an asshole,” he says.
“Too late. Go eat some of the little finger sandwiches, or something. We need girl talk.”
“Girl talk,” he echoes, not believing her for a second, but Clarke just grins and shoves him away.
“I was getting bored with you, anyway.” She takes Octavia’s hand. “Your sister’s way hotter; I definitely should have held out.”
He’s watching them from the buffet table—Clarke is trying to teach O the foxtrot, while Octavia still insists on taking the lead even though she doesn’t know the steps—when Atom slides up to him.
“I talked to your mom,” he says conversationally, and Bellamy eyes him a little. Everyone’s treating Aurora’s presence one of two ways; they’re either ignoring her, convinced she’s a figment of their imagination, or they’re chalking it all up to a lot of champagne and a wedding miracle. “She said she’s happy about the baby.” He chokes a little, and Bellamy looks over in alarm. “She said—she said she was surprised that it wasn’t born yet, because last she remembered, he was seven, hitting the winning ball at his baseball game.” He glances over at Bellamy, eyes shining. “We’re having a son,” he says, and Bellamy grins.
“Congratulations,” he says, clapping his shoulder. He even means it. After the night they’ve had, it’s a little hard to dislike Atom. He’ll probably have to tell him the truth, soon, about Clarke and the Downstairs. It seems he’ll be sticking around for a while, and they may want Bellamy and Clarke to babysit.
Aurora finds him next, but he’s not surprised. He knew she’d come for him last.
“Your wife is lovely,” she tells him. “So full of life.”
“Yeah,” he agrees, watching as Octavia twirls her so much they’re both dizzy. “She really is.”
***
When Bellamy and Clarke renew their vows, they’ve been married for ten years. Bellamy is thirty-five, and he’s recently died of pneumonia, but he’s not really that upset about it.
Octavia rolled her eyes when she found out. She cried a little too, mostly angry, until he showed up at her door the next night, with his own tin of graveyard dirt, and she tore him a new one.
August did too, and Bellamy had to try not to laugh through the whole speech, because his nephew has one hell of a lisp.
When he asked Clarke to marry him again—for real, this time—she just stared at him for a minute. “Really?” she asked, finally, so surprised that he laughed.
“We’ve been together for ten years,” he pointed out. “You really thought I wouldn’t want to marry you, correctly?”
Clarke shrugged, nestling in against him. They were in her room in the Downstairs, because he’d been coughing a lot through the night, and the smell of mulch was actually helping. “I thought it’d be a waste of time. We’re already technically married.”
“Yeah, but,” Bellamy rubbed a hand along the bare skin of her back and she hummed. “I want to do it right. You deserve your own vows.”
She rolled over to beam at him, bright and happy, and he pulled her in. “Maybe I don’t want to marry you,” she teased while he nosed at her neck.
“Do you?”
She pretended to think about it and then smiled. “I do.”
“Save it for the wedding,” he joked, and she kicked him. He died the next morning.
When he remarries Clarke, it’s in front of the tree she climbed out of the night he first met her, and the wedding party looks more like the front window of a Halloween costume shop. Raven is her Maid of Honor, with Octavia as her Matron, and both Atom and Miller are Bellamy’s Best Men, because he’s terrible with picking favorites.
There’s Wells, and Lincoln, and the skull boys play at their reception, while Murphy and Monroe spin four enormous webbed walls that sparkle in the sunlight. They’ve spent the last ten years subtly trying to kill him, humanely for the most part, and now that he’s finally dead they’re very pleased.
But there’s also Atom’s mom, and cousin, and a few of Bellamy and Octavia’s relatives who were a little surprised to see the invitations, since they’d just been to Bellamy’s funeral the week before.
August holds the rings, looking serious in his suit, all of eleven and growing up like a weed. He helps his sister toddle down the aisle, dropping flower petals wherever she feels like, and sometimes trying to eat them instead. They’ve both spent a good amount of time in the Downstairs by now; August has practically grown up between both worlds. So when Nyko’s head falls off halfway through the surface, August just rolls his eyes a little and picks it up for him.
Aurora isn’t at this wedding. Clarke offers, but he says no. Seeing her once was enough, he doesn’t want to get greedy.
She wears a different wedding dress, something vintage but new to her. She says she doesn’t want to wear the one that she died in, that she bought to marry another man, and Bellamy doesn’t argue. The new dress is just as pretty, and Bellamy likes it more anyway.
Clarke’s vows aren’t very long, or wordy, which doesn’t surprise him. For the most part, Clarke herself is practical and to the point.
She says “My whole existence, I felt like I was waiting for someone to spend the rest of my life with. I wished for that someone every day. And then I died, and I was sure that it would never happen. But then you came, and now I think everything was leading up to that moment. I was waiting so long, because I was waiting for you.”
Bellamy’s grinning so wide his face hurts, but so is she, and he squeezes her hand. “Me too,” he tells her, and she sniffs a little. “I wished for you too.”
The minister—a necromancer named Anya, who somehow knows Lincoln pretty well—skips the last line. Till death do us part.
After all, death is really what brought them together.