Chapter Text
This show down has been 125 years (or more) in the making and honestly he’s surprised it took this long but as per usual, Raven’s timing, not ideal. His first thought is that Clarke is just stunned speechless when she opens her mouth to retort and no sound escapes. Then her eyes roll back in her head and her body drops like dead weight against her bed. The frantic beeping of a monitor matches the erratic beat of his heart as it alerts them to the seriousness as the doctors converge on Clarke who has begun to shake violently. Sound has a way of melding together incoherently. Someone is yelling for them all to get out, someone is tugging at his arm, and someone is calling his name, but Bellamy is frozen to the spot as he watches in horror, unable to look away as Clarke flails and shakes helplessly, a stream of black blood running from her nose.
It takes Emori smacking him to snap out of his state enough to move. Echo is there saying something to him. He agrees easily but to what, he has no clue and allows her to lead him from the room, palms sweaty despite the frigid coldness of his hands as blood seemingly stopped flowing to his extremities. The air in the hall is significantly colder than that of Clarke’s room, shocking his system into overdrive as everything else around him seems to happen in slow motion. Raven and Murphy are bickering. Madi, who’d refused to go home despite their best efforts earlier, is crying as Octavia rocks her soothingly in a similar fashion to that of their mother while settled on the floor. Miller is shaking and pale. Even Echo looks pained as Bellamy finds his back against a wall, unable to do anything other than slide down to sit on the floor. Gaia pulls Madi into a hug, moving her hair away from her neck and rubbing her back in soothing circles so Octavia is free to sit with her brother.
“All of this is your fault! All of it! I wish you’d never come back to the ground! Everything was fine until you all showed up. If she hadn’t thought you all hated her she never would’ve been alone at that stupid party! She never would’ve let her guard down and she never would’ve had her body hijacked!” Madi shouts through her tears.
“Hey kid look, we know we’re not perfect but neither is Clarke, she’s made bad choices too. Choices we’ve had to forgive her for too.” Raven turns her energy from Murphy to Madi but she’s significantly calmer talking to the teenager.
“But you haven’t! Not really! As soon as she does something you don’t like you throw everything back in her face all over again. She’s never had to forgive you because she’s never blamed you in the first place!”
“Some of us haven’t done unforgiveable things.” Raven grumbled.
“Raven—,” Bellamy warns seeing the burning fire in Madi’s eyes. The girl might be young, but none of them should underestimate her or forget who raised her.
“How many times have we needed saving from her?” Raven had finally snapped turning on him this time. “Ask Bellamy, no one has needed saving from Clarke more times than him. He forgives her constantly though lord knows why given her most recent betrayals.”
“Raven, that’s enough!” Bellamy barks receiving a look of shock from her as Madi cuts over him.
“You mean the one where he left her chained to a boiler to talk me into taking the flame after telling her she wasn’t even his family after she waited six years for you all to come back? She spent every day for six years calling to him on the radio only for him to come back and tell her she’s not part of your little family. Guess what, we didn’t need you all those years either! She chose to save me when his planned back fired, hoping his sister wouldn’t go through with killing him the way she was going to me. Is that the betrayal you’re talking about?”
Bellamy looks horrified. “Madi—that’s not...”
“Don’t worry she didn’t tell me. She sugar coated that story too, to protect you. Just like she did every one of the stories she told me about Spacekru growing up. I overheard Niylah and Indra talking about it. Don’t believe me? Ask Clarke about the scars on her wrists. I’m guessing from pulling against the cuffs hard enough?” For not being Clarke’s biological daughter, she certainly has the exact same daggering glare as she looks at Bellamy with hatred in her eyes. She’s also smart as a whip and resourceful as hell just like her mother. Sometimes it’s easy to forget she’s barely a teen, only a few years younger than Clarke herself when she had to take on the weight of the world.
“He did what now?” Murphy’s brow shot up as he co*cked his head and pursed his lips as if to hear Madi better, his eyes darting back and forth between Madi and Bellamy.
“God! You’re all so quick to talk about every bad, unforgiveable thing Clarke has ever done but none of you even talk to each other about what you’ve done to her and still she keeps fighting for you.”
Raven blinks back tears as she searches Bellamy’s face for any sign that it isn’t true. They hadn’t known, none of them. And like always, Clarke didn’t bother correcting them. If Bellamy had to guess why it’s probably because she does feel guilty for leaving him behind even after what he’d done but he never stopped to think about it from her perspective and he should have. She’d done nearly the same thing to him once in an attempt to keep him from opening the bunker for his sister. He knew firsthand how that felt, but in the end, she’d done the right thing and he hadn’t.
The silence in the hall threatens to consume each of them as they sit in their guilt, waiting for an update on Clarke. It’s only broken up by the occasional sniffle, cough, or cleared throat.
Eventually Emori lets out a huff of frustration, turning her attention to Bellamy who is sitting with his knees bent, looking pointedly at the floor. “You told her she wasn’t our family?” Emori sounds as betrayed as she looks while she stares at Bellamy waiting for an explanation.
“That’s not what I—” Bellamy sounds defeated as runs a hand down his face and pushes up from the floor to pace the length of the hall. He can’t even say he didn’t say it because he’s pretty sure he did, it’s just not what he meant. He needs to do something. He can’t sit with all this pent up without finding a way to burn some of it off or he’s going to explode.
“What exactly did you say?” Raven is holding back her emotions, masking it with anger as she normally does. Bellamy knows because he knows her and he does the same.
“I told her I was protecting my family too.” Bellamy snaps as he turns away from them, running a hand through his hair.
“My family or our family?” Murphy asks deadly quiet not bothering to pick up his head to look at him.
“My family, I guess.” His breathing comes in short, jagged, hard to catch breaths as his thoughts begin to spiral. I failed her.
“You idiot, she thought you were saying she isn’t your family any more, like she didn’t matter.” Murphy chides as Bellamy stalks off down the hall needing to get away from everyone and get some fresh air. For as much as Bellamy understands Raven’s anger masking emotions, Murphy seems to understand Clarke and her way of thinking in a way none of the others could. It makes something deep inside of Bellamy ache for the days that it was him who understood her better than anyone, now he’s not so sure. Octavia looks to each of them as they watch Bellamy disappear around the corner before settling on Echo.
“I got him.” She pushes up from the ground and powers off after him, hoping to catch him before he does something stupid with his anger. Gaia finally convincing Madi to get some rest guides her down the hall after them, Madi’s head tucked into her mentor’s shoulder the whole way.
“How do we keep f*cking up so badly?” Miller pipes up for the first time, looking sullen and lost.
“If she doesn’t tell us how are we supposed to know?” Raven turns to Miller, her eyes blood shot and tear stained.
“Because you’re supposed to know Clarke!” Octavia bursts throwing her hands in the air. “Look, I know no one has made more mistakes than me, but no one has been through more sh*t than Clarke and still she gets back up to fight another day. What are we all gonna do when she doesn’t?”
“You’re not exactly a cake walk yourself Reyes and yet somehow here we are once again with everyone putting up with your bullsh*t but condemning Clarke for the one thing none of us could do without her, surviving. Did you know she tried to kill herself?” Murphy glares at Raven before picking up staring at his spot on the floor again.
“What?” Emori, Octavia, and Miller all spit out at the same time. Each of them positive they hadn’t heard him right. Clarke is the strongest person they know, surly Murphy is mistaken.
“Yeah, during the red sun, while everyone else was running around trying to kill each other? The only person Clarke was trying to kill was herself. Think about that for a minute. The person she hates more than anyone is herself. How long do you think she’ll keep that up before she really goes through with it?”
*
Clarke won’t let anyone come see her after her episode even though Jackson is fairly confident it was an isolated event. A mixture of exhaustion, stress, and an electrolyte imbalance on top of the brain trauma, the likely culprit and with a closer maintenance of those things, she should be able to avoid any future seizure activity. She’s been holed up in her hospital room, refusing visitors for a week now and with the exception of Niylah on occasion, Jackson, and Gabriel, no one has seen her. She won’t even let Murphy in now. If Bellamy thought it was scary when Murphy was the only one she wanted to see, it has nothing on her shutting him out too. Madi is withdrawn as well despite Gaia’s best effort to try and help her through Meditation, Octavia’s method of “Fighting it out” seems to be what she’s drawn to the most.
“She’s doesn’t want anyone seeing her like this.” Jackson comes out to sit on the steps where they gather throughout the day. All of them have their own schedules and duties but at any given time there’s at least two or three of them sitting on the steps outside the hospital and they all come and go throughout the day waiting for any kind of update that they can relay to the others.
“What does that even mean?” Echo is the first to break the silence.
“We’ve tried telling her she needs her friends that she’ll recover faster.” Jackson tells the group that’s gathered. Bellamy’s never seen the young doctor look so lost in what to do. “She won’t even let me do more than examine her before she’s shutting me out too. She’s depressed and it’s not getting any better.”
“Ok but how are we supposed to help her if she won’t let us?” Emori asks as Murphy pushes past all of them and heads up the steps into the hospital setting a powerful pace of determination with every step.
“Murphy, she doesn’t—,” Jackson starts but he is already disappearing through the doors and out of sight.
Murphy blasts through her door without preamble, a storm reckoning in his face.
“Get up”
“What?” Clarke blinks slowly at the crazed look in his eyes. Normally it’s Bellamy that looks just this side of losing his sh*t, not Murphy. But then again she’s all but pushed Bellamy away as she continues to fight through images of betrayal and replace them with reminders of who Bellamy is. He’s the guy that dressed like Azgeda and matched across a field of warriors to get to her she reminds herself.
“I said, get—up.” Murphy marched over to the side of her bed and threw back the covers.
“Murphy, I’m too tired just go away.” Clarke goes to turn away from him but he’s faster, grabbing her arm to stop her.
“No.” Murphy had spent months with his guilt over what happened to her eating away at him. Now that he has this chance to do better, to be better, to earn back that forgiveness she so willingly gave him, he won’t blow it.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me Griffin, I said no. I know it’s not a word you’re all that familiar with but it’s a simple one really” he grabs hold of her legs and swings them over the edge of the bed before grabbing hold of her arm and elbow gently to help sit her up better. “It means negative, not gonna happen, no way. I don’t give a sh*t how depressed you are, I’m not gonna sit by and watch you wither away because you’re feeling sorry for yourself, now get your ass up.”
Clarke blinks back the few tears welling in her eyes and for a moment he thinks she’s going to yell at him, scream, tell him to go to hell and kick him out, but then she just nods. It’s slow and hesitant as she wipes the tears that have escaped as she silently agrees. She shifts her weight into the arm he has supporting her as she struggles to push herself off the bed and onto her feet.
“I got you.” He tells her reassuringly and she feels a wave of gratitude that she’d picked him. Her legs are weak and her knees wobble under her, barely capable of supporting her after so long without use but she’s standing and that’s more than she was yesterday. She’s perfectly capable of standing at this point, having worked with Niylah endlessly on it, it’s more the fact that it’s all she seems able to do that gets to Clarke.
“You think you got a step in you?” he asks much more gently this time knowing this alone was already taxing for her. Clarke nods, grits her teeth and with Murphy’s help takes a single step.
Murphy is unable to hold back the pride in her as he nods his head approvingly. “Alright let’s get you back in bed.”
“No! Wait. I want to try another.”
“Clarke,” He says her name hesitantly, preparing to shake his head, no. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to push it.”
“Please?” Murphy blows out a breath, closing his eyes momentarily to decide how Bellamy would handle this, because yeah, he’s the dad in the group but also he’s the one most capable of talking Clarke out of her ideas. Even as she stands there and pleads, her knees begin to wobble with the strain.
The second Clarke shifts her weight to take another step without him she’s collapsing forward into Murphy’s arms. “Dammit!” she screams as she buries her head into his shoulder. “Dammit” she whispers sounding more defeated.
“Hey, it’s ok. You’re gonna get there. You’ll be back to kicking ass and taking names in no time. But you gotta be willing to get up and try every day. Clarke Griffin doesn’t give up.” He looks at her with a fondness she didn’t know he had in him. Not for anyone other than Emori at least. “Now to get us some help getting you into bed.”
“No one’s around, I sent them all away.” She says bitterly.
Murphy rolls his eyes at her and then yells over his shoulder. “Hey! Can we get some help in here?”
“What are you—,” before she can finish her question the door to her room opens and in walks Jackson with a smile on his face.
“You think the goon squad was gonna let me come in here by myself?” Murphy scoffs.
“Next time you want to push her maybe make sure someone is around to help you.” Murphy looks up at Jackson slightly offended.
“What you think I can’t handle Princess on my own? She weighs like thirty pounds... Seriously Princess, that liquid diet they had you on, not for you.” Murphy’s not wrong. She knows she’s lost weight by the sullenness of her cheeks and the way her clothes don’t quite fit the same. She doesn’t look the same. She doesn’t feel the same.
“Murphy” Bellamy growls from the door. It’s the first time Clarke notices that he’s there too. She begins to shake as she looks away from him, knowing deep in her heart that it isn’t fair to him that she has such a visceral response every time he’s near, but every time she looks at him she sees white robes and betrayal. It’s going to take some time to override that.
“What is he doing here?” She whispers turning back into Murphy’s shoulder as he and Jackson help her up. “Stop! I don’t need your help. I don’t want your help!” Clarke lashes out, her words catching in her throat, thick with emotion. She feels childish but she doesn’t want Bellamy to see her like this. It makes her cheeks burn with embarrassment just thinking about what he’s probably witnessed over the last six months and she’s not sure she can stand another moment of it. She knows rationally he doesn’t view her any differently than he ever has. He’s seen her in how many countless situations, but every time he looks at her, he gives her the Bellamy eyes and she can’t help but feel like they mean something differently to her than they do to him this time.
“Blake—out” Murphy throws over his shoulder not fully turning to look at him, his eyes intent on Clarke instead.
A huff of frustration comes from the door. “I’m not going anywhere Murphy”
“Seriously Bellamy, now’s not the time.” Bellamy hesitates for a moment longer and then slams open the door, disappearing into the hall.
*
He hates it. He can’t even say he blames her, he has messed things up with her as it’s been pointed out to him again. He had to earn her trust back and he’d do whatever it took to do it. All he wants is to be the one to help her, to let her know how sorry he is, to go back to the days where they relied on each other. His mind drifts back to a time, sitting in the chancellor’s office on the Ark. Clarke is making the list that she’d later get attacked over.
He wakes up to her crying and rubbing at her forehead from strain. He can see she’s struggling with the enormity of this, so much so when he looks down he sees she hasn’t even put her own name on the list. “If I’m on that list, you’re on that list” He says with an unwavering conviction. How can she still not see how important she is?
“Bellamy I can’t” Her eyes are haunting with a desperation for him to understand but they’ve come too far to quit now. If she can’t bear the weight of yet another impossible decision thrown on her unfairly, he’ll carry it for her. If she can’t justify writing down her own name, knowing there are hundreds of others being left off, he’ll do it for her. But what he won’t do is lose her.
“Write it down, write it down or I will.” She shakes her head so he takes the pen and does it for her, taking the weight off of her shoulders at least for one name. At least for this they can’t blame her. She didn’t choose to save herself but she chose to save him the same way she does every day in ways she’ll never understand. If they ever get to a moment that doesn’t feel like the end of the world, he’ll tell her, but for now he hopes it shows in his actions. He will always choose her.
“So what now?” She’s exhausted, he can hear it in the sound of her voice and not just physically.
“Now we put it away and hope we never have to use it”
“You still have hope?” She looks to him with disbelief. She’s his hope. His hope that one day they will get there moment, a hope that the world can’t possibly so cruel as to take that from them too, not after everything.
“We still breathing?” He reaches out to squeeze her shoulder. The air around them feels incredibly charged in its intimacy. He just begins to wonder if she can feel it too when she tilts her head into him and reaches out to hold the hand resting on her shoulder like an anchor.
Murphy’s voice breaks him from his flashback to one of his more intimate moments with Clarke. Why didn’t I just tell her then?
“She doesn’t want you seeing her like that.” Murphy tries to reason with Bellamy after helping Jackson get her back into bed and situated. They’d managed to get her to agree to two physical therapy sessions a day in exchange for promising her they wouldn’t hold back with her.
“What and she’s just magically fine with you?” Murphy fights the urge to roll his eyes at his friend’s theatrics as he follows him down the hall toward the hospital’s front doors. Always so dramatic.
“Let’s just say I’ve seen the Princess in worse states than this.” Murphy admits instead, instantly regretting his big mouth when Bellamy comes to a halt, holding out his arm to stop him in his tracks.
“What do you mean?” Murphy rocks his head back and forth weighing his options when Bellamy takes him by the shoulder and slams his back into the wall. “What—do you—mean?”
Murphy jerks himself free of Bellamy’s hold continuing on down the hall. What the hell, the others already know. “During the red sun while you were out trying to kill Clarke and I, Clarke had...” he hesitates stealing a quick glance at Bellamy to gage his facial expression. “She had a little bit of a different reaction.”
“What?” Bellamy narrows his eyes confused. “What do you mean? What happened?” shaking his head, not understanding.
“The only enemy Clarke was concerned with ending was herself.”
“She—what?” Bellamy feels like his tongue has swollen to twice its normal size, choking him as he processes that. He runs a hand through his hair, tugging slightly, and looking away. “Why didn’t she say something?” He turns quickly back to face Murphy still in a state of shock.
“Not exactly something you advertise” Murphy’s face is straight and emotionless, bordering on indifferent but after six years in space together, Bellamy knows different. The more bored and tuned out Murphy appears the more he is trying to shut off in the way of his emotions.
“She tried to kill herself?” Bellamy mumbled more to himself than anything as if trying out the sound of the words for himself.
“More than once” Bellamy feels like he’s going to puke. Scratch that, he is going to puke. He barely makes it to the garbage can at the end of the corridor before losing his lunch into it.
“When was the other time... or times, I guess.” He corrected, shaking out the feeling of how wrong those words tasted on his tongue. What else don’t I know? What else did I miss?
“Look man... it’s not really for me to tell, it’s her story and she’ll share it when she’s ready to. All I’m saying is, just give her time alright? I think it’s harder for her to have you see her this way.” Bellamy just nods, too stunned to do much of anything else.
The walk home is slow and quiet as Bellamy thinks over what to do about Clarke. He’s worried and the only way for him to be less worried is to be close to her. When they finally arrived outside their respective homes he finally turns to Murphy, fully intent on thanking him for being there for Clarke. What comes out is, “Did you know she didn’t put her name on the list.”
“What list?”
“The list of 100 people that would survive when they were trying to rebuild to Ark to survive Praimfaya. She left herself off the list. I’m the one that added her name. She had two spots left and she chose me for one of them.” Murphy nods along probably waiting for him to get to the point. “I told her if I was on the list then she was too but even then she said she couldn’t do it. I had to write her name on it. Even then she didn’t think she deserved to survive. Or she didn’t want to. I don’t know why I didn’t see it for what it was.”
“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” Murphy narrows his eyes, searching for something.
“I don’t know. It just seemed like such a private moment, her and I choosing each other. It seemed like we had time to address it and then the world ended and she didn’t make it to space with us. And well you know the rest.” Bellamy admits as he messes with the curls at the nape of his neck. He couldn’t even talk about Clarke for the first three years after Praimfaya and then when he did, it was only to honor her memory. It took a toll on him, a toll that didn’t just disappear when they finally made it back to earth and found her alive.
“That’s why you haven’t told her isn’t it?” Murphy phrases it like a question but they both know it’s not. It’s exactly why he hasn’t told her. She just forgave him, like she always does but he hasn’t forgiven himself. He’s not sure he deserves her. He’s scared that if he tells her and she doesn’t feel the same, or it’s not enough, that she’ll still find a way to leave. He’s not sure if his heart can take it again.
For a moment back on the ship, standing beside Clarke looking out over their new world, everything felt as if nothing had changed. Like no time had passed and they were a team again. He’d held her against him and they’d drawn comfort from each other like they always had. But that moment was fleeting and reality stuck hard when they woke the others and it was immediately apparent that although he’d forgiven her, no one else had. Within hours Clarke had withdrawn into herself again. She put up walls and shut him out, six years standing in the way of getting through.
*
Clarke wakes to the feeling of someone’s hand in hers. Instinctively she knows it’s his. She doesn’t move or open her eyes or let on that she’s awake for a minute, just soaking up the inexplicable comfort it brings her. She doesn’t want to need him the way she does. She doesn’t want to want him the way she does either. But of the two of them the latter is the harder one because she knows he doesn’t want her the same way.
She’s not really sure when it happened that she finally admitted to herself the feelings she has for Bellamy. Part of her thinks she’s always carried a bit of a torch for him but the timing was never right. An even bigger part of her recognized it when she spent 2,199 days calling him on a radio he’d never respond to. She thinks that part of her was in denial by necessity of the situation. She couldn’t allow her heart to fully commit to it back then because of the toll it would’ve taken if he hadn’t survived and she came to realize she’d been talking to her dead best friend all that time. But then he did come back and he was with Echo. He was different. He’d taken up her roll in her absence and no longer needed her, confirmed during his ranting under the red sun. He’d found a way without her and that hurt more than she ever could’ve imagined despite how truly proud of him she was. Some part of her imagined him to be more torn up over her or they’d have some big revelation and feelings would be revealed, but then Eligius happened.
He didn’t need her but she still needed him. She’d always need him. She just couldn’t allow herself to want him. She had to let him go.
She wants to be mad at the ass for not listening to her, for not staying away like she’d told him to, but then he wouldn’t be Bellamy, not her Bellamy at least. That’s when she decides that the Bellamy that had been in her head, the one that disappeared into the anomaly, the one they’d thought died, that had fundamentally changed so much she didn’t even recognize him anymore, the one that betrayed her trust, all of their trust really, the one she’d thought she’d killed, wasn’t real. All of it was an elaborate “fever dream” if you will where her brain took information she was hearing and pulling it into a storyline to work though some underlying trust issue and that’s when it hits her. The anomaly was very real just like space. And just like space, the anomaly took him away. It represented space where he’d disappeared to for six years and when he came back he’d broken her trust despite the fact that he was sure he was doing the right thing for everyone involved. It was history repeating itself only the second time none of it was real.
He was just that, the Bellamy in the white robes that haunted her, was a figment of her overactive imagination. A representation of everything she was feeling combined with every hard decision, every life lost, every battle won that chipped away at her soul a little more, every time her friends took out their misery on her and she took it. She always took it because it was hers to bear. If she could ease their suffering she felt it was her responsibility and then she snapped. Her brain dreamed up of a version of Bellamy that represented everything she felt and she let it all go with that bullet. But this Bellamy, her Bellamy, he wasn’t that person. They could fight and disagree and be at odds but at the end of the day, no one truly understood her the way he did. No one forgave her the way he did. And it all started with that first time she forgave him when he was so certain he didn’t deserve it.
He’d shot Jaha in a moment of desperation after a life of compacted hurt and pain, not unlike Clarke when she shot Bellamy for the same reason. After so much, she just snapped. She’ll never be able to express how grateful she is to have a second chance. Now it’s time to give him his.
When she finally can’t hold onto the charade any longer, Clarke starts to twist and stir. She expects Bellamy to pull his hand away and vacate the chair beside her. But he stays. She wants to push him away, keep him at arm’s length, but no matter how many times they’ve pushed the other away they always seem to find their way back, like to magnets destined to collide.
Her eyes flicker open as she turns to look over at him.
“I’m not leaving. You can yell at me, tell me to go to hell, ignore me, whatever you gotta do, but I’m not going anywhere.”
“Ok” she yawns sleepily. “Ok Bell, you can stay”
