Work Text:
“This isn’t fair,” she hears, and her hands still in the dirt. There are still seedlings to be planted and weeds to be pulled, still good, helpful things she should be doing, but instead she looks up at Bellamy. She can hardly see him for the sun, at least until he moves to block the blinding light, and suddenly she can make out his face—the way his lips are pressed together, the way his eyes are tired and sad, the way the lines around them don’t come from laughter.
Clarke licks her lips, tastes blood where they’re chapped, split. “What’s not fair?”
Her voice is rusty. It’s not that she hasn’t spoken since she returned to Arkadia. But she hasn’t spoken to him.
“It’s not fair that you’re here,” he says. “It’s not fair of you to—to sit there, like this is normal. Like you’re going to stay.”
His expression hurts her to see, so she looks down. His hands hang loosely at his sides, which is worse than if they were in fists. She knows, she understands the Bellamy who fights.
She doesn’t know the Bellamy who gives up.
But she says, “But I am going to stay.”
His fingers twitch, and she pretends, maybe he’s thinking of reaching for her. Maybe he’ll reach out and grab her hand, like he did when they first landed on earth. Maybe he’ll reach out and save her, like he always used to do.
He doesn’t. “For how long?”
“What?”
“How long?” he bites out. The words are so sharp, she wonders if they taste like blood in his mouth. “How long until you leave, because you can’t handle this, or because you decide you’re the only one who can fix things, or because you’re fucking wanheda and people are always going to take you away, and you’re always going to go?”
“Until you can come with me.”
“What?” He chokes out the word, like it hurts him, and oh god, she’s so tired of hurting him. She’s only ever wanted to keep him safe, but she just keeps hurting him instead.
But. There’s dirt under her nails, and scars on her palms, and she’s not sure her hands will ever be clean or pure again, but they can still do good things. They can plant living things and they can tend living wounds and they can save people.
She can save him this time, she thinks, maybe.
She reaches up and catches his hand in hers. It’s warm. Slack.
“I’ve left without you before,” she says. “I know what it’s like, to see beautiful things, and places, and people who’ve never been touched by this war.”
He turns his head away, and the sun blinds her again. So she holds his hand tighter, keeping him anchored to her.
“But there’s no point in doing it again,” Clarke says, “unless I’m doing it with you. So I’m staying. With you, Bellamy.”
Slowly, so slowly, his fingers curl around hers.