Chapter Text
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Clarke spit at Bellamy, when he showed up in her off hours clinic in Factory again. This was the third time this week he’d come to see her for stitching and a badly bruised rib. “Are you doing this on purpose?”
“Yup. How else am I gonna get to meet the pretty new doctor.” He smirked at her through his split lip. “Maybe I’m trying to work up the nerve to ask you out.”
“Take off your shirt. Let me see that rib from Monday.” He winced as he pulled off his shirt. The bruise on his side had spread, but was nicely yellowed at this point. She ran her hands over his skin. It was warm and soft like the old velvet throw her mother kept in her room. She cleared her throat. “Feeling better?”
When she looked up at him, she found him staring at her. “Why are you doing this?”
She snorted, but continued to examine his fading bruises. “Because you’re a walking punching bag, apparently, and don’t know how to duck.”
“No. I don’t mean me. I mean this. You’ve been doing this clinic for what? Three months?” He took the hand from his side and held it between his own, battered hands. He looked around at the corner of the rec center, where she’d set up an impromptu, unsanctioned clinic behind a folding screen.
“Maybe I’m trying to meet guys who like to get beat up a lot. Alpha station gets kind of boring, you know. Same old same old, all the time. Everyone walking around without bruises.” She tried to avoid looking at his eyes, but she didn’t want to pull her hand away from his.
He gave her a disbelieving face. “Yes. I can see why you’d want to meet the dregs of the Ark down here. We’re fascinating. You probably spend all your credits on medicine and bandages and all this, too.” He waved his hand at her supplies, set out on the tray next to where they sat. “I’m pretty sure you didn’t steal them from your real clinic, Doctor Griffin.”
“Call Me Clarke,” she said. She was still not used to being called Doctor, even though she earned the title, finished her apprenticeship and was now an actual qualified physician. “Doctor Griffin is my mother.”
“Right,” he said. “Princess Clarke, daughter of two council members. Betrothed to Prince Jaha, chancellor’s son. Slumming it on Alpha.” He said it bitterly, although his face was mocking.
“I’m not.” She bit off between her teeth. “And that’s not true. That’s just gossip.” She didn’t really want to talk about it, because once upon a time it was true.
She and Wells had grown apart. They wanted different things now. They believed different things. “What about you?” she tossed back, lobbing his nosiness right back at him. “Why are you doing this? Look at you? You’re beaten to a pulp. You said you were a guardsman. You have a decent position. You don’t need to be putting yourself through this gladiator show.”
“It’s for the credits,” he told her, looking into her eyes, still holding her hand between his. “My sister’s a second.” He tilted his head just a little, waiting for her reaction to his words.
“Oh,” she said quietly. A Second. Second child, born outside of the sanctions of population laws. Someone, somewhere had decided that if a family decided to break the law, in addition to stiff penalties, that second child should be given none of the Ark resources. No food rations. No housing allotment. No education. No medical treatment. Seconds were considered the lowest of the low on Ark Station. Wastes of air.
Her jaw clenched. That’s why he had to submit to these underground battle games, winning prizes, so he could feed and house his sister. “Do you actually make any credits doing this? Because, hate to break it to you, you suck at it.” Without meaning to, her free hand rose up to brush against his split lip.
His lips parted slightly under her thumb. She touched his bruised eye gently.
“I threw the tournament,” he whispered, eyes still locked on hers. “I was paid off. I had to. If I didn’t, Octavia would have had to…” finally he broke her gaze. “I promised her that she would never have to do that. I promised my mother before she died that Octavia would never have to do what we did to get by.” His adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed heavily. “See, so getting beaten to a pulp once in a while isn’t all that bad.”
Clarke saw how Bellamy couldn’t meet her eyes. It made her mad.
She’d heard too many arguments between her mother and father about how the council should handle the powder keg that was the lower classes. Abby always argued for a cool head, to help people as the need arose, but Jake saw the problem as systemic. He’d been to every part of the Ark in his role as head engineer, and had seen the profiteering, the prostitution, the near orphans left to fend for themselves, the gambling rings and the black market. He argued that the whole system of entitlement and rationing on the Ark had to be radically altered.
But Clarke had grown up hearing them argue about council matters. Nothing ever got better. The Ark had gotten worse. They floated the troublemakers, instead of sending them to the skybox, but that only fanned the flames of discontent. Whoever thought that humanity could ever survive together on one Ark without tearing itself apart, when they couldn’t manage it with a whole planet at their disposal.
She shook her head in disgust.
Clarke didn’t think that the Council could do anything at all to help anyone. They were all far too satisfied with the way the Ark worked, with them on top. And that was why as soon as she’d become a doctor in her own right, she had bought supplies with her own credits and spent all her rec time down here, doing the only thing she knew how to do.
“When was the last time your sister saw a doctor?”
He looked at her finally. Relieved for the change of subject. “Not since my mother died. A year, almost two.”
“Bring her to see me. I’ll give her a check up.”
“It doesn’t bother you that she’s a Second?” There he was, looking for her reaction again.
“It does, but not in the way you think.”
He was silent for longer than she was comfortable. But she couldn’t break the silence either. And her hand felt warm in his. She liked it there.
“The way they treat Seconds is wrong,” she said quietly, like she didn’t want anyone to hear it. There were always people listening, looking to work an angle. That was true on Alpha and it was true here in the shadows of the lower stations, too. “The way they treat you down here on Factory, on Mecha, on Hydra…I just…”
“Just what?” He leaned forward, his head stopping just shy of hers.
“Something has to be done,” she said and it was barely more than a whisper.
“What should we do?” he whispered back.
‘We’, he’d said. His lips looked full and soft, despite the injuries. She was a fool. “I don’t know. This is all I know how to do.” Her hand twitched in his, helplessly.
His eyes fell to her lips, then. She felt her heart speed up. She hadn’t planned on meeting anyone like Bellamy down here. She wanted him to kiss her, and it was not in the plans. Whatever plans she had.
But he didn’t kiss her. He cleared his throat and leaned back. “I’ll bring O to see you,” he said. His voice was husky.
She nodded while he stood up, and put his shirt back on. She stepped back. He smiled at her and nodded when he turned to go.
“Hey, Bellamy?”
He turned back around as if relieved that she would call him back.
“Yes, Clarke?”
“If you were going to ask me out, you should have done it before,” she gestured vaguely at her own face, “while you were still pretty.”
He blinked and a broad smile stretched over his face. He winced at the cut lip, touched it briefly. “I’ll be pretty again, Clarke.”
“Not if you keep letting them beat you to a pulp, you won’t.” She raised an eyebrow at him.
“Is that your professional medical advice, doctor?”
She couldn’t stop the slow spread of her own smile. She blinked slowly at him. “It is.”
He only half smiled this time, and her knees went weak. Maybe it was only to save him from the pain of this cut, but it didn’t stop her from wanting him.
“I’ll try to stay pretty for you, Princess.” He nodded, and ducked out of the screened off area.
Clarke blinked after him. Trying to calm her beating heart before calling in her next patient.