Chapter Text
Who would’ve thought they could still hurt each other after all these years?
Bellamy watched as Clarke stormed away from him, slamming the basket of bandages on the bench before she blew through the med tent flaps. His own personal hurricane.
The troops had arrived a week ago. They mostly kept to themselves. These weren’t the children of months ago. These soldiers had been fighting the interminable war for years and it showed. They existed quietly, energy spent on battle and nothing else. Bellamy waited for days when they first arrived, wondering when he’d get his first runner. But none of them attempted escape. They knew it was useless.
Empty eyes are soul sucking and they’d all felt it. Being around these lost people had been hard on the med unit. And perhaps that’s why he and Clarke had ended their hard fought for peace so spectacularly. They needed emotion, thrived on it. So much so that when they couldn’t tend to someone else, they had to create their own wounds to stitch up, just so they’d have something to do with their hands.
He remembered the first time he’d realised that Clarke practiced medicine on herself. He’d walked in on her stitching up a cut on her leg, had started with concern before he’d twigged that she had been the author of her own injury. She’d looked at him coolly, waiting for him to trail off in horror.
“We don’t have cadavers to practice on. And they don’t bleed as effectively.”
He should’ve walked away right then; reported her; even just kept a wide distance between them. But Bellamy had always walked the line. Meeting someone who actively crossed it, ostensibly for the sake of science, both intrigued and repulsed him.
So, he really had no one to blame but himself – though he reflected bitterly that this didn’t make him feel better. Her pragmatism kept other people wary – her laser focus and cutthroat attitude earned her few allies. And he couldn’t say they were friends. They trusted each other with their lives but considering that that was perhaps the least valuable of all their possessions, Bellamy sometimes wondered how much that meant.
And he had crossed the line today. He knew that. But he also knew that that didn’t nullify the truth.
‘You scare people Clarke.’
And he’d meant it. What he hadn’t meant was for her to get so hurt by it. They spoke to each other so truthfully, baldly, not ever bothering to sugar coat things that he had come to assume that her skin was made from stone. But this had hit a nerve, one he never imagined she would possess. That didn’t lift any blame from his shoulders, and he knew that. He knew that.
He wondered idly whether he should go after her, whether it was worth the bloodbath that would follow. She would put up a fight – would scratch and claw at him, reduce him to shreds. Clarke fought dirty, always had. When they first met, she had cloaked this within her strong-willed morality, preaching on high to the other meds. But four years of war, of being consistently abandoned by those who they had given everything to protect had stripped her of this power. He knew she fought now for her own survival, and precious else.
“What did you say to Clarke?” Octavia’s snarl as she bundled into the tent was barely concealed in her low tone and breaking from his reverie, he could feel her glare even before he met her eyes.
Octavia’s inexplicable attachment to Clarke annoyed him. Constantly. Especially because O seemed to have appointed herself as Clarke’s personal protector, abandoning any sibling allegiance in the process. As far as he could make out, Clarke didn’t return that loyalty, and if he was honest that pissed him off more than anything else. If he had to do without O, then Clarke should at least realise how lucky she was.
“The truth, O.” Sighing, he picked up the basket that Clarke had left behind and started sorting through the bandages, hunkering down on one of the stools.
“You can’t say shit to Clarke and then claim it’s the truth, for God’s sake Bellamy learn some tact.”
“She needs to stop it O, you know this. They come here to recuperate not to be confronted by Death’s living representative on earth.”
O snorted, folding her arms and managing to look spectacularly unimpressed and disgusted at the same time.
“She’s only like that because of you, Bellamy.” Bellamy nearly dropped the bandage he was holding.
“Excuse me? I know you two manage to blame everything else on me, but I’m not about to take responsibility for her fucking hormones. The rest of us have to live with her. She’s a goddamn hazard, O.”
“You’re so stupid Bellamy, I swear to god.”
Bellamy stood abruptly, towering over his little sister, who characteristically met this perceived challenge by resting her hand gently on the hunting knife at her belt.
“Seriously O? You’re going to run me through because I stood up?” He couldn’t pretend this didn’t sting. To be ignored is one thing, to be treated as a threat was entirely another.
Octavia at least had the grace to let a glance of shame relax her hand. He took this as an apology because he knew she wasn’t going to utter one.
“Clarke is a grown-up and she can sort her own shit out. She doesn’t need you raising your hackles every time someone expects her to act her age.” He pushed past O, feeling stormy. Far from elevating his mood, his sister had managed to do what sisters had done since the beginning of time – rile him the fuck up.
* * *
He found Clarke by the river, as he knew he would.
She was washing something in the fast water at the top of the stream, before it cascaded further down the rocks and crested into a waterfall. Climbing closer he realised she was working the wool fibre she’d managed to claim from the allied Grounders. Methodically rubbing it under water and then pulling it out to stretch over two sticks driven into the wet mud by the shore. She was never idle.
“They gave you good wool.” He tried for a gentle tone, cool.
She turned her head, didn’t pretend not to have heard him approach.
“And why wouldn’t they? I gave them enough in return.” Her eyes sliced through him, voice hostile and tight. She was still angry then.
Her hair was fronded at the ends, her characteristic braids fluffy around her scalp from where she’d slept in them the night before. As the sun broke over the treetops and struck them, he was disconcertingly reminded of the paintings in the capital, the women bending over children or animals or fallen angels, with the brightest of lights illuminating a halo around their heads. Her hair, dirty blonde on a good day, shone gold. Irritated, he turned away, examining the reassuringly turgid mud at his boots. She returned to her wool.
“What will you make?” He tried again, still in that tone. He knew it was a clumsy attempt at conversation, one she would easily see through.
“A cloak. For winter.” He lifted his head, trying to read her voice. She had relaxed slightly, maybe reassured that he hadn’t bitten her head off. He reflected grudgingly that perhaps O had had a point.
He searched the glade, watching the fish dart through the clear water, leaves shivering on the trees from the last of the rain drying in the sunny breeze. Searched for something to look at but her. She was still facing away from him, shoulders rounded as she crouched in the mud, squelching slightly as she shifted position to take the first load of wool from the sticks and balance it over her thigh as she started on the second, dry pile, heaped on a flat stone by the bank.
He watched the dark stain of water wander through her thin pants. It was not past eight o’clock yet, the breeze chilly despite the light. Wordlessly he stepped forward and, exercising extreme care not to touch any part of her, lifted the wet wool from her thigh and retreated quickly.
“I can hang it here.” He grabbed his axe from his belt loop, hacked off the leaves from a small branch protruding from the mountain ash that some of the younger soldiers used to dive from in the summer months. She watched him, wordlessly.
He turned, hesitated, caught in her stare.
“You meant it, didn’t you?”
He glanced down quickly at his hands, unwilling to meet her eyes. His hands, capable of killing a man, of bringing him back to life, of mortally wounding this woman in front of him. He didn’t need his hands to do that though – his mouth, his mind was enough.
“Do I scare you?” He swallowed.
Memories, unbidden, flashed across his vision. Clarke, nine days ago, wandering across the protruding rocks at the edge of the waterfall to pick some river moss, oblivious to the water gushing across her blue feet, to the fatal drop not three inches from her toes. Clarke, refusing to leave the operating table of the young soldier who had died, twice under her watch – Clarke, plunging her hand into his chest and forcing his heart to keep beating until his body kicked back in. Clarke, calmly amputating feet, arms, legs, sucking poison from wounds with her own mouth. Clarke throttling a chicken, scaling a fish, sorting through the intestines of a deer that had caught in the fence. One she’d insisted on killing, rather than letting go. Clarke, personally castrating one of the medics she’d caught raping a young grounder girl, before turning him out to the wolves; yet the next day, ordering the med unit to cease ties with the girl’s village, suspend medical supplies. Clarke, dispatching enemy Grounders with her rifle, refusing to stand down until the last one had been confirmed dead by her hand, and sometimes her knife. Clarke, face red, screaming at him, eyes laser focused and mad.
“Do I?” her voice soft now. She’d ceased washing the wool, had left her hands in the freezing water, waiting for his reply.
He finally looked at her, found her searching eyes and locked onto them. The icy anchor that held him steady as much as it dragged him down.
“Yes.”
Her eyes flickered, but she didn’t miss a beat.
“Why?”
He was pinned to the spot, the words weighing him down, her attention holding him by the throat.
“I don’t know, Clar-“ she stood suddenly, fluidly, water sluicing down her hands. He took half a step back, words caught in his throat.
“You do know. You do know why.”
His back hit the mountain ash. Mouth dry. Head thumping, blood rushing.
“Clarke…”
“If you say something like that to someone, and then deny them the opportunity to grow from their mistakes, you’re as bad as everyone else Bellamy.” Her face was flushing slightly, high colour in her cheeks, eyes shining with fervour or tears he didn’t know.
He stepped away from the tree, dropped his shoulders, feeling the familiar terrain beneath his fingers. They were gearing up, both of them. He could see the slant of her eyes begin to crease, her eyebrows beginning to lower together. He knew, instinctively, that whatever words would leave his mouth now, they would be remembered, mulled over, brought up for years to come.
A breath, two. He plunged.
“You scare me. Because I can’t predict you. I don’t know how to justify your decisions. Because I know they’re right. But they’re not decisions that any normal person would make.”
She was still, regarding him with those icy eyes, letting nothing escape, giving him no hints.
“You’re brutal Clarke. You…you have no-“ he stopped himself, breathed out, flexed his fingers.
“If you have morals, if you have a guiding-I don’t know, a guiding compass? I don’t know what that is, I can’t find it – I can’t,” A step forward, finding his way now. She still hadn’t moved. “I don’t know where you get your strength or your conviction from. It’s been four years, and God, I thought you were the Ark’s model when you came. Because everything you said was in line with what they wanted. So I thought fine. That’s Clarke, I know what she’ll do because it’s whatever the Ark wants.”
Her silence was unnerving, but she wasn’t stopping him. Aware that this opportunity to speak uninterrupted was rare he soldiered on, feeling heavier with every word he uttered.
“But after you went to Mount Weather you stopped following them, you stopped listening to them. This camp has been yours for years now, and every decision you make – I can’t predict it. I don’t know why you do the things you do, for what? You scare the soldiers because they know that they could live or die by your hand and no one would question it – you scare the medics because they know that the Ark backs your every move – somehow, somehow you’ve convinced them to let you rule here.”
She was breathing a little hard now, eyes grey as flint.
“Do you see why we’re scared of you? You make no friends; you mark no loyalty to anyone but yourself. You’re unpredictable.”
She had taken a step backwards, and he was suddenly aware that he had no more words left, that he was close to hurting her again. But still he continued – he knew the consequences, but his mouth worked faster than his brain.
“You scare me because I want to see the good in you. But you make it so hard to find, Clarke.”
She jerked, physically jerked away from him. He looked down at his feet, up at her face again, mouth working. Her skin was ashen, all traces of colour gone, and she was far from the soft golden light of minutes earlier. Her eyes were dark smudges in her face, paling in sharp relief from the spidery veins that rose through her neck with her short breaths.
He couldn’t pretend he wasn’t shocked by her appearance, couldn’t pretend that he had meant to hurt her as badly as she looked. He tried to step towards her but she moved immediately, backing straight into the stream, not even reacting to the icy water washing over her boots and through her legs.
“Leave, Bellamy.”
Her voice was soft, deceptively soft. She wouldn’t stop looking at him. Her face was too sharp – the beauty she sometimes revealed in soft moments a distant memory to this lost, empty creature in front of him.
He was unnerved by her, suddenly wished to be anywhere but here, and put up no fight. He turned and walked away, quickly broadening his steps and crashing through the undergrowth, uncaring of who could hear him.
He could feel her stare, and resisted the urge to look back, her expression etched into his brain.