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Arkadia has never been the richest of countries but on the day Clarke Griffin meets Bellamy Blake it all spills over. Neither of them know it yet, the girl who’s wearing her last clean shirt (everything else is covered in paint and even her fingertips have charcoal on them) and the boy who needed a new tie but bought his sister ballet flats instead.
They meet because the painting they’re analyzing in class in an obvious example of the male gaze and Clarke mutters “Fuck the patriarchy” under her breath.
She doesn’t mean for the handsome guy sitting next to her to overhear but she hears him chuckling and replying, “That’s about right.”
Guys like him, muscly arms and smirks, rocking the weird nerd vibe like they’ve come off the front page of Vogue, don’t usually agree with her and so she asks, “What’s your problem with it?”
He raises his eyebrows, smirks. “I’m a bisexual, biracial guy who grew up in a shitty neighborhood.”
“Ouch.”
“Yep.”
Clarke pokes him with her pen, offers, “Bi buddies?”
He bumps her fist and grins. “I’m Bellamy.”
“Clarke.”
Two months later, they’re leading a protest together. And it’s all because Clarke said she hates the patriarchy and Bellamy brought her coffee after they’ve stayed up all night studying.
(It turns out that, for a history and an art major, art history isn’t the best of both worlds. It’s the fucking worst.)
“You hate the patriarchy, right?” he asks out of the blue one morning and Clarke nods confusedly. “So how do you feel about the current politics in Arkadia?”
“Hate ‘em. String them all up on the main square and leave them to die.” He swallows, hard and Clarke rolls her eyes. “I don’t mean it. No, I disagree with them. They’re ruining our future and cutting off all funding for higher education and healthcare.”
She doesn’t mention that her mom is on the council that’s pretty much in charge of the way things are run around here. It doesn’t matter, not exactly, because her phone still has twenty missed calls from Abby Griffin and not a single one taken.
“So how would you like to come to Sky with me?”
She knows of Sky vaguely. It’s a bar downtown, rumored to be the center of the students’ protests. No one’s quite sure who’s in charge, they just know one thing – if it started with students, who knows who’s going to be the next one to stand up?
It’s easy to forget how tough the situation is. No one is actually starving, not in the polished city with its electric heart and cobblestone in the old district. Not with its coffee shops and bright-eyed students, businesspeople taking the train to the main square every day.
It’s easy to forget and then there’s Bellamy looking at her more serious than she’d ever seen him.
“You’re trying to say – “
He nods, curt. The students around them chat, getting ready for another lecture, and Clarke thinks that this can’t be how she joins the revolution. This can’t be it. This is too normal.
“Okay,” she says suddenly. Her stomach is plummeting and the world has gone a little red around the edges. It’s not a bad feeling. “Okay, I want to go.”
She barely makes it through the rest of the day, absolutely restless – fingers drumming against the desks in her lectures, turning the pages of books like there isn’t enough time, like she has to leave right now. It feels like something is happening and the newspapers are full of grim headlines every day but they’re all sitting here, pretending like it’s all sunshine and puppies.
Pretending. That’s what her people are good at.
When she meets Bellamy on a street corner downtown, her bag heavy with books that don’t hold any importance anymore, she can feel the corners of her lips pulling up in a smile.
He’s scowling, as always, observing the movement of the crowd around him. Then he zeroes in on her and worry dissolves from his face, replaced by the serenity she’s seen only when he’s tired and on the verge of collapsing.
She teases him on their way over, making fun of his asocial tendencies and the overwhelming grumpiness he uses to keep most people at bay. “Are your friends imaginary? Am I just going to be greeted by empty chairs at empty tables?”
But they walk into the bar together and when he’s greeted with cheers and affectionate pats, Clarke knows why the circles under his eyes could replace the midnight sky.
“You’re in charge of all of this?” she breathes out, his hand warm on her elbow as he steers her towards the table in the back.
Bellamy shrugs. “Someone’s gotta be.”
“Wow, is that really what you’re – “
She’s interrupted by a flurry of dark hair and lanky limbs throwing itself at Bellamy. It takes Clarke a whole second or two to realize that he hasn’t been attacked by an actual storm, just a girl that closely resembles one.
When she’s let go of him, her combat boots stomping against the floor audibly – even through the chatter of the students – Bellamy rolls his eyes fondly and, slinging an arm around her shoulders, introduces her: “Clarke, meet my sister, Octavia.”
The girl grins, feral, a smile ready for war. “I’m the better Blake to his bitter Blake.”
Octavia’s knuckles are scraped when she shakes Clarke’s hand and her smile widens impossibly when Clarke frowns. “Boxing. I can’t believe Bell hasn’t bitched about it.”
Bell hasn’t bitched about anything, really. He hasn’t even mentioned he has a sister who’s vaguely their age. Octavia doesn’t look twenty-one like the two of them, but she can’t be younger than eighteen. When Bellamy spoke of her, Clarke thought she might be ten or twelve at best.
But she’s eighteen and looking for a fight.
“I’m glad I met you,” Clarke responds, to which Octavia links her arm through Clarke’s and, flipping her hair over her shoulder haughtily, sticks her tongue out at her brother.
“Come on, I’ll introduce you to the gang.”
After that, it’s just a mess of faces and hands enthusiastically shaking hers. They’re a vivid bunch; Bellamy, a history student who’s got his head stuck somewhere between ancient Rome and the world that he has to exist in today, Octavia who looks like she’s in it just for kicks, Monty and Jasper, two chemistry students that obviously balance each other out – Monty’s sarcasm is enough to dial down Jasper’s quirkiness (goggles perched on top of his head), Miller, a theatre geek –
“Just Miller?” Clarke asks, raising her eyebrows.
“Yeah, just Miller.”
It’s Monty who scoffs. “His name is Nathan.”
“He doesn’t let people use it, though,” Jasper adds.
“Sure he does.”
“He lets you,” Octavia points out gently, shooting Clarke an exasperated look.
At that, Monty blushes furiously and Clarke sees Miller smile. With time, she’ll come to realize that the only way to make Nathan Miller smile is to place him in close proximity of one Monty Green and let the nature work its mysterious ways.
Lincoln Woods is a law student, quiet and kind in a way that no one would presume if they just looked at him. Even his muscles make Clarke feel tiny, despite her perfectly average (thank you very much) height of 5’7. But then he smiles and makes room for her on the bench around the table that’s already overflowing with coffee and beer, and really -
It’s hard not to feel like she’s known them for ages. They rope her in on their inside jokes, Octavia and Lincoln taking turns at explaining one thing or another.
“Let’s not repeat the chem lab explosion again, please,” Bellamy begs of Monty and Jasper when they get to talking about making smoke bombs.
Octavia explains quietly, “They blew up their lab last year. Jasper didn’t have eyebrows for the rest of the term.”
And then there is Raven Reyes.
Raven smells like motor oil and gasoline and she’s got a smile that could set the whole city on fire.
She approaches their table with so much confidence that it makes Clarke sit straighter, be more careful. When she walks, it’s with a keep up or fuck off stride and Clarke knows, just knows deep down, that this is a girl that’s made for bigger things.
All of them are, really, but Raven Reyes is a nuclear explosion girl and when she introduces herself as “Engineering student. Hate engineers, they’re fuckers, but NASA wouldn’t take me with this thing” Clarke knows that she wasn’t wrong.
Raven taps her brace, takes her seat and downs the whiskey sour already waiting for her. When she lets out a contented sigh, she looks at Clarke again.
“And you’re Clarke Griffin. I know your mom.”
Clarke hasn’t been sitting there for a long while but she’s heard the names of the Council members being spoken with enough venom to make her guts twist in knots now.
“Hope she didn’t ruin your life,” she shoots back, crossing her arms at her chest as the conversation pauses around them. Clarke doesn’t dare look at Bellamy.
Raven gives her a wry look. “Nah. Saved it, actually.”
Only then, when it looks like she won’t get a beating from the girl who sure looks like she can pack a punch, does Clarke dare glance at Bellamy.
And she finds his expression perfectly blank before he clears his throat. “Clarke’s mom is on the Council, Abigail Griffin. If anyone has a problem with that, I suggest you leave.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Jasper asks, turning so fast towards Clarke and extending his arm to draw her into a half-hug. “Clarke’s ours now, we’re not giving her away.”
His goggles knock into her forehead but Clarke’s heart swells with affection all the same.
“Yeah, we’ve all got a shitty parent or two,” Octavia agrees, taking a sip of Lincoln’s beer as he rolls his eyes. “Doesn’t make us bad people.”
Bellamy smiles at his sister, something like pride flickering in his eyes. “Good. Now that’s settled, anyone want to tell Clarke what it is that we’re doing here?”
“Drinking, mostly.”
“Thank you, Monty. Who we are, I meant.”
It’s Miller who replies. “A little gay and really broke.”
“Hear, hear!”
“We also want to change the country, so there’s that,” Jasper adds, shrugging.
Clarke shouldn’t be smiling but her cheeks hurt all the same as they take turns insulting each other until Raven finally shouts for them to shut up and turns towards Clarke.
“We’re behind the protests. It’s Bellamy who gathered all of us when the university cancelled scholarships for the next year. All of us wanted to do something but he’s the only one who had a plan. So when you’re thinking about the two thousand people on the protest last weekend, you have Bellamy to thank for that.”
“And this is just the beginning,” Bellamy takes over, his sleeves now rolled up as he rests his elbows on the tabletop. “The people are tired of this, Clarke. They are tired of governments being chosen and falling apart, for three mandates now. We’re just the first ones who decided to voice our disapproval but Miller’s dad is a cop. The police union isn’t happy either. They can’t cut the wages and benefits, bring people to the brink of poverty. They’ve kept Arkadia on life support for years now but they can’t do it anymore. And the people won’t comply if they have nothing to lose.”
As he speaks, the room grows quieter and quieter. Glasses stop clinking and chairs cease their scraping as a new fire is lit somewhere deep within all of them.
Clarke listens to him and thinks, they’d all die for him.
Clarke listens to him and knows that, when her heart flips and starts pumping adrenaline until she’s ready to bruise her knuckles fighting for what is right, she’d do the same.
His eyes lock on hers behind his glasses, strength covering up his fatigue. “I know it must sound ridiculous – what the hell are these kids going to do? But you don’t change the world one grand gesture at a time, you change it with small acts of disobedience. You keep shouting no and no until their ears bleed and there’s nothing left to do but yield the power to those whom it really belongs to. The people.”
The neon in the open sign on the other side of the window stutters, casting a red light across his face. Clarke remembers how he brought her lasagna and cheap vodka, how they spent three nights in a row hunched over their books and her laptop. She remembers how young he’d looked then.
But now he looks centuries old, world-weary, and she nods. “Alright. I’m in. Let’s change the world.”
This shouldn’t be how she joins the revolution, with a ragtag group of people who have nothing in common but still make fast friends with her. Here, in a bar named Sky with the bartender, Gina, who pours whiskey into mugs and charges them less because “You’re all broke college students, I’d go straight to hell.”
This shouldn’t be how she joins the revolution, with Bellamy’s hand searing hot against the small of her back, steadying her as they go get drinks, and raw honesty across his face as he asks, “Do you think we stand a chance?”
I think everyone’s throats hurt from swallowing down bile rising when they can’t pay for their children’s school supplies. I think no one has the heart to break someone else to survive. I think people deserve better and I think you still have the scars from the life that’s led you to this point.
Clarke doesn’t say that.
Instead, she says, “I think you’re fighting for what is right.”
Bellamy smiles ruefully, dark curls glittering in the yellow light of the bar, and it’s enough. They joke and they laugh but everyone feels it, nerve endings lit on fire and ozone in the air. Clarke soaks it in, Octavia barking out a laugh as she leans on Lincoln, Bellamy drinking beer and letting himself just be, Raven propping her feet on the table and blowing Gina a kiss – young, happy, invincible.
She soaks it in because it can’t last long.
This sort of happiness can exist untouched only in memories.
*
“I can’t believe you roped me into this.”
They’re in Sky, as usual, and Clarke is surviving on two vending machine snacks and six cups of coffee. Octavia, sitting across from her, is dozing off with her head buried in the crook of her elbow and Raven is trying to throw peanuts into Jasper’s mouth and failing miserably.
So, basically, it’s a regular evening, except that Clarke’s got a bag full of textbooks she should be studying from but Bellamy pouted and begged her to come help them with the signs for the tomorrow’s protest.
Bellamy’s eyes widen and it comes out in a flurry of words: “You really don’t have to. I understand, you’ve got other things. Totally fine, Clarke, I just thought you could give us a hand with these because God knows Jasper pretends like he knows something about graphic design,” strategically placed side-eye in Jasper’s direction as the boy finally catches a peanut, “which is a filthy lie, let’s be – “
She lets him go on for a while before raising her hand. “Bellamy, breathe. You’re rambling.”
That seems to calm him down and he exhales audibly, flopping down on the bench next to her. This close, he’s all warmth and the smell of his cologne is embedded in Clarke’s nostrils by now. She’d recognize the woods and the musk anywhere.
He’s a picture of a tired history student, running his hands through his hair and finally looking at her. “What are we even doing here, Clarke?”
“We’re making signs.”
He shoots her a look at which she just laughs, that particular brand of a tired laugh that makes his gaze on her soften as he leans in closer. Bellamy is a study in contrasts; the hard line of his jaw, dimples, soft eyes, sharp tongue. He’s got the face for a revolution, too.
“You really don’t have to stay.”
“I want to.” Clarke finds his hand on the table, squeezes it for a second before returning to the empty cardboard in front of her.
They all work their asses off that night, deciding to go home and get some sleep only when Jasper thinks to check his phone and announces that at least three thousand people – not students exclusively – will be joining them tomorrow.
Clarke and Bellamy stay behind everyone else to clean up, just the two of them and Gina in the back. It doesn’t feel like a bar anymore, it’s more of a weird sort of home.
He’s done stacking the chairs on top of the tables, sleeves rolled up to his elbows and glasses crooked, when Clarke announces that she’s loaded the signs into Monty’s van and takes a seat next to him on the floor.
“I know it can’t be easy,” Bellamy starts, looking away. “Doing this when your mom is on the council.”
Clarke hums in confirmation, leans back on her palms and looks up. There’s a tiny glowing UFO sticker on the ceiling, inexplicably.
“We don’t talk anymore.” He looks genuinely surprised to hear that and Clarke clarifies, “It was her fault my dad got killed. She knew about this all along, about the whole system just crumbling. He wanted to warn the people but she sided with the Council. And once they’d declared him as the enemy of the country, well, it was just a matter of who got to him first.”
She still remembers those days – her dad’s hands on her shoulders, telling her that she needs to be strong now, a holdall by his feet in the hallway. It was just the two of them, bitter tears running down her cheeks as she begged him to stay.
Her dad died that day, for her. It didn’t matter that it took two weeks for his body to be washed up on the shore of the river. When she opened the door to the police, it didn’t matter at all. Jake Griffin had been dead and gone much longer.
“I remember hearing about it on the news, yeah,” Bellamy says, brow furrowed as he looks into the distance. “They said he got caught in a crossfire? Gang wars.”
Clarke barks out a laugh, feeling her stomach twist in knots. It’s been years and she almost feels guilty for not flaring up in pain at the mention of it.
“He was trying to do what is right, that’s all.”
Just like we are now, she thinks, but bites her tongue to stop the words from coming out. Her dad would’ve liked Bellamy, all brains and no polish, idealistic and young. Levitating between the ground and the clouds. There, but not quite.
The silence stretches between them until Gina tells them that she has to close up and they’re back on the streets. There’s no one in the world but the two of them and Clarke smiles when Bellamy says he doesn’t feel like going to sleep yet.
“So don’t. Come over, I’ve got really cheap vodka that’s bound to give you a headache and leftover pasta.”
He grins at her, runs a hand through his hair. “Sounds like heaven.”
“Good.”
Her apartment is just a mattress on the floor and huge windows, mugs cluttering up the sink and half-filled canvases lined along the walls.
“I get an idea and lose it just as fast,” she explains as she moves textbooks from the table, offers him a seat.
It’s different, seeing him here. The whole room is illuminated by the city lights pouring in through the windows. At this time of the night, it’s alive. At this time of the night, it can’t hurt them.
Bellamy keeps looking out it, his hunched posture too big for her small room and Clarke lets out a nervous chuckle, grabs the bottle of vodka and nods towards the window. “It’s not much but it’s got an exit to the roof. Wanna go?”
He nods so fast she teases him about it. “Whoa there, you’ll break your neck” and he rolls his eyes, fond and amused, but he takes her hand when she offers it.
Arkadia is sprawled below them when they take a seat next to each other and she pours them liquor into the only clean mugs she was able to find.
“I propose a toast,” Bellamy says and Clarke raises her eyebrows. “To a group of delinquents who just don’t know when to quit.”
They clink their glasses together and Clarke takes a sip before she stops to add, “And to us. Because someone has to keep them in control.”
“To us.”
If she thinks she sees something in his eyes, it’s just a trick of strobe lights in front of the theatre. Bellamy smiles and laughs at her side, and by the time he unloosens his tie, his head is in her lap and neither of them see anything strange about it.
She cards her fingers through his hair, tugging at the curls above his ears. Bellamy slams his eyes shut after the third mug of vodka and that’s when the words come pouring out.
He tells her about his childhood, about the small, crappy apartment in a black-hearted part of the city. He tells her all about getting into college as a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, about Octavia who was just like him – pebbles embedded in her skin where she’d scraped her knees in a fight, too smart to pay attention in class.
Bellamy tells her about the moments his mother would sing along to the radio, about the good days when Aurora Blake wasn’t someone he’d blame for giving birth to him and sentencing him to a miserable life. About the good days when Aurora Blake was the kind of mother who waved at her kids as they got on the school bus. Clarke smiles, makes him tell her about the scar above his upper lip, trails her fingertip across it to make a point.
“A fight.”
Clarke scoffs, throws her head back and looks at the stars. “Of course it was a fight.”
“Like you didn’t get into fights,” he challenges and when she looks back down again, there’s a mischievous glint in his eyes.
“I’ll have you know that I didn’t,” she shoots back, raising her jaw petulantly. “I believe in the fine art of manipulation and guilt-tripping people into doing the things I want them to, thank you very much.”
When Bellamy shakes with laughter, so does she, and it’s easy. It’s so easy to forget herself and everything that’s been weighing her down when they can just do this. Simple.
And then he tells her about the bad days because both of them seem to be a strange mixture of both, making for bittersweet souls. He tells her that Aurora would sometimes come home and just pass out on the couch, her last words being – Octavia is your sister, she is your responsibility – and anger flares up in Clarke.
“Did you know that I named her?”
“Who, Octavia?”
Bellamy hums in confirmation, closes his eyes again. “After Emperor Augustus’ sister Octavia. Our mom used to read me these stories before O came along. They made sense back then.”
She keeps pouring them vodka until they’re back side by side, Bellamy raising up with a groan and Clarke holding out a hand to steady him. It hasn’t rained for days but the roof is still slippery and Bellamy shoots her a thankful look.
“Shit.” He winces and Clarke turns around, alarmed. “Shit, I forgot I had a meeting with Kane before the protest tomorrow.”
“With the dean?”
Bellamy nods. “Yeah. Now that the unions have voiced their support, he wants to talk.”
“I could come, if you’d like. He’s – he used to be my dad’s friend.”
“Are you sure? I mean, you’ve done enough. I should have never – “
“Bellamy.” She covers his hand with hers, just as she’d done in the bar, and he smiles at her ruefully. “I’m in this now. You’re not getting rid of me.”
Dawn finds them sitting on the rooftop still, the bottle empty and their hearts a little lighter than they were when they first came out. They talk about the life neither of them thinks they’re going to lead because no dreams come true in an unstable country.
But Bellamy looks at her with eyes full of gratitude and Clarke thinks that it might not be so bad after all.
*
The ball starts rolling and it doesn’t stop.
As the factories close down for strikes, union representatives come to look for Bellamy and Clarke, holed up in Sky and skipping more than attending their classes.
They talk to people who need someone to listen, someone who is bright and young and whose blood is still thrumming wildly in their veins. They find that someone in Bellamy who shakes his head and says gravely, “We are going to win this fight” and Clarke whose mind starts looking for a solution as soon as the workers enter through the doors of the bar.
There are still nights when Gina gives them the keys and asks them to close up, everyone’s hearts beating erratically because this is something else – this is a state of crisis, adrenaline pumping every day and every night. Clarke’s mornings turn into a mess of throwing her clothes on and running to the bar, forgetting about the pile of classwork waiting for her.
Bellamy doesn’t sleep, she thinks, always hunched over his laptop or a project one of their friends has come up with. They talk and they talk until they wake up with hoarse voices and splitting headaches because they forgot to eat yesterday and they might not get to do it today either.
Miller arrives in the company of his dad one day, a stoic-looking man, every bit like his son if it weren’t for the neatly ironed uniform. With time passing, Clarke learns to recognize it as a sign of defiance. If they’re trying to destroy you, don’t give them the satisfaction of seeing it work.
“There’s strength in numbers,” David Miller tells them, his hands clasped on the table. Clarke swallows and Bellamy smiles. “If there’s someone the police union can join, well – we’re going to do just that.”
Miller hugs his dad before he leaves and Clarke hears the sergeant saying that’s he proud of his son. “I’m sorry for what I’ve said, Nate. You kids have more guts than most of my colleagues. I believe in you.”
When the doors close behind David Miller and Monty comes to link his fingers through Nathan’s, Clarke hears him asking, “What did your dad say?”
“He said he was proud of me.”
He says it with so much emotion that it doesn’t matter how he pulls his beanie over the tips of his flushing ears. Clarke knows what it means and her heart swells in her chest until it’s big enough to devour the whole of Arkadia, just to protect her friends.
There are still protests every week, now in the main square. There isn’t a day that Clarke doesn’t see at least ten people walking around with signs under their arms, some of them she made herself.
The Council holds press conferences every day, promises that they’re working on things, but the TV gets turned off whenever a cold, emotionless face says just that and the people go back to their drinks or their cards.
Gina opens the door to the backroom and reveals a table inside, her smile stretched from ear to ear. “I figured it was time for you guys to have your privacy.”
“And a coffee machine,” Jasper beams.
“And a coffee machine.”
Clarke laughs along with the rest of them when Raven shakes her head, staring at Gina incredulously, and finally presses a loud kiss to the bartender’s lips.
“I really fucking love you, you know that?” Raven says, her hands sliding down to Gina’s hips, seemingly uncaring of the world around them.
(There’s still a bruise on her cheek from where she crashed on the pavement during a protest three days ago. It looks a morning glory now.)
“Good to know, Reyes.”
All of them elect to give them privacy. Only Jasper can be heard shouting, “I love you too, Martin!”
*
They’ve all had a little too much to drink one night, giddy because service employees union asked them to join the new, more official movement and it feels like something is finally happening.
When their friends are in various states of disarray; Jasper sleeping with his head in a puddle of beer and Octavia shoving at Lincoln, demanding that he fights her, Clarke notices that Bellamy is missing.
He does that sometimes, when he feels like there is no one who would need him (that’s why he’s there – while the rest of them have fun, he’s usually on high alert). And if Clarke didn’t know him so well underneath that grouchy mom friend façade, she’d have thought they annoyed him.
But the thing is, Bellamy Blake thinks he doesn’t deserve the lighthearted moments. He thinks he deserves endless fighting because that’s all his life has ever been, and where it made Octavia wild and reckless, it made him wary and looking like a tamed animal who barely remembers freedom.
So Clarke stumbles out onto the street awash with yellow light and music coming from within the bar. On nights like these, she feels bigger than her body, heart beating in sync with the city.
She finds him sitting on the curb, not far away from the entrance to Sky. He’s leaning his chin on his clasped hands, staring off into the distance, and Clarke’s heart flips because suddenly he looks so young.
He looks so young and lost when he thinks no one can see him.
She sits down next to him slowly, as if not to scare him off. It’s easy to forget that he’s just her age, easy to forget that he’s just like her – good at pretending he’s got everything under control.
“Hey, Bell,” she says softly, smiling when he turns to look at her, eyes unfocused and his mind somewhere far away. “You good?”
He hums in confirmation but he’s shivering, curling into himself. His blazer is still draped across the back of a chair and now he’s wearing just a purple shirt whose collar has seen better days. It still looks good on him and Clarke chuckles when she realizes just how beautiful he is; stormy dark curls, freckles brushed across his cheeks and joining into constellations, dimples and kind eyes – even when he’s scowling.
Yes, Bellamy Blake is beautiful, even more so than the statues of ancient Greeks he studies. His beauty is of the unforgettable kind, striking enough to make you feel like you’ve uncovered a secret of the universe just by being in his presence.
Clarke knows he’s not going to admit that he’s cold so she takes off her jacket and drapes it over his shoulders. He looks up, confusion written clear across his face and Clarke just shrugs. “You looked like you could use it.”
His responding smile is tiny and the jacket is too small for him and his broad shoulders but the sight of him content is so nice, so inherently good, that it makes warmth bloom in her chest.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She sticks her tongue out at him because the world is bright and she’s reached that point of drunkenness where she feels untethered, as if she could just fly away any second now.
Bellamy chuckles, ducks his head to hide one of those smiles that put dimples into his cheeks. Whenever she gets one of those, Clarke really feels like she’s earned it.
“You’re not Atlas, you know?” It rolls off her lips and now it hangs heavy in the air between them. “You don’t have to carry the weight of the whole world on your shoulders.”
Bellamy’s eyes widen behind the thick-rimmed glasses, worn with scratched left lens. Everything about Bellamy feels like that one shirt that defies time, that one shirt that’s been worn threadbare because you love it. He’s part epic wars he goes on long rants about and part sunshiny mornings in the amphitheater, his smile as he brings her coffee to their shared art history class.
He is everything as he pushes his frames up his nose and says, “I bear it so they don’t have to.”
Their friends are lovely, Polaroid photos of summers on the beach, hearts raw with love, laughter spilling over rooftops, but it’s always Bellamy and Clarke who go to meetings with those in charge, Bellamy whose muscles are taut at the sight of injustice, Clarke who seethes with rage when no one takes them seriously. It’s always BellamyandClarke who join forces, a forest fire boy and a hurricane girl, making everyone very aware and very afraid.
“You don’t have to do it alone anymore,” she gently reminds him. “We can do it together.”
For a second, she’s not sure what his reaction will be. He’s gotten used to carrying the weight and responsibility on his own. Everyone thinks that people are relieved when they get unburdened but in reality, they’re really just afraid of it being too good to be true.
But then he just grins and asks, “So how are the kids, honey?”
Clarke rolls her eyes, curses Jasper (he’s the one who started calling them mom and dad after a drunken night to celebrate a successful protest, and the rest of the gang joined in) and replies, “Alright, poobear. Octavia fell asleep on Lincoln after he wouldn’t fight her, Miller is petting Monty’s hair, I’m pretty sure Harper is making straw crowns, and Gina is blackmailing Raven into drinking water.”
“What the fuck,” he deadpans and Clarke shrugs.
“Hey, don’t look at me. They’re your kids, too.”
“I’m more worried about poobear. Do you really consider it to be a term of endearment?”
“Sure, sugarplum butt.”
He gives up, laughing with his throat to the stars. “I pity your significant others.”
“Same. I can imagine your pillow talk.” She mimics him by deepening her voice and knitting her eyebrows together. “Babe, how can you laugh after what happened to the Library of Alexandria? Oh, wait, are you super into roleplaying the siege and pretending you’re the librarian who saves it?”
“Oh, shut up,” he shoots back but there’s no heat in his words and his gaze is softening by the second.
For all the mocking of Bellamy she does, Clarke really is fucking in love with him.
*
The storm rages on.
When they have enough time to go to the lectures, the professors don’t call on them. They don’t answer their questions. They simply turn their heads around and pretend like there is no one there in their seats.
“I think your lecture is shit and I’m sorry I ever wanted to take this class,” Clarke declares in art history one morning, after she’s had enough with Wallace looking at her and then pointedly choosing to ignore her.
Bellamy’s eyes widen in disbelief when she casts a glance at him but he needn’t have worried.
Wallace just looks at her and then turns towards another student.
“Yes, Mr. Mbege, what was your question?”
As soon as the class is dismissed, Bellamy drags her into the hallway, their bags heavy with everything but textbooks. A muscle in his jaw is ticking and he looks ready to rip his hair out.
“What the hell were you thinking?”
“He’s loyal to the Council, Bellamy,” Clarke explains calmly, shoving her pencil case into the bag. “Didn’t you notice that he ignores us?”
“Still, you can’t pull that shit, Clarke, it’s – “
“It is what it is, Bellamy!” Students turn around when she raises her voice, and she lowers it again. “We’re both failing classes taught by professors loyal to the Council. Kane can support us all he wants but he is untouchable. We are not.”
“So what the fuck are we even doing here?”
With matching victorious smiles, they stride out of the building and don’t stop until they reach the bar.
Soon enough, Octavia wakes up Clarke one morning by screeching into her phone. It takes Clarke good three minutes to calm the girl down and get her to explain.
Clarke and Bellamy’s face is plastered all over the papers, headlines naming them and their friends the Sky People.
“Brave young students who started a revolution,” Raven reads out and snorts. “Yeah, really brave. Murphy there nearly pissed his pants when he met Indra the other day.”
Their ranks grow in numbers, more and more students trickling in every day. John Murphy is just one of them and when he comes to join them, he asks for Bellamy. At least it brings them some comic relief when the sullen-looking philosophy student shrugs and explains why.
“We used to hook up.”
That keeps them alive for days, everyone bursting into full-bellied laughter whenever Bellamy and Murphy sit uncomfortably next to each other, and Clarke realizes that it’s what they need.
They need some humor to keep them going because their lives are now just endless streams of coffee and good news followed by bad ones.
On one sunny day in February, when the sunshine can’t extinguish the cold that bites Clarke’s cheeks, the Council decides that students participating in protests will not be receiving financial help anymore and the workers are risking penalties for every day spent striking.
“We can’t ask people to starve for the cause,” Indra, the representative of the service employees union states in a meeting that follows the announcement. “Some of them are refusing to stop protesting, but a far larger number will return to their posts, effective immediately.”
Everyone is full of understanding but Clarke and Lincoln still move their things into Bellamy and Octavia’s apartment because, without the financial help from the university, they can’t make their rent anymore.
“They can’t do this, can they, Bell?” Octavia asks, arms crossed at her chest when the four of them have congregated in the already tiny kitchen. It’s vastly different to what Clarke’s used to, but it’s good. It’s better than sleeping in the snow.
Bellamy looks at his sister and Clarke knows that he wants to tell her that they can’t, that there is something they can do to stop them. She knows how much it pains him to say, “They can do whatever they want, O.”
“So we keep fighting, right?” She looks at them, fists already bunched up at her sides. Lincoln’s mouth trembles from where he’s trying to stifle a smile.
“That’s the only thing we can do.”
There is thunder in Clarke’s heart when she crosses the small hallway from the bedroom she shares with Octavia into the living room where Bellamy is supposed to sleep.
He’s sprawled on the couch, his shirt riding up and uncovering a piece of tan skin dusted with stray freckles. She could wake him up, kiss him even, lie next to him on the tiny couch, make him whisper all the constellations they can’t see into her skin.
But this is no time for a romance and so she just takes a seat next to him and drinks what’s left of the Coke sitting on the table.
“Couldn’t sleep?” His voice is rough and Clarke nods. “Yeah, me neither.”
“You know Octavia’s in love with Lincoln, right?” She has no idea where it comes from but Bellamy chuckles and his sheets rustle as he props himself up on his elbows.
She hands him his glasses and he puts them on, ruffles his hair like it can be any more of a mess.
“You know I’m in love with you, right?”
Clarke’s heart skips a beat and there’s endless affection in her heart for this ridiculous boy as a lazy smile spreads on her lips.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Good.”
He’s beaming at her and she curls up next to him, buries her face into his soft t-shirt as he slides a hand into her hair. He works at untwisting the knots made by pencils, the only thing she could find when she needed to focus without her curls falling into her face.
For a while, they don’t speak. Red and blue lights flash across the ceiling, sounds of the city asleep almost a symphony. Warmth seeps into her skin where he rubs absent-minded patterns into it.
Bellamy hums a tune Clarke could swear she knows but it’s out of her grasp, always is. She can almost feel it brushing against her fingertips, escaping, escaping. Bellamy keeps humming and Clarke lets her blood slow down in her veins, her hand trail under his shirt and linger there.
“Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
His chest rumbles with his laugh and he does kiss her. He presses his lips to the crown of her head, pulls her closer. “Sure, Princess. In the morning, huh?”
Clarke hums in confirmation, lazy and tired, and that’s when she remembers the melody he’d hummed. It’s sunlit days and baseball caps put on backwards, shielding her eyes with her hand and licking the ice cream melting down her fingertips as Wells laughs at her. It’s coming back home to her mom and dad tucking her in, promising that she’d be safe.
It’s a fake memory, but a good one nevertheless.
Bellamy starts humming again and Clarke gives in.
*
It’s Monty’s mom who throws the first stone and the world goes red around them.
What was supposed to be a peaceful protest turns into an angry mob storming the streets of Arkadia. Loud, ugly cries echo into the overcast skies and this world isn’t free anymore, it’s a prison.
Clarke hears the moment in which Raven’s boot connects with a policeman’s shield, the police trying to push the protestors back. Her voice is hoarse when she demands, “We are your people! How can you go against your own people?”
If he replies, Clarke doesn’t hear it. The shouting gets louder, chants and swears, the sound of glass breaking and the smell of smoke. Always the smell of smoke, filling Clarke’s nostrils as her eyes start burning.
“Tear gas!” Miller? Lincoln? Monty? Monty? “Get away!”
The crowd jostles her forward, right onto the shields the police has put up in front of them. Bodies thrash against them, the crowd never stopping.
Soon enough, they break the barricades and Clarke runs just as fast as Bellamy does towards the stage where the Council members stood and talked just a few minutes ago. Oh, their words were pretty, and some of them tried to sound sympathetic, but at the end of the day nothing would change.
And the people are angry.
The world is just noise around her and Clarke stumbles over a microphone wire, finds herself looking at the mass of bodies swarming the streets. The police forms a new cordon, blocks off the side streets, and Raven grabs her hand.
“We have to get out of here!”
Raven’s mouth is full of blood, some of it trickling down her chin and her leather jacket, her pride and joy she used to coo to like a baby during good nights, is ripped at the sleeves.
“How?”
“I know a way, come on!”
Clarke follows her down the stage, out in the back, past a group that yells at them and calls them cowards for trying to get away. Raven tells them to fuck off and Clarke stays quiet, imagines what the angry mob would do to her mother if they’d gotten to her.
“We understand your worries,” Abby said. “We understand how hard it is for you but please, know that we are doing everything we can to fix this.”
She couldn’t see Clarke in the crowd, standing between the Blakes and holding up a sign above her head. But Clarke still liked to imagine that Abby could see her daughter’s defiant glare.
Back then – an hour ago – Clarke would have wished for something like this to happen.
But now she knows that it is carnage, absolute chaos, and when Raven slams the Rover door behind her, Clarke exhales for the first time in the last half an hour.
As soon as everyone they could’ve gotten to gets in, Raven floors the gas pedal and navigates the maze of the old town streets until they reach a clearing free of people and free of police. Only then does she pull over with trembling hands and turns around to look at everyone.
Jasper and Bellamy are bleeding. Lincoln is leaning heavily on Octavia. Harper and her girlfriend, Monroe, are curled up into each other, whispering and shaking their heads like they’re not quite there, but lost in the crowd still.
“Where are Monty and Miller?” Clarke asks, tucking a stray curl behind her ear and coming off with fingers full of blood. Nothing hurts, except for her heart hammering in her chest.
Bellamy’s face sinks. “We got separated in the crowd.”
“Can someone call them?”
“I tried,” Jasper wheezes. “No answer.”
It’s Octavia who speaks then, the girl whose ribcage was a prison, always the bravest, always getting up after getting knocked down. But when she speaks, Clarke’s stomach drops because she sounds as tired as the rest of them.
“Can we go home now, Bell? Please?”
That day in the Blakes’ apartment, Clarke stitches up cuts and disinfects swollen eyes, puts butterfly bandages on every split lip and exhales in relief when no one has a concussion. She washes her hands with vodka, drinks a sip, gives a sip to Raven when the girl grins wickedly at her.
“I’ll be fine. Just stitch me up, doc.”
She tries not to think of her mother smiling over her shoulder as Clarke stood in the clinic and watched.
Miller and Monty arrive with Gina in the evening and Clarke thanks the lucky stars for mild bruising instead of cracked ribs Jasper earned.
“Where’s my fierce warrior?” Gina asks, smiling when her eyes land on Raven, her leg propped up on the table in the kitchen. Clarke turns around to give them privacy, but not before she’s heard Gina saying, “I’m so glad you’re okay. God, I’m so, so glad.”
When she returns to get some coffee for Bellamy who’s dropped Jasper off in the hospital, she sees the two girls intertwined on the floor and tries to stop her heart from breaking.
(It doesn’t work.)
Bellamy looks crestfallen and broken in ten different ways when he says, “This never should have happened.”
Monty flushes and tries to stammer out an apology before Miller stops him. “Your mom just did what everyone else wanted to. No, Bellamy, this shouldn’t have happened, but it’s the only thing that could have happened.”
“This has gone long enough,” Lincoln agrees. He’s favoring his left side but refuses to let Clarke look at it. “The Council can’t ignore this anymore.”
That night, they all go to sleep with chaos swirling in their thoughts. Clarke crashes on the bed next to Bellamy and just breathes, their hands clasped together.
He kisses her just as the dawn breaks and a news reporter announces that everyone who took part in the protest will be questioned and detained if involvement in the violence is discovered.
It’s a hungry kind of kiss, teeth clashing and Clarke pulling him in by the nape of his neck. There’s desperation in it where there could have once been sweetness but there’s blood underneath her fingernails and he’s got three stitches on his stomach. What’s a bruising kiss to all the blood that has been spilled today?
They part and his breath is warm against her lips when he leans his forehead on hers. They stay like that for the longest while, the world stirring outside the walls without knowing how to spin now that it’s out of its orbit.
Clarke knows the feeling intimately.
“So now’s the right time, huh?” she asks, unable to stifle the hysteria rising in her voice. She feels like laughing, inexplicably. The tear gas still stings her eyes when she closes them.
“It felt like it was now or never.”
*
They find out that Lincoln was right when Abby Griffin walks into Sky the next afternoon and asks to see her daughter.
(Not Bellamy. His seat is empty because he was among the first ones they thought to question and he still hasn’t returned.)
“You should see her,” Raven tells her, holding an icepack to her eye and looking like a world-weary pirate. The worry in Clarke’s stomach is extinguished by anger.
“I have nothing to tell her. If she’s come to question me – “
“Maybe she hasn’t. Maybe she’s come to tell you something.”
So Clarke stands up and faces her mother, faces the deep crease between her eyebrows that wasn’t there two years ago, faces the look of seeing too much and wanting out, the flight instinct kicking in. Like mother, like daughter.
When they sit across from each other, Abby reaches for Clarke’s hand and the latter gives up, gives in, grasps it so hard in her own that there might be bones breaking but neither of them care.
It takes them the longest while to start talking through sobs and tears spilling down their cheeks but the world is collapsing around them and they might all go to hell, so who cares? What’s another minute?
“I want to help you,” she says at last, the stern-faced councilwoman in the dingy bar Clarke planned a revolution with her friends, wearing paint-stained frocks to Bellamy’s threadbare shirts. They were different people then and that Clarke might have known what to say.
But this Clarke is tired, tired, tired and so she just replies, “Alright.”
“Alright?”
“Yes, mom. Let’s end this.”
When they turn on the TV that night, in the bar that still smells like young blood and hearts ready for a fight, Abby Griffin holds a press conference and declares that the Council has decided to enter into negotiations with the representatives of the united movement.
“The process will be hard, but it will not be long. The people have suffered enough.”
They don’t celebrate and there are no victorious cries.
There is just Raven leaning back into her seat, finger tracing the rim of her beer glass, and stating, “Fucking finally.”
Bellamy comes home in the middle of the night, glasses askew, hair matted and his shirt rumpled. When he collapses into the bed next to Clarke, the world is back to normal.
“We did it, Bellamy,” she breathes out into the darkness.
Bellamy nods, doesn’t look anywhere but straight into her eyes. There’s a crease between his eyebrows and Clarke taps her thumb against the pillow to stop herself from smoothing it out.
“So why don’t you look like it?”
He gives her a half-shrug, a pleading look.
“Because good things never come free. Not to us.”
And it blows her heart into pieces, seeing him wrecked, hopeful while trying not to be. The wonder that is Bellamy Blake; the world breaks him ten ways till Sunday and he still stands up, spits the blood out of his mouth and asks – is that all you’ve got?
“Okay,” she whispers, comes a little closer, close enough to count every freckle on his cheek. His hands are callused when she takes them in hers, flips his palms up and feels his wrists.
There’s Atlas, there’s Sisyphus. There’s Achilles.
Bellamy looks like a wild animal peering out of a forest fire, a muscle in his jaw ticking and eyes still so fucking hopeful. He’s old, he’s young, he’s everything and every single nerve in Clarke’s body wants to keep him safe even for a moment.
So she does. She entangles her legs with his, slides her arms around his waist and presses her forehead against his. She holds him so tight that he starts laughing after a while. “Don’t suffocate me just when we’ve won the war.”
“This is called love, you asshole.”
It defuses the tension, at least, and Bellamy huffs. She loosens her grip on him so he can turn them around, his body warm around hers, one melting into the other until there’s no knowing where Bellamy ends and Clarke begins.
“What now?” he asks, voice barely louder than a whisper, just as Clarke’s trying to trick herself into sleeping. The first glimmers of dawn are painting the room a light shade of blue and somewhere, a new future is beginning.
For Clarke, it’s clear what hers will be. It might not be her paintings hanging in a museum for her grandchildren to look at. It might not be Bellamy holding a lecture and writing his nerdy books, as Octavia used to say. It might not be what they’ve imagined.
But Bellamy smiles at her, slow and unsteady, and she holds onto him. When she speaks, she knows she’s telling the truth.
“Now we live.”