Stronger Together | The 100 [Bellarke one-shots]

Swimming Lessons

"Who we are and who we need to be to survive are very different things."

Bellamy couldn't have known how much that quiet, unexpected sentence meant to Clarke. It ran in her head like a looped video for days, weeks after he said it. It helped her focus on what needed to be done.

And it made her see Bellamy in a new light, like a slowly brightening room suddenly illuminated. For she had already begun to shift her views of the tall, swaggering rebel in a more favorable manner once his motives had been laid bare. He wasn't a bad person any more than she was. True, his intentions hadn't been carried out in the best of ways, but was such a thing ever possible when survival was at stake?

Finn was recovering from his poisoned dagger wound, with Raven constantly at his side. Clarke was still a little bitter at the brash, flirty spacewalker for trapping her feelings so easily, but she really couldn't blame him entirely. Still, he could have told her about Raven at least, instead of leading her on with false hope.

But that was in the past, and she had moved on. They were still practically strangers to each other, as were almost everyone else in this camp. She still didn't trust Bellamy, not really, though she thought that probably, one day, she could.

Today, Clarke needed to get away from camp, even if it was just for an hour or two. Seeing that fresh water hadn't been collected for that week, she decided to do it herself. The volunteer food team had fashioned a sort of sled on which to drag the full water containers back from the river which was about a three-mile roundtrip.

As she was standing by the sled, calculating whether she'd need help in dragging the heavier weight of full containers back to camp, Bellamy came into view in the early morning light.

"You won't be able to go by yourself," he said bluntly, once he'd quickly concluded why she was standing there. "The sled will be too heavy, and you know we've got hostile Grounders out there. Going anywhere alone is a death wish."

Clarke eyed Bellamy as he walked over, his hatchet swinging from its loop at his belt, the handle hitting his thigh with every step. He raised an eyebrow at her look, as if daring her to contradict him. She wouldn't, because he was right: she couldn't go by herself.

"Right," she said, nodding. She glanced over her shoulder at the still mostly-asleep camp. Smoke trickled up from smoldering campfires to meet the morning fog that lay thick and gray over the forest, blurring the shapes of the low tents scattered about the dropship. "I guess I'll go wake someone up."

"No need," Bellamy said, bending down and picking up one the long branches that served as handles for the sled. "I'll go. Unless you've got a problem with me, princess?"

His voice was both teasing and challenging, which was his attitude half of the time . . . when he wasn't showing those odd, unexpected moments of kindness and understanding.

Bellamy was an enigma to Clarke, and she found herself wanting to unravel and discover his mystery. It was probably the same allure that had so many of the girls in camp in Bellamy's tent at night, giving him no lack of company.

"No, I don't," Clarke said, picking up the other handle. She glanced up at Bellamy, standing shoulder to shoulder with him as was necessary to pull the sled with a partner. "Let's go. The sooner we leave, the sooner we get back."

~

At first, Bellamy didn't like Clarke. At all. The blonde girl had challenged him in the first moment he'd seen her, and she really hadn't stopped since then. But now . . . now, there was a sort of appeal to her stubbornness.