Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

— 1961: BERLIN (GERMANY) —

Bellamy marries Clarke on a warm August evening.

He doesn’t really want to. But his five-year old sister Sarah wanders over to his bedroom where he’s sitting organizing his collectible baseball cards, and she tugs on his sleeve and whines C’mon, Benji, because she wants him to help her and her friends with the game that they’re playing. He says no, because he’s almost ten years old and he just wants to sort his cards, dammit. But then Sarah goes and gets their mother, who forces him to follow his sister (a little sullenly) to the apartment balcony, where all her friends are waiting.

“What do you want,” he snaps, irritable. Three of his sister’s friends sit cross-legged on the floor of the cramped little balcony, a space not more than a few strides wide.

“We’re having a wedding,” Sarah announces. “Clarissa is the bride, ‘cuz she’s wearing white. And we needed someone for her to get married to.”

He crosses his arms, eyeing Clarissa. She’s blonde, with a rounded face, and indeed she’s the only one wearing white; a white, frilly dress with lacy blue accents that complement her big blue eyes. When he looks at her she stands on her chubby legs and holds out her hands excitedly.

“Why don’t one of you just marry her?” he asks, looking at them all. This is such a stupid game.

Clarissa tilts her head at him, almost as if considering the suggestion. The rest look at him like he’s an idiot.

“We need a groom, silly,” Sarah giggles, and grabs his hand and puts it in Clarissa’s. “Now stand there. You’re about to get married, aren’t you happy?”

No, he is not, he muses. He doesn’t look at Clarissa while Sarah starts spouting out a long and rather nonsensical version of wedding vows. Bored, he looks out across the street, where he can see people walking up and down the sidewalk, and where cars are zooming past them.

He tunes back in only because Sarah says proudly, “You may now kiss the bride.”

He balks. Clarissa is already leaning in, but she’s too short, even when she’s stretching her neck up and standing on her tip-toes. “Uh, no,” he says uncomfortably. But then he sees Clarissa’s face fall and oh god no there are tears glistening in her eyes.

“She can’t be married until you kiss the bride,” another one of Sarah’s friends whines while he internally panics. If one of Sarah’s friends starts crying, it’ll end up being his fault and he’ll probably get in trouble.

Floundering, he finally just leans down to press a kiss to Clarissa’s cheek instead. But she turns her face towards him at the last second— his lips land on the corner of her mouth.

Instantly, he shoots back up to full height and lets go of her hands. Sarah and her friends are cooing, but he’s blushing, and Clarissa’s blushing too, a small shy smile spreading on her lips. She claps her hands over her own mouth and giggles.

“You are now husband and wife!” his sister yells, jumping up and down with the rest of them, but he doesn’t really hear them, because suddenly a sharp pain splits through his skull, and he yelps in pain.

There’s a flash of light behind his eyelids, and when he opens them, he and Clarissa are staring at each other in shock.

He’s suddenly being bombarded with images, memories, some of which he doesn’t even understand. He staggers back, falling against the railing and sinking against it. His headache is growing. He can’t wrap his mind around any of the feelings or half the adult memories that are suddenly rising in his mind. He feels— he feels too much. Emotions are bombarding him from every angle, and he can’t process a single one.

The one thing he can process is this: His name is Bellamy.

And hers— his eyes snap to Clarissa’s— her name is Clarke.

As if on cue, Clarke’s face crumples, and she collapses to the floor. The girls still haven’t noticed the breakdown of the newlyweds, so joyful in celebration as they are. At least, until Clarke starts screaming.

Everyone flinches.

But she doesn’t stop. She just keeps screaming and screaming and screaming, hands clamped against her head and eyes scrunched up as if in agony. The other girls start crying and screaming for help, too, and Bellamy’s mother runs onto the balcony, looking alarmed.

No one can get Clarke to stop screaming.

Bellamy, still in the background, frozen in shock, knows what’s happening to her. She’s five— A five year old getting hundreds of years worth of memories. It’s too much for her. It’s almost too much for him. It takes all his energy just to stand upright, but no one seems to notice his struggle. He doesn’t understand his memories, or even know where to begin in sifting through them, but one thing is very clear to his nine year old mind, completely absurd but completely true somehow: this girl is his wife.

Clarke only stops screaming when she passes out a full three minutes later.

She’s sent home, which is a few streets west, and Bellamy skulks near the phone later, eavesdropping on the worried and quiet conversation between his mother and Clarke’s. Clarke still isn’t well, apparently. She woke up and started screaming again. They took her to the hospital, but they haven’t figured out what’s wrong with her yet. She’s just screaming gibberish, and not much else.

His mother puts down the phone with a sigh that night and when Bellamy turns around to go to his room, he runs into his sister.

Sarah has her hands on her hips and her eyes are full of tears. “What did you do?”

“I— what?” he asks, bewildered.

She shoves at him and although she’s tiny compared to him, he stumbles because he’s caught off guard, and his mind is still whirring from the memories he hasn’t yet been able to process.

“You did something to Clarissa!” his sister screams at him. “Mommy, Benji did something to Clarissa!”

“I didn’t do anything!” he protests when his mother looks between them, but that’s a lie. He did do something.

His mother sighs and rubs her temples. “Go to bed, you two.”

“But—”

“Go. To. Bed!”

He does. So does Sarah, still sniffling. He lies awake all night, thinking of Clarke.

And the next day, they start building the Wall.

—

Bellamy doesn’t pay much attention to the Wall being built because he’s busy trying to deal with his new memories. It’s a lot to handle, and some of it is just overwhelming. The next day he keeps to his room, staring out the window. His parents don’t seem to notice, perhaps preoccupied themselves, and his sister is still mad at him.

But that night, he’s confronted with the memory of a blonde woman with Clarissa’s blue eyes dying in his arms and a wave of grief hits him, so intense and soul-shattering that the next thing he knows, he’s just sobbing into his pillow, willing the pain to stop.

He barely hears the door open, his father whispering his name in concern. He can’t answer, just banging his head against his pillows trying to get all this to stop, until his father grabs his hand— his left one.

That sets off another memory, of his own mangled left hand being sawed off, and the pain is so fresh in his mind that it sets him off into a new burst of tears.

“What’s wrong, Benji?” his father soothes, gathering him up in his arms like a small child. Bellamy buries his face into his father’s neck and lets him rock him back and forth.

“I’m seeing things,” he manages to get out. “I’m remembering things. It’s too much. It’s too much,” he repeats over and over until he dissolves back into tears. Even without looking up, he can tell his mom in the doorway and his father are exchanging worried glances.

“Think it has something to do with that girl Clarissa?” he hears his father murmur as he pats a comforting hand on Bellamy’s back.

“It better not be,” his mother replies. “Apparently she hasn’t gotten any better.”

His father gently pries Bellamy’s fists away from his own hair. He hadn’t even realized he was tugging on it. “Take him to a doctor. First thing in the morning.”

Bellamy freezes up. He hates doctors. And somehow— somehow he knows what’s happening to him is far beyond them, anyway.

It takes all his strength to withhold the tears that are still spilling from his eyes and blurt, “No. No doctors.” He leans away from his father, and both his parents look at him with concern.

“We’re just trying to help, Benji,” his father says.

Bellamy wipes his face with one hand, dropping his gaze to the floor. “I’m fine. It was a really bad dream.”

They see his sudden calmness and seem to buy it. His father stays with him until Bellamy mimics sleep well enough that he leaves, turning off the light and closing the door softly behind him. But Bellamy lies awake in the dark on his side, eyes wide as he stares out the window at the beginnings of the construction of the wall on the next street over.

He hardly sleeps at all that night.

—

It’s a long time before he’s able to sleep well again. But eventually, he finds a way to shove back the memories so he doesn’t have to deal with the tidal wave of emotions that come with them. He knows snippets of his past lifetimes, but most of all he knows Clarke, and he worries about her. A lot.

A month later, he goes for his first day of school. His friends greet him in the hallway, laugh about things that don’t matter. He struggles to keep up the facade of being a nine year old boy.

That afternoon, on their way home, he turns to his sister. “Did you see Clar— Clarissa today?” he asks her, as casually as he can.

Sarah blinks at him. “Clarissa?” She sounds confused for a second and then her expression clears. “Oh, Clarissa. Mommy says she’s not going to come to school anymore.”

He gapes. “Why?” He thought he’d at least get to see her in school. But his sister shrugs, already back to singing some nonsense tune and forgetting all about her former friend. Bellamy wishes he could do the same.

His mother, driving the car, answers for him. “Clarissa’s not well enough for school yet, honey. They went away to take her someplace to get better.”

“To get better?” he repeats, and a wave of panic shudders through his thin frame. Clarke. He has to protect Clarke. But he can’t do that if he doesn’t know what is happening to her. “Where? Where is she now?”

There’s an urgency to his tone, one that he immediately chastises himself for; he’s trying to fly under the radar. But luckily his mother doesn’t notice; she’s too busy staring out the window with a troubled expression on her face as they drive past the construction of the Wall.

It gives him a chance to compose himself, so that he sounds only mildly curious when he asks again, “Mom? Where’s Clarissa?”

His mother’s hands tighten on the wheel. “On the west side of the wall,” she murmurs, so low Bellamy hardly hears. “Even after she gets well, you and Sarah probably won’t see her anymore.”

And this is the first time that Bellamy’s eyes swing to the construction of the Wall with more than just detached interest. Because now, suddenly, it’s an obstacle to Clarke. Dimly he remembers going over to her apartment with his family a handful of times. It is indeed a few streets west, past the wall. “We won’t see her anymore?” he repeats, trying not to betray his slowly brewing panic. “They’re going to cut the city in two?”

Her silence says everything.

He swallows. “They can’t do that, can they?”

“Benji,” his mother sighs as they turn onto their street. “They already did.”

—

Growing up, it becomes evident that the Wall isn’t coming down any time soon.

It also becomes evident that shoving down his memories is the best course of action.

He feels older than all his friends going back to school that year. He’s quiet in class, and a few weeks in the teacher pulls him aside to ask if something’s wrong at home.

“You’ve just been looking very sad,” his teacher says, a concerned look on her kind features. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you don’t talk much to anyone. I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

“I’m fine,” Bellamy says automatically. He doesn’t think he sounds very convincing.

She doesn’t seem to think so either because she squeezes his shoulder. “You can always tell me, you know. Is everything alright with your family?”

Not really, he thinks to himself. Well, technically yes; his father still has a job, and his mother is doing fine despite her worrying cough, and his sister is happy as a daisy. But unbeknownst to them all, there’s another person in Bellamy’s family, and he has no idea if she’s alright or not.

Through more eavesdropping, he’s learned that there have been talks of admitting young Clarke to a mental institution over on the west side; apparently she keeps doing and saying very strange things. And apparently, talking to someone no one can see; Clarke’s mother, a superstitious type, is saying her daughter might be possessed.

Bellamy, meanwhile draws his own conclusions. He really wishes young Clarke had the capacity to shut up about their previous lives. He’s actually kind of surprised she hasn’t implicated him in her mess yet. He wishes she would; maybe they’d want to question him and he’d have a reason to see her. But she’s probably not coherent enough in her rambling for them to figure out who she’s going on about, anyway. So the devil it is.

He finds that kind of funny, too. Maybe they’re not too far off.

He tries to smile at his teacher; the action stretches the corners of his mouth painfully. “Thank you. But everything’s fine.”

And from that point on, everything is. Because he acts like it is. And whenever he can pick up a scrap of information of what’s going on in Clarke’s life, he eats it up. Those become fewer and farther between as time goes on, as his family eventually stops having any sort of communication with the people on the other side of the Wall. The last he hears about her is in passing, his mother wondering aloud if “that Clarissa girl” is still in the mental hospital. The idea of Clarke locked away saddens him, but at least she’s alive, out there, somewhere. And she’s smart; he knows when she’s old enough she’ll learn to keep her mouth shut and they’ll let her out. She’ll have a chance at life. He has to believe that.

And in the meantime, he decides he can wait for Clarke, wherever she is, and try to live some semblance of a life himself. After all, he’ll see her again someday.

Even if it’s not in this lifetime.

—

But it’s still hard to act like he’s a normal person sometimes.

Like the day when he’s thirteen and he lets himself into the apartment after school after walking home with a girl he knows from class like he always does, and his father is sitting very seriously in the living room and says, “We need to have a talk.”

This sets Bellamy on high alert right away. There’s something very stern about his father’s eyes and for a split second he’s seized with the fear that his father has found the West Berlin phone book under his bed; the one he had scavenged out of a trash bin and scoured through hoping to find some number he could call for Clarke’s family.

His father continues slowly, and a bit awkwardly now, “That girl you walk home with. She seems to like you.”

Oh.

“Well, so does her brother,” he can’t help but remark, because it’s true; maybe a real thirteen year old wouldn’t be able to recognize the signs of romantic interest, but he can because well, he’s seen them before.

His father frowns. “Whatever the case may be,” he says, patting the couch cushion next to him. “We need to talk about it. You’re growing up now, and there are things you need to know.”

Now Bellamy’s fear is replaced with an entirely different sort of panic, and he feels a blush rising to his cheeks. This is a sex talk he’s about to receive. He hardly hears his father’s next words because suddenly other memories are coursing through him.

He has not spent a lot of time dwelling on the lifetime where he was a prostitute, mostly because he really, really didn’t want to. And he does not want to be triggered into vividly reliving those memories now because his hapless father is trying to be helpful.

So externally, Bellamy, who has not moved an inch towards the couch, rubs the back of his curly haired head with his hand. “Can we do this later?” As he talks, he’s already moving backwards, retreating to the front door.

His father stands. “This is important, Benji— You don’t want to go getting a girl pregnant, now—”

Bellamy gulps because a memory of a time when he most definitely got his girl pregnant has flashed through his head. He squashes it down. “I’m going now, I’ve got somewhere to be,” he shouts over his father’s rambling about the birds and the bees, and then he flees the scene, running downstairs and onto the street to cool off.

Needless to say, it’s awkward at dinner that night. His mother forces the issue and the talk happens anyway, but at least he’s somewhat mentally prepared for it by then.

—

When he’s in his late-teens, his mom gets sick. It turns out that cough she’s had for years is something more. And it’s chronic. Her medication is expensive, even more so since they live in East Berlin. His father struggles with making enough money to keep them all afloat. Sarah is more worried than a kid should be. So he makes a decision.

Bellamy decides to drop his plans for university education and get a job out of high school so he can help pay for his mom’s meds. He waves away his parents’ protests.

“I’ll go later,” he promises his mom. “When you get better.”

She clutches his hands weakly and gives him a brittle smile. They both know there is a good chance she won’t get better. “You’re a good boy, Benji.”

Not really. After centuries spent alone, he has been savouring the feeling of living with a whole family for the past several years. And he doesn’t want to let go of it. So he just squeezes his mother’s hands, lets go, and pulls on his uniform for his first day of work at the Knorr-Bremse brake factory.

—

Ten years after he kissed Clarke on that balcony, he finally sees her again.

When the Four Power Agreement of Berlin is made earlier in the month, allowing residents to cross to and from East Berlin with a permit, he had immediately applied for one. He’d been declined, but that was to be expected. Most Easterners who got a permit were those whose work made crossing over a necessity. He’d resigned himself to trying again later, maybe when he had more of a clue where to start with finding her.

So it comes as a surprise that morning when, as he’s standing at his station in the factory, grubby and soot-stained from head to toe as he diligently sorts metal parts, a voice at his shoulder says, “Hey, you.”

He starts a little, because he was so concentrated on his work he hadn’t heard anyone come up to him. But then his mind connects the voice to the person, and when he turns his head, Clarke is standing in front of him, smiling big and bright and looking utterly out of place in this gloomy factory.

“Clarke?” he croaks. She beams again and stands up on her tiptoes to press a kiss to his cheek.

“Nice to see you too.”

He stares at her, stares and stares. Her blonde hair is in a french braid, her cheeks are full and rosy, and she looks pristine and healthy, he’s relieved to note. She’s wearing a pale pink top and a dark plaid skirt. He feels drab and grubby standing next to her. She must be about fifteen, about the same age as she was when he first met her in their first life, but she looks a little older than she is. And she acts a little younger than she is, grabbing his gloved hands excitedly and eyes sparkling in joy, waiting for his response.

There are so many things to say and questions to ask to her after ten years apart that he somehow settles on the most stupid one. “How the hell did you get in here?” Workers have a card that they have to show at the door of the factory.

He can tell from the way she rapidly blinks that this question was definitely not what she was expecting, but admirably, she takes it in stride. She leans in, way into his personal space and whispers like a secret, “With my feminine wiles.”

Whatever shock he was under breaks, and he finds his lips tugging up into a smile. “I’m not even sure why I asked.” Then Bellamy envelops her in a hug.

Clarke leaps into the embrace immediately, sighing into his shoulder. He presses his nose against her hair and marvels in the smell of her, real and here and solid and in his arms after such a long time apart.

A voice cuts through his haze of bliss. “Hey, Benji, who’s this? You never introduced us.”

Clarke pulls her head away from his shoulder and turns to the dark-haired speaker. It’s Igor, a Russian worker at the factory and one of Bellamy’s friends. He’s wearing a shit-eating grin like he already thinks he knows, with his hands on his hips and blue eyes sparkling with mischief. Some of the other workers around them pause in their work too, having given up on subtle eavesdropping as they await a real answer.

But Bellamy hesitates, looking at Clarke. He has no idea what he’s supposed to say, or what she expects him to. He can’t exactly say his wife from nearly a thousand years ago. So, his friend? His sister’s friend? His acquaintance? His—

“Girlfriend,” Clarke announces, stepping closer into his space and wrapping her arms around his middle. “I’m his girlfriend.”

Bellamy blinks, stunned, while wolf-whistles rise up from his co-workers.

“Damn, Benji!” Igor yells in glee. “You never date and now we know why. Where you been hiding her?” His eyes rove up and down Clarke’s form in appreciation, but Bellamy certainly doesn’t appreciate it.

“Igor,” Bellamy says pleasantly in lieu of answering, “If you’re going to check out my girlfriend, you could at least try and be subtle.” The word ‘girlfriend’ on his tongue sends a thrill through him. Maybe it has a similar effect on Clarke, because she stretches up on her tiptoes, turns his jaw towards her, and makes their second kiss in this life a good, dirty, public one.

If his friends were wolf-whistling before, they’re practically howling now, he notes as the two of them part. Looking into Clarke’s blue eyes, his heart beating fast against her chest, he makes a reckless decision.

He glances at the clock on the wall. It’s not even lunchtime. “I’m leaving early.” He glances at Igor, who’s still wearing his smug grin. “Can I call in that favour today?” A while back Bellamy had worked a shift for Igor while he got tied up in family stuff, and Igor had promised to do the same for him whenever he needed. Back then, Bellamy had never thought he’d need to ask. He needed to work as many shifts as he could get.

Clarke in his arms is kind of shifting his priorities at the moment, though.

“You got it. I’ll get your minimum done,” Igor says, slapping him on the back. “You lucky bastard.”

“Minimum?” Clarke repeats, looking between them. “Bellamy, if you need to work, I understand. I was actually going to wait until later to find you.” She chews her lip. “But I couldn’t wait.”

“It’s okay,” he says dismissively. The foreman will have his hide for having such a slow day, but he can’t find it in himself to care. “Let’s go.” He pulls off his gloves, throws them down on the workbench and takes her hand, tugging on it.

She lets him tug her along, out of the factory’s side door to where the white Trabant he drives is parked.

“Is this your car?” Clarke asks as he unlocks the door and holds it open for her. He feels his smile grow at her impressed tone of voice. Clearly West Berliners don’t have Trabants; if they did, she wouldn’t look so impressed. Trabants are truly the crappiest brand of car to ever exist, but they’re fairly popular in East Germany.

“Family car,” he explains, and goes around to his side to get in. It’s the family vehicle, but his dad works close to home so he usually walks, while Bellamy has to drive all the way to Friedrichshain district to get to work. He puts the key in the ignition, and the vehicle roars obnoxiously to life.

He pulls off from the side of the street and starts driving, a place already in mind. “How did you find me?” He asks her. “I’ve been looking for you my whole life, ever since that day, but I couldn’t find you.”

“I have more resources,” Clarke says, settling into her seat. “I’m an intern for a journalist. I can look up people pretty easily. As soon as I heard about the day passes into East Berlin, I applied for one. It took a while, though.”

“Intern for a journalist?” he repeats, casting her a sidelong glance. She shrugs. “I heard that they… sent you away, after what happened.” She’s silent. “To the mental hospital.”

She glances out the window, facing away from him. “They did.” Her tone is unreadable. “I hardly even remember those first two years. It was just a haze of pain and confusion.”

He swallows back a lump in his throat. “All those memories…”

“It was too much,” she finishes. “After they realized I wasn’t getting better, they put me away for a while and pumped me with sedatives all day to keep me normal. It took me years to grow into it all, and learn to shut up about things that made me sound crazy. And after I started doing that, they discharged me after a few months. Clean bill of health, and I got to go back and live with my family and everyone who thought I belonged in the nuthouse.” There’s a slight bitter edge to her voice, and he realizes that even bringing this up might be painful to her.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” he says gently, even though he yearns to know about those years of her life without him. “What matters is you’re here now.”

She turns her face back to him, a small smile now on her lips, and puts her hand on his, on the wheel. “Yeah. So, what about you?”

He turns onto the next street. “Yes, I’m here too, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

She hits his shoulder. “What’s going on in your life? I know you work in a factory. What else? Do you go to school? Do you have anyone in your life?” Her words are light, but he casts her a wary glance.

“No.” A beat, and he adds, “I haven’t really even been with anyone in this life.”

“Me neither,” she replies instantly, and he feels a little lighter. “But what about the rest?”

He tells her how his mom is sick, so he can’t go to school, and fills her in on the other major details of his life. He can feel Clarke studying him as he pulls the Trabant into a parking space near the bakery he’s bringing her to.

“You’re all dirty,” she notes, running her finger down the line of his forearm, where his uniform sleeve has been rolled up. The pad of her finger comes away a little smudged with metal dust.

He turns to her, about to be apologetic, but she’s settled in her seat with a dark gaze, biting her lip and he has to tear his gaze away before he does something stupid.

He clears his throat, clenching the wheel with tighter fingers. “I could go home and wash up first,” he offers, voice a little guttural.

“Don’t you dare,” Clarke practically purrs, and opens her car door. “Where are we?”

He shakes it off and follows her out. “The Pastry Chef,” he reports, holding the door open for her. “My sister and I love this place.”

“Sarah,” Clarke recalls, and they walk into the brightly lit establishment, with its pale pink tiled floors and lazily swinging fan on the ceiling. “How is she?”

There’s a line, so they go to the back and Bellamy wraps his arm around her from behind, resting his head against her hair. She leans back into him and they sway slightly on the spot. An older woman walks by them and smiles indulgently. Bellamy imagines how they must look; just another happy couple. The thought sends his heart into overdrive.

“Great,” he replies to Clarke in reference to her question. Honestly he doesn’t want to talk about his sister right now, though, so he nudges her in the side. “So, you’re my girlfriend, huh?”

He can see her cheeks reddening slightly at his teasing tone. She tosses her hair back, into his face, making him sputter. “Yes,” she says. “So treat me like it.”

One of his hands slides down to her hip. “I’ll treat you like it, all right.”

“You better.” The line moves up a little and she asks, “What are we getting?”

“Whatever you want.” He gestures to the glass display, where truly drool-inducing platters of strudels, marzipan, krepels and other pastries sit.

He ends up getting a strudel, and she ends up getting stollen fruitcake (“Give me extra sugar. More,” she instructs, and he smiles behind his hand).

When he goes to pay, she protests, “I have money, you know.” She fishes it out of her pocket. “The exchange prices were crazy, but—”

“It’s on me,” he says, handing his money over to the cashier.

“Bellamy, you shouldn’t spend money on me. Not with what’s going on in your life right now.”

He shrugs as they head outside to find a seat at one of the tables outside. “Give it a few years, and the wall will come down and I can go find one of my stashes.” For now, he’s stuck in the confines of Eastern Germany, but as soon as he can he’s making plans to go find some of the treasure he’s hidden around the world, and end his family’s money troubles once and for all.

She gasps, straightening as they sit down across from each other. “I almost forgot!”

He bites into his strudel. Delicious, as always. “I didn’t.” Because he’s a cheapskate.

“So much for that bet,” she muses, “since we died at the same time. Where’d you hide it, anyway? Did it get discovered?”

He tells her about the treasure, and where he’s stashed it, and the fact that the research he’s done thus far has indicated that much of his loot from his pirate days hasn’t been discovered yet. She nods along, enraptured, and he’s equally enraptured by the way the pink strap of her top slips over her shoulder. His voice dies away midway through his story, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She picks up her fruitcake and takes a bite, and nearly moans.

“This is so good,” she marvels. He internally smiles at the way she closes her eyes in bliss. There’s a bit of frosted sugar on her nose; it’s adorable.

He swipes it away with his thumb. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

She’s silent a moment, then looks down at her pastry and does just that. “I didn’t get married after I left Cebu Island, you know. Well, not really.”

That shocks him. He’d assumed she had; she hadn’t even disputed it, but now that he thinks back to those conversations, she never exactly confirmed it either.

She goes on, sounding almost nervous. “I met a girl at my debut. Her name was Emilia. I kind of fell in love with her.”

He’s quiet a moment before he asks, “Did it work out?”

She beams. “You’d never guess. The man my parents wanted me to marry was in love with Emilia’s fiance. So we made an arrangement.”

He laughs in disbelief. “Don’t tell me you all got married to satisfy your parents.”

“It was a win-win situation.” Her smile is smug, and she goes on to tell him stories of her life with Emilia, and he feels his heart melting with every word. Despite a distant jealousy at the description of her long life with someone else, she positively glows telling the story and well, at least one of them should get some happiness now and then.

“The four of us adopted a few children, too,” she tells him on the drive back to his home. It’s afternoon; he supposes it would’ve made more sense to take her out for more substantial food, but she doesn’t seem to be bothered by having dessert for lunch. “It was my idea,” she adds. “To adopt some kids, I mean.”

He shoots her a look, then. Her expression is very warm, and she stretches out a hand to stroke his jaw gently.

“I told you I never forgot about you,” she says gently. “Or what you did for us.”

Bellamy knows she’s referring to Arwin and the others. He swallows and nods.

—

She looks around in wonder as they climb the stairs of his apartment building. Mrs. Schmidt, the old woman living next door, is walking down the hall and passes them.

“Benji,” she says in surprise and gives him a warm smile. She’s always been something of a grandmother to the kids growing up in this building. She pauses to look Clarke up and down. “But who’s this young lady?”

“My girlfriend,” he tells her, delighting in it, and then pulls Clarke along to their door. Mrs. Schmidt mutters something that sounds like “kids” in a fond tone and continues hobbling on her way.

“This apartment looks exactly how I remember it,” Clarke declares when they walk in, turning around in his living room. She crosses to the wall to examine an old family photo, pointing excitedly. “This! Bellamy, I remember this playground. We played on it all the time.” She wheels around, eyes sparkling. “If I’m remembering right, your mom always made you babysit us.”

“It was boring as hell,” he confirms.

She smiles, and her eye catches on something else. “And that’s the balcony— the one where we were playing…” Her voice dies away as she gets caught up in memories, and she crosses over to the balcony door, pushing it open. A gentle breeze falls in, and she steps out. He admires her from inside.

Clarke leans against the railing, giving him a great view of her ass in that skirt. He might be imagining it, but she’s sticking it out a little.

“We kissed right here,” she says, tilting her head up to the sky. “Right here, on this balcony, I married you.” She tosses him a sultry look over her shoulder, and he knows he’s not imagining that.

So when she turns back to survey the street below, he stalks forward the few steps he needs to crowd her in, pins her right up against the railing with his hips. She gives easily, arching her back and pushing against his groin.

Already riled up, he grips her hips easily and nudges her head to the side with his so he can press his lips to her cheek. There’s still a spot of sugar from her stollen, and he licks it up, making her gasp. “You want some more sugar, Clarke?” he whispers, rolling his hips right back against her.

“Took you a while to get the hint, didn’t it,” she breathes, tilting her head even more so he can start trailing kisses down her jaw to her neck. One of his hands pulls at her shirt to slide under it, sweeping over the skin of her stomach and higher. She reaches a hand back to hold his bicep in an iron grip, sighing as he continues to grind against her ass, and they spend a few moments just like that.

Then she pushes him away and he takes the hint, stepping backwards until he’s back through the door, into his apartment. Clarke turns around, and he can see her cheeks are flushed and eyes cutting into his as she follows him.

They meet again in the middle of the living room in a fierce kiss. She slants her mouth against his, hands everywhere, not giving him a chance to think, only to feel, to respond. He slots his knee in between her legs and instead of simply widening her stance she hooks her leg over his hip. He hitches it higher and backs her into the wall. They make out hungrily, sloppily, while still grinding against each other. The warm friction of her through layers of fabric is driving him crazy, and maybe he’s a little rough, but she’s rough right back, nails raking down his back, fingers tugging on his hair, the heel of her foot digging into his ass.

She tugs at his uniform. He takes that as a hint to take it off, but she shakes her head.

“Keep it on,” she says, voice huskier than usual as she fingers the collar, still covered in metal dust. “I want to fuck you in this.”

His eyes nearly roll back in his head at the deliciously dirty prospect. To regain control, he stops moving against her, pausing, breathing hard as he leans his forehead against her. “You gotta stop saying things like that,” he manages, voice ragged.

She nods wisely. “You’re right. Less talking, more doing.” She grinds against him hard one more time before she pushes him a step back and drops to her knees.

His mouth goes dry at the sight of her. “Clarke, you shouldn’t—”

She puts an innocent finger to her lips in the universal shh gesture, and with the other hand palms him through his pants, causing a gasp to escape his throat. She smiles slyly, now scratching her nails down his inner thigh. “I may technically be a virgin in this life, but I still remember how you like me to suck you off.”

There’s no way he can respond to that except for a strangled sound, and when she proves her point for the next two minutes, all he can do is brace his hands against the wall and let his head fall forward, watching her unravel him in the way only Clarke knows how. He talks her through it too. Mostly filthy things about how good she looks, what he wants to do to her, because just like how she remembers how to do him in, he knows just how to get her going, too.

The wall is really all that holds him up afterwards, while Clarke tucks him almost demurely back into his pants and straightens up to full stature with a Cheshire cat smile, hair tousled around her face from his hand.

“Was that good?” she asks him. Her lips are swollen and red.

In lieu of answering, he grabs her and practically throws her on the couch. She bounces a little, perhaps a little surprised as he pulls her legs right over the sidearm.

“You know damn well how good that was,” he growls at her, squeezing her thighs, and she mewls. She props herself up on the couch cushions as he pushes her skirt up with the intention of returning the favour tenfold.

Bellamy doesn’t know how he hears the approach of footsteps in the hallway outside while she’s giving him those hooded come hither eyes, but he’s forever thankful that he does, because he manages to pull Clarke to sitting position, smooth down her hair, and back up a few steps to a respectable distance before the door opens and his mother walks in with his sister.

A long string of swear words runs through his head in that moment, but he stays completely silent as Sarah and his mom takes in the scene in front of them. Clarke looks bewildered at the turn of events but admirably goes with it.

“Sarah!” she says with a beaming smile. “It’s been such a long time.”

He’s almost offended she sounds so normal ten seconds after he was breathing on the junction of her thighs, but then she spreads her arms out and he notices her hands are trembling slightly and a little bit of smugness zings through him.

Besides, he realizes the big welcome is supposed to be more of a distraction anyway, because Sarah’s suspicious gaze melts into surprised joy the moment she recognizes her old friend, and the same happens to his mother.

“Oh, my god! Clarissa!” Sarah exclaims, dropping her grocery bags to embrace her. Bellamy watches with a small smile as they catch up, and Clarke explains how she’d run into Bellamy on her way to their apartment.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” his mother asks him sternly. Clarke stops speaking, looking panicked. Bellamy smoothly covers her.

“I forgot my tool bag and had to come back for it. It’s in the car now,” he lies, shoving his hands in his uniform pockets.

His mother seems to accept it, coughing into her hand. The action wracks her shoulders; Clarke watches with concern.

“Go back to work, Benji,” His sister says. “Thanks for taking care of Clarissa, but we’ll take it from here.”

Somehow he doubts that.

Unfortunately, his lie means that he has to leave now back for work for a few more hours, so he heads for the door. Clarke follows him while Sarah and his mother unload their groceries.

“I’ll stay here until you get back in the evening,” she whispers. “But I only have a one-day permit so I have to go after.”

“That’s okay,” he says automatically, but inside he’s jarred by the realization that this isn’t a real reunion for them— the Wall still separates them. Who even knows when she might get another permit to cross? To distract them both from those troubling thoughts, he slides his hand down to her ass and squeezes momentarily. “Rain check on the other thing?”

Her eyelids lower. “Definitely.” And then his mom turns back to them and he backs out, headed for the factory.

Clarke is true to her word, laughing and eating dinner with the rest of his family when he gets back from work. She looks up when he enters, face shining with joy. He smiles back, despite what had happened when he had gotten back to work.

Lucky him, the notorious asshole of a foreman visited their section in the factory today while he was gone with Clarke. His absence couldn’t be covered up, Igor had apologetically explained, and his pay was docked. It’s all his own fault, really. He’d waved away Igor’s offers to split his earnings from the day. He’d just work more hours next week, pick up more shifts.

He sits down and eats dinner with his family and Clarke, and he feels whole for the first time in a long time. Clarke’s apparently told them that she’s crossed over as part of errands for her internship.

After dinner he drives Clarke back to the border, where the police, or the Vopo as they’re called in these parts, watch with a stern eye.

“I’ll come back,” Clarke promises. “As soon as I can.”

He nods. “Until then.” She makes to get out of the car, but he catches her wrist. “Clarke.”

She turns back.

He takes a deep breath, brushes his thumb over her pulse point. Today has been happy— one of the happiest days of his life. Too happy. “Don’t die, alright?” he says lightly.

She blinks. And then she smiles, a small one; as always, she understands. “I won’t if you don’t.”

“Deal,” he replies. Clarke squeezes his hand and then she’s gone.

—

Clarke’s given Sarah her phone number, and Bellamy can’t help but phone her the very next evening.

He’s lived centuries on his own patiently, but it feels like years drag on while the operator connects him to West Berlin, and when someone picks up, it’s a young female voice. But it’s not Clarke.

“Is Clarissa there?” he asks tentatively.

“Who’s speaking?”

He pauses. “A friend.”

The phone gets moved away from the girl’s face, and he hears her muffled voice yell, “Clarissa! There’s a boy on the phone for you!” A moment later, the same voice asks gleefully, “Is he your boyfriend?”

Instead of answering, Clarke presumably grabs the phone because the next thing he hears is her voice. “Sorry. That was my sister. Charlotte.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“Three of them,” Clarke complains. “Triplets, two years younger than me. Thirteen year olds can be so irritating.”

He feels a smile pull at his lips. “You’re fifteen.”

“I’m nearly a thousand,” she counters.

“Right.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear your tone just now, and ask you how your day was.”

He does, sugarcoating a little, and then it’s her turn. If he knows her at all, she’s probably sugarcoating too. They chat over the phone for a few minutes, but Bellamy’s painfully aware of money going down the drain every sixty seconds, and Clarke seems to realize that too.

“I’m working on getting another permit,” she tells him, before hanging up. “Don’t die.”

“I won’t if you don’t,” he echoes her, and he can hear the soft smile in her voice as she replies.

“Deal.”

—

It’s a few months later when she can come again, and she calls excitedly beforehand. He makes sure he gets the day off, and the day before he’s so enthusiastic clocking out that Igor asks if his girlfriend is back in town. They still assume she’s from somewhere in East Germany, and he doesn’t correct them.

“Hey,” Clarke says brightly when he meets her, right out the gates. She hefts her purse over one shoulder. “I brought condoms.”

Bellamy chokes on his own spit.

“Great invention,” she comments, linking her arm with his and leading him down the street. “Now, let’s go see a movie.”

Despite Clarke’s enthusiasm (and if he’s being honest, his too) they don’t have sex the first few times she visits. His apartment is nearly always crowded with family. But he doesn’t mind too much. Just being able to stroll down the street hand-in-hand with her on a semi-regular basis makes him the happiest man alive.

Every few months, he gets a call from her telling him that she’ll be over soon. Sometimes the wait between is less, sometimes more.

They don’t do anything grand. It’s mostly spontaneous little things. Sometimes they go on walks down familiar streets, sometimes he drives her into the countryside, sometimes they go do something with Sarah and her friends, sometimes they just sit on the couch at his home, his head in her lap and her fingers in his hair, and talk for hours. Catching up on their lives together. Although they’re never together on birthdays, they make sure to treat each other on the next closest day they’re together. Bellamy is a little flustered when Clarke presents him with a bouquet of dark red carnations when he turns twenty-one.

“How’d you know I like flowers?”

“Because you like pretty things.”

He kisses her. “Damn right.”

The more time they spend, the more he realizes how different life on the West side is. She’s shocked when she learns he knows practically nothing about popular culture or music and vows to show him some of it the next time she comes.

But the Vopo force her to leave all her Western paraphernalia at the border, so she can’t.

His family eventually figures out what’s going on. But they don’t seem to mind the relationship between the two of them. Although his sister threatens to kick him in not-fun places if he ever hurts Clarke.

One day Clarke tells him that her sisters are dying to know what he looks like.

“My parents think I run errands for my job over here, but my sisters know about you,” she explains. “Thanks to Charlotte’s big mouth. They promised to keep it secret if I got them a picture of you.” She holds up her camera.

He smiles indulgently for her while she clicks the picture. The photo prints out a second later— overexposing his skin because of the sun, but otherwise it’s a nice photo.

“Good?” he asks.

She beams, her eyes flicking up from the photo to the real thing. “Perfect.”

The next time she comes, she brings her three sisters.

He pauses at the sight, because he’s used to waiting by the Trabant for just Clarke’s blonde haired head to appear at the gate, but this time it’s four. They approach him and he straightens, pushing off his car. The triplets walk a little behind Clarke, staring at him and giggling behind their hands.

When Clarke reaches him, he arches an eyebrow at her and turns a wide grin at the girls he assumes are her sisters. “Ladies,” he greets them.

Clarke points at them in turn. “These are my sisters, Charlotte, Chelsea, and Cheryl. This is Benji,” she says to them, grabbing Bellamy’s hand.

Bellamy recovers from his initial shock and opens the passenger door for them, turning up the charm. “I’ve never seen so much beautiful in one place,” he says. “Let me take you all out for icecream.”

They giggle and blush. Clarke rolls her eyes as they pile into the Trabant’s back seats. “I showed them the picture and they begged to see you,” she whispers to him apologetically. He shrugs.

“I’ve always wanted to meet them.” He just never thought it would happen before the Wall came down.

Her sisters are a riot, as it turns out. He buys them all triple scoop icecreams and tries his best to follow their conversation, but they talk so fast and even over each other in vying for his attention that it’s difficult at times. They’re adorable.

“I’ll come alone next time,” Clarke tells him at the end of that day. They’re standing near the Wall patrol, holding hands. He’s very aware of her sisters watching from a few meters’ distance.

“I don’t mind them,” he replies. “I think they’re great.”

“Oh, I know you do. Since you were flirting with them the whole time.”

His mouth falls open in indignation. “I wasn’t flirting, I was trying to be nice—” He stops when he realizes she’s laughing, and she nudges his nose with hers.

“Don’t die,” she says on the end of a giggle, and he kisses her hard and fast, much to the delight of the triplets.

He delivers the standard response. It’s become automatic, their little joke. “I won’t if you don’t.”

“Deal.”

—

The year Clarke turns eighteen, he’s left without her for so long that he begins to worry.

He’s been applying to cross over to the West himself, but hasn’t been accepted yet.

“I’ve applied five times in the past two months,” she tells him when he calls her again. “I’m trying, alright?” She sounds tired, a little frustrated too, and he automatically softens his voice.

“I know you are.”

“Stupid wall,” she mutters.

Privately, he wonders if that stupid wall will ever come down. “I haven’t seen you for over half a year. You graduated high school, right? How’s everything?”

“I’m fine. Got a real job with that journalist.”

She sounds a little off. He prods, “What else?”

She’s quiet for a long moment. And when she speaks again her voice is low and desperate. “Bellamy, be straight with me. Are you with anyone else?”

Well, that isn’t what he expected. He almost feels a little insulted. “Clarke… how could you even think that?” She’s silent again. “Why would you think that? What did I do?”

“I got a package in the mail,” she whispers, and he almost has to strain to hear. “No return address. No note. Just photos of you, near your apartment building, leaning over a fence to talk to some girl. Dark hair, long and curly.” She talks as if she’s staring at the photos right now. “They look like they were taken from a balcony or something.”

His blood slowly turns to ice at the words. He knows what girl she’s talking about— that’s the one he grew up with, across the street, and used to walk home from school with. He still talks to her now and then, when they cross paths in the neighbourhood. But— who’s taking pictures of them? Not to mention sending them to Clarke.

When he doesn’t answer, she mutters, “I was hoping maybe they were doctored, but judging by your silence…”

“No,” he says quickly. “I know her. She lives in the neighbourhood. I’m not interested in her.”

Her voice sounds a little frosty. “You sure? She’s practically up against your chest in these.”

He winces. That neighbour of his hasn’t taken the hint in the ten years he’s known her. “It’s nothing, trust me.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing.”

“Clarke,” Bellamy repeats, unable to believe they’re actually having this conversation, “I promise, you’re the only one.”

Silence again. Maybe she’s mulling it over.

“Clarke, I’m sorry if I’ve made you think you’re not.” His voice breaks a little at the end at the thought that maybe he hasn’t been showing her enough love; that he’s been neglecting her, making her doubt herself.

She picks up on it, he thinks, because she immediately responds, now sounding less suspicious and more sad. “No, Bellamy, I’m sorry. I should’ve— I should’ve known it was just some creepy stalker thing.” He hears the swish of her throwing the photo to the side. “It happens to journalists sometimes, from what I’ve heard. But I haven’t been feeling all that right lately.”

Her confession makes him even more concerned than he was hearing about the creepy stalker thing. Having been about to suggest she pursue another profession, he asks instead, “Why?”

An even longer pause follows that question. He waits patiently; the money he’s spending on this phone call is worth every cent. When she speaks, he’s startled to hear that she’s close to tears. “I think I’m losing my mind, Bellamy.”

He clutches the phone harder, especially when he hears a muffled sob on her end. She must be home alone to be doing this, and he wishes more than at any other point in their separated life that he could be right next to her, right now. Comforting her.

“Weird things keep happening lately,” she sniffles into the phone. “Small things that seem like nothing. Like my desk chair at work got replaced with a wooden one but no one else’s was. Last night I came home and your photo wasn’t on my dresser anymore, it was just gone, and my sisters swore they didn’t take it. My stash of tea— which was in the cupboard— got switched out with another brand. And on top of it all, my dad lost his job. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

Bellamy takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, his grip on the phone now almost painful to his joints. “I’m sorry about your dad. But maybe you did those other things yourself?”

“But I don’t remember!” She sounds panicked. “That’s just the small things, Bellamy. It’s gotten worse. And I don’t remember doing any of it. I feel like someone’s watching me or— something. One of my best friends stopped talking to me last month without telling me the reason. My life is falling apart and I don’t understand why.”

“You need to talk to someone,” Bellamy says urgently. “Have you told your family this?”

“I can’t!” She’s breathing too fast. “They’ll think I’m going crazy all over again!”

“Calm down,” he tells her, trying to be soothing. “Take deep breaths—”

“What if they’re right and I am going crazy?” she says, fast. “Maybe they should put me back in the nuthouse, clearly I’m a nutcase—”

“Don’t call yourself that,” he says sharply. “Clarke. We’re going to figure this out. You’re just stressed out.” He pauses. “And if you have a stalker, they might be connected to this. You’ve got to go to the police.”

Silence again.

“Clarke?”

There’s a dial tone. He pulls the phone from his ear, staring at it, and automatically dials again.

It doesn’t work. He gets the warning tone that indicates an error in the number he dialled instead of the operator.

He keeps re-dialling until his sister comes into the room. “I need to call Martha,” Sarah says, referring to one of her friends. “Are you done with the phone?”

He backs away from it like it’s a snake ready to strike, and swallows. Because something’s not right here and he can’t figure out what. “Yeah.”

Sarah watches him go with puzzlement but says nothing.

—

A month into his radio silence with Clarke, he finds out exactly what is going on.

It starts at work one day.

The foreman is yelling at him for not having finished his quota for the day. He bows his head and takes it; he’s been distracted as of late and hasn’t been working efficiently.

When the foreman leaves, satisfied with docking Bellamy’s pay once again, Igor creeps up to him. “You okay, man?” he whispers. “You’ve been down lately.”

Bellamy offers him a single glance as he drops his tools and strips off his gloves. “Fine.”

“Wanna go get a drink tonight?”

That question is a test to see if Bellamy’s truly fine and he knows it, but he says, “No,” anyway, because he’s too worried to care what Igor thinks.

He walks out into the dark alone, hands stuffed in his pockets. When he draws closer to his Trabant, he realizes there are three men standing by it as if they’re waiting for him.

He halts in his tracks, taking in their dull grey-green uniforms visible in the dim lighting. They’ve got neutral, hard expressions on their faces. He’s never seen them before in his life. His gaze shifts; next to his Trabant is a white van.

Bellamy instantly knows who they are; they’ve got the insignia on their chests for the Ministry for State Security. But they’re better known as the Stasi— the secret service. The shadows in every East German’s peripheral vision. The invisible force that runs their lives.

“Benjamin Black,” one of them says calmly, while he stands rooted to the spot in terror. “Let’s take a drive, shall we?”

—

Bellamy doesn’t really have a choice but to go with them. They escort him to the back of their transport van and slam the doors shut. He sits and waits as the vehicle moves forward, wondering idly if he told his mother he loved her that morning.

When the van stops and the doors open, there’s another man waiting, a gun resting casually in his hand. Bellamy follows its movements warily as the Stasi agent gestures for him to get out. When he does, he looks up to see a large, grey building looming in front of him with the Ministry’s insignia on the doors. They’ve taken him to the main state security complex in Berlin.

He’s lead inside, through a series of convolutedly twisted hallways, and then finally into a small room, no longer than a few strides and very narrow. It’s got yellow, flowery wallpaper that somehow still feels sinister and a single wooden chair that faces a wall. When he approaches the chair, he realizes there’s a barred window built into the wall. And someone is sitting behind it, face shrouded in darkness.

“Sit,” a voice rings out, and he starts. The voice comes from a speaker in the cell, oddly garbled. Another agent walks through the door with him and the door he came through clangs shut. Hyperaware of the burly man behind him, slowly Bellamy sinks into the chair.

“What can I do for you?” he asks, going for bravado and crossing his arms. He’s not exactly afraid for his own life, anyway.

There’s no greetings, which is expected. “What is the West German journalist Clarissa Graeber currently working on?”

He blinks once, twice. Clarke. They’re talking about Clarke. He plays it cool.

“Why the hell would I know?”

The agent behind him is suddenly standing right next to him, and before Bellamy can blink he gets slapped so hard that he falls off his chair and to the floor.

His ears are ringing so he’s barely able to hear the question, repeated: “What is Clarissa Graeber working on?”

He clambers to his hands and knees, but before he can collect his bearings the agent’s hand wraps around his uniform collar and tugs him up. He struggles to his feet, sparing the agent a glare as he’s pushed back in his chair.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The agent’s palm strikes him across the other cheek, out of nowhere, and he again falls out of his seat. The man is strong.

Angered now, he spits on the floor as he’s dragged back up again like a rag doll and deposited back in the chair. But the agent’s got a gun in his other hand. Even if he could win it from him, Bellamy’s not stupid enough to think that he and the agent are truly alone for a fair fight in this little cell.

He straightens and takes a deep breath. “Why would I even know this Clarissa Graeber? I’m a factory worker.”

He braces himself for another hit, but instead the cool voice from the speaker says, “For the past three years, you have been having meetings with Miss Graeber,” he’s told. “Picking her up from the border.”

He abandons pretense. He should’ve known— of course they watch the goings-on at the borders. “Well, she’s an acquaintance.”

A gloved hand suddenly presses a photograph to the bars, and he’s startled at what he sees: It’s a candid shot, of him and Clarke on the balcony of his apartment that very first day, taken from the apartments across. It looks even more sexual than it had felt at the time; Bellamy’s pressed up right against her from behind, his hand disappearing under her shirt, and her head is thrown back and mouth open in mid-moan as she clutches the railing. Jesus.

He barely has a moment to process it, before he’s slapped hard again, and, caught off guard, he falls to the floor, head knocking against the concrete. He’s wrenched up quicker this time, with not even two seconds to absorb the hit, and is still seeing stars when he’s thrown back in the chair.

The interrogator is unfazed watching the violence in front of him. The photo has disappeared from view, and a part of Bellamy misses it. He hasn’t seen Clarke in so long. “Looks to be a little more than acquaintance,” the voice notes.

“My girlfriend, I guess,” Bellamy mutters after a pause. There’s no point in lying about that.

The photo is again shoved into his view. “This photo was taken the first time she crossed to our side. Reports say that you both acted like you were already extremely… familiar. How is that possible if that was the first time you had ever seen each other?”

Bellamy’s head starts spinning for a different reason. Even three years ago— he and Clarke were being watched? What the hell? Who had been spying on their lives? There are too many possibilities; are their Stasi informants living in his neighbourhood? Is his car bugged? His phone calls tapped?

The interrogator plunges on in the face of his internal panic, not waiting for an answer. “Miss Graeber has been writing some disturbing articles about the German Democratic Republic over in the West. Causing quite the stir. Causing… problems.”

So that’s what this is about, he realizes. They’re trying to shut her up. And Clarke, brave, stupid Clarke— she’s been writing this stuff, knowing the danger of it? She hadn’t told him. He thought she was a fluff journalist for God’s sake, and she completely and deliberately let him believe it. Bellamy is going to kill her.

God, they’re literally going to kill her. They’re going to kill her and there’s nothing he can do about it.

He takes a few deep breaths and attempts to calm himself— yes, they might kill her, but he will see her again. It’s okay.

The thought doesn’t really help, somehow.

“Your work as an accomplice can be forgiven,” he’s told. “You will be allowed to go back to your life. If you tell us what we need to know.”

He swallows, hyperaware still of the agent in the room practically breathing down his neck. It’s been at least a minute since the last time he got hit. “What? I don’t know what the hell she’s working on. She never told me a damn thing.” He’s not faking his frustration, and maybe it shows.

“Then tell us how you were meeting with her before the Agreement was signed.”

He swallows. He can’t exactly tell the secret service he’s been reincarnated with this girl for centuries. “Before the Wall, we were friends.”

This time a hand on the back of his neck slams his head forward against the bars, and pain explodes through his forehead. He falls backward limply with a groan of pain, chair tipping back slightly. The agent behind him steadies the chair so it doesn’t tip over completely. Then he pushes his head forward, so he’s forced to look through the little window again.

The interrogator waits patiently while this is happening, and then: “She would’ve been five years old, and you ten, at most. Clearly, you were communicating in some other way to become as close as you did.”

Well, they’re not wrong in that logic. But still. There’s no way for him to tell the truth. “For fuck’s sake!” Bellamy snaps. His head is throbbing. “It’s not some epic life-long love story, alright? She came through the Wall that first time, I stumbled into her, and we started having sex. Sometimes I take her out for milkshakes after I fuck her. There’s no communication involved.” The lies taste disgusting in his mouth, but he’s desperate.

He probably comes off more as being mouthy, though, because the next thing he knows he’s thrown to the floor and kicked in the gut, once, then twice.

And then it stops. He pries one eye open, bewildered. The agent in front of him walks over to the door and opens it, polite as you please, and gestures for Bellamy to leave the room.

Bellamy stares from where he’s still in the fetal position on the floor. The agent stares back. Bellamy finally gets up off the floor, wincing at the pain searing through his stomach, and goes through the door.

He’s led back through the hallways they walked in through, and once they reach the outside doors, he realizes with disbelief he’s being allowed to leave.

They pack him back into the van and then they’re back at the factory, now completely closed down for the night. Bellamy’s Trabant is the only one in the lot.

“We’ll be in touch,” the Stasi agent shoving him out of the van says. “I think you know better than to talk to anyone about this.” And then they’re gone, and he’s left standing by his Trabant, almost doubting whether it happened at all. The dull pain in his forehead and stomach, as well as the sensitivity of his skin when he prods his cheek, is the only real indicator that it did.

—

His family’s not surprised when he comes home hours later than he usually does.

“We got a phone call from the foreman that you had a small accident at work and that you’d be late,” his mother says, concerned as she feels the bruise on his forehead. “Oh, dear. We’ll put ice on that. Your dinner’s still here. And warm!”

He accepts the plate numbly.

“Your cheeks look so red,” his father observes from the table. “Is the wind blowing really hard out there?” Sarah hurries forward to take his coat, and he just stands there like an idiot for a second before plastering on a smile.

“Yeah, it’s almost hard to believe it’s only September…”

—

Bellamy lives on edge for the next month. His entire family notices.

“I’m sorry you haven’t seen your girlfriend for a few months, but I’m starting to think there’s more going on,” his father says to him.

Bellamy folds his arms and says nothing. He would take another sex talk over this one, honestly.

“Is everything alright with you and Clarissa?”

“Yeah,” he says automatically, but then he makes the mistake of looking at his father, the concern on his face, and his facade crumbles a little. He rubs a hand over his face. “Yeah, no it’s not.”

“What happened? Did she leave you?”

“No,” Bellamy says quickly, “That’s not it. She’s just not doing well, right now. And I can’t help her.” He scrubs his hands vigorously over his face, exhaling deeply, trying to control the tears that prick at his eyes.

He expects to be prodded for details, but instead his father says softly, “I know that feeling.”

Bellamy looks up to see his father watching him with a sympathetic expression. His wife, like Bellamy’s, is falling apart in front of him, but there’s not much either of them can do.

“All we can do is support them in whatever way we can,” his father says. “If your girl is anything like mine, she appreciates that more than you know.”

He sighs, a shaky breath as he attempts to hold back tears, and nods. The older man reaches forward to hug him, and strangely that’s what sets Bellamy off.

Or maybe not so strange. He’d forgotten, over all these lifetimes, what it was like to have a father.

—

A few days later, Bellamy gets hit by a car.

Well, the car is heading for his sister; she’s walking ahead of him because she’s mad at him for not telling her what’s going on with him. They’re heading to the bakery for a bite to eat for breakfast when he sees the car— a Trabant— barrelling towards her and he doesn’t think, he just moves.

He shoves her out of the way, so he takes the brunt of the impact and more.

He flutters in and out of consciousness for the next little while. At his next moment of lucidity, he dimly registers he’s in a hospital, on a gurney. Doctors are flitting around him, but he just registers his sister’s tear-stained face in his vision, bent over him.

“Mom and Dad are coming right now,” she says, trying to sound stern and failing. “The doctors are going to take you to surgery. Stay alive.”

He blinks sluggishly and tries to speak.

“Don’t talk,” Sarah says.

“Love you,” he manages.

“I said don’t talk!” his sister snaps.

He tries to swallow but finds he can’t. “Stasi,” he says next.

A gleam of curiosity gleams through her eye at the mention of the secret police but then it’s replaced with desperation again. She strokes his hair out of his vision. “Shh. You’re going to make it.”

He ignores her. His entire body is ablaze with pain, so he focuses all his efforts on forming words. “If I don’t… Tell Clar…”

“That you love her? You can tell her your damn self, Benji.”

He closes his eyes; he’s so damn tired. “L….”

“I know. She knows. She knows you love her.”

He tries to shake his head but can’t. “Tell her… live.” That’s his last word before he passes out.

He doesn’t wake up. Despite the doctor’s efforts, he dies in surgery. Time of death, approximately ten in the morning on October 5, 1973.

—

Numbly, Clarke presses play on the small audio recording that had been anonymously sent to her. Bellamy’s voice, crackling with static but undeniably his, sounds out again. “For fuck’s sake! It’s not some epic life-long love story, alright? She came through the Wall that first time, I stumbled into her, and we started having sex. Sometimes I take her out for milkshakes after I fuck her. There’s no communication involved.” The tape ends. Clarke methodically rewinds and stabs play again.

As Bellamy proceeds to detail again how Clarke is nothing but a good fuck, she decides this is only confirmation of her fears. The Stasi sent her this. And Sarah, the one who had told her what had happened over the phone, had mentioned one of Bellamy’s last words had been Stasi.

And it’s because of her, and her work.

She’d received this stupid recording about a month back. It had shaken her, but it wasn’t like she could talk to Bellamy about it. His number was cut off, and he never called her again. And her suspicions had already been in place by that point anyway. So instead of wallowing in her confusion and fear she’d gone to work and slaved away doubly hard on her latest piece.

So this was them playing their last card, she thinks. Well, fuck them. They can try and break her all they want. But Bellamy’s death is only going to drive her. She’s still going to write this damn article.

She hits replay on the tape player and turns back to her typewriter. Zersetzung, she writes. The word literally means decomposition. A tactic the GDR’s Stasi use to silence their enemies, through psychological warfare. The aim is to break them in too subtle a way to be traced back to them, in the most intimate and private parts of their victims’ lives, so that they are too distracted to fight against the regime. In my case, in my fight to expose the regime. She pauses in her writing. Methods of Zersetzung I have recently found used against me: breaking into my home to misplace things. Attempting to break apart my relationships. Mysterious, baffling deliveries. Coming into my place of work after hours, shifting furniture and pictures and other things to cause me to think I’ve lost my mind.

She pauses again.

Maybe it worked, a little.

There’s a knock on her room door, and she hits pause on the tape player.

The door creaks open a little. It’s her sister, Charlotte, looking somber. “It’s time to go if you want to make it. The funeral is in an hour over in East Berlin.”

Clarke nods and scoots away from her typewriter. Charlotte, ever the nosy sister that she is, takes a few steps into the room. “You didn’t tell us where you went.”

Clarke says nothing. As soon as she heard Bellamy died, she’d taken off.

“I saw your travel papers. You went to France? Without telling anyone?”

Yes. And her entire family was furious but, well, she was nearly nineteen, and didn’t need their permission for anything anymore. She’d gone and found one of Bellamy’s stashes he was always talking about, and she’d put it to good use.

She slides on her jacket and turns to grab her scarf, pausing when she realizes her green and white striped scarf is gone, and in it’s place is a red and white striped one. She stares at it a moment, racking her brain. Was the scarf really ever green? Is she...

She swallows and counts to five. You’re not going mad, you’re not going mad. They’re just after you.

Her hands still tremble as she puts the scarf on. She can’t handle anything else today.

Charlotte doesn’t get that, of course. “Look, I understand you’re sad about Benji—”

“I’m not sad,” Clarke snaps, winding her scarf around her neck, and that, at least, is true. No, it’s a different feeling that’s settled into her stomach over the past week. She walks past Charlotte. “Let’s go.”

—

The service is outdoors, and the sunniness of the day contrasts with the storm cloud that looms over the congregation. It bogs Clarke down as she watches quietly from the back. His family is there, as well as neighbours and other people that were in his life.

That best friend of his— Igor— makes a moving speech about the kind of person Bellamy was, and it’s the only point during the service that Clarke is nearly moved to tears. He smiles softly at her as he finishes, and Clarke looks away. She herself declined to make any comments at his funeral, even though Bellamy’s family asked if she wanted to. She’s already attended two funerals for him. She doesn’t have any words left to say. And while Sarah is crying beside the closed casket the only thing Clarke feels is the overwhelming urge to kick it.

Afterwards, while the congregation slowly migrates across the graveyard field to the church, where there are refreshments, Clarke stays standing by his casket. Sarah and Charlotte come up to her.

“I forgot to tell you,” Sarah says in a thick voice. “His last words were to you. He said... he wanted you to live.”

“What a jackass,” Clarke replies without thinking.

“What?”

“I said he’s a jackass,” Clarke says, a little louder, and turns around to face the two shocked girls. She doesn’t care anymore. Her red-white scarf is wrapped around her neck choking her, and she’s losing her mind. “He wants me to live? Easy for him to say, since he’s dead, and he’ll wake up somewhere else and find me again, and I’m the one who has to suffer now. So yeah, he’s a fucking jackass if he thinks I’m doing that.”

Charlotte gasps.

“What the hell, Clarissa?” Sarah slaps her across the face; Clarke takes it, and watches Bellamy’s sister walk away, clearly upset.

“Clarissa?” Charlotte says hesitatingly as Clarke turns back around to face the casket. “I know you’re sad, but—”

“I’m not sad!” Clarke yells. Her hands form fists at her sides. “I’m angry. He left me. Couldn’t he wait a few years for the wall to come down?”

Silence.

Clarke shakes her head rapidly. It’s starting to hurt. “No, he just went and died.” She bares her teeth. “I’m going to kill him when I see him again.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Charlotte says fearfully. “Clarissa… You haven’t been yourself lately. Even before Benji died.”

Clarke hugs herself, ignoring Charlotte. What does anything she says matter? Her sister, and the rest of her family, will be dead in a few decades. They won’t come back. The only ones that ever come back are Clarke and Bellamy. The terrible truth of it all is that he’s the only one that matters, in the grand scheme of things.

She’s suddenly faced with the prospect of living out an entire life without the one thing that matters, and it makes her eyes shift to the road stretching on in front of the cemetery, where cars are whizzing by.

Her feet start moving on their own, briskly heading in that direction.

Charlotte catches her arm before she can make it more than a few steps. “What are you doing?”

“Dying,” Clarke announces, wrenching her wrist out of her grip. “Right now. No more wasting time.”

“What?” Her sister is shocked, and tries to grab her again. When Clarke shakes her off a second time, she screams for help. Then more hands are on her, wrenching her back. She turns her head. It’s her other sisters.

“Get off me!” she hisses.

“Clarissa,” she’s gently told, in a voice she hasn’t heard used on her since she was in a mental institution. “You’re not yourself right now.”

She pulls at them again, but she can’t fight them all off, especially when they’re drawing attention, and more people are headed their way. “Let go of me!”

Her sister clings to her, tears in her eyes as well. “Never.”

“I want to be with him. Let me be with him,” she sobs. She struggles futilely against her sisters’ hands.

“Jesus Christ,” Igor exhales sadly from behind them. Dimly, Clarke knows she must seem like a total mess, but somehow she can’t seem to find it in herself to care. The only thing she cares about is meeting Bellamy again. It hurts too much to face a world where he’s gone. Again.

But she’s being pushed away from the road, torn away from her chance to be reunited with him. It’s breaking her heart. Dimly, she hears her sister whispering in her ear, smoothing down her hair, telling her there’s so much to live for. But Clarke just shakes her head, over and over, tears finally burning at her eyes.

And then all at once she starts laughing.

None of them seem to expect that. But once she starts, she can’t stop. She stops fighting them and just laughs, the movements wracking her shoulders more than sobs ever could. Because it’s funny, all of a sudden. A long time ago, she swore to Bellamy that every lifetime she had would mean something to her. It had to, for her existence to keep feeling meaningful. And now here she is. From an outsider’s perspective, she’s trying to kill herself. Because nothing else holds meaning— because despite her best efforts, she’s lost her humanity somewhere along the way.

So she laughs.

She keeps laughing until eventually she’s dragged away. She’s still quietly giggling to herself when she’s admitted back to the same mental institution she was in as a child.

From far away, Bellamy’s apartment neighbour, Mrs. Schmidt, watches with keen eyes as Clarissa Graeber laughs madly, and she overhears the whispers of her family that the mental illness she’d had as child has made a comeback. That’s all the intel she needs.

The old woman glances at Benji’s casket one last time. She’s truly sad about his death; he was a good boy. But the Stasi paid her well to be an informant and she needed the money. She nods briskly to herself and leaves the cemetery to relay her information to the secret police: that after successfully inducing another psychotic break, the Republic doesn’t have to worry about this journalist anymore. Clarissa’s second admittance into a mental institution will effectively destroy any credibility as a journalist she can ever have again. Whatever article she was working on is no longer a threat.

The Stasi close their file on Clarissa Graeber, and shelve it next to Benjamin Black’s.

—

It’s a month after his son’s death that Bellamy’s father opens the mail for the day, expecting to find more bills for his wife’s medical care. They are hardly keeping up with payments, and without Benji there to supplement his income, he thinks they might be at a point where they can’t afford anymore.

But when he opens today’s envelope, it’s not a bill that falls out. It’s a notice.

He reads it once, then goes back to the beginning to re-read, disbelieving. It can’t be.

“What is it?” His wife asks.

“Your bills,” he says in amazement. “They’ve all been paid.”

She comes closer to stare at the paper. “That’s impossible. Who would have done that?”

There’s no name; an anonymous donor. They’ll never find out who it was that set up an account with enough money in it to pay Bellamy’s mother’s medical bills for a lifetime.

And they certainly won’t ever connect it back to the ex-journalist who now lives out her days in a mental institution in West Berlin.

Ultimately, the universe doesn’t care about us. Time doesn’t care about us. That’s why we have to care about each other. —David Leviathan

— 2051: VANCOUVER (CANADA) —

Clo comes to the sad conclusion that she’s got feelings for her teacher about halfway through the semester.

She’s sitting at her desk in English Literature, her chin resting on her hands. Mr. Blake is standing in front of his desk, leaning slightly on it. His arms are crossed over his white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up his forearms, and his legs crossed as if bored. His gaze is lowered to the floor, completely oblivious to her stare. As relaxed as he appears, one might almost think he’s not paying attention to his class at all.

But then Ryan, who’s currently reading aloud from Beowulf, mispronounces a word and she watches her teacher’s curly-haired head shoot up.

“‘Doughty,’” Mr. Blake cuts off Clo’s boyfriend. “It means brave. ‘Of earls to be honored; sure the atheling is doughty, who headed the heroes hitherward coming.’”

Ryan’s face flushes and he straightens his book, mumbling something about how stupid the poem is. The class titters. Mr. Blake just continues looking at him plainly. Clo smiles to herself. Ryan has never been very good at reading aloud, and so far that’s all that this class has been about.

Ryan repeats the sentence with the proper pronunciation in place, stumbling slightly. Mr. Blake makes no comment, just looks to Clo’s friend Queenie, who’s supposed to read the next part.

As the class continues, Clo takes up her examination of her teacher again. He’s hot, yes. She already knew she had a crush on him since the beginning of September, the first time she’d seen him. The news had come at the end of the previous school year that the old Literature teacher was retiring and there was a new, very young one coming in. But on her first day of school a month and a half later, her heart had dropped into her stomach to see him standing at the front of the classroom, holding a stack of syllabus sheets. He was gorgeous, and she knew she wasn’t the only one that thought so. Half the class were enamoured. At least, until he finished going over the course outline and gave them an assignment on the first damn day of class.

But Clo’s still pathetically into him for a girl who has a boyfriend. But he’s just— so kind. And gentle, and he doesn’t condescend, even to Ryan when he mispronounces the simplest of words. On top of it all, his childlike enthusiasm for the written works of old is absolutely contagious. And adorable.

“Clo?” She’s jarred out of her thoughts to find Mr. Blake looking at her expectantly. She doesn’t think it’s her imagination that his gaze is a little warmer on her than it is on her classmates, though.

She blinks a few times.

“Clo, you’re up,” Mr. Blake repeats patiently. “Next stanza. Start at Line 80.”

Clearly he could tell she hadn’t been paying attention. Embarrassed, she bends down to her book and clears her throat. After her turn is over, he nods as if in approval and moves on to the next, and Clo spends the next twenty minutes staring at the Oppenheimer quote poster on the wall.

The bell that marks the end of the school day cuts off the class discussion, and everyone leaps up in the middle of Mr. Blake’s sentence.

As people practically scramble for the door, he raises his voice above the din to say, “Your assignment is to write a minimum half page paragraph on your thoughts on Hrothgar so far. For tomorrow.” The statement prompts a dozen groans from the students, but he doesn’t seem to notice or care.

As Clo packs up her books, Queenie leans in close to whisper, voice easily lost in the loud sounds of chairs scraping and people talking, “I’ve decided he’s ugly.”

Clo looks at her friend with bemusement. “I seem to remember you saying on the first day of school that if you weren’t a lesbian, he could ‘get it.’”

Queenie waves her hand impatiently at Clo’s judging tone. “I said he was nice to look at. Stop projecting on me. But even being pretty doesn’t make up for being a complete hardass.” She shakes her head, swiping up her books.

Clo goes to the library for the next hour while Queenie goes to catch her bus. Clo takes the city bus and it doesn’t come for another hour, which would normally be annoying. But it’s not, for just one reason.

When she gets on the bus, that one reason is already sitting in the back, his book already open, and Clo has to hide a grin as she strides over.

“I don’t understand how you always beat me to the bus stop. I ran all the way here.”

Mr. Blake glances up from his book, lips quirking up. “You were late. Nearly missed the bus.” As if to punctuate his point, the bus jerks into movement just as Clo wraps her hand around one of the vertical poles, standing in front of him. There are plenty of seats around, but somehow sitting down with her teacher always feels too formal.

“What are you reading today?” she asks him instead.

He holds it up to show her. The Crucible. “We’re reading this in a few weeks in class,” he tells her.

“Ooh, for once I’ve actually heard of that one,” she says excitedly. “The one about Salem witch trials or something like that, right?”

He smiles. Just a little. “Something like that, yeah. It’s actually an allegory for the McCarthy era of the Cold War.”

The bus turns rapidly and she holds tighter to the pole. “Cold War, huh? Can’t wait to read it.”

Mr. Blake huffs a laugh. “I really can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.”

“No!” she protests, and suddenly she thinks that Mr. Blake is more aware than she thought about how some of his students feel towards his class. “No, seriously. You always make it interesting.”

He glances away, and maybe it’s her imagination but there looks to be a slight tinge of a blush on his cheeks. “You’re probably the only one that thinks so.”

“That’s not true,” she says firmly. “Look, everyone thinks you teach really well. It’s just that you give us so many assignments, and most of us have a lot going on already. So um, people kind of don’t like that.”

He blinks a few times, like he’d never considered it. “You serious?”

The bus makes another sharp turn and Clo wraps herself around the pole to brace herself. And then realizes she probably has a stripper pose going on so quickly extricates herself again. “I mean, I think that’s why.”

“Why didn’t anyone just say so?” He sounds a little frustrated, and runs a hand over his face. She’s surprised. “This is my first time teaching. It would make things a lot easier if I got some feedback once in awhile.”

“Teachers don’t usually listen to feedback,” Clo points out lightly.

He snorts. “Fair point.”

They lapse into silence for the next few minutes, him staring thoughtfully down at his book and Clo staring out the window, watching the scenery and the bridge go by. And then it’s her stop, so she pauses to say, “See you tomorrow, Mr. Blake.”

He looks up at her again. “As long as you don’t skip again.”

She gasps in outrage. “That was one time!” But he’s chuckling, so she just rolls her eyes and gets off the bus.

—

“Mr. Blake’s been kidnapped,” Queenie announces during lunch break several days later, leaning against Clo’s locker.

She looks up. “Queenie, he’s standing right there.” He’s just down the hall, talking to the art teacher, Ms. Altavilla, who has a notorious crush on him, one that he’s notoriously oblivious to.

Queenie holds up a finger. “He’s only give us one measly assignment this past week. Clearly, he’s been replaced with a pod person.”

Clo rolls her eyes as Queenie saunters off, still muttering to herself, and in the next moment she gets crowded up against her locker by a warm body.

“Hey, Clo,” Ryan says against her neck.

She hums in response. “Are we still on for that study date after school?” Code for sex, obviously, but she thinks it might take her mind off a certain hot teacher that she’s crushing on.

His hands tighten on her hips momentarily and he steps back, so she turns around.

“That fucking jack-off Blake gave me detention today,” he grumbles, looking pissed about missing out on this opportunity.

Her eyebrows raise. Without being able to stop herself, she glances down the hall to where Mr. Blake had been, but neither of the teachers are there anymore. The prospect that maybe he finally relented to a lunch date with Ms. Altavilla has her stomach curdling. She turns back to Ryan, hands on hips. “You were in detention yesterday, too. What did you do this time?”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Ryan snaps. “He gave me detention for no reason.”

She presses on. “There had to have been a reason.”

“There wasn’t.” He looks over her head, lips twisting into a scowl. “He just looked at me in detention yesterday and said I had another one today. No fucking reason, like I said.”

“That doesn’t sound like him,” she mumbles, almost to herself. He looks at her sharply.

“What would you know about him?”

“Nothing,” she says quickly, straightening. But he’s already talking again.

“Forget it. He’s just an asshole.”

“You should talk to him, though. That’s not fair. I’ll go with you,” she adds in encouragement.

Ryan looks to be sorely regretting even bringing up the topic. “I said fucking forget it, okay?” He pushes off the lockers and storms off.

—

She doesn’t forget it. She needs answers; she can’t just let things go. Ryan should know better.

So she finds Mr. Blake in his classroom before the end of lunch period. He’s got a Subway sandwich in his hand and a pen for marking in the other, and he looks up when she enters.

As always, his eyes warm up a little for her. “Clo,” he greets her. His expression grows to puzzlement as she says nothing, just strides all the way over to his desk and smacks her palms down on it.

“Why’d you give Ryan detention?”

Any warmth in his expression disappears at the mention of Ryan’s name. “What?”

“You heard me.” As she’s talking, she finds herself getting pricked with anger. “You gave him detention but didn’t even tell him the reason. Well, I want to know. Why?”

He blinks at her slowly, registering her words, and then something else flits over her face, something she didn’t expect: sympathy. It’s gone before she can figure out what it means, and then he speaks, slowly as if carefully measuring out his words. “He knows exactly why I gave him detention.”

“Yeah? Well, he doesn’t seem to. So maybe you should be a little more clear.”

He doesn’t say anything to that, his gaze hard and unreadable. There’s a muscle ticking away in his jaw, which might fascinate her if she weren’t kind of pissed.

The words come out of her mouth before she can stop them. “For an English teacher, you’re pretty shitty at communication.”

He’s standing within the instant. “You want detention too?” he growls.

Despite the fact that she now has to look up a little to glare at him, she doesn’t back down. “What I want,” she replies, “is for you to tell me exactly why you put my boyfriend in detention. And if not, tell him why. So that he can tell me. Either way, I’m going to know. So spit it out already.”

He stares hard at her for another moment, and just when she thinks he’s really going to put her in detention too for being so bold— all at once he swallows and looks away. “Clo...”

The utterance of her name is so soft and gentle that it catches her off guard.

“I gave him detention because of the way he was talking about you.”

She blinks.

He doesn’t elaborate, just stares at her like he’s waiting for her to get it. But he can’t possibly mean…

“How was he talking about me?” she demands, leaning in.

He looks away again. “He was talking to some of his friends about you. Inappropriate things.”

“Sexual things,” she says flatly.

He winces. “Yeah.”

She puts her hands on her hips, her anger now directed to a new source. “What kind of things?”

He hesitates. “It was crass.”

“Did he talk about me sucking his dick or something?”

He makes a strangled sound and runs a hand over his face. “Jesus, Clo. Yes. Among other things. He had a picture on his phone he was showing them too.” And he pulls it out of his drawer where he’s apparently confiscated it, muttering, “I shouldn’t even be showing you this.”

She snatches it out of his hand and types in Ryan’s code, the one she’s seen him type in when he thought he was being so covert about it.

Scrolling through his pictures she immediately finds the offending photo. It’s her, naked in the sheets of Ryan’s bed, and fast asleep. If she had to guess it was taken the last time she had sex with him a week ago. She’d never given him permission to do this.

Her horror has flooded to her face, and he sees it.

“I didn’t look at it, whatever it is,” he says softly. “It was pretty obvious what he was showing them from their conversation so I just took the phone away.”

She’s still staring at the phone. With a shaking hand she deletes the picture but can’t seem to tear her gaze away from the screen.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly.

She collects herself, taking a deep breath so she can look back up at him with what she hopes is clear eyes. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“If you shouldn’t be showing me this,” she says slowly, waving the phone in his face, “Because it’s against school policy or whatever, why did you?”

His jaw works but he doesn’t answer right away. When his lips part, the bell rings and they both jump.

He takes the phone from her. “You should get to class.” He’s back to being brisk and formal. She’s still shaking from the revelation that her boyfriend has been going behind her back, so all she can do is nod, stunned and make to turn around.

But then his hand is on her shoulder. “Clo.”

She freezes up for a second. He’s never touched her before and she’s just realizing it now. Because the weight of his hand is warm and heavy and reassuring. She glances back.

“I’m not going to try and meddle with a student’s private life,” he tells her. “But whatever you decide to do, just remember that you deserve to be respected.”

Strangely, she feels a little close to tears upon those words, and she blinks them away furiously. The door opens and kids start walking in for the class that he’s teaching next. He lets go of her shoulder. She steps away.

“I know. Thanks, Mr. Blake,” she whispers, and flees.

—

“So, are you telling me you broke up with him?” Queenie asks impatiently over the phone that night. “Because that’s what I’m hearing.”

“We had a huge fight and I told him to fuck off,” Clo sighs, drawing her feet closer to her chest as she stares up at her bedroom ceiling. “I don’t know where we stand. But Queenie. He was showing his friends pictures of me naked and he didn’t even seem that apologetic when I confronted him about it.”

Queenie makes a noise of sympathy. “Such bullshit. He was a jackass from the beginning anyway, I told you.”

“But you think all guys are jackasses.”

“Not all.”

Her lips tug into the first semblance of a smile she has worn for the past several hours. “Name one you don’t think is a jackass.”

There’s a long pause at the other end of the line. “Hey! I know. Mr. Blake,” Queenie says. “Or at least, Mr. Blake’s pod person, so I approve if you want to date him next. And also, my dad’s not a jackass. But, please don’t date him.”

Clo snorts in laughter. But she was finally feeling a little better.

—

She meets Mr. Blake on the bus to school the next morning. She’d been unable to face Mr. Blake after school the day before, so she’d taken Queenie’s bus to her house and got driven back to her own home. But now she has to face him.

When she gets on, he’s not reading. He’s looking for her.

When he finds her, she smiles at him, and some tension seems to leave his body. He smiles back, and she approaches.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hey,” he replies. A pause. “How are you?”

For once, she plops into the seat next to him. She needs comfort today. “I’ll manage.”

He nods once, and they don’t talk for the rest of the way to the school. He doesn’t try to prompt conversation and she appreciates it.

And over the next few weeks, she notices Mr. Blake giving Ryan the longest and most wordy sections of the texts to read aloud. While correcting him, there’s now a slight smile on his face, not quite an obvious smirk but if Ryan’s purpling expression is anything to go by, it still feels condescending.

Clo had had no idea Mr. Blake had it in him to be condescending. But the first time he does it he turns slightly to her and winks, fast enough that she might have missed it had she not been paying attention; and she decides it’s the funniest thing she’s ever seen.

—

On the last day of the semester she walks to the bus with Mr. Blake.

“So,” he says to her, unwinding his scarf a bit. It’s really cold out. “Last day of school for the semester, over. Excited to be done?”

She makes a face, her boots slipping slightly on the ice. He catches her arm immediately, steadying her so that she can clamber onto the bus. “Not excited for exams.” She looks at him hopefully as he gets on behind her. “Would you make yours optional if I asked nicely?”

He grins, and it’s so adorable her heart skips a beat. “Not a chance.”

“Worth a shot.” He sits down as usual, and she clings onto the pole in front of him as usual. “I’ll try again next semester.” She’s taking the second part of the Literature course with him, and she’s quite happy about the prospect of spending another few months in his classroom.

“You can try,” he says with amusement once they’re settled. The bus creaks into motion. “How’d your art project go, by the way?”

Clo makes a face. She’s been complaining about this project to him on the bus for the last few weeks. And now she pulls it, rumpled, out of her backpack. “I gave it my all and… Ms. Altavilla gave me a B.” She throws her piece of artwork at him in disgust.

He catches it, eyebrows going up. “This is beautiful.” His thumb strokes over it delicately, handling it much more carefully than she had when she crammed it into her backpack.

“I know,” she says hotly. “And she gave me a B.”

“A B’s not bad.”

“Yes, well, some of us want to go to a good university.”

He raises an eyebrow, handing it back to her. “What are you implying?”

She ignores that, taking it back and stuffing it back in her bag with even more vigour than the last time. “What I’m implying is that you should talk to Ms. Altavilla for me and get me the A I deserve.”

He barks out a laugh. “Even assuming I would try, why would she listen to me? I’m not exactly an art aficionado.”

She stares at him, wondering if he’s really that dense, and opens her mouth to point out Ms. Altavilla’s huge crush on him when suddenly the bus swerves out of nowhere.

It skids uncontrollably on a patch of ice, and Clo barely has time to clutch onto the pole a little tighter as people scream and the bus careens off the road, towards the river.

And then it all goes black.

—

She comes to slowly.

First it’s the distant sound of sirens wailing in her ears, and a soft familiar voice in her ear, murmuring words she can’t distinguish.

Then it’s pain. Mostly in her leg, splitting with agony; but there’s a pulsing ache in general throughout her body.

Then it’s that she’s cold. So damn cold, and soaked to the bone.

Then she jackknifes up into sitting position, coughing water violently.

Instantly there’s a hand at her back, and she blearily opens her eyes. She’s lying on the frosty grass right beside the river. The bus she was in seemingly moments ago is in the river, too, halfway submerged. It’s a surreal sight. There are people being pulled out of it by paramedics.

And her eyes then shift to Mr. Blake, kneeling in front of her with a slash across his cheek and concern in his eyes. Except he’s not Mr. Blake anymore.

He’s Bellamy.

And she’s Clarke.

Her next thought is the first one that she voices. “Bellamy, what the hell?”

He rocks back on his heels. He looks soaked to the bone, and shivering even more than she is. “The bus went into the lake,” he says, voice hoarse. “You were the only one standing instead of sitting when it did. Got pretty banged up.” He swallows, pushing a strand of her wet hair behind her ear.

She still doesn’t get it.

“You weren’t breathing,” he adds, sounding a little desperate, a little pleading. “I pulled you out of the bus and when I got you here I realized you weren’t breathing.” His voice shakes.

She now realizes her chest hurts too, like an elephant was sitting on it. She presses a hand to her sternum, wincing. “You did CPR.”

He swallows. “And mouth to mouth,” he adds unnecessarily. Clarke had already figured that part out. “And that’s when… well…”

They stare at each other. Clarke takes him in, because it’s been a while. He’s doing the same to her.

“Your hair is shorter in this life,” he notes.

“Yours is longer,” she retorts. It brushes over his eyebrows more than she remembers from Berlin.

His lips quirk up. “I didn’t say it was a bad thing.”

“I didn’t either.” She pauses, looks down at her shaking hands. They should not be talking so casually right now. There are things to discuss. “I think we’re in shock.”

“I think you’d be right,” he agrees. The paramedics are finally making their way towards them, having tended to those still trapped in the bus.

Clarke shifts, intending to get up, but a sharp pain sears through her leg and she falls back with a pained groan.

“I think her leg might be broken,” Bellamy tells the paramedics. “And she stopped breathing for a minute there.”

They set a stretcher next to Clarke. “What about you?” they ask him.

“I’m fine.”

Clarke scoffs and the paramedics look at her. “He’s not fine. Look at him, at the very least he’s in shock. Probably hypothermic.”

“You should come with us too,” the paramedic tells Bellamy, who’s glaring at Clarke. “Overnight observation.”

“Please,” Clarke says softly, and Bellamy sighs.

“Fine.”

—

It’s a whirlwind of doctors and family for a while, and at the end of it all Clarke is simply lying in bed, unable to sleep despite the meds. She tries not to look too long at the blank white wall of the hospital room; it reminds her too much of her time institutionalized in Berlin.

She is calmed somewhat when Bellamy walks through the door.

Her head snaps his way. He’s a silhouette in the hallway, wearing a hospital gown, at least until he closes the door behind him, sealing them in pitch black darkness.

“You okay?” He asks quietly.

“Well, my leg is broken and I have a cracked rib thanks to CPR—”

“That’s not what I was talking about,” he cuts her off.

He gives her a meaningful look; after a moment, she realizes he must have seen her expression when he’d walked in.

“The hospital… it kind of reminds me of Berlin,” she admits, and takes a deep breath. “I’m fine now. I’m fine.”

There’s a long pause where she can tell he’s examining her. Eventually, he apparently decides to drop it, possibly sensing she doesn’t want to elaborate. “We need to talk,” he says instead.

“You shouldn’t even be out of bed.”

“They’re discharging me in the morning.” He shuffles closer, so that she can barely make out his face as her eyes adjust. “We need to talk about… us.”

“What’s there to talk about?” Clarke asks, even though she already knows what he’s getting at from the tone of his voice. “I found you again.”

“And I’m glad,” he replies softly, his hand brushing over her forehead. She closes her eyes. A pause. “But you know we can’t be together, right?”

Her eyes snap back open. “Why not?”

“You know why not. I’m your teacher. You’re a teenager.”

Her mouth drops open in outrage. “I’m nearly eighteen!”

He answers readily, like he’s been thinking about this. “I’m twenty-three. You should— you should be able to enjoy being young.”

“What, like you’re a senior citizen?”

He ignores her. “I’m your teacher, Clarke. You know this can’t work.” He sounds a little cold, a little logical, and it infuriates her. He turns away from her anger to start pacing around the small room. “We shouldn’t stop our lives because of this. You should still go to university like you were planning.”

She clutches tighter to her bedsheets, enraged. “But everything has changed. Plans can change, too. I want to be with you.”

“That’s great, Clarke,” he deadpans, stopping his pacing to look at her. “Can’t wait until I’m fired for having an affair with my student. Maybe even go to jail.”

That thought quells her anger a bit, and she shuts her mouth. It’s true; social rules have changed since Berlin. Germany’s age of consent is fourteen. Their relationship back then was completely normal. But now? Not so much.

Meanwhile, he’s still talking. “I’ve thought about this, okay Clarke? There’s no way we can have our lives and have each other.”

“Then we don’t have to have our lives. We could leave,” she attempts. “We could run, just go somewhere by oursel—”

“Stop,” he says, abruptly stopping his pacing to look at her. His voice is ragged. Now she sees what she couldn’t before; conflict in his expression, bitterness even. “I’m not taking your life away from you again. I already did that once.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I didn’t think I’d need to remind you that you were in a mental institution for years in Berlin because of me,” he replies bitterly, not looking at her. “I took your childhood from you, and I refuse to do it again. Please, stop.”

Her lower lip quivers, and they stare at each other from across the room. “Bellamy…” she says softly, at a loss. She trails off, not quite knowing what to say to fix this. Maybe it’s not fixable.

When the silences stretches on, his brow furrows. “And besides… you want to leave your family behind now? What happened to living every life as if it’s your last?”

Clarke swipes a tear from her eye with her palm. “It’s getting tiring. Maybe this—” she gestures between them— “is our real life now. And every reincarnation we live is just another day of it.” It’s a horrible thing to say, puts a pang in her stomach to even think that her family and friends are just cardboard cutouts in a fabricated existence. But she’s tired. She’s so tired, at this point all she wants are simple answers.

He seems to mull that one over. “That kind of takes the meaning out of life, doesn’t it?”

She shrugs emptily. “So I guess we just have to make up our own.”

They stare at each other. She pushes her hair away from her face. His eyes follow the movement, and his hand twitches at his side as if it meant to move. It doesn’t. The gap between them only seems to grow wider in the ensuing pause.

“Tell you what,” Bellamy says abruptly. “Go to university like you were planning. I’ll be waiting right here when you graduate. If that’s what you still want.”

She opens her mouth to argue it, at least until she notices how exhausted he looks, like he too is hanging by a thread. She’s not the only one who’s tired.

So she sighs. “Of course it is.” But he just stands there, fists clenching and unclenching, and suddenly she can’t take it anymore, being so far apart from him when she just found him again. “Come here.”

His eyes cling to hers but he doesn’t move.

She holds her arms out. “Please come here,” she begs, sitting up in her bed as best she can. “Bellamy, I— I just want to touch you.”

That gets him moving. Slowly— because she suspects he’s more hurt than he’s letting on, he comes to her side. She scrabbles a little blindly in the dark for his hand, and then it’s there, sliding easily into hers. He squeezes tight.

“I’m here,” he exhales. “Clarke, I’m here.”

She reaches up, tugging at the collar of his hospital gown, making him bend closer. He follows her lead, pressing his cheek against hers, nuzzling against her skin. She clings to him and breathes in his scent. He turns his nose into her hair, inhaling. They melt into each other.

“The Stasi killed you, didn’t they?” she murmurs to him.

“I think so.” He sounds unbothered.

Tears prick at her eyes. “Because of me. Because I didn’t stop.” He says nothing. “I should have let it go.” If she’d let it go— they could’ve been together, eventually.

“Clarke, stop,” he whispers firmly, lips against her ear. “You couldn’t have known. You barely even knew what was happening to you. There was so much more going on. You can’t put this on yourself.”

A tear still escapes her eye, and he pulls away for just a second, just to kiss it away and smooth her hair back, and she feels so right in this moment, with Bellamy at her side in this calm and dark hospital room, where she can almost pretend they’re the only two people in the world.

The illusion shatters when the door opens.

Bellamy smoothly steps away, face now expressionless and standing at the foot of her bed. Clarke wipes at her eyes so she can see who’s standing there. It’s the nurse, and she’s frowning at the sight of them.

“Mr. Blake? What are you doing in this room?” She looks sharply at Clarke. “Clo, honey, is he bothering you?”

“No,” Clarke says hastily, still wiping at her cheeks. “No, I know him. It’s alright.”

The nurse looks between the two of them for another moment before realization dawns. “Oh, that’s right! How silly of me that I forgot. He’s your teacher, right? You were both on the bus in that accident yesterday.”

Clarke nods, smiling with relief. “That’s it. We were just talking.”

Confusion again. “At three in the morning?” She looks between them again. “Surely it could wait until morning. Mr. Blake, you should really go back to bed.”

“I will,” Bellamy says tonelessly. The nurse doesn’t move, folding her arms and arching a brow at him. Clearly she’s not leaving until he does. After a pause, he moves for the door.

“No, he can stay,” Clarke says helplessly, reaching out a hand to empty air as he heads out.

“You should both be asleep,” the nurse says sternly. Behind her, Bellamy pauses at the door to look back at Clarke. Just a look, but it’s soft, and it feels like a hug. Then he disappears into the hallway.

Exhaling, Clarke slumps back into her pillows. She expects the nurse to leave right away, but she doesn’t.

“I had a crush on one of my teachers in high school, too,” the nurse says with something of nostalgic air.

Blood rushes to Clarke’s cheeks, and she’s thankful for the darkness. “I don’t have a crush on him.”

She smiles indulgently at Clarke. “Well, good. Keep it that way. I got a C in the class he taught because I never really heard a word he said.” She giggles to herself, almost childlike, and turns to the door. “Good night, honey.”

—

Clarke’s in the hospital for a solid week, a time in which she gets countless visits from her parents, seven from Queenie, three from the rest of her collective friend group, and absolutely none from Bellamy.

That pisses her off. A lot.

Her mom comes in on the last day and informs her that she has to reschedule all her class exams because of her injury. Except one.

“Mr. Blake apparently said you don’t have to do the exam,” her mom says. “That was kind of him.”

That makes her slightly less pissed off.

When she gets home and finishes her exams, she tries pulling up his address, or phone number, or anything. But ‘Bradbury Blake’ (speaking of which, she has got to remember to make fun of him later) doesn’t pull up any results.

When the semester starts again, she’s on crutches. She runs into Bellamy in the hallway on her way to her first class.

He stops short in front of her. “Clo,” he says politely. “How’s the leg?”

She glares at him, still irritated about his radio silence, but two of her friends are at her side watching the exchange. “Pretty broken.” She wiggles her casted leg for effect. “The doctors say it’ll be three months before it’s completely healed.”

He glances down at her cast and the trace of a smile crosses his face. “Is there anyone on earth who hasn’t signed your cast yet?”

She looks down at it and then back at him, grinning despite herself. She can hardly see any white space. “Someone’s uncle somewhere, I’m sure.” His lips tug up further. She gets so caught up in his smiling eyes that she almost forgets there are about twenty witnesses around them. She clears her throat and adds casually, “And you.”

One of her friends tugs at his baseball cap and makes an enthusiastic noise. “Dude, Mr. Blake! You should sign it.”

Not taking his eyes off Clarke, he nods. “Later, maybe.” He straightens, professional mask back in place. “And Mr. Martinez, I’m not your ‘dude’. Now go to class.”

—

She has her first class of the semester with him at the end of the day again, which suits her just fine since it gives her ample time to saunter (as well as one with a cast and crutches can saunter) over to his desk after the bell rings.

He barely looks at her as all the other students flee through the door, choosing to sit down in his chair behind his desk. “Clo. Questions about the syllabus?” His tone is brisk as he bends under his desk to grab his bag.

Clarke looks at the syllabus in her hand. “Yes, actually. It says under your contact info that your phone number is the school’s number.”

His back stiffens for a moment before he straightens with his laptop bag in hand. “What’s your point, Clarke?”

“My point is give me your cell phone number.”

His answer is swift. “No.”

“Oh, come on,” she complains. They’re alone in the room now. “You’re going to deny your wife your cell phone number? Really, Bellamy?”

“You’re my student, not my wife.”

That stings a little, but he’s avoiding her eyes so she can’t give him a death glare. She opts for a sugary voice instead. “What if I get stabbed and bleed out in a ditch or something? How am I going to contact you?”

That gives him pause, but eventually he replies, “You should really call the ambulance, not me.”

She rolls her eyes. “What if I die from blood loss before they get to me?”

“If I give you my number, will you stop talking about things I try not to think about?” he says, sounding a little pained. As he says it, he fishes in his pocket, and Clarke nods excitedly. He tosses his phone at her within the next moment.

She texts herself so that she’ll have his number and hands it back to him. With raised eyebrows he looks down at the message she sent herself— Hey sexy— but makes no comment as he pockets it.

“Only contact me at this number for absolute emergencies,” he instructs before she can feel disappointed.

She sighs. “I don’t suppose you’re going to change your stance from when we talked in the hospital?”

“Clarke,” he says, voice far gentler now. “I want to be with you. Just not right now. It’s not— it’s not right.”

“Why, because I’m seventeen?” she shoots at him, leaning over his desk a bit. “I’m almost eighteen. And remember when we got married the first time? I was fifteen then. Practically an old bride.”

He winces at the reminder. “Maybe that was normal a thousand years ago, Clarke. But it’s not like that anymore. Just enjoy the life you have right now. For once, it’s relatively normal.”

She relents for now, sighing and her shoulders sagging. “Fine.”

He watches her dejectedly slump and after a moment he opens his desk drawer, producing a Sharpie. “Any room on that cast of yours?”

It’s a stupid thing to get cheered up about, but it does the trick. She eagerly sticks out her foot. “If there’s not, you can just write over one of the dicks Queenie drew.”

He chuckles low and stands up from his chair. In the next moment he gets on one knee in front of her. Her cast extends almost all the way up to her knee, and before she can prepare for it his hand reaches out to cup her leg right behind the knee, lifting it just a little more for his inspection. As he examines it for free space, his hand slides down her calf, over her cast; and although his palm is separated from her skin by thick layers, she swears she could feel his warmth caressing her anyway.

It feels too intimate, and she’s glad he’s preoccupied scribbling something near the rim of her cast to see how her cheeks have flushed from his pseudo touch. When he’s done writing, he continues to kneel at her foot, reading the messages friends and family have left.

“A lot of people love you,” he comments, eyes flicking up to hers meaningfully. “Don’t waste it. This is a good life you’ve got.”

She holds his gaze. “I can think of a few ways to make it better.”

Neither of them move for another moment. And then there’s a theatrical throat clearing at the door, and both of them whip their heads that way.

It’s Queenie, looking like she’s biting her cheek hard before she speaks. “Hey Clo, I was gonna ask, wanna meet in the library? To start planning for that term project?”

“Yeah,” Clarke replies, hoping her voice is normal. “Let’s go.” Meanwhile Bellamy stands up slowly, placing his marker back on his desk.

“Queenie,” he greets the other girl without looking at her. “I’m a little disappointed you’re not taking my class this semester.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got other things to do,” Queenie says with attitude. Clarke smiles to herself. Queenie dropped Bellamy’s class in order to take one with Grace, her crush. They’re both hopeless.

“Bye, Mr. Blake,” Clarke says. “Thanks for signing my cast.”

When she and Queenie are in the hallway, Queenie rounds on her, snickering. “Oh my god. I swear it looked like he was proposing to you.”

Clarke gulps and forces a laugh. It sounds a little unhinged. “Right. Not in a million years.”

—

At the library, some of her friends are reading her cast again (Clarke can’t wait until that gets old) when one says, “What the hell does this say?”

Clarke looks down and sees that he’s pointing at the spot where Bellamy wrote his message. She hadn’t even thought to ask him what he had put. “Is it messy?”

He frowns, tilting his head. “It looks like a different language or something? Who wrote that?”

She tries to bend over her cast, but she can’t see it properly upside down so she fishes out her phone. “Take a picture of it.”

He obliges, and when she accepts it back she stares at it for a good ten seconds.

It’s a short phrase written in Arabic. Not modern Arabic— It’s an older version of the language that was used in Jerusalem most commonly by natives. As a princess, she’d known it too, but now she struggles to scrounge up memories of it. After a few seconds she can piece together what the message reads. And her heart stops.

I love you.

“Clo?” her friend asks, puzzled. “What does it say?”

She unfreezes and clears her throat, pocketing her phone. “No idea.”

—

Neither of them take the bus anymore. Clarke’s parents have sworn to pick Clarke up every day after school, which is slightly annoying. But at the same time she’s grateful because she’s not sure she wants to be on that thing anymore. And he’s not on the bus because he got a new car. Well, ‘new’ is a bit of a stretch, but still.

(“I’m not taking you on a joyride,” Bellamy says firmly when she asks, one day at lunch. He doesn’t even look up from the tests he’s marking. “Why would you even want to? Thing’s a piece of shit anyway.”

“Who said I was talking about the car?” Clarke asks innocently. Needless to say, she’s sent out.)

For the next few weeks, life settles back to normal. Being able to see Bellamy five days a week is absolute heaven, but the fact that she’s not allowed to touch him the way she wants is absolute torture. She’ll take it.

She falls in love all over again from the second row of the classroom, watching him talk about whatever they’re reading that week, the way his brow furrows as he considers a tough question from one of his students, even that time his temper slips when he overhears one student calling another a slut.

He looks furious as he sends them to the office, jaw clenched, a muscle jumping there. Clarke’s fascinated by it. She sits up a little in her chair, tracing the tension of the line of his neck into his collar. The door slams shut behind the angry student and Bellamy’s eyes shift to Clarke as if called there.

His dark gaze shifts slightly when he sees her sitting there, biting her lip. For a fraction of a second she swears there’s actual lust there, but then he tears his gaze away and continues with the lesson as if nothing happened.

Intriguing. And— she crosses and uncrosses her legs under her desk restlessly— hot.

—

At first, it’s not like she’s trying to seduce him or anything. No, it’s just that she wants to see how far this goes.

A few weeks later, she gets her cast off, although she still has to be careful.

She and her friends celebrate by going prom dress shopping; the event won’t be for another three months, but most people go early to find their perfect dress. None of them are planning to go with dates (“Grace is almost as oblivious to me as Mr. Blake is to Altavilla,” Queenie complains) but they are all going as a group.

It’s in the dressing room, as she’s debating between a green and a blue dress, that she’s hit with an idea.

She takes her phone from her purse and pulls up Bellamy’s number.

EMERGENCY!! She texts him, followed quickly by, I can’t decide what colour dress to choose for prom.

His answer pops up a minute later. That’s not an emergency.

Holding back a grin, she types back, Green or blue?

She waits another few minutes, leaning against the stall door, but gets no response. Once she’s certain he’s ignoring her question, she goes for a new tactic.

Still wearing the green dress, she poses in the mirror, fluffing up her hair a little and pouting. The strapless cut of the dress does great things for her breasts, and maybe she pushes her chest out just a bit when she takes a photo of herself. Then she changes into the blue one, does the same and sends them both to him with the caption: Green or blue?

This time, Bellamy’s answer comes within half a minute. Blue.

She smirks and buys the blue one.

—

“I know what you’re doing,” Bellamy says to her after school one day, when she once again dawdles behind her peers.

“What do you mean?” She bats her eyelashes at him. He looks a little pained, glancing away and tugging at his necktie. Clarke is seized with the urge to replace that hand with her own but squashes it.

“I mean I know what you’re doing.”

“Explain.”

He glares. “Sending me pictures of yourself. Batting your damn eyes at me in class. Leaning over my desk like you are right now, with your top half-unbuttoned.”

Clarke looks down at herself, feigning surprise as she looks down at her own cleavage. “Oh, I didn’t notice.”

He’s standing up in a flash, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “You’re playing a dangerous game, Clarke.”

She straightens to meet his gaze. “But it’s fun.”

“You know this is considered harassment? I could report you.”

Her mouth drops open in indignation. “You wouldn’t—”

A student walks through the door right then, stopping short at the sight of them. “Uhh…”

Bellamy’s back to professionalism. “My classroom is detention today, Jared. You’re in the right place.” Jared nods and slouches over to the back. Bellamy turns his glare back at Clarke. “Get out or I’ll report you.”

“You should put me in detention too,” Clarke purrs in a low voice. “I mean, according to you I’ve been bad, right?”

Bellamy doesn’t bat an eye. “I’ll send you to the principal’s office. You can tell him how bad you are then.” Clarke scoffs at the bluff, but just then more students filter into the classroom, effectively ending the conversation.

—

Clarke tries to tone it down. She really does. But it’s really hard when he’s up at the front, with his white shirt stretched over his shoulders and all she can think about is how intimately she knows every contour of his body under it. She probably just needs to get laid. The problem is, there’s only one person she wants to do that with anymore, and it’s none of the other girls or boys at her school anymore. It’s her fucking teacher.

He tends to ignore her completely in class these days; he doesn’t even call on her to read all that much. When she sticks around after class, he warms up considerably, but even then he’s on his guard, like he expects her to do something.

One day at the end of the class, when she saunters up, he’s got something to say about it.

He’s got his back to her, wiping the chalkboard clean (She’s kind of amazed that chalkboards are still in use even with all the technology available today). “You shouldn’t come talk to me so often after class anymore.” He turns around, face blank. “People are starting to notice.”

She scoffs. “Like who?” He doesn’t answer. She folds her arms. “You could have just said how much you don’t like talking to me.” She knows she sounds petulant. She doesn’t care.

“Plenty of people have walked in while we were talking, if you haven’t noticed,” he snaps. “Even that nurse from the hospital the very first night knew something was going on. So consider this a preemptive measure.”

“Then when am I supposed to talk to you?”

Bellamy says nothing.

Her hands form fists at her sides. “Come on, Bellamy. If we can’t be together like how we used to be, at least let us be friends.”

He closes his eyes as if in pain. “I want that, Clarke. I don’t like having to do this either. But I’d rather not screw up your life again.”

“And I told you, you could never screw up my life. Unless you took yourself out of it.”

He goes on as if she hadn’t spoken. “Besides, it’s not like I’m cutting ties. You have my number.”

That’s true. After the prom dress shopping thing, they did more texting. It wasn’t much, but it got her through weekends when she didn’t see him at all. “That’s not the same.” Her voice comes out as a little whiny again.

“Don’t be such a child, Clarke,” he snaps. “I’m trying, alright?”

“A child?” she repeats indignantly, hands on her hips. He already looks to be regretting his word choice; his mouth opens, presumably to apologize, but she beats him to it, intending to hurt him with her next words.

She taps her finger against her chin. “You know what I was thinking about today in class?”

“Clarke,” he says with gritted teeth, “I didn’t mean—”

“I was thinking about which would be better.” She nods at his desk. “Me bent over your desk, you fucking me from behind? Or,” she goes on, taking another step forward while he breathes in sharply, “you sitting on that chair, while I sit in your lap and fuck you?”

He hasn’t backed down from her steps, and this close up she gets the treat of watching his pupils dilate at her words— she can hardly see his irises. He’s thinking about it now, she can tell. Her grinding down onto him right here with her legs wrapped around his waist. Or maybe how he could so easily turn her around against the solid wooden surface of his desk right now and...

Clarke brushes her fingers down the rigid line of his arm, tilting her head. He barely seems to be breathing. “What do you think?”

While she’s still leaning in, he suddenly seizes her by the waist.

But instead of hauling her closer, he turns her around so she’s facing towards the door. “I think we’ll call it a draw,” he says roughly behind her, and gives her a little push. His voice is near guttural. “Now get out of my classroom.”

—

Bellamy’s self-restraint is becoming entirely too inconvenient. She can’t believe she’s doing this on a regular basis now, going to school and getting sexually frustrated, going home at night to lie in her bed, pleasuring herself and panting his name muffled against her pillow so no one will hear.

The only thing that gives her any satisfaction is knowing that she can drive him up the wall in the exact same way. She knows it because one day she shows up wearing a pink top and plaid dark skirt, near replicas of the outfit she’d worn the first time she’d met him— and blown him— in Berlin.

When she walks into his classroom, he drops the stack of quizzes he was handing out.

She places a sucker between her lips, making sure to pop it through her cheek at him, and winks as she sashays to her seat. She watches him bend down to grab the papers he’d dropped, the way his shoulders rise and fall in a measured way, like he’s taking deep breaths.

And that night, she’s sure she’s not alone in her routine.

—

Clarke turns eighteen on parent teacher night, coincidentally.

She shoots him a text that afternoon in class that says How about a deal? I’ll stop doing inappropriate things if you say nice stuff about me to my parents tonight.

Later that evening, while her family is eating cake before they head out, her phone buzzes with his reply.

Technically I never said I wanted you to stop.

“Who’s ‘Bellamy’, honey?” Her mom asks, peeking over her shoulder. Clarke clamps her open mouth shut and pockets her phone immediately.

“Friend from school.”

“As long as he’s not related to that prick Ryan, he’s an improvement,” her father booms from behind his tablet. Clarke rolls her eyes. In any case, she somehow doubts her father would find her teacher to be a better match.

As is tradition, Clarke comes with her parents to the event. Bellamy ends up being the first teacher they have an appointment with.

He opens his door, all pleasantry. “Mr. and Mrs. Griffith? Pleasure to meet you,” he says in his deep voice, and fixes his polite charmer smile on her mother. Clarke’s pretty sure her mom’s eyes go wide for a second before going back to normal. “Will Clo be joining us?” He glances at Clarke, almost dismissive in the gesture, but Clarke knows it’s all for show. In the half second he’s looking at her, his eyes sweep down her form, taking in the dress she was wearing for her birthday party.

“No,” Clarke coughs into her fist. It sounds extremely awkward to be in a room with both her ex-husband and her parents who are oblivious to the fact.

“Suit yourself,” Bellamy says, a trace of humour in his words like he knows exactly what she’s thinking.

As soon as the door shuts she immediately regrets her decision. He’d never actually agreed to her proposal to say nice things about her.

She’s doing well in his class, but what if he says something about her behaviour? God, he would do that, make some offhand comment that leaves her parents vaguely confused, just to keep her on her toes—

The door opens again and she jumps, glancing at the clock. “Already?” But it’s already been five minutes, she just hadn’t been paying attention.

Her parents walk out, and another couple walks in to speak to Bellamy.

“Don’t look so nervous,” her dad tells her. “There just wasn’t much to say. It was all good things he said.”

Her mom hugs her. “I’m proud of you, honey.”

They go off to meet with her next teacher and Clarke chooses to remain where she’s sitting under the hopes that she’ll run into Bellamy again.

Twenty minutes later, she gets her wish. The last set of parents leave Bellamy’s class and he pokes his head out the door. “Did the Martinez’s come by?”

“Nope,” Clarke says. He looks at her for a moment where she’s sitting on the floor, leaning against the row of lockers with her legs stretched out.

“I like your dress,” he says, gruff.

She looks down at it— it’s lavender, with swirling patterns on it, and the silky material stretches modestly past her knees. She glances back at him just in time to see a trace of something dark in his eyes. He’s always a little contradictory when it comes to what he wants from their relationship, and she suspects it’s because he’s more conflicted than he tries to let on. It’s nice to know she still has that power over him, after all this time. “Thank you,” she replies primly, smoothing the fabric over her legs.

Bellamy leans against the doorframe and fishes in his pocket. He looks up and down the hallway before saying, “I got you something for your birthday.”

Her jaw drops. “You knew it was my birthday?”

He gives her a look that plainly says he thinks that question is insulting and produces his gift from his pocket, leaning down to drop it in her outstretched hand.

She opens her fingers. It’s a charm bracelet. Classy in its simplicity— nothing fancy or expensive-looking, but it’s pretty, with shining, swirling pendants dangling from it. And as she notes, it has blue accents exactly the colour of her new prom dress.

“Thought it could go with your dress,” he voices her thoughts as she continues staring at it stupidly.

She finally gets her vocal cords to work. “It will. But Bellamy, you didn’t have to—” She shakes her head. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“I know you didn’t. I think it’s called a surprise.”

She stands up and whacks him in the arm and he huffs a laugh, falling back a step. “When’s your birthday?” she demands.

He rubs a hand over his jaw. “September.”

She pouts. She’ll be gone to university by that time. “I’m going to get you something early then.”

“There’s nothing I need.”

She snorts. “I’m sure I can think of something.” She slips the bracelet on and stretches her hand out, admiring the look of it against her skin.

“I like your parents,” he says suddenly, out of the blue. “Although they look nothing like you.”

She smiles, taking the bracelet off and tucking it in her purse. “That’s because I’m adopted.”

His eyes widen a bit. She enjoys his surprise. “I didn’t know,” he says at last.

She shrugs, shouldering her purse. “It’s not a big deal.”

“There’s so much I don’t know about you,” he says, and her eyes snap back to his. His eyes are wide, sad suddenly. “I wish I could.”

Her heart aches for him— for them, and she reaches out to take his hand. Before she can, a pair of parents walks around the corner, and they both step away smoothly.

“Mr. and Mrs. Martinez?” Bellamy asks, professional.

“That’s right,” says the man.

Bellamy backs into his classroom again without giving Clarke a second glance. “Come on in. Lots of things to talk about. Especially how your son keeps calling me ‘dude’ no matter how much I...”

The door shuts and Clarke, knowing she probably won’t get another opportunity to talk to him tonight, walks off down the hall to find her parents.

—

Prom is the first weekend of May for their school. Clarke and her girlfriends get their hair done at a salon, where Clarke asks her hairdresser to take a picture of her intricate updo so she can send it to Bellamy.

How much hairspray did you put on that thing? He simply replies, and she smiles to herself.

A little while later, she’s all primped up and ready to go, and slips Bellamy’s bracelet on her wrist. As she’d suspected, it complements the dress perfectly. And having his gift with her makes it feel a little like she at least has a piece of him with her tonight.

The prom is being held at a fancy hotel; when her entourage gets there, however, she’s shocked to see Bellamy himself leaning against the wall outside, talking to another teacher. It takes her a moment to realize he must be one of the volunteers supervising tonight, not that it’ll make any difference. The prom is really just a pre-party for all the decidedly unsupervised ones taking place later.

Surrounded by a gaggle of friends, she can’t go to him, but his eyes find hers as if he sensed her, and he pauses in conversation. He’s across the room, separated from her by distance, noise, expectations and throngs of people but in that moment, with his lips parting slightly like he’s just seen her for the first time, it’s like he’s the only other person there. She holds her breath, enthralled as his gaze goes down and up her body at a leisurely pace. It feels like he’s touching her everywhere.

At least, until someone elbows her side and she jerks away to glare at Queenie.

“My bad,” Queenie says, elbowing her again. “But look, doesn’t Grace look hot tonight? I swear, I’m gonna ask her to dance. If she doesn’t get the hint then, I’m giving up.”

“I hope she says yes,” Clarke replies distantly. At least someone should get the romance they want tonight. When she shifts her gaze back to where Bellamy was, he’s gone, and she feels a little disappointed before shaking herself. She’s supposed to be enjoying this; being young, being with her friends. He would want her to.

So she does.

—

She goes in and for hours she dances, talks to friends and jokes and laughs and she truly has a lot of fun. And yet, despite all that, there still feels like something is missing.

At some point, after a particularly energetic song, she slips off her heels and goes off to find a drink in the lobby outside the dance, and that’s where she finds Bellamy, leaning against the wall and watching her.

“Having fun?” she asks him, a little out of breath as she fills her glass.

“I can think of more fun things to do.”

She pauses; their eyes connect. His aren’t giving anything away. There’s a beat where she wonders if he’s wishing for the same thing she’s been wishing all night, and then it’s over. She figures she must have misconstrued his meaning and just looks away, wishing someone would just spike the punch already.

She leans against the wall next to him and sips her drink, surveying the lobby. It’s more or less secluded save for the photo table to the side, where props are set for use by the high schoolers to take as many silly pictures as they please.

Clarke watches a group of friends hold masks to their faces and put on silly expressions for the camera. One of them kisses their date before the photo is taken; a lump grows in her throat watching them laugh freely together, and she turns to Bellamy, who’s watching the same thing she is with a faraway look to his eyes.

“Why can’t we have that?” Clarke whispers.

His gaze flicks back to hers. “We’ll have it.”

“But not now.”

“I told you, later. I’ll marry you the day after you graduate with your degree, if that’s what you want,” he attempts a smile.

But it doesn’t help; Clarke feels tears prick at her eyes. That feels like too long to wait. She’s tried valiantly to be fine with their situation, but she really, really can’t anymore. “That’s what we think. But before we can I just know something’s going to come along and kill us like always and we have to start over.” He stays silent, and to her own horror a tear or two slip out from her eyes. She wipes them away as daintily as she can without ruining her makeup. “Every day I have to act like you’re not my favourite person in the world, and it’s torture.”

His eyelashes sweep down, and his jaw clenches. But he says nothing.

She turns to him, eyes shining, begging him to validate her feelings. “Bellamy, doesn’t it hurt?”

And then his hand is there, on her cheek, thumbing away her tears, and her breath hitches. They’re in the lobby. Even though no one is paying them attention, anyone could see them. If they just glanced towards their corner, they’d see a teacher wiping away his student’s tears with a slow and delicate touch.

His eyes are shiny too, when he retracts his hand. “It’s agony,” he admits softly.

She squeezes her eyes shut. More hot tears spill out.

He makes a soft sound. “Don’t cry.” Now both hands are on her cheeks, forcing her to look at him. “Tonight is supposed to be happy. You’re supposed to be happy at prom.” He sounds desperate.

“I don’t want to be happy at prom,” she cries. “I want to be happy with you.”

Bellamy closes his eyes and sighs, taking a step back from her. “Someone’s watching us.”

She jerks her head to the side, heart leaping. But it’s just the photographer, who, with no one else in his lineup, is watching the two of them curiously. Maybe he’s simply wondering if they want a photo. Or maybe he’s not. Either way, their moment is over.

“Wash your face before you go back in,” Bellamy says.

“I’m not going back in.”

“Clarke.” She hates that Bellamy sounds as sad as she feels. She hates that it’s probably her bad mood that’s doing it to him. And she hates that she can’t stop herself anyway.

She wipes her cheek with the back of her hand. “I don’t want to be here anymore.” And she certainly doesn’t want to go to any of the damn after-parties.

“You’re leaving? Do you have a ride?”

She starts to say yes but pauses. She had agreed to go with Queenie, but Queenie is probably planning to stay longer, and go to a party after. She’d take Clarke home in a heartbeat if she asked, but she knows that’s not what the other girl wants to do.

He sees her hesitation. “I’ll drive you home.”

Clarke’s surprised by the offer but doesn’t let it show. There must be some risk involved in that, isn’t there? But he seems fine with it.

Well, she’s not looking a gift horse in the mouth, so she just nods instead, and he says, “I’ll bring my car around the back. Be there in five.” Then he disappears, and Clarke turns back into the prom to find Queenie.

She feels very lucky about the dim lighting; her red-rimmed eyes aren’t immediately noticeable. She searches around the room for Queenie and sees her and Grace kissing in the corner.

She feels her lips turn up into a smile. Looks like the happy ending happened for those two after all. Instead of interrupting, she shoots Queenie a text that she’s leaving with someone else and walks out to meet Bellamy round the back.

As soon as she gets in the car with him, she feels like she could stay here forever. It smells like him in here. She sinks into the leather of the seat and sighs.

“I’m hungry,” she announces.

He side-eyes her, reading her intentions. “No.”

She pouts.

—

“Fries with that?” the drive through guy asks. Bellamy glances at Clarke.

She shrugs. “Sure.”

After they get their orders, the smell of fast food overwhelming in the small car, Clarke’s stomach rumbles. She’s apparently even more hungry that she thought, so she reaches into her bag eagerly. His hand wraps around her wrist, and she looks up, startled.

His eyes are on the road. “No eating in my car.” Her mouth drops in indignation, at least until he adds, “Let’s go to my place.”

She shuts her mouth.

His place turns out to be a good half hour drive away from the hotel the prom was at, in a small, two level house in an urban neighbourhood.

She takes it in— it’s a little shabby. There’s an overgrown flower bed out front, and the gate looks rusted. The white paint on the side of the house peels slightly.

And yet, all she can do in that moment is imagine herself living here in a few years.

She can imagine walking up this cracked path to the front door every day, greeting him there with a kiss. Or maybe they’d sit out front in the summer in lawn chairs, clinking together their glasses of lemonade as well as their wedding rings. Maybe she would help him spruce the place up— although, sadly not too extravagantly. Bellamy’s stashes from his pirate days have apparently all been discovered by now, as he’d told her in a rather disgruntled way a few months back.

But still. Just the prospect of living here with him is altogether thrilling, and with that thought in mind this neighbourhood looks like heaven.

Despite that, as he parks in the driveway, she pokes her head out the window and comments, “Love what you’ve done with the place.”

He shoots her a wry look. “It’s not mine. It’s my brother’s.”

“Your brother’s—”

“I live with him,” Bellamy explains. “When I got this job and had to move here, he offered me his guest bedroom as long as I paid half the rent.” He pauses to look at her, mistaking her shock as concern. “Don’t worry, he won’t be a problem. You’ll see.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” she gets out. God, he’s right. There’s so much about each other they still don’t know.

“He’s a damn idiot,” Bellamy says fondly, pulling the keys out of the ignition. “Which reminds me.” He reaches into the back and produces a plain black hoodie. “Put this on over your prom dress. I don’t want to make it obvious I’ve been cradle robbing.”

“You’re not cradle robbing,” she huffs as she obeys. “I’m eighteen.” But he’s already getting out of the car with the fast food and walking over to her side.

He opens her door and she steps out, zipping up his sweater to her nose. It’s entirely too comfortable and smells exactly like his skin, which she tries not to think about. It also completely hides the fanciest part of her dress. With just the bottom tulle showing, it could almost pass as a fancy dinner dress.

They walk up the steps to the front door and he lets them into what looks like a living room. There’s a hologram TV display on the opposite wall, and there’s a dark haired man sitting on the couch watching it, pointing his finger at the display to change the channel.

“God, you’re home finally,” he says. “And you brought food. The most helpful thing you’ve done your entire life, little brother.” He twists in his seat; he’s got the same colouring as Bellamy, albeit without the freckles and with a thinner face and scruffy-looking beard. He’s wearing a sweatshirt and baggy pants. His eyes fasten on Clarke. “Never mind. You didn’t bring food for me at all, did you?”

“You can have mine if you’re so hungry, jackass,” Bellamy shoots back. “But from the smell of it, you’ve already ordered pizza.” He steps forward and— making Clarke’s heart jump— takes her hand in front of him. “This is Clarke, a friend of mine. Clarke, this is my brother Boris.”

“Nobody calls me that, Bradbury, so shut the fuck up,” his brother grumbles. He waves at Clarke. “Uh, nice to meet you. I’m Rick.” Rick looks between the two of them. “Are you two together?”

“No,” they both say in unison. Rick stares and then shrugs. He turns back to the TV.

“I’m not sure why I pretended to care, right there,” he comments, taking a bite from a slice of pizza on the table and reaching for a set of virtual reality goggles. “Hey, you guys want to play?”

“What’s the game?” Clarke asks.

He tells her. She frowns. It’s one of those first person shooter games, but ever since she regained her memories she’s lost her appreciation for them.

“Pretty sure we have MarioKart around here somewhere,” Bellamy suggests, and Rick grumbles before walking over to a box in the corner to rummage around for it.

“What does he do?” Clarke whispers to Bellamy. “As a job, I mean.”

From the looks of him, she wouldn’t have been surprised if Bellamy told her he didn’t have a job at all, but he doesn’t. “He’s a lawyer. Specializes in child protection.”

She blinks.

“Yeah,” he says, a sardonic twist to his mouth now. “I know.”

“Found it!” Rick yells, holding up the game, and after putting on their headsets they get to playing. Clarke had honestly forgotten how fucking engaging the game could be.

“Yes!” Clarke screeches, jumping up and down as she finally gets her little wagon in front of Bellamy’s, as his slides out of position due to a banana peel she’d strategically thrown down. “Take that!”

Bellamy gives her a playful push on the back. “Shut up. You keep breaking my concentration.”

“Do I need to remind you you’re battling over eighth place?” Rick asks. They both ignore him.

When Clarke ends up locking in seventh place for the third time in a row, she drops her wheel, throws down her goggles and turns her head to grin at Bellamy, who’s scowling on the couch. “Don’t be a sore loser.”

“He’s been that way since birth,” Rick drawls from his armchair. Bellamy throws his goggles to the side even though he hasn’t even finished the race yet and reaches forward suddenly, arms wrapping around Clarke’s waist and dragging her into his lap. She’s so surprised that she’s completely caught unawares when he starts tickling her.

“Fuck!” she gasps, seizing up in his lap. She tries to push his hands away, but he ends up scooping up her wrists in one of his so she’s helpless to his attacks. “Stop it!” He’s relentless, though, and he knows all her ticklish spots exactly, so she ends up falling sideways onto the couch giggling uncontrollably. He follows, pressing his smiling laugh into her neck. She dimly hears Rick mutter something under his breath and get up to grab more pizza.

Bellamy’s voice rumbles against her pulse point. “I’ll stop if you admit you cheated.”

She shrieks, “Cheating is the point of MarioKart—”

“So you admit it.”

“Okay, fine, stop— I’ll do anything!” she wheezes, tears coming from her eyes now in laughter.

He stops tickling to squeeze her side. “Anything, huh?” His head lifts so he can look her in the eye. His hair is messy over his forehead, cheeks red from exertion and eyes glittering with energy. She knows she looks the same.

His panting breaths puff against her lips in time with hers, and she becomes aware he’s got her wrists pinned above her head and one knee slotted between hers. His eyes turn liquid dark as if he’s realized the same. Subconsciously, she spreads legs further apart, arches up a bit.

Bellamy licks his lips. They’re so close to hers. She could surge up right now and kiss him if she wanted to. And he looks like he wants her to. Badly.

“I thought we had a rule of no making out in the common areas,” Rick complains behind them. “I have to live here too, you know.”

Bellamy blinks and then releases her wrists, clambering off her. “We weren’t—”

Rick cuts him off. “Yeah, whatever, little brother. Do you guys want to play another game? Or should I say, lose another game?”

Clarke, still on the couch, watches Bellamy glance at the clock. “It’s nearly midnight. Jesus, we’ve been here nearly two hours.” He mumbles that last part to himself.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Rick muses, ambling off for the bathroom.

“It’s okay,” Clarke says eagerly, sitting up when they’re alone in the room. “I told my parents to expect me around midnight at earliest.”

His lips twitch. “And they’re okay with that.”

“I might have asked them while they were distracted.”

Bellamy shakes his head ruefully. “Of course you did.” He studies her, and she self consciously smooths down her hair, which must be a rat’s nest after everything from tonight. She doesn’t even want to think about her makeup.

“I’m taking you home,” he says abruptly. She sighs. Game over.

—

Despite that, it’s with a happy glow inside that she rides home with Bellamy. And when he parks on the other side of the street from her house, she doesn’t want to get out.

He clears his throat. “I’d walk you to the door, but…”

“I know,” she says softly. “You’re my teacher, and all.”

The ensuing silence is sticky. Back to reality. But her own words remind her of something, and she bolts up straight.

“Wait!” she says excitedly. “I just remembered I got you a gift.”

He blinks and then half-laughs. “It’s not my birthday yet.”

“Does it look like I care?” She tugs on his arm. “Come with me while I go get it.” When he looks up at her house, expression filled with trepidation, she adds, “I’ll go through the back door. My parents won’t notice. You can wait in the backyard.”

He fights with himself for only a half second before unbuckling his seatbelt.

They sneak around the back, where the grass is cut to perfection and crickets chirp in the near-darkness. Bellamy looks around, taking in the neatly cut grass, the tall house, the trampoline, and the neighbours’ white picket fence. It’s a nice neighbourhood, far nicer than Rick’s. But somehow she likes his more.

She can overhear her parents watching some movie downstairs as she slips inside her house to grab his gift, catching a glimpse of herself in her dresser mirror as she does. Her hair has fallen out of her updo, messy around her shoulders, and her eyeshadow is smudged. But somehow— she pauses— she still thinks she looks prettier than she did when she left the house.

After a moment she gets it— it’s that sparkle in her eye, the contentedness clearly visible. It wasn’t quite there before. She’s certain it’s been the last two hours that did it.

He’s still waiting outside when she returns, leaning against a pillar. He pushes off when he sees her, and one eyebrow raises as Clarke holds out her gift.

He stares for a second and finally cracks a grin, shaking his head as he accepts it.

“A ‘World’s Best Teacher’ mug? Really?”

“It’s just the truth,” Clarke replies, cheeky.

A smile still on his lips, he turns it over in his hands. “If you think this is going to get you extra credit—”

“Of course not,” Clarke cuts him off. She knows he’s joking, but she finds herself growing serious, wanting him to understand her feelings. “Seriously, Bellamy, you’re a great teacher. I always thought so, even before I got my memories back. I can tell you love it.” He flushes at the praise, looking down, but she’s not done. “And I’d never want to take it away from you or— or jeopardize your reputation. I’m sorry for everything I did at school. I was childish, you’re right.”

He rubs his thumb over the edge of the mug thoughtfully. She plunges on.

“So I’m going to go to university in the fall, and you’re going to teach, and one day we’ll have everything. Maybe it’ll be in this life, maybe it’ll be in another one, but until then, this is everything.”

Bellamy finally looks up. His expression is unreadable as he holds up the ‘WORLD’S BEST TEACHER’ side of the mug to her. “I’m not sure I really deserve this title after this.”

“After wha—”

He kisses her.

Bellamy crowds Clarke against the pillar he was leaning against a moment ago, caging her in with his arms, and he kisses her. In a different lifetime, a different world, he would have taken advantage of her open lips to thrust his tongue in her mouth, but instead he just captures her bottom lip in both of his.

Her breath stutters in her throat. Bellamy’s patient, letting go of her lip briefly and then leaning in to peck her lips again before she gets with the program. She wraps her arms around his neck and this time she meets him in the middle, and then their lips are sliding together as familiar as they’ve always been, him tilting his head to one side and her to the other. She wants to cry at how good it feels. How good he feels with his body pressed against her body and his warm mouth moving with hers.

They could go on forever like this, really, so it’s a sound that breaks them apart. Clarke tenses until she realizes it’s the booming sound of her own father’s laughter, distant from the living room somewhere in the house.

She looks at Bellamy, panting like he’s pulled all the breath from her lungs and replaced it with his own. He runs his hand down her ratty looking hair, thumb brushing against her mascara stained cheek, and stares at her like he thinks it’s her most beautiful look of the night.

And then he exhales shakily and smiles. “Good night, Clarke.” His voice soft and deep simultaneously in the quiet summer night.

“Good night,” she manages to croak back, and then he’s gone, leaving her leaning against the pillar of her house with her fingers pressed against her lips, and the ghost of his there.

It’s five minutes before she realizes he didn’t ask for his hoodie back.

—

She washes it over the weekend in preparation to return to him on Monday, but he’s not there.

It’s odd. He’s never taken a day off in all the time she’s known him. She even remembers a time he’d shown up with a cold, deadpanning, “In case anyone was wondering, today’s class is sponsored by Tylenol and Halls,” and everyone had laughed.

But there’s a substitute teacher waiting in the classroom when Clarke comes in that day, so it gives her pause.

“Hello, class,” the older, grey-haired woman at the front of the room says, peering over her glasses at them all. “I’ll be teaching today, so let’s get started on—” She pauses, noticing Clarke’s hand is raised in the air. “Yes, dear?”

“Where’s Mr. Blake?” Clarke asks.

The sub frowns, looking down at her notebook. “I wasn’t told anything about your regular teacher’s situation. Luckily, he has very neat notes, so there hopefully won’t be too much of a transition period today.” She smiles kindly at Clarke, but she can’t seem to smile back. There’s a feeling of foreboding in her stomach.

The sub starts talking but Clarke doesn’t hear a word. He’s probably just sick, right? Maybe he’s got a bad enough cold that he finally had to stay home.

Just to make sure, though, she pulls out her phone and pulls up her conversation with him, intending to text him. Before she can, though, her phone is whisked straight from her hand.

“No devices in my classroom, dear,” the sub says sternly.

“I need that,” Clarke says without thinking.

“Not in class, you don’t,” the sub replies. “You may get it back at the end of the day, from the office.”

Clarke slumps in her seat for the rest of the class, mind elsewhere.

At the end of the day, she practically runs to the office for her phone and after a gentle chastising from the secretary, it’s handed back to her. She texts Bellamy right there, a simple Everything ok?

She stands there waiting for a response for God knows how long, and she’s only moved when the secretary says awkwardly, “Um, honey, there’s someone behind you in line.”

Clarke jerks into movement and goes home. Every time her phone buzzes, she dives for it. But it’s never Bellamy.

Maybe his phone is dead.

Maybe he’s dead.

The second thought comes to her mind that night, while she’s staring up at the ceiling, and she presses her face against her pillow in an effort not to cry. She knows she’s overreacting, being irrational. He has his own life, too. He doesn’t need to tell her everything he has going on.

The next day, she searches for Bellamy’s car in the lot. Her heart plummets when she realizes it’s not there. Peeking into his classroom, she sees a substitute teacher, different from yesterday. When she asks him, he doesn’t seem to have a clue what’s going on either.

With increasing desperation, she exits the classroom and spots Ms. Altavilla walking down the hall in her black heels.

“Ms. Altavilla!” she yells, causing several heads, including the teacher’s, to turn curiously. Clarke doesn’t care, just picks up the pace to catch up with the art teacher.

“What can I do for you, Clo?” Ms. Altavilla says with a smile.

“Where’s Mr. Blake?” Clarke asks, and watches the teacher’s smile slide right off her face. “You know, don’t you?” she presses wildly, taking a step further.

Ms. Altavilla looks a little uneasy. “Well, I’m not sure that’s a matter to be discussed with the students. Confidentiality and all.”

Clarke struggles for coherency with her next words. “They’d tell us if he died, wouldn’t they?”

“What?” Ms. Altavilla says, now looking shocked. “Of course he hasn’t died, heaven forbid. Clo, who put that thought in your head?”

Instead of answering Clarke bursts into tears out of relief, right there in the hallway. The first warning bell has already rung, so there aren’t many people around; those that are, look her way curiously. But she couldn’t care less. He’s alive. As long as he’s alive, everything will be okay.

Meanwhile, Ms. Altavilla puts a hand on her shoulder, bewildered. “Clo, dear, what’s wrong? Are you alright?”

Clarke shudders in her attempts to rein in sobs, straightening her shoulders and wiping her eyes. “I— I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She closes her eyes and takes a few deep breaths, calming herself.

Ms. Altavilla is silent for a moment before saying, “I have to get to my class, but I can assure you that Mr. Blake is in good health, Clo. He might not be here for the next little while, though.” She pauses. “I strongly advise you not to get so attached to your teachers. It’s trouble all around.” And then she leaves Clarke alone, staring down the hallway as a different, new kind of pit settles in her pit.

What is that supposed to mean?

There’s only one horrible conclusion Clarke can really think of in that moment, and that’s… they’ve been found out.

Stunned, she sinks into a sitting position against the row of lockers, barely hearing the bell that announces her tardiness to class. Her mind is working very fast. Is this why Bellamy’s gone so suddenly and isn’t answering her messages? He’s in disciplinary hearings? Did someone see them kiss?

Did someone see them stand a little too close at prom?

Did someone see them leave together?

Did someone simply see how much time they spent together all the time?

There’s a myriad of ways their true relationship could have been witnessed. They haven’t been careful at all. The realization has her frozen in horror, staring blankly ahead.

But no, she thinks firmly to herself. If they found out about her and Bellamy, surely they’d drag her into it as well? Surely they’d question her about it?

Surely.

It’s only been two days since he’s been gone, an ugly voice in her whispers. Maybe they haven’t gotten to that stage in the proceedings yet.

Clarke sits there until the bell rings again, and then, when people begin filtering into the hall, she picks herself up again and goes to the washroom instead to sit in a stall until she’s collected herself enough to leave the school.

Her phone’s blowing up with messages from friends, but again not a single one from Bellamy. She gets her mom to pick her up from school, citing hormones as the reason for her distress, and she curls up in bed while her mom calls the school to excuse her absence.

“Honey?” her mom asks at the door later in quiet voice. “Is everything okay?”

No. “Yes.” After a moment, when Clarke says nothing more, her mom leaves. Clarke closes her eyes. If she gets Bellamy fired, or thrown in jail, she’ll never forgive herself. She stares at her phone, willing it to light up with his name, but it never does. Eventually, she falls asleep.

—

Bellamy isn’t there the next day, or the day after either. Clarke finally snaps at one point and takes her mom’s car to Rick’s house. But the lights are all out, and when she knocks, no one answers, so she just goes home.

She’s a zombie going through her classes. No one seems to know what’s going on with him, although there are plenty of theories.

She’s stirring her soup-in-a-cup listlessly Friday at lunch when her friends veer onto the topic of Mr. Blake.

“I heard he was caught selling drugs, dude.”

“I heard he finally fucking snapped and left town.”

“That’s stupid, why would he snap?”

“Why not? He has to see your name on the attendance sheet every damn day—”

Clarke stands up and all her friends look up. “I’m going to the washroom,” she lies. Without waiting for a response, she turns on the heel.

Queenie catches up. “What’s up, Clo?”

“I told you, I just don’t feel well—”

“That’s bullshit,” Queenie exclaims, grabbing her arm and forcing her to stop. “You’ve been like this all week. Is it because of Mr. Blake?”

Clarke can’t help herself from glancing away. Queenie releases her arm, taking a step back.

“Shit. It is, isn’t it?”

Clarke resumes walking. “Go away, Queenie. I want to be alone.”

“Shit,” Queenie repeats, catching up with her again. “You’re into him. And not just as a crush.”

Clarke’s throat feels tight, and all she wants is to get away. Everyone’s faces are just a blur as she makes her way around the lunch crowd, Queenie in tow.

“Oh my god, was he into you? I always kind of thought he was, you know,” Queenie marvels at the thought, and then apparently a new one. “Oh my god, were you guys— is that why he’s not he—”

Clarke snaps. She wheels around and screams, “Can you shut the fuck up, Queenie!”

Conversations pause all around them. Queenie’s eyes go round with shock and hurt. Clarke regrets her words instantly, but before she can apologize the other girl has backed up and walked back down the hallway.

Clarke numbly turns and keeps walking, dumping her cup of soup in the nearest trash can. She can’t be worried about her friendship with Queenie; she’ll apologize later. Right now she’s barely keeping herself together.

She’s headed for the bathroom when in her peripheral vision, she sees Bellamy’s classroom door is open. That gives her pause; she’d seen the substitute head off to the lunchroom earlier, and there’s still twenty minutes left of lunch.

Changing her path, she stops in front of the doorway and there, slumped at his desk and looking absolutely exhausted, is Bellamy.

She thinks she makes some sort of sound, because he looks up from where he was staring blankly at his thin computer screen. His haggard expression transforms once he sees her, and he rises from his seat.

Clarke kicks the door shut with her foot, sealing them in alone, and launches herself at him.

She’s intending to tackle him in a hug, but her footsteps halt before she can get there. She hovers awkwardly in front of him. He looks confused too, hands outstretched and ready to receive her hug, but he lowers them.

“Clarke,” he says lowly, “I’m so sorry I didn’t get your messages, my phone ran out of battery and I just saw —”

“At first I thought you were dead,” Clarke chokes out, shutting him up.

His eyes widen.

“Then I thought the school found out— found out about us. I thought I’d ruined your life.” Her voice cracks.

He’s shaking his head halfway through her sentence. “Clarke, you could never ruin my life. You’ve only improved it.”

Clarke bursts into tears for the second time that week.

He immediately tries to envelop her in his arms, making soothing noises, but she pushes him away, stepping back.

“Get off me,” she sobs into her hands. “I’ll get you in trouble.”

“Clarke,” he whispers helplessly. “I’m fine, everything’s fine. I’m sorry for not telling you.”

Clarke can’t seem to stop crying; she’s shaking with all the emotion she’s been repressing all week and the relief that threatens to overwhelm her now.

He again tries to touch her, just to pry her hands off her face. Once she can see his soft expression, his lovely brown eyes gentle for her, his skin a little pale from exhaustion, her mind changes, and all she can do right then is step right into his arms and hug him.

“I was so worried,” she hiccups, muffled into his chest. “I couldn’t think about anything except what might have happened to you.” He’s silent, stroking her hair. She lifts her head. “What did happen to you?”

“My brother got shot in Langley because of a court case. It was touch and go for a while. When I heard, I dropped everything, including my phone charger.” He smiles self-deprecatingly at the end of that sentence, but all she hears is the first part.

“Rick? Is he okay?” she asks urgently.

“He will be, now,” he replies softly.

She runs her hands down his chest. “Are you okay?”

He fixes his tired eyes on her. “Once I get a cup of coffee, yeah.”

She wipes her tears away with the back of her hand, starting to feel herself calm down. “You shouldn’t have even come today. You should have gone home and slept.”

His lips twitch up again at her tone. He tucks a piece of her hair behind her ear. “I’m fine.” His eyes flicker to the closed door, and Clarke realizes she’s been hugging him too long. Someone could walk in at any moment. So she backs up a bit, and he falls into his chair with a sigh.

“So many damn emails,” he mutters at his screen. She watches him tug at his tie and feels incredible fondness rise in her chest.

She leans against the front of his desk. “I love you,” she’s about to say, but then the PA system crackles on.

“Code black.”

Conversations in the hallway pause.

The voice sounds again, grave. “I repeat, code black. This is not a drill. Report to your next period classrooms.”

“Code black?” Clarke asks in a hushed voice.

“Bomb threat,” Bellamy says slowly, and then he’s in action, striding over to the door and wrenching it open, barking at students in the hallway to get inside.

Clarke stays where she is. If there’s a bomb, she’s not going anywhere away from his side. He doesn’t try to make her, either.

The phone on the wall rings once the classroom is filled with students. Bellamy goes to pick it up. Clarke watches as he listens to the voice on the other end, and his expression turn to ice.

“What’s wrong?” A student asks, voice quavering.

Bellamy doesn’t answer right away. Doesn’t even blink. He’s staring at the phone, and she realizes after a moment he’s staring in horror.

“Mr. Blake?” Another student says. His voice is high-pitched. Bellamy’s lack of response is scaring them all. “What’s going on? Is the threat gone?”

Bellamy’s expression changes. She watches his gaze flicker from the window, the clear skies, back to the class. He looks like he’s debating even telling them. “I don’t know,” he lies. “They’ll call us back.”

Why does he lie? She wonders.

The rest of the class seems reassured by this, and they go back to quietly murmuring amongst themselves. Clarke marches right up to Bellamy and grabs his arm.

“Why didn’t you tell them the truth?” she hisses. “What’s going on?”

He looks at her, straight-on. She barely hears his response, so quiet as it is murmured only to her. “Because there’s nothing we can do. There’s a nuclear bomb heading for Vancouver. Less than a minute to detonation.”

There’s no way to respond to that sentence, really. She releases his arm, stunned.

“You’re joking.”

He looks grim. “I wish I was.”

Now she understands why he lied. There is nothing that can be done to satisfaction in one minute. “Why?” Clarke manages to croak. “Is this war?”

“This is the end,” Bellamy finally says, voice grave, and cradles her cheek. “The reason doesn’t matter.”

The fact that he’s touching her in front of two dozen students solidifies the fact in her mind.

“We have to get out of here,” Clarke whispers, numb. “We have to— get our family—”

“It’s landing in half a minute,” he interrupts her, and kisses her hard and fast. If anyone sees or says anything, she doesn’t hear a damn thing. When he pulls away, they both only have eyes for each other. He says, “I’ll see you soon.”

She wants to cry again, but she just holds on, clutching his wrists. “Make it easy on both of us and just kiss me as soon as you see me in the next life.”

He laughs a little, pressing his forehead against hers. “Maybe you should. It didn’t work out so well the first time I tried.”

“Try harder,” she retorts.

He closes his eyes. “For some reason I thought you’d—”

The bomb hits.

It shakes the earth, and for the one second before the blast wave reaches them, they’re simply startled apart.

And the next moment, everything falls to pieces around them, and Clarke burns.

All she knows is the feeling of fire under her skin. She has no body; all she has is pain. There is nothing else left to feel. It’s agony. She wants to die. She’s going to die anyway, but this— this is torture.

And then a hand— or some semblance of it, anyway, closes around her wrist. In that moment she doesn’t know anyone or anything; she just knows it’s a person who could grant her relief. She tries to force her mouth open, to beg for mercy. She can’t get the words out.

But whoever is there, lying in the rubble with her, seems to understand. The next moment, a sharp pinprick of pain erupts through her neck, only to quiet everything.

The waves of agony start to ebb in the next moment. She wishes she could thank whoever did it. But all she can do in that moment is die.

So she does.

—

Bellamy lies in the rubble, body halfway over hers. There’s a shard of glass impaled through his arm from the window, and it’s stained with both his blood and Clarke’s.

He hardly has capacity to feel anything except pain. He doesn’t have the strength to push the shard into his own neck, so instead he simply lies there dying; his one solace is that the woman he just killed out of mercy is going to be waiting for him somewhere.

A few minutes later, he follows her there.

I will love you forever; whatever happens. Until I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, until I find you again. —Phillip Pullman

— 2149: EARTH —

“Stop!”

Her voice rings out, and he turns to look.

The girl who spoke has pale skin, with wisps of blonde hair falling out of her braid, and a stern expression on her face. He knows who she is.

“The air could be toxic,” she says.

He scoffs. “If the air’s toxic we’re all dead anyway.”

Then his sister comes out of nowhere, and he’s distracted for a moment in their reunion. When Octavia leans in to hug him, he looks over her shoulder to see the blonde girl still watching him. There’s something about her, he thinks, momentarily puzzled. He’s got the strangest feeling like there’s something he’s forgetting to do right about now.

“Where’s your wristband?” the girl barks, and the thought vanishes from his head to be replaced with annoyance. She’s too observant.

In this lifetime, his name is Bellamy once more. And hers is Clarke. Perhaps it’s a fitting cosmic joke, one neither of them will be aware of for a very long time. Right here, right now, it doesn’t matter anyway.

Bellamy pulls the lever, welcoming them back to Earth.

—

The first time Bellamy really sees Clarke is with Atom in the woods.

“Kill me,” Atom manages to choke out, but Bellamy can’t. He’s frozen, unable to put the boy out of his misery, when Clarke kneels across from him and gently takes the blade from his hand.

“It’s okay,” she says gently to Atom, a kind expression on her face like somehow she understands his suffering. Bellamy can’t do anything but watch, mesmerized, while she hums and smiles and looks like an angel on earth while she takes Atom’s life away.

And it’s the first time he realizes there’s a lot about the princess he really doesn’t know.

—

This life is a lot like their first one; they’re leaders, and tend to disagree and fight each other at first. But once they decide to work together, they’re in it. All the way.

Bellamy would be lying if he said he’d never thought about her in ways that weren’t strictly platonic. She’s beautiful, after all, although he tries hard not to admire her too obviously. She’s so pretty, but the moments when she really takes his breath away are when she looks at him in that soft way she does; like she somehow believes he deserves it. Really, it’s hard for him not to fall for someone who, despite everything he’s done, still believes he can find redemption.

He does the same for her, of course. “It had to be done,” he tells her softly over the fire, the words he knew she needed to hear but she was too guilty to ask for.

He sees the way a weight seems to come off her shoulders upon that, and he’s relieved that he can grant her the same understanding she has always given him.

—

After Finn dies— Clarke’s second mercy killing— they head to TonDC for war talks with Lexa and her army. At some point in their travels he and Clarke find themselves in a healer’s hut of a Grounder village. Clarke is helping the healer treat a Grounder’s wound. Bellamy is there simply to look after Clarke.

“You don’t have to come with me,” Clarke had said to him earlier. But he’d seen the exhaustion in her eyes, the dejectedness weighing her shoulders down. Somebody’s got to take care of her, the way she takes care of everyone else. The way she takes care of him.

“It’s not negotiable,” he had merely retorted at the time, so now he leans against the wall of the hut and watches Clarke, bent over her patient as she stitches their wound up. She pauses for a moment to sigh and close her eyes.

“You okay?” he asks from his side of the hut.

She rubs her eyes without looking at him. “I’m just tired.”

His hands itch to touch her. But after what’s happened, he doubts he would really be able to comfort her. So he keeps his distance.

“You didn’t have to offer to help patch him up, you know.”

“Yes, I did.” She leans over the table. Her back is tense. “We have to keep the peace. Helping them is part of the deal if we want to get our people out of Mount Weather.” She sounds a little snappish at the end there, so he leaves the conversation at that.

A door in the room flies open, and Bellamy immediately tries to move between the entrance and Clarke.

But it’s no attack— it’s an old Grounder woman, hunched over and wearing a bandana over her hair. She peers at Clarke and Bellamy with beady eyes.

She shuffles inside, not taking her eyes off them. They do the same. She picks up a cloth from the wash basin and hisses at them, “Wanheda.”

Bellamy blinks, unsure of what it means. She’s looking between the two of them, and again addresses them, “Wanheda.”

Clarke speaks. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand—”

The healer walks in through the same door carrying supplies Clarke had asked her to fetch, and upon spotting the old woman she makes a tsking sound. “Edna, what are you doing here?”

Edna is already backing away from Clarke and Bellamy, towards the door. “I sensed them. I had to see for myself.”

The healer and Edna exchange a few words in Trigedasleng, and then the older woman is gone.

“Who was that?” Clarke asks.

“She’s one of our village elders,” the healer replies. “Her wisdom is precious to us.” She pauses. “She saw something in you two, although I couldn’t understand what exactly. Some things are beyond me.” She turns back to their patient briskly. “Should we get back to work?”

Clarke nods, looking thoughtful, and Bellamy goes back to his place leaning against the wall like it never happened.

He thinks about it for a long time after, though.

—

He doesn’t even hear that word again until months later, when an Ice Nation soldier says the word “Wanheda.”

And later, Indra tells them in the Rover that it means the Commander of Death.

He hasn’t told anyone about the first time he heard the word, but he’s suddenly wondering why that old woman was calling Clarke Wanheda before the Mount Weather massacre had even happened.

And even more curiously, why he had been included in that title, too.

—

He eventually patches things up with Clarke. Her leaving had bit at him more than he would’ve thought. He wishes she’d never left in the first place. Sometimes he thinks they’d be a little happier today if she didn’t.

He can’t ever forget the mistakes he’s made. When they’re in the middle of the next crisis, he keeps it together because he has to. But in those moments between crises, when he has time to breathe, he loathes it, wishes he didn’t even have it. Because then he starts thinking.

A night in Arkadia shortly after the defeat of ALIE, he’s sitting on his bed after another exhausting day of planning. For some reason or another, he’s pulled out the copy of The Iliad Gina had given him and he’s simply staring at it when there’s a knock on his door.

“It’s me,” Clarke’s voice filters through. He debates not answering, but she knocks again, persistent, so he rises and opens it.

She takes in his expression and steps right into his space. He takes a step backward.

“You okay?” she asks him, sincere, and then her eyes fall on the book he’s left on his bed. “Light reading before bed, huh?” Her tone is light and teasing.

When he doesn’t smile back, her expression fades back into concern. “Bellamy, are you okay?” she repeats.

“What do you need?” he simply replies, weary as he falls back to sit on his bed.

“Nothing,” Clarke admits after a pause. “I just wanted to…” she flounders, face flushing a bit, “I guess I’ll just leave if you’re busy, then. See you in the morning.”

He snags her wrist before she can take two steps. “You can stay.”

She pauses.

“Stay,” he repeats. I want you to stay.

He can’t say it that way, though. The words get stuck in his throat, but she hears them anyway, sinking beside him on the bed and picking up The Iliad.

She runs her thumb over the title. “This is from Mount Weather.” There’s a question in her voice, a bitter one.

“Gina gave it to me,” he tells her.

Her hand pauses. “I heard about her. You and her were…?”

“Yeah,” he replies, gruff.

There’s a strange silence that hangs between them for a second.

It passes when Clarke squeezes his hand. He blinks tears away, and he can’t help but tell her, “I killed her, Clarke. It was my fault.”

“No it wasn’t,” Clarke says instantly. “You did what you thought was right. Everyone else made their decisions too. It’s not all on you. Their deaths… their deaths aren’t always on you, you know.”

Bellamy knows she’s not just talking about him. He flips his hand over so he can squeeze hers back. “Or on you,” he reminds her quietly.

She looks up, eyes shiny, and nods, turning her head against his shoulder. He wraps an arm around her. He didn’t know Lexa, doesn’t even really understand what she and Clarke had, but he knows the pain that Clarke is feeling, and he wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

And they sit there in comfortable silence for a long while, just leaning into each other, unable to escape their own darkness, but at least able to help the other see the light.

She sighs into his shoulder, and then out of nowhere she asks, “You know how big hurricanes have an eye in the middle of them?”

He glances down at her, a little puzzled. The topic seems a little random, unless maybe she’s thinking about the storms that desolated Polis. “Yeah, why?”

“I was thinking about them,” she says, and frowns. “I’m not sure why. It just came to me. But in the worst tropical cyclones there’s an eye. In the middle of all the darkness and chaos, there’s a little centre where everything is calm and light.”

He’s about to ask where she’s going with this when Clarke lifts her head off his shoulder to fix her gaze on his. “That’s what you are to me, Bellamy.”

He blinks.

She touches his face with her fingers. She touches his soul with her eyes. “You’re my eye in the storm.”

—

They’ve known each other a long time when they kiss.

Maybe deep down, he always knew it would end— or rather, begin— like this. Her lips on his, her eyelashes fluttering against his cheek, her sigh swallowed up by his mouth. He just always thought it’d be a moment of weakness for them. Instead it feels like a union of their strength.

Then something happens, as it always does, and they’re torn apart to shoulder their responsibility together.

It’s later, when he’s alone, that he remembers. The memories come to him slowly at first, and then all at once.

He sets out to find her immediately. She bumps into him, eyes wide. “Bellamy—”

“Clarke—”

She kisses him, messy and desperate. He returns the favour ten-fold, and when his lungs burn, when he feels light-headed from lack of air, only then does he pull himself away.

“We’re here,” Clarke marvels, her hand running through his hair, down his face, his throat, to his chest, like she can’t believe he is. “We’re alive again.”

They hardly pause. She backs them back into his room, releases him and turns around to shut the door.

And when she does that, Bellamy is suddenly struck with how much he wants her.

He’s wanted her in this life before he remembered their previous lives, of course. He’s loved her so long and so deeply in this life that sometimes he could hardly breathe. But now, knowing that she has always loved him back just as fiercely, he doesn’t hesitate anymore. He can’t even wait as long as it takes for her to turn back around. As soon as she turns the lock, he’s got her pressed up against the door, kissing her neck, and she melts against it.

“I’ve wanted you so long,” he growls against her neck, grinding against her. “Do you w—”

“After what you put me through in the last life, I want to fuck you so hard you forget your name,” she hisses.

Damn. He struggles for control, pushing her hair aside and biting her ear. “I’ll make it up to you.” She shudders, and he feels it up the line of her body. She tries to push at him, to turn around, and he gives her just enough space to do so. She seeks his mouth again, and while they’re kissing he reaches to unbutton the front of her pants. Clarke doesn’t waste a second, grabbing his hand and guiding it under the material of her pants, slipping under the material of her panties so he’s cupping her with his large hand.

“Yeah, you better,” she pants.

He rubs his thumb over her slowly, almost apologetic, but mostly teasing. “Just tell me how you want it.”

Her breath hitches at how he pushes his finger in just a little. “I want your mouth on me.” Her order is a touch high-pitched. Bellamy likes her just like this, to be able to watch her head tip back, lips parting at the sensations, but now she’s put that thought in his head, and he has the overwhelming urge to taste her.

He swallows past his dry throat at just the thought. “You got it,” he manages, leaning in for a brief but dirty kiss that tugs at something low in his gut, makes her fingers dig into his scalp.

She backs towards his bed, and he follows, helping her tug her pants down her legs, and then she’s on the mattress, thighs spread wide just for him. He clambers on with her, bracing his hands on her knees and leaning over her just a moment to absorb the gleam of excitement in her eyes. And then he gets to work.

He may not be able to see her expression while he works her up, but she urges him on with her noises, by rocking her stance wider, grinding down on his mouth and fingers. Her sounds slip up into a higher octave in time with twists of his wrist. He’s just enjoying how loud she can be when they go a little muffled, and he looks up to see she stuffs her knuckles in her mouth.

He pauses to bring his free hand from her breast up to her wrist, prying her hand out from between her lips.

“None of that,” he tells her, voice rough from lust. “I want to hear you.”

“You want everyone else to hear me too?” she laughs, the sound a little unhinged from how close she is.

“Do I want them to hear just how good I can give it to you?” He strategically crooks his knuckles, and she keens, body shuddering against him, fluttering against his fingers. “Kind of.”

She slumps against him for just a moment while he kisses up her mostly still-clothed body back up to her mouth, but she’s not down for long. A minute or two into making out, her kisses lose their lazy feeling and regain their sense of purpose. She lets go of him to scoot up the bed and as he watches, she pulls her threadbare shirt and bra over her head in one fell swoop to say in her throaty voice, “Now I want them to hear how good I can give it to you.”

He sucks in a breath as he drinks her naked body in for the first time since Berlin. She’s got more scars, maybe a little more toned from the ground, but she’s the same Clarke as always, really. Beautiful and his.

She lets him look his fill but inevitably gets impatient. She pulls at his shirt. “Clothes, off.”

“Romantic as always,” he replies wryly, crawling over her.

She licks a straight line up his chest once she’s got his shirt off. “You like it like this.” He groans, and once he’s naked too, she wraps her legs around him and tugs him down.

Once he’s inside her, he finds it hard to breathe at the feeling of her tight and warm around him before he gets his bearings. And even though she drives him crazy with lust with the way she tosses her head back with her eyes half-lidded, fonder feelings rise to the surface too. This girl is inside his heart just as much as he’s inside her body. “Yeah,” he agrees gently. “I like you just like this.”

—

“Bellamy,” she says afterwards in a soft voice.

“Mhmm.” His eyes are closed. She’s lying on top of him and playing with his hair, the way she used to, the way that calms them both when they’re anxious.

“If one of us dies,” she whispers, “Can we agree that the other should keep going?”

Reluctantly, he opens his eyes. She looks incredibly vulnerable right then. “Why are you asking me this, Clarke?”

She looks down, tracing a finger down the line of his arm. “Because our people need us,” she whispers. Swallows. “And I love them, just as much as I love you.”

He draws her closer, and she leans her head against the junction between his neck and shoulder. “I think that what you’re asking was always the plan,” he whispers back. “We don’t abandon our people.”

That’s who they’ve always been, since the time they were king and queen of a now forgotten land. At their core, they have not changed.

And they don’t tell anyone about what they’ve found about themselves. In some ways, it just doesn’t matter. There’s no noticeable change in who they are. They were Bellamy and Clarke before, and they are Bellamy and Clarke after.

For the first time since their original lifetime, they’ve had the opportunity to fall in love with each other slowly, naturally, so their dynamic doesn’t really change when they remember. Some things are different, of course. They share inside jokes nobody else understands. Like one day when they separate for a mission and he bops his nose against her and whispers, “Don’t die,” and she half-smiles and replies, “I won’t if you don’t.”

Or the time he finds himself idly whittling away a piece of wood with a dagger, and she catches him and they share a look.

“That one looks better than the one you gave Roman,” she whispers to him, and a smile tugs at the corners of his mouth.

“I’ve had a thousand years to practice.”

It’s not always fun to reminisce.

Like when someone not paying attention almost hits Bellamy with the Rover backing up, and Clarke can’t stop shaking for hours afterward, even after he peppers her entire body with kisses, he can see she’s far away in Berlin.

There’s the time they’re meeting with a Grounder clan for trade talks and he sees what looks like a gigantic wooden cross on the ground, perhaps a leftover relic from Polis, and his gut twists.

Clarke sees it too, but her face is turned away so she doesn’t see his visceral reaction. “I still can’t believe you married Jane after she got me killed.” It’s teasing, not accusing at all, but he takes it as one because this is a sore topic. There were a lot of factors that led to him going along with their pre-set wedding.

“You fell in love with Lexa after she forced you to kill Finn,” he points out instead. “Not to mention abandoned us to die at the Mountain.”

She’s silent and turns around. “It was more complicated than you’re making it sound.” He gives her a look and she blinks as if just realizing what she said. And then smiles ruefully. “Touche.”

He shrugs. He and Clarke know better than anyone that matters of the heart are never simple or logical. They just are. The only thing about his heart that seems even remotely predictable is the fact that it keeps falling for Clarke, over and over again.

—

It’s peacetime when they run into that old Grounder woman Edna again, the one that had called them the Commanders of Death.

They’re part of the delegation attending at another trade talk, standing at the gates and waiting for the clan leader. The clan is situated on a cliff side, overlooking a beautiful mountain view. Bellamy catches a glimpse of the woman walking between huts and he catches Clarke’s sleeve. When she looks up at him, questioning, he jerks his head in the direction, and her eyes follow.

“It’s her,” she marvels. She looks at Bellamy excitedly. “She knows about us, Bellamy.”

He doesn’t disagree. She must have known, somehow.

“She’s a witch or something,” Clarke breathes. “We should go talk to her.”

He’s already regretting bringing it up. “Why?”

She’s silent. But her eyes are far away.

“Clarke,” he says, a little sternly, “don’t tell me you’re thinking about asking her for a wish again.”

“I’m not,” she says quickly. She chews her lip. “But… I do want answers.”

He waits.

“How long is this going to go for us?” she asks him lowly. “Is there any rhyme or reason to how long this—“ she gestures between them—“lasts?”

“Maybe it’s better not to find out,” he tells her. The two of them haven’t talked a lot about it; there’s an inevitability to the situation they are in that Bellamy prefers not to think about.

“Hmm.”

The clan leader comes out, effectively shutting down the conversation but Bellamy persists for one last point. “Clarke, we’re talking about this later.”

“Fine.”

—

They don’t talk much with their words that evening. Instead, in the hut they’ve been given for the night Clarke fucks him like it’s her mission, and he fucks her right back. It feels a little like an argument, one that they end by collapsing against the mattress together in exhaustion.

“Tiring me out isn’t going to make it easier to get me to agree with you,” he pants.

Her chest rises and falls rapidly as she stares up at the ceiling. “Bellamy, why is it so hard to understand that maybe I just really felt like having sex?”

“You’re marathoning tonight,” he replies. “Which means you have an agenda. So let’s have that talk now. We both know this tactic just ends up backfiring on you anyway.”

He knows he’s right when she yawns. “Bellamy, I have to know.”

“I told you to drop it.”

“And I told you I wanted answers. Real ones. I’m so tired of not knowing, Bellamy. I can’t drop it. Not when she’s right there.” She turns to face him, eyes pleading. “Please. Just this once, and if she doesn’t know anything I will drop it after that.”

He sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Fine. In the morning.” It’s hard not to relent when she’s looking at him like that.

She smiles and leans forward to kiss him again. It’s forceful, hungry still.

Still not quite recovered from their last bout, he leans away from her to laugh, “You got what you wanted, you know. You can stop.”

Clarke clambers on top of him, eyes glinting. Her stamina is truly formidable. “I definitely didn’t get all I wanted.” She grinds on him to make her point, and he grabs her hips reflexively, drops his head into the pillows and groans.

“You’re going to put me in an early grave.”

“And I’ll be waiting on the other side,” she says, voice sugary.

Needless to say, it’s a long night.

—

When morning comes, they’re both yawning.

“Do you want to go ask her now?” Bellamy asks. “We’re leaving right after the agreement is signed. Might not get time after this.”

She chews her lip as she ties her hair back. “Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

He blinks and pauses in tying up his boots, taken aback at the question. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I was thinking about it last night, afterwards. I never asked you what you wanted.”

Bellamy stares at her.

“Bellamy, if you don’t want to try to get answers— if you’d rather not know— I’m fine with that.” She comes up to him where he’s still sitting on the bed and places her hands on his shoulders. “For once, let’s do what you want.”

Touched, he wraps his hands around the back of her thighs, drawing her in close so he can lean his head against her stomach. “Clarke, it’s not like that. I want what you want.”

“Well, I want what you want.” She cradles his head closer, leans into him.

His lips twitch at the chicken or the egg scenario they’ve suddenly found themselves in. “That’s... unfortunate.”

“If it were up to you,” she persists, “and if I wasn’t around to ask, would you go to her?”

He thinks about that, and then shakes his head. “I don’t think so,” he says truthfully.

Her reply is instant. “Then it’s done.”

“Clarke,” he starts, “if you want answers—”

She climbs on his lap as he talks and shuts him up with a kiss. “Don’t,” she cuts him off when they part. “She probably doesn’t even have answers, anyway. I don’t think anyone does, except that djinn.”

She sounds a little sad at the thought. He runs a hand down her spine soothingly. “Maybe it’s like you said,” he replies, “About the meaning of life. That we just have to make up our own.”

She smiles at the memory and fixes her gaze back on him. “In that case, maybe we’ve already found it.”

—

They don’t go to find Edna, but Edna finds them before the morning is over.

She runs into them, looking the same as she did years ago, although with a red bandana covering her hair instead of blue. She’s holding a pail of water in her hands, and she looks between them. “I wondered if I would see you again, Wanhedas.”

Clarke says nothing, but Bellamy knows she’s itching to ask, so he does it for her.

“You’re a witch,” he says quietly, so none of the others can hear.

She doesn’t bat an eye. “Is that what you call it? I am a descendant, that’s all. I don’t have the power of my ancestors. I simply see things.” She pauses. “And I see you’ve been awakened.”

Bellamy looks at Clarke. Despite their earlier conversation, he doesn’t want her to wonder for the rest of her life. “Yes. And if you could, we’d like some answers.” Clarke turns to him, eyes wide.

“About what?” the woman says. “You’re not Wanhedas anymore.” Clarke’s mouth drops open and Bellamy blinks, giving the woman ample opportunity to shoulder past them into her hut.

Predictably, Clarke instantly recovers and follows. “Wait.” Bellamy is two steps behind her.

The woman doesn’t pause in her strides.

“What do you mean?” Clarke persists.

The woman turns to fix her gaze on something around them that they can’t see. “I mean that the spell is broken.”

Silence.

“Broken?” Bellamy croaks. “You mean—“

“I mean you’ll die, yes,” the woman replies. “For good this time.”

He’s stunned. Naturally, Clarke is the one to take it in stride.

“Why?” Clarke asks. “Who broke the spell?”

“You did, of course.” When neither of them seem to understand, she makes an impatient sound. “Who else could?”

“How?” Bellamy manages.

“You married each other,” the woman replies as if it’s obvious.

Bellamy glances at Clarke. She looks equally confused. The only time they ever got married was in their first life. “What? We never even had a ceremony—“

“Marriage isn’t a ceremony, girl,” the old woman scoffs, settling into her chair. “It’s a state of mind. When your lives, your journeys, and your souls are aligned, that is what marriage truly is.” When she’s again met with silence, she adds, “Just think about it. I’m guessing that whoever cast this spell told you exactly how to break it, if you were just paying attention.”

Clarke’s outraged for a moment at the condescending tone of voice. “No, they didn’t! The djinn just said…” her voice trails, and Bellamy remembers what Clarke has told him about that conversation over a thousand years ago.

“She said she wanted to see us in love again,” Clarke recalls softly. “For us to have another chance at a life together…”

And there it is, Bellamy thinks. In all their lives, they’ve never—they’ve never truly had a chance. Something has always stopped them. Be it physical separation, or emotional, or temporal.

While Clarke stares off into space, Bellamy has to brace himself against the wall. He suddenly feels very faint.

“Looks to me like you weren’t paying too much attention back then,” the old woman says with an air of satisfaction. “I’ve given you answers. Now get out of my hut.”

Neither of them move, too shocked. The woman sighs, and in true Grounder fashion pulls out a blade.

“Do I have to repeat myself? Get out of my hut.”

—

They don’t have much time for talking after that. The day starts, which means they’re needed. So they’re split apart for a few hours, and don’t have an opportunity to talk until a while later when their group leaves the Grounder village.

It’s mid-afternoon when they stop for a break, still cliff-side. There’s a large tree near the edge of the cliff, and needing a little space at the moment, Bellamy climbs it to the topmost branch that he can safely sit on. He’s still thinking about what the old woman had said.

From here, he can see the whole valley spread out before him, everywhere that the sun hits. He can see his people below the tree, laughing and joking with each other, the remnants of the original hundred as well as new people they’ve found along the way.

“What are you doing up there?” Clarke asks, and he looks down to see her staring up at him from the base of the trunk.

“Brooding,” Raven answers for him.

Clarke’s mouth twitches before she announces to him, “I’m coming up.”

“Don’t,” he says immediately. “It’s too dangerous. I’ll come down.” As soon as the words leave his mouth, he realizes she will take it as a dare.

Sure enough, her eyes narrow and she climbs the tree, using the same handholds he had. He’s on edge the entire time, until she’s finally situated near the top, on a branch on the other side of the trunk.

She spits hair out of her mouth, panting slightly. “That wasn’t so hard.”

He represses his smile and turns his gaze back to the horizon. She mirrors him, leaning against the trunk and sighing.

“So I guess this is it, huh.”

He nods thoughtfully.

“I’m not sure how to feel,” she admits to him quietly, leaning closer so that the others won’t hear. “I mean, what if we die tomorrow?”

It’s a real possibility, but somehow it doesn’t bother him. “Then we do the same thing we would’ve done if we didn’t remember— live the hell out of today.”

She’s quiet at that. Then: “Remember in Vancouver, how my neighbours had their white picket fence? Nice rose bushes? Perfect life?”

“How could I forget,” he says dryly. He’d been almost awed, looking at all the luxury.

“I thought a lot about us having that life,” she says quietly. “No death, no hard decisions, no pain. Just us living in a nice house, with a nice lawn, going to our jobs every day and coming home to each other.”

He thinks about that, tilting his head, and then looks at her to crack a grin. “Sounds kind of boring.”

A smile spreads over her face and she giggles into her hand. His grin grows wider watching her.

“Yeah, I guess it kind of does,” she laughs, and then grows thoughtful. “I think… I think I like it this way.” She sounds cautious, as if not sure he would agree.

But of course he does, infinitely glad they’re on the same page about this. “It feels right. This is the lifetime where I feel the most like…”

“Yourself?” she supplies quietly. He exhales and nods.

Their first life together wasn’t easy, either. They were leaders, had to make hard decisions. In some ways, it’s fitting that this lifetime, so symmetrical to the first, will be their last. It feels right.

“I wonder what life will be like after we die,” she says suddenly. “We won’t know what happens in the future anymore.”

He shrugs, unbothered. “That doesn’t mean we can’t still have an effect on it.” She tilts her head at him, and he elaborates. “I never asked to live forever, Clarke. But what we do now can make the future a little better for whoever comes after. That’s the only kind of immortality I want.”

“Legacy.” Clarke hums in contentment. “I like that.” And then she leans around the tree trunk. He takes the cue to meet her halfway and their lips meet in the middle, sun shining on their faces, valleys of Earth laid out before them, and catcalls from their delinquents below.

Miller yells up at them in sing-song, “Bellamy and Clarke, sittin’ in a tree—”

Bellamy breaks from the kiss just to snap a twig off the branch he’s sitting on and throw it with unerring accuracy at Miller, while Raven stands nearby hooting with laughter.

Far from irritated, though, he only feels fondness watching them down below. He loves them too, albeit in a different way than he loves Clarke.

Clarke reads his mind, reaching for his hand. “They’ll be alright.”

“Even after we die,” he agrees, although he hopes of course that that day won’t come for a long time yet. Because he has plans, goddamnit. They still have their whole lives ahead of them. They’ve survived together in this life much longer than they ever have in any life before, and this one has been one of the hardest. And that gives him more hope than he has had in a very long time.

“That’s right. One day, we’ll die,” Clarke says softly, once again reading his mind. She squeezes his hand. “But first, we live.”

The sun sets as Bellamy and Clarke continue sitting there, up in that tree overlooking the valley. In the back of his mind, he knows they should probably head out soon. There’s still problems to deal with. There always are. But he doesn’t move just yet; somehow, he feels very alive right now. Like this is only the beginning. For now, it feels okay just to sit here, holding on to his best friend and breathing with her, in and out. There’s no rush in this moment, really.

They’ve got all the time in the world.

Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone. —Mitch Albom