/1/vengeance is a dish best served cold

The meeting with the Grounders didn't go quite as planned. Now they're torturing Clarke, and hell hath no fury like Bellamy scorned. Set during the events of a slightly AU {1.09}.

this idea came about as a mix of "Clarke's the only medic, what if she got injured" and "what if the Grounders wanted revenge" (and bellarke of course, what do you take me for) and then it kind of took a dark turn and morphed into something that i can most definitely say is the angstiest thing to have ever graced my keyboard.

disclaimer: i have no affiliation with the CW's The 100, and if i did, i'm pretty sure i would've already been fired on grounds of unnecessarily excessive character angst. also, i swear i'm not a terrible human being. pinky-swear it.

also, let's maybe just rate this T

As he breaks out of his stupor, filmy gauze peeled back like a curtain, the first thing Bellamy notices is the smell, musty and yet somehow fresh, a strange combination he's come to associate with Earth. Fitting, seeing as it's populated by both a host of new, strangely wonderful experiences and bands of roaming savages. He breathes in the scent, savoring it, letting it clear his hazy mind, and opens his eyes.

And he could kick himself because the first thing he noticed should certainly not have been the smell. Much more relevant are the stone walls and ceiling (dirt and crumbling wood) that box him in, a rickety staircase leading up and out, the only source of light in the dim room. Or the fact that he can't move his arms or legs. That probably comes first. He's strapped down to a chair and Bellamy is almost 99.6% positive that that is not where he began the day.

He whips his head from side to side, up and down, and he catches sight of a shock of blonde that stops his confusion dead in its tracks.

Clarke.

She's lying in a heap on the floor, and the knife strapped to her thigh brings everything back in a rush of clarity that winds him as well as any blow to the head could've.

Finn's meeting with the Grounders. Clarke offering to step up as representative of their people. His own goddamn ego and refusal to relinquish the mantle. The leader of the Grounders holding a knife to her throat. The crunch of twigs underfoot behind him. And then, nothing.

And that can only mean one thing: they've been taken. He struggles against the ropes that bind his wrists with renewed effort, succeeding only in straining a muscle and chafing skin. He growls in frustration, ready to hurl a less-than-complimentary name at the wall across from him, but then he realizes that Clarke hasn't been restrained (which he admits is a little suspect, but who is he to question when the universe decides to give you lemons?). "Clarke. Clarke! Wake up!"

At first, she barely stirs, but soon she's groaning and leveraging her arms beneath her, picking herself up out of the dirt. She turns to Bellamy and narrows her eyes. "Bellamy? What's—?"

And then Clarke's eyes widen and Bellamy hears a voice like icy fingers creeping down the back of his neck, trepidation gripping him in its fetid claws. "Good. You're both up."

Through his growing unease, he tries to place the cadence of the voice, the way it seems both monotone and yet ripe with intimidation at the same time. But he can only focus on the way Clarke goes stiff all over before a woman steps out from behind him and recognition rears its head: the Grounders' leader.

Stringy brown hair, clad in a simple, unassuming tunic and white markings, expression placid, she doesn't seem like much. But Bellamy remembers the way her knife against Clarke drew blood, the way she'd smiled as something clubbed him in the back of the skull.

For a moment, he only stares at the woman, speechless. But then a man covered in furs and tattoos and a menacing amount of girth emerges from the shadows near the stairs, and Bellamy doesn't have time to shout a warning before he seizes Clarke by the elbows and pulls her toward him.

Clarke recoils immediately. "Let go! Let go of me, you mother—!" The Grounder restraining her silences her with a vicious slap to the face, the force of which knocks her to the dirt. When she lurches forward through her daze and grabs for the axe at his belt, he delivers a savage kick to her ribcage. She curls in on herself, wheezing for air, and in between her pants, Bellamy can make out one single, whispered word that hollows him, focuses his existence on the swath of blonde hair and crumbling resolve huddled on the floor in front of him: his name.

He sees red. Strains against the rope that fetters him to his chair. Tries his damndest to break free and show their captors that you don't just fuck with Clarke and get away with it. His voice starts out quiet, quivering in spite of itself, and then charges ahead and fills itself with rage and unspoken promises of violence. "No… no. No! Don't you touch her!" But his threats hold all the weight of Clarke's whispered plea.

The Grounder yanks her up by her hair and drags her to the center of the room. She digs her heels into the dirt, claws at his fists, hurls obscenities, but her attempts at escape seem feeble in the face of her swimming vision and the Grounder's air of dangerous nonchalance. He seizes one wrist, and then the other, binding them tightly in a loop of coarse rope and dangling them from the ceiling, pulling it taut until her boots barely touch the ground. He unhooks his belt from around his waist, and Bellamy sees with a growing sense of dread that it isn't just a belt: it's a whip, hewn together out of rough leather and twine.

He distantly wonders who else has had the misfortune of coming to the same realization, but then Clarke stops thrashing and kicking and begins to talk. Her voice is steady, serious, betraying almost none of her fear, and Bellamy would almost believe she was calm if he didn't know her any better, the way her eyes flick back and forth, up and down when she's anxious.

"You don't have to do this—we don't mean you any harm. If you just give us a chance we can tell you who we are, where we came from. We just want peace..!"

The Grounders' leader ignores her and turns to Bellamy. "You torture one of ours, we torture one of yours. An eye-for-an-eye. We will show you what happens to those who don't understand how things work here. As leader to your people, it is paramount that you understand the consequences of your actions." She turns to the man, who has positioned himself behind Clarke, and says simply, "Begin."

Bellamy feels his stomach drop somewhere between his knees as his eyes desperately seek Clarke's, and when he finds them, he wishes that he hadn't been so damn arrogant, that he had let her step up as leader of their people instead. Maybe then she'd be in his shoes, and he in hers.

The whip arcs down, and for one furtive moment, her eyes cloud over with a flash of panic before they're replaced with something much worse: pain. Her eyes roll back in searing hot agony, but she grinds her teeth together and holds herself still in a show of defiance, and Bellamy is absurdly proud of her before he sees the Grounder let loose another strike. He hits her again and again, and with every strike he can see Clarke's resilience, her determination, uncoiling and slithering away from her inch-by-inch. Her winces grow louder and louder and the red on the whip, darker and darker, until something snaps and she's screaming and shrinking away as far as her bonds will let her.

Bellamy feels Clarke's pain as a living thing, and his own soon entwines with hers. He shoots a venomous glare at the Grounders' leader, stoically observing the crying, shaking girl as if she is no more than a sack of meat waiting to be flayed, and snarls at her in a fit of rage and loathing. She regards him callously, her eyes unblinking as if to say, "See what happens when you defy me?" Bellamy is hurling indecipherable strings of profanities and delirious pleas (shouting her name over and over and over again) and he's aware that they're falling on deaf ears but, damn it, Clarke is in pain and helpless and if there is one thing Bellamy knows about her, it's that she hates showing weakness.

Her abuser switches arms and strikes again, and then Clarke is wailing, wailing, and Bellamy has never heard anything so horrible before. It is all he can hear, sharpened into a dagger and piercing him down to his very core, assaulting him on all sides, and it is all he can do to not start wailing himself.

The lash comes down again, jerking Clarke forward, the aftershock as she writhes in her bonds. This time, her legs give way from under her, and she slumps, supported by no more than the ropes that encircle her bloodied wrists, rubbed raw and chafing.

Bellamy thinks that surely, surely, this will be the end of it; they'll see that Clarke can handle no more, that they've broken her resolve (his and hers, both), that this is some dark, perverse side of humanity that should never, ever, be let loose again. But they don't.

The man lifts his arm again and lets it fly, the whip coiling around Clarke's torso, ripping her shirt (that shirt that she wore when she told him he wasn't a monster, that she needs him) and leaving a welt of fresh blood in its wake. This time, she only exhales sharply, her voice lost to her torment.

"Stop—stop it..! Please! I'm begging you… please, stop…" he chokes out, his voice stumbling and catching on his words. "I understand now; I'll do whatever you want. Just stop it…" Bellamy's trembling, eyes flicking back and forth between Clarke and the man, imploring him, bowing his head in supplication, all notions of pride and bravado thrown out the window. His voice cracks and wetness fills his eyes, his rage replaced with an all-consuming fear for the girl hanging in front of him.

She's just so still. And Clarke is never still. She's always ordering someone around, arguing with him, solving someone else's problems but never her own. Whether he wants to admit it or not, whenever she steps into a room, it's like she's all anyone can see, an implacable force of nature surrounded by walls of resolve and compassion and a hope that he just doesn't have the luxury to afford. He silently prays to whoever is listening that she'll get through this undamaged and whole and optimistic again, and he feels ridiculous, but damn it, all he cares about is Clarke and the soft whimpers that are making her chest rise and fall.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the Grounders' leader gesture something, and the man who is hurting Clarke—hurting Clarke—stops. He brings the whip up and licks it—actually licks it, as if this is some sort of sick parody of those Grade B horror movies Octavia always asked him to smuggle in—and drops it at his feet. He digs his fingers into Clarke's back, which Bellamy is trying to imagine isn't covered in bruises and blood and crisscrossing wounds, and sneers when she moans.

"I heard one of your men thought we looked scarier with our face paint. Maybe you will too." And he smears Clarke's blood over Bellamy's face. Bellamy gags when bile rises in his throat.

"Enough, Raffe." The Grounders' leader raises a hand, and Raffe retreats backward, wiping the rest of Clarke's blood on his pant leg and running his hand through the ends of her hanging hair as he passes.

Before Bellamy can react, the leader approaches him, bends low and whispers in his ear, her words dripping with condescension, "Hopefully you learned something today; if you value your life or the lives of your people at all, you will acquiesce when we want something. You will leave us to our devices. When we ask you to jump, you will say, 'How high?' Do you understand, boy?"

Bellamy glances at Clarke, face covered in bruises and a thick sheen of sweat, hair matted with dirt and spatters of blood, and has to bite back a retort about how all he understands is how badly he wants to tear this woman limb-from-limb and make her suffer just as badly. When he doesn't answer, the woman grabs his chin between thumb and forefinger and jerks it up. "I asked you a question, boy."

He meets her glare with his own and snarls, "I understand."

The woman flicks his face aside as if it disgusts her to have touched it and stalks away. Halfway up the cellar's stairs, she calls over her shoulder, "Better clean and dress those wounds. If she doesn't die from blood loss or shock, the infection will get her." And then she's gone.

Raffe soon takes her place and slowly, mockingly, furls the whip back around his waist. "You're lucky I'm not in charge. I take even less kindly to smug little interlopers like you. And I can think of a few different ways this could've ended." He leisurely rakes his gaze over the length of Clarke's battered body, in a decidedly vile way that sends chills down Bellamy's spine and renews his hatred of this man and all the visions of what he'll do to him when he gets free.

Raffe slides a finger down her cheek, and he smirks when she doesn't recoil in disgust, as if she hasn't just been beaten past the point of consciousness. "Till' we meet again." He unlatches a knife from his boot and kicks it over toward Bellamy's feet. And then he's gone too.

For a second that stretches into the silence (the kind of silence that accompanies complete and utter despair, that follows as you return to your tiny little home, empty and silent and yet somehow filled with the echoes of your mother's screams as she floated, or your sister's cries as she looked at you in disappointment), for that second, Bellamy just sits there, frozen: in his anger, in his grief, in his guilt, he doesn't know what. Clarke is in pain, most definitely terrified and disoriented, and it's his fault. He's the one who brought the Grounder back to camp. He's the one who tortured him. He's the one who was too weak to finish the job, eliminate any possibility of retaliation. And they had retaliated, in the worst possible way. He can't stomach what he's done any more than he can stomach the sight of the brutalized girl in front of him.

But Clarke needs him. He chokes back what he tries to pretend isn't a sob (he has to be brave for Clarke, he has to) and breaks himself out of his reverie, eying the knife on the floor. He rocks back and forth on the heel of the chair until it crashes on its side, and even though his face smashes into the ground and he can feel wetness trickling off of his nose, he twists and turns until he palms its handle. Fingers slick with sweat and concentration running in haphazard circles, he fumbles with it until he liberates his hands and slices through the knots at his ankles.

In a daze, he stumbles over to Clarke but stops short of touching her. Hand hovering in the loaded space between them, afraid that if he reaches out, she might shatter into a thousand tiny shards, each one more fragile than the next. But then he sees the blood pooling from the gash in her shirt, and he lays a tentative palm on her shoulder and shakes. And then he feels wrong, because what if he's hurting her more? But when she doesn't respond, he grows more frantic. He cuts her wrists out of their bondage and winces at the sight of their mangled skin, cut through with red and splinters.

But nothing can prepare Bellamy for what he sees next. As Clarke pitches forward, he cushions her body with his own and catches a glimpse of what's been done. What he sees makes him want to retch. What he sees is worse than Atom's body in the woods all those weeks ago. What he sees is agony, spelled out plain and clear on what was once the skin of Clarke's back. Cords of raised flesh, bloodied and bruised in a disgusting array of purples and blacks, litter her back, her shirt lacerated into tatters that barely conceal anything. Thick rivulets of crimson stream from her wounds, tumbling into one another and painting anything left undamaged in a sick sheen of blood.

Bellamy tries to tamp down his rising horror, balling the material of what remains of her shirt in his fists, lip curling up in a new bout of fury. But all he can picture is this Clarke juxtaposed next to the one who told him he wasn't a killer, who defended him in front of Jaha, who fired a rifle and beamed at him afterward. The Brave Princess.

He lowers her to the floor, props her on her side, cradles her cheeks with shaking hands (they almost envelop her entire face, has she always been this tiny?). "Clarke. Clarke! Can you hear me? Please say you can hear me…" When she doesn't answer, he traces a trembling line over the bruise on her chin, feeling about as rubbed raw and vulnerable as he's ever felt before. He just isn't equipped to deal with anything remotely like this, overcome with guilt and self-loathing as he is. "I can't do this without you…"

He hangs his head and grinds his knuckles into the dirt, and then all of a sudden, Clarke is moving, gasping for air and very nearly convulsing. Her eyelids flutter open, and all at once, she's flailing away from him and then reeling forward as the mass of ruined skin on her back hits her full force. Her pupils twitch back and forth, rapidly adjusting and dilating in the cellar's dim light, and her hand clamps around his wrist like a vice.

"I—where?" Her gaze finally settles on Bellamy and colors with recognition. She sucks in a breath as her mouth curves into a trembling O. "A—are… you hurt?"

"What? Am I—?" He lifts his fingers to his temple, and they come away red. "I'm fine. This isn't only mine, it's—" He hesitates. Scarier with our face paint, maybe you will too. "It doesn't matter. Clarke… god, I'm sorry. I couldn't stop them. I tried, but I couldn't—"

She shudders as another wave of pain rips through her, but she tightens her grip on his arm in spite of herself. "Bellamy… not… your fault." God, she's comforting him. She's comforting him, and he's just sitting here like an asshole, basking in it when she's bleeding out on the floor and whimpering and shaking and in so much pain she can't even see straight. It's all too much.

"Stop worrying about me!" he yells, wincing when she flinches back. "Clarke, it's bad. You've lost a lot of blood and I'm not a medic like you. I'm just some guy and I've never dressed a wound like this before and we don't have anything—"

"… camp… now…" she murmurs, cutting him off. "… supplies…"

Even semi-conscious, she's more alert than he is (as she always has been, hasn't she?), and Bellamy feels ridiculously grateful that she's still aware enough to order him around. He's no dashing hero, medical genius, survivalist extraordinaire, but he'll make sure this exasperating, infuriating girl comes out of this in one piece if it kills him. And if he can't keep calm in the process, he sure as hell has to keep strong. He makes a deliberate effort to shove aside his guilt, his anger—he'll deal with those later—and braces her against his side, shrugging his jacket over her shoulders. He gently lifts her onto his back, trying to not cringe and jostle her further when she moans and feebly digs her nails into his chest.

He swallows the stutter in his throat and moves his feet forward, one after another: left, right, left, right. "Clarke, I'm going to take us back to camp now, but you have to stay awake no matter what. No passing out on me because I'm not above dropping you in that Loch Ness-infested river Octavia was telling me about. Or doodling a monocle or some handlebars on your face; they'd go nicely with that shiny, new bruise of yours I think."

He tries to ignore the silent tears he feels slinking down his neck, the blood wetting his shirt. Only adrenaline carries him up the stairs and out into the forest, the sunset backlighting the trees in shades of red and violet that seem to mock him, make him want to turn away and bury his face in his hands. But, instead, he presses on, stumbling in the direction his gut tells him is home.

"If you don't pull through this, I don't know who's going to nag me and Spacewalker all the time. And you still need to face your Mother. You can't expect just me to face my demons; that's not fair. When we get back and you're feeling better, I'm going to lock you in the Comms Tent until you two work things out, okay? So you need to get through this… okay?"

He's babbling, but Clarke is breathing softly into his ear, mumbling an occasional assent, and for now, he's hopeful. And that's enough.

{fin.}