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34. (the 100) a focal point
title: a focal point.
fandom: the 100.
characters/pairings: bellamy, clarke; bellamy/clarke.
rating: pg.
words: 2219.
prompt: danielle wanted bellarke ice-skating.
summary: if you trust me. or the one where clarke shows bellamy how to ice-skate.
notes: set sometime post-s2. obvious au. i want to set it in this universe i'm trying to write but the fic isn't done yet.
title is from amber run's i found.
Sometimes Clarke thinks Bellamy’s a little too gullible. Like, when Monty asks him if he can have his radio for an hour to fix the crackling of it, he should know better than anyone he's not going to fix anything. He’d give it a go, if Bellamy really asked him, but Monty isn’t his go-to technical expert. He’s the berry guy, the one who knows which leaves will leave a rash on your skin. She’s the one who knows how to cure it. He’s the tremors in the earth that come before the storm that’s her.
She tells him to come with her, that she’s found something only she can show him. It’s important, she says, that Kane doesn't know. If he finds out, he'll ruin it. Take it for himself. Have Raven build him a bomb to shatter it.
He reluctantly agrees, but Clarke thinks he’s putting the sigh and the heavy feet on.
With her arm wrapped around his, she tugs him along the snow covered ground. Their boots are thick, jackets even thicker. She knows he doesn't like it when she brings up the fact his stitch work is one of the strongest in the camp, but she likes that she wears a thick jacket with fur losing the cuffs and the hood that he had worked on.
“All I see is snow,” he says. He sounds grouchy, tired, even winded from the walk. Clarke doesn’t speak, breathing hard as she tries to pull her legs right up so she doesn't slip inside of the snow and freeze between the layer of it and the earth it protects. “Where are you taking me, Clarke?”
“I told you," she stresses. “It's a secret.”
He looks at her, face covered and shadowed by his hood. She knows his eyebrow’s cocked as his expression is one of disbelief. “It's a secret you're taking me to. You do know that means it won't be a secret anymore?”
Clarke looks up at him with her lips pressed together in annoyance, but her hood flops down to cover her eyes and he laughs. Tipping her head back to see her hood shift, it still obscures her vision. Walking with her head tilted upward strains her neck, but she ignores it when she notices him looking at her from the corner of her eye.
He sighs and looks out at the white coated world around them. He almost slips on the snow, but with her arm looped around his, she’ll either tumble with him to the ground or keep him up.
She’s glad she keeps him up.
“Are we at least close?”
Clarke hums, purposefully stalling. She doesn’t want him to know she knows exactly where it is. It defeats the purpose of pretending she might be lost. To see the panic swirl within him, griping him like ice, would see her laugh again, but she remembers how badly her attempt to show him an animal as white as the snow they walk along had gone.
She lifts a hand and points ahead. Curling her fingers into her palm, her glove is so thick she can barely point with only her index. “There.” Mist appears from her mouth, travels around her neck and disappears. “Walk faster,” she says, giving his arm a tug.
Bellamy doesn’t speak again. It’s hard to, finding that she's winded before she’s even begun. She'd once thought running through a cave and leaping to her supposed death at the bottom of a lake with Anya as her only ally had been hard enough. Barely able to breathe, she'd felt weighed down with her guilt, with her grief, with her desire to flee back to when life on the ground had been easier.
But the snow is the worst Grounder of all. It's one none of them can defeat, not even Raven and her bombs.
They leave slippery and sloppy tracks behind them as they reach a small cluster of trees. Naked from any leaves, the snow clings to the branches, sits on top of bushes, and ice covers the lake she’d once shown him before the winter had settled in.
He doesn't recognise it. She isn't surprised. She’s the one who ventures this far out with her own unit, following behind Miller who leads them about to patrol the surrounding areas. Bellamy’s always been posted near Mount Weather, as though he needs to somehow pull the ghosts he thinks remain inside of it out from their prison.
She gets it. It's why she can’t go back.
She stops, pulling him up short once they reach the lake. Pure white and glinting in the sun, the ice is thick on the top of the surface. She looks at him with a smile, watches as mist appears from his mouth as he breathes hard. Winded the best of their soldiers. She thinks to laugh, but doesn’t.
“It's a lake," he says eventually. He doesn’t look at her, but she can hear the puzzlement in his voice.
“Yes,” she says. “It’s a lake.”
“You brought me to a lake.”
Yes."
“Are you going to tell me why?" He looks at her then, brows lifted as some mist covers his features.
She licks her bottom lip and feels the cold climb across it almost immediately. “I'd rather show you,” she says. She looks out at the lake, sees that it shimmers in the sun. Even though she's afraid of it still, she thinks it to be beautiful. She's tried to capture it on her papers, in the soft shadings of her pencils, but without the paints Mr Cage had, she can’t quite capture its beauty.
Clarke looks up at him. "If you trust me.”
“It’s a lake,” he says. He lifts a shoulder. His entire jacket makes a loud noise as he does. “What's there to show?”
Pressing her lips together, she tilts her head tot he side and cocks her head toward the lake.
Bellamy sighs. “Fine,” he says. “Show me.”
Her lips curve into a wide smile as she tightens her arm in his own. Gripping onto the crook of his elbow, she moves forward.
He takes a step and then stops. She halts.
Looking up at him, she tilts her head again. "Come on. Trust me.”
“We're not walking across a lake, Clarke.”
Patiently, she speaks to him as though he’s a child, “We’re not going to walk, Bellamy."
“We're definitely not going to be able to swim!”
Mist appears from her mouth as she tugs on his arm again. Slipping hers from his, she grabs his hand. Her glove is so thick, and paired with his, it’s impossible to hold onto his hand. Threading their chubby fingers together, she grips onto him hard, presses her fingers impossibly tightly around his own. It doesn't feel natural, but she thinks she has always needed to tighten her hold on him. She knows she has. Choking the life out of him at times. It's the repentance she commits herself to after leaving him when he needed her most.
She tugs on his hand. He looks down at them, as though he can somehow learn of her intentions in the fabric of her glove. Looking up at her, she can see how he relents. With a roll of his eyes, he moves, no longer rooted into the snow and the earth sitting below it.
She guides him onto the lake. It’s hard, solid beneath their feet. Feels like the metallic floor of the Ark. Steady and stable, unlike how it’d been in space, even rocketing down to the ground, the thick layer of ice stays still.
Reliable. She thinks he can sense that.
Taking a tentative step forward, she knows he follows. There’s only some resistance in his grip, but she knows he's trying to learn to trust it. Bellamy and trust is a slow romance, one that requires a hell of a lot of courting. It’s an explanation Octavia had given Clarke after she’d read a few dozen of the novels found inside of the mountain.
He pokes his tongue out between his teeth, keeping his head bowed to watch the ice. “It won’t break,” she says quietly. She takes a step forward and he follows.
When they’re far from the edge of the large lake, she tops. He follows, easily trusting her to lead the way, to perhaps know the parts of the surface that may be so thin they'll crack beneath the pressure of their feet.
She turns to face him, keeping her hand in his. "Don't pick up your feet,” she says.
Bellamy looks up at him with a quizzical furrow of his brow. "What?"
“Don't pick up your feet," she repeats, voice still soft and kind. She keeps her head bowed, eyes on the toes of his boots. Sliding her feet along the ice, she looks up at him. “Slide,” she says. Looking down at his feet, she tips her head back up to him, “Drag them. Don't pick them up.”
“Why?"
She smiles. “Please just do it.”
With an awkward movement, Bellamy drags his foot forward. The heel of his boot screeches against the ice, an awkward sound similar to that of the Ark's floor. She'd tried to teach Octavia how to slide along it, using her as a student so she could somehow teach Bellamy.
His sister had a grace he doesn’t have on his feet. When he’s standing tall, thinking strategically, she thinks him to be as beautiful. Sometimes she wants to sketch him when he’s standing with Kane, when he's talking to Miller, to Octavia, even bowing his head toward Raven's at her workstation. He’s graceful when he's the caretaker, but when he’s expected to let another care for him, he’s clumsy.
She drags her feet along the ice, can feel the wetness slick the bottom of her boot. It becomes easier. She’s purposefully made sure he’s worn the right kind of boot, the one that she'd tested with his sister along a slippery Ark floor.
His movements are still jerky, his slides too heavy. He’s thinking too much, but telling Bellamy not to think it’s like informing a stone to stop being so heavy. It only makes it worse.
She continues to move, watching his feet, making sure the slides are smaller. Trust me, she wants to say. Trust yourself. He’s been able to slip and slide along a slippery floor, across tumultuous waters, and even on unpredictable patches of land.
Without her.
It should sting. And it does. He’s flourished without her, even if he doesn't see it. But without him, she’s only wilted.
If she's to wipe the snow off the surface of the lake, she'd be able to see their reflections. Once, she had been afraid of what she would find there, if she’d be the girl he remembered, the woman she wants to be. But she knows if she was to wipe away the flakes of snow, she'd see herself blossoming.
“I still don't get what we’re doing,” he says. His voice is lighter. She thinks there's a laugh in there, frozen somewhere inside of his throat.
“Skating,” she says. She smiles widely to glance up at him and finds he's looking at her. “It was in this diary I found … You put on these shoes and you can skate along the surface.” Pressing her lips together, she feels shy, and ducks her head to let her hood obscure his vision of her face. “I wanted to make sure you wanted to do it. I found the shoes.”
Bellamy looks down. “Is this it?”
"You're not meant to do it with your boots …” She smiles when he looks up at her. “They're wet enough. It still works.”
He looks down at their feet again in a way she can only describe as boyish excitement. He looks a bit younger, a lot brighter. If he was able to emulate the sun, she knows they’d be swimming in cold water.
“Do you like it?”
“It's weird," he says. He stops skating. She stays still, her hands still in his. Straightening his back, she follows suit, feeling the strain at the top of her shoulders disperse along her arms. “But we should get the shoes.”
His smile widens as he pulls at her arm. She yelps, finding her footing lost beneath her. But Bellamy has her.
“Lets go now.”
“Bellamy," she laughs loudly. Loud enough for the sun to hear. Loud enough for the syllables to reverberate beneath the ice. Loud enough to remind him she’s never leaving again.
He does his best to slide his feet along the ice as they make their way back to the edge of the lake. Longer strides. More determined than the meekness he'd greeted her proposal with initially.
And when they reach the bank, she finds him pulling snow down her jacket. They don't return with the skating boots she's found hours later, but she does find that there’s an imprint of her body in the snow near the lake to say that this place is theirs.
Together, the snow angels say. And Clarke is relieved to know it isn't a lie this time.
fandom: the 100.
characters/pairings: bellamy, clarke; bellamy/clarke.
rating: pg.
words: 2219.
prompt: danielle wanted bellarke ice-skating.
summary: if you trust me. or the one where clarke shows bellamy how to ice-skate.
notes: set sometime post-s2. obvious au. i want to set it in this universe i'm trying to write but the fic isn't done yet.
title is from amber run's i found.
Sometimes Clarke thinks Bellamy’s a little too gullible. Like, when Monty asks him if he can have his radio for an hour to fix the crackling of it, he should know better than anyone he's not going to fix anything. He’d give it a go, if Bellamy really asked him, but Monty isn’t his go-to technical expert. He’s the berry guy, the one who knows which leaves will leave a rash on your skin. She’s the one who knows how to cure it. He’s the tremors in the earth that come before the storm that’s her.
She tells him to come with her, that she’s found something only she can show him. It’s important, she says, that Kane doesn't know. If he finds out, he'll ruin it. Take it for himself. Have Raven build him a bomb to shatter it.
He reluctantly agrees, but Clarke thinks he’s putting the sigh and the heavy feet on.
With her arm wrapped around his, she tugs him along the snow covered ground. Their boots are thick, jackets even thicker. She knows he doesn't like it when she brings up the fact his stitch work is one of the strongest in the camp, but she likes that she wears a thick jacket with fur losing the cuffs and the hood that he had worked on.
“All I see is snow,” he says. He sounds grouchy, tired, even winded from the walk. Clarke doesn’t speak, breathing hard as she tries to pull her legs right up so she doesn't slip inside of the snow and freeze between the layer of it and the earth it protects. “Where are you taking me, Clarke?”
“I told you," she stresses. “It's a secret.”
He looks at her, face covered and shadowed by his hood. She knows his eyebrow’s cocked as his expression is one of disbelief. “It's a secret you're taking me to. You do know that means it won't be a secret anymore?”
Clarke looks up at him with her lips pressed together in annoyance, but her hood flops down to cover her eyes and he laughs. Tipping her head back to see her hood shift, it still obscures her vision. Walking with her head tilted upward strains her neck, but she ignores it when she notices him looking at her from the corner of her eye.
He sighs and looks out at the white coated world around them. He almost slips on the snow, but with her arm looped around his, she’ll either tumble with him to the ground or keep him up.
She’s glad she keeps him up.
“Are we at least close?”
Clarke hums, purposefully stalling. She doesn’t want him to know she knows exactly where it is. It defeats the purpose of pretending she might be lost. To see the panic swirl within him, griping him like ice, would see her laugh again, but she remembers how badly her attempt to show him an animal as white as the snow they walk along had gone.
She lifts a hand and points ahead. Curling her fingers into her palm, her glove is so thick she can barely point with only her index. “There.” Mist appears from her mouth, travels around her neck and disappears. “Walk faster,” she says, giving his arm a tug.
Bellamy doesn’t speak again. It’s hard to, finding that she's winded before she’s even begun. She'd once thought running through a cave and leaping to her supposed death at the bottom of a lake with Anya as her only ally had been hard enough. Barely able to breathe, she'd felt weighed down with her guilt, with her grief, with her desire to flee back to when life on the ground had been easier.
But the snow is the worst Grounder of all. It's one none of them can defeat, not even Raven and her bombs.
They leave slippery and sloppy tracks behind them as they reach a small cluster of trees. Naked from any leaves, the snow clings to the branches, sits on top of bushes, and ice covers the lake she’d once shown him before the winter had settled in.
He doesn't recognise it. She isn't surprised. She’s the one who ventures this far out with her own unit, following behind Miller who leads them about to patrol the surrounding areas. Bellamy’s always been posted near Mount Weather, as though he needs to somehow pull the ghosts he thinks remain inside of it out from their prison.
She gets it. It's why she can’t go back.
She stops, pulling him up short once they reach the lake. Pure white and glinting in the sun, the ice is thick on the top of the surface. She looks at him with a smile, watches as mist appears from his mouth as he breathes hard. Winded the best of their soldiers. She thinks to laugh, but doesn’t.
“It's a lake," he says eventually. He doesn’t look at her, but she can hear the puzzlement in his voice.
“Yes,” she says. “It’s a lake.”
“You brought me to a lake.”
Yes."
“Are you going to tell me why?" He looks at her then, brows lifted as some mist covers his features.
She licks her bottom lip and feels the cold climb across it almost immediately. “I'd rather show you,” she says. She looks out at the lake, sees that it shimmers in the sun. Even though she's afraid of it still, she thinks it to be beautiful. She's tried to capture it on her papers, in the soft shadings of her pencils, but without the paints Mr Cage had, she can’t quite capture its beauty.
Clarke looks up at him. "If you trust me.”
“It’s a lake,” he says. He lifts a shoulder. His entire jacket makes a loud noise as he does. “What's there to show?”
Pressing her lips together, she tilts her head tot he side and cocks her head toward the lake.
Bellamy sighs. “Fine,” he says. “Show me.”
Her lips curve into a wide smile as she tightens her arm in his own. Gripping onto the crook of his elbow, she moves forward.
He takes a step and then stops. She halts.
Looking up at him, she tilts her head again. "Come on. Trust me.”
“We're not walking across a lake, Clarke.”
Patiently, she speaks to him as though he’s a child, “We’re not going to walk, Bellamy."
“We're definitely not going to be able to swim!”
Mist appears from her mouth as she tugs on his arm again. Slipping hers from his, she grabs his hand. Her glove is so thick, and paired with his, it’s impossible to hold onto his hand. Threading their chubby fingers together, she grips onto him hard, presses her fingers impossibly tightly around his own. It doesn't feel natural, but she thinks she has always needed to tighten her hold on him. She knows she has. Choking the life out of him at times. It's the repentance she commits herself to after leaving him when he needed her most.
She tugs on his hand. He looks down at them, as though he can somehow learn of her intentions in the fabric of her glove. Looking up at her, she can see how he relents. With a roll of his eyes, he moves, no longer rooted into the snow and the earth sitting below it.
She guides him onto the lake. It’s hard, solid beneath their feet. Feels like the metallic floor of the Ark. Steady and stable, unlike how it’d been in space, even rocketing down to the ground, the thick layer of ice stays still.
Reliable. She thinks he can sense that.
Taking a tentative step forward, she knows he follows. There’s only some resistance in his grip, but she knows he's trying to learn to trust it. Bellamy and trust is a slow romance, one that requires a hell of a lot of courting. It’s an explanation Octavia had given Clarke after she’d read a few dozen of the novels found inside of the mountain.
He pokes his tongue out between his teeth, keeping his head bowed to watch the ice. “It won’t break,” she says quietly. She takes a step forward and he follows.
When they’re far from the edge of the large lake, she tops. He follows, easily trusting her to lead the way, to perhaps know the parts of the surface that may be so thin they'll crack beneath the pressure of their feet.
She turns to face him, keeping her hand in his. "Don't pick up your feet,” she says.
Bellamy looks up at him with a quizzical furrow of his brow. "What?"
“Don't pick up your feet," she repeats, voice still soft and kind. She keeps her head bowed, eyes on the toes of his boots. Sliding her feet along the ice, she looks up at him. “Slide,” she says. Looking down at his feet, she tips her head back up to him, “Drag them. Don't pick them up.”
“Why?"
She smiles. “Please just do it.”
With an awkward movement, Bellamy drags his foot forward. The heel of his boot screeches against the ice, an awkward sound similar to that of the Ark's floor. She'd tried to teach Octavia how to slide along it, using her as a student so she could somehow teach Bellamy.
His sister had a grace he doesn’t have on his feet. When he’s standing tall, thinking strategically, she thinks him to be as beautiful. Sometimes she wants to sketch him when he’s standing with Kane, when he's talking to Miller, to Octavia, even bowing his head toward Raven's at her workstation. He’s graceful when he's the caretaker, but when he’s expected to let another care for him, he’s clumsy.
She drags her feet along the ice, can feel the wetness slick the bottom of her boot. It becomes easier. She’s purposefully made sure he’s worn the right kind of boot, the one that she'd tested with his sister along a slippery Ark floor.
His movements are still jerky, his slides too heavy. He’s thinking too much, but telling Bellamy not to think it’s like informing a stone to stop being so heavy. It only makes it worse.
She continues to move, watching his feet, making sure the slides are smaller. Trust me, she wants to say. Trust yourself. He’s been able to slip and slide along a slippery floor, across tumultuous waters, and even on unpredictable patches of land.
Without her.
It should sting. And it does. He’s flourished without her, even if he doesn't see it. But without him, she’s only wilted.
If she's to wipe the snow off the surface of the lake, she'd be able to see their reflections. Once, she had been afraid of what she would find there, if she’d be the girl he remembered, the woman she wants to be. But she knows if she was to wipe away the flakes of snow, she'd see herself blossoming.
“I still don't get what we’re doing,” he says. His voice is lighter. She thinks there's a laugh in there, frozen somewhere inside of his throat.
“Skating,” she says. She smiles widely to glance up at him and finds he's looking at her. “It was in this diary I found … You put on these shoes and you can skate along the surface.” Pressing her lips together, she feels shy, and ducks her head to let her hood obscure his vision of her face. “I wanted to make sure you wanted to do it. I found the shoes.”
Bellamy looks down. “Is this it?”
"You're not meant to do it with your boots …” She smiles when he looks up at her. “They're wet enough. It still works.”
He looks down at their feet again in a way she can only describe as boyish excitement. He looks a bit younger, a lot brighter. If he was able to emulate the sun, she knows they’d be swimming in cold water.
“Do you like it?”
“It's weird," he says. He stops skating. She stays still, her hands still in his. Straightening his back, she follows suit, feeling the strain at the top of her shoulders disperse along her arms. “But we should get the shoes.”
His smile widens as he pulls at her arm. She yelps, finding her footing lost beneath her. But Bellamy has her.
“Lets go now.”
“Bellamy," she laughs loudly. Loud enough for the sun to hear. Loud enough for the syllables to reverberate beneath the ice. Loud enough to remind him she’s never leaving again.
He does his best to slide his feet along the ice as they make their way back to the edge of the lake. Longer strides. More determined than the meekness he'd greeted her proposal with initially.
And when they reach the bank, she finds him pulling snow down her jacket. They don't return with the skating boots she's found hours later, but she does find that there’s an imprint of her body in the snow near the lake to say that this place is theirs.
Together, the snow angels say. And Clarke is relieved to know it isn't a lie this time.