Archive of Our Own ^beta

Clarke has always been aware of Bellamy.

When she is a child, it is nothing but a pretty name, like wind chimes on her tongue as she repeats it, tracing the dark blue ink on her wrists.

Bellamy, Bellamy, Bellamy. 

Her parents tell her that people are born with other people's names on their wrists. Sometimes there are no names, sometimes there’s more than just one.

"Sometimes people have a lot of love and they've got to share it, kiddo," her dad says, ruffling her hair and laughing his trademark easy laugh - the one Clarke would always remember by sitting on his shoulders during baseball games, sun high in the sky and her cheeks reddening.

It isn't until she gets older that her mother sits her down and looks at Clarke's wrists with a strange mixture of sorrow and happiness.

"Clarke, we told you about soulmates, didn't we?"

"Yes, mom. Soulmates are people who will understand and love us, “ she parrots. “They are our souls' other parts."

"But we haven't told you about enemies. See, your left wrist, the one on the side of your heart, that's your soulmate."

"Bellamy," Clarke whispers solemnly and Abby nods.

"The one on your right wrist, though. That's your enemy, that's the person you are going to fight."

And there it was. Like a red streak of blood on pristine skin, like a piece of shattered glass, loud as bells and quiet as a shrine - but it felt like betrayal.

The dark blue ink, Bellamy, it betrayed Clarke. It took her heart, ripped it out of her chest and stomped on it.

"Bellamy," she repeats, finally realizing why her mother never could hide a sad smile when looking at Clarke's wrists. 

"It doesn't have to mean anything."

Clarke nods but both of them know it’s a lie. 

Same name on both her wrists means everything.

*

When she is sixteen, Clarke wears leather bracelets around her wrists, laughs like every time will be her last and kisses every pretty girl and handsome boy because she belongs to no one.

She can't imagine what sort of a relationship it would be to hate and love someone at the same time, forest fire and a summer drizzle, everything and nothing. All she knows is that it would hurt like hell, if it’s painful already when she takes the bracelets off and finds herself looking at the same name at the end of the day.

"Do you have a soulmate?"

The term is whispered reverently, like you talk about miracles and tragedies. 

So Clarke just smiles crookedly, wraps her lips around a beer bottle and shoots back, "I don't believe in that crap."

When she meets Finn, though, she wants to. He wears bracelets similar to hers, runs his fingers through his hair a lot but he can make her smile without any effort at all.

Clarke wants his name to be on her left wrist, wants him to be her soulmate because he is kind and soft and beautiful not in the way he looks, but in how he behaves.

"Maybe we can choose our own soulmates," he tells her, carding his fingers through her hair as they lie in her bed, sated and heavy and light at the same time. She took her bracelets off and that was intimacy. After he'd seen what she hides, bare skin meant nothing.

Clarke hums in approval, turns around to look at him.

"Yeah," she replies, smiling a little. "Maybe we can."

Three days later, she meets Raven and scrubs her skin clean of Finn's hands. They still scorch her skin where they touched her and Raven keeps looking at her.

"You're not what I expected," she tells her at last, sinking onto Clarke's couch.

"What did you expect?"

Raven looks at her with the smile similar to one Clarke’s mom has been carrying ever since her dad died and baseball games stopped being laughter and became sorrow. "I thought I could hate you."

When Clarke sees Raven again, Finn's name on her wrist is covered with a tattoo of fire and ashes and creation from destruction. 

"We pick our own soulmates," Raven tells her and every bone in Clarke's body wants to give up, give in, let the waves crash over her head.

Seventeen is too young for heartbreak. And Bellamy still brings an ache to her chest, burns bright, and Finn leaves scorch marks on her skin.

But Raven's jaw is set like she's daring Clarke to defy her, a spitfire in a red bomber jacket, hands stained with grease and soul with starlight, so Clarke smiles. "I'd pick you first, Raven."

"Of course you would. I'm awesome."

They kiss and kiss, Clarke's fingers tangle in the small braids and Raven's ponytail gives way to her insistent tugging. When Raven bites into Clarke's lower lip, it feels like retaliation.

Clarke takes it. Girls like her have always been destined to collapse and ruin. Girls like Raven have always been destined to rise stronger.

They are lovely and lonely and smile at each other because they are a rest station during a long drive. Stretch your legs, crack your knuckles, look at the sky and be thankful for what you’ve got.

“We belong to no one,” Raven says, dark skin flashing in bright red neon as they sit in a 7/11 parking lot and drink warm beer, get high on stars.

Clarke squeezes her hand. “We belong to no one.”

*

Nineteen and Clarke meets Octavia Blake. The girl’s smile is sharp, her eyes even more so, but when she laughs it’s like she’s dying to breathe. They become friends instantly because Octavia takes one look at Clarke’s covered wrists and nods, setting her jaw. “Fuck soulmates and enemies.”

It’s hard not to be friends with her after that.

Raven gets along with Octavia like a house on fire but she and Clarke are tamer now. Still friends, still able to make the other one smile by just being there, but they’ve grown out of making out like their kisses are going to change the world. Clarke still catches Raven tracing her tattoo when a pretty boy smiles at her, like she’s reminding herself of heartbreak she’s withstood. Closing herself off, like a pretty little shell with dangerous edges.

One night, Raven, Clarke and Octavia lie on the floor of their apartment (equal parts engineering major’s scraps of metal and half-finished robot projects, equal parts Clarke’s art supplies and pre-med textbooks, and equal parts boxing gloves and whatever the hell Octavia wants) and they look at the stars shining bright overhead.

“My brother knows all their names,” Octavia says, voice barely louder than a whisper. Sometimes they do this, just collapse on the floor and stare at the sky, heads pressed close. “The constellations, you know? You’ve got your Cassiopeias, Orions, blah blah blah.” She ticks away their names on her fingers, dropping her hand in Clarke’s lap when she’s done. “When Bell tells their stories, though, it’s more interesting.”

“I thought they were a bunch of literal motherfuckers,” Raven shoots back, causing the other girls to laugh. They’ve become a three women army and Clarke loves them, loves them so much her heart might burst with it. Who needs a shitty soulmate anyway?

“Bell usually skipped those parts until I was old enough to hear them. But yeah, basically.”

Clarke knocks her shoulder into Octavia’s, teasing, “When are we going to meet the elusive Bell?”

Bell, twenty-three, history major, spent his life taking care of Octavia – dropped out of college when their mom died, probably has a halo on top of his head. Clarke isn’t sure she could ever be friends with someone so pristine and clean, sinless. But she’d try. For Octavia, she’d try.

“Yeah, O. When’s that gonna happen? I’ve got a feeling he’s hot.” Raven waggles her eyebrows at Octavia, earning a smack to her arm.

“Gross, Rae. He’s my brother, that’s just – “

“So he is hot,” Clarke confirms, reveling in Octavia’s frustrated groan.

“Objectively – yeah. He’s as fucked up as you two are, though,” she tells them, no heat to it. “You three might even get along.”

They still don’t meet him and Clarke doesn’t dwell on it. She drops pre-med, switches her art minor to major, fights and makes up with her mom, cries on the doorstep of the house that hasn’t felt like a home ever since her dad died, keeps shooting the shit with Raven and Octavia, and time passes.

Everyone knows that she and Raven don’t date. Not like Octavia does, carrying name Lincoln on her wrist (her enemy’s name is covered with a tattoo of a sword) but still enjoying meeting new people, fluttering from one person to the other like a human butterfly, hair that smells like the sea even though she’s been nowhere near it, chocolate chip cookies stacked away at the bottom of her bag.

Yes, Octavia is different, but she still scrapes her knuckles on Dax’s jaw when he asks, “What the fuck is wrong with Reyes and Griffin? Are they freaks who don’t have soulmates?”

When Clarke holds an ice pack to Octavia’s swollen skin and Raven laughs as she passes a beer bottle to Octavia in their small apartment, Clarke tells her, “You shouldn’t have done that.”

Twenty and victorious, twenty and invincible, like no one in the world could ever possibly stop them. They’re an army, they are strong and powerful and not even the sky is the limit.

Twenty and a solemn expression on Octavia’s face, over her blood-stained jeans (she punched Dax and wiped away the blood on her pants, moving on like it didn’t hurt like hell) as she says, “You’re my friends. For that, I’ll have his head on a pike.”

Later that night, Clarke falls into her bed smiling, even after she’s taken off her bracelets. The name is still there, Bellamy, and it’s no different than it was when she looked at it with awe only kids can manage. But it doesn’t hurt anymore.

Now she knows that she can take whatever happens.

*

Two things happen during Clarke’s junior year.

First – Octavia returns home one day looking dazed, for the first time in her life, and it takes plying her with cookies and apple ciders to get her to talk.

“I met my soulmate.”

The world shifts a little, like the colors have faded, and Clarke recognizes the pain of Raven’s white knuckled grip on the table because hers is the same.

“Lincoln?” Clarke manages to breathe out.

“Lincoln.”

He just tripped into her, rushing out of a coffee shop, she tells them, eyes wide and fingers never ceasing their movement over the sword tattoo. She’s not tracing Lincoln’s name, she’s tracing her enemy’s and Clarke knows that there has always been a lot of things they have never talked about, but.

Octavia seems different.

“He apologized then but he didn’t have to say anything. I just – I just fucking knew, Clarke.” Hysteria creeps into her voice. “Shit, I have to call Bell.”

Raven and Clarke exchange a worried look that turns into hopeful when Octavia smiles a little while retelling the same story to her older brother. Maybe things will be better for her. Maybe, out of the three, Octavia will be the lucky one.

A week later, after her first tentative date with Lincoln, Octavia enters the apartment on the tips of her toes, high heels in her hands and a goofy smile on her face. The three erupt into cheers, sharing the joy like they have shared misery in the past, and the world is different.

“Have I ever told you guys why I have a tattoo instead of my enemy’s name?” she asks them later, head in Raven’s lap and feet in Clarke’s.

Raven shakes her head. “Nope. But you don’t have to, we get it.”

What she means to say is – we’ve been upfront about having secrets of our own. Between the three of us, there’s enough shit to manure a Nebraska-sized garden.

“It’s because it’s Bell’s,” she says, quiet. Clarke’s breath catches in her throat and tears sting her eyes too soon. “It’s because my brother is my enemy and it’s because I don’t believe in that shit. Fuck that. I love my brother. No shitty freckle is gonna change that.”

They all laugh but they all cry, too. Raven tells her what happened with Finn, how they grew up together and melted into each other until they couldn’t find their respective limits.

“It was just Finn. It’s always been just Finn, ever since I was a kid. I don’t know what came first – the soulmates marks or being best friends.”

Clarke tells them that she has the same name on both wrists and for a while, no one says a thing. Police sirens wail in the distance, painting their apartment red and blue, and Octavia’s dress shines like the stars her brother can name.

“See, that’s why I hate this,” Octavia muses, lifting her wrist. The sword is sharp and grey, just ink, but Clarke swears it catches light. “What if that’s just a chance to write someone off at the beginning? What if it’s coincidence? And who the fuck came up with this?”

“The names have always been there,” Clarke shrugs, having come to terms with it a long time ago. Sometimes she takes the bracelets off and draws little stars to cover the name. “And they’ve been telling us what to do since forever.”

“Fuck that,” Raven hisses. “I’m with Octavia – no shitty freckle is gonna tell me who I’m supposed to love.”

Maybe there’s bravery in trying, too.

The second thing that happens is that Octavia gets sick. It starts out as a harmless cold and turns into pneumonia.

Octavia is practically delirious, burning up in the backseat as Raven drives like crazy and Clarke tries to keep O afloat. The doctors promise them they’re going to do everything to help her but Clarke shrivels at the smell of the antiseptic, at the sight of green hospital walls, and it takes Raven to get her to sit down and breathe.

She still flinches when she hears the doors flapping but this time it’s Raven, limping like she does when she’s tired and her leg is being a bitch.

“He’s coming.”

“Bell?”

Raven nods. “Yeah. He’s not too far away from here.”

And yet they’ve never seen him, that guy who knows too many myths and can’t love a girl because he loves his damn history too much (according to Octavia).

“Doctors say anything?”

Clarke shakes her head, feeling small and useless again. She should be doing something. She should –

“Fuck, Raven. If I’d stayed in pre-med, I would’ve known it wasn’t just a cold, I should have – “

Raven smacks her fingers. “Shut the fuck up, Griffin. Neither of us could’ve known. Don’t blame yourself now.”

She tries not to but she sees Octavia murmuring unintelligibly in the backseat, hot to touch and eyes glassed-over. Full of life to waning in front of Clarke’s eyes.

When Bell arrives, Clarke feels it as an affirmation of what she’s always suspected - that the world hates her for some reason and that she should have known better than to hope things would turn out alright.

At first, he is gorgeous. Wild inky curls – like he lives in a perpetual storm, broad shoulders fashioned to carry the world (Clarke knows exactly two Greek myths from start to finish – Orpheus and Eurydice, and Atlas), dark skin covered in freckles – and it suddenly makes sense why he knows all the stories about constellations when she could find thousands of them in his cheeks.

But then his glare singes her and he’s storming towards them, nothing but disgust and anger in his eyes when he stops in front of Clarke. Not Raven. Just Clarke, like he’s getting ready to unleash hell upon her.

That’s when she knows that Bell isn’t just Bell. No, she couldn’t feel that fury and that pull – like her heart is a war drum and every nerve in her body wants to come close, to see whether they’d destroy each other or just collide. The pull that has her seeing red and blinding white at the same time, breath catching in her throat but fists bunching up at her sides.

Her skin itches where she keeps it covered by her bracelets and she knows that his name isn’t Bell. No.

“Bellamy.”

He knows and she sees it. While she’s standing with her breath knocked out of her lungs, there’s a forest fire raging in his eyes and all she can think about is how beautiful he is – even now. How beautiful, how celestial, how he might be her worst enemy but she’d still want to kiss the fight out of him.

“You’re Clarke?” he asks, even though he knows already. Muscle in his jaw ticks when he sets his jaw, so similar to Octavia in that one gesture. Like he’s bracing himself for something horrible, like he’s done it so many times it’s become muscle memory.

“Yes, I am,” she replies, lifting her chin petulantly and crossing her arms. It’s fascinating, how he makes her want to smooth away the crease between his eyebrows and rip him to shreds.

Then his hand flinches and she sees his wrists, dark strips covering both. Black ink encircles them, erasing the names for good, and Clarke tries not to let it get to her but it still hurts – like it hurt when her mother first told her that her soulmate would forever be her worst enemy, too.

“What sort of a shitty friend are you?” he snarls, voice dripping with venom that somehow doesn’t make things worse. It just establishes what she’d known. “How could you not notice that she has pneumonia?”

It’s Raven who comes to her defense. “We didn’t know, Blake. What the fuck are you – “

He spares her a sidelong glance, a hiss, “I’m not talking to you. I want to know what the fucking princess has to say for herself, since she’s pre-med.”

The last word comes out twisted, bitter, his full lips curling into a sneer. She wonders whether he really doesn’t know or he’s just found the one thing that makes her want to curl up into a pathetic ball on the floor and wither away.

Still, Clarke doesn’t back down. Instead, she squares her shoulders and stands her ground. I belong to no one and no one belongs to me. He doesn’t get the right to utter three sentences and break her.

“Except I’m not - which you would have known if you gave two shits about who your sister is friends with. But no, you had to leave, get a degree. Fuck Octavia, am I right?”

She knows she’s found his weak spot right there, from the dangerous flash in his eyes, every muscle taut, knuckles white at his sides.

“You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

“Is that so? Because this is the first time I’ve seen you in the last two years. A brother who cares doesn’t do that. A brother who – “

Through gritted teeth, he warns, “Say another word and I’ll – “

“What? Punch me?” She scoffs. “Yeah, Bellamy, go right ahead. You couldn’t make me feel shittier even if you tried.”

His jaw snaps shut and Clarke takes a seat next to Raven, settling in comfortably. Her sweater scratches at her skin while Bellamy’s glare burns a hole in her cheek. She doesn’t care, doesn’t care, keeps repeating it as he stares.

Finally, he takes a seat, too, but it doesn’t feel like a truce. It feels like a promise of the horror that’s to come.

Octavia wakes up and when she sees them standing by her bed, she swears.

“Shit. You’ve met.”

It takes her a while to explain that she’s always presumed who Clarke is. When she does, Raven is sleeping in the armchair by the window, Bellamy is pacing back and forth, running his fingers through his hair (Clarke’s not sure how she knows that it’s a tell he’s nervous, but she still does), and Clarke wants to know.

She wants to know if he’s felt betrayed by her, too.

“I just figured, it’s not exactly a common name,” Octavia explains, cheeks sullen and eyes drooping with fatigue. She’s out of the woods but Clarke’s still worried. “I didn’t want to say anything, not until you were ready. You know how I feel about that enemies shit. Bell has my name on his right wrist, too, but he’s still here.”

Clarke sneaks a peak towards him, finds him looking at her already. Puzzled, a crease in his brow again, like he can’t get the hang of her. “So you have both my name and Octavia’s?”

He nods, curt, and Clarke wonders what kind of a man has two enemies and only one soulmate.

“I didn’t want him to come, Clarke,” Octavia tells her softly, like she’s not the one who’s sick and in need of comfort. “Bell would’ve met you already, he’s a fucking mother hen.”

“O-“

“No, wait, I have to tell her,” Octavia cuts him off. “She’s my best friend and you are my brother. I don’t want you two to fight.”

They promise they won’t, almost in unison, and if things were different, Clarke would smile at him. But they’ve got each other’s names on their wrists and so they lie, for Octavia’s sake.

That night, when she returns home, Clarke takes off the bracelets, stares at his name for a very long time. The ink gives away nothing, it never has. But she burns the leather all the same, watches it turn to ash and dust in her bathtub, and faces her bare wrists.

All this time, she’s been scared shitless of the monster that she might be, loving the man that she hates.

And now that she knows him – she’s not scared. She’s determined, if anything. Determined to prove that it’s all bullshit, that hate can’t extinguish the flame of love she feels for her friends every day. Determined to prove that soulmates aren’t people with whose names you get born imprinted onto your skin.

The real soulmates are the ones you choose.

*

Over the next two years, Bellamy becomes a distant voice at the other end of the line – “Is Octavia here?” “Yeah, sure, wait a sec.” He becomes Octavia’s stories of how he finally graduated and accepted a job in New York. An invisible entity that comes in form of a text Clarke receives when O’s battery dies and Bellamy just wants to check if everything is alright.

He’s not her soulmate, he’s not her enemy. He’s just Bellamy and there is nothing to talk about. Whenever he drops by, an overnight bag slung over his shoulder and glasses crooked on top of his nose, there’s electricity crackling in the air – that first moment in which Clarke’s fight or flight instinct kicks in. But Octavia breaks the tension with a joke, making both of them laugh, and it gets easier.

One morning, Clarke forgets that he’s there and forgets that her wrists are bare. Everyone knows now so why should she hide it? It means nothing if she doesn’t let it.

Bellamy is wearing a threadbare shirt, ratty pajama pants and his hair is a fucking mess as he gets breakfast ready for them. Octavia was right, he is a mother hen, and Clarke would’ve found it funny if there still weren’t miles separating them from becoming something akin to friends.

“Clarke, hi,” he stutters, nearly knocking a plate full of pancakes over. She holds them steady, flashes a quick smile in response. “I didn’t think you’d be up this early.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got to be in the studio at ten.” He frowns, confused, and she clarifies, “Art major. I paint.”

“No shit?”

At that, she can’t help but to grin. It’s weird, grinning when he’s in the same room, but it’s not bad. “No shit.”

“Huh.”

They work around each other in the kitchen for a while seamlessly, Bellamy puttering around the stove with that self-assuredness that can only come when you’ve taken care of someone ever since you were a kid yourself. Clarke knows a lot about him but it still feels too private to talk to him so she turns the coffeemaker on.

“Do you take your coffee with milk or?”

Bellamy nods. “Just two sugars, please.”

It’s not until she hands him a chipped purple mug that his fingers touch hers and his gaze drops to her wrist. She’s gotten used to the ink but it’s new for him. Automatically, she looks for her name and remembers that he’s covered it.

“You really do have my name,” he whispers. The tips of his fingers make her whole body hum with electricity. It’s the first time he’s touched her, she realizes, and the ludicrousness of that makes her chuckle nervously.

Bellamy looks at her, expectant and Clarke shakes her head. “No, it’s just that – this is fucking ridiculous, isn’t it? We keep dancing around each other but we haven’t talked about it.”

He bristles at that, taking his mug forcefully enough for some coffee to spill on Clarke’s hand. It stings just a little. “Nothing to talk about.”

“You’re kidding, right? You think that, just because you painted my name black, everything else stops?”

For a second, she thinks he might say yes, but then he sighs, like he’s not twenty six – rather, two thousand years old, leaning on the shoddy counter in their little kitchen. “What do you want me to say, Clarke? No. I don’t think anything stops. But I don’t want anything to happen.”

“Because it’s easier to push people away, huh?”

She doesn’t even know why she’s fighting him when she agrees with him. It’s absurd but she still feels like she’d keel over if she didn’t disagree out of principle.

“God, Bellamy, you’re a coward, aren’t you? You pretend you’re all high and mighty, above all of this caring shit, but all you wanna do is care. It’s pathetic,” she adds when he doesn’t move, gaze fixed to the floor. Only after she’s said what she shouldn’t have – it was wrong, so, so wrong – does he look at her.

He’s not even angry. Mostly, he looks resigned, curls brushing against his forehead, muscles strained in the tight-fitting shirt, and he’s not sharp turns and hard marble anymore.

In the morning light, he’s just a man. In the morning light, she just wants to find out whether there’s anything redeemable between the two of them.

“And you’re fucking desperate to be loved, Clarke. You’re no better than me.” His smile is sad and there’s no heat to his words. He’s just telling the truth. “You keep repeating that you don’t believe in this soulmate crap but I can see straight through your mask. You can fool yourself six ways till Sunday but you don’t fool me.”

The silence seems to stretch on forever and Clarke bursts out laughing. She laughs because she can’t be mad anymore, not when he’s right, and she laughs because that’s probably the worst thing about this whole mess.

It’s like they can smell the blood dripping from the other’s wounds, knowing just what to say to hurt the other without even trying.

So she laughs, nearly drops her coffee, and then invites him to join her on the couch. He sits next to her, amused, and when Octavia finds them half an hour later, they’re still sitting with their thighs pressed together, drinking coffee and talking.

“Now that’s something I thought I’d never see,” she says, grinning from ear to ear.

Their lives have long stopped making sense but Clarke doesn’t mind. Sure, he might fuck her up completely by the time they are through but right now, he’s telling her how his students are the fucking worst (“And I mean the worst. This one kid thought Bill Gates is our current president.”) and she makes fun of how predictable he is, covering the names on his wrists like that’s going to change something.

“You wore bracelets,” he points out, sliding his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose. “Bracelets, Clarke.”

She shrugs, takes a sip of her coffee. “Bracelets are cool, Bellamy. Get with the program.”

He turns from the faceless entity on the other side of the line into Bellamy “How’s it going with pieces for your exhibit?” Blake into “You sure you don’t mind picking me up from the airport?” into Raven, Octavia and Clarke graduating and Bellamy cheering for the three of them equally.

They’re not friends, they can’t be when they’re destined both to love and hate each other, and they’re wary of crossing the point of no return. He’s sensible, when he keeps Octavia between them at all times, and Clarke isn’t reckless when she returns his texts politely, all correct grammar and punctuation even though she texts like a straight white frat boy with everyone else.

Octavia is happy with Lincoln, loving without any pauses or reserves, and of course Bellamy worries.

“It’s dangerous,” he tells Clarke when he’s flown in for the weekend, to celebrate Octavia and Lincoln moving in together. He’s got a glass of red wine in his hand and it’s already turning his lips a dark shade of blue.

“Soulmates?”

He nods. “It’s like you don’t get a say in who you love.”

“Of course you do,” Clarke counters mildly. Their fights aren’t screen doors slamming and hurricanes whirling anymore. Now it’s just bickering and the moment of unbearable tension before one of them realizes that the other is right and there’s nothing to hold against them. “We had a say. We chose not to try. Lincoln and Octavia chose to be together.”

Bellamy scoffs, his tongue darting out to lick at his lips and Clarke has to get a tight grip on the plastic lawn chair to stop herself from reaching for him. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up, every vein in his forearm popping, and she wants to trace them. She wants to paint him or take up sculpting because this beauty has to be immortalized. It has to.

“Did O ever tell you about our mom’s soulmate?” Clarke shakes her head and he continues. “Yeah, it was O’s dad. He used to beat our mom up and say that it was for her own good. He loves her, and so she should trust him that he knows what she needs.”

Clarke’s stomach plummets and now she knows. Now she understands.

“So forgive me for being careful. Yes, they are happy,” he says and looks in Octavia and Lincoln’s direction, swaying softly to the music under the soft lights in the yard. “But I don’t want her to think that she has to stay with him because he’s her soulmate. I want her to have a choice.”

They don’t touch each other – ever – but Clarke still places her palm on top of his, smiles when he looks up, bewildered. “She knows. And she’s not alone. She’s got you, Raven, she’s got me. If something happens, she knows she’s loved by so many people, not just her soulmate.”

They don’t touch each other but Bellamy still links his fingers through hers and squeezes, so much gratitude in his eyes when he finally allows himself to breathe. He doesn’t say it and he doesn’t have to. Clarke knows.

Months later, Raven meets Gina Martin and falls in love with her. Clarke watches her stumble into the apartment late at night, smiling from ear to ear, and Clarke is happy for her. Gina is kind and soft, a lot like Finn, but with an honest heart. She’s good for Raven, she makes her smile and feel good at last.

“I’m going to get a tattoo of her name,” Raven tells Clarke one morning, the same brazen look she’s worn when she told Clarke that they pick their own soulmates when they were seventeen. Now they’re twenty three and things are different.

“It’s your call, Raven.”

“I know.” A beat of silence and then – “I think she’s the one for me. I can’t know, but it feels right. Gina feels right.”

Clarke smiles because she knows that, too. She knows how right someone can feel even though they’re supposed to be at least half wrong. She feels it every single time Bellamy crashes on their couch and grunts that his back is killing him in the morning.

But she says nothing, just wishes her best friend good luck and moves on with her life.

When Bellamy tells her that the museum he takes his class to is looking for a modern art section curator, Clarke moves to New York.

Raven and Octavia drive her there, the three of them in the front of Raven’s truck, singing on top of their lungs like they’re twenty and invincible again. But Octavia’s got a ring around her finger and a sheepish smile as she tells them the story of how Lincoln proposed to her when they went hiking, and Raven answers Gina’s calls with the brightest smile in the world.

They’re still kids, they’re still friends, but they’re moving on.

Clarke moves on to Bellamy helping her unload boxes from the truck, swearing when he stubs a toe and bemoaning the loss of today’s youth’s integrity, like the old man that he is.

“Come on, Bellamy, there’s beer in it for you if you get those boxes up.”

Her apartment is a literal shoebox but it’s got soul and a fire escape she climbs onto whenever she needs to breathe. Sometimes Bellamy comes over, under the pretense of Octavia asking him to check up on her, and they sit on the fire escape for hours.

“Did you know that I’m the only one who has two enemies?” Clarke shakes her head because – no, she didn’t know that. Bellamy just flashes her a self-deprecating smile that makes her heart squeeze painfully in her chest. “Yeah, I’m hated by two people instead of just one. What a miracle.”

“I don’t think you’re hated at all, Bellamy,” she tells him, knocking her knee into his as a cat meows in the distance. His shirt is rumpled, hers is paint-stained, and the skies above them are grey, but it still feels like a magical little moment. That sort Clarke would get whenever something bad was about to happen. “Actually, I think you’re loved so, so much.”

He looks at her like he doesn’t dare think she might be right and Clarke is ready to fight him on this but in the end, he just sighs. “Maybe. But you’re right. Painting the names black doesn’t mean shit.”

It’s different with Octavia – he’s her brother. But Bellamy looks at Clarke and he knows that it could all go to hell in a second. She knows it, too. There’s nothing to stop the things from escalating between the two of them. There’s just this precarious balance they’re managing to juggle. For now.

“What sort of an asshole has two enemies and just one soulmate?”

“Bellamy Blake sort of asshole,” she shoots back, sticking her tongue out at him. He laughs at that, some of the weight she sees breaking his shoulders dissipating, and Clarke tries to savor the moment. Tries to savor feeling like they’re friends, his curls billowing in the wind that picks up, the dimples in his cheeks when he smiles at the cat that’s come to say hello, the scar above his upper lip that she wants to kiss, her bare legs dangerously close to him on the crowded fire escape, just everything she can.

When she meets Lexa, tries to fall in love and ends up feeling like she’s been betrayed again, she knows why she got all those moments with Bellamy.

How many times can she love without being loved, really?

How many times is enough for her to realize that no one could love someone like her, and that it’s always pointless to hope?

Lexa leaves her with red paint on her hands and a shirt soaked through with tears, having placed a kiss on Clarke’s forehead after she said, “Love might not be weakness, Clarke, but it’ll always be ours.”

Lexa, who kissed Clarke, knowing and accepting the pain she carried. Lexa, who was a cynic turned romantic, from rolling her eyes at couples in love to lighting candles in her apartment whenever Clarke would come over. Lexa, who made her coffee when Clarke couldn’t stop painting. Lexa, who knew about Bellamy and only smiled saying, “We choose the people we love.”

Every fucking broken hearted person said that. But that didn’t make it true.

And so Clarke takes the bottle of vodka Raven left when she came over last week, takes it and fills the tub up with cold water that might help her clear her mind. She keeps looking at her hands, the red paint that’s smudged on her legs, too, smudged on Lexa’s shirt she didn’t take back. They don’t tell her anything but there’s still blank ink on her wrists and Clarke has always been aware of Bellamy.

“He’s still your soulmate,” Lexa told her. “Just like Costia is mine. It’s powerful, what we have. It doesn’t mean it’s good for us.”

What she didn’t say is that both of them would come running if their soulmates called, but that’s fine because Clarke knew that, too.

Octavia and Raven call until Clarke’s phone dies, stuttering off to a black screen, and Clarke keeps listening to the sirens wailing outside, people shouting, car horns honking. New York is bright and alive but Clarke feels like withering away.

She doesn’t even notice when Bellamy breaks into her apartment, too busy trying to figure out why there’s a crack in the floor tile. What the fuck is up with that tile? What the fuck is up with Clarke, who runs her finger across it, leaves it red.

Bellamy comes in, wary, every muscle in his body taut like when he’d been willing to destroy her in the hospital, but different. Careful. Hesitant.

Clarke just looks at him and asks, “Why the fuck do I have a cracked tile?” He stays quiet and she rambles on, alcohol slurring her speech even though she doesn’t feel drunk. Not at all. “Can the landlord pay for it or do I have to? Wait, Bellamy, do you know of any good repairmen?”

He blinks and blinks endlessly, frozen in the doorway and searching her face like he thinks she’s lost it. She probably has but it’s alright. She’s just had one too many heartbreaks. The first one came when she was fifteen and her dad died, a car accident, just a statistic that’s going to be reported in the paper. Then came Finn, then came Bellamy and kept coming because he’s been there ever since she first noticed the ink on her wrists, and Lexa.

“I actually thought I had your name on both wrists because we would love each other so much,” she tells him at last, drunk and sad and tired as she leans her chin on the bathtub’s edge. It’s cold, and so is the water. The tips of her hair are wet and slightly red-tinted. “But sure, I was a kid. What do kids know?”

Bellamy approaches her slowly, kneels by the bathtub so he’s at eye-level with her. His expression is soft and she’s kind of always wanted to see it when he looks at her. He tucks a stray wet curl behind her ear and smiles like you’d smile to a child. “What’s up, Clarke?”

She ignores it, keeps rambling about what she’s always wanted to say. Maybe he’ll listen. Who gives a shit, anyways? “I fooled myself into thinking – hey, my soulmate is going to love me so much because I’ve got their name on both wrists. How cool is that? We’ll probably get married and have kids, or not. That’s fine, too. I like dogs. And I’d say that to my parents every single time, over lunches and breakfasts and during long car rides. I used to imagine you as a girl with curly hair and freckles, as a guy with blonde hair and green eyes, as anyone and anything, and when my cousins asked me how I’d like you to look, I’d say – I don’t care, as long as they love me. I will love them, too.”

Tears warm her cheeks up, even though her toes are already slightly blue from staying in the cold tub for too long, and Bellamy’s becoming blurry in front of her. When the bitterness rising in her throat becomes too much, she lets go, weighed tears plopping into the water almost rhythmically.

“I really didn’t care, Bellamy. I just knew I had my person and it made me feel less lonely.”

She feels his fingers against her temple, leans into the touch a little. “You were a lonely kid?”

“You wouldn’t believe it but yeah,” she shoots back, smiling as she thinks about Wells who moved away. After him, Bellamy became a safe haven before she made other friends. “So I had my person, this mysterious Bellamy. Imagine my surprise when my mom sits me down when I’m thirteen and tells me that having the same name doesn’t mean we’ll love each other a lot. It just means we’re enemies, too.”

His fingers move more rapidly across her temple, slide into her hair, pull her closer until she can feel his warm forehead against her clammy one. His breath fans across her lips when he whispers, “Fuck that, okay? Fuck that, Clarke. We’re friends, we’re never going to be enemies.”

And then he tries to help her up from the tub but Clarke doesn’t want to go. Her apartment is a mess, broken glass and spilled paint, and she clings onto the bathtub’s edges as he tries to pry her fingers away. “Just let me, Bell, just – “

He does it infinitely gentle, her worst fucking enemy and her fucking soulmate, the two of them always dancing on the edge of a precipice and never quite crossing the line.

Finally, he gives up and she knows it by the set of his shoulders, half-crouching and half-kneeling on the cracked green tiles. “Tell me what you need, huh, Clarke?”

“I need to just be small and pathetic for a while.”

Bellamy smiles at her like that makes the most sense in the world and nods. “Sure. You mind if I join you?”

She should hate him, she knows, when he climbs into the tub with her, letting her press her back against his chest. His beige slacks get darker when they’re soaked with water but he doesn’t say a thing.

She should want to fucking wreck him until he’s bits and pieces, when he rests his palms on her lower belly, careful to let her breathe – the only thing she can’t seem to get the hang of doing right now.

He is her enemy and he shouldn’t be the one she leans on, breathes out, breathes in, feeling like she can exist for the first time in the last two days.

What does it say about her that the first time she can breathe is in the eye of the storm?

“Hey, you want to know what I thought about you?” he asks, voice quiet but still somehow booming loud. Even in a room full of people, she’d find him. Miles away, she’d hear him. Why the fuck did she think she could love anyone else?

“Sure.”

“I thought you were gonna save me. No, hear me out,” he adds when she chuckles. “I was this scrappy kid from the wrong side of the tracks who was just trying to get by. Our mom always worked a lot so O and I were left to our own devices. I like to think that she turned out fine but, you know. You can’t let a kid raise a kid.”

Her stomach churns with the hatred towards his mom, who instilled “my sister, my responsibility” into him when he was too young.

“Anyways, I loved reading which probably doesn’t surprise you now.”

“Yeah, you’re a nerd,” she presses out between sobs, now calming down a little. Bellamy chuckles and it vibrates against her skin as his arms get a little tighter around her waist.

“You hang out with Octavia too much. She used to say the same thing. I always had my nose stuck in a book and I loved Greek myths the best. You know, daring heroes, brave princesses, outcasts who realized they were demigods. They didn’t get happy endings but there was always a divine intervention to save them when they were at their worst, so I thought – you know – my soulmate’s gotta be like that. They’ve gotta save me, whoever they are. Wherever they are.”

She leans her palm against his hand, tries to link their fingers together and settles for just pressing his skin closer to hers.

“Years passed and I realized that no one’s going to save me. My mom’s soulmate was shitty and I grew up in parts where everyone’s soulmate wasn’t all what the papers made them out to be. So why should mine be any different? I sure as hell don’t deserve it.”

“Bellamy, you deserve – “

“Mm, no, I don’t. But that’s fine because I’m sick and tired of it. I don’t care anymore about who I deserve, who I’m supposed to hate and love.” He takes a deep breath, water around them shifting as he straightens up in the tub. His pale blue shirt is darker now and Clarke traces the line where azure becomes navy.

“God, I am so sick of not loving you, Clarke.”

His voice is choked and when she scrambles to turn around, the tub overflowing and water dripping onto the tiles, his expression splits her in two.

Nothing could prepare her for the open hurt painted across his face, along with a small smile crossing his lips when he rubs his hands down her back like he doesn’t dare do anything more. Like that’s all he’ll ever be worthy of.

It kickstarts something inside her, pulls her to him and she cradles his head in her hands, small and weak and so fucking angry because who the hell took this beautiful man and made him think he wasn’t worth fighting for?

“Good,” she whispers against his lips, keeping her eyes focused on his. He’s trying not to hope, but his hands are still on her back and they’re sitting in a bathtub full of water like a pair of shipwrecks that don’t know how to move on. “Good, because I don’t care, okay? I don’t care about this,” she lifts her sleeve up and flashes him the inside of her wrist. “I don’t give two shits about this. I need you. That’s what I know. I’ve always needed you and all these years have been so fucking wrong because you weren’t there.”

She doesn’t care that he’s painted her name black, doesn’t care because she leaves her name on his lips when she kisses him, like a hurricane, like a tornado, like waves crashing against the shore until he gives in, returns the kiss with enough ferocity for her world to tip on its axis.

Clarke doesn’t care about the name on her right wrist because no one feels like home as much as Bellamy does and they can fight every day, they can slam the doors and break each other’s hearts with morning coffee, but she’ll still want to try.

There is bravery in trying, now she knows. Maybe love really is giving someone the key to your destruction and trusting them not to use it.

When Bellamy slides a hand into her tangled curls and bites into her lower lip, she tastes blood and it only makes her want to laugh because – there it is. That’s how they can ruin each other but choose not to.

She pulls away and brings a thumb to his cheek, wiping the tears illuminating his freckles. She doesn’t care that he wanted to forget her because she leaves her name in his skin wherever her lips find a freckle. Bellamy laughs and laughs, pulling her closer, murmuring that she’s crazy and perfect and why the hell has he been stupid for this long, like it’s nothing at all, but she knows the weight he’s had to bear.

She knows and still she loves him because love isn’t about what people deserve. She tells him as much.

“What is it about, then?”

“It’s about you and me, and the choice we have to make. I choose you, and I don’t give a shit if it’s because your name has been on my arm since I was a kid. I choose you because you feel right. I choose you because I’ve loved you even when you saw straight through my bullshit.”

Clarke chooses him because he cares, because the world made a mistake with giving him two enemies when it should have given him two soulmates. Someone like him cares too much for just one person, someone like him is going to overflow with all that love, and when she runs her hands across his back, pulls him in, it’s because she’s trying to keep him together.

Bellamy Blake is a lot. Bellamy Blake is too much, but she loves him and she doesn’t know what else to do.

“Okay,” he says, frowning as he ducks his head and tries to understand. “Okay, if you’re sure.”

They could destroy each other, but –

“I trust you, Bellamy. I don’t trust the soulmarks, I trust you.”

She knows he couldn’t bear to see her name on his skin but she doesn’t care. The dark strips over her name are nothing compared to every syllable woven into every bit of his skin she can find. She mouths her name into his shoulder, unbuttons his shirt, traces the freckles and finds constellations until he laughs, and brings her up for another kiss.

He whispers her name until it loses its meaning, fervent hands roaming until they’re soaking wet and dying to be closer, like a dam has finally broken and now they’ve got nothing to stop them now.

It’s years of trying not to collide with each other that have gotten them to being so fucking desperate now.

I love you, I love you, I love you, in every touch, in every kiss. In his lips when he brings her wrist up and peppers it with feather light kisses that send shivers down her spine, warm her right down to her toes.

In the morning, she traces the freckles on his back until he opens one eye and his lips curl into a smirk.

“Having fun?”

Clarke hums in confirmation, keeps going at it. “Octavia said you know all the constellations.”

He turns around in her arms, nods seriously. “I do. I can teach you.”

But now that she knows Bellamy, his freckles don’t look like constellations anymore. They look like battlefields and he hasn’t stood triumphant over every single one but damn, at least he’s fought like hell.

*

Ten years later, when a journalist asks her why she named a painting of two people in love ‘Fallout’, Clarke just squeezes Bellamy’s hand.

“Because sometimes love is a nuclear reaction. It doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting for.”