a/n Hello and welcome - we're standing outside the gates on the way home from Mount Weather, here, and looking forward to an alternative version of the three months between seasons two and three. Thanks to Stormkpr for being the best beta a penguin could ask for. Happy reading!

Bellamy knows it is madness. It's less than two months since he first met Clarke, and they've spent a good part of that time separated by circumstances. But all the same, he could swear there is something off in her body language as she hugs Monty and lingers outside the gate.

He gathers his courage and crosses the distance that lies between them.

"I think we deserve a drink." How else is a dedicated delinquent to start a difficult conversation?

She's not looking at him right, and he doesn't like it. "Have one for me."

He tries to hide his shock at her implication, casts about for something reassuring to say. "Hey. We'll get through this." At least, he hopes they will.

"I'm not going in."

"Look. If you need forgiveness, I'll give that to you. You're forgiven. Please come inside." He knows he sounds desperate, but that's because he is. He is every bit as desperate to get Clarke to stay as he was to protect his sister back in that damn Mountain.

"Take care of them for me."

"Clarke -"

"No. Seeing their faces every day is just going to remind me of what I did to get them here."

"What we did. Together." He takes a deep breath, and reaches out to snatch her hand as she starts to turn away from him. He knows she will hate him for what he's about to do, but in this moment, he cannot think of a better idea.

She looks up at him, expectantly. She has always been able to read him a little too well.

"I can't do this without you, either, Clarke. I can't take care of them without you."

She crumples at that, as he knew she would. That resolve she has clearly spent so many hours trying to shore up softens before his very eyes. All the time she has spent preparing herself for this moment, wasted.

"I – I don't -"

"You have to stay." He tells her, hating himself even more than she hates him for manipulating her like this. "You have to stay and look after your people. They need you."

She brushes aside a tear, and storms off, and leaves him standing and watching her retreating back.

But she's retreating back to Camp Jaha, so at least he's won. At least he's won the most hollow victory of his young life.

…...

He finds her three hours later, already half way up to her eyeballs in moonshine as she slumps over the very table they sat at to talk strategy only weeks ago. It's not quite what he had in mind when he suggested they grab a drink, but Clarke has always had a knack for turning his plans on their head.

"I hate you." She informs him, the venom in her voice slightly undermined by the smell of alcohol on her breath.

"I know."

"You knew I'd stay if you said all that about staying for my people. You knew I'd feel so guilty that I'd just give in and stay."

"Yeah." He counts the imperfections in the table top to avoid meeting her eyes. "I did. That's – that's why I did it."

"That's emotional blackmail." She informs him, spitting the words like a curse.

"More or less." He agrees. "And I'd do it again. Want another drink?"

She gives a humourless laugh. "Yes please."

He makes his escape, then, practically jogs to the bar and throws back a shot – or two or three – before he takes their order to the table. He deposits a couple of drinks in front of her and waits for her reaction.

"This is more than one drink."

"Didn't see the point in going to the bar more often than we needed to." He says with a shrug, sparing just a moment to detest himself for implicitly encouraging this terrible idea.

"I still hate you." She tells him, and he's not sure if she sounds less venomous because she's actually warming up to him or because the alcohol has softened some of her sharp edges.

"So you should. I'm a monster. Isn't that why we're both here?"

She nods, and throws back her next shot of moonshine. And so it continues, as the minutes stretch out to hours and they trade nonsensical insults and misplaced anger and redirected grief. It's not how he imagined his first drink with Clarke would go, if he's being honest. A time or two when he was in the Mountain, he would tell himself a tale of better days, when all this was through and he would be able to get to know Clarke as an attractive young woman, and not as the saviour of her people.

He should have known that was never going to happen. He should have realised that breaking the Mountain would break them both, too, and that it was going to take more than a dash of corny romance to put the pieces back together again.

The evening lengthens, and he finds his tongue growing loose with liquor. He can't believe Clarke is still upright, when he counts the glasses of moonshine she has managed to put away. Then again, she always was stronger than she looked.

This is a bad idea. Everything about this is a bad idea, and he knows it. Drinking their troubles away is stupid, and unhealthy, and getting loose-lipped around the woman he's been thinking of since she sent him to his probable death a fortnight ago is the worst idea of all.

Then his mouth comes up with an even worse idea.

"When I asked you to stay, and I gave you that reason – that wasn't the reason I wanted you to stay." He confesses to her. "I gave you the reason I thought might work on you, but it wasn't the real reason."

"I know." She tells him, necking another drink and trying not to look at him.

He presses on, despite her less-than-encouraging tone. "I wanted you to stay for me."

"I know." She says again, because of course she does.

She's Clarke Griffin, several units down and hot on the heels of a genocide. He should have realised this was not a good moment to admit he cared about her in the slightest.

…...

Clarke wakes up the following morning to a raging headache, an unfamiliar bed, and a very familiar scent coating the pillow beneath her cheek.

"Bellamy?"

She sits up in confusion, trying to make sense of her circumstances. It is definitely Bellamy she can smell on the sheets. There is a glass of water on the bedside cabinet. There is no one else in the bed.

There is a mop of dark curls and a hint of snoring in the chair across the room.

"Bellamy?" She repeats it once more for good measure, this time with even more confusion in her tone. Is she to understand that he has spent the night sleeping in that chair and watching over her while she passed out in an alcohol-induced stupor? It would almost make more sense, she reckons, to wake up to evidence that she had drunkenly fallen into bed with him, and that they had some kind of angry sex as she tried to process her feelings at the way he manipulated her into staying at Camp Jaha.

She's still angry about that, for the record. She's more than angry – she's incensed. No glass of water on his bedside cabinet is going to put that fire out any time soon.

"Clarke." He sits up, frowning in evident discomfort. She's not sure whether it's more physical or emotional discomfort that he's feeling – for her part, she knows she's certainly feeling a pretty unpleasant combination of both.

"What happened?" She asks, admitting defeat and taking a sip from the water glass. She may be furious with him, but that's no reason to turn down perfectly good refreshments.

"We had a drink." He says, and she curses the fact that he is forthcoming only when it suits him.

"I guessed. Did I do anything stupid?"

"Not really." He shrugs, but she notices that he's putting a little too much effort into it. She thinks there must be something going on here that she's missing. "Apart from drinking that much in the first place. I don't think that's the healthiest way of processing all this, Princess."

She bristles at the nickname, at the poor timing of wheeling that out now of all moments. "Did you do anything stupid?"

She's hit a nerve there, she can tell from the way he clenches his jaw.

"No." He lies through his teeth at her. "Nothing to report."

She finishes the glass of water, and then she walks out of his room.

…...

Clarke isn't sure what to do with herself for the rest of the day. She's not responsible for medical matters here, not like she was back at the dropship. Her mother and Jackson have entirely replaced her in that regard. And she's not responsible for leadership or strategy, she presumes, now that the alliance with the grounders is broken. Surely Kane will take over on that front, now that there is no reason for it to be her who holds things together.

She doesn't know what to do without responsibilities. She can't remember what it's like, to be Clarke Griffin without the weight of the world on her shoulders.

And she has another weight on her shoulders, now, the weight of hundreds of lives, and she's got no idea how to process that. Not all of her kill count are fresh deaths, of course. She's committed a good number of massacres in recent months, starting with the grounders at the dropship and carrying through to the Mountain Men only yesterday. She includes the missile victims at TonDC in her calculations, too – she might not have pulled the trigger on their lives, but it's her fault they're dead all the same.

She had to let them die. That's what no one seems to understand. She had to let that missile drop on that village to save Bellamy.

That's not a thought she's proud of. A good leader makes decisions based on the fate of all their people, she seems to remember, rather than letting herself be swayed by an attachment to one individual. She has tried so hard to justify it, to reassure herself that Bellamy's life represented the lives of all their people because he was the only one who could save them all, but somehow those words always ring hollow in her mind.

She bites her lip, and tries to clear her head, and casts about for literally anything to do other than wallow in self-loathing.

She goes to see Raven, first. That seems like a good and friendly and useful thing to do. But then Wick is already at her bedside, holding her hand and laughing with her about nothing in particular, and Clarke is faced with the indisputable fact that she is useless here, too, before she has even set foot in the room.

"Clarke." Raven notices her, and beckons her forward.

"Hey." She swallows with difficulty. "I thought I'd check on you. Do you need anything?"

"I'm good thanks. Your mum has been incredible. And Wick here's been OK, he brought me some lunch." Raven teases him with a grin.

"OK then. Well, I'll be going."

She turns around and walks straight back out the door.

It is the same story everywhere else she goes, that afternoon. She checks in with her mother, wondering if such a thing as a hug might be in order after all they have just been through, but Abby thinks she is there to help out in med bay and says that they have plenty of hands and she should go and relax. She calls in on Kane, asks if there is anything she can do, but he suggests that she should take a couple of rest days. She gets so desperate that she even seeks out Miller who is training with the guard, and is on the point of asking if she might shoot a gun for a while for something to do when she sees Bellamy hefting a rifle some metres away and flees.

She's forgotten how to be idle. She's forgotten how to relax, and how to rest, and how to be at leisure. But most of all she's forgotten how to be useless, how to be anything other than busy and productive and in charge.

But she doesn't want to be in charge any more, because people die when she's in charge - friends and enemies alike.

It is barely supper time when she finds herself in the bar once again.

…...

Bellamy knows there is some irony here. After he went to such lengths yesterday to prevent her from leaving, Clarke has managed to spend the entire day running away from him. Sure, she's stayed inside the camp fence the whole time, but from the moment she fled his room this morning to the way she took one look at him and walked out halfway through a conversation with Miller this afternoon, she couldn't have made it more plain that she is doing everything in her power to avoid his company.

He's not just going to sit back and take it. She's hurting, he knows she is – he knows it, because he is hurting, too – and he's going to see what he can do about it. And in the meantime, he's going to do what he can to ensure she's at least physically well while she takes her time to get her head back in the game.

With that in mind, he strides to the mess hall and takes two portions of whatever slop they're distributing for supper tonight. He saw Clarke escape to the bar only minutes ago, and he's absolutely certain she did not eat first.

He finds her at the same table as last night, a glass that is over two-thirds of the way to empty sitting before her. That's not the only glass on the table, though. There is a full one set before the place he already considers as his, too.

"Expecting company?" He asks, as he sinks into his seat and pushes a bowl towards her.

She only shrugs, and makes no move to pick up the spoon he places next to her hand.

Not sure what else to do, he digs into his own supper and watches her out of the corner of his eye. Any naive hope he might still have harboured, that all this would blow over quickly and she'd thank him for the gesture of bringing her food, finally flees from his mind.

He's embarrassed to admit it, but he actually made a start on planning what he would say to her if she asked after his day. He was going to tell her that it was great to shoot with Miller, and that Kane's suggested he might lead a hunting party later in the week, but that it sucks that he's not allowed to do anything more meaningful than that. He was going to say that it's an odd adjustment, going from being some kind of high-stakes inside man to hanging about camp feeling so goddamn safe all the time. And he was going to use that conversation as a bit of a gentle gateway into talking about what's bothering her, because he's pretty sure she's experiencing some similar things right now, but it's not really in the nature of their relationship to just go ahead and ask those difficult questions outright. They always have to find some awkward back door to the conversations that really matter.

But she's ignoring him – or trying to – so he doesn't say any of those things.

"Eat your stew." He instructs her, in the end.

She really must be feeling terrible, because she actually does what he tells her to. She takes a couple of spoonfuls, and washes them down with moonshine, and avoids his gaze for all she is worth.

He wonders about offering to get them another round of drinks, just because the silence is getting to him. But he doesn't want to encourage her to make a regular habit of getting as thoroughly trashed as she was last night, so he fishes about desperately for anything else uncontroversial to say.

He is on the point of commenting on the texture of the stew, of all things, when she pushes her chair back from the table with a scrape.

"I'm getting another drink." She informs him, tone cold. "Want one?"

"Please." He nods, and it is an admission of defeat. He's not proud of himself, for the record, but – well, he's feeling pretty grim just now, too. And it's taking every shred of sanity he has left to try to look out for Clarke, and if she's so determined to make his life even more difficult, he thinks he might just give in and join her.

He eats a couple more spoons of slop, and tries to gather his composure. He was doing so well, he thinks, at pretending to the outside world that he was doing OK, and a bit of silent treatment from Clarke is not going to leave visible cracks in his mask.

By the time she arrives back at the table, with not just two drinks but half a dozen balanced on a tray, he reckons his expression is almost neutral once more.

"The food's better than I remember." He tries, but then he realises his mistake. That could sound like a veiled reference to his recent fortnight of absence from Camp Jaha, and could therefore tread too close to the issue they are avoiding.

Sure enough, she doesn't answer. She just necks a glass of moonshine, and splutters out a short cough.

"I hear you visited Raven." He offers instead. "How is she?"

"She's doing OK. Wick's with her." That's not a lot of words, but he'll take it.

"That's good. I think they could be good for each other, if – if she'll let him in." Clarke's not stupid, so he knows she doesn't miss the allusion to their own circumstances. He can read it in her eyes.

"Thanks for supper." She says, much to his surprise. "Have you got any plans for the evening or are you staying for another drink?"

It's a stupid question. She's already given him those couple of extra drinks she just brought back from the bar, but he plays along for her benefit. "I'd like to stay for a while, if that's OK with you."

"Be my guest." She says.

So that's that. That's the closest friend he has on this damn planet, doing him the courtesy of permitting him to stay and drink in her presence. He supposes that, given the way he manipulated her yesterday, he can't be choosy. He will just have to accept that this is all she can face right now, and keep her company, and keep ensuring she eats. And maybe in the days and weeks to come he might even try to help her find a healthier coping mechanism or two.

For now, though, he is in no state to suggest any such thing. He can hear the ghosts himself, if he's being truly honest, the hundreds of souls that lie heavy on his conscience sighing just on the edge of his hearing.

So he picks up his moonshine, and clinks his glass against hers, and drinks.

Those half a dozen glasses don't last them long. And the next half a dozen don't hang around, either, and by about the third batch the room is starting to spin. But that's a good thing, Bellamy decides. When he's concentrating on keeping his supper in his stomach, he's not concentrating on the temptation to run out into the woods and spear a bear single-handed, or anything idiotic and risky like that. He's not concentrating, either, on the fact his baby sister doesn't need him any more, or the fact the hundred don't need him any more or – or the fact that his people don't seem to need him any more, if he's being really honest.

In fact, the only person in the world who still seems to need him is sitting right next to him, gulping down moonshine like it's water.

She hasn't said much all evening and it's eerie, after a couple of months of knowing her as a woman who sometimes talks too much for his convenience. But she's said enough to imply that she's got her wits about her slightly more than she did last night, so that's progress.

She's got her wits, but evidently she doesn't have her legs. When he suggests that it's time to call it a night and she stands up to leave, she staggers sideways into him and almost overturns the table.

"S'OK." She promises him, with the first true smile he's seen from her in as long as he can remember. "Don't worry. I'll be OK – Bellamy will get me home."

Well then. So much for her wits. And so much for that mask that he's been wearing so carefully, which shatters into a thousand pieces the moment he hears her talk of his protection with such utter confidence.

"You're right, Clarke. He'll take care of you." He knows that there is no point prolonging this conversation, but somehow he finds that he is powerless to stop it.

"Yeah. He took me home last night. Well – not my home. His home." She hiccups. "He's great, is Bellamy."

He doesn't have the words to reply to that. He doesn't have the words, because he's a bit busy clenching his jaw to stop some ill-timed confession from sneaking past his lips. He simply wraps an arm about her waist and starts shepherding her back to his room. It looks like he's going to have another sleepless night, but it's worth it. He's had sleepless nights for the sake of keeping Clarke safe before now, and he has no doubt it'll happen again.

She doesn't speak, as they make their way slowly down the corridor towards his quarters. She doesn't speak when they arrive, but simply pulls back the covers with a familiarity that makes his heart ache, as if she has already made herself at home in his bed.

He speaks, then. He speaks because he cannot help it, because he is too drunk and exhausted and frankly overwhelmed to reconstruct that damn mask.

"I'm glad you're here, Clarke. I'm glad you stayed. I know you hate me right now and I'm sorry for the way I got you to stay but – the only way we're going to survive this is if we face it together."

He likes to think that the humming noise she makes as she falls asleep is one of agreement, but he's not altogether sure.

a/n Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think!