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Sometimes Bellamy shows his age in conspicuous ways—he hoists trunks onto one broad shoulder, with nothing but a grunt and a smirk; he has no patience for the teenage drama that bleeds through the camp periodically, “fucking kids,” he huffs, whittling a piece of wood with his knife, bored.
Then there are times, when Bellamy is not even trying, that Clarke sees his maturity. It’s easy to forget that your co-leader is five years older than you when he treats you like a total equal—despite nicknames.
(and hey, princess has become something more of a compliment lately.)
Once, after a week's worth of rain flooded the camp, everyone had to work double duty. Things kept sliding away. Every day structures needed fixing or replacing. It was trying for all the kids. Not the least of all Clarke and Bellamy, who couldn't find a moment to themselves.
So when Clarke bursts into Bellamy’s tent, eight days into the The Flood, she shouldn’t be so surprised at what she sees.
“Bellamy, the north end of the fence is starting to—“ her sentence gets caught in her mouth and comes out a little garbled.
He’s shirtless and half-turned towards her, both hands up around his face—the angles creating some defined biceps which Clarke looks away from—shaving with a knife. About half-way done, by the looks of it.
“What?” He says, lowering his hands. There’s a little lift to his mouth, like he knows there’s a joke waiting for him somewhere here, he just has to find it.
Clarke was never aware he had stubble before. She realizes now that he must have been shaving pretty much every day to keep his face so smooth. Not that she noticed.
Now, in the low orange light of the tent, his boyish freckles seem darker. But darker still is the shadow of the hair on his jaw and upper lip. Where before those freckles might have made him youthful, now he looks anything but juvenile.
It’s all a bit unnerving to say the least.
“You should be careful,” Clarke says, and she knows it’s a dumb thing to say to the person with the best knife handling this side of the river. But she’s pre-occupied with other things. Like his face.
Bellamy tilts his head, and it’s almost predatory. When he smiles, it definitely is.
“Princess,” he says, “if I was going to kill myself shaving it would have happened by now. Don’t you worry about me.”
Clarke rolls her eyes. “I don’t worry about you. The north end of the fence needs to be stabilized. Or reset. When you’re done beautifying, come help.”
She turns on her heel and exits the tent, leaving Bellamy alone. She hears the sharp thunk of a knife landing point-down on a table.
At the north end of the fence as Clarke is pulling on ropes and hoisting pillars upwards, Bellamy catches her eye. When he turns his head towards her, only half of his face is shaven. The visual of him—sopping wet, hair plastered to his head, half-shaven—is so funny that Clarke nearly loses her grip on the rope.
He shoots her back a deadly look, but it seems like he can’t quite keep the smile from his mouth.
After that, he never wears his face clean shaven again.
Clarke doesn’t complain.
+++
Then, there’s the time that Octavia brings a wounded fawn to camp.
The gate opens, and in comes Octavia—sweet Octavia, the first person to ever walk on the Earth in 100 years—carrying a little fawn in her grip. All four of its legs stick out from under her arms, and its little head turns in quick starts.
Clarke sees her first. “Octavia…what—“
“It needs medical attention.” The youngest Blake replies, lifting her hand away from its body, revealing a dark red spot.
“This is a deer,” Clarke says.
“I know it’s a deer, Clarke,” Octavia huffs, “but it’s a baby.”
Clarke raises an eyebrow. Yes. It is a baby. Deer.
“We’re gonna be eating its mom’s meat for months. C’mon. One of the guys ‘accidentally’ shot it.” Octavia says accidentally but she widens her eyes. Not everyone has the same reverence she does towards wildlife—towards life in general.
Clarke frowns. “Who was hunting with bullets? We use spears for hunting. We can’t afford to waste bullets on wildlife that don't even run away from our spears!”
It was true; even with the Grounders, the forests were overrun with wildlife that didn’t care about the presence of humans. It made them easy to hunt.
Octavia shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. We gotta save the baby. Clarke. Look at its face. Please. Clarke. Look.”
Clarke does look. And yes, it has big dark eyes that are pleading yet primal. “Fine.”
The fawn is docile. Clarke doesn’t say it out loud, but she thinks that Octavia’s presence is part of the reason it acts so tame. The younger girl connects with living things on a level that surpasses boundaries of human and animal.
As she presses gauze to the bullet wound, she feels a little ridiculous. But its brown fur is soft under her fingers, and it is sort of breath taking to be so close to an animal. It’s pretty cute.
“Clarke?” Bellamy’s deep voice echoes into the dropship. He’s returned from one of the new bunkers they found a couple days before.
“In here,” Clarke calls, more concerned about spooking the deer than telling Bellamy where she is.
In some time, he figures it out, and wanders through the flaps of the dropship. He’s got his rifle slung over one shoulder, and his expression is bright—they’ve found something good.
“Princess!” He booms, over-excited. He notices his sister. “Octavia. Deer?”
He fumbles to a stop, one hand on his hip. “What the hell is this?”
The fawn’s legs tremble a little, and Octavia smoothes her hand over its head. “Bell, not so loud.
Bellamy frowns, but when he comes closer his steps are as soft as when he walks through the forest. His dark eyes flicker from Clarke to Octavia, to the fawn, and back again.
“Somebody shot it.” Clarke says, not without some guilt. She’d never felt more like she was ‘playing’ doctor than when she plugged the wounds of a baby deer.
Bellamy turns to Octavia. “This has you written all over it.”
“Yeah, well maybe I don’t like to see things orphaned,” she mutters, her hand curling around the ear of the fawn.
At this, Bellamy turns and walks from the dropship.
Clarke finishes wrapping the bandage. She doesn’t bring up what Octavia said. Instead, they discuss how they’re going to feed the fawn. Because—duh—it’s staying.
A few days later, the fawn has been pretty much embraced by everyone at camp. It’s like their little mascot. Jasper declares its name to be Knob, after its four knobby knees. The title sticks. Knob grazes on the grass within the walls of camp, allowing itself to be pet and rubbed.
Clarke wanders into Bellamy’s tent, as she has so often lately. Sometimes there isn’t even anything to report. Sometimes they just bond, sit together, talk about the burden they share. The weight lessens between the two of them.
But the tent is empty. A little disappointed, Clarke wanders back outside. She takes a short walk around the wall of the camp, discreetly looking for her co-leader.
She finds him behind the building where they smoke meats, feeding Knob.
He has a carrot in his hand as he crouches next to the deer. The little fawn munches away, taking small bites that it can manage. Bellamy’s other hand passes along its back. The look he’s giving the animal is warm. Surprising, considering he’d been ignoring the thing for most of the time it’d been present.
“Well, well.” Clarke says.
Bellamy looks up, sheepish.
Clarke takes a few steps closer, until she can crouch right down in front of Knob and Bellamy. Her hand automatically goes to scratch behind the ear, where she knows Knob likes it best. A little pink tongue darts out and licks her hand as it passes. Bellamy is a silent but acute observer.
“Knob likes it when you scratch here the best,” she explains. She feels a little sheepish herself. The proximity between her and Bellamy is startling at first; they haven’t been this close in a while. Their knees almost touch. She can see every freckle and hair on his face.
“She just looked hungry,” Bellamy says. Now Knob is licking his empty hand. “The kids love to pet her, but sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who feeds her.”
Clarke laughs. Bellamy’s complaints about the kids can edge into ‘grumpy old man’ territory from time to time.
“Knob’s a her, now?” She asks, smiling.
This time Bellamy is bashful, turning his head. “She has a female energy. That’s what Octavia says.”
Clarke smiles back at him. Knob decides she’s bored, and wanders away on her peg legs. Bellamy and Clarke remained crouched beside each other. It all feels a little clandestine, crouched behind the meat smoking shed.
“What? Can’t I care about the cute little deer like everybody else?” Bellamy sees the look on her face and goes defensive.
“I never said that. We all know how much you care.” Clarke puts her hand on his arm. He meets her eyes.
Bellamy nods, and something passes between them. An understanding that goes beyond words. Clarke wonders if this it what Octavia feels when she touches an animal; utter respect and understanding all in one breath.
Something goes boom at the other side of the camp and the spell breaks.
“Back to work,” Clarke says.
A couple weeks pass, and Knob is taller than ever, but still as sweet. She walks around the camp, back and forth, seeming restless. And then, when the gate opens to accept a returning patrol, Knob darts gracefully right out of the walls.
Shock radiates through the camp. Clarke can’t quite believe it herself, and she watched the deer shoot straight through the camp and out the gate. The kids are outraged. Knob is—was something of a novelty, and now she’d gone and escaped. There was talk of going after her, coaxing her back to camp.
“Even if we named her, she was still a wild animal,” says Bellamy, and his voice rises out of the din, silencing the crowd. “She was getting too big to stay cooped up in these walls anyways. I don’t want to see or hear anything about anybody going after that deer. She got her escape, just like we did.”
After that, everybody goes back to their own business. Jasper and Monty don’t seem impressed with this decree, speaking to each other in hushed tones, arms crossed. Octavia’s expression is content as she looks at her big brother.
“You don’t want her back?” Clarke says, after the crowd disperses.
Bellamy purses his lips. “What do you think, Princess? She was a part of the camp.”
A part of the family, Clarke wants to correct him. “But you’re right. She deserves to be out there.”
“Didn’t make it any easier to watch her go.” Bellamy replies, and there is a thick note of sadness in his voice. He pretends like he isn’t, but Bellamy is just like his sister: a big bleeding heart. He never saw Knob as a novelty like the kids did; she was like a companion to him. His fondness for the deer exposes the paternal streak that runs through his blood.
“May we meet again,” says Clarke, looking to where the gate has closed.
“May we meet again,” Bellamy agrees.
When someone reports, weeks later, that they saw “a doe with a big scar in her side, just like Knob, it had to be Knob!” while on patrol, Clarke immediately goes to tell Bellamy, just so she can see the smile on his face.
It’s everything she hoped for.
+++
Then there was the time Clarke disappeared for three days.
It began with a fungus. Most likely. Clarke isn’t so sure. But the symptoms started after she returned from the Eastern marsh, which was filled with a plethora of funguses, along with the nuclear bunker. In any case, Clarke and Harper both returned to camp with coughs.
From there, the effects diverged. Harper ran a high fever the next night, but in two days she was fine. Clarke, however, experienced vivid dreams the first night back. On the second night, she begins to hallucinate.
For the first hour of terror, her limbs are immovable. Black shapes twist and turn above her, press on her chest, squeeze out the air. Fear swirls inside of her with such ferocity she feels sick.
Focusing all her energy on moving, eventually she breaks free of the nightmare’s grip, waking up. Or so she thinks. The night is still thick and dark. Her entire body is damp with sweat.
All the darkness still remains from her nightmare. It lives here, on Earth, in hell, with all the other monsters. Back on the Ark, the only thing to fear was lack of resources and air. Down here, there’s more air and resources, but they have to live among monsters.
She has to escape. Terror moves her. She grabs the flashlight on the ground. The emergency bag beside her bed is already filled with everything she needs. She slips it on, and leaves her tent.
The night watch is pretty lax lately; only one guard. Clarke stares at the back of his head and sees two red eyes blink at her. She sneaks through one of the foxholes. When she reaches outside of camp, she runs until the sun comes up.
The next few days are a blur. The hallucinations continue well into the daytime. Clarke is a ball of paranoia. If she could see her eyes, the huge blackness of her pupils would startle her.
Clarke’s been sitting in the tree for nearly three hours. The branch has cut off all circulation to her ass, and her arms are fatigued from holding on to the trunk. There’s a bee’s nest only a few feet from her head. But still she sits, twenty feet above the forest floor.
Three hours ago, she saw a beast.
The problem is, the fungus is starting to come out of her system. Clarke can’t distinguish the reality from the hallucinations. Was it really a monster she saw? Big and dark, with glowing red eyes? Something between a man and an animal? Did it really catch her scent?
So now she’s trapped by the uncertainty. Doesn’t help that she has no idea how long she’s been outside camp, or where the hell she is. Guilt sends her into overdrive. They’re probably worried sick.
Bellamy’s probably—better not to think about it.
She shifts slightly to ease the pain in her backside. As she does, her grip on the trunk slips. Overcompensating for the loss of balance, she scrambles her arm out, slamming it into the side of the bee’s nest.
Fresh fear chills her blood.
It’s getting colder lately, so the bees are slower. Still, the buzz of the hive accelerates. Black shapes start to move near the bottom of the nest.
Clarke swings forward, climbing down the branches as fast as she can.
It’s a lot easier to get up a tree than— is the last thing she thinks before her footing slips. The next branch slams into her forehead.
“Clarke!” The voice is fuzzy, like when they make an announcement through the PA on the Ark.
But this isn’t the Ark. She never hurt this much in space.
Fortunately, the pain is fuzzy too. Beneath the blur, it has a thick beat of its own: ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.
“Clarke!” Suddenly the voice is right next to her, and crystal clear.
Clarke opens her eyes. The world swims in white. Somebody is beside her, touching her. One hand passes over her face; a solitary black shape against the whiteness of the sky above. A head moves into view. Her vision is blurry, but the outline of Bellamy’s hair is unmistakable.
“Clarke, holy shit. Clarke? Clarke, can you hear me?” His voice is pained.
Bellamy, I’m the one in pain here, Clarke wants to say. Instead, she lets out a long groan.
“Take this—just take it!” He’s yelling at somebody she can’t see. Then, she feels his arms move under her thighs and her back, hoisting her up. The movement jostles her ankle, which she finally realizes is broken.
A scream tears from her lips as the pain shoots up her body. Bellamy falters, and Clarke wants to tell him it’s not his fault, but she just yells again. He sets her back down.
“You have to immobilize her foot—“ says somebody. A girl.
“Fucking clearly!” Bellamy yells. “Clarke, I’m so sorry.”
“S’ok,” Clarke says. The pain is making everything sharper, keeping her awake. Bellamy’s face is clear now; she can see the whites of his eyes as he looks at her.
“Clarke? Hey,” his voice is gentle, “we have to splint your foot before we move you.”
“I know,” Clarke replies, “do it.”
Who ever Bellamy has with him is a quick worker. Clarke guesses it’s Octavia, because the splint is tied to her foot with the speed of a healer. Too bad her head feels so heavy she can’t check. All she can see is Bellamy’s concerned face.
“Gonna move you now,” he says, and his arms come back under her, lift her up. Her arms link behind his neck.
The splint keeps her ankle relatively still, but the pain is still making Clarke nauseous. With every beat of her heart it rolls through her. She presses her face to Bellamy’s chest, breathing in the salty smell of his jacket to distract herself. Her entire body feels bruised. She realizes how far she must have fallen.
“Wow,” Clarke whispers.
“Hmm?” Bellamy looks down at her. His arms tighten around her as he moves uphill, pressing her right against his chest.
“I fell so far,” she says.
“Why were you out here?” Bellamy asks.
Clarke has her ear flush to his chest, and she can hear the accelerated beat of his heart, the labour in his breath.
“There were monsters,” she says.
“Monsters?” Bellamy snorts, but it’s a half-hearted effort.
“Everywhere. I ran away. I ran—how long was I…” she can’t finish the question.
“Three days,” Bellamy says. How two words could be filled with so much anger, she doesn’t know.
“Three days. Bellamy, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry,” she repeats, and now she’s crying into his jacket, every sob shaking her body. The pain in her ankle seems to sense this moment of weakness, and doubles its efforts to feel terrible.
“No, Clarke, don’t cry. Princess, please don’t cry,” Bellamy says, his lips touching her hair. “You just scared me. Scared all of us.”
“I’m sorry,” Clarke repeats, “I was terrified. I’ve never felt that. Not even when…when we came to Earth.”
“That bad? Shit,” he breathes. His hand squeezes her side. “Don’t run when you’re scared. Just come find me, next time.”
Clarke smiles, a little, despite the fact that her body feels like its been, well, dropped through a tree. “Okay.”
“When we couldn’t find you, that first morning…” Bellamy exhales into her hair again, choosing his words. “I’d never been more afraid. That we’d never find you. That I’d have to do this alone.”
“You don’t,” Clarke whispers, and she pulls upwards slightly, so that her face sits right in the spot between his shoulder and his neck. The stubble on his jaw scrapes against her forehead.
“Don’t scare me like that again,” Bellamy says, but there’s no anger in his words anymore.
Back at camp, Clarke’s return is a real show. People actually applaud. Clarke tries to hide herself in Bellamy’s jacket. Not stopping for the hero’s welcome, Bellamy takes her straight into the dropship.
She ends up on the medical cot in just her black undershorts, for maximum access to her leg.
It’s Octavia who resets her ankle. “It’s still under the skin, if you were wondering, Clarke. It feels pretty stable, too.”
“Good,” replies Clarke. The risk for infection if the wound was open would be dangerously high. “Set it with a splint. It’ll have to be elevated until the swelling goes down.”
“I know,” Octavia smiles, “I learned from the best. Just don’t move.
It hurts, a lot. Clarke cries. Bellamy is beside her, holding her hand. When her nails scrape across his knuckles, he doesn’t complain.
Octavia wraps the splint with some fabric, and then a cast that Raven made out of seltbelts and scrap metal. The result is a pretty sturdy ankle. Clarke’s impressed. With Bellamy’s help, she hobbles back to her tent. It’s a little after sunset.
Clarke sits down on her bed, and Bellamy turns to leave.
“Bellamy, wait,” Clarke says.
He turns back. His face is impassive.
“You don’t have to worry about me leaving you. I’m not gonna do that.” Clarke says, hoping that by speaking the words they will become truth.
“Clarke,” her name comes out of him like a sigh. He comes back to stand in front of her. “You can’t promise that.”
“Yes, I can. I won’t let it happen. We’re in this together, Bellamy. And just because some spores made me run away, doesn’t mean I’d ever want to.”
Bellamy sits down beside her on the bed. It shifts with the weight of him. In a single, delicate movement, he drapes his arm across Clarke’s back. She relaxes into his side.
“The worst part of it was not knowing,” Bellamy whispers, “I didn’t know if I was ever gonna find you, or if I found you, that you’d be…dead. Then I kept thinking about bringing your body back to camp, and the funeral, and how much better you would be than me at planning the funeral. And the kids…”
His voice is shaky. Clarke stares up at his face, at the constellations of freckles there, and sees his eyes shining in the low light.
Her cheeks heat as she looks at him, really looks at him, the way she doesn’t usually allow herself to. Because when she does, she notices the dark beauty of Bellamy, the gentleness in the hard lines of his face. It inspires her.
In the same delicate movements he did, she slips upwards and presses her lips to the corner of his mouth. Bellamy freezes.
“You found me,” she breathes against his face. Her heart is in her throat as she speaks. “Don’t leave me.”
Bellamy’s hand touches Clarke’s cheek. His eyes are black, hooded. “I don’t want to.”
His kiss is a study in dichotomies; gentle yet unrelenting, his lips are soft while his hand fists in her hair. Clarke is quick to react. She opens her mouth to him, sucks on his bottom lip—a move that elicits a muffled hiss from Bellamy.
Both arms wrap around her waist and yank her into his lap; a little awkward at first because of the cast, but Bellamy just moves forward so that the cast can rest on the ground.
Their kiss deepens. Clarke finds herself losing more and more of her breath as Bellamy trails heat along her collarbone, nips at her neck, and finally returns to the warmth of her lips. His hands cup her ass, squeeze her through her shorts. Every so often, he scrapes the rough stubble of his face against her neck, and the action feels downright possessive to Clarke. Like a big cat, Bellamy marks his territory, leaving warm rashes in his wake.
Clarke giggles.
Bellamy pauses, looks up. His lips are swollen, his eyes lidded. He’s never looked better.
“What?” He asks, slipping his hands under the hem of her shirt.
“I feel like you’re…marking me,” Clarke titters, running her thumb across his bottom lip. He pokes the digit with his tongue, “Ow! Gentle!”
With his perusal of her torso, Bellamy touches some of the bruises from her fall, sparking some very non-romantic feelings in Clarke’s body.
“God, sorry, Princess,” his apologize is punctuated with a deep kiss. “And maybe I am marking you.”
Clarke laughs again, and she wonders if this is what adult love feels like. It’s slow but consuming; there’s time for laughter and passion all at once. With every touch, she senses this feeling building, this certainty, until it’s almost a physical presence between them.
“Do you feel…” she whispers between kisses, unsure of how to articulate her thoughts.
“Yes. Always.” Bellamy replies into her neck.
“Is it normal?” Clarke asks. She’s less experienced than Bellamy, and her experience never felt like this. A twinge of jealously pinches her heart when she imagines Bellamy having these emotions with somebody else.
“No,” Bellamy says after a while, and he pulls back to stare at her.
Clarke’s smile is bright enough to power the dropship. “It’s amazing.”
“I only feel it with you.”
Clarke’s fingers grip the edge of his shirt and pull up until his body is uncovered. Her hands explore of every of skin, marked with new and old scars. She kisses each one until Bellamy moans. It’s a deep, primal sound that makes her insides quake.
Bellamy scoops her up and places her on the bed. When she’s lying comfortably, he unzips his pants and steps out of them, revealing the same black undershorts that she wears. Except his look…bigger. Clarke runs her fingers along the bulge, her heartbeat erratic. Bellamy swats her hand away.
“Easy, Princess,” he chuckles.
Never one to be outplayed, Clarke removes her own shirt and throws it across the tent. Bellamy’s gaze darkens.
“Now you don’t play fair,” he says as he climbs into bed beside her.
Clarke is all hands, running all over his body. She’s so eager; she’s never wanted anything more in her life, she thinks.
Surprisingly, it’s Bellamy that finally pulls back . “Clarke, we can’t do this tonight.”
“You don’t want to?” Clarke asks, pressing against his hardness.
He replies by grinding back against her, breathing shallow. “Obviously, I want you. But you’re covered in bruises. You have a cast on your leg.”
“You can’t work around that?” Clarke lays her head back on the pillow, connecting the freckles on Bellamy’s chest with her finger.
“No. I’d be more focused on not hurting you than making you come,” he says nonchalantly.
Clarke rubs her thighs together.
“When this happens—and it will happen, Princess—I’m gonna put all my energy into making you feel good. You’re gonna be screaming my name,” his voice is low and hoarse, and his hips start grinding into her again. “and I can’t have you writhing around with a broken ankle, now can I? Last thing I need is to be hit in the nose with a cast.”
Clarke grins. “You might be right. We gotta protect this pretty face,” her hand rests on his cheek, and he kisses her palm.
“You’ll stay though, won’t you?”
“Nothing could make me leave, Clarke.”
Satisfied, Clarke shuffles closer to be enveloped by his arms. He pulls up the blanket on top on them, but in all honesty, Clarke has never felt so warm in her life. This is what it feels like to be loved by a man, she thinks, it’s patient.
Later, when Bellamy’s breath evens out into a deep pattern, she whispers “I love you,” into his skin.
He shifts, tightens his grip. “Mmmlove you too.”