meme / @lingeringscars.
rose is almost relieved when bellamy lets the smile fall. god and everybody – at least christian and laurel and lissa, god knows she’s talked enough about it in their company – knows she loves his smile, but she can almost feel how hard he has to work for it, the effort he’s putting into holding it up. it makes her wonder if he’s doing it for her, if he feels like he has to pretend with her, and that makes her want to reach out to him, reassure him somehow that it’s not the case. it’s hard to hold herself back. she’d almost regret her words if they weren’t so true, if she didn’t feel that he was in such dire need of hearing them – that he might’ve gone his whole life believing something different and is struggling with the repercussions of that now. the last thing she wants is to make him feel like he has to force anything for her, but as she finds herself beginning to worry, there’s something keeping her silent, telling her to stand her ground and wait – wait for him to process, to keep talking, because if she looks closely enough she can see he’s on the verge of it, that maybe he’s heard the sincerity of what she’s said and that’s given him the urge to open up, given him permission to have a single moment where he’s a fraction as gentle with himself as he is with everyone else.
she’s known since she saw him on the phone that there’s more going on inside him than he’s letting on – since she saw that weary look in his eyes as he talked to octavia and the defeated one afterward, felt a heaviness to him throughout that seemed extreme for the circumstances. her gut tells her it’s the right thing, allowing him to either continue or choose not to without any additional prompting from her, but holding back was hard, just as it was when she’d seen him become more and more strained on the phone with his sister, but she can see the necessity of her patience, and so she finds it within herself.
once she knows it’s right, it’s not so hard at all to muster.
it was that distress that had kept her in the room even though she wondered if the right thing would be to turn around. she didn’t know he was on the phone when she’d walked in, and for all she knew this was a private conversation he didn’t want an audience for. just because he liked having her around and seemed to enjoy whenever she did something that implied she felt at home here didn’t mean he wanted her present for conversations with his sister, and while it was an honest mistake, he might not appreciate her hanging around afterward. but she could hear the exhaustion in his voice, and no matter how she tried to convince herself to wait in the living room until he was done, she couldn’t stand the idea of leaving him alone like that. so instead she’d sat on the bed hoping she could lend him some kind of support, that having her there was better than not. it was a risk, one a part of her still worried was taken hastily, but she was glad she was there when it was over, glad to be able to take his hands and try to offer him some comfort. she hopes he’s glad as well, that he’s not wishing he was alone.
just as the smile disappears she finds herself reliving that last second of it, though, and then understanding outweighs insecurity because suddenly she can almost feel what he’s feeling so completely – so perfectly – that it’s nearly painful, can feel what he’s feeling because she’s lived it before, experienced it herself. maybe not the same thing, not the exact same thing, anyway, but she knows what it’s like to have been given something kind and not know how to hold it, to simultaneously want to hold it close to your chest and throw it away because you can’t possibly deserve it, can’t possibly keep it to yourself. bellamy wants to push it away because that’s what he knows, but he’s trying to hold onto it anyway. he’s trying to cup it in his hands and tuck it away somewhere safe, even if all he wants to do is give it back to her, even if all he feels like doing is sending it far away. rose is inspired by that, will remember that next time she finds herself wanting to do the same, how much it took for him to keep it close and accept it rather than turn it away, but for right now, she’s proud of him. god, she’s so proud of him. she can’t respond to the thank you because she’s so proud of him.
and she wants to tell him more than anything, but that would be asking too much right now, maybe, so later, maybe, and then he’s talking – he’s talking, telling her things, and all there is in the world is what he’s telling her. they haven’t moved long enough for her to become restless, to begin fidgeting with his hands out of habit, but she lacks the urge. she does squeeze them, though, silent encouragement, the silent tenderness she finds herself aching to give him out loud, to express by wrapping her arms around him. it breaks her heart, what he’s saying. it’d be easy to cry for him, to hold him as if she can somehow heal every heartbreak he’s endured that way, but she knows he can’t. she does let her thumb meet his, though, her way of temporarily staving off the massive urge she has to hold him, to physically position herself so that she’s between him and any threat that could possibly materialize in the doorway because he’s allowed himself to be vulnerable.
until you. she wants to be warmed by that, but mostly she’s sad, sad because she hates the idea of bellamy having lived so long with this alone, that she wasn’t somehow there earlier to ease the ache. it should be a wonderful, heady thing to be first in this way, to give him something no one else was willing or capable of giving, but her heart breaks again and again for every year bellamy went without something as simple as unconditional love, as safety. for every year he felt like he didn’t deserve love, like he had to earn it, like his worth and value in a relationship was as a caretaker. i’m sorry, she wants to say, because she is, she is, or that’s horrible, because it is, it is, but neither of those things feel right, and neither does telling him her opinion of how he was raised when he’s still forming it himself. something in him is trying so very hard to process that, and she needs to let him, no matter how much she wants to insist it was cruel, so cruel.
if bellamy decides he is going to resent his mother for what she did to him, for the weight she put on him, she’ll be the first person to tell him it’s okay, that feeling whatever he feels is okay; she won’t discourage him like dimitri did her, won’t dismiss him like her mother has. but he has to get there himself. he can’t be thinking about her anger; he can’t be thinking about her, period. “ that must have been so hard, ” she does say, so softly it’s nearly a whisper, soon finding herself unsatisfied with the words. hard. the understatement of the century. “ that must have been impossible, ” she corrects. because no matter what he did, he would have been wrong, or felt wrong. more than anything she wants to say it wasn’t his fault, that he’s not responsible for any of it, but she knows it would be invalidating him, because even if it wasn’t his fault, he was all that octavia had, all that kept her alive. to say he wasn’t responsible is to say that isn’t true, and as much as she wants to cry at the thought of a six year old bellamy trying to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, that’s not something she can do now. she has to hear him when he says it was all on him, because it was. it had to be because he was all there was.
“ you’re the strongest person i know, ” she says at that second part, eyes full of truth, of faith, even if a little shiny. it’s clear she means every word she’s saying. “ even when you’re scared. even when you’re upset. even when you don’t know what to do or say. none of that makes you weak. ” she’s thinking about the phone call now, this phone call that stirred all of this in him. she can understand now – he wasn’t able to give octavia what she needed, or felt like he wasn’t able to, and now he’s blaming himself because since he was six years old, giving octavia everything she wanted or needed has been his job, his sole purpose for existing. that’s something else she’s going to cry about later, but she’s pushing that away for now.
“ when octavia was growing up, if anything happened, it was on you. it had to be, because auora wasn’t around and there was no one else. it was just you and octavia, ” she says in a gentle voice, choosing her words carefully. she doesn’t want to overstep, offer unsolicited advice or whatever, but she can’t shake the feeling that he needs to hear this. “ but that’s not true now. octavia has friends, she has me. ” that last part is a little tentative, but not because there’s anything she wouldn’t do for octavia, not because she’s not devoted to her – she just doesn’t give herself enough credit, ever really. “ granted, someone who wasn’t a literal percentage point away from failing most of her classes for most of her high school experience might be better suited to help her with school, but it’s still true. it’s not all on you anymore. you’re always going to be the person that raised her, but you don’t have to be everything for her anymore. you don’t have to carry the weight of that anymore, or the responsibility. ” and she knows that’s a hard thing for him to accept, so it never stops being gentle, more suggestion than fact. she doesn’t want him to feel like she’s saying he’s wrong, like she’s trying to push anything on him. “ i don’t think octavia needs you to fix everything for her anymore, ” she says in an even softer voice, if it were possible. “ maybe she just needs you to hold her hand while she fixes it herself. and maybe that’s hard and messy and takes awhile, but she’s strong, too. and she learned that from you. ” she lets her forehead touch his in affection for just a second before pulling back to look at him. “ it’s okay not to have the answers. it’s okay to not be able to make this better right now. that doesn’t make you weak. that doesn’t make you less worthy of love or anything else. ”
