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It rains for a week when Clarke goes missing.
It's a permeating rain, and the chill that comes with it seeps into every corner of the Ark camp, into Bellamy's clothes, bleeding through his skin to his core. The skies are gray, and in the ten hours between the night it never really feels like the sun comes up, never feels like it's getting any warmer, and he can't keep the mud off his boots, because the second he steps outside, the dirt clings to them like a magnet.
The grounders have been gone for two days. They took Finn's body with them when they went, after leaving it up on that post for days, for the birds and the bugs and the ceremony, and Raven went into another cycle of mourning, a hair-trigger stupor that even Wick couldn't tease her out of. They held a vigil for Finn that night, lit what candles they could scrape together and stood out in the damp, sang low solemn funeral songs that Bellamy knows too well, by now. In the morning, Clarke is gone.
Bellamy finds Octavia at Lincoln's bedside, where she's been every night since he was recovered. He can't help but eye the larger man warily as he enters the medical bay, beause a week ago this clean-shaven specimen curled gently around his sister was a faceless threat in a dark parking garage, and Bellamy doesn't forgive easy when it comes to protecting his family.
He waits patient at the curtains around Lincoln's bed until Octavia notices his presence. She twists around in the loose cradle of Lincoln's arms, smiles softly, "Bell - "
"Clarke's gone," he says, without preamble.
Octavia slides off the bed quickly, concern etched in her tired face. "Was she taken?"
Bellamy shakes his head. He's standing stiff, straight, the pack on his shoulder weighed down by rations and a bedroll and batteries, a lantern, a radio he had to steal because Raven won't be ready for a few more months at least to offer up any sort of help in the preservation of Clarke. His pistol, the one he got back from the guard because it was his by blood, by the men he's killed with it, digs into the small of his back.
"She's fine," he says. "I think she just needed some air." He doesn't say, I would know it if she was hurt, if she was in danger, the same way I always know if you are. "I'll go get her."
"I'll come with you," Octavia starts to bend down to put on her boots, but Bellamy shakes his head shortly before she can get further than the first level of laces.
"I think she needs to be alone right now," he says. He doesn't need to explain any more than that, because Octavia understands, that there is no alone anymore between him and Clarke - hasn't been since he held her the night she thought her mother had died, since she told him she needed him, since they became king and queen of their ragtag group of idiot kids, since he realized that nothing feels safe without her walking two steps behind him, thinking three steps ahead.
"Where is she?" Octavia asks, settling reluctantly back down at Lincoln's side.
"Not far," Bellamy says simply, because there are only so many places left to hide on the ground, and he and Clarke are the only two that know about one of them. He'd like to keep it that way, and maybe it's selfish, but he has a feeling they're going to need somewhere to disappear to, in the future. "I can make it there before sundown."
"If you're going through any of our territory, it's best you go unarmed," Lincoln says, from behind Octavia. He's reclined on the bed, in an incomfortable-looking half-sitting position, the restraints he still insists upon - the ones Bellamy would insist upon otherwise - holding him down. "Your girl may have made a truce, but it is a very delicate one. A single wrong move and the entire thing could explode in your faces."
"I'm unarmed," Bellamy lies. "Just a hunting knife."
†
He's soaked to the bone and wishing he'd had the forethought to scrounge up a change of clothes to bring with him by the time he reaches the abandoned aid depot. The hooded jacket he grabbed from the supply room has done little to keep him sheltered, and water is running from his hair down his face in rivulets as he stands on the edge of the forest and surveys the land in front of him, the grown-over door to the bunker, the lake stretching out infinitely into the sinking half-light.
This place is heavy. He remembers everything in flashes, fits and starts of memory, on his knees in the dirt, the man he almost killed standing in front of him, remorse and guilt and exhaustion, his fight instinct broken, screaming flight, flight, flight, life is a fight, get the hell up and face your demons.
He breathes out heavy, bracingly, hefts the pack higher on his shoulder, and squelches his way down the mudslide slope of the hill towards Clarke.
The low tunnel of the depot is dank and murky, and he has to crack a glowstick to light his way over the uneven, cracked concrete floor. He's starting to think that he's wrong, that Clarke went back to the drop ship or just took off, took her father's watch and a week's worth of rations and no weapons, tore off the patchwork piece of his heart that resides entirely in the continued beat of hers, and left him.
But he reaches the end of the passageway, where the space opens up and Bellamy knows there are barrels and racks of guns looming all around him in the dim, and a ring of electric lanterns illuminates a small circle of light. Clarke's tucked into a mound of threadbare blankets at the center of it - he wonders if she thought to brink them, or dug them up - a stack of damp paper in her lap, a filed chunk of graphite perched delicately between her fingers. Her eyes are red, but they're dry, unfocused even as she sketches in broad strokes over the page, and her tangled golden hair is drawn back in a knotted braid.
She looks up at the sound of his footsteps, her hand stilling. "Bellamy?"
He closes the distance between them in a few strides and drops the pack, eases down next to her with his back against the cool stone wall. "Fancy seeing you here, princess," he says lightly.
She sighs deeply, holds his gaze for one more long moment, and goes back to her drawing. "I'm sorry I just took off like that," she says, not looking at him. "I just couldn't - deal with it any more."
"Honestly, I'm impressed you lasted as long as you did," he leans his head back against the wall and looks out into the gloomy depot, the tension that's been inlaid in his shoulders for the past few days easing with the scratching of the graphite over paper, her steady presence next to him. "I was ready to start punching people for you. Major Byrne has been trying to use your disappearance as proof of guilt."
Clarke laughs, more than a little bitterly. "I imagine my mom is taking that really well," she says, but she doesn't defend herself, has no indignance, and Bellamy can't help but hear the unsaid maybe I am guilty, maybe I'm a murderer and Byrne is right, I ought to be tried and punished -
"Raven's probably on Byrne's side, huh?" Clarke asks, quiet, and he knows that for her that hurts more, that someone she's saved, been saved by, almost died with, loved like a sister could -
"She didn't mean it, Clarke," he says, before he can help himself. He's tried this before, tried to tell her that Raven will get over it, that she knows it wasn't really Clarke's fault, that Clarke was helping Finn, but they can both still see her, folded over in Bellamy's arms, still in front of the fence when the rest of the camp had dispersed, and Clarke coming back with her hands bloody, Raven snarling it should have been you -
Clarke doesn't reply, and he has a million consolations on the tip of his tongue, a billion reassurances tingling at the ends of his fingers, and he wonders how she would react if he pulled her close, ran his fingers over her skin and murmured into her hair the same thing she's told him a million times, who we are and who we need to be to survive are two very different things.
Her breath catches, and he looks over, but her face is shielded from him by a curtain of escaped hair. "I think," she says slowly, and then in a rush, "I think she's right, it should've been me - "
Bellamy sits forward quickly, and he doesn't know what to do with his hands, so they end up white-knuckle fisted into the blankets around her legs. "No, Clarke - "
She tosses down the papers, the graphite skittering away over the floor. "I've killed hundreds, hundredsof grounders, Bellamy, they should be out for my blood but they aren't, they took him for killing eighteen - "
She pushes herself to her feet, casting off the blankets, leaving him sitting on the floor in the cocoon of warmth she's left, papers scattered around him. "Clarke, you did what you had to do, you killed soldiers, not women and children - "
"If death has no price then life has no value, right?" she shoots back. She makes it to the edge of the reach of the lanterns, turns, and looks down at him, and she's flushed, her hair a humid golden halo around her head, biting her bottom lip to keep it from quivering, and he's never seen her this close to the edge before, but he's happy he's the only one who has. "That's what Lincoln said, isn't it?"
"They killed our people, and you reciprocated," Bellamy counters. "Life for life, that's how war works - "
"I wish they'd taken me instead, Bell," she says, quiet and hoarse. "I wish I didn't have to wake up in the morning and know that I killed my friend, that I couldn't save him, I couldn't save any of them, I couldn't stop any of this, and I don't understand why they don't just kill me - "
He's up and across the space between them in a heartbeat, and he has no idea what to do or say, but when the queen falls the king catches her, picks up the pieces and seals them back together with willpower and his lips and he's terrified. And if life is a fight, he's ready to bleed for her, for them, for all of them.
"We need you, princess," he says forcefully. "I need you. We're in this together. If there's blood on your hands, it's on mine too. But neither of us deserve to die for what we've done to protect our people."
She looks up at him, big blue eyes and long lashes, and her voice cracks when she says, "I never wanted to be a warrior, Bell. I never wanted to kill anyone."
She looks down at the pile of papers behind him, and he follows her gaze, sees the sketch she was working on, smeared with moisture, and it's Atom, surrounded by flowers and bleeding from his neck, eyes staring up at nothingness, and all around him are Finn, Wells, Anya, grounders he can't recognize, but somehow he knows Clarke can see those faces as clear as reality in her mind -
Bellamy looks back down at her, and she's not looking at him, so he puts his hand under her chin and guides her gaze up to his. "It's not your fault," he murmurs, "none of it - "
He kisses her in the next breath.
Her mouth startles open under his, and for a long moment she's frozen, breathing shakily against the gentle press of his mouth, but then she surges up to meet him, throws her arms around his neck and pulls him down. Her fingers tangle in his hair, she bites hard on his lower lip, and maybe it's desperation or madness fueling them but who cares, when his fingers are past her shirt and digging into the skin just above her ass, when her heartbeat is as strong and real as her breasts pressed into his chest.
He growls in the back of his throat, like he's still trying to get his point across, and she's a step ahead of him still, jumping up to wrap her legs around his waist, and he catches her easily. She rolls her hips against his, and he swallows her moan, tugging ever so slightly at the long braid down her back, and he can feel her boots digging into the backs of his thighs, her knees hiking his shirt up around his torso, and she kisses like she does everything else, head-first with one hundred percent of her heart and soul.
He turns, goes down on one knee and topples them back into the pile of blankets, his hand between Clarke's head and the concrete. She tilts her head back, and he presses an open-mouthed kiss to her neck, sucks a deep mark in case anyone ever forgets that he's hers, she's his queen -
She pushes past his shirt and jacket to flatten her hands over the smooth skin of his back, her knees coming up to frame his hips, and he grinds down involuntarily, loses all the air in his lungs for a long minute at the sound of her breathy moan. "Bellamy," she gasps, "I need - "
He kisses her gently. "I know," he murmurs into her lips, "I know, princess."
His wet shirts go, then his boots, Clarke's smaller boots knocking into his. She wriggles out of her pants, and he can't hide what the slide of her body against his does to him once he's down to his boxers, mutters apologies into the skin behind her jaw when she shivers at the slide of his rain-chilled hands under her bra.
He presses short kisses along her jaw, back to her mouth, her fingers mussing his hair on end as he goes, the heat from between her legs driving him near out of his mind. All he sees is white, all he feels is her skin, her hair against his face as he slides a hand between them, into her underwear to rub against her, and she arches into him, her breath caught captive in her lungs. He brings her up slowly, mouths at her collarbone as her blunt nails dig into his shoulders, and it takes every ounce of willpower he has not to buck into her, not to lose himself in her scent and her gasping breaths and the pressure of her knees against his waist -
She's close to the edge, her chest heaving, clenching spastically around his fingers, wet and hot and her mouth skimming his forehead, and she says, "I need you, Bell - "
She helps him get rid of his boxers, shoves her underwear out of the way, drags him back up to kiss him hard as he slides into her, and it feels like coming home, feels like the most natural thing he's done in his life even as his stomach swoops, he has to close his eyes and breathe deep to keep from coming right then. Because they're as close as they're ever going to get, he's sunk deep inside her and she's wrapped around him, her ankles hooked over his ass and his lower lip in her mouth, and he feels like he's in a hundred pieces when he says, "Clarke - "
Clarke presses a kiss to the side of his head, rolls her hips deliberately, slowly, and he sucks in a long breath against her shoulder.
He pulls out slowly and thrusts back into her, and she moves with him, like a wave, her back sliding across the threadbare blankets, the shirt she's still wearing bunched up around her breasts. She gives his hair a tug, moans, "Move," and he loses time, loses everything but the drag of her around him and the arch of her spine and the fluttering of her eyelashes against his cheek, the sound of her voice and the sound of his name tumbling from her lips like a plea -
She comes the barest whisper of a second before he does, holds him on the precipice for a heartbeat that feels like eternity before he follows her over the crest, down through the break and into the calm.
He rolls them over, pulls her into his shoulder and settles back into the blankets from a hundred years ago that will probably give them nine different diseases, but Clarke smiles into his skin and he doesn't care, at all. He runs his thumb over her hip, noses over her brow, breathes in their mingled scent.
"You protect us," he murmurs. She tenses under him, looks away. "Finn, Atom - if they were alive, they'd thank you, Clarke. You saved them."
She doesn't look like she believes him, but she turns her face into the crook of his neck, and he holds her, feels her hot tears against his neck and her shoulder shaking gently under his arm. He wishes she never had to learn to cry silently.
†
They leave two mornings later.
The rain is still falling, but it's a gentler drizzle, and the mud has solidified somewhat into soft, scattered patches of grassland. They're coated in a thin layer of mud by the time they can see the Ark camp, looming asymetrically in the distance, but Bellamy can still taste her on his tongue, and she reaches over to squeeze his hand briefly.
"I'm going to talk to Raven," she says. "Major Byrne, too, and the council, but we should probably plan before we try to make it through that particular confrontation."
He squeezes her hand back, because there still isn't any such thing as alone between them, especially not now. Not when they have a kingdom to reclaim and a mountain to conquer and people to bring back home.
"We're in this together, princess," he says. "You have to run, you run. Just go somewhere I can find you."
She looks over at him. She's tamed her hair as much as possible with their limited supplies back at the aid depot, but there are still red bruises on her neck from his mouth, he can still feel the marks her nails left on the skin of his back. "I'll be fine," she says. "I just needed some air."
He believes her.