Work Text:
When Bellamy sleeps with Raven for the first time (the second first time), he doesn’t ask too many questions. Those months after Mount Weather don’t invite questions in general, and this time, he doesn’t even lie to himself that he doesn’t care to know the answers. He simply accepts silence as a fact of life, and takes off his clothes.
He does it out of love, not the kind of love that wants, but the kind that makes you angry. The bruises on Raven’s ankles, wrists and neck are long gone, but she has a new set permanently settled under her eyes; shadows speaking not of blows, but of mundane, quiet violence called sleeplessness and worry. So Bellamy doesn’t ask; doesn’t ask himself how exactly he loves her, and doesn’t ask her if she’s still with Wick. He simply takes off his clothes, anger choking him up until he can’t speak, and no matter how things start, he ends up with his face between Raven’s legs, his fury beaten and molded until it becomes patience. She sleeps well that night, he makes damn sure of it; sleeps warm and sated, his body curled around hers like a shield.
How selfish of him.
***
Soon he starts wearing Raven on his skin.
His are simple marks, marks made of worry and care; a splinter in his palm from bringing in twice the firewood, and a red welt on the back of his neck from buckets of water on his carrying pole being twice as heavy. At some point, the firewood gets cut in half again, and Bellamy’s quarters fill up with doubles: double blankets and double food, and a double set of spare clothes on a shelf Raven built one winter day. There is a single gash on Bellamy’s knee from Raven’s brace bumping into him that night he came back from the woods late, and two points on his shoulders she keeps pressing when she tries to rub cold stiffness out of his muscles. There is, finally, a love bite low on his stomach, left when he was gasping for air after a tremendous act of courage. This one, he thinks, matters as well, and he knows exactly why, but neither of them is ready to say it out loud.
Raven’s body tells its own story, and some cowardly nights, Bellamy spins them for himself. The fresh scar from the drill is a constant reminder that he had to, had to, had to. It’s no excuse, of course, that his murder wasn’t a mindless slaughter, but an exchange, lives for lives, but when he looks at Raven’s leg moving under his fingers in the faint morning light, he is angry enough to know he’d pull the lever again and again, just to stop helplessness from choking him to death.
Even Bellamy can’t spin slaughtering children into an act of justice or self-defense, but seeing Raven’s healed wound brings a different kind of comfort.
There are, also, things about Raven’s skin that are more mundane; burns and scratches her work puts on her fingers, and her smooth, hollow cheeks that start filling out a bit now that Bellamy does all in his might to make sure she sleeps and eats. Raven, he learns, is a strange creature to love. Long weeks of being beaten down, then told she loves too much or not enough make her vulnerable, challenging, and angry, and it shows in her body; in the fingers of her right hand curled like talons around her left arm when she stops herself from touching him, and in her eyes fixed on his face, making sure that he noticed. He never tries to move her hand or loosen her desperate grip; instead, he wraps his arms around her, and hugs her whole, until she places her hands on his clothed back, then scratches him lovingly as she tries to pull him closer, closer, closer.
It’s for warmth. Of course it is. Or else he doesn’t deserve it.
One night, not particularly easy, or dark, or brutal, Raven’s hand finds his while he’s moving slowly inside her, and she threads her fingers with his, then places their joined hands on the pillow by her head like a point of comfort, an easy grip anchoring her in the pleasure they’re slowly starting to take for granted.
In hindsight, he should’ve known it would turn out to be much more complicated.
***
It starts so innocently Bellamy doesn’t notice at first. It’s all about hands, or maybe that’s just all she dares to ask of him; her hands thrown back, and gripping the bed over her head, or immobilized in his own hands, his hold disguised as a caress. Her bruises are still fresh in his mind, so he never puts his fingers around her wrists, but when they’re just touching, palm to palm, it slips his notice how still Raven holds herself in those moments.
Then there comes a night when Raven leaves her brace on.
It’s a different kind of dare, the way she makes him wait, gasping and naked, for her to slowly undo the straps, take off her pants and shorts, then fasten the buckles of the brace back on her bare skin. He spends that time staring at her fingers, trying to memorize the movements, and when he looks up again, she’s staring him down with a challenge. He doesn’t quite know what to do with that, so he just pulls her into a kiss, and ends up lying flat on his back, with Raven straddling his hips like her life depended on it. He has his hands on her thighs, stroking and caressing as he rolls his hips up, and maybe he does apply a little bit of pressure to make the thrusts harder, but when Raven grasps his wrists roughly, he feels like there is a shift in the air. She keeps her eyes fixed on his when she moves their joined hands behind her back, and presses them to the base of her spine, daring him to protest. So he doesn’t.
Eventually, he holds on to her wrists like she holds on to his, hard enough for finger-shaped marks to appear on delicate skin – or at least that’s how the shadows make it look when she falls forward, exhausted and unsatisfied, her legs not nearly well enough to let her do what she wanted.
Before Bellamy forgets himself and presses a tender kiss to the inside of Raven’s wrist, she rolls off of him, and gets on all fours, her ass sticking out furiously, and he knows better than to waste time trailing kisses up her spine. She goads him until his fingers dig into the skin of her hips, so painfully exposed he’s almost embarrassed to see her like this, harder, harder, fuck, harder, don’t you dare, I can, don’t you fucking dare. It’s like she has something to prove, so he doesn’t stop, not even when Raven’s drilled leg gives way under her, and he comes with a guilty little gasp, shocked that the sharp edges of his hips didn’t make her shatter like glass.
Afterwards, she sleeps curled up on top of him, quiet and trusting, and in the morning, grasped by sudden terror, he catches her examine with breathless curiosity the finger-shaped marks that bloom under her skin.
***
After that night, they become the strangest push and pull; fear, and challenge, and love twisting and turning between them until they can’t even begin to tell which is which. Bellamy watches his hands a lot these days; not the marks left on them by the ground, but strong bones and smooth muscles that can crush someone’s windpipe as easily as another person might break a twig. Sometimes he wonders if he should remind Raven of what his hands are capable of, but there is no point, really. She was the last person he remembers that he couldn’t bring himself to kill, and so he wonders sometimes: if things had been different, if he’d made different choices after Raven, if the others had survived him, would he love them too?
No matter.
What matters is that his hands are now drawn in red and purple all over Raven’s skin, and he doesn’t mean for this to happen, he really doesn’t, but she tells him, and he listens, and she becomes so full of life and color he does it again and again; holds down her wrists or thighs, or closes his shaking fingers around her throat and squeezes, just like this, yes. If he does it exactly like this, she’ll be so enthralled by her own unbreakability she won’t even notice his tremor.
Or so he thinks.
It happens when she’s on top of him again, and she leans in for a deep kiss, her hands slipping out of his grip, and resting gently on his chest. He never learns what gives him away, but he suspects it’s something as simple as familiarity of bodies built despite his efforts to mold himself exactly how she needed. Suspects, too, that she loves him, in a very Raven way. At least it feels like love, the way she escapes his hold a minute before he crumbles under the effort of keeping it in place.
“Raven, I’m sorry,” he manages in a weak voice, and she nods, letting his hands fall limply on top of the covers. It’s not, they don’t have to say after four months of sleeping together, because he thinks she can’t take it. It’s because he can’t.
Slowly, very slowly, Raven starts rolling her hips again, and when she has her balance, she brings her right hand forward, and puts her fingers on Bellamy’s exposed throat.
He locks his eyes with hers immediately, but then the first surge of panic passes, and what’s left is just blood pumping loudly in his ears, sharp and red, and suddenly he’s not allowed to fix himself on Raven’s body anymore. He only has his own.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” she asks quietly, but doesn’t tighten her grip when he nods, frantic. If she isn’t giving, is he allowed a thing that feels good? And if he isn’t, what the fuck has he been doing here for the past four months?
“More,” he gasps, then watches her smile as she squeezes harder, as hard as he usually does, and slams her hips down, down, down, taking him in and making him arch up, a curse on his lips. “Again.”
His hands stay flat on the sheets until he comes, but two nights later, after they undress each other, hands hungry and impatient, he grabs Raven by the wrist as he lies under her, and moves her hand to his throat without hesitation, then gives her ass a light, playful slap before digging his fingers into her hips.
It’s the most loving sex they’ve ever had.