Prompt: The four ways Clarke begins to mend, and the one way she becomes whole once more.
A/N: I basically got an anon message asking me for jet packing!bellarke (which is I guess reverse spooning? sorta?). Anyway, because I am psychotic, this got angsty as hell very fast. My many apologies.
Read on AO3.
ONE
Clarke comes home.
And it tastes different on her tongue, that word - home home home - but she repeats it to herself like a mantra, repeats it to herself as though it is the sole anchor holding her to this violent, twisting world.
She comes home, and Murphy is back, with dust in his hair and untamed terror in his eyes, with mad stories about a raving Jaha and a robot woman on the tip of his tongue like an omen. She comes home, and Jasper hasn't really been eating for months, his already-thin body now frail and aching, and he has fainted multiple times since she's been away, Abby tells her, but he just can't hold the food down. She comes home, and Raven is cursing at her leg, at the universe, at Finn and Lexa and every goddamned thing - but not at her. (When Raven sees her, she collapses into Clarke's arms and just lets herself cry, words like I'm sorry and I'm so tired and it hurts tumbling from her lips like a bag of spilt marbles at her feet.) She comes home, and Octavia gives her glares that feel like ice skating along her flesh, and Monty wraps her in a hug every fifteen minutes, and Miller gives her a relieved look and a slight tilt of his head.
Clarke is strong. She knows this about herself, despite her doubts in the past, despite the fact that she was too weak to handle the truth all those months ago. But she persevered, she soldiered on, she didn't let the darkness wrap its talons around her neck and pull her into the depths of hell, too. And so she can stand the cold looks, and the curses spit at her feet, and the wariness that surrounds everyone's interactions with her (save Raven and her mother and Monty). She understands, and even though it hurts, even though it feels like she is being stabbed a thousand times over with the rusty knives of her old transgressions, she knows she can get through this, too.
But then there's Bellamy.
Bellamy, who supported her through everything, who pleaded with her to stay all those weeks ago with promises dangling from his lips and anguish carved into his cheekbones. Bellamy, who offered her forgiveness where she was undeserving, who held his hand in her hair like a lifeline, as though by sheer force of will he could tether her to him and to them and to together. And she had taken his vow into her flaming fist and turned it to ash, burned it to the ground and left it at his feet as a parting gift as she walked away.
She doesn't know why she expected forgiveness to be offered twice, but the tiny voice of her unrelenting optimism tells her that she obviously did.
She comes home, and he's the first person she sees, standing guard at the door as she half-falls into the walls of home home home.
"Bellamy," she breathes, and she knows the smile is cracking her face in two, her lips chapped and bleeding and her head aching and her skin blistered from the sun. He looks different, a little bit older, a little more worn around the edges. Stubble is lining his jaw and there's a hardness to his gaze as he looks at her, and the only time she has seen that same loathing and detachment was so far back, when it was princess and this is on you and whatever the hell we want. She tries to force everything she needs to say into that one word, because she needs him, dammit, she needs him to know, to understand, but then -
"Nice of you to show up," he says back, and his voice is empty. Cold. Unfeeling. She feels as though she's swallowed glass, and the fragments are puncturing her heart and her lungs so she can't breathe. His words are daggers, and her body is a target, and he is launching them into her fragile flesh. (He always did have perfect aim. He always did know where exactly he could push to set her off.)
And he turns away.
She's wrapped in her mother's arms in an instant, her head perched on Abby's quaking shoulders, and she watches Bellamy's retreating form as he makes a harsh comment to Miller, as he slips into his tent and doesn't look back.
She comes home, but it feels like hell.
TWO
Clarke is adaptable.
She knows this about herself, too, and is fairly confident in her ability to take charge of a situation and handle it, no matter how many complexities arise. She led an army into the mountain of death, she found a way to make peace with a Grounder army hell-bent on destroying them, she inadvertently became the leader of one hundred teenagers when she crash-landed to Earth all those months ago, so if that is any indication of her adaptability, well: she's pretty fucking great at it.
So she adapts.
Bellamy won't speak to her, aside from a few curt words now and then when she asks a question - because he is the leader now, she supposes, since she abandoned them and him and everyone, and because there are so many changes. There's construction everywhere, and strangely-dressed men and women come through the gates once a week and meet with Bellamy, Kane, and Abby in the old Council room. "The Ice Nation," Raven whispers to her one day, both of them sitting at one of the tables outside eating a handful of the new apples the gatherers had found, as she stares. "Ever since the whole TonDC incident, all of the Grounder clans are starting to turn their backs on Lexa and her regime. They can't trust her anymore. And us..." Raven trails off, watching alongside Clarke as the three Sky People and a handful of Grounders slip into the Ark and shut the door loudly behind them. "Well," she continues, "we survived. We destroyed the one common enemy they all shared."
Clarke stares at the iron-clad door - the one that, in another lifetime, another place, she would have been on the other side of, with Bellamy by her side and Abby and Kane to her back, the peace talks and alliances being of her own making, not something that was shoved upon her. Raven sighs, sensing Clarke's emotions, and lays a hand on her shoulder. "It'll go back to normal soon," she says consolingly, and Clarke turns to her, the tears threatening to spill over but not quite there. (Clarke is a lot like that, too. On the precipice of everything: of greatness, of madness, of love, of hate. So close to snatching it in her grasp, but then it falls over the edge, tumbles into an abyss she can no longer reach.)
"Will it?" she asks tremulously, because she truly isn't sure. "Why did you forgive me?"
Raven frowns, looking down at her nails and then to the sky and finally, to Clarke.
"Because... I know what it did to you. All of it. Bellamy... Bellamy can't fully understand the scope of what happened, because he wasn't here, when you were struggling with it all. He saw Finn, and he saw Mount Weather, but..." She sighs, and gives Clarke a trembling smile. "He saw the before and the after, but he never got to see the way you fell apart. And I don't think... I don't think he realized, that by pulling that lever, it was the last crack your heart could take."
Clarke bites her lip, and she can feel the tears traipsing down her cheeks unevenly, can feel the pent-up sobs welling in her lungs and cutting off her air supply. But she swallows them down down down, because she is adaptable. It hurts now - it feels like knives dragging over blistered flesh, like stitches being pulled from unhealed skin, like she's being burned alive and drowned all at once - but pain is temporary.
But her fear, the one that has been lodged in her throat since the moment she pulled her lips from his cheek, bubbles to the surface as she murmurs, "What if he never forgives me?"
Raven gives her the saddest look in the goddamn universe, her fingers tangling with Clarke's on top of the table, and she whispers, "You, and him... it's inevitable."
"Inevitability is basically just a prettier version of fate," Clarke argues with a quirk of her eyebrow. "And I'm not sure that Earth gives a damn about fate."
Raven shrugs. "Whatever word you want to associate it with. But all I'm saying is this: you're Clarke, and he's Bellamy, and the guy can pretend to be a dick for as long as he wants, but you two always seem to find your way back together in the end."
Clarke smiles at her, and it's crooked and damaged and more of a half-grimace than anything else, but she's working on it. And Raven smiles back, a much more radiant, more lively one than Clarke has ever seen, and she rolls her eyes as Clarke says, "Raven Reyes, you've become an optimist since I've been away."
Raven goes to stand, shrugging on her jacket again and she retorts, "Yeah, well, someone had to make up for it while you were gone."
THREE
She starts working in the med-bay again, but slowly, this time, as though her mother is afraid that by letting her too close to the day-to-day injuries and maladies that come with the territory of being on the ground, she will drift away on the wind, unable to handle the sight of her people in the smallest bit of pain.
Except they aren't her people anymore. She carelessly tossed that aside, all those weeks ago. So now she is just another person among the pack, another mouth to feed, another set of hands to help build.
And she loves helping. If Clarke knows anything about herself (and she has learned quite a bit these past few months, has come to accept and understand herself better than she did before), she knows that she must keep busy. She can't fixate on the fact that Bellamy hasn't made eye contact with her in the past three weeks, can't fixate on the fact that Octavia almost hit her with a spear the other day while she was training and deemed it an accident. She certainly can't fixate on the way the words murderer and devil and evil fall from Jasper's mouth like he's eradicating the poison that has taken over his body, infiltrated his bloodstream, turned him into a hollow shell of the vibrant boy he once was. And it fucking hurts, all of it, so much more than she thought it would.
She thought it would be easier.
Clarke mostly tends to the minor injuries: bruised knees and scraped knuckles, the occasional stitch or suture when Abby's and Jackson's hands are full. But then one day Abby and Jackson are both operating on this younger kid - the idiot got himself tangled in some thorn bushes when he was outside the perimeter unsupervised (it happens more often than not, unfortunately, given the number of orphaned kids running about) - when Octavia comes stumbling in with a gash in her thigh and a sweat breaking out on her forehead. Bellamy is nowhere in sight, surprisingly, and Octavia starts talking the minute she enters, not even glancing up to see who is inside the med bay: "It... it was during training. Fucking asshole thought he was being smooth by taking his spear to my leg when I wasn't even looking - prick was just mad because I - " Octavia finally looks up after collapsing onto the bed in front of Clarke, and Clarke doesn't even pay her any mind as she begins to examine the wound.
"Was his blade clean?" Clarke asks, completely formal, readying her necessary supplies and not even making eye contact with Octavia.
"Where's Abby?" she demands, her voice cold and emotionless.
"I'm going to need to clean and stitch this, it'll probably hurt." Clarke sanitizes her hands and stealthily avoids Octavia's questions, grabbing the alcohol to douse the wound. Octavia grabs Clarke's hands, though, and she sighs.
"Where. Is. Abby?"
Clarke finally looks up and meets Octavia's clear, shining eyes. She can see the wisps of pain hanging on to the fringes of her vision - it is, admittedly, a pretty nasty cut - but she refuses to let up. She is adaptable, but Octavia needs to be, too. "My mother is in surgery right now with a ten-year-old kid. So is Jackson. So you can either wait on them, for however long that may take, which could potentially allow infection to spread and your pain to worsen and make the damage worse, or you can let me help you, since I am capable and willing and right fucking here."
Octavia blinks rapidly, her eyes flitting over Clarke's face, and Clarke can see the slightest hint of her crumbling resolve. She refuses to break the connection, her eyebrow lifted as though daring her to sit here for probably hours. Finally, with a sigh, Octavia slowly relinquishes her steely grip on Clarke's arms and lets her get to work.
It takes longer than Clarke anticipates, because the wound is deeper than it looks and she wants to ensure it's properly cleaned and bandaged. Abby comes out of surgery towards the end of her stitches, staring between the two girls as though waiting for one to spontaneously combust. But Octavia is now exhausted, leaning back against the bed with her eyes drooping shut, and she and Clarke have fallen into a shockingly companionable silence. So Abby leaves, and Clarke finishes, covering the wound in gauze and clearing her throat to gently coax her out of her dozing sleep.
"I'm done," she says quietly, covering Octavia's lower body with a blanket. "You're going to need to rest for a little while, and no training for a few weeks, at least. Unless you want me to repair those stitches, which I'm sure you don't."
As she turns to leave, Octavia latches on to her wrist. "Clarke?" she whispers. Clarke turns slowly, cocking her head to the side. "Thank you. Really. And... and he'll come around, you know. He's a stubborn asshole, but he'll come around."
Clarke gives her a shaky smile, squeezing Octavia's hand once before letting it drop onto the bed. "Get some rest, O." She slips out of the med-bay and shoves a fist in her mouth as her back slides against the wall, to keep herself from screaming.
FOUR
She and Monty and Raven eat most meals together, bringing their food back to Raven's work lab. Monty and Raven had established this tradition awhile back, apparently, because Monty was petrified of eating in there alone, of being with all those people and seeing Jasper not eat. Miller sometimes comes, too, when he isn't on guard duty, and Clarke can't pretend she doesn't see the ghost of his hand against Monty's back, the quiet intimacy that comes from established trust and no boundaries. (It makes her heart ache a bit, too, to think of what she had once had and had now lost.)
They enter the cafeteria area one day and have just grabbed their food from the line, Raven busy in a meeting with Wick about something - which neither Monty nor Clarke have any desire to interrupt - and they are beginning to make their way back to her work lab ("We won't be meeting in here, I promise," Raven had said, and so they were hoping against hope that was true) when Jasper stumbles in.
Clarke swears she hears the breath leave Monty's lungs in an instant.
Jasper is almost deranged looking, making his way through the throngs of people, his eyes fixated on Monty's face. Monty is curling into himself, somehow trying to make himself smaller even as he's standing, and Clarke can hear the words falling from his lips at rapid-fire speed, a defense mechanism he didn't even know he adopted: "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And so Clarke sets her tray of food upon one of the already-occupied tables, receiving a glare in turn, but she merely grabs Monty's shoulders and forces his eyes to hers.
"Monty, hey, Monty. Go back to the lab, okay? You go eat there. I'll be there soon." He opens his mouth to object, but she raises an eyebrow at him, and with a heavy sigh and a murmured okay, he scurries away out of the mess hall.
"What the fuck - " Jasper starts as soon as he walks up, and Clarke grabs ahold of his thin, wiry arm and starts pulling him away. "Get your fucking hands off of me you fucking murderer, you have no fucking right to - "
"Jasper, shut. The hell. Up," she snarls as soon as they are out of sight. He stands stock still, watching her with narrowed eyes, and he folds his frail arms over his bony chest. God, it makes her want to cry. He's so fragile, so thin a harsh breeze could knock him to the ground. She begins walking forward, poking him in the chest as she goes. "Look, I get that you are mad at me. But you have no goddamned right to make Monty feel like a piece of shit because you're hurting." His eyes are widening, now, in both surprise and horror and a little bit of awe, and Clarke keeps walking him backward, and she imagines this is a scene that would be funny if it wasn't so damn heartbreaking: the tiny, tempestuous girl shoving the tall, gangly boy against the wall as she screams at him. In another lifetime, another place - it would be hilarious.
It's not. Not here, not now, not this.
"And I get that you're hurting. No - don't you fucking dare give me that face. I had to shove a dagger into Finn's heart, and let him bleed out into my arms, so don't you fucking dare pretend like I don't know what it feels like to lose someone you love. And Maya's death was tragic. It will always be tragic. And I will never not be sorry for the fact that she was a sacrifice that had to be made to save you, to save all of you. Did you know we were watching Raven be drilled on a fucking table when we pulled the lever? Did you know that my mother had already been drilled, right before then - and Harper, and Monty, and it would have been all of us. All of us bleeding out, waiting to die." His back is against the perimeter fence, now, and she knows there must be people watching, somewhere, but she doesn't care. She needs him to hear this. She needs to say it.
"And you know what else? Monty is not solely responsible. He may have built the lever, but guess what? I fucking pulled it. Me and Bellamy. So you want to blame someone? Put it on me. Because I can handle it." Her breathing is erratic and her chest is heaving, their faces terrifyingly close together as she quietly finishes, "He's your best friend. Put it on me. I would rather you put it on me, if that's what it takes."
Jasper stares at her, his eyes a little bit glossed over, and he whispers, "What if... what if I stop missing her, when I forgive him?"
Clarke gives him a broken smile, a smile that has ripped edges and torn corners and has a decade's worth of pain tucked into the crevices. "You won't stop missing her. The pain... the pain doesn't ever go away, fully. But what you're doing? To Monty, to yourself? She wouldn't want that, Jasper. You and I both know that." She pauses, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and swallowing heavily. "Love isn't weakness, Jasper. You're closing yourself off from it right now, you're forcing yourself to be your own perception of strong and loyal and whatever, but it's not strength. Strength doesn't mean turning away those you love. It means letting them in enough to see the way that you may be a little bit broken, but you're still here."
She can see the silent sobs wracking his tired, quaking frame, and so she lets him slide down the fence and clutch his face in his hands, lets him sit there and cry away the pain and anguish and internalized guilt that he's been holding hostage for all these months. She turns her back and she walks away, and she sees the small gathering of people around, and she mutters, "Get away from here, Jesus. Like vultures, all of you." She scatters them, and just on the periphery - just in range of seeing what is going on - is Bellamy.
She turns away without looking back.
+ONE
It's better, now. She has Raven and Monty and Miller, the same way she did before. But now Octavia doesn't look away when she catches her eye, and Jasper has started eating again, and Harper and Monroe came into the med-bay asking for her to stitch up silly injuries that didn't need anything just for a reason to talk. It's better, and her chest doesn't ache quite so much, her back isn't quite as sore from the burden of the world she had strapped there.
It's better, but it's still not right.
Because Bellamy still won't even look at her. Not when she's also looking, anyway. She'll catch him, sometimes, with his eyes on her face and a pensive expression pulling at his brow, but as soon as she makes eye contact he quickly turns his entire body away from her, as though he's afraid she'll burn him with her gaze. They never speak, not even about minor things, anymore, because she's gotten the hang of it at this point - she's been home nearly three months, has now made up the time she's been away - and she also is petrified of speaking with him. Which feels silly and stupid and wrong, because it's Bellamy. He's her best friend, her co-leader, her partner in any and all things.
Or was.
Because she has to use the past tense, now.
She isn't really sleeping, still, the nightmares too vivid for her to close her eyes soundly, the images of burnt bodies and scorched torsos and the screams of the cursed and the damned haunting her until she's flying awake with sweat-stained skin and a pounding heart. And so she wanders the camp, plays games with Miller to make sure he's staying awake, visits Monty to make sure he's, at least, sleeping. Sometimes she even goes into her mother's tent, and finds Kane already there, asleep at her bedside with his hand tightly clutched into Abby's. She thinks about inevitability, about fate, and she doesn't know if she should weep or laugh.
It's one of those nights, a crisp day in the fall (she can't really tell months, down here, but seasons are fairly distinguishable) that she hears the screams.
They're not loud - certainly not loud enough to alert the guards, who are positioned on the wall, and the tent is in the middle of camp - but they sound panicked, absolutely terrified, and Clarke full sprints to the tent they're coming from. She doesn't even notice where she's entered until she sees Bellamy's sleeping frame wearing nothing but boxers, his face and chest soaked in sweat and a look of complete and utter torture marring his features.
"Please..." he whispers, and Clarke thinks she feels her heart crack in a thousand different directions all at once. "Please, make them stop. Make them... make them stop screaming... and please... God, just... just turn the shower off, I swear I'll be - I'll be - "
Clarke moves quickly to his side, clutching his face between her palms. "Bellamy," she whispers, stroking his cheeks with the pads of her thumbs, "Bellamy, come on, wake up."
She says the last word a bit louder, and he flies awake, his entire body shaking so badly Clarke worries that he's going to pull a muscle or something. She winds up straddling him to keep him in place, her hands locked around his jaw as she forces his wild eyes to meet hers. "It's me. It's just me. I promise. You're alright," she repeats and repeats and repeats, until she can feel his heart fall back into a normal rhythm beneath her body, until his breathing stops shuddering and returns to normal. She doesn't release him, though, her eyes roaming his face, and she realizes that his own hands are holding her waist tightly, hard enough to leave bruises.
“Bellamy,” she breathes.
"I know, I know," he mutters, "I need to wake up."
Clarke stiffens, rubbing her thumbs over his cheeks again. "Bellamy..." she says slowly. "Bellamy, it's me. I'm here. You're... you're not dreaming."
His fingers clench against her skin, brushing up under her thin t-shirt to feel her heated flesh. "You always... you always tell me you can't stay. Can you stay, this time? Please?"
"Bellamy, please, listen to me. You're... you're not dreaming. I'm right - I'm right here - "
"You came back," he whispers, and the awe and reverence and surprise in his tone makes her want to rip this throbbing organ from her chest and toss it away. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, and pain is supposed to hurt - but not like this. Not. Like. This. "You... you came back, and I've been... I've been so terrible... so, so terrible..."
"No you haven't," she whispers back, dropping her forehead onto his and clenching her eyes shut. "You were allowed to be mad at me."
"I missed you," he murmurs, "so damn much, all the time, and I thought... I thought that if I ignored you, when you came back... if I, if I just - if I just showed you, how much it hurt me, then..."
"I missed you too," she breathes brokenly. "Bellamy, please. You're not dreaming."
"You never... you never say it back in my dreams. You... you haven't left yet, you - " Clarke can feel the confusion emanating off of him, but she refuses to move, keeps her forehead pressed tightly to his, keeps her fingers skating across his jaw and cheekbones. She can feel the way his breath suddenly catches, as though realizing what's happening, waking from his dream-within-a-dream. She waits for him to pull away, but he merely starts rubbing circles on her hips, on the soft skin that his callused hands were clutching just moments before.
"Clarke?" he asks, and his voice is ragged, croaking, as though he's trying to choke down a thousand sobs and a thousand proclamations he's been dying to utter.
"It's me," she whispers, "I'm here. I'm here."
Neither of them move, just stay pressed closely together. Clarke can feel Bellamy's breaths ghosting across her skin, and she can feel the way his fingers dig into the flesh at her waist as though he's marking her, and she can feel the way he relaxes beneath her nimble fingers. She still refuses to open her eyes, though, because perhaps if she can keep them closed, she can pretend that this will never end, that he won't go back to erecting that fifteen-foot-tall wall between them, that it won't all be icy stares and words like razor-blades. "Clarke," he murmurs again, and she hums in response. "Will you stay? Please?"
Clarke nods, and Bellamy moves them downward, back onto the bed, Clarke's chest pressed to Bellamy's back, her fingers dancing along the skin there (the raised skin, from scars that she did not know existed, from a torture she was never told about). She falls asleep, for the first time in months, and she murmurs I'm sorry's into the flesh of his back, and when she feels Bellamy grab her hand and lace their fingers together, her brain whispers home home home, and she thinks it might be right.
