Chapter Text
.
They find Octavia with her back to the wall in the narrow hallway outside the fourth floor stairwell, her legs splayed out in front of her, her bloody sword resting in her lap. No one has any idea how she made it this far down the tower. It took them hours to get to this floor.
If Clarke had wondered why there were half-healed cuts and bruises on Bellamy’s face before, she doesn’t anymore. Bellamy warily approaches his sister, crouching to gently touch her shoulder, but Octavia stands up quickly, and Bellamy startles so visibly that he actually falls backwards on his ass. Octavia looks smug.
Clarke feels bile rise in her throat.
“Come with me,” she says, grabbing his hand and pulling him down the hallway. She sees the desperate look in his eyes as he glances back at his sister, and if her heart could break more, it would, because the last time she saw that look in Bellamy’s eyes, he was looking at her.
She pulls him down another narrow hallway and into a tiny bedroom. Servant’s quarters, probably. She sits him on the small bed while she rummages through the drawers for a clean rag. Pulling a stool and the large water basin next to the bed, she sits and begins to gingerly dab the wet cloth at the fresh wounds on his face. To her surprise, he doesn’t protest.
“I’ve lost her,” he mumbles. His eyes are dazed and unfocused, still trained on the door, and he doesn’t even flinch when she runs the rag over a particularly deep cut on his nose, which is definitely broken.
“Bellamy,” she says, soft, because she doesn’t know what else to say. She sighs, raising her hand to lightly trace the half-healed cuts on his cheek, his nose, his jaw. For the first time since she told him about ALIE’s threat, he looks her in the eye. “Bellamy,” she repeats, finding her voice. “You didn’t deserve this.”
He shakes his head. “You weren’t there, Clarke.”
For the first time, it doesn’t feel like an insult.
“The things I’ve done,” he continues. “I deserved it.”
“You didn’t kill Lincoln.”
“I didn’t save him, either.”
“You tried to—“
“But I didn’t.”
With an exasperated sigh, she drops the rag from his face and leans forward, her forehead resting on his shoulder. He falters for a moment, but then gently takes the rag from her hands and tips her head up. Without a word, he brushes the last remnants of Ontari’s blood from her nose and chin. When he’s finished, he looks at her for a long moment.
“I’m…um,” he starts softly, seemingly nervous. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
Clarke half-smiles. She reaches for his hand and squeezes it. “I’m glad you’re okay, too.”
“You should get some rest.” He gestures to the bed. “I’ll come get you when they get the stairwell cleared.”
Too tired to protest, Clarke nods and climbs into the tiny bed, sliding under the stiff blankets. She’s already drifting off when Bellamy leaves the room, cracking the door on his way out.
After they finally clear the stairwells in the tower, it’s a long, silent journey back to Arkadia. Even though Abby is clutching her hand the entire way, Clarke can’t bring herself to tell her about ALIE’s threat of impending nuclear doom. She doesn’t know if her mom could handle it. She doesn’t know if anyone in this group can handle it.
As she looks around, she sees a lot of broken people, but she sees a lot of healing people too. Leading the group are Kane and Bellamy, rifles slung across their backs, momentarily unafraid of what or who might be lurking in the words. A little further back, she spots Miller and Bryan, leaning on each other for support. To her right she sees Murphy and Emori walking shoulder to shoulder, and Clarke hasn’t eaten in a few days, so she can’t be sure, but she thinks she sees Murphy smile. There are even a few Grounders in the pack, deciding to leave the mess of Polis behind to settle in and around Arkadia. Roan is among them, looking haggard but standing tall, and so is Indra, who is hobbling alongside Octavia, looking proud and maybe a little frightened.
A few hours after they arrive in Arkadia, after helping her mother and Jackson tend to the wounded, Clarke wanders the path to engineering. Raven is right where Clarke knew she’d be, hunched over a metal table, fiddling with pieces of scrap metal.
“Raven,” she breathes.
Before Clarke can even blink, Raven flies around the table and envelopes her friend in a hug.
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Raven says, pulling away to get a better look at Clarke. “You saw my signal,” she smiles, smug.
“Subtle,” Clarke laughs, shifting on her feet. “But, speaking of you solving all our problems…”
Raven’s smile fades, suddenly serious. “Oh boy.”
“We have a new problem.”
Sighing, Raven rounds her table and plops down on her workbench. “When do we not have a problem?” she says, halfheartedly waving a wrench through the air. “Will there ever be a time when we’re not fighting for our lives?” Tossing the wrench, she runs her hands over her face. “Well, what is it this time Clarke? Is it Ice Nation? What do we need? More weapons? Higher security? A rocket launcher? I say we just blow ‘em to hell this time, screw diplomacy, ‘cause I’m-“
“Raven,” Clarke says, cutting Raven’s tirade short. “It’s not the Grounders.” She pauses, not quite sure how to break the news. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath.“It’s a nuclear apocalypse.”
Clearly perplexed, Raven says nothing.
“We have six months until 96% of the Earth is once again a nuclear wasteland,” Clarke tells her, blunt.
“How—“
“ALIE told me. In the City of Light.”
“And you believe her?”
“She’s a computer.”
“So?”
“Can computers lie?”
Raven contemplates this for a moment, and seemingly satisfied that what Clarke is saying is true, she nods. “Tell me everything.”
Clarke gives her the rundown, informing her that they basically have six months to figure out either how to stop a bunch of nuclear reactors from exploding, or find the 4% of inhabitable Earth and migrate. Or, the most likely option, die.
“I have no idea how I’m going to do this,” Raven says, sighing and rolling her chair to the computer in the corner, “but I’ll get started.”
“If anyone can do this, Raven,” Clarke says, “it’s you.” She turns to leave. “I have to head back to medical, but um…I’ll be back.”
Raven turns to look at her, a serious look on her face. “I’m sorry about Lexa, Clarke. I know—“ Raven falters, absentmindedly running her finger over a long scar on her forearm, one Clarke knows is from TonDC. “—I know you cared about her.”
Clarke bites her lip and gives her friend a sharp nod. “Thanks,” she says, and walks out the door.
.
Only 3 hours into the reconstruction of the completely pointless fence that can do nothing to protect them from a nuclear apocalypse, Bellamy finds himself in medical, face to face with the wrath of Clarke Griffin. He’s sore all over, has definitely pulled muscles in his back, and his throat is so swollen he can hardly speak or breathe. Clarke is pissed.
“You were supposed to take it easy, Bellamy,” she scolds him. She gives him something for the back pain and then makes him sit on the examination table. He tries to protest, but she’s Clarke, and she just pushes him backwards until the back of his legs bump the table and he sits.
She raises her hands to examine him, and the brush of her fingers on his neck is so feather light it sends shivers down his spine. She frowns at the dark purple bruises, as if she can make them go way with the sheer force of her gaze.
“I didn’t notice these before,” she mumbles.
He closes his eyes and shudders at the memory of a chipped Kane looming over him in the throne room, choking the life out of him. He feels the air being sucked from his lungs in the airlock. The chain in Mount Weather. Murphy’s noose.
It’s too much. He pushes Clarke’s hand away from his neck and bolts to his feet, desperate to get out this room, out of this space station, out of this god dammed camp.
“Bellamy!” Clarke tries to stop him with a hand on his arm, but he shrugs her off. He can’t think, can’t breathe, needs out, out, out.
“I’m fine,” he rasps, walking away as quickly as his sore muscles will allow. He hears Clarke’s footsteps behind him, registers her voice, but he doesn’t know what she says. Her footfalls stop somewhere in the halls of the ark, and by the time his boots meet the soft earth outside the Ark’s walls, he’s alone.
As he makes his way to Raven’s gate, the only sounds he hears is the rushing of his blood through his veins and the rapid beating of his own heart. There’s a secluded place between the cool metal of the ark and the buzzing electricity of the fence, a place where he can be alone, but when he rounds the corner, instead he finds Octavia curled up in a ball against the side of the Ark, looking small and fragile as tears fall freely from her eyes.
The look that crosses her face when she sees him makes it clear that he is not welcome here. He leans against the Ark to catch his breath anyway, leaving plenty of distance between them. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see her hastily wiping tear tracks from her cheeks, and the instinct to comfort his baby sister makes it difficult to focus on the sounds of his breathing and the zig-zag of the tree line in the distance.
He spares her a glance, wants to give her a smile, a nod, a reassuring hand, anything, but she doesn’t look his way and he knows she doesn’t want that, doesn’t need that from him right now. He wonders if she ever will.
She sniffles and sits up straighter, defiant and strong-willed as ever, refusing to let anyone see her look weak. “I came here to be alone,” she says after a beat, gritting her teeth.
“Me too,” he responds, and they don’t speak after that.
After he cools off, Bellamy tries to go back to work on the gate, but Miller tells him to “chill the fuck out, Bellamy,” and gets Kane to put him on temporary leave. Granted, Kane doesn’t look him in the eye when he orders him to take the rest of the day off, but an order is an order.
He finds himself on his back on the extended roof of the ark, watching the sky turn pink and orange as the sun slips below the horizon, far from the raucous party some of the delinquents are throwing down below. He can’t bring himself to celebrate with them. Not when the world is ending.
It’s long past dark by the time he hears Clarke climb up the makeshift ladder he’s leaned against the wall. She slings a medical bag up onto the roof and plops down next to him, already opening her mouth to speak, but he’s ready for her.
“I’m fine, Clarke. I don’t need you to patch me up,” he bites, eyeing her medical bag.
She rolls her eyes and reaches into her bag anyway, but instead of gauze and medical supplies, Clarke pulls out a full bottle of champagne. She passes it to him, a tiny smirk playing on her lips.
“I think I owe you a drink,” she says, nudging his shoulder.
“Where did you get this?” he says, awed.
“Murphy stole it from Polis. I stole it from Murphy.” She shrugs, and then she smiles. It doesn’t quite reach her eyes, but it’s a real smile nonetheless, and after the way things have gone for her in the past few days, Bellamy thinks that’s a win in itself.
Clarke’s hair is wavy around her face, pulled back into an intricate braid like it had been when they first landed, her porcelain skin clean and glowing under the moon. She’s traded her grounder clothing for a standard pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and she looks so much like the Clarke he knows and loves that it hits him like a ton of bricks how much he misses her.
She’s struggling with the cork, so he takes the bottle from her and twists it out with his knife. She produces two tin cups from her bag and watches intently as Bellamy fills them with the bubbly liquid, but before he can even recork the bottle, she’s downed her entire cup.
“I thought we were supposed to toast or something,” he laughs, pouring her another cup.
She raises this one, clinks it with his. “To our impending doom,” she says, and tosses it back.
Bellamy sips his drink a little slower.
There’s a beat of silence, a palpable tension in the air.
“Are you ever going to tell me what happened in the mountain?” she blurts out.
His limbs go cold.
When he lifts his head, her eyes are trained on him. Determined. Begging. A little sad.
He doesn’t answer.
“Why do you know what it’s like to be hung upside down and drained for your blood?” Her voice is small, barely a whisper. He’s never talked about the mountain, except in small pieces with Octavia, but Clarke’s eyes are so blue and sad and confused and it hurts and he wants to, so he cracks.
“Things didn’t go as planned,” he starts, a little sardonic. He keeps his eyes down, idly pulling at a loose thread on the leg of his pants. Clarke rests her forehead on his shoulder, and he tries to focus on her breathing. “Lincoln and I made it to the tunnels, but he wasn’t ready. He knew he wasn’t ready, but I pushed him, and he traded me for the red.” He feels Clarke tense, but he keeps going.
“They stripped us down, lined us up, me and a bunch of other grounders. They sorted us; some of them were to become reapers. The rest of us were marked for harvest. They chained us up, sprayed us with chemicals, shot us up with a bunch of drugs. I woke up naked, in a cage.”
He sighs, trying to keep his mind with his body, here on this roof, here with Clarke.
“I needed to get out. So I fought. But they gave me more drugs, knocked me out, I guess, and I woke up hanging upside down, watching my blood run through the wall.”
He leaves Echo out. He can’t think about Echo. What he lost because he trusted Echo.
“Maya saved me,” he says. “Maya saved me and people inside that mountain put their lives on the line for me and in the end I’m the one that killed them.” He digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. “God, Clarke, it’s all I do. All I do is kill people.”
She opens her mouth to protest, but he’s angry and he’s a little drunk so he keeps going.
“I killed 300 people when I destroyed that Radio. I killed those people in Mt. Weather. I massacred an entire army while they slept. I killed Linc—“
“You did not kill Lincoln.” She grabs his face in her hands, forces him to look her in the eye. “You did not kill Lincoln. You didn’t know those people on the Ark would die. You pulled that lever with me in Mt. Weather because we had no other choice.” The force of her gaze could move mountains. “You have always done what you thought was right for the group.”
He looks at her then, wonders how she can look at him like this, like he’s good.
“We’ve always done what we thought was right,” she repeats, but Bellamy thinks it’s more for her benefit than his.
He places one of his hands over where one of hers rests on his cheek, brushing the soft skin there with his thumb. “We have,” he affirms, and he sees relief wash over her features before he continues. “But I was wrong.” He removes her hands from his face and turns away from her. “And a lot of people have died for it.”
“Bellam—“
“Clarke, please,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Can we just—can we not do this right now? Let’s just drink, okay? We can hate ourselves again in the morning.”
She stares into her drink, swirls it around in her cup for a minute before giving him a tight nod and a fake half-smile. “Okay,” she says.
It works for a few hours, pretending that they aren’t two horrible, broken people; that they aren’t terrified for the nuclear meltdown ALIE promised. For a while, it’s easy to pretend that everything is okay between them. But too soon Bellamy runs out of constellations and Clarke runs out of ways to keep him talking and they’re side by side in silence, both a little drunk, or in Clarke’s case, a lot drunk, drowning in the all of the words unsaid hanging in the air between them.
Clarke is the first to speak.
“Do you think we’ll ever get to be happy?” she asks. She’s lying on her back, shoulder to shoulder with him, tracing the rim of her empty cup with her pointer finger. “Do you think we deserve that?”
Bellamy doesn’t know if they’ll ever be happy. He doesn’t even know if they’ll survive.
He knows they don’t deserve it.
“Yes,” he says anyway. He wants it.
She scoffs. She knows he’s lying.
She lets her head loll to the side so she’s looking at him. Her eyes are watery, and it occurs to him that their noses are only inches apart. He knows she’s thinking about Lexa. He doesn’t understand, but he knows.
He thinks of Gina and his heart stings.
“Do you think we’ll ever get to love again?” she asks.
This answer is easy. He’s already done it.
“Yes.”
She nods. He thinks maybe she believes him.
Getting Clarke off the roof is one of the hardest things Bellamy’s done in his time on Earth, and he’s done some hard shit. At first, she insists on climbing down herself, even though she’s belligerently drunk. She gets on her hands and knees as if she’s trying to stand, but she topples over before she can get her feet under her, so Bellamy quickly makes his way down the ladder first.
This apparently pisses her off.
“I can do it m’self, Bellamy,” she slurs from where she’s camped out on the roof, refusing to accept his assistance.
He’s standing at the foot of the ladder with his hands on his hips, impatient, his buzz wearing off quickly. It seems the time he spent at the bar after Mt. Weather has provided him a tolerance.
“Clarke, you can’t even stand up.”
“Yes,” she says, a little too loud, “I can.” She gets to her knees, and he can tell when everything starts spinning for her because she pitches forward and catches herself on all fours. “Woah,” she giggles.
When her giggling subsides, she rolls to the edge of the roof, letting one arm dangle off the side. It makes him a little nervous, seeing as she has almost no control of her own body, but when he moves himself to where he could catch her (or at least break her fall), she rolls her eyes at him. Despite how exhausted and not drunk he is, he huffs a laugh, because he’s never seen anything more Clarke in his life.
She just looks at him for a moment, expression unreadable, and he’s weak, feeling his heart soften at the sight of her golden hair illuminated by the moonlight and the stormy blue of her eyes and then-
“I can’t get down, Bell,” she sighs, defeated.
“I know,” he says. “Come on.”
She gets herself onto the ladder, makes it a few rungs on her own even, but once she’s close enough for him to skim the tips of his fingers against her back, she just slumps back into him, either too tired or too drunk to finish the ladder on her own.
By the time they make it to the main door of Alpha Station, Clarke is leaning almost all of her weight against him, mumbling something about a two headed deer.
“Which way, Clarke?” Bellamy asks her.
“I dunno.”
“What’s your room number?” he clarifies, turning her to face him.
“I dunno,” she slurs again, more aggressive this time.
”How do you not know, Clarke?”
“I dunno. I slept in medical last night.” She pitches forward when he lets go of her, leaning her forehead on the middle of his chest and groaning. “I’m so tired.”
He sighs and props her up with his arm. “I know. Come on, I have a couch.”