Bellarke One Shots Book 2

83) Whoever we need to be

Archive of our own
By: Kitpurr

She's dead on her feet, but Clarke is too stubborn to let something as petty as exhaustion stop her, not when there is more work to do.

The problem is there is always more work to do.

Her ribs ache the most, the bruise Dax had left blossoming to a painful blue already. The rest of her body just feels wrung out, like she hasn't slept for a week. Still, Clarke trudges on through the low fires of the slumbering camp, to the place she knows he will be.

"Princess." He says in greeting, not even bothering to turn and look.

Of course he can tell who she is by the sound of her footsteps alone. He probably has x-ray vision too, and echo-location.

"Moon-gazing?" She asks clambering up next to him on the lookout post the camp had rigged. wincing as she stretches her punished ribs climbing the scaffold.

Bellamy is pensively still, the planes of his face outlined by the waxing moon high above them. It's rare to see him so motionless so she just sits beside him, takes in the huge expanse of the night sky.

After living in the Ark all her life sometimes she is terrified by the openness of the world. She lets the fear roll over, breathes in the deep pungent smells of the forest. Awe. Awe is what she feels.

Bellamy sighs finally. "I'm wondering what will happen to me once Jaha and the others get here." His voice is low, a deep soft rumble. "Do you know what I was on the Ark? A janitor." His laugh is joyless. "A boy from seventeen with no other options."

She tries to imagine Bellamy pulling a mop and pail behind him and fails. The idea is utterly ridiculous. She smiles slightly, bumps her shoulder against his.

"Well there's no floors to sweep here Bellamy, I guess you're out of a job."

He looks at her, like she is completely unfunny. She isn't really. She's too tired to do levity well. Back to business.

"Come on Bellamy, I need to clean your face." She tugs him gently from their perch. "I didn't drag you back to camp so you could get sepsis and die."

He follows in surprising compliance, her silent shadow. She struggles with the unfamiliar sensation she feels at his side, now that they are at uneasy peace with each other. It disturbs her slightly when she finally places it: safety, even bloody and beaten his presence makes her feel more safe than she's felt in weeks.

When had Bellamy gone from being her biggest fear in the camp to the one she most trusted to have her back?

He lets her seat him in the med tent as she digs around in the scant boxes of medical supplies until she has what he needs. His hands are on his thighs, still clenched in tight fists he can't seem to loosen.

She touches them carefully, uncurls them deftly, examines the abrasions and gashes with a physician's eye. The marks criss-cross and decorate his long fingers in bands of rust red and black, but none of them seem alarmingly deep. She can almost hear her mother's voice in her head.

That's good, no mobility loss.

"This will sting a bit."

He doesn't even flinch as she starts debriding the wounds with a scrap of rag dipped in Monty's moon-shine. His quietness is a tad unnerving as she cleans dried blood and grit from his grazes. She finds herself talking just to fill in the silence, talks about nothing, about the camp. The people who had been ill today from the hallucinogenic nuts: two cases of dehydration, three of exhaustion, one girl had felt compelled to cut her hair and gave herself a nasty cut when her hand slipped. All in all it hadn't been too bad for their first run-in with a potentially toxic food stuff.