#fuck jroth

[lady-blodreina]

I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds

Clarke Griffin and Bellamy Blake, The 100 1x10- I am become death

#the 100 #bellarke #bellamy blake #clarke griffin #bellamy and clarke #clarke and bellamy #bellamy x clarke #clarke x bellamy #i wish we could've seen more scenes like that #bellarke showing off #fuck jroth

[captainmar-bear]

What if Echo was just Jason Rothenberg’s projection of himself onto the 100’s universe and he was so awful to Bellamy and Bob Morley because he, like Echo, is toxic and in love with Bellamy, and he killed Bellamy’s character because he refuses to deal with his internalized homophobia and the resulting self-loathing?

#bellamy #bellamy blake #bellamy deserved better #bellamy x clarke #the 100 #the 100 bellamy #clarke #clarke griffin #fuck jason #the 100 season 7 #bellarke #fuck jason rothenberg #fuck jroth #the 100 spoilers

[yiangchen]

you know, i would kill for the og s7 script to be leaked...i've said before that i would never rewatch the show because the ending is just so unsatisfying and ooc for so many characters, but...if i could rewatch almost all of it and stop at whatever point in s7 that it changed and then just read the og script? i'd rewatch in a heartbeat!

#maybe they'd still be the last of the human race and sterile which jfc is just BEYOND STUPID #however... #to have bellamy alive??? #to have bellarke end up together??? #dude... #i would take what i could fuckin get man i am so serious #and you know what?? #i like to think that the og script was entirely different and didnt have the dumbass sterile human race storyline #and also that madi didnt die wtf #first abby then bellamy and finally madi....jroth really killed off clarke's whole family huh... #(i also have never watched the ep bellamy dies in or any ep after not even the finale... #but from everything ive heard it sounds so fucking dumb) #bellamy blake #bellarke #t100

[laufire]

I've mentioned something on this line but really, the pilot (and I'm predicting it'll be the case for season 1 in general) really makes me feel that if jroth had focused from the word go into where his heart clearly was, aka the blake siblings, and had built the show around that, the 100 might've been good good. alas, I care more about echo or murphy or emori's narratives than about the blake siblings, so I don't mind the trade off.

#sidenote. in this alternate world we all now blakecest shipping would've been THROUGH THE ROOF #whether or not canon would've actually leaned more in that direction #(it doesn't seem to be jroth's deal but the vibes would've probably happened even if unitentionally lol) #talking to the void #my thoughts #t100 thoughts #the 100 #the 100 1x01 #octavia blake #bellamy blake #favourites: soul siblings #favourites: fucked up families

[hermywolf]

i’ll never forgive the cw for what they did to them

#spn #t100 #the 100 #clarke griffin #supernatural #dean winchester #bellamy blake #castiel #destiel #bellarke #hermy posts #two of the greatest ships of all time and they didn't let them kiss and killed one of the two. both times #fuck dabb and jroth i'll curse your names forever #deancas #cw #the cw #cw network

[anditwentlikethis]

Clarke killed Bellamy for a book that she ended up not getting, to protect Madi that ended up dying anyways, and then it turns out Bellamy was right all along. So Bellamy literally died for nothing

#idc if jason had beef with bob he had no right to do that to bellamy #it's not even about bellarke it's about BELLAMY BLAKE not getting the happy ending he deserved #he didn't even get the death he deserved he didn't die a hero he didn't die trying to protect his friends HE DIED FOR A FUCKING BOOK #AND THAT DEATH WAS MEANINGLESS IT DIDN'T STOP ANYTHING #jroth if I catch you #my the 100 rewatch

[delicatebluebirdruins]

if i had a penny everytime i watched a character get kidnapped for the purpose of being a vessal for the bad guys dead child consciousness. i’d have two pennies its not a lot I know but still

#is this coherent? nope not really #we all know who i'm thinking of #clarke griffin #rosemary winters #main reason i want to play village is for the sheer catharsis i'm sure mirandas fight is going to give me because fuck the primes and jroth

[batcows]

hot take of the night: the 100 should be an anime

#its funny because i havent thought about this show for literal years #i probably blocked it out of my memory because the finale was so bad lmao #i always said they were the cw version of game of thrones but damn i didnt think theyd commit that hard #BUT NO LIKE THINK ABOUT IT??? #a tight 24 episode banger #fixing all the shit that jroth broke #the OP and EDs would be fucking legendary #does anyone else see the vision???? #im putting this out in the universe and also the internet so maybe some company can use ai scraping for good instead of evil #the 100

[tkstrrand]

You know, I haven't said this in years, but it's still as true as the first time I said it

fuck jeff davis

yes this is about what he did to stydia in the tw movie, yes i will stay bitter what of it

#him and jroth can truly and i mean truly get fucked #anti jeff davis #anti tw movie #maybe? i mean its more about jeff but just in case

[sixstepsaway]

I've had a bee in my bonnet for a while now over the concept of representation.

Every now and again, I hear someone complain that x person on x show is "bad rep", maybe because they're a promiscuous bisexual or a flamboyant gay or whatever, and I find myself wrinkling my nose because I don't really...agree, and quite often those characters are simply good characters, so I don't... see why this sparkling concept of Representation™ matters in this context?

And, like, don't get me wrong - representation matters. Having representation on mass media matters so much, and having good rep matters too.

But I think I've narrowed down my issue with the concept being applied so broadly.

Before I get to that, let me dig into how I feel about 'bury your gays' in mass media. Many will not agree, which is fine, but my idea of 'bury your gays' is that if your show has one lesbian and you kill her, you fucking suck. If your movie has one gay man and you kill him, you fucking suck (and so on and so forth). If your show has a bunch of lesbians and one of them dies, that isn't bury your gays.

Similarly, in my opinion, if your show is something like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, where characters die all the time, killing a (or even the) gay character isn't really bury your gays. It's a little iffy if you introduce a replacement gay character in the same episode you kill the current one, but generally speaking killing gay characters in a show full of death is just... it makes sense? I don't really want all gay characters to have magical plot armor for the rest of time because Bury Your Gays sucks as a trope.

Which brings us back to representation.

A few years ago, The 100 season 3 was filming, and the head writer Jason Rothenberg made a huge deal about Lexa, the lesbian Commander of the Grounder Coalition. He'd share bts shots of her actress, he'd talk about his pride in having her as representation, he'd get people to follow him on twitter to 'earn' more bts shots, outtakes, bloopers, whatever, and then he killed her off 7 episodes into a 13 episode season.

And it was shitty. It was shitty because he built this self-aggrandizing, masturbatory back-patting club around himself and then killed her off and thought it was funny. It was shitty because at that time she was the only lesbian character in the show (we had Clarke, who was bisexual, but bisexuality and lesbianism are not the same), and it was shitty because it made no sense (but that's an essay for a different post, frankly).

Lexa was representation because JRoth wanted her to be representation. He made a huge deal about her being representation and so she was.

Other shows, or books or movies or whatever else, do this too, talking about how their characters are representation in interviews or on Twitter, but often they don't. Their characters are just... their characters.

Sometimes, people write characters because they want to write that character, because the tropes and traits involved in that character are true to the character being written, not because they're Good Bisexual Representation or whatever.

I think when there isn't an explicit goal to create representation, it's rather unfair to get angry at writers for writing 'bad representation' or just sub-par representation when the goal is simply to write an authentic character, rather than a specific sexuality to be held up on a display and presented for the world to see.

Not to mention that every time I see someone say, "This character is bad rep because they're xyz trope!" I see someone else say, "Yeah... so am I... this character represented me so well..."

No group is a monolith! You will never represent an entire group in one character, not ever.

But I think the itch for me has always been, and continues to be, the idea of yelling at someone for poor representation without ever knowing if that's what they were trying to achieve.

I don't think Laenor in Fire & Blood was meant as Good Gay Representation, I think he was just right for the story, and the fact GRRM repeatedly includes queer people in his medieval fantasy as just a part of the world to me means so much more than him trying to shoehorn in a perfect example of representation. Similarly, I definitely don't think Aneela and Kendry in Killjoys were meant as Good Lesbian Representation (far from it considering they both spent many seasons as villains), they were just good characters and having those two be who hooked up instead of Aneela and Johnny (a somewhat obvious direction for the show to go, if you ask me, had the show been more traditional with its tropes) or Kendry and idk Pree for the sake of horrifying example.

Trying to write perfect representation always ends in shallow, two-dimensional characters who inevitably let someone down, and slandering people who write three-dimensional characters for those characters being imperfect is cruel and unjustified and I think that is what's been bothering me every time I see conversations about representation.

Not all characters are representation. Sometimes they're just characters.

#queer #representation

[lady-blodreina]

If I'm on that list, you're on that list.

Bellamy Blake and Clarke Griffin, The 100 4x03- The Four Horsemen

#bellarke #bellamy and clarke #clarke and bellamy #bellamy x clarke #clarke x bellamy #the 100 #bellamy blake #clarke griffin #fuck jroth

[kizo2703]

Hey Sunflowerkru, it's been 2199 days since another jroth's disaster.... oh fuck, hold on. 🤣🤣🤣

No, we're not gonna mention that asshole on this day. 😜 Thanks for tagging @togetherkru. 😘 Anyway, you can enjoy the garden (without my face 😘).

Saying hi/sending love to @travllingbunny @jeanie205 @astridandoddsandends @standing-bears-dont-run @delicatebluebirdruins @newbellarkefan @morleybobsource @tori613 @multifandomstan20

#bfsn #2199 days since praimfaya #bellarke fam #happy bfsn ya'll! #lovely mutuals #........................................ #bellarke™ #otp: 👱‍♀️👨🏾‍🦱 #praimfaya #4x13 #2199 days

[terapsina]

6 Times Bellamy Tried to Forget That He Was in Love With Clarke (+1 Time He Couldn’t Anymore)

(canon compliant UNTIL IT’S NOT)

word count: 13.6k

status: complete

content: some of the bellarke greatest hits, all the seasons except the-one-that-shall-not-be-mentioned, and a happy ending because f*** you jroth.

---

ao3

---

---

1.

---

The first time Bellamy tried to forget that he was in love with Clarke he wasn’t really even fully there yet.

She was still the Princess, though what he meant when he used that term had changed, it was no longer filled with scorn but layered with just a bit of fondness. She was no longer the privileged daughter of the Ark's councilwoman. No longer the threat to him and Octavia he saw her as in the beginning. She was his partner, the co-leader carrying half the weight of their people. She might even be his friend now, though he was uncomfortably uncertain if she thought of him as hers.

And since Unity Day he’d been just a little bit in love with her. It was hard not to be when someone said they needed you and gave you the forgiveness you'd never deserve. So yeah, he was a bit stupid about her.

It was fine though. It wasn’t that big of a deal, he was quite capable of putting that feeling in the back of his mind to be dealt with later. Once they were finally safe from the Grounders and didn't have to deal with an emergency requiring to choose between three terrible options twice a day. He'd see what to do with it then.

That was the plan and in his opinion, it was a pretty great plan, which worked right up until he found Raven waiting in his tent. “What are you doing in here?”

“They don’t waste time, I’ll give them that,” she said, her voice angry and heartbroken and something in his stomach sank sharply, the thing-he-didn’t-think-about twinged painfully at the back of his head. He held back the flinch but only barely and was not actually certain that Raven didn't notice it anyway because he was pretty sure he stopped breathing for three full heartbeats. His only hope was that she was too distracted by her own bleeding heart to see the slight cut in his. “What’s it been, a day and a half?”

“You’re mistaking me for someone who cares,” he said and inwardly grimaced at the way it came out more bitter than he’d have expected, “time to move on.”

She dropped down on his bed to shuck off her jacket.

“What are you doing?” he asked once Raven’s boots joined it. The question was rather pointless of course, it was pretty clear exactly what she was doing and why.

“Moving on.”

-

He slept with Raven more for her than himself - at least as far as emotions were concerned, physically he made sure it’d be a pretty even deal. He could see full well that she was hurting far more at the idea of where Clarke and Finn were and what they were doing right now than Bellamy. For him it was not so much jealousy as the persistent itch of disappointment, which was a surprise because he didn't even seriously entertain the idea that Clarke might like him back, there shouldn't have been any hope for her to crush.

But still, it was nowhere near as painful as the other things he'd lived through. It didn't come even close to what he’d felt when his mother was floated. When he’d spent a year unable to see Octavia. When Charlotte jumped. Or when he’d seen the sky burning with three hundred people that died because he was stupid and selfish and unwilling to look past his own fear until it was far too late.

And okay, this was a completely different kind of pain that wasn't really comparable to those other things but it was still clearly lesser and he could have just as well dealt with it by stealing some of Monty's moonshine. He would have been fine.

But Raven's offer was tempting and he did want to help her, - and well, it's not as if he was blind, Raven was gorgeous; it wasn’t exactly a hardship to let her fuck him even if it did end up being some of the most depressing sex he'd ever had.

When they were done and Raven was dressing with a single-mindedness that was almost a bit insulting, - head turned away, and putting on her discarded clothing like being naked was making her skin crawl now.

"Did that help?" he asked, it was more out of having nothing better to say than because he didn't know the answer.

"No," she said one foot already outside the door.

Yeah, he hadn't thought so. It hadn't really helped him forget either, so he wasn’t surprised to hear Raven's heart was as sore as it had been when she’d first thrown down that gauntlet by taking off her shirt. Especially because now that he was alone again his own mind went right back to fruitlessly trying to stuff all those very dangerous feelings - the ones he’d up to now done such a good job suppressing - back into that box to be forgotten again. He was so consumed with it he didn't even feel the half-expected bruise to his ego he might have otherwise been struck with.

-

When they finally figured out that something was wrong and went off with a search party to look for them - when they realized that Clarke and Finn had decidedly not been spending a romantic getaway away from the Dropship - he and Raven suddenly couldn’t quite manage to look at each other.

Which was beyond stupid, neither Bellamy nor Raven had anything to feel guilty about. And it's not like Clarke would even care.

They found Myles hiding between the roots of some kind of shrub. He was bleeding and barely conscious and as Raven dropped to her knees beside Octavia, trying to free Myles from the foliage covering him, Raven desperately asked after the two still missing. “Where are they? Clarke and Finn? Where are they?”

“Grounders took them,” Myles choked out hoarsely.

Bellamy’s heart stopped. Or at least that’s how it felt like for the next few moments as those words landed square across his chest.

He forced himself to swallow his first reaction back and focused on Myles. He couldn’t think about Clarke and Finn and what might be happening to them - what might already have happened - there was a kid here he could help, so that had to take priority.

“Easy there, we have to take him back to camp,” he said.

“Bell, what about Clarke and Finn?”

He didn’t know what to say to his sister but he looked at Raven and finally accidentally caught her eye. They both slowly got to their feet, still looking at each other, Bellamy felt bile at the back of his throat and by the look on Raven’s face, he wasn’t alone.

“Raven, I’m sorry,” he said and meant more than just Finn being missing.

Raven didn’t answer but there was a look on her face that he was certain was mirrored on his own. And he knew there existed a shared thought at the very front of their minds.

What had happened between them was never going to happen again.

Because God, the idea that Clarke might have been dying while he was in that tent was almost unbearable. The fact she might be dead right now was even more so. And he didn’t need to be able to read Raven’s mind to know she was feeling that same thing about Finn.

And this pain actually did register on that scale he’d been thinking about before.

He wished he could send out a search party like Raven wanted him to. But he knew what Clarke would have wanted, they didn’t have time to look for two people that were already more than likely dead when they were all about to be attacked by Grounders retaliating for their losses on the bridge.

He needed to be a leader right now, he couldn’t afford to be distracted by worry that wasn’t gonna do any good to anyone anyway.

-

There sounded a commotion by the gates and Bellamy was already running to confront whoever or whatever was waiting for him now - because of course even getting strung up by his neck by Murphy didn’t give him five-minute breathing room - when Miller’s voice echoed through the camp.  

“Wait! Hold your fire, it’s Clarke and Finn, open the gates!” Miller screamed from his watch position and relief crashed over Bellamy in a wave.

The first thing he saw as the delinquents pulled aside the sheets of scrap metal to let their two missing people in was Clarke running in front, scraped up but seemingly uninjured. He wished that the relief that overtook him was entirely selfish, that it had to do with the fact that he had his partner back and he wouldn’t have to carry the burden of their people’s lives all by himself. But that was crap.

It was vastly overpowered by the simple joy of seeing that Clarke was alright.

“Hey, we heard an explosion. What happened?” she fired out rapidly as soon as she was in front of him. Face serious and eyes focused entirely on Bellamy, - and it was something that had gotten to be so familiar to him that it almost felt like having her there was akin to getting back a missing limb.

He almost, almost fell to the instinct to pull her into his arms because he was just so damned glad that she was alive that the only thing that saved him was the fact Jasper got there first.

---

2.

---

The sun was so bright it was somehow almost physically painful. It shouldn't have been so bright and beautiful after they'd killed so many people. People who had helped them, children, who'd had nothing to do with anything.

He wondered if it would be easier walking back to Camp Jaha if the sky was as gray as the emptiness inside Bellamy. If that would somehow help with the sick feeling in the bottom of the stomach that should taste like regret but didn't. He couldn't feel regret for saving his friends. Pulling that lever... he knew it hadn't been the 'right' thing to do but it had been the only thing that was left.

And he couldn't have let Clarke pull it alone.

His eyes slid to his left, Clarke walked like she was in a dream - or a living nightmare - eyes straight ahead and with a faraway glaze to them. He knew he should be angry that she almost let his sister die, and he was, and under any other circumstances he would never have let it go but... these were not any other circumstances.

-

He looked up from the gate he was holding open for their people when they'd almost all finished walking inside. There were only Clarke and Monty left, exchanging a hug before Monty pulled away and joined the rest of the survivors of this latest adversity. He was pulling his knitted sweater tighter around himself and as he walked past Bellamy, he sent him a look that rattled something inside him. Bellamy's eyes followed Monty inside even as he finally joined Clarke.

"I think we deserve a drink." There was an edge of tension in his voice, an uncertainty he tried to bury but couldn’t quite hide. They’d won, it was over. And yet it felt like the walls they were yet to stand behind, were about to enclose on him.

"Have one for me,” she said and the metal jaws of the trap slammed closed around Bellamy.

"Hey, we can get through this,” he still tried, hoping beyond hope he could find something, anything to say that would stop Clarke from telling him the thing he was afraid to hear.

"I'm not going in.” The words were quiet, gentle, and no less a dagger that pierced his chest.

"Clarke. If you need forgiveness, I'll give that to you. You're forgiven."  Desperation was beginning to slip into Bellamy’s voice as he turned to look at Clarke, trying to put as much truth into his eyes as possible. Begging for her to listen. Those words had stopped him once from running, maybe they could stop her too. "Please come inside."

"Take care of them for me." But Clarke seemed to already be beyond his reach, the tears in her eyes blinding her to the way Bellamy was a hair’s breadth away from shattering.

"Clarke-"

"Seeing their faces every day is just going to remind me what I did to get them here.” And what was it going to do to him? To know that she was somewhere out there, alone and vulnerable and dealing with it alone?

"What we did." He’d pulled that lever with her, the blood wasn’t just on her hands, it wasn’t just her burden. "You don't have to do this alone."

She almost looked like she was considering it, letting his words sway her into staying. There was a heartbeat where Bellamy dared to hope, but then her face turned toward their people and he could see her swallow, her eyes filling with a painful kind of strength.

"I bear it so they don't have to,” she said like she was quoting something and he knew he’d failed, no words would sway Clarke now. He’d already lost her.

"Where are you gonna go?"

"I don't know," she said and then moved, pressing her lips against his cheek and making lightning stretch from that spot going inward, wrecking everything in its path. Her arms went around him and he pulled her as close as he could, already afraid of the moment she'd pull back.

"May we meet again," she whispered, her voice and his heart breaking in sync.

When Clarke pulled back it was as if his heart was being ripped from his chest with every inch of space she created between them.

"May we meet again."

-

The anger didn't come all at once. For the first two weeks, he was too consumed by shock and too busy with taking care of their people to have the time to be alone long enough to know what he actually felt. He was running around the camp making sure everyone had somewhere to sleep, arguing with the new council over the distribution of rations, and basically doing what Clarke had wanted him to do when she left.

The anger was gradual, it built with every person that asked him where Clarke was, with every person that asked when she'd be back.

Eventually what pushed him into letting it loose was Monty. This probably made sense, Monty had been in that room with them, and he was the only person other than Bellamy who had known that Clarke wasn’t going to cross those gates into camp. It’s both what had drawn them into something resembling a real friendship and what made it hard for Bellamy to look at him sometimes because every time they were in a room all Bellamy could think about was Clarke.

“We need to open trade with the Grounders. You have to convince them to listen,” Monty repeated for what felt like the hundredth time. “Clarke would have wanted us to-”

“Well, Clarke’s not here!” Bellamy snapped.

Monty fell quiet, a look in his eyes like he knew exactly what had made Bellamy lose his composure. It was probably sympathy but what it felt like was, pity. 

He had no interest in dealing with it or talking about it either way. What would be the point? He already knew what was wrong, and discussing it wouldn’t fix anything. So he stood up and left toward the place in the camp that had been created as the communal dining hall but very quickly turned into an impromptu pub.

-

He met Gina there that same night. He’d been brooding in a corner for what felt like hours, avoiding the other delinquents and snapping at anyone that tried to start up a conversation, when someone dropped a glass of something in front of his downed head.

“Fuck off,” was all he was willing to say.

There was the pointed sound of a throat clearing and he finally pushed up his face to see which of their kids he’d have to get rid of this time.

It wasn’t one of his friends in their attempts to get Bellamy to stop moping, it was the pretty bartender who somehow kept managing to keep her clients in line despite how rowdy and loud the evenings in the pub got.

She was staring at him, utterly unimpressed.

“Sorry,” some surviving corner of his manners demanded him to say “I’m Bellamy Blake.”

“Don’t be a dick, Bellamy Blake,” she threw back just as quickly, using her finger to slide the glass he was now pretty sure contained water, closer to his face. “I’m Gina Martin.”

-

He didn’t start dating Gina to get over Clarke. He actually spent quite a lot of effort into making sure that Gina and Clarke would take up completely separate corners of his mind.

He started dating Gina because he liked her. She was sweet and funny and took absolutely no shit from him and he needed that. He dated her because they had fun together and it was right about the only thing that made him feel like he was doing more than just... waiting. She was good for him. Or as Raven liked to point out - often and repeatedly - too good for him.

And he couldn’t exactly say that Raven was wrong.

Because it turned out that when your partner broke your heart and left you behind after you’d both committed genocide, you didn’t come out of it without a few scratches in whatever passed for their souls now.

And Gina helped. So loving Gina was easy.

He just wished it was just as easy to fall in love with her too. Or to fall out of love with the girl whose kiss stung his cheek every time he closed his eyes.

---

3.

---

Seeing Clarke as he followed Octavia into the room made the ground underneath him quake like it did every time he saw her anew. As if Clarke was the axis on which his world turned.

It hurt so much to know - on some deep, untouched level - that this would always be the case, like it didn’t matter that Clarke had chosen the Grounders over her own people, over him; that it didn’t matter how deep his grief for Gina and how wide his hatred for the people who killed her. His eyes met Clarke’s and his heart shook.

It was simply a law written into the atoms of his universe.

“Go easy on Octavia. I had to beg her to get me into camp.” Clarke looked like a stranger, garbed in dark leather that made her look like one of them. Black coal might no longer be smudged under her eyes as it had been when she’d asked him to leave her behind, but the hair twisted into matted braids still reminded him so much of Lexa’s own regal form, that something ugly coiled through his belly all the same.

“What are you doing here, Clarke?” Bitterness simmered within him and he felt every breath like sharp daggers which scraped against his chest cavity.

“We need to talk.”

Did they? Now that she wanted it but not any of the times he’d tried to? Not when it might have made a difference?

“Oh, you've decided that. The mighty Wanheda. Who chose the Grounders over her own people, who turned her back on us when we came to rescue you? Now you want to talk.” It was so hard, looking at her and seeing two versions of the young woman he loved. The one who begged the Ice Nation prince not to kill him in exchange for compliance. And the one who stood at Lexa’s side like none of the things they’d survived mattered.

“I came here to tell you that the Ice Nation has paid a price.” Clarke’s voice was so even. Like this was a negotiation and Bellamy was just the latest pawn that needed to be moved. “Justice has been served for the attack on Mount Weather. I came here to tell you it's over.”

His lips twisted in some harsh version of amusement. “There it is again. Why do you get to decide it's over?”

“We did our part,” she said, and he felt the last of his calm fraying.

“We?” there hadn’t been a ‘we’ since she’d vanished for months without so much as a word that she was still alive.

“Lexa and I,” she said and he felt the sentiment hit him like barbed wire, ripping into his skin and leaving him bleeding somewhere beneath her notice. “The Ice Queen is dead. The problem was solved and then you let Pike ruin everything.”

He couldn’t listen to her, it was too hard, all he could hear was the roar of the explosion which had killed Gina and so many others. And any ability he’d had to hear Clarke out vanished at yet more proof that Bellamy meant nothing.

“Why are you here, Clarke?” He let go of his crossed arms and narrowed the gulf between them in a few steps. He was so tired. He wanted her to say her piece and leave him be.

“Arkadia needs to make things right or Lexa and the twelve clans will wipe us out.” And yet she still thought that Lexa could be trusted? Even after everything? Or was it just that Clarke cared about the Heda and wanted to protect her from losing face?

He hated how much the idea burned. He hated that he couldn’t even remain loyal to Gina’s memory for a few weeks. That so much of his heart still belonged to Clarke that knowing hers might be Lexa’s ripped into his own with a blow he didn’t know how to patch back together. Or if he even could.

“Let her try.” His voice had gone cold.

“Please tell me that going to war is not what you want.” Now she looked at him like she couldn’t even recognize his face. He turned his head away and then back, letting the silence stretch as for a moment he found himself unable to say anything.

“We've been at war since we landed. At least Pike understands that.” It was an excuse, he knew it was just a meaningless platitude that did nothing to convince even himself when he let himself think on it. And yet he didn’t want Clarke to see his doubt. If she saw his weakness she’d exploit it in a heartbeat.

"Pike is the problem.” She seemed finally to lose her temper. Good. It was easier to remain angry when she was too. “This isn't who you are.”

“You're wrong. This is who I've always been,” he said, memory full of the people who had already been on his conscience long before this latest event had washed him in blood once more. “And I let you and Octavia and Kane convince me that we could trust these people when they have shown over and over who they are and I won't let anyone else die for that mistake.”

“Bellamy, I need you,” he felt the words like a gut punch “and we don't have much time.”

“You need me?” The sheer lie of it felt like an insult all on its own.

“Yes, I do. I need the guy who wouldn't let me pull that lever in Mount Weather by myself.”

“You left me,” he reminded her. “You left everyone.”

“Bellamy-” there were tears in her eyes now but he couldn’t let himself believe them. Not anymore.

“Enough, Clarke!” he snapped, nearly yelling. “You are not in charge here and that's a good thing because people die when you're in charge.”

A part of him couldn’t quite believe what he was saying and yet he couldn’t make himself stop, tears beginning to build in his eyes and his heart stuck in his throat. “And you were willing to let a bomb drop on my sister. Then you made a deal with Lexa who left us in Mount Weather to die and forced us to kill everyone who helped us. People who trusted me.”

 “I-”

He turned away from her, unable to look at Clarke just now. Giving himself a moment, just a moment to feel just how betrayed by her he felt.

“I'm sorry.” When he turned around Clarke was sitting, like his words had cut her at the knees. “I'm sorry for leaving. But I knew I could because they had you.”

Her sincerity cut into him just as deeply and he felt himself waver. Her face twisted into agony and he saw her shoulders beginning to shake into quiet sobs.

Going to her, dropping to his knees in front of her wasn’t a choice, her tears sliced into him ruthlessly and Bellamy just couldn’t stand there and watch Clarke cry. He took her arm, running his thumb over her wrist, trying to soothe away her tears.

When she looked at him her eyes shone with faith and for a fraction of a moment Bellamy almost gave in. She smiled and it was like the sun rising across the horizon.

“I know we can fix this.” But her ‘we’ no longer included Bellamy and the reminder shook him loose.

“I'm sorry, too,” he choked out and moved before she had time to do more than blink, handcuffing her to the table.

She made a sound like he’d pierced her with a blade.

“Hey! No, don't, no. Bellamy, don't.“ her voice begged at him through new sobs as he stood, shook off her hold, and left. Buried his heart back under the avalanche of grief and darkness. He couldn’t let Gina’s death mean nothing, and he couldn’t betray her by letting his foolish heart follow someone to whom Bellamy meant so little. It was bad enough he’d never stopped loving Clarke when Gina had still been alive. If he couldn’t do so even now...

He had to.

-

The realization of exactly how far into the pit of darkness he’d let himself fall because of his rage and guilt made Bellamy certain he’d never see light again. Not that he deserved to, not after what had happened to Lincoln.

He saw Clarke approach from the corner of his eyes, the rest of him still facing the nothingness of the dark water washing against the shore at night, and he struck a preemptive blow out of ugly habit.

“Let me guess, you came here to fix things. Wanheda, the peacemaker.” He said the words but didn’t know if he even meant them anymore. If he’d proven anything it was that she'd been right to stand against him.

“I came to see if you were okay.”

“Well, I don't need your help.” He didn’t deserve her help, he’d all but lost his rights to that when he’d taken her hand and instead of making peace had let his thirst for vengeance - and his jealousy if he was honest at least with himself - make him into an even bigger monster than he’d been already. He looked toward his sister, stalking around the fire like fury incarnate, and felt another piece of himself breaking. “Clarke. I've lost her.”

Clarke’s eyes when she turned to look at him were far kinder than Bellamy had any right to yearn for.

“Give her time, Bellamy,” she said and he wished he could believe that, but he knew his sister too well to truly expect that time alone would do anything but deepen the chasm between them. Octavia had loved Lincoln far too much. He only need imagine how he’d have reacted if Clarke had been the one to die and his sister to blame, to know this would not be something that was easily buried. “There may be blood on your hands but it's not Lincoln's.”

“Some of it is,” there was no escaping that. Bellamy had tried to save him, he had, but without Bellamy’s mistakes, Lincoln would still be alive today.

“Maybe,” she sounded more like she was humoring him than as if she truly agreed. “But you didn't want that to happen. You tried to stop it. Octavia will forgive you eventually. The question is, will you forgive yourself?”

He looked toward his sister again and watched as she fed more wood to the signal fire; could feel her rage even with the distance between them.

“Forgiveness is hard for us,” he admitted and looked at Clarke again, feeling his heart clench in his chest. “I was so angry at you for leaving. I don't want to feel that way anymore.”

It wasn’t Clarke’s fault that he loved her and she didn’t. Or that she’d been unable to share the burden of her pain over what they’d done inside that mountain with him, just because he’d have found it easier with her at his side. It was time to accept things that couldn’t be changed.

His sister might hate him until the day she died. He wasn’t able to turn his feelings for Clarke off despite how hard he tried or how much guilt he felt. And Clarke would never love him as he loved her.

“You know, you're not the only one trying to forgive yourself. Maybe we'll get that someday.” He wiped his eyes free of the tears which were beginning to fall, unable to do anything other than listen to her. “But we need each other, Bellamy. What we're doing now, the only way we're gonna pull this off is together.”

She stared at him for a minute, hesitating in place - like she wasn’t sure she was welcome - and then wrapped her arms around his shoulders like she’d done when she’d left, pressing her chin into his shoulder. He felt his insides twist into a knot and then loosen as he pressed his face into her hair, breathing in her scent and letting it soothe the pain of everything else.

Even his resignation to his injured heart.

---

4.

---

It was strange how much could change in so little a time. And how little was truly different at all. They were trying to be ready to survive a second global apocalypse and making deals with the Azgeda. But they were also hoping that Raven's brilliant mind could make their desperate plans into reality for the hundredth time. All while Octavia still would not respond with anything other than rage and disgust at his presence.

Bellamy had known that it was unlikely that his sister would forgive him, not ever probably and certainly not so soon, and yet hearing her tell him that she was no longer Octavia at all - that Bellamy had killed her alongside Lincoln - cracked him open; made him hear his mother's disappointed voice somewhere near the back of his head telling him he'd failed in the most important task she'd ever given him.

His sister. His responsibility.

"I'm gonna take the Rover back to camp," he said once he felt Clarke joining him by the bank of the river.

"Octavia?" she guessed as she stood beside him.

"It's pathetic, right? She hates me but I keep coming back for more." When Bellamy wasn't careful he'd still feel her hard blows against his face, feel Octavia's hot tears hitting his split flesh as she sobbed above him, her heart visibly cracked down the middle and bleeding her dry to a point where it became just a calcified shell that had once been a vital organ.

There were moments - the darkest of them - when he thought he'd seen her hovering over the thought of going further, of hitting harder and never stopping.

If Bellamy had the power for it, he'd exchange his life for Lincoln's in a second just so that Octavia would never have had to feel what she'd felt that day. But he could no more do that than he could stop Praimfaya.

“She's your sister. She's blood,” Clarke said clearly trying to reassure him “She'll come around and see how special you are.”

She wasn’t quite looking at him as she said it and that managed to make just a tiny bit of long abandoned hope spark alive inside him. This might be a terrible time for it, but he might never get another chance. And suddenly he just wanted to say it, just once, so that it would finally be out there.

He loved Clarke. Was in love with her, really.

And at this point, he didn’t even really care if she felt the same or if he was simply her best friend, after all his mistakes it was far too much of a miracle that she still cared about him at all for there to be any resentment in him at not being something more to her.

But she deserved to hear the words, to know that there would be someone out there who would love her, with all they had, for as long as they lived.

“Clarke… If I don't see you again…” the confession was on the very tip of his tongue.

“No. You will,” she interrupted him so quickly it was instantly clear she must know what he was about to tell her and didn’t want him to finish.

It felt like she’d seen the doors to his heart slipping open and had responded by slamming them shut in a panic, jamming them closed with a loose pipe so that nothing spilled out.

It was all he could do to stay still and not let any of the pain that had suddenly seared into his veins show up in his eyes.

-

This time his attempt to forget how he felt was halfhearted at best. And pointless.

Raven had already once - an eternity ago now - taught him that it wouldn’t help. But the world was ending and Clarke still loved Lexa, and it was far too easy to join Jasper in his nihilism, join their party to dance with Bree, and then fuck her in her quarters - her blonde hair lacking the waves he dreamed about but in a shade that was nearly right - to close his eyes and pretend it was what he actually wanted.

When he later learned that Clarke had spent her night putting her life at risk and nearly boiled her own blood in the attempt to become a Nightblood to take the place of Murphy’s girlfriend, - saved only by Abby's love for her daughter - he nearly felt like laughing in self-deprecation.

The more things changed the more they stayed the same.

It wasn’t funny - it was the very opposite of that - but he was sure Raven would have laughed at him too. Laughed and then called him a fucking idiot.

---

5.

---

Bellamy’s world was bright with hope for the future.

Five years on the Ring waiting for the radiation to become survivable with Clarke and their friends while his sister stayed down in the bunker was nothing. After reaching something nearly like peace with Octavia, a thing he’d been certain would never happen, being parted by something as simple as distance, was a gift.

“So let's go over this again. I figure two months until the algae farm produces enough food to feed us. If we ration the MREs, we should get there.” Clarke was working on the math again, he wanted to remind her that they’d have plenty of time for that later but he knew that she wouldn’t be able to turn off her brain until they were all strapped in and ready for liftoff - probably not even then, still calculating all angles even as they left Earth behind them - so he didn’t even try.

Instead, he stared down at Echo and Emori as they worked to fill their shuttle with all the things they’d be able to carry with them into space.

It was hard to trust them, especially Echo, in whose hands his trust had once killed Gina.

"Grounders in space,” he said, fingers tapping against the metal handrail and a feeling of disquiet heavy within him. He felt Clarke join his side but didn’t yet look at her “it's an oxymoron.”

“Survival's a team sport, especially up there. It was the only choice.” Logically he understood that and even beyond that he didn’t want to slip into the same mindset that Pike had used once to further incite Bellamy into committing an atrocity. But still, it was hard after all the things they’d lived through. “Only choice, also an oxymoron, by the way.”

She smiled at him and as was always the case he felt his own lips pulling up at the corners helplessly.

She looked a mess, exhausted and overworked, her face damp and shiny with sweat that glued her hair to the sides of her face. In a word, beautiful.

“So is cold sweat.” He moved his hand and pushed some of the more stubborn strands a little further away from her eyes. He didn’t even think about it, following the reflex to touch her without facing the familiar flinch of doubt. It was probably that he knew they’d have time to breathe up on the Ark where there would be no enemies for them to fight against anymore. They might even have time to talk if she wanted; if she was ready to listen. But he put those thoughts away for now and grew a little more serious. “Still holding out hope for that nightblood solution.”

If nothing else then maybe they’d be able to come down sooner than five years.

“There was never any solution. ALIE was right about that.” It sounded like she’d surrendered to the failure.

“Our fight is not over,” he said at once, pushing for her to see what he wasn’t saying. He had faith in her.

“My mom had a vision of me dying,” she said and he forced his face into remaining unconcerned even as something inside him turned over in rebellion. That wouldn’t happen so he refused to let even a hint of terror float upward. “Just like the one Raven had that told her there was a rocket here.”

“It is not the same thing,” he said. It wasn’t. There was a difference between leftover code that let Raven access some kind of information storage of ALIE’s and seeing the future. 

“Yeah. They were both EMP'd.” 

“And Abby will be fine, too. Raven told her how to stop it,” he tried to reassure her.

“That's not what I'm talking about.” Clarke seemed frustrated with him. “If anything happens to me-”

No, he wasn’t listening to this.

“Nothing is happening to you,” he told her before she asked him to promise her something that would utterly destroy him. He stepped away from her, walking back toward the line of computers, hoping she’d get distracted by the preparations again. “Come on. Let's run these water numbers again.”

“Please, Bellamy, I need you to hear this.” Her voice had grown higher and he turned his face away from her, feeling hunted, cornered like an animal that knew any flinch of movement might be its last. But it seemed he was unable to deny Clarke anything anymore, so he breathed in painfully before coming back to face her. Her eyes were filled with something he couldn’t put a name on, or maybe something he didn’t trust himself to name. “We've been through a lot together, you and I. I didn't like you at first - that's no secret - but even then, every stupid thing you did, it was to protect your sister. She didn't always see that, but I did. You've got such a big heart, Bellamy.”

He felt something inside him stagger at that look in her eyes. The heart she was describing suddenly tripping over itself.

“Clarke-”

But she wouldn’t let him interrupt her.

“People follow you. You inspire them because of this,” and she placed her hand on his chest over his heart. He wondered if she could feel it beating against his ribcage so hard he was nearly afraid it would break through, “but the only way to make sure we survive is if you use this, too.”

And her hand moved to his temple, resting there so gently, it hurt.

He shook his head, unable to take in her words, unwilling to entertain even the idea behind what she was suggesting.

“I got you for that,” he said.

But she swallowed, the last traces of her smile vanishing into smoke.

“Raven's premonition came true,” Clarke continued, - nodding even as Bellamy shook his head into denial again, - and looked like there might be more she wanted to say when they were disturbed by the sound of electricity sparking and a startled, pained yell.

-

“Come on, Clarke,” he whispered, eyes on the doors, trying with every single cell in his body to somehow will Clarke into appearing. He needed her to make it on time, he needed it more than he’d ever needed anything.

He’d written her name onto that terrible paper they’d never ended up needing to use just to avoid a moment like this one. If he was on that list, she was supposed to be right there beside him.

He didn’t want to survive without her.

“Bellamy,” Raven said, her voice heavy with awful meaning. The sand clock was quickly running out of sand and there was no more time. Bellamy felt every metaphorical grain of that sand smashing into his chest like hailstones.

“I know, Raven.”

Just a few more seconds, just a little bit more time.

“The radiation's already affecting the avionics. It's now or never.”

He felt like he was forcing his hand into his own chest, taking his beating heart into a fist, and as he turned around, dropping it on the ground behind him. Like he knew that he couldn’t afford to wait any longer, but that his heart could stay there behind him, marking the way for Clarke. It could wait there, it could wait there as long as it took for Clarke to come back, it could wait there for eternity if it needed to.

But Bellamy had to leave.

-

The first two years were hell.

Every breath drove spikes into him. He dreamed about Clarke every time he went to sleep, and knew that as soon as his head hit the pillow it was only a matter of time until he could see her.

In his dreams, she came up into space with him. Or he stayed down with her as Praimfaya consumed them both. Sometimes they had time to get back to the bunker. To join his sister and her mother underground.

He didn’t care which dream would come, only that he’d be with her again.

For a little while. Until he had to wake up.

For two years he refused to forget Clarke, to forget a single thing about her. He held on to the sound of her voice, - coarse like she had a cold and she’d just drunk tea with honey in it. He held on to the way she’d sometimes - so rarely it was all the more precious for it - smile like there was sunlight under her skin. To the way it had felt when she pressed her face into his shoulder the first time she’d hugged him, slammed into him from out of his blindspot, and embraced him like holding him was the only thing that had mattered. To how brave she was, always. To the way she never stopped believing in Bellamy, even when he stopped believing in himself.

Memories were all he had left of her, so he refused to forget them.

But she’d given him his orders. He was the head without his heart now and so he did what he had to, to survive.

Instead of waiting all day until he could sleep, he began finding ways to stave it off. Walking the corridors of the Ring like he was still a rookie cadet on a patrol. Training with Echo in hand-to-hand combat until he was too tired for dreams to come. And then later, once another year had passed, he staved off sleep in other ways.

With Echo. It didn’t start out because of any particular feelings, it was just the process of elimination. Not Monty or Harper because they had each other. Not Murphy or Emori because despite the way their relationship had eventually broken in the isolation, Bellamy would rather float himself than get in the middle of that. And not Raven, because that old, shared thought had never wavered between them, they would never go there again.

So it was Echo.

And he did grow to care about her. She, like all the rest of them, became Bellamy’s family. His old hatred just didn’t have enough air to survive up in space now.

But the truth was that the only way he was able to do as Clarke had asked, was by burying his heart in the same grave she rested in. So despite how he came to love Echo, or as close to loving her as he was still capable of - his heart was never hers, it couldn’t be.

So it was two years of hell and then four years that slowly transformed into a paler, lesser version of contentment as they at first waited for the radiation to reach survivable levels and then began working tirelessly to find a way to fix their way down.

In the end, they'd somehow miraculously found a new way. But they did reach Earth again, which was all that mattered.

And then his long-buried heart crashed like a comet back into his chest as the young Grounder girl who’d come out of the darkness killing the men who’d been about to shoot them all, looked up at him with awe and spoke the impossible.

“Bellamy?” she said with a sudden smile that seemed filled with relief “Clarke knew you would come.”

The universe twisted around him as reality overwrote six years of unprocessed grief and then righted. His heart really had been left here behind him, waiting.

“Clarke’s alive?”

---

6.

---

He’d done a lot of terrible things in his life but as Madi fell back into Gaia’s hold and failed to open her eyes moments later, he wondered if this might end up being the worst of them.

“Clarke woke up right away.“ He stared at the young girl in Gaia’s arms and teetered in place, feeling everything inside him plummeting to the ground. He rushed closer to Madi’s side, falling to one of his knees. “Wh-why-why isn't she waking up?”

"Patience,” Gaia told him in that calming way she had which never failed to remind him of Luna, though this time the tone didn’t do much to assure him or to loosen the stone from its weight on his conscience. If Madi died. If he’d killed her- he shuddered, horrified by the thought. The chip wasn’t meant to hurt her. “The Flame affects every commander differently. Help me.”

He grabbed Madi’s legs and helped Gaia put her atop the altar. Trying to fight off his fear, to ward off the echoes of the pleading and the screams Clarke had thrown at his back when he’d left her behind in the cells.

He wondered if Madi would be right in her words on how Clarke would never forgive him.

”You said you've never done this before.” So how could she be certain that Madi would be fine? Had this really been his only choice? Or had Bellamy fallen once again in thinking himself right when the consequences that followed ended up proving him a fool?

"I haven't, but I've been preparing for it my whole life.” Gaia sounded so certain he tried to grab onto her faith.

She reached for something from beside Madi and lifted her head to enclose it around her neck.

“This collar will protect the Flame.”

Bellamy was staring at the firelight reflecting on Madi’s small face, wishing she’d open her eyes when they were found. Octavia’s men, Miller among them, rushed into the Ascension room, audibly readying their weapons for fire.

“Back away from the child right now,” Miller ordered as Bellamy and Gaia turned to face them, raising their arms in ingrained reflex.

And there Clarke was, moving around the men and freezing in place once her eyes landed on Madi. Then her gaze switched between her daughter and Bellamy while he was forced to see her hope of getting here in time to prevent the Flame from being implanted - and so marking Madi as the new Commander - die in her eyes.

Clarke walked toward Bellamy unsteadily, still staring at him, face twisted into pain, and as soon as she reached him - before Bellamy could say anything; before he could even part his lips for sound - he felt her hand slapping the side of his face so hard his head turned.

And still, she said nothing, just shook her head minutely. As if there were no words in her for him anymore, and never might again.

His heart cracked.

Clarke’s gaze went back to Madi and she rushed forward. “I need to get it out.”

“Clarke, no,” Gaia interrupted at once. “The Flame is bonding with her mind. If you take it out now before it's complete she may never wake up.”

It was then that Octavia entered Bellamy’s sight and despite everything he felt himself breathe out in relief. Monty’s algae hadn’t killed her, he wouldn't have to live with his sister’s blood on his hands.

”Quiet, traitor.” Octavia- Blodreina said, voice harsh. “Do it, Clarke.”

"If you kill this child, you make her a martyr.” Gaia threw back, her voice filling with the first traces of true hatred. “You weaken yourself even more.” 

"I can't,” he heard Clarke whisper - voice breaking on the last word - and had to close his eyes to stop himself from looking at her. Inherently knowing that she didn’t want his eyes on her right now.

Octavia’s already stony face hardened.

"Take them to the Rover,” she ordered her guards. “Go.”

"No.” Gaia tried protesting.

"O,” Bellamy said, the old nickname slipping out reflexively and moved toward her hoping to reach the sister within the Red Queen, the guards cocked their guns and his steps faltered.

It was Miller whose gun was pointed straight at Bellamy’s face, expression uncompromising, and he felt a sting of hurt at yet another sign of this change in his old friend.

Another one of the guards carried Madi past Bellamy, Clarke right on their heels. She slowed only for a moment, eyes meeting Bellamy’s for a fraction of a second before she turned her face from him. Leaving him behind to face Blodreina’s justice.

”Arrest the traitors.”

-

Bellamy couldn’t make himself look at Clarke, it hurt far, far too much. If he’d known that she was alive those entire six years he may have prepared himself to face a Clarke to whom he meant so little that she could leave him to die. Maybe.

He’d at least have been prepared for the vast space which seemed to have grown between them - a space he hadn’t felt at all during that initial moment when their eyes had met for the first time in years when he’d had Madi drive him to negotiate with Diyoza and hostage the lives of two-hundred-and-eighty-three of Diyoza’s people for Clarke. At that moment it hadn’t felt like any time had passed at all for Bellamy.

Or no, he supposed he’d felt every second of those six years where he'd have done anything, absolutely anything, to bring Clarke back. And finding himself only feet apart had meant he’d be willing to fight demons or to become one himself so that he’d be able to bring Clarke home.

He’d felt as if he’d become Orpheus of Thrace, there to make a deal with Hades.

He should have known then to prepare himself for the worst. Making deals with gods had never ended in anything but tragedy, and receiving their gifts always came with the highest of prices.

There came the sound of light footsteps going down the ramp behind him and then Madi walked into the edge of his sight line as she joined him in staring toward the horizon, awaiting his friends.

“You have to forgive her,” Madi told him with the stubbornness inherent in children.

“Now's not the time, Madi,” he said, not wanting to talk about it. He’d rather hide his bruised and battered heart deep within and out of view.

But when had Bellamy ever gotten what he wanted?

“Do you have any idea how much she cares about you?” Madi’s voice filled with a certainty that made Bellamy hurt even more. Which was impressive as he hadn’t thought that even possible.

“So much she left me to die in a fighting pit,” Bellamy turned toward the girl and did his best to keep his voice even. Despite his effort though, there was bitterness dripping acid at the back of his throat and coloring his words.

“That was a mistake,” Madi threw back and there was a sudden glint in her eye which promised him she’d just come up with something clever that was about to disembowel him. “How many mistakes did you make to protect the child you loved?”

The hit landed like a well-aimed Trikru arrow.

“That was different,” Bellamy tried but felt the rigid righteousness of his argument turn into sand which began slipping through his fingers.

He’d committed many, many mistakes to protect Octavia, some that haunted him even to this day. But Octavia was his sister.

And Madi was Clarke’s daughter. If there was a difference did it even lean in Bellamy’s favor?

“Was it?” Madi asked pointedly as if she could read the waver in his conviction “I shouldn't tell you this, but when you were on the ring, she called you on the radio every day for six years.”

He’d been right, his organs seemed to clench like flesh receiving an electric shock and then vanishing. There was a distant thought telling Bellamy that if he were to look down and see them spilled out, rolling across the grass by their feet, he wouldn’t even blink in surprise.

“You didn't know that, did you?”

All Bellamy could do was stare at Madi, lips parting but no sound coming.

And like a compass yearning for the Earth’s magnetic pole, Bellamy’s eyes found Clarke. She’d been looking at him before he turned, he knew because he managed to catch her eye for the second it took before Clarke moved her gaze off.

That second lasted long enough to read her regret though. And her pain.

He’d hurt Clarke. And then she’d hurt him.

And none of that changed anything because his heart, now burning inside his chest with his own guilt, reminded Bellamy that it was still waiting and that the name seared into it was still hers.

---

+1

---

Being in the same room as Josephine Lightbourne made Bellamy’s insides twist into knots. He breathed deeply, feeling his sanity fraying like a worn rope that was destined to snap in half.

He wanted to let it snap in half.

He wanted to dig his fingers into the back of Clarke’s skull and rip Josephine out, smash her chip under his boot, twist his heel until plastic turned into dust.

“What about the mother and child, will they agree?”

“I’ll handle our people,” he said, feeling like he was running lines in a play. Pantomiming the character he was supposed to be playing while in reality he just wanted to smash all their faces into a bloody paste. “How long will it take to build?”

Bellamy wanted to burn Sanctum to the ground and cut the throats of every Prime.

And the only reason he wasn’t, was because Clarke would want him to protect their people - to protect Madi most of all.

But that was the rational part of him, and that part did not at all want to stay in control when he was in the same room as Clarke’s corpse. A corpse that was walking and talking and breathing the air that was meant to be Clarke’s.

Josephine cleared her throat and he clenched his jaw, fighting off the urge to cross the room, lock his fingers around her throat and squeeze.

“Just a moment, sweetheart,” said Russell Lightbourne, his eyes busy running over the plans they were going through.

Bellamy’s eyes kept falling on and then flinching away from Josephine. Again and again. As his heart longed for one last look at Clarke’s face so that he could memorize her, and then recoiled because it wasn’t Clarke he was looking at.

But then movement caught his gaze and his attention narrowed. He heard Russel say something but the words lost meaning before reaching Bellamy’s ears.

Josephine was tapping her finger against the side of her crossed arms. Short, long. A pause. Short, long, short, short. Pause. Short, short.

He pulled up his notebook. Dots and dashes were scrawled without blinking or looking down, eyes glued to Josephine’s hand. Short, short, short, long. That pause. Short.

“Bellamy!” Russell called out, seeming to notice Bellamy’s distraction. “Bellamy? Are we agreed?”

Adrenaline spiked.

“Yeah,” he said, forcing himself to join the moment again. “We’re good. For now.”

“I’ll order construction to begin,” Russell said, sounding pleased, something that just seconds ago would have made Bellamy clench his hands into fists that would have demanded to be smashed into the man’s face.

“Let’s go,” Bellamy said instead, gesturing at Miller to follow.

They left the Lightbournes behind them and as soon as he and Miller were away from their eyes, he stopped trying to fight off the encroaching euphoria.

“Hey, remember when Pike taught us Morse code?” he asked in a whisper as soon as the doors closed behind them.

Miller blinked rapidly as if Bellamy had just transferred him back in time to some memory of his father asking him if he’d been paying attention in school. “I slept through most of Earth skills so...”

“Okay,” Bellamy nodded not really paying attention. “Josephine was tapping out Morse code on her arm.”

He added letters at the beginning of each string of lines he’d written. Feeling something within him being hit with warm light as the word was spelled out. Alive. He turned the notebook around passing it to Miller.

“What does it mean?”

“It means Clarke’s alive.” It meant he no longer had any intention to follow Murphy’s advice. He would do it bloodlessly if he was able to because it’s what Monty would want of him. But if it took starting a war, or killing every single person who had stolen another person’s life and body like they were trying to steal Clarke’s, he would still do it. “And we’re gonna get her back.”

-

“Echo,” he said before she could leave the room with the others, “can we talk?”

Echo’s eyes grew brittle and her face went from the thawed expression that occasionally even warmed now, - something that had taken years on the Ring, - to the look that was all frozen tundra of an Azgeda spy.

He waited until they were alone before trying to speak.

“Echo, I-”

“You’re trying to figure out how to break up with me,” she said, she’d never had any patience for Bellamy to find his words when she could read them herself. During their years-long isolation of just seven people in a world of their own, this had felt something like a blessing. There had been very little he’d wanted to say, it had been easier to let Echo just draw her own understanding from the lines of grief that crisscrossed Bellamy’s entire soul.

“I don’t-” But of course he did. He’d already put it off for far longer than he should have. He’d known that it was unfair to keep being with Echo in a universe where Clarke was still alive, but it had been easier to pretend otherwise, to use Echo as something like a shield that might protect Bellamy from feeling his heart breaking yet again. And there had been that promise he’d made Echo, about how nothing would change on the ground. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

That much was true. He cared about her, and would never have started dating her at all if he’d had even a hint of hope that Clarke had survived Praimfaya. If he’d known that the nightblood had worked, or that she’d reached cover before the fire itself could consume her.

But he’d been without hope.

And he’d loved Echo as well as a dead heart could love someone.

“I know. But you’ve always been in love with Clarke,” Echo told him, staring over his shoulder. There was no wetness to her eyes but Bellamy knew that it didn’t actually mean anything. She’d never forgotten her training. “I’ve always known that. We’ve been on borrowed time since the minute you found out she was alive, I’m just surprised it took this long, really.”

“I did love you. I do love you.”

Her eyes flicked to his with a glare and Bellamy closed his mouth. Grimaced at his mistake, despite the sentiment, the words were cruel.

“Nowhere near the way I deserve.” She seemed to agree with his last thought.

“I know,” he repeated “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, just save Clarke,” Echo told him and turned around to leave, their conversation done. She didn’t stay for a hug that might bring them from two people who’d been in a relationship for three years, to two people whose relationship had ended but who were still family in many other ways. No goodbyes, it just wasn’t Echo’s way. “Or what would be the point of any of this?”

-

Bellamy tested the chains locking him to the cave wall for the tenth time when he felt Josephine’s eyes on him.

“What?” he asked, irritated by that smirk on her face. Hating it because even an expression that small wasn’t quite right. He’d seen Clarke smirk, it had never looked quite that self-important and arrogant when she did it. Her smirks tended to slip into grins or to fade so quickly he thought he’d imagined them.

“My father was a fool for letting you people stay,” she started out with a lilt to her voice that he was beginning to recognize as her preparing to turn long-winded and to say things that would end with Bellamy needing to remind himself that any harm he did to her he’d be doing to Clarke too. “All that time spent building a sanctuary for the human race, and he destroys it because of the most human thing of all - love.”

The implied double meaning landed like a punch to the gut, as was Josephine’s intention he was sure. He turned his head toward her, opening his mouth though uncertain what it was exactly he was planning to say to her.

It’s not like he had any intention to say those words for the first time to the person doing their very best to murder Clarke. Even more so to someone who was wearing Clarke’s body like body-armor.

It turned out though that he didn’t end up needing to say anything, as Bellamy had already learned, Josephine loved hearing herself talk far too much.

"I mean, who can blame him? I am awesome. It's just...well, one look at you, he should have known how this would end,” she clicked her tongue to underline her point and he moved in place, adjusting his sitting. More discomfited than he’d like to be. “Guess I'm just saying all this because I know so much about you now.”

Ah, so there was her game.

“Hmm, you do, huh?” he smiled, knowing it wasn’t reaching his eyes but almost amused in a colder kind of way.

“Mm-hmm,” she smiled too, her eyes carrying a little malicious glint. “Take you and Clarke, for instance. Now that's a weird relationship, isn't it?”

He felt himself freeze in place, rock beginning to dig into his spine. But he didn’t move, somehow aware that it was more important for him to ready his walls for a catapult.

"First you want to kill her to save your own ass, even though it means the genocide of your own people on the Ark, and then you become besties, bonding over the actual genocide at Mount Weather.” It was frightening to know how much Josephine had gleaned from Clarke’s mind now when initially she’d known nothing. He wondered what that meant for Clarke, was she losing her fight with Josephine? How long did Bellamy have to bring her to Gabriel?

“Together,” she mimicked mockingly.

He said nothing, unwilling to give Josephine the pleasure.

"You lock her up, she locks you up, you leave her on Earth, she leaves you to die in the Fighting Pits.” The oxygen around Bellamy seemed to grow thinner with her every word. “I mean, it's exhausting, frankly.”

He stared toward the ceiling and gave in.

“Tell me about it,” Bellamy muttered, feeling every event she’d described as having sunk iron into his bones; like he’d just grown heavier by tons. Then he shook it off and made his own point. “You're wrong about how this ends, by the way.”

He saw her twist Clarke’s head toward him with an expression like she was already rather doubting him.

He hummed.

“First, we get you back into your Mind Drive,” he told her as a foregone conclusion because he wouldn’t be accepting any other way this ended. He’d get Clarke back, “and then I'll use it for a peace deal with your Father.”

“Your belief in yourself is cute,” Josephine said, not sounding like she thought that at all. “But unfortunately, putting aside about a thousand variables, chief among them Clarke's newfound evangelical, do better-ism, making it impossible for her to accept a peace deal with those awful body snatchers, all three of us are gonna die in this cave.”

“Yeah, okay. We'll see,” he scoffed.

"Okay, now your confidence is just pissing me off,” Josephine snapped back.

Bellamy took a quick look at her, staring at the way Clarke’s shoulders rose and fell slightly. He matched it. They were still breathing, so Bellamy still had hope.

-

Watching Clarke flat-line was unlike anything he’d had to live through before. Well, no, he supposed it wasn’t much different than how it had felt any of the too many other times he’d feared Clarke dead - though maybe not quite as bad as those times when he’d truly thought her so. And if he never had to go through that ever again after this, it would still be too soon.

But what made this different was that Bellamy needed to let it happen. That he had to stand there in Gabriel’s hut and trust the man to sacrifice the person he loved to save the woman who meant very little to him, and everything to Bellamy.

“All right,” Gabriel said, pulling out the mind drive and hurriedly dropping it in a metal dish. “Cover the wound.”

Bellamy followed the instructions, forcing his hands to stay steady as he bandaged the back of Clarke’s neck and then with Octavia’s help turned her onto her back to give Gabriel access.

“We need to restart her heart.”

Bellamy watched the man injecting adrenaline straight into Clarke’s heart and swept his eyes over the screens as soon as the needle was out, trying to catch the moment when the line monitoring her heartbeat would jump back into movement.

But the line stayed still.

Bellamy felt his forced calm begin to abandon him the longer the extended warning sound, which announced that Clarke’s heart was still yet to start beating again, stretched.

“Why isn't she waking up?” Horror was building up inside him again.

Bellamy couldn’t do this again. He couldn’t. The idea that he would have to go back to Sanctum and tell Madi that her mother was dead? Again? To tell Abby? Their friends? And then to return to living some shadowed reflection of life where Clarke was gone again as he’d done for six grueling years?

He refused to accept that.

“I'm sorry, but her brain can no longer support two minds,” was all Gabriel told them and Bellamy went cold, a high-pitched whine beginning to ring in his ears as his chest contracted and froze, stilling despite the pressure he could feel building in his lungs.

“What are you talking about? Do something,” Octavia demanded. “They're both still in there.”

Bellamy’s eyes flicked over his surroundings, hand hovering inches over Clarke’s head and the reality around him going fuzzy. Like if he didn’t have to listen to Gabriel’s words they’d stop mattering.

“Latent neural activity continues for a short time after death, but once the head stops telling the heart to beat, it's over, okay?”

Those words. Bellamy’s entire life narrowed down to those words.

“The heart and the head,” he said to himself.

He just needed to give Clarke time. To keep her heart beating long enough for her mind to catch up. If there was one thing Bellamy knew with everything in him it was that you could always trust Clarke’s mind to start working.

“The heart and the head.” He moved his hands over her chest, pushing Octavia slightly aside, and started compressions.

Clarke stayed still and unmoving under his hands. The seconds stretched as he put more and more weight on his work.

His mind filled out with pictures. Scenes from memory. The time he'd caught her hand and pulled her free of the pit of spikes that awaited her on the bottom. The time she’d sat beside him on the ground with their backs against the tree, for the first time truly his partner. The way she hummed a lullaby as she killed Atom in mercy. The first night after she’d returned from escaping Mount Weather and they’d camped by the fire when they’d gone searching for Finn; when Bellamy had felt something in his heart clench at seeing her asleep for the very first time. Hearing her voice on the hand radio, when he'd gone down to infiltrate the Mountain. Every single time Clarke had ever hugged him and he'd felt warmth suffuse his very being.

“Bell,” his sister said quietly, her hand pressing against his back, attempting comfort.

He ignored her. He didn’t need comfort, he needed Clarke.

"No,” he shook her off. “I'm not losing her again.”

He’d lost her to Mount Weather. And then to her grief over having needed to irradiate that same mountain, killing hundreds. He’d lost her to Wanheda. And then to Praimfaya. To his own stupidity. And then to the Primes. And he wasn’t losing her to Josephine a second time.

“Come on, Clarke.” Oxygen. The brain needed to receive air to continue working. He leaned over her, stopping the compressions long enough to push air into her lungs twice, and with some buried corner of his mind noticed that his tears now wetted her face too.

“Come on! Clarke, Clarke, I need you,” he was begging now, pleading for her to hear him. Mind scrambling for something that might be important enough to make her listen. “Madi needs you. Now wake up!”

“Bellamy she's gone,” Octavia’s voice was tearful and compassionate. But not something he was willing to accept.

“No, she's not!” He yelled in his sister’s face and then turned back to face Clarke a fraction of a second later, momentarily losing focus as he realized he’d stopped the compressions. “Wake up, Clarke! Come on!”

He pulled his hand into a fist and hit her over the heart now. Old, buried lessons reminding him that breaking the ribs just meant that the compressions were actually reaching the heart and so could be dealt with later.

"I'm not letting you go,” he told her, speaking only to Clarke.

"You're a fighter," he reminded her. She'd always been one, he hadn’t recognized it in the very beginning but she'd taught him hadn't she? "Now get up and fight!"

He smashed his hand over her heart once more.

Then moved his lips over Clarke’s, pushing air out of his own lungs and into hers again.

Clarke coughed, choking. It was the most beautiful sound Bellamy had ever heard. He sobbed pulling her up and turning her just slightly to ease pressure on her airways.

"You're okay," he said, crying to himself. He ran hands over the sides of her face, pushing hair away from her eyes and supporting her head as she tried to raise it.

"Just breathe." He couldn't stop looking at her, the way she was finally moving, breathing on her own. "Just breathe."

But finally, a worry that had been irrelevant while Clarke had been failing to wake swam to the surface and Bellamy felt his breath stutter as he began to stare deeper into her eyes. Trying to read her. To see her.

"Clarke?" he asked, needing to make sure it was actually her in his arms now. He didn't know what he'd do if he saw Josephine, only that he would break utterly. But he didn't have to find out because his answer came in the way her eyes wouldn't stray from Bellamy's face, a look filled with years of unspoken words - or maybe words she'd spoken into the radio calls which Bellamy had never had the chance to receive; the contents of which had been haunting him since Madi had told him of them.

It was her. Clarke. His tears ran harder as his heart lurched with familiar relief.

And this time Bellamy just couldn't stop himself. The relief was too great, his heart too full, he pulled her closer and leaned down to catch her lips for the third time that night.

Except this was the only time that really counted because Clarke's lips moved under his own, kissing him back after only a moment during which Bellamy felt like his world might be about to end after all. Her hand went up to squeeze the material of his jacket, seeming to pull him closer.

Bellamy's heart sang as he kissed her, deeper now, beginning to lose himself in the moment and trying to pour every bit of his love into it, suffusing it with all his relief and joy and sheer adoration.

He didn't know if he'd ever have this chance again so he made sure to memorize it. To remember her taste, the way she smelled. Everything. All of it.

Eventually, though, they both needed oxygen and their kiss slowed. Lips parted, as they blew heavy breaths against each other's faces.

"The head and the heart," Clarke whispered, while Bellamy nodded and pulled her closer to him, hugging her tightly to assure both of them that she was alive.

-

Clarke woke with a start and Bellamy was at her side in moments.

"Hey. You're okay. I'm still here," Bellamy assured her, noticing the way her eyes had jumped around before settling on him and calming.

"Thanks to you," she said, "How long have I been asleep?"

"A few hours," he told her and then felt his face twisting into a pained grimace. The hours he'd spent waiting had brought with them the reminder that it had been Bellamy's fault that this had happened to her in the first place. "I'm so sorry, Clarke. I knew you were a target. I didn't protect you."

"Bellamy, you saved me."

He opened his mouth and then hesitated, suddenly remembering that they weren't exactly alone, turning toward Gabriel who was visibly trying to be unobtrusive and giving them as much privacy as was possible, Bellamy asked “Can you please?-”

"Of course," Gabriel nodded and stood to leave. "Call me if you notice complications."

They waited a few moments until Gabriel had left, Bellamy's stomach falling into a painful swoop filled with disappointment when he noticed the way Clarke’s eyes were beginning to avoid his own.

"Bellamy?" she spoke eventually. "Maybe we shouldn’t-"

But Bellamy was tired of avoiding this conversation. He'd let her silence him more than a few times those years back. And all it had left him with was a sea's worth of what-ifs which had haunted Bellamy for every one of the six years they'd been apart.

"No, I’m not doing that anymore Clarke," he said gently but without backing down, moving her head up with a touch of fingers to her chin to catch her eyes. "This time just- just please let me say this."

She nodded, pulling her hands around herself. Like she needed to protect herself from what Bellamy was about to tell her.

"I love you, Clarke." His voice shook nearly imperceptibly but he knew that Clarke would still catch it, he certainly caught the way her shoulders halted in place for a moment before resuming their natural motion. Her eyes flicked up to his, a startled look in them he couldn’t quite make any sense of. This hadn't exactly been a secret he'd kept very well after all: Kane had known, and so did Abby, Raven, and Monty. Murphy had certainly made himself pretty clear. Diyoza, Roan. Lexa and Niylah. Josephine and- point being, it wasn't like he'd been very subtle. "I’ve loved you for- fuck I don’t even know how many years it’s been now."

They'd been down on the ground for nearly a year before the second wave of radiation had burned everything, he thought. Or was it slightly longer? Then six years on the Ring of course and more than a hundred asleep.

And which of those years counted? He knew that the time he'd thought her gone absolutely did because he'd never stopped. And he felt like his time in cryosleep did too because it certainly felt like he'd loved Clarke for a century.

"And I know you didn’t, that you don’t-" here he stumbled, heart growing heavy again, he'd accepted it, yes, but that didn't mean it hurt any less "and that’s fine Clarke. I get it."

"But-" Clarke finally moved to interrupt him. "Echo."

"I broke up with Echo before we left Sanctum," he told her and then moved quickly ahead, suddenly worried that she'd read some kind of pressure in that. "Which was long overdue and it's probably gonna take a long while before she forgives me for not having done it sooner."

"I-"

"Just- just let me finish, okay?" he swallowed and squeezed his eyes shut, knowing that to get his next words out he'd need all the strength he had. "Clarke. I’m sorry for kissing you right after- I shouldn’t have done that."

She'd just been dead not even a full minute before. He didn't think there even was a more vulnerable moment Bellamy could have found for when to do it.

Which he'd realized after but certainly hadn't even taken a moment to consider at the time.

"It was stupid and wrong of me but you woke up and you were you, Clarke, and I couldn’t- couldn’t-" His jaw locked and he breathed for a moment before continuing. "I'm in love with you, Clarke. And I don’t care if you still hate me for putting the Flame in Madi, or if-"

He was silenced by Clarke's fingers falling over his mouth, fingertips resting gently against his lips and making heat flash through his bones.

"Bellamy. I think now’s my turn,” Clarke said, her eyes filling with tears again.

He felt the alien world around them halting into silence as Bellamy’s fate and heart rested in Clarke’s arms. Which wasn’t really any different than usual but somehow felt a thousand times stronger just now.

“I missed you. After Praimfya it was so hard, and I would have lost myself if I hadn’t found Madi. Talking with you though is what kept me sane, even though you never answered. And then you came back and you were so different, still you, but... not mine anymore. Which was stupid, of course, it’s not like I really expected-”

“I-” she pressed her fingers tighter against his lips, stilling his denial and his apology.

“But I think I hoped. And it hurt when I realized that somewhere up there you’d found a family that I was no longer a part of.”

“You are,” he said before she could interrupt him again, kissing her fingers to take the sting off failing to follow her request for his silence.

“And you’re mine, Bellamy. And I need you to believe me when I say this next bit, okay?” She said and then breathed in heavily, starting to run her hand over the lines of Bellamy’s face, stopping occasionally like she was marking some of the more significant spots. “I love you, Bellamy, I was afraid to, because everyone I love always dies, everyone who loves me always dies. And I couldn’t let you join them.”

He felt years of old pain begin to evaporate and smiled at Clarke, feeling tears on his cheeks again.

Then he felt her hand slipping into his probably gross and sweaty hair to hold the back of his neck, and he only had time to take in a single deep breath before Clarke’s lips slid over Bellamy’s, as she pulled him into herself. She tasted of sunlight, of hope and love, and the kind of happiness Bellamy had thought out of his reach. Suddenly it didn’t matter exactly how long Bellamy had been in love with Clarke, or how long Clarke returned those feelings. All that mattered was that they loved each other right now, at this moment.

And he never wanted to forget it again.

#bellarke #bellarke fic #bellamy blake #clarke griffin #the 100 #the 100 fic #fanfic #otp: the head and the heart #bellarke fanfiction

[yiangchen]

.

#CLARKES BEEN BACK FOR ONE DAY AND YOURE ALREADY TAKING ORDERS #A GOOD LITTLE KNIGHT BY HIS QUEENS SIDE #TOO BAD YOU WERE NEVER THAT DEVOTED TO GINA #i- #raven was so insane for that but she was so right #kdfjasldfjd #recently ive been remembering all these very blatant statements said in canon about bellarke and it is truly just WILD #like #jroth really put us through it #we were fucking going THROUGH IT

[dragynkeep]

don't mind me just imagining a world where jroth and kim shumway were banned from twitter and social media as a whole for the duration of the t100 apart from five minutes a month

part of me wants to remember what made the fandom so toxic and how much it came from those to wankers to basically highlight how not to interact with a fan base but I also don't want to get annoyed and frustrated (which is sure to happen as most i remember is jason/ kim says shit= fandom bullying got a jolt and huge upkick/ daddy basically remembering specific interactions? would be helpful but also scared and nervous)

them & that layne loser who was so determined to have her opinion be canon?? like the shit that came especially around the lexa death / s3 era was just horrendous on all sides & the showrunners did nothing but make it worse.

then when it got exposed that they were being abusive on set & their racism / sexism soon followed, then they finally shut the fuck up. interesting!

#the 100 #the 100 salt #jason rothenberg #kim shumway #layne morgan #ais.txt #answered #q

[lovergurrl411]

Rewatching the 100 and it's like my heart is breaking all over again. All Bellamy asked was for the people he loved and trusted most in the world to believe in him. That's it. Can you imagine standing in front of your family and closest friends, simply asking them to believe in you and no one does? I want to cry all over again because that right there was the greatest injustice of all. He died thinking that the people he loved the most in the world hated him, never trusted him, and because he's Bellamy Blake (always searching for redemption, self-deprecating, all heart and leaps of faith) he probably died believing they had every right to feel that way, to turn their backs on him.

He was right about transcendence and everyone else got to enjoy his HEA but him? Fuck that. Fuck them. Fuck JRoth.

I'm livid. Time to go write fanfic to settle this rage.

#the 100 #bellamy and clarke #bellamy and murphy #bellamy and raven #bellamy and echo #bellamy and octavia #t100 s7 disaster #fuck that season #i'm not okay #my heart is frail #t100 #bellamy blake #bellamy deserved better #with friends like these #who needs enemies #he was right #no one believed him #i'm heartbroken #the rest of the original delinquents would've believed him #bellarke fanfiction #delinquents as family fanfiction