An angsty post 3x05: Hakeldama drabble written for @marauders-groupie *-* Also tagging @bellamyblake because there’s pain in here AND YOU HAVE TO SUFFER WITH ME <3
I LOVED THIS EPISODE EVEN THOUGH IT HURT ME
Oh darling I don’t want to feel this distance anymore
The days after her fight with Bellamy pass mostly in a blur of his bitter words ringing in her ears, the image of his tears haunting her like the repeated nightmare she used to have of a monster when she was a child. Back then it had taken her a while to understand that the monster was just her imagination trying to trick her, and when she’d noticed the pain roaming his facial features, she had found herself wishing that that wasn’t real either; that there was no way that she had been the one to hurt him so much, because she didn’t want to think that she was even capable of that, but she knew better - knew that hurting people she cares about had become inevitable.
Why Bellamy though? Why him?
Why did it have to be the one person on Earth who never stopped believing in her? It’s the people you need the most that you tend to take for granted, and Clarke thought that her words would be enough to get him to come around this time too, but no. The obviousness of how he doesn’t trust her anymore is what is threatening to bring her to her knees: “We?” She doesn’t blame him when in fact the ‘we’ that had existed so beautifully between them had evaporated like breaths into freezing night air. Honestly, none of them know what that word means anymore, not with everything that’s happened, and as he looks at her, the fury shadowing his eyes again - when he turns his back towards her, heading for his tent, she’s afraid that it might not mean anything at all to him.
Don’t ask her why she follows him knowing that he will probably explode as always. Maybe it’s because she desperately hopes that at some point he has to have let every ounce of anger filling his body out on her, and that they could start over as soon as that’s happened, begin again. However, it’s been weeks: weeks of broken gazes, words like poison weighing on heavy hearts; the same thing repeating itself in a vicious cycle that has made her want to give up countless times.
But she cannot. It won’t ever matter how much he hates her - letting go of him is a decision that she doesn’t want to realize that she might have to make.
Therefore, this time while standing behind him, she does not ask him to talk - doesn’t demand an answer from him. Instead, she lets the words from her heart pour out of her mouth: “I hate what I’ve done to make you hate me. And I wish I-- I wish I’d stayed. But I didn’t, and I lost you. If you think for one second though, Bellamy, that I am going to stand here and watch while you suffer because of me, then you’re wrong!”
Aware that she shouldn’t, she reaches for his hand, pulling him around to face her. Breathing heavily, she closes her eyes to hide the tears in them. Pull yourself together, Clarke. He shouldn’t feel bad for this too.
Suddenly, she senses his hands on her waist, holding her in place, and the words he speaks are low, ghosting over her lips, making her heart pound even harder: “I’ve always been the monster here, Clarke. And you want me to be the man the man you left at the gate, but I’ve never been that guy. I’ve never been the good guy.”
Finally, she forces her eyelids to flutter open, staring into his dark eyes, full of hurt yet almost free of anger. This is the first time… “Maybe there are no good guys.”
Or maybe there is. It just sure as hell isn’t them. After everything they have done to people, to themselves and also, to each other: deliberately left, manipulated and hurt. More than anything else in this godforsaken world, Clarke wants that to end, wants to be able to take every mistake she has ever made back - hell, she would go back in time to stop herself from walking away if she could; she would’ve made sure that he had someone to talk to, someone to hold. Someone, he could trust. Not this new strange person she’s become, who took him for granted.
“Are you going to accept that you might never get me back?”
That question hits her like a bucket of ice water, freezing every vein in her body and causing her to tremble in his arms. With tears burning in her eyes, she lets out a single sniffle before leaning into him, burying her nose in his shoulder. “Yes,” her voice is barely audible, “even if it means that I’ll miss you more than I do now.”
Unexpectedly, the next thing she feels, so vividly, is how Bellamy’s hand is now in her hair, his calloused fingers tangling within it. Letting out a raspy breath against the skin of her neck, he slowly pulls her closer. “What I’ve done while you were away is not your fault. You haven’t turned me to into this.”
That’s when the tears start to race down her cheeks, soaking the material of his jacket, and even though he freezes against her for a second, he begins to rub her back soothingly. “You don’t have to comfort me,” at this point she’s terrified that no matter what she does, she ends up hurting him. To think that there ever was a time where she didn’t do that is unbelievable. She took that time for granted, too.
What he replies changes everything in an instant: “Yes, I do, because I’m done choosing to further the distance between us. I need you, Clarke, but you’re always so far away. The girl I knew is gone too, and I can’t get her back, even though I tried. I fucking tried!”
“I know. I’m so sorry.” Then, she takes his face in her hands, thumb caressing his cheek. “Look at me,” she begs, “there must be something you recognize.”
Although she notices that he indeed tries in earnest again, searches for her, she’s still miles away, and it hurts his eyes to have to look that far. “I left but now I’m back. You have to believe me - I never stopped caring about you,” no, scratch that. The word is not strong enough, “I never stopped loving you. That hasn’t changed,” after a beat she adds: “Has it for you?”
“You don’t care about me anymore?”
He sighs, his heart heavy. And the minute in which he stands in front of her like a statue is perhaps the most torturous of Clarke’s life. To her relief, it does pass when he presses their foreheads together, whispering with the soft voice she just barely remembers: “Yes. I do.”
At that Clarke’s heart stops, and to get it pumping again, she catches his lips with her own, then realizes, horrified, that she’s never been this impulsive with him before, that it’s supposed to be wrong and starts to pull away, but Bellamy doesn’t let her as he chases her mouth, which briefly surprises her, until he deepens the kiss without a second thought and she senses it too; miles slowly melting away, the feeling of bitterness turning into the stranger that he has seen her as for the past months.
Slower than she expected, Bellamy pulls her shirt over her head and when he’s thrown it away carelessly, her hand guides his to her heart. It’s oddly intimate while still necessary, to feel his hand dry from blood and carrying the weight of heavens, upon her chest, sliding to her ribcage. To build up courage, Clarke presses her lips to his neck, noting the effect that it has on him; how he holds the breath he was just about to let go. Then they move to his jawline and further up to press tenderly to a spot behind his ear that releases a moan from his throat. “We shouldn’t do this.”
That right there is what ‘we’ means - he’s found it again, but that doesn’t make him right.
“Yes, we should because we both want to,” startled by those words, he pulls away and for a moment Clarke fears that he wasn’t really ready to hear that, but then he lets his jacket and shirt join hers on the floor. Frowning, he steps back towards her, kissing her as if it is not his first chance but his last. Actually, maybe it’s both.
The sex is strange, honestly. Not because it’s with him but because at one moment it is powered by reassuring gazes and careful fingertips lingering upon unexplored skin - the next he’s pounding into her, swallowing her moans with deep kisses as she runs her nails down his spine, urging him on. And still, at the end, when he gives the fingers that are intertwined with own a tiny squeeze, when she brushes a sweaty curl off his forehead, they’re both crying. Crying since becoming one with each other after all of this time with unbearable distance quite frankly felt unreal.
Now, they kiss the tears off one another’s cheeks instead of encouraging more to flow. And as they lay in the dim light of the tent, Bellamy murmurs against the skin of her collarbone: “We can fix this.”
Because ‘we’ means together…
