Christmas prompt from @morleybob : Bellarke Modern AU where Clarke is a resident in a hospital and is in a relationship with Bellamy but Clarke has to work on the night before Christmas and Bellamy wants to surprise her with a visit at work but has an accident on the way there and Clarke stays with him the whole night (because he's in danger you know) and when it's morning and it's Christmas Bellamy wakes up and asks her to merry her?
Clarke slumps into a chair in the resident’s lounge, relieved to be sitting for the first time in what must be 13 hours. It’s hard to decide whether her feet hurt more than her back or vice versa. It’s been one of those shifts where one disaster has replaced another, but thankfully she’s not had to deliver the worst kind of news to any waiting families. She hates looking into those desperate, pleading eyes and not being able to give them the answers they want, especially now, just before Christmas.
She exhales slowly, lets the tension seep out of her bones. It’s her last shift before the holidays, just a few more hours and she can go home and curl up in Bellamy’s arms and stay there for a week. A slow smile tugs at her lips at the thought. She fell for him so hard when she first met him, and every day since she’s been falling a little more.
She tugs her phone out of her pocket and sees a message from him and she shouldn’t still get butterflies after six years but she does every time, without fail.
I’ll stop by the hospital after my shift. Love you x
It makes her grin wider and stupider. Sometimes he’ll stop by on his way home from work just to check on her, just to make sure that she’s well hydrated and that she’s eaten some of the provisions he always packs for her. He’s such a mom, but she loves it.
She frowns when she sees the time of the message. It’s already two hours old and she’s pretty sure he should’ve finished his shift already. Her thoughts are interrupted by her pager buzzing, and she puts her phone away in her locker again before hurrying down the corridor to her next patient.
When she’s done an hour later, Miller’s there and she smiles widely at Bellamy’s partner, waving at him with a limp hand. She’s so exhausted it takes her a few moments to realise he’s not smiling back, and Bellamy isn’t right behind him like she expected. In fact it takes her several moments to question Miller’s presence entirely. The wheels in her head turn slowly, noticing that Miller is still in his police uniform. The dark material looks wet, too dark and sticky. And then she sees his hands. His hands are shaking uncontrollably and they’re covered in blood.
Her body goes cold and she stops in her tracks. Miller’s face is ashen, his eyes staring blankly ahead, and it’s clear that he is in shock. Behind him, more police officers turn up, agitated and pacing, and even if she recognises many of them they all refuse to look at her. She turns slowly, walks on autopilot to the curtain behind her, ripping it open.
It’s like the world stops in its tracks. She can hear Jackson giving short, curt orders to the nurses to hang more units, to increase pressure, to check for exit wounds. She can hear machines beeping erratically, and interns giving stats that are far from reassuring, but it’s like the doctor in her has left the building because the only thing she can focus on is him. There, on the gurney, is Bellamy, pale and unconscious. He doesn’t even look like himself, his freckles barely visible, his hair smeared back and blood soaked compressions stuck to the side of his head. One of her interns is pressing down hard on his gut, her plastic gloves stained red with his blood. Another of her resident colleagues is applying pressure to his right leg, but she can see the blood spurting out beneath the compress and that’s when the room starts spinning.
Thank you so much to Hilly ♥ for participating in our bellarke christmas. Please go and check out her other great work.
He can think of at least ten other places he’d rather be right now, but all in all he could do worse than the annual Arkadia Creative Inc christmas party. There is half decent food, beverages with a reasonably high alcohol content, and thankfully this year someone has finally manned up and banned Jasper from the DJ booth. Plus there’s the added bonus of being able to openly perv at his girlfriend’s glorious tits in that tight, red dress she bought especially to drive him to the brink of insanity. It’s a christmas party, it’s expected.
Normally, he tries to be inconspicuous about checking her out. They told Kane they were seeing each other and he’d made them go to HR to sign a bunch of forms to basically say that yes, it was consensual, and no, Clarke wasn’t abusing her position of power to sexually harass him. Other than that they had decided to keep it quiet, both to avoid office gossip (Jasper) and water cooler judgement (mostly Indra, but fuck if Miller couldn’t be a little bitch when he wanted to be). He kind of likes it, likes keeping something just for him and Clarke. Plus, he’s getting it on the regular now, so they’ve totally chilled on the office sexcapades. Apart from that time they were working really late and Miller went out to get them dinner and he bent her over the conference room table. Oh and that time Clarke had been away on a business trip for two whole days sexting him the entire time and he dragged her into the handicapped toilets and went down on her the minute she stepped foot into the office. But you know, as a rule, the office is strictly for business these days.
“Stop staring at Clarke’s tits, you perv,” Miller says, mild, handing him another one of Monty’s suspicious looking drinks.
“Why the fuck does Monty alway put tinsel in every drink he makes, it only makes them more difficult to drink,” he grumbles, deflecting, but not really bothering to drag his eyes away from those glorious breasts that he is intimately acquainted with by now.
“Maybe it’s so you don’t get drunk at your place of work and ogle your boss’s rack,” Miller suggests, but he’s not rolling his eyes yet so he figures Miller’s just as tipsy as him and probably doesn’t give two shits what Bellamy stares at.
Clarke laughs heartedly across the room, patting Kane affectionately on the shoulder. Her smile is brilliant and devastating at once, and it makes his heart squeeze to see her so relaxed and happy. He remembers her shedding actual tears of happiness when her mother had called and told her she’d gotten engaged to Kane. Watching her repair her relationship with her mother has consistently done funny things to his stomach. He’s known he’s been in love with her forever, but he never truly understood what that meant until he realised he had become dependent on her moods to determine his own. If she is happy, he is ecstatic, if she is upset, he is devastated. She’s turned him into a goddamn sap and it’s almost disturbing how little he cares.
“Dude,” Miller says, elbowing him in the side for effect, and yeah, maybe it is time to stop staring now. Shit, Monty makes a lethal cocktail.
“I’ll stop staring at tits if you stop staring at Bryan from accounts,” he grumbles, elbowing back in pure childishness.
“Yeah, well, at least I’m tapping that,” Miller huffs, one corner of his mouth turned up in a self-satisfied smirk.
“Really? You and Bryan?”
It is entirely possible that he has been too busy trying his best not to watch Clarke’s ass wiggle in her selection of tight skirts around the office to notice that Miller is having a secret affair right under his nose.
“For a while now, yeah,” Miller confirms, and maybe he has been hovering around the break room a little too much recently.
“Nice,” he offers, taking a big gulp of his drink and then proceeding to cough most of it back up, because holy shit, Monty!
“You ever gonna do anything about your massive boner for Clarke, or are you just gonna keep picking fights with her so she doesn’t notice that you always stare at her tits?"
“I don’t pick fights,” he snorts, but he totally does. He and Clarke fight like cats and dogs in the office, just like old times, but now it’s because of how sure they are of each other. Plus, it’s a nice warm up for later.
“Really? That’s your takeaway?”
He just shrugs, and Miller actually rolls his eyes, and thank god his phone buzzes in his pocket so he has an excuse to abort this conversation asap.
You look so good in that tie.
He looks up and Clarke’s eyes are glittering darkly at him from across the room. He nearly drops his phone, cause she bought him this tie for his birthday and then proceeded to use it to tie his hands together behind his back and go down on him until he damn near passed out. Afterwards he accused her of trying to murder him. She didn't deny it.
Yeah? You got plans, Princess?
He shoots back a quick message, and he’s vaguely aware that Miller is still talking to him but it’s a little difficult to juggle a drink, a phone, a hard on and a casual conversation at once.
Take it off.
Oh ok, fuck, she means business and her eyes are dark and heavy on him and he can’t down his drink fast enough all of a sudden, never mind the tears it bring to his eyes. He shoves his empty glass into Miller’s hand and his phone back into his pocket and starts to undo his tie with shaky hands.
“Whoa, Party Blake coming out?” Miller snorts, and there is a vague thump of awareness at the back of his scull that he should probably care that he’s in a public place and that there are eyes all around. But then she does that thing with her mouth that drives him nuts, she runs her tongue lightly against the seam of her lips and he loses all ability to think rationally.
“No, just hot in here,” he grumbles, a little more breathlessly than he’d like.
He rolls the tie up slowly in his hands, and he’s about to shove it into his pocket when she makes a move, slowly stalking across the dance floor towards him. The red fabric of her dress stretches tightly over her curves, making it a little hard to breathe and a little more hard to stand up straight. He watches her hips sway slowly, watches her curls bounce, and then he makes a really concerted effort not to look at her tits because things are already getting pretty difficult to contain down there.
“Incoming,” Miller hisses at him, and he actually straightens his back like he’s bracing himself, and man is Miller gonna have a field day with that later.
Clarke holds his eyes steady in her gaze and the way she looks at him makes him want to run away from her and towards her at the same time, she still terrifies him and excites him in equal amounts. He swallows hard as she approaches them, but just when he thinks she’s gonna come straight up to him she slides past them, brushing against his shoulder. Her hand meets his, tugging the tie out of his hands before she disappears down the corridor behind him. He lets out a shuddering breath and immediately reaches for another drink, whist Miller pats him sympathetically on the back.
“Just fucking talk to her already,” he huffs, giving him some serious side eye before he slinks off to find Bryan. “You’re pathetic,” he adds, just for good measure. He hates it when Miller is right.
He watches the party grow more raucous, sees Jasper make a beeline for the DJ booth and Monty’s eyes widen in alarm. Everyone is drunk and getting worse, happy and electric and thankfully completely unaware of the internal struggle he’s having with the tent in his pants. His phone buzzes in his pocket again, and while that doesn’t exactly help his situation, he already knows, just fucking knows, that his life is about to get 1000% better.
He’s turned on his heel, darting down the dark corridor behind him in a heart beat once he’s able to breathe again. Clarke’s just sent him a photo, perched primly in an office chair, naked except for a pair of skimpy panties, her shiny black heels and his goddamn tie. He’s pretty sure no one saw him leave, but even so he couldn’t have stayed a second longer at the party when his cock is rock hard and painfully pressed against the zipper of his slacks.
He looks into each dark, glass walled office along the long corridor, but she’s not in her own office, nor in the next ten he peers into. When he finally finds her, he’s pretty sure his heart skips a beat. She’s got her legs up on the desk, her hand toying with the tie and her pale skin glowing in the street lights from below, but it’s her smile that really stops him in his tracks.
She’s so beautiful he finds it hard to tear his eyes away from her. He’s seen every part of her. He’s seen her naked, he’s seen her crying. He’s seen her angry and frustrated and drunk and hangry, he’s seen her irrational, messy, insecure and he’s seen her be wrong. And he’s never stopped finding her beautiful even for one second.
“Babe,” she laughs, and he has to shake that thought out of his head because she is naked in the office, with their drunk colleagues just a few steps away. “Come here.”
She beckons him over and it’s only when he walks into the office that he realises it’s Kane’s office. Fuck. Every time he thinks there isn’t anything in the world he can find hotter, she proves him wrong.
“Here? Really?”
“Didn’t peg you for a quitter, Blake,” she smirks, that familiar challenge in her voice again, and he stands no chance against it.
“What is it with you and challenges,” he chides, moving around the desk with sudden urgency, dropping to his knees in front of her.
“I just like winning, that’s all,” she pouts, but it quickly turns into a moan when he runs his fingers up her thighs, swings her around and places a leg on each of his shoulders.
“I think I’m the one winning here,” he mumbles as he buries his nose in the soft silk of her panties, inhaling her scent.
He noses carefully at her clit, drawing out soft whimpers from her lips that make his head spin.
“Nope, definitely me,” she pants as he hooks his thumbs into her panties and slides them off her legs, pushing her knees up in the air.
“Fuck, Princess, let’s just agree we’re both winning here, ok,” he says, impatient, before leaning in and licking a fat stripe up her slit.
He laps at her, slow but firm, keeping his tongue flat against her as she tenses and flexes underneath him. She runs a hand through his hair, nails scraping against his scalp and he was already a little tipsy, but nothing can ever make him drunker than her juices.
“Fuck, that feels so good,” she babbles, her voice high and whiny, her hand erratic and needy.
He stiffens his tongue and dips it into her, slow and methodical, winding her up higher and higher until her legs tremble under his hands and her moans turn into pleads. He moves up to run quick circles around her clit with his tongue and she jerks against him so hard that the wheels of the office chair rolls her closer.
“Bell,” she moans, loudly, and he’ll never tire of hearing her come to pieces with her mouth full of his name.
He closes his lips around her clit and sucks gently, flicking his tongue over the swollen flesh fast and hard until her whole body starts to convulse. He sucks harder and she pulls him closer, clawing at him, desperate to get him where she wants him. She comes hard and loud, a string of expletives tumbling out of her mouth, but the music from the party drowns out most of her desperate sounds.
“Princess,” he sighs, breathless, his forehead resting against the back of her thigh. Her skin is like velvet, his hands soothing her trembling with long, slow caresses. “You drive me crazy, do you know that?”
His mind is full of her, she invades his every waking thought, and most of his dreams too. He never truly understood addiction until he let her consume him like this. He’s pretty sure love is as close as you can get to insanity.
He runs his hands under her so he can get back up on his feet and put her down on the desk, pressing a searing kiss to her lips. She chases his lips with her tongue, licking her own taste off him.
He palms her breasts, groaning into her mouth at the glorious weight of them in his hands. He jerks his hips against her, his cock throbbing with want when she clamps her legs around his ass, pulling him in closer.
“Why are you still wearing all your clothes,” she breathes, pulling at his collar petulantly.
“Not all,” he smiles, pulling at the tie dangling between her breasts.
“Come on, babe,” she laughs, releasing him just enough so she can unfasten his belt and tug at his fly.
He only gets a few buttons open before she’s got his cock free, closing her soft fist around him, pumping him slowly. He leans in and captures her mouth gently in his, his hands flying up to cup her face. He loves to have her any way she wants him, hard and fast or slow and careful, but sometimes he just wants to stop time so he can poor all his feelings into his finger tips and make her know his love even if he can’t say the words yet.
“I need to be inside you baby,” he whispers into her mouth, and he doesn’t think his need for her, his urge to be as close as he can will ever fade.
She runs a thumb over the head of his cock before she guides it to her entrance. When he sinks into her it feels like he’s home, like he’s right where he belongs and the feeling never gets old. He thrusts slowly into her, relishing in the tight heat of her, the hot stretch of her flesh against his skin. Her muscles flex and contract around him with each jerk of his hips, her mouth open in a slack o like all her attention is on the feel of him in her cunt.
“You feel so fucking tight and hot babe,” he growls, nipping at her jaw.
“Fuck yeah, Bell,” she mewls, her eyes shuttering as he increases the speed with each slippery glide of his cock.
“I can’t believe I’m fucking you on Kane’s desk,” he rasps in her ear, running his teeth over her pulse point, sucking a mark on her neck she’s gonna scold him for later. Later when she’s not wrapping her legs around his ass like a vice, when her nails aren’t digging crescent shaped marks into his neck.
He widens his legs a little, changing the angle when he thrusts into her again and she hisses when he finds one of her sweet spots with practiced ease.
“Holy fucking shit,” she growls, dirty and raw, throwing her arms around his neck to bring his forehead to hers.
His mind goes blank, everything in him is need. He pushes into her, chasing his pleasure and hers, nothing else matters. She breathes out and he breathes in, moving together in focused determination. He grabs the globes of her ass to bring her closer, pushes her up against him so his pubic bone grinds against her clit and he can feel her start to lose control again.
“Fuck, babe, you’re so good to me, that feels so good.” Her words spill out in a throaty moan, and her thighs start to quiver around him.
“Let go,” he commands, he wants to see her fall apart, wants to feel her shudder and break around him. He wants to spill everything he’s got into her, wants to fill her up with his cum.
He can feel her clench down on his cock, watches as her back cracks and contorts almost painfully, hears how her breath constricts and how her voice fights against raw lungs when she releases a long, deep moan. He can see her pulse hammering in her throat, watches as the muscles in her stomach contracts and her body seizes around him. He can feel the clench of her cunt draw pleasure out of him, his shaft impossibly hard and suddenly he feels that familiar surge and he falls forward, all his weight on top of her as he comes in thick streams. His vision goes dark and his breath comes out in heavy, hard heaves and the words leave his mouth without permission.
“Fuck, I love you.”
He stills on top of her as his own words reach his ears. It’s not that they’re not true, he does love her, he loves her so fucking much. But shouting it out mid-orgasm on top of Kane’s desk was definitely not how he planned on letting her know. Fuck.
He opens his mouth to explain, to reassure maybe, he’s not even sure if he needs it more than her at this stage. But just as the words find their way to his tongue he hears distinct footsteps and light giggling move down the corridor towards them, and it’s moving fast. Before he has a chance to even fully think about the precarious situation they’re in, his body reacts, pulling Clarke up and ducking them both behind the desk just as the footsteps reach them.
“Are you sure about this,” he hears Harper giggle in a very obviously tipsy voice.
Next to him on the floor Clarke’s eyes are wide in shock, but she also has that slightly blissed out look on her face that lets him know she doesn’t really give a shit if they’re caught right now because she’s still riding out the aftershocks of her orgasm.
“Yeah, no one is down here, I promise,” he hears a male voice say, and jesus, is that Monty?
There are more giggles and wet, sloppy noises that leave no room for interpretation and at this point Clarke is actively biting her lip to stop the laughter building in her throat from escaping. He shoots her a warning glare and presses a palm over her mouth but it only makes her giggle more, her whole body shaking. Finally, after more sloppy making out, Harper and Monty continue down the dark hallway and he says a silent prayer of thanks that they aren’t quite shameless enough to choose their boss’ office for their extracurricular activities. Only my Princess, he smiles to himself.
“Jesus, does everyone in this office hook up?” he mutters gruffly when they are alone again. Clarke finally lets a throaty laugh out, and she’s so infectious that he can’t help but laugh along.
They get dressed quickly, his tie getting tucked into his pocket carefully. He’s getting more and more attached to the thing now. Clarke goes first, checking up and down the hallway before slipping out, while he adjusts the papers on Kane’s desk one last time. He’s definitely going to feel bad about this on Monday, but right now his ears are still ringing a little from coming so hard.
He follows Clarke down the corridor and they manage to sneak back into the party somewhat inconspicuously. They come to a halt in the doorway and takes in the mayhem that is the Arcadia Creative christmas party with amused fondness. He clears his throat before leaning in, muttering into her ear.
“So, I didn’t really mean to say it like that...”
Before he can finish that sentence or even start to process her expression there is a loud shrill over the monitor.
“Mistletoe!” Jasper crows over the mic, and it’s like the whole room turns towards them in slow motion.
He cocks his head up, and he and Clarke are indeed standing directly beneath the mistletoe like a couple of idiots. His jaw drops and he is suddenly very aware that the entire room is looking directly at them with expectant faces. He drops his eyes to her and he can actually feel his cheeks flush with heat, even though he’s kissed her six ways since Sunday a hundred times over. He really doesn’t know why he’s suddenly struck with embarrassment, but it only gets worse when he leans in and presses a quick, chaste kiss to her cheek and the whole room groans with disappointment. He looks around at them, confused, and he definitely sees the white in Miller's eyes as he rolls them hard.
He feels Clarke’s hands tug lightly at his curls, and before he has a chance to compose himself she pulls him down into a long, lingering kiss. His pulse raises, his heart beats heavily in his chest and he can’t resist sinking into the kiss, letting his tongue slide slowly over hers and pulling her flush with his body. He’s vaguely aware of the room erupting in cheers and wolf whistles around them, but she floods his senses and all he cares about is her and how much he loves her. Which is a lot.
She pulls back after a while, face twisted into a brilliant smile, cheeks flushed and her blue eyes glistening with something like tears.
“I love you too, Bell.”
And fuck, if she can’t bring him to his knees with nothing but a smile.
Clarke takes a yoga class. Bellamy is the instructor. Her flexibility needs work.
Clarke is no stranger to yoga practice. The heavy breathing, the stifling heat, the sometimes overpowering odours, she can block them all out easily and just focus on the stretch of her own muscles, the count of her own breath, the pinpoint focus of drishti. She comes, finds her rhythm on her mat and works at her practice with minimal intervention. That is until the new teacher arrives.
She hears about him before she sees him, the regular yoga bunnies all a flutter with how thorough he is, which leads to choked giggles as they sip their coconut waters.
“I’ve never gone that deep before,” one claims, which makes the others keen loudly, so she already knows he’s probably young and decent looking. They never get this excited about any other guest teacher.
So she’s somewhat prepared when she rolls up for her first class, but she’s not about to let it distract her. She knows what she’s about and getting excited about a hard body and an acceptable face is really not in the yoga spirit. She’s here to learn, to grow, to holy shit. She’s momentarily thrown by dark curls, freckles and a jaw that she could cut herself on, tries to shake it off, but is forced to let her eyes rest on him again because he is fucking breathtaking.
She finds her mat and closes her eyes, tries to let the opening mantra clear her mind and find her centre, but it’s fucking impossible because as soon as she opens her eyes he’s right there, and her eyes flicker over the flex of his muscle as he helps another student deeper into pagangusthana. She finds her breathing and starts on her sun salutations, stubbornly focusing her eyes on her fingertips, on her navel, on her nose like she’s been taught, but she’s losing her rhythm already, breathing into downward dog far longer than she’s supposed to.
Before she can come up, she feels warm hands on her hips, pushing her backwards and she forgets to breathe in as he fits his body flush against her, stretching her hips and lungs apart with thick fingers.
“Breathe,” he murmurs and dear god she’s trying, but he’s burning hot against her and the way he’s rocking her back to increase the stretch in her hamstrings doesn’t feel like the regular kind of yoga instruction when her cunt throbs like that. “Engage your bandha.”
She tries, she clenches up and in and hopes it will ease some of the pressure building inside her but instead she feels like she’s missing something to clench down on. Like his fingers. Or his cock. Fuck.
He lets up eventually, and her next inhale is shaky as hell. She hopes he doesn’t notice, but turns out he is the engaged kind of yoga teacher, and over the next hour he’s constantly on her, correcting almost every position, pushing her deeper into every asana.
Post 4x04 from Bellamy’s POV because the Bellamy Blake Bottom Lip Tremble™ won’t leave me alone
When the heart breaks it doesn’t make a sound. There is no rip of flesh, no jarring moan, no heavy thud. There is just silence. Emptiness. Like the universe itself couldn’t come up with a sound to encompass such profound devastation.
The screams that tore his throat to shreds die down but his heart keeps breaking in silence. With every heartbeat the tear in his heart grows, one side weighed down with grief. His sister. The other weighed down with guilt. His responsibility. Every breath he takes is a protest against his ribcage, wrestling for space against the pain.
The chains tug at his wrists, carving deep grooves into his skin, but he doesn’t feel it. He is pulled over rocks and fallen trees, and sometimes he falls, but he doesn’t feel stone breaking his skin, doesn’t flinch against the crack of bone. Angry commands are growled in trigedasleng, but he doesn’t turn towards it or away from it. He feels heavy eyes on him, but he doesn’t look up at them. He keeps going, not hearing, not seeing, not feeling, just breaking.
He should probably care that there is the sharp tip of a spear digging into his back between his shoulder blades, that the spear is pushing him towards a battle that shouldn’t happen, that once again they are at the brink of war and destruction. Instead he feels numb, unaffected, since the reason to care about these things has been taken from him.
A warrior does not mourn those she's lost until after the battle is won.
She’d said that to him a long time ago, and she’d lived by those words since, but they ring hollow to him. The world could incinerate right at this moment and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Azgeda is marching on the only home he knows, ready to kill every single one of his friends, and there is no fight left in him. Keeping his sister alive had been the real battle of his life. And he’d lost. So what is there left to fight for?
He’s forced to this knees by heavy hands, a sharp knuckle tearing into his cheek when he isn’t quick enough to react. The metallic taste of blood fills his mouth and he feels a slow trickle of blood run down his face but there is no pain, no sound escaping his lips, just silence. Soon there is darkness too, a hood or something having been shoved over his head and more shackles around his legs. He accepts the blackout, he puts up no fight. They can’t do anything worse to him than they already have.
He is dragged, pushed, jostled, he is blinded and restrained, but with every thud of his boots against the ground his heart pounds and aches and tears. Gone gone gone. Even if he had started to lose her piece by piece since they landed, knowing she was alive had always kept hope floating that one day she’d come back to him. Dead. There is a finality to death that feels so severe, like a period in the middle of a sentence cutting the meaning in half. Now there is no hope of repairing what had broke between them. She died hating him.
When the hood is eventually ripped off him, the daylight is blinding and painful and he barely has the energy to tilt his head up and take in the scene before him. He’s surrounded by the Azgeda army, a sword resting lightly on his chest as a threat or precaution, it’s hard to tell which. Kane is on his knees in the mud next to him, Roan and Echo on their horses behind him. He catches a flash of Echo’s steely eyes on him - he’s felt them on him the entire trek.
I’m going to kill you.
He saves the anger for another day, if there is another day. It’ll keep.
Clarke is there, facing the entire army on her own and he isn’t even surprised. She always thinks she can fix everything. For her sake, for their sake, he hopes she can, but it doesn’t seem like it’s his business anymore. None of this matters. People are going to die. Most of the people here will be gone in two months, one way or another, so it barely matters if it all ends right here, right now.
Clarke and Roan talk in clipped tones, Kane interjects, angry voices rise behind him and the walkie in Clarke’s hand buzzes and crackles. He doesn’t really pay attention, his mind drifts, jumping over old memories. Some are painful, most are happy, but even those feel jagged and raw like they have been tainted by death.
Suddenly there is a blade to his throat, hands gripping his hair and pulling his head back to expose his neck. Echo. She issues some kind of ultimatum and Clarke’s face falls in that way he hates. Her eyes flicker and then steady, and he can tell she’s made some sort of decision. Her jaw is tight and ticking and, fuck no, not this. She doesn’t get to choose him over others, not again. Never again.
Echo’s sword digs deeper into his skin, nicking it slightly and he glances down at the metal. There are fresh bloodstains on the blade, no more than a day or two old and his heart stops beating entirely. Octavia. He stops hearing the voices around him, he only hears the blood thumping in his ears and those words that ended his world. It was a good death.
He pushes forward, leaning into the blade, letting it pierce his skin. The hand in his hair pulls back, fights him, but he keeps pushing. Warm blood pours out and he keeps going, against the muffled shouts and the pull at his scalp. Finally Echo looses her balance, letting go of his hair and letting the blade fall to the ground as she stumbles forward, calling her bluff. He huffs at the irony, that after everything she has done to him she still can’t bring herself to actually kill him.
Around him the world descends into chaos, gunshots ring and voices scream and hands grab him, but before he can figure out who they belong to there is a sharp blow to his head and the world goes still again. He leans into the darkness.
He wakes up back in Arkadia, head throbbing and heart in pieces. He finds himself disappointed that he’s alive, sighs deeply with the realisation that there will be no easy way out for him. He should’ve guessed. No lucky breaks.
There is a hand in his hair still, but it feels different, lighter and softer, not demanding anything from him. When he flickers his eyes open he’s not surprised that it’s Clarke watching him wake up. He doesn’t know when she stopped surprising him, when everything she does started to seem inevitable to him.
“Hey,” she says, eyes weary but not urgent. She must have found a way to fix it after all. He wishes there was some way she could fix this too.
“Hi,” he breathes, closing his eyes again, hiding from her scrutiny.
“What was all that about?” she asks, carefully, fingers running lightly over the unbandaged parts of his throat.
He doesn’t answer, there is no words to explain how his heart is still tearing apart, or how impossible it is to keep breathing when every breath he takes hurts.
“Kane told me,” she says after a while, voice soft and solemn, her fingers still running slowly through his hair. “About...”
She stops herself and he’s grateful. He’s not ready to talk about it, about how his life holds no meaning without his sister, about the cold that has started to settle in his bones. He stays silent because it is the only thing he can still hold on to.
“I’m sorry,” is all she says, and her voice cracks a little.
She sits by his side in quiet solidarity, running her fingers through his hair over and over until her touch makes his eyes leak. Fat, warm tears stream down his cheeks through the closed curtain of lashes, staining his skin. He stays quiet, he doesn’t wail or scream like he did the first day, when all his pain was on the outside, sharp and raw. Streams of tears wet his face but he breathes slowly, feeling the dull pain that has settled in his chest expand and contract.
She leans her forehead against his, and he can feel her own silent, heavy drops land on his face. He scrambles blindly for her hand, for an anchor and finds it, warm and reassuring. She feels his pain as acutely as she does her own, it’s what drew them together in the first place, this wordless understanding of each other’s agony.
So without a word, in complete silence, she holds him steady, carries him through as his heart finally rips apart, the pieces falling soundlessly like a feather.
