Warnings: deeply nerdy titles, figurative language, character angst, friendship feels.

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Prologue - Study

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The first night on Earth, Bellamy dreams of fire.

He stands beside the drop ship, both feet planted into the pressure-smashed dirt with one hand on the metal wall of the vessel. Yellow flames, intangible the way that dreams can be sometimes, lick at his feet. They curl over his ankles as he watches his shoes smoke.

Bellamy's initial reaction is detached curiosity. He admires the variety of color when orange flickers into blue, then white, then back to yellow. Throughout human history, flame has been the enemy of sailors, the bane of the sea or the sky. Fire eats oxygen, the most precious resource on the Ark. He'd seen videos in the common room, and teachers had lit small flames in his science courses; there was once even a cafeteria fire on his level that sent two girl to Medical for a week. But until a bunch of adolescents built bonfires around the fallen remains the vessel that abandoned them, Bellamy had never reached out to feel the heat in the air itself.

Now he sees it climb the soles of his boot, up to his socks and the cuffs of his trousers. It feels like nothing, illusory and flat, until the physics of Bellamy's dream shift and all at once it feels like everything.

Heat bites into the skin of his calves. Hot air fills his lungs and a crash of panic overwhelms him. Bellamy pounds on the side of the drop ship, then runs to circle it and bangs on the steel door. "Let me in! Fuck, fuck, let me in! Please!"

As his clothes smoke in little puffs of cotton and chemicals, he knows it can't be a dream. Not when his eyes pinch from the fumes and he can smell his own hairs burning. Fire climbs up the nearest trees, never mind that they were wet with dew just minutes before. Everywhere he looks the forest burns, and Bellamy expects to faint from the pain. Beneath his hands, the ship stands like a cool steel box, salvation blocking him out.

They're all inside, ninety-eight teenage criminals including his sister, but Bellamy is out here and he is going to die.

"Miller!" he screams. "Murphy, let me in or I swear to god I'll twist your necks myself! Octavia!"

Bellamy throws his weight against the hollow metal: bang, bang, bang. It won't open. The ramp's not going to drop for a murderer. Not for a liar and a fake. But if someone hears him maybe there's a chance, maybe—

"Atom! John! Anyone, please! Octavia, help me! OCTAVIA!"

As he crams his fingernails into the seam of the crash door, paint begins peeling off the call letters that decorate the pod. It bubbles in the heat, rises, and splits to bubble again in wide circles. Smoke burns his eyelashes and blots out the trees. By the time Bellamy's legs collapse and he falls against the exterior landing equipment, his jacket is already on fire. His fingers are burning too, and fire creeps up to his chest where it sears his shoulder like a brand. The clean air of Earth is a dream betrayed, but he opens his lungs to scream—to beg—one final time.

"CLARKE!"

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1 - Chiaroscuro

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So far, night on Earth is warm and grossly humid, like someone fell asleep at the life support station for the whole planet. There are insects everywhere, and the only thing to lie down on are ferns and rocks, both of which have more insects underneath. Most of the kids pile back into the drop ship the first night, but Bellamy sets himself up with a tent made from scraps of the parachute tarp, and he doesn't sleep alone. After the fires are stamped out, the atmosphere is alien and quiet. With no hum of engines or creak of flexing metal, all the normal markers of time are gone. If a cricket chirps there's no discernible pattern in it, nothing to count the slow minutes by. They're strangers in a foreign land, with their only keepers the trees and the wind.

Outside the ship, a breeze knocks down part of his slap-dash tent, making the ends flap together. A re-purposed seat buckle swings against a piece of stripped sheet metal: bang, bang, bang.

Bellamy's on his feet with his arms swinging before he even realizes he's awake.

The world behind his eyelids is still painted with yellow and orange glows. He almost stumbles into his bedmate as he swipes imaginary charred skin off his chest. Aster, journeyman astronomer turned pill thief, twists in her makeshift bed and snaps at him to go back to sleep. Panting, Bellamy mouths the numbers from one to ten and bends at the waist. His sister's childish voice sings along with him to take stock: Head, shoulders, knees, and toes! Knees and toes!

At least his toes haven't melted off.

"Damn," he breathes, as his body acclimates to the balmy night in place of the dream's stabbing heat. He touches the corner of his neck, right where it meets his collar bone and shoulder. The skin under his fingertips doesn't feel broken, but it's warm, and a little itchy.

"Fucking spiders," he growls to the darkness, because who doesn't appreciate getting bitten by some toxic earth bug in their sleep? Reminding himself that potential death by poison is better than certain by space vacuum, Bellamy reaches up to the buckle that's still knocking into the metal half of the tent. He reattaches it, then drops down to slide under the tarp bedsheet. He slings an arm over Aster's waist, trying to tug her back up against him, but she moans and rolls away. With one arm pillowed under his head, he sighs and stares at the curve of her silhouette until he can't hear the crickets anymore.

When he wakes a second time the sun is out, and Clarke dares him to help look for Jasper. Her goading eyes make his stomach twist, but an opportunity can only become a victory if you take it, so Bellamy summons Murphy to march along after the prince and princess of the Ark. He doesn't think twice about the dream, and the itch on his shoulder becomes just another smear of dirt.

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"What the hell is that?"

Octavia's voice is all the warning he has before she pushes his head back, tugs his shirt down, and jabs him in the right shoulder with a calloused finger. They're alone in the lower level of the drop ship, and Bellamy's been in here an hour trying to find something they can make into a needle.

"What?" he asks, craning his neck to see what she's fixated on. The angle is enough for his chin to obscure his line of sight, but there does seem to be a dark purplish color near the periphery. He almost shoves her hand off, but the poking isn't that bad, and after days of fierce argument it's nice to have his sister's attention.

"Right here." She jabs him several times more to drive the point home. If she keeps at it, she'll give him another bruise to add to the extensive collection Earth has already gifted him with. Bellamy doesn't remember her being aggressive before the Sky Box, but he's still getting to know this Octavia.

She presses, "Does this hurt?"

"Not really."

Octavia crosses her arms, leaning back on her heels. Her gaze fixes firmly on his face, brow pulling together exactly the way their mother's used to do when she was onto something. In the late afternoon glow coming through the small windows she looks familiar and new all at once.

"So you're not injured? You didn't run into a branch or anything?"

He straightens his shirt again and leans against one of the remaining drop seats. "No, O, I didn't run into a fucking branch. Why do you…?"

Bellamy trails off, frowning as he remembers the spider bite that first night. It wasn't that much of a bite if he never had any swelling from it, and the itching had stopped almost as soon as it began. The skin hadn't even been broken. All he has left is a dark blotch under the surface that Aster assured him was barely visible.

Yet here Octavia stands, with a completely different explanation practically jumping off her tongue.

He reads her face, because it's so easy for him, and when she begins to smile he throws his hands up. They're trembling a little when he says, "No."

"Bell."

"No."

"Bellamy," Octavia drawls, keeping her voice melodramatically low. Suppressed excitement creeps into her tone, and it makes him a little ill when she declares, "That's a soul mark."

He barks out a laugh that isn't much of a laugh at all.

"Yeah, that makes perfect sense." He pushes off the wall and looks at anything but her. "Who's my magical partner supposed to be, a grounder? 'Cause I've met every person in camp and I guarantee it's no one here. It's just a bruise, O. Don't make a big deal of it."

She folds her arms, standing taller. Earth has already begun lifting her up, strengthening his baby sister in a way life on the Ark never could. "How long has it been there?"

"How should I know, I can't see it," Bellamy retorts. "Anyway it's probably a reaction to a bug bite. Or a bruise. We both know that's a lot more likely than divine intervention."

"You're not even allergic to anything, Bell." When he shrugs, Octavia sighs and tucks her hair behind her ears. She sticks her chin out and paces across the cold floor, giving him a sideways glance every few steps. "Okay, big brother. Just keep an eye on it, alright? I don't wanna lose you to mutant earth bugs. Or internal injuries."

"You won't," he promises, forcing his face to make all the right motions for a smile. "Blakes are tough. We heal quick."

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The bruise doesn't heal in the next day, or even the next week. It gets big enough and dark enough that Miller spots it underneath his shirt collar when they're bent over a pile of guns from the bunker, and that's about that for Bellamy's attempt at discretion.

"It's like the size of a belt buckle, kinda blackish brown," Miller reports, unrelentingly interested despite the human pile of glares sitting across from him. "You sure you can't see it?"

Pulling his mouth to one side, Bellamy picks up a spare bullet from his stack. Hefting it in his palm, he makes a show of examining the base, then tosses it right at Miller's forehead. The younger man snaps "Hey!" but Bellamy is already loading the next round.

"You could have blinded me, asshole."

"Probably help you see better if I did."

Miller flashes Bellamy the middle finger, and continues undaunted. "I'm just saying, your sister might be onto something. It doesn't look like a bruise."

Bellamy yanks the magazine out of the next automatic rifle, and grabs a handful of sand from the collected supply at their feet. He vigorously rubs the grains over the dark gunmetal until the packing grease falls away in wet clumps. As his palms grind into the sharp grooves of the weapon, he throws out the first defense that comes to mind, weak as it is.

"Well I'd give my opinion, but I loaned my vanity mirror to one of the girls. Wait, no—that was sarcasm. We don't have mirrors."

"Your soulmate's in for a real fun time."

Aurora Blake had taught her son the basics of deflection at a young age: when cornered, attack, attack, attack. "How do I know it's not you?" he counters. "Holding out on me, Nathan?"

Miller brushes this off like a bad smell in the air. "I spend enough time with you already. Maybe it's Finn. There's a shit-ton of tension and rivalry that you both wanna pretend doesn't exist." For a second he stops loading his weapon and tilts his head, eyes finding Bellamy from under his beanie. He stares at his friend across the gun pile, then adds, "Of course, he'd have to climb out of Clarke's ass long enough to notice."

That volley lands on its intended target, and Bellamy has to actually flex his fingers to keep from pinching his fingernails into his skin. He likes Miller, and he trusts Miller, but he also kind of hates him sometimes. Too many people have thought they could brush off the Sergeant's delinquent son as a mere idiot or bully, but Nathan got away with stealing for a long, long time before they caught him.

"First of all," Bellamy says to fill the air, jamming the last bullet into his chamber and setting the weapon on the finished stack, "Fuck you and all your future children. Second of all, it's not a mark. I think I would know before anyone else."

Miller snorts, and as if Bellamy hadn't spoken at all, speculates aloud: "I bet it comes out shaped like a semi-automatic. Or that hatchet you take everywhere."

"Seriously man," Bellamy snaps as he lumbers to his feet. "It's just a bruise. What you're talking about, it's not gonna happen. Not right now, probably not ever. We don't all get a freebie from the universe; most of us just get fucked on. So please... drop it."

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Turns out it's easy not to think about mysterious bruises when the whole goddamn planet wants to kill you. They've got weapons and radio communication now, but leadership is a tug of war that never ends. Every conflict goes down the same: Bellamy pulls on one end, Clarke pulls on the other, and just when they might reach a compromise Spacewalker trips them both up. Run, panic, duck; repeat.

He doesn't worry about the thing on his neck for nearly a week, and only then because Raven stalks into his tent and takes her shirt off. After losing Roma he'd taken to sleeping on his own, but Reyes wears gorgeous-angry like a second skin, and fuck it, they could all die tomorrow.

He's kissing a path up her throat when she freezes, spine rigid under his warm hands. "What?" he croaks. He can't properly think with her legs around him, but Bellamy is sure things were going alright ten seconds ago.

The pretty, bitter mechanic scrapes a finger from his neck to his shoulder, one sinuous line. When she speaks it's like a logistics report. "Your skin is darker right here, above the shoulder. Looks...weird. Abnormal."

Fucking scientists.

With no warning she rears back, grabbing his hair roughly to look him in the eye. "Is it a rash?" The way her fingers dig into his scalp is distractingly hot, and a fifth variation on this same stupid conversation is the last thing he wants to deal with.

"It's a birthmark," Bellamy says, letting his voice drop and his eyebrows climb up his brow. "Problem?"

Raven meets his flat gaze for a long time, then shakes her head once. "No," she says, and rolls her pelvis deeper into his lap. He inhales, because holy shit that feels good. They're still wearing underwear, something Bellamy means to fix ASAP. She smirks, bites his lip, and whispers, "No problem."

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Bellamy hates fire. He's never articulated to another person how fucking intensely he hates fire—because it's pretty obnoxious to disparage the only thing keeping them alive and fed—but he really, to the depths of his every cell, hates fire.

Starting fires was illegal on the Ark, and largely unnecessary besides. On Earth, flame is the light in the darkness and the secret to drinkable water. It's the explosion on the bridge, the combustion in the barrel of the gun, and the plan that's supposed to save them all. This was the prize that got Prometheus strung up on an altar for the eagles to pick at, and when the dropship door closes on Clarke's crying expression, he knows fire will be the last thing he sees before the end.

Bellamy drags his eyes from the ship long enough to duck the grounder captain's mace, and that's when Spacewalker jumps on the warrior with a face full of violence. He knocks the man to one side long enough to grab Bellamy by the arm.

"COME ON!" It's one of the most badass things Bellamy has ever seen in his life.

They scramble over rocks, shrubs, and bodies. They're nearly at the edge of the burn zone when he gets a good look at Finn; the guy's perpetual handsomeness loses some of its shine with bloody hair and clothes covered in mire. He wonders how much he's going to owe him after this, then remembers that this level of petty bullshit thinking is what got them all here in the first place.

"Watch it!" Bellamy shouts, pushing Finn to the left as a javelin soars between them. He spins in the mud and slips, but the boy pulls on his shoulder until the cave entrance is in sight. How long has it been, twenty seconds? A minute?

"The ship," he starts to warn, but his words are severed as a blast sends them both tumbling into a rock crevasse. Bellamy can't breathe, can't scream, can't even think under the heat. The nightmare of his first night comes back in agonized familiarity, and his right shoulder feels like someone's trying to stab him with a slow arrowhead. There's a glimpse of burning trees before blood runs into his eyes, then into his mouth. He's half considering if his face is broken when darkness swallows the world entirely.

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If being beaten and almost burned alive isn't enough, getting arrested puts the crown jewel on Bellamy's day.

It might even be the day after, but what with losing consciousness for a portion in the middle it seems pointless to harp on details. The so-called 'Chancellor' Kane has all three tattered young men dragged into the makeshift brig, then asks questions he doesn't want the answers to. It's a sweet promotion for someone who executed families on his free time. With his hands tied behind his back, Bellamy tries to explain the situation on the ground, Finn shifts in place like a nervous animal, and Murphy folds himself into a sullen pile in the corner.

After Kane swans off to waste bullets somewhere, Doctor Abby Griffin makes a surreptitious appearance. She doesn't look much like her daughter, but there's a familiar quality to her confidence that lures a person in. By the time she begs them to hunt down Clarke, they're all willing and ready to sign up. If it gets him outside to find their friends, Bellamy will take any guns the doctor can part with.

"Meet at the west end of camp in thirty minutes," she orders. "On your way, stop by Medical and give them my name. Someone needs to make sure you don't bleed out before you find my daughter."

The medical triage zone is easy to locate if one follows the sound of loud complaints. Bellamy cuts in front with Abby's name, and he feels a sick when he passes a kid with blood on her face. He'd rather go back in line and push the little girl forward, but every minute Clarke and the others are out there is another minute they could be held under a grounder's knife. A nurse gestures Bellamy into a corner of the bustling room and slides a curtain across for privacy.

"I'm Ming-Na, N. P. Start by taking off your shirt, and use the towel by the canteen to wipe down the best you can. I want to see what your ribs look like. You'll need a few stitches for that cheek. God knows what else is going on under those rags. Come on, shirt! I don't have all day."

He peels his top and drops it on the stool near Ming-Na, then picks up the towel and water canteen left on one of the chairs. The fabric is beige, with a small stain in the top corner that's been diligently washed to fading. Someone must've put it on the stool just before the nurse practitioner called for her patient, and as this thought ruminates Bellamy's gaze goes from the cotton, to the canteen, to the tarp walls strung up on metal grommets. Steel walls of the Ark enclose three sides of the general space, and beyond the curtain what could be a hundred voices trade volleys about fluid loss. The small triage zone smells like blood and antiseptic. Bellamy hasn't smelled antiseptic in almost a month. He hasn't stood beneath a real ceiling in—in—

"I think I'm gonna be sick."

The nurse looks up from her tools to see his body sway, and Bellamy could swear that she moves faster than the giant cat that once tried to kill him.

"No wait, wait a second!"

Ming-Na shoves a bucket into his arms just in time for Bellamy to lose a stomach's worth of bile. Little bits of dark stuff float in the yellow mess, and he wonders if it's ash or something worse. Coughing, he winds up with his ass in the chair and the bucket tucked into his grip like a life-preserver.

"Hey, come on now," the woman tries, not without kindness. She wets a second cloth with the canteen, sprays it with a sharp-smelling mist, and then drips more water on his face to clear the blood. "Put the bucket down, you'll be fine now that it's done. Head back, that's it."

He obliges, mostly because her voice is gentle this time. Ming-Na hums while she plucks pieces of earth-knows-what out of his facial abrasions, and he tries to discreetly wipe down his arms and chest without jostling her. He thinks about Clarke while she works, remembering a different pair of hands wringing blood out of bandages. Blue eyes looked at him from across Jasper's body, then across Finn's, and they never once faltered.

"Is this gonna take a while?" he asks through his teeth. "Doctor Griffin needs me at the gate as soon as you clear me."

"Almost done," she answers, pushing the needle through his skin. "Your torso looks alright, just a few contusions that you won't enjoy tomorrow. I'm gonna assume you'd tell me if your legs were in trouble. Looks like your head got the worst of it, so sit still. We gotta stitch you up right the first time, if you don't want half your cheek to fall off when you see your soulmate."

Of all the sentences Bellamy was prepared to hear, this one strikes the breath out of him.

"What?"

"This," she says with a smile, and taps the exact fucking spot Octavia had noticed ages ago. It no longer burns; he hasn't even felt it ache in hours. "Coming along nicely. Of course what we know about the marks is mostly guesswork and proteins, but once they start, they always finish."

Ming-Na ties a small knot against his skin and pulls it tight, snipping off the remaining thread as she speaks. The Ark has fallen, he's sitting on a stool in a triage bay, and some nurse just changed his life as if she were changing a bandage.

His eyes slip shut, and Bellamy finally lets it all go.

"Okay," he breathes. "Okay." He wipes the sweat from his palms against his pants—a fruitless endeavor, they're disgusting—and tries to think it through. There have to be steps. There's got to be a process. When your entire future happiness is wrapped up in a single person, forever, there has to be a process.

"How long do I have before it settles?"

She hums, and puts her tweezers in her tool basket. "I couldn't say."

Bellamy tries a different question: "What if I don't know who the other person is?"

The nurse practitioner steps back and hands him his shirt. It's almost too filthy to wear again, but he puts it on without complaint. "Can't say that either," she continues. "I take it this the first you've talked about it? Showing off is a classic approach, but no one's gonna force you to deal with it. We had a private registry on the Ark, but... well, we're not on the Ark, are we."

"No," Bellamy agrees as he pushes his sleeves into his cut-up jacket. "We definitely aren't."

With a final nod, Ming-Na makes a notation on her medical requisition tablet and hands it over for him to sign. Pushing his tongue into the roof of his mouth—because of course these people are still carrying around tablets like it's nothing—Bellamy wraps his hand around the stylus and scratches his name. With concentration, the green pixelated signature is only a little shaky.

The nurse glances his way. "What do you think it's going to look like?"

Thinking how minutes ago she'd wiped his face when he was shaking his guts and tears into a bucket, he shrugs and pushes the tablet back at her. "Missile. Stray dog. Maybe a broken crook and flail."

Ming-Na, N. P., smiles dryly as she pulls back the curtain to her stall. "Believe it or not, facetiousness is a good sign for the healing process. Drink some water before you collapse."

She shouts "Next!" as he pushes through the line and back out of the remnant building, into the sunlight. Moving westward, Bellamy keeps his head down and tries not to call attention to himself. When he sees Finn, Murphy, and Sterling loitering by a break in the fence, he lets out a deep breath. His people are out there, lost in the dark and tangled wood, and it's past time to bring them home.

Eyes on the search party waiting for him, Bellamy reaches up one hand to rub the corner of his neck, then starts to run.

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The whirlwind nightmare of Earth comes around again as the first search party fractures. Finn executes a grounder, then they lose Sterling because Bellamy waits too long to take a stand. He finds Octavia, brokenhearted but alive, and suddenly color is returned to the world.

He imagines that taking that first step toward camp without their friends—without Clarke—is going to be difficult, but once he puts his arm over Mel's shoulder, it's somehow the easiest decision he's made in weeks. Bellamy repeats it in his head with each rough mile: this is what she would have done. Save the ones you can, make a choice and don't look back.

And maybe that's a fairy tale, false logic to justify abandoning the quest, but fuck if it is. Clarke has trusted him for so long; it's about time he trust himself.

So Bellamy does—he walks home with Mel at his side, Monroe up front, and his sister guarding his back. It's hard not to believe he's done something right when the day ends with another miracle: Clarke and Octavia sleeping on either side of the campfire. On last watch, Bellamy chews a piece of wheat ration as his attention drifts from one young woman to the other, then back again. Octavia seems mostly whole, apart from a sporadic limp that she tries her best to hide. Her long hair is partially tied back into a braid, and tucked under her arm is a sword of all things, but his sister is alive. Probably not safe, definitely not happy, but alive.

The fire crackles, making a strange music in time with the crickets. Fucking crickets still exist. He'd read about them in novels here and there, but no one ever talked about how loud they are, how sometimes they hop on you in the middle of a conversation, and how the night movements of a thousand other creatures hide under their blanket of sound. Earth is so full of life, it's maddening to think he almost lost the two right in front of him.

Bellamy runs a hand over his neck and shoulder, telling himself it's just to stretch. Beside the fire, Clarke opens her eyes. Her hair spills over her arms, and her body is half-curled against the evening chill, but she smiles at him.

This time, Bellamy doesn't look away.

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The sun is halfway gone when the grounders finally dispose of the body. From a long distance Bellamy sees them peel it down from the post, just a wet sack of gore and bone. Had things gone any worse, Raven would be the corpse getting carried away in disgrace. Three days in, and the alliance is already too fucking expensive. How many citizens will they have to give up to torture and death to get hold of this mythical army?

It's a question Clarke might know the answer to, better than the rest of them at least. Bellamy can watch her from where he stands: she's over by the well with Kane and that Trigedakru healer who almost poisoned Lincoln. The three of them hover like a conspiracy of magpies outside Lexa's war room, feathers ruffled and heads shaking.

Glad to look at something other than a corpse, Bellamy tries predict their conversation by expression and body language. It isn't difficult; Kane shakes his head periodically, eyes narrowing just like they did back when Bellamy served as a cadet. Nyko frowns at both of them in a way that's more sad than admonishing, while Clarke keeps stretching her neck and pushing back her shoulders like she's trying to resettle the weight of the world. Bellamy sympathizes.

"Stop rubbing your neck," a voice scolds behind him, and he turns as Raven drops to sit on a large crate by his left. With two crutches and a torso of brown cloth, she looks like she's been stitched up again, probably the twentieth time in as many days. She gives him a sardonic once-over. "People will think it's a tell."

Shifting his weight, Bellamy snorts. "I've been lying every day since I was five; I don't have any tells."

"Well, it sure as shit isn't a birthmark."

"God," he mutters to the sky, and lets out a dry laugh. Can he go one fucking day? Just one?

"Okay, Raven," he says after pretending to consider it longer than he really did. "You're wounded, so I'll give you a freebie. Let's hear it."

She folds her hands in her lap, sitting upright. For the casually graceful girl he's come to know, it's odd to see movement measured and meted out so gingerly. First the leg brace, now her ribs; Earth has been unkind to Raven Reyes. The corners of her cheeks are still wet from tears and her face is blotchy, but she commits fully to this opportunity for distraction.

"Does it hurt?"

"Sometimes."

"What is it shaped like?"

"Nothing so far."

She inclines her head, big brown eyes on him like an owl to a mouse. "Do you know who—"

"No," Bellamy interrupts. He looks back at the trio by the well. Kane is gesturing with his hands while Clarke nods her head. She looks tired. "I don't know, I don't think, and I don't really care."

"You ought to," says Raven lowly. "Not everyone gets what you're getting. In theory we're all supposed to have someone, but life doesn't shake out that way sometimes."

"If this is the part where you tell me I'm lucky, I swear I will punch you. You won't be the first injured person I've beaten up."

"You are lucky," Raven snaps, and there's enough malice in it to make his head swing back around. She draws two deep breaths, then continues in a slower voice. "I thought Finn would be my soulmate. I used to wake up and check myself in the mirror, desperate to find that smudge of something new under the skin. When he went into the Sky Box for me, I thought that would be enough to trigger it. He loved me so much that he saved my life."

Her hand falls to the necklace she still wears, a delicate bird with lifted wings.

"But he's not my soulmate," she continues. "He's not Clarke's either, or anyone's. If Finn had a soulmate, she'll be alone now for the rest of her life, and never know how come. Always wondering if he got lost along the way."

Even from a sitting head height, Raven's glare makes him feel like a child. "Be sorry for that girl, Bellamy, but don't be sorry for yourself."

After a minute, he drops the staring contest and coughs into his elbow. "Shit, you're maudlin lately."

"You wanna trade?" Trade lives, trade injuries, trade the whole fucking basket.

"No," Bellamy concedes, then screws the top off his canteen to offer it to her. She tosses her head back for a long swig as he adds, "We both know I'd be a crappy tech."

"You flunked Chemistry, didn't you?" Her smile is small, but it's there.

He takes the water back and mumbles, "I got an A in Calculus," as if that should make up for it.

"Weak," says Raven, and pokes him with her crutch.

.

Bellamy may have taken the same four years of Earth Skills as anyone else on the Ark, but there's no textbook in existence that can accurately prepare one for the experience of fog.

Calling it gloom, water vapor, or even a miasma does little to convey the fundamental alienation of walking through a forest buried in the dawn fog bank. The sun isn't quite up, but ambient light from behind Mount Weather turns everything to a dull gray. Per Indra's advice, they'd left camp in the black hours of morning and cut away from any known paths. It was clear for a while, patches of starlight guiding them between the treetops, but no matter how far or fast you run, tomorrow always comes.

And with the shreds of gray light comes the fog.

As Bellamy reaches out his hand to slide along the trunk of a birch, the tips of his fingers are blurry in the haze. Everywhere he touches, delicate peels of white bark slough off, leaving a dark wood underneath. Ahead of him, Lincoln floats in and out of sight—one more ghost among the trees.

Water beads on Bellamy's forehead in cold droplets as they hike, then slides down his skin into the borrowed Trigedakru gear. It can't be topping more than fifteen Celsius out here, yet the humidity has him sweating into his fur-lined armor. Hopefully the mist will hide the two of them as effectively as it hides everything else, but he's not sorry to have the strips of iron and steel blocking his arms from Reaper arrows.

He'd swear that the whole get-up weighs a fuck ton more than it did when this trek began.

"We'll be out of the fog soon," Lincoln says, and Bellamy jerks his head to the left in surprise. The guy is so goddamn creepy, sometimes. Side by side, they step over ferns and between rocks as they make their way toward the ridge. The dawn gloom is burning slowly to daylight, and the sun barely crests the mountaintop when Bellamy screams.

His knees hit the dirt, and the horizon reels as he forcibly chokes down another howl. They can't afford to be caught this soon. Bellamy clings to that thought as his consciousness spins and his balance abandons him. Something is ripping through his shoulder like a gunshot, and he hopes they aren't under attack because he can't see past the immense wave of agony. Over the cacophony in his ears, Lincoln shouts a warning, and Bellamy thinks he might have grabbed his elbow, but he shoves the other man's hands away and crouches. He holds his right shoulder as tight as he's held onto anything in his life, fingers pressing into his flesh to stave off the pain.

He's dying, he must be dying. He can see fire behind his eyelids, then the fire evaporates and a new terror replaces it: water. More water than he's ever drank before, more than his body can endure. Did he swallow a river god? Did he step right when he should have stepped left?

The world is so upside down that his next thought is how unfair it is that he didn't even make it to the riddle test.

Liquid fills his lungs till he can't breathe, and yeah, okay, this is how the story ends. Bellamy Blake is gonna drown in the middle of the woods, dressed like a Reaper and choking on nothing.

"—have to push through it," Lincoln hisses, arms wrapped around him to keep Bellamy upright, and then—like a door being slammed shut—it's all gone. The water in his throat vanishes and the lightning in his shoulder recedes to pin prick, and finally nothing.

He sucks down air in two great heaves, then brings his eyes up to see the grounder's undaunted gaze.

"It's over now," says Lincoln. He still grips Bellamy's waist and head, keeping him from choking on his own tongue maybe, but when their eyes meet he gingerly lets go. "Time to stand up. Time to leave."

"What was that?" Bellamy's mouth is dry but he forces the question out. Two fumbling steps and he's on his feet again. "What the hell happened to me?"

"Dawn," Lincoln replies, and it's the last thing he says for hours.

.

It takes both of them to drag Lovejoy's body into the anteroom behind the harvest chambers.

To Bellamy's surprise, Maya begins the unpleasant task of stripping the guard without being asked, separating the body armor from the fabric like she's dismantling a bomb. It gives Bellamy a chance to wipe his face and neck at a wash station by one of the tool cabinets. In theory, bathing should make him feel human again. In the dim blue light of the medical suite, knowing he just took someone's life with his own fingers, it doesn't. He shakes his hands out, then his hair, and picks up the dead man's slacks. He gets those on, then goes for the rest.

"Oh!"

His head jerks up, but it's only Maya looking at him, a vein of wonder threading her voice despite the macabre scene at their feet. She sounds like the teenager she probably still is when she whispers, "You have an angel mark."

Arms now partially rolled up in the guard's dress shirt, Bellamy freezes. There's no hint from Maya's curious tone that it's anything but what she says it is. He had, in the horror of the last three days, actually forgotten about the thing.

She bites her lip and sighs, her gaze still on his skin. "I don't have one. Most of us never do."

A retort flirts on the tip of his tongue: maybe if they stopped slaughtering their neighbors they wouldn't have that little problem. But Maya has been brave beyond anything he could have hoped for, and Bellamy doesn't have it in him to be cruel to a girl who just helped kill someone to save his life.

"Huh," he murmurs, "I guess it finally settled." If he cranes his head he can almost make something out—the edge of a distinct line. Not a spider bite then, and not a bruise: just the rest of his whole goddamn life packaged and stamped right where he can't see it. "What does it look like?"

She lifts her gaze and opens her mouth to speak, but after a moment she closes it again. Bellamy retreats a step, and suddenly wants nothing more than to reach back in time and stifle the question. Here they stand with a dead person's uniform and nearly a hundred prisoners just through the door; what could he possibly expect?

Maya surprises him, again, when she puts her hand on his arm. He gulps, the taste of blood still buried beneath his tongue, but she meets his eyes and her tone is wistful.

"It's beautiful."

Bellamy's mouth drops, and he tries to align that description with what he knows has to be true. Maybe she's being kind, or romantic. For a group of people who rarely get soulmate marks, any sort of design has got to be fascinating.

Maya's hand lifts from his elbow, and she ducks her head so that her hair falls like a curtain when she adds, "It belongs in the sun. Like… like all of you."

"Right," he swallows. "Okay."

"Do you want to see it?" She turns in place, looking for an adequately reflective surface among the ancient medical equipment, but halts when she her eyes land on the body.

Yanking the man's shirt the rest of the way over his shoulders, Bellamy gives her a flat refusal. They don't have any more time to waste on this as it is. He can't be here when someone comes to relieve Lovejoy, and Maya's going to be in as much danger as himself soon enough. He leans over to snag the bullet-proof vest, then buckles it over the uniform shirt. It fits poorly: tight across the top and loose in the back. The hat is a vanity prop on a soldier who spends every day hiding from the sun, but they all wear them so Bellamy gets stuck with it as well.

From the blood equipment to their soft, undamaged clothing, there's so much that's fucked up in this place. The Mountain Men are frighteningly oblivious, living in anticipation of a day that will never come. At least, not after Clarke turns up on their doorstep with her army.

When he finishes tying the laces of his boot, Bellamy glances at his new ally and draws on years of faking confidence under stress. "Alright Maya," he asks, "Where do we put the body?"

.

The air on Level 1 is flat and cold. It deadens the sound of Bellamy's footsteps as he rounds a corner and leans, panting, against a wall. At this point the surface is an expanse of unfinished rock, nothing as pristine as the corridors upstairs. Little points of stone dig into his arm, but there's no one shooting at him right now, so he takes a breather.

Monty and Jasper stayed back in the harvest chamber with Maya, but they'll be coming up behind him in a minute. It wasn't hard to figure out where the prisoners had vanished to, but the last thing Bellamy would choose is to risk the front gate. If they're even a little bit lucky, someone'll still be waiting at the reaper door. If they're more than a little lucky, it'll be Clarke with her battalion of guns and swords. Bellamy would like to believe she'll be there to save them all, even tries to envision it, but it's a tough picture to paint after seeing row upon row of empty cages.

Someone already rescued the grounders, and he'd bet his last bullet that it wasn't anyone on his side.

Running a hand through his hair, Bellamy heaves down several breaths. Bracing himself, he closes his eyes for a few precious seconds. It's stupid and maybe he'll get shot, but he's never been this tired before. Catching sleep in air ducts and supply closets between inspections worked adequately for a few days, but everything went to fuckshit after the gas explosion, and he's been on his feet ever since.

"Come on Clarke," he whispers from his place in the cavernous hallway. "Now would be a great time to save the world."

A river of cold snakes down the side of his neck, and Bellamy's eyes pop open. By pure habit his right hand flies to the familiar spot, and he lurches to his proper balance, gun in his other hand. Jasper and Monty's voices echo back the way he came, so Bellamy straightens up and looks down the opposite direction. It's fifty feet to the Reaper door, and death or salvation beyond it.

He'd like to see the sun again, and his sister. If he's being honest, he'd really fucking like to see Clarke too. Sucking his breath, Bellamy raises his weapon and steps out of his corner. He swings it both ways, sees the way is clear, then sprints toward the final door. He puts his hand on the metal then leaps backward as a gunshot clangs on the other side.

Panting, rifle up, Bellamy waits. The mark on his neck and shoulder throbs now, its chill replaced with tremors. A buzzing like electricity runs up his neck muscles and rings in his hears, making his hands shake. In front of him, the tip of the rifle wavers.

"What are you doing?" a voice shouts from other side, and Bellamy has never been happier to hear the half-disgusted, half-impatient snarl that only his little sister can deliver.

Grip unsteady, he slides Lovejoy's key card into the wall, and exhales when the steel slab swings wide into the cave.

"Bellamy."

She says it just the way their mother used to, and for once he sees a ghost beneath the battle make up. He lowers his gun when Octavia leaps into his arms, just as Monty, Jasper, and Maya run up behind them. Then his eyes meet Clarke's gaze over Octavia's shoulder, and like a slammed door, the buzzing stops.

For the first time in hours Bellamy's head is clear, his mark is silent, and he can completely breathe again.

There's unshed tears in his friend's eyes, and salvaged metal on her shoulders. He hugs his sister closer, grounding himself, but he can't get past the sight of Clarke in a commander's jacket, half swallowed in the darkness of the cave. He stares at the high collar around her neck, at the studs and spikes shielding her vulnerabilities. When was the last time he saw her in an open shirt? He remembers a violet thing with long tattered sleeves, and the prisoner's jacket that never left her shoulders. The heat was sweltering some of those nights at the drop ship, and even beside the fire she wore it like a second skin.

She's traded it for real armor now, just like him.

Bellamy tightens his hold on his sister, soaking up the last bit of familiarity, and Clarke's eyes soften as she watches them. Maybe it's the darkness of the tunnel, maybe it's the sadness in her bearing, but Bellamy can't tear his gaze away. Clarke stands before him, trying to summon a smile because he's alive, and all of the sudden the world feels so fucking small.

She's waiting right there like the polar North, like the light in the tunnel to guide them out of Hell. A tiny, traitorous part of Bellamy thought he'd never see those eyes again. In the blaze of the tank chamber, he was nearly certain of it. Yet here they all are, together at the end of the line, and Clarke Griffin isn't looking at anyone—or anything—but him.

Since they landed on this godforsaken planet everything always, somehow, comes back to her. The cacophony inside him has gone silent, and fuck if that isn't for her too. Even braced at the mouth of the underworld, she looks angry, scared, and so beautiful it devastates him.

Bellamy lets go of Octavia, then steps up to face Clarke.

"Okay," he breathes. "Okay."