I'm a damsel. I'm in distress. I can handle it.

[Clarke Griffin]

Clarke is in ^trouble.
Clarke is always in trouble.

Even with her hands in the semi-clear water of the stream she could tell they were still dirty. The girl scrubbed at her hands frowning at how much dirt was caked under her fingernails. She cleaned them methodically, her messy red hair crunching slightly whenever she moved, before reaching for her pack and the tin she kept in there. During the day, when she was more easily recognized, Clarke tried to stay as far away from other people as she possibly could.

The bushes to her left rattled. Clarke stilled, her heart rate accelerating to a rapid war drum in her ears, as she waited silently for whatever it was to show itself. A pig popped out of the bush. She would have exhaled in relief if she didn't care whether the pig knew she was there or not. It was a small thing, no taller than to her knees, and she knew the meat was good. Which, of course, meant that it would have to die.

A year ago she would never have imagined killing other animals, or even eating them. She'd figured what little of her life was left would be spent with gross gritty protein paste and metallic tasting water. Funny how things worked out. At least it was in her favor, and not the pigs.

Clarke moved her hand very slowly towards the blade at her side. She didn't want to startle her next meal. The woods were so fickle who knew when she'd get another? Her dirty hand closed around the rough hilt of the weapon, and she drew in a slow, steadying breath before she attacked. The pig had probably seen her crouching there like an idiot and realized it needed to run away.

It screamed as it turned, a high pitch whine of desperation, and fled back through the bush. It's pursuer made a groan, half frustration half exertion, as she tried to follow her prey. Clarke leapt over the bush, fumbling the landing, and rolling back to her feet with skill born of necessity she'd never exhibited before. The pig had a good lead on her, but she was the one with longer legs. The girl from space ran through the woods perfectly comfortable in what had been completely foreign territory not three months past.

Her quarry slowed as it reached, what appeared to Clarke, to be a gigantic rock. The girl followed the little pig around the rock and stopped in surprise when she saw two more pigs the same size. Did pigs travel in herds? Was that a thing? Clarke paused for a wary moment because the chances of three pork lunches sounded too good to be true. Mount Weather style too good to be true.

That was, precisely, the moment that the giant rock moved.

The little spacer stared in horror as a monstrous boar lumbered onto it's feet. It's skin seemed diseased, wriggling with parasites, and it smelled like a coming death. It was massive, a good deal larger than Clarke, and had wicked looking tusks the size of small trees to stab her with. Repeatedly. Somewhere, buried deep inside, a tiny voice told her she deserved this. A louder voice, that sounded vaguely like Finn, told her to run.

Clarke ran. She ran like she'd never run before. The massive thing was behind her. She could feel it closing in on her as she desperately searched for a place to go to escape it. Could pigs climb trees? The girl made a beeline for the nearest tree with branches low enough she could reach. She leapt up, grabbed hold of a branch, and pulled herself up with a huff of exertion.

Never before had Clarke embraced her inner squirrel so fully. The girl was halfway up the tree by the time the massive boar smashed into it. She made a noise, barely loud enough to be considered a squeal, and held on tightly to the tree trunk. Again the boar hit the trunk with a crunch of wood straining. Crap. She'd never thought to question if pigs could bring down a tree.

Bellamy Blake
Hope this works <3

[Bellamy Blake]

Bellamy was out hunting with a small group. The others weren't far off, they knew better than to wander out of shouting distance and they all had radios. They had to stay sharp. Just because they were out hunting didn't mean that something wasn't hunting them.

It was the sound of the pig's deceptively human squeal that had caught his attention. Bellamy didn't like to leave danger to chance. Whatever had prompted that sound, it was close enough to be a threat to himself and to the others in his unit. He hurried toward the noise at a cautious jog, but the brush was thick in this area; it was hard to see anything until you were almost right on top of it. It was the perfect sort of environment for predators and prey alike, ripe with hiding places to lie in wait.

Bellamy's feet slid across a carpet of fallen leaves as he skidded to a stop an uncomfortably close 20 feet away from the creature. His eyes were big round saucers as he took a slow step back away from the beast, hoping he hadn't startled it. He'd read about wild boar in stories: their strength, their ferocity, but never in his wildest imagination had they ever appeared so big on paper. Maybe it was the radiation.

With his second step backward, a twig snapped under his heel. The creature swung its massive head toward him, suddenly much less concerned with whatever had scurried up the tree.

The boar charged. He didn't know how something so big could move so fast. It was all he could do to raise the rifle and wrap his finger around the trigger, shooting from the hip because there was no time to aim. Another second and it would have been on top of him.

The bullet buried itself somewhere in the meat of the boar's shoulder, but it kept coming. He fired off three more rounds, running backwards to spare himself that critical extra second. In his haste, he tripped over a root, and went down, meeting the ground hard. Fortunately, so did the boar.

---

Clarke Griffin

[Clarke Griffin]

Clarke is in ^trouble.
Clarke is always in trouble.

She was going to die.

She was so going to die. Clarke's knuckles whitened on the tree bark as the boar slammed into the tree again. The Arker let out a soft whimper as her sanctuary made a snapping sound. Leaves rattled around her, with the derisive laughter of all the people she had killed, as though trying to shoo her off their branches. Then, the monster turned away.

Clarke hadn't heard the branch snapping over the sound of her own pulse in her ears, but the boar had. At first she couldn't believe it, as the monster charged away from her, but the sudden flurry of gunshots left her mouth agape and her eyes wide in horror. There was a scuffle, or...something that Clarke couldn't see through the thick foliage, and then silence. The girl waited a few heartbeats, shifting uncomfortably on her tree branch, before she gathered enough courage to descend back to the forest floor.

Leaf litter crunched underfoot as the girl with the red hair dropped to the ground next to the abused tree trunk. She didn't take more than a few seconds to survey the damage because Grounders didn't use guns. One of her people had attracted the boar's attention. Another one of her people might be dead.

Morbid curiosity and a stifling sense of guilt had the girl cautiously following along the path the massive boar had carved into the forest during it's rampage. The monster came into view first, unnaturally still, and Clarke froze for a horrified heartbeat before coming to the conclusion that it was dead. Still, she tiptoed around it, her eyes searching the leaves for a decidedly more human figure. She saw no one until she looked down.

There was a man with a gun, sprawled on the ground, and Clarke moved closer carefully. The figure was familiar in a heart-clenching way that made her want to turn tail and run. She didn't. Yet. “Are you alright?” the girl asked carefully not moving any closer as her eyes widened with recognition. “Did you...Bellamy?”  she said his name as if it stole the breath from her.

Bellamy Blake

[Bellamy Blake]

The fall knocked the wind out of him, leaving him disoriented, perhaps he'd even lost consciousness for a few seconds. It was always hard to tell that sort of thing when you were the one lying on the ground. Unconscious people were terribly unreliable witnesses. Oh God. He saw those tusks before he'd even opened his eyes. The memory and fear hit him hard; he started suddenly as if waking from a nightmare.

His hand groped where his gun was supposed to be, but it was gone, knocked out of his arms when he fell. It came up empty with nothing but dirt and a few twigs where he'd expected a weapon. The rifle was lying on the ground nearby, not three feet away. He thrust a hand out to grab the cold metal and dragged it towards him.

The sound of her voice came so out of context, so far from his expectations of being mauled alive, that his brain had trouble processing the information. It wasn't until he sat up, rifle at the ready, and saw the lifeless boar, that the adrenaline fog began to clear. When he was sure the boar wasn't getting up, he turned his gaze to the familiar figure.

Static erupted on the radio clipped to his belt. "Bellamy? Bellamy, come in. We heard shots fired, are you alright," the static asked.

"Clarke?" His disbelief made it sound like a question, but perhaps his surprise was unfounded. Just when you give up looking for something, that's when it finds you.  Bellamy swallowed hard, laid the rifle back down of the ground, and pulled himself up to a kneeling position. He sat back on his heels as he unclipped the walkie, held down the "talk" button, and spoke:

"Yeah, I'm fine," he said, though his voice sounded choppy, uneven, but only to Clarke's ears. It would just sound like normal connection interference over the radio. He was sort of counting on that. It would help sell the lie.

"Damn thing got away. Hold your position, I'm coming to you," he told the voice on the other end, holding eye contact with Clarke. He wanted her to know that he wouldn't betray her position; he'd momentarily forgotten that he was supposed to be angry at her.

---

Clarke Griffin

[Clarke Griffin]

Clarke is in ^trouble.
Clarke is always in trouble.

The sound of another voice on the radio caused Clarke to jerk backwards like a startled animal. She froze again, wide eyes watching Bellamy as he said her name and put down his weapon, only to take another step backwards when he pulled out the walkie and lifted it to his lips. Her body tensed to flee, expecting him to tell them where she was, to tell her mother where she was, and then proceed to try and drag her back.

He didn't. She kept eye contact until he released the button, until she was sure that he wasn't going to lift it back up and betray her. The longer she waited, the longer those heartbeats stretched into an unfathomable silence, the more Clarke's posture relaxed. "Thank you," the delinquent princess said, ignoring the crackle of her red hair around her ears as she dropped his gaze to glance at the boar that would have speared them both.

It would have been a lot of food. Could still be if the strange growths crawling across it's hide weren't some sort of disease. The Grounders would know. Lincoln would. But carrying such a beast back seemed an impossible feat. She turned her gaze back to Bellamy.

"I-" the girl opened her mouth to say something and then abruptly stopped. She shifted, unused to civil conversation after three months on the run, but wanting it so desperately anyway. She clicked her mouth shut before trying again: "There were some smaller ones," she suggested to him, gesturing loosely at their fallen monster with a dirt covered hand. "I saw them before it attacked."

Clarke's eyes unfocused, as if she was recalling the attack, but it was also the realization of what might have happened if Bellamy hadn't arrived. He was always saving her. Even if he didn't do it on purpose. The girl's eyes refocused sharply on his freckled face. "There's a lot of people to feed back home," but she'd known he would take care of them.

Bellamy Blake

[Bellamy Blake]

As frustrated and angry at her as he was for abandoning them, knowing that Clarke was alive made it hard to feel anything but relieved. He'd wondered many times where and when he might run into her again, yet he still felt wholly unprepared for this moment.

After clipping the walkie back to his belt, Bellamy grabbed the strap of his rifle and slung it over his shoulder as he raised himself back up to standing. He didn't move any closer to her, even though he wanted to, afraid that like a frightened animal, any sudden movements might scare her away.

They wouldn't have much time before the others radioed back to find out where he was, and what was taking so damned long. He had to find the right words to make her come back with him, and he didn't have long to do it.

It was amazing to him how she could look so different and so much the same. Her clothes had changed, there were marks from injuries he knew nothing about, she was clearly doing some strange experiments with her hair, but her eyes were the same; the way she looked at him was the same. 

A part of him seriously considered taking Clarke by force. Even if she hated him for it, at least then he could keep her safe. If he'd known the grounder clans were hunting her, he would never have hesitated.

Bellamy followed Clarke's gaze to the fallen beast. For a diseased animal, this boar had shown an awful lot of spunk. At least he had the manpower needed to get it back to camp a radio away. Bellamy hung on her disjointed words, trying to decide whether or not she wanted to go after the smaller pigs. 

It was hard to feign interest in hunting when the thing he'd been looking for was standing in front of him. They needed more than just food. They needed her. He needed her.

"Everyone's okay. Your Mom's okay, just worried," he told her, because he knew she would want to know. Jasper had seen better days. So had he, but he didn't need to go into that, not yet at least.

"We've been looking for you. I've been looking for you," he confessed. It was part of why they trusted each other. Despite an unyielding talent for telling others what they needed to hear, Bellamy always told Clarke the truth. 

---

Clarke Griffin

[Clarke Griffin]

Clarke is in ^trouble.
Clarke is always in trouble.

Mom. The redhead's knees wavered. The last time Clarke had seen her mother the woman was suffering multiple wounds. All of them were her fault: she'd chosen not to evacuate TonDC, she'd killed Dante causing his son to retaliate. It was good to hear she was okay, and her pale eyes watered as she nodded numbly in acknowledgement.

"I know," Clarke admitted, meeting his gaze for a moment before darting it off to look at some less judgmental trees. She'd been avoiding the Arkadia patrols with the same fervor she avoided the Grounder ones. The Griffin girl had become rather good at running, hiding, and sneaking around the woods. Really, though, it probably only worked because no one looking for her expected the girl from space to be smart enough to figure out such a thing. Plus, sometimes she had help.

She took a hesitant step forward and tipped her face to look up at Bellamy earnestly. "I'm sorry," the girl who'd pulled the lever with him said softly. "You don't need to do that," she said, her lips twisting slightly as she pursed them together. They shouldn't have wasted time on her when there were more important things to do. She wasn't important. She'd killed people.  "Don't waste resources on me."  I'm not worth it.

"I can't go back," Clarke protested with some finality, her eyes full of regret. "Not yet."

Bellamy Blake

[Bellamy Blake]

Clarke stepped closer and looked up at him with those piercing blue eyes of hers. He only managed to hold her gaze for an instant before he lost his nerve and looked away, afraid that his anger was staring to show. Instead he stared intently at a stick on the ground.

Bellamy swallowed hard, trying to stomach the disappointment. She was saying "no" before he'd even had a chance to ask the question. The thought that he was about to lose her again so soon gripped him with panic. She was close enough to him now that overpowering her and dragging her back to camp would have been feasible.

"You would have done the same for me," he said matter-of-factly, but still couldn't seem to look at her. Clarke was leaving him. Again. The others would turn to him for answers, but who could he turn to? Kane and Clarke's mom were major leaders now, but even they asked for his input, and he always found himself wondering what Clarke would have said or done, and wishing that he could ask her.

"You can come back," he argued, pleading with eyes that had finally found the strength to look at her again. Bellamy had tried to respect her decision not to return from Mount Weather, but Clarke wasn't the only one being punished by her absence, and even if she was, being on her own like this was dangerous, and it couldn't be good for her.

"If not now, then when," he asked, aware that the desperation was starting to show in his voice. Maybe it would help. It wasn't as if he had any other cards to play. Bellamy had already lost. Again.

---

Clarke Griffin

[Clarke Griffin]

Clarke is in ^trouble.
Clarke is always in trouble.

He was right. She'd have done the same if Bellamy had left without a trace. If he had left her standing at the gate of Arkadia to watch over their people while he vanished into the woods. She'd have abandoned everything else on a wild quest that might make her forget all the people she'd killed in the hopes of saving just one boy with freckles and deep brown eyes.

Clarke's eyes left him to hide the guilt and grief from their depths. They both seemed to be avoiding the other's gaze. It reminded her of when they'd first landed on the ground together, when they'd mutually avoided each other, but she didn't hate him anymore.

She hated herself.

"I don't know," she admitted with a broken voice. Clarke didn't know when she would feel right returning to Arkadia, if she'd ever feel right again. They had killed people: children, innocents who had no idea that her friends were being slaughtered, and even their friends who tried to help them escape the mountain. His hand had joined hers on that lever and together they had pulled it.

Her guilt ran deeper than that, though. She'd let TonDC be destroyed. She'd let a missile hit it without warning them. She would have let it hit Octavia to keep him, and his mission, from harm. At the gate he might have offered her forgiveness but she knew he could never forgive that. She had done so many terrible, horrible things. The delinquent princess shook her head as her vision blurred.

"I still see them Bellamy," she confessed in a hoarse whisper as her throat closed around the words. They weren't as vivid as Finn, who had haunted her every waking moment following his death until they had burned his body, but they still crowded in on her conscious when she least expected it. Tears tracked clean trails down her dirty face. "I can hear them, sometimes, screaming as they..." she trailed off, tightening the grief on her face back into an emotionless mask. They'd both been dealt a losing hand.

"I'll bear it," she said, Dante's words that had become her mantra, "so they don't have to, but I can't go back. I can't see their faces every day and remember what we did to save them." Even though she did anyway.

Bellamy Blake
This is like an avalanche of sad xD

[Bellamy Blake]

Clarke didn't need to take all of the blame. It was his too, and she couldn't take that away from him. War was a sickness that didn't discriminate between guilty or innocent. It took everyone.

"I see them too," he said quietly, meeting her eyes so she would see the pain in his, so she would know he wasn't just trying to placate her. He saw them in his nightmares, on the nights he stood watch, every time he had to help Monty with Jasper. He saw the woman who'd saved him, Lovejoy's son. He saw level five.

Pulling a lever in another room was a strange thing, it was almost too much death to process. It was different to have your hands wrapped around a person's throat, waiting for the life to leave their eyes. The same eyes as his son.

"Remember when I told you there were kids there," he asked the rhetorical question, barely above a whisper, knowing that neither of them would ever forget. Bellamy wasn't sure why he felt the need to tell her after all of this time, probably because he'd never told anyone, and yet he thought of it so often.

They'd burned the only person that knew. It was a relief for Bellamy to be able to unravel; it was one of the reasons why it was so hard for him to not have Clarke around. He dropped his eyes back towards the dirt before speaking again as he recalled the events, seeing them with perfect detail in his memory.

"This kid, he's six, maybe, he sees the uniform I'm wearing, and starts telling me about how his dad's training to be in a ground unit--," he cut himself off and swallowed hard as eyes started to burn.

"There's a patch on his backpack with him name. I'd just killed the kid's father; it's how I got the uniform. I--," his voice cracked with emotions that were boiling over, but he pushed on with the story, hurtling toward the end.

"I just hope no one told him; I hope he died not knowing," Bellamy said. As if burning the child alive weren't bad enough, the thought that he might have been subjected to that level of grief beforehand was beyond cruel. Bellamy had killed so many, but those two were the ones that he saw in his nightmares. Perhaps they were his penance.

---

Clarke Griffin

[Clarke Griffin]

Clarke is in ^trouble.
Clarke is always in trouble.

When she met that pain-filled, guilt-ridden gaze Clarke realized how incredibly selfish she'd been. Running away had been so easy, the only thing she had done for herself since she hit the ground, but not everyone had the same luxury. The delinquent leader knew she could leave because he was there. That he would take care of their people in her absence. She hadn't thought about the toll it would take on him. She'd been too focused on the dead to think about the living.

"Bellamy," she breathed his name at the similar confession, her brows pinching with worry over this shared burden she didn't want him to bear. She deserved it, for all the people she had killed, but he didn't. He was the only reason they managed to save their friends. The girl stayed quiet as he explained about the little boy, and the father he had killed, while she tried not to think about her own dead father. Tears still tracked their way down her face, but Clarke tried to smile at Bellamy reassuringly. It wobbled. She understood the significance of the tale, even though it broke her heart.

She would take this, too, so he wouldn't bear it alone.

Clarke closed the distance between them, "I'm so sorry," she said as she reached to pull him into a desperate hug. The words changed nothing. The boy, and his father, were still dead. But she wasn't apologizing for their deaths. She was apologizing for not being there when he needed her. For when she wouldn't be there again.

Three months in isolation had left her low on human contact. Clarke didn't pull away. Instead she buried her wet, grimy face in Bellamy's shoulder and breathed in the familiar scent. He smelled like a home she didn't deserve to return to. Her breath caught in her throat, shuddering out like a sob, before she lifted her red-rimmed eyes to meet Bellamy's again.

"You don't have to go back," the girl reminded him in a whisper, despite knowing that he did. Despite being very well aware that running from these problems did nothing to solve them. "Mom and Kane are in charge. They can take care of everyone."

Bellamy Blake

[Bellamy Blake]

Usually Bellamy was able to remind himself about the number of people they'd saved rather than the ones they'd lost, but it was hard to ignore them when they had names, and families, and crayon drawings on the walls.

Bellamy hugged Clarke close and buried his face in her crunchy, red hair, perhaps trying to do her a favor by softening it with his tears. His body relaxed into her, letting her share his weight for this brief moment. A moment that would sustain and drive him onward in her continued absence.

Running away was a fantasy, a dream that could never be realized. Octavia hardly needed him anymore, but he still couldn't leave her. Bellamy had taken responsibility for the 100 when they had first landed only to try to keep his sister safe. At that time, he'd always considered leading to be a part time job until his crime caught up with him.

Even though so much had changed, he knew he couldn't just abandon them; having people to protect gave his life meaning. He didn't know what he would be without them. The thought scared him.

"Bellamy, where are you," a voice came in over the radio, it might've been Monty's, stomping on their moment of peace. If this was what peace looked like. People like Clarke and Bellamy couldn't be expected to recognize such a thing.

"I have to," he told her, reluctantly releasing her from his arms as he reached down for his walkie. He looked at Clarke and placed a deliberate finger on the talk button.

"I'm on my way, relax. You guys aren't going to believe what I killed," he said in a smug, top-of-the-world tone that was nothing like how he felt.

He released the the button and put the radio away again, swallowing hard, trying to stomach what was going to happen next. He wasn't ready for her to leave, to be left wondering where she was, and if she was okay, to think of all of the things he should have said or done that might have kept her safe.

"You need to take this," he said, unholstering his spare sidearm, a semiautomatic pistol, and pushing it into her hands. "Please," he begged. Short of cuffing her and dragging her back to camp kicking and screaming, he didn't know of any other way to protect her.

---

Clarke Griffin

[Clarke Griffin]

Clarke is in ^trouble.
Clarke is always in trouble.

Clarke had never hated a radio so much in her life. Maybe it was because this was the first one working against her, interrupting something she wanted to let linger, but it was also because it was a threat. If one of the others arrived, if they gave her location to Arkadia, it was only a matter of time before her mother arrived. The runaway wasn't sure she could come face to face with that much concern and disappointment and still leave.

She jumped at the sudden, crackling, question and she couldn't help the ache in her heart when Bellamy said exactly what she knew he would. The girl nodded too quickly, her hair crunching around her ears like static, and took two quick steps back from the boy once he released her. His easy response that didn't betray her position made the now feral space princess relax slightly, but she took another step back when he reached for a gun.

Bellamy wouldn't shoot her. Bellamy would never, but at the sight of that weapon something cold settled in the pit of her stomach and she froze. Clarke let Bellamy press the weapon into her hands, let her fingers curl around the metal, and looked up at him with an anxious, nearly vacant expression. She could remember, easily, the last time she had held a gun. The last person she had murdered with one. Somewhere, behind her, she could hear Dante's body thud to the ground.

"I c-" -an't she protested, cutting herself off at his begging plea. Even though her head shook, and her hair rattled about her shoulders like crisp fall leaves, the girl accepted his deadly gift. Some logical part of her, repressed by the onslaught of recent emotion, recognized it was a good idea to have a weapon. She didn't protest any farther.

"I'll come back," she promised him, her knuckles shining pale through the dirt on her hands as she gripped the weapon like a life-line. "When I can..." the girl trailed off, realizing that it could be never and hoping the brown eyed boy in front of her didn't realize it to. To distract herself, and perhaps Bellamy, from that uncomfortable truth she stepped forward again.

"Thank you," she said quietly, shifting her weight up onto her toes so she could press a soft kiss to his cheek. "May we meet again."

And then she walked away. Again.

Bellamy Blake
This was a beautiful thread 

[Bellamy Blake]

"You better. I like that gun," he teased gently, trying to lighten the mood with a sad smile that broke a little too soon.

She kissed his cheek and said those words he'd been dreading, and just like that, it was the return from Mount Weather all over again. Only this time it hurt more, because he'd seen it coming from the very first moment he'd laid eyes on her.

Once again, Bellamy stood there and let her walk away when all he wanted to do was run after her. "May we meet again," he said to her retreating footsteps as he turned to leave in the opposite direction.

Bellamy glanced back over his shoulder, hoping to spot one last glimpse of the girl as she disappeared between the trees, but Clarke was already gone. And he was alone. Except for a big-ass dead boar.

The creature had to weigh at least a few hundred pounds, and even Bellamy knew better than to try to drag it back to the rendez-vous site by himself. Once he met up the others, they'd bring the jeep in closer and have the extra manpower to get the monstrosity back to camp.

Bellamy retreated through the forest. The fleeting moment of honesty had ended. Soon, he would be telling lies to his patrol unit about what had happened, soon he would have to decide what to tell Abby; he didn't know if he could lie to her. He didn't know if she would ever forgive him for not bringing her daughter home when he'd had the chance.

He didn't know if he would ever forgive himself.

---

Clarke Griffin
May we meet again.