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It's sometime after Murphy gets back and causes an indescribable amount of stressful chaos, after too many kids come to her sick and scared and in pain that Clark has finally -- finally -- wiped the blood off her hands and gets to leave the dropship for the first time in five hours.
It's around midnight, judging by the restlessness of the guards at the gate that look desperately in need of a shift change. They look tired and weary in way that makes her own exhaustion catch up with her and, in the firelight cast by the lit torches and scattered campfires, she comes to the conclusion that her body is tired but her mind is processing too much at this point for her to get some sleep, no matter how bad she needs it.
Clarke takes a deep breath and runs her fingers through her hair, hands shaking minutely, pulling at the strands clumped with something dried -- dirt, blood, there’s no difference to her anymore. It’s all disgusting and all a pain in the ass -- in a vain attempt to separate them. She steps off the door of the dropship and onto the ground, and she decides she's going to try and wash her hair tomorrow, if she has the time. She thinks that if she feels a little cleaner, at least she’ll have one less thing to deal with for a little while, and maybe it will help her morale. Maybe.
Clarke heads over towards where the bonfire is burning low, letting her thoughts wander to the memory of an actual bed and shampoo and running water. A rationed shower had been better than nothing, and she thinks about what she would do to get one for a while, distracting herself from the thoughts of grounder attacks and sick kids and sleepless nights.
She doesn't see anyone sitting at the bonfire until she’s almost on top of them, and she gasps, stopping in her tracks, fight or flight just barely starting to kick in and her mind jumping from calm to alert in a fraction of a second. Her eyes dart around, looking for anything that could be used as a weapon, wondering how in the hell the guards let someone get by them --
They look up, and it's just Bellamy. Clarke closes her eyes and takes another deep breath that does little to slow her heartrate.
"You alright there, princess?" Bellamy asks, cocking an eyebrow briefly and tossing a small stick into the low-burning flames.
"Yeah," Clarke says, rubbing at her forehead. "Yeah, I just thought..." She trails off, because her exhaustion is finally catching up with her and her mind isn't forming thoughts coherent enough anymore for her to explain to him that she thought he was an intruder, and she was ready to beat him with a log if it had come to it.
She wonders when she had become so paranoid.
"I see," Bellamy says, and turns his gaze back to the fire. Clarke drops her hand back to her side and stares at the flames licking at the logs in the fire, almost like they hold all the answers she could ever need, like they’ll tell her just about when she started to think boys sitting by the fire were grounders waiting to kill her.
"... are you going to sit down or what?" Bellamy asks, and Clarke snaps out of a reverie she wasn't fully aware of entering. She blinks, seeing him through a haze of orange and red and yellow before she sets her jaw and sits down a few feet from him, pulling her knees to her chest and loosely wrapping her arms around them.
They sit in silence for a while, both of them staring at the fire. She wonders if he is as tired as she is.
“How was the hunting today?” she asks, after a while. She had been too busy in the dropship to come out and see what the hunting party had brought back earlier in the evening, but from what she had heard, there had been quite a bit.
“Fine,” Bellamy says. “We got a deer and a few rabbits. Jasper and Monty found some berries.” She turns to look at him them, eyebrow cocked, remembering the last time Jasper and Monty had found things like nuts and berries.
The corner of his mouth quirks up in a smile. He remembers that as well as she does.
“I made them eat some to make sure they weren’t like the last ones,” Bellamy tells her. Clarke goes from amused to concerned within three seconds.
“Bellamy, they could have been poisonous,” Clarke scolds, and Bellamy sighs, and that gets Clarke just a little more worked up. “What would you have done if they were poisonous? It could have killed them!”
“Lots of things can kill them down here, princess,” Bellamy says shortly. “I don’t think they’re gonna be taken down by some wild berries.”
“You have to think, Bellamy,” Clarke says.
“Listen, Jasper and Monty are fine. No harm, no foul,” Bellamy says. “It’s fine, Clarke.”
“It’s not fine, Bellamy -- “ Clarke starts, completely ready to beat the importance of not letting their people eat things that they don’t know are safe, when Octavia pokes her head out of the tent about fifteen feet from where they’re sitting.
“No offense, guys,” she says, sounding equal parts sleepy and pissed, “but some of us are trying to sleep. You can fight about whatever you want in the morning, but right now, shut up.”
“Octavia,” Bellamy says.
“Goodnight, Bell,” Octavia says with finality. She disappears back into her tent.
Clarke sighs heavily, shifting to cross her arms over her chest. They stop fighting, but Bellamy is brooding and Clarke is still a little peeved, so the silence that follows for the next few minutes is tense and uncomfortable.
Then, after a while, when Clarke’s mind gets bored of being angry at Bellamy and starts to revert back to being just frazzled and tired, the silence becomes a little more comfortable. Bellamy continues to toss small sticks into the fire, and Clarke starts to go through to-do lists in her head, trying to figure out what they need to get done tomorrow.
“We need to see if we can find some of those herbs Lincoln uses,” Clarke says absently. Arnica for concussions, inflammation, and shock. Calendula or comfrey for healing salves. She had drawn pictures of them as best she could, and given them to Monty to look for. So far, he hasn’t brought her any, and she’s considering going out herself next time to look for them.
“We’ll find some,” Bellamy says. Clarke nods and starts adding to her list of herbs in her head, trying to think of what’s more scarce than anything in the medical inventory.
“I would kill for some actual medicine,” Clarke says. “Healing salves and crushed up flowers can only do so much.” She thinks of the kids that come in, scraped up and bleeding. Of the kids that accidentally cut themselves on knives, of the heightened risk of infection out here. She thinks about how whenever a kid gets hurt and she tries something that doesn’t work, and just makes things a little bit worse, that’s on her.
She thinks of her mother, and is reminded for a numerous time that this is how she felt all the time, being the head doctor on the Ark. Taking care of a population with limited supplies and an unlimited amount of ailments.
At least she had actual anesthetic, Clarke thinks, only slightly bitter.
“In ancient Roman times, Gladiator blood was recommended for different ailments,” Bellamy suddenly says. Clarke almost chokes on her own spit, and her gaze snaps to him. Bellamy is still staring into the fire.
“That’s disgusting,” Clarke says.
“That’s the Romans,” Bellamy responds dryly.
“That’s morbid, Bellamy.”
“I didn’t just make it up, princess, I’m just reminding you that at least we aren’t the Romans.”
“Well, thank you for letting me know that by being as disgusting as possible,” Clarke says, making a face and trying to keep herself from thinking about just what gladiator blood could have been used for. “Anything else?” She hopes he catches the sarcasm and figures out that she doesn’t want to know anything else.
Instead, he smirks, and says like he’s testing her, “Urine was used to clean clothes.”
“Bellamy!” Clarke snaps, but she’s caught between laughing at the absurdity of it and being even more grossed out than before.
“A Roman emperor tried to put his horse in the highest elected office of the Roman government,” he says next, and then Clarke really does laugh.
“That’s unbelievable,” Clarke tells him after she’s stopped giggling.
“That’s history,” Bellamy says simply.
They go on like that for a little while. Bellamy tells her different facts, and she listens, and sometimes asks questions, and sometimes she counters with facts of her own -- about paintings she likes, or artists that she remembers reading about up on the Ark. It’s companionable and nice, and surprisingly relaxing.
After a while, she finds herself yawning. Bellamy sees and gives her a half smile that she only just barely catches before it’s gone.
“You should get some sleep,” Bellamy says. It sounds like everything else Bellamy says: careless, at least at first, but with enough of an impact that , if you listen closely, carries the weight of something reminiscent of genuine concern. Clarke thinks it’s nice, and she’s too tired to disagree, so she nods and starts to stand.
“See you in the morning, Bellamy,” Clarke says, nodding before another yawn hits her and she's covering her mouth to hide it.
Bellamy looks at her and smiles a little. She almost misses it.
“Goodnight, princess.”
XXX
The next day she’s back up a little past dawn, and has just enough time to eat breakfast and pull her hair back before several kids come up to her, complaining of things ranging from headaches to dislocated shoulders. After it’s known that she’s awake, it seems the whole camp needs something from her, and she’s swamped with hurt and sick kids until mid-afternoon.
She’s thinking about just how tired she is when Bellamy comes into the dropship. Clarke looks him over quickly, trying to see if he’s hurt, but he’s walking fine and he doesn’t look pale. After concluding that he is indeed fine, she turns back to the kid who’s stitches she checking.
“The wound is healing nicely,” she tells the kid. He’s only about fourteen, with dark hair and light eyes and a nice smile that she gets to see when she pats his shoulder lightly in approval. “They can come out soon. Just make sure you don’t do anything that might pull them out, okay?” Clarke gives him a fleeting smile when he nods and jumps off the table, heading back outside and calling for his friends.
“What’s wrong, Bellamy?” Clarke asks, reaching back to adjust the careful knot she uses to keep her hair pulled out of her face. “Is someone hurt?”
“No,” Bellamy replies. “Brought you something.” He tosses her the cloth bag that she hadn’t seen him holding. She gives him a look and tugs at the leather cord holding it closed, and when she peers inside her eyebrows shoot up in surprise.
“You found them?” Clarke says, feeling her heart skip a beat. “Where?”
“Herbs are a lot easier to find than gladiator blood,” Bellamy remarks, nodding at the bag in her hands.
Clarke laughs a little, smiling, glad that she can knock one thing off her list.
“They should be the right ones,” Bellamy continues.
“They are,” Clarke says, pulling the contents out onto the table so she can start to sort them. “Thank you, Bellamy.”
“Don’t mention it, princess,” he says and then he’s gone.
It takes her a few minutes to rearrange everything into separate piles, and then a little more time to find the appropriate places to put them. But once everything is put away properly, Clarke returns to the table to pick up the bag and find a place for it, when she spots a small slip of paper on the floor.
She picks it up and unfolds it, not recognizing the thick handwriting for a moment. Then she reads what it says.
Caligula often wore women’s clothing in public.
Clarke laughs again, shaking her head, and tucks the paper into her pocket. A few minutes later, when a young girl comes in asking if she has anything for a stomachache, Clarke forgets about the note, and she doesn’t think about it for the rest of the day.
XXX
Clarke doesn’t know why she’s so surprised when it continues. A few days later. She comes back to her tent and finds some food and a hastily scrawled factoid about how, in Rome, left-handedness was considered unlucky. The next morning, when she sees Bellamy in the camp, he passes her and presses a cup and a note about the release of eagles after the death of an emperor into her hand before motioning for her to follow him to the wall, and suddenly they’re being leaders again and Clarke doesn’t have time to process her fact of the day.
After a while, she comes to expect it. He’ll pass her a note when he sees her, or leave one where he knows she’ll find it. Sometimes it comes with supplies, and other times it’s just a scrap of paper laying innocently on a table. On occasion, when they’re out looking for food or doing a patrol around the wall, he’ll break the silence by saying something like, “You know, the Romans were the first to use concrete arches with some skill.”
“You have to admire their ingenuity,” Clarke would reply, and Bellamy would nod, and they’d continue on with their day.
Clarke comes to look forward to it. She keeps the notes in her coat, and she looks over her favorite facts when she has the time at night, or she needs a smile. Sometimes she counters with her own facts, but most of the time it’s always just Bellamy, sharing bits of knowledge with her that are so, so irrelevant to anything they’re doing, but so special to her that it doesn’t matter.
Then, as things pick up and the grounder assault starts pressing into their thoughts and actions, the notes start to come less frequently. She’s so busy most of the time she doesn’t remember that it was something they did. The only time she’d really ever think about it was when Bellamy would, in the rare moments of calm, tell her a quiet fact before going back to work. When she thinks of those moments, she misses them, but she doesn’t have the time to dwell, and she reluctantly moves on.
And when she’s forced to close the dropship door, when she’s forced to leave Bellamy and Finn out in the fight so that their people have a chance to survive, it’s not until she’s woken up in Mount Weather and convinced she’s going insane that she remembers the little things he told her.
Romans invented central heating.
The longest war ever lasted from 1651 to 1986. There were no casualties.
Napoleon once got attacked by rabbits.
In between her planning an escape and trying to watch over her people, she starts to collect little facts she finds from the books in Mount Weather. If -- when she saw Bellamy again, she thought, she wants to have some things to tell him.
She stockpiles facts like she stockpiles blueprints of the mountain, like she takes notice of all the little things that don’t seem right around her. And when she finds Anya, caged up like an animal and prepared to die, through her shock Clarke thinks about how Bellamy told her about the fourteen attempted prison escapes prisoners did from Alcatraz, way back when, and how most of them had been presumed failures.
After that, well, between the running and the fighting, that’s the last time Clarke gets to think about anything other than surviving for a long while.
But when it’s all said and done, when Anya is killed and there’s nothing she can do to stop the bleeding, and Clarke’s been apprehended as a prisoner and proved to be just the opposite, when her mother has shown up and hugged her tight and let her sleep for a few precious hours, Clarke finds out Bellamy is alive and can’t stop herself from crying.
And after what seems like forever, when the camp gates open and she sees Bellamy striding through them looking tired and dirty, she runs and hugs him before he even has a chance to recognize her. She wraps her arms as tightly as possible around him and feels the relief that he’s not dead, and he’s hugging her back, and Clarke knows everything is far from okay but at least she can finally start to work through things with him there to back her up.
He hugs her tight, face buried in her neck and her hair, and Clark says quietly, “Da Vinci painted a picture of himself in drag.”
She feels him smile, and Clarke feels like she’s ready to fight for a little longer.