Chapter Text
In daylight he can push her voice away.
Drown it out.
That soothing alto murmur, vowels cool and metallic, consonants crisp. He knows the voice as well as his own; because, of course – at least for a little while – it was.
It lived inside his own mind, a thing suddenly indistinguishable from what made him himself.
But she is gone now, and it is easier to remember this in daylight.
He builds a wall each morning between his memories and himself, and the presence of other people, other voices, makes it possible to maintain. Here comes Indra with news from the ambassador summit. Here comes Nate Miller with an update on the guard rotations. Lexa’s tower is full of people, coming and going, always busy. There is machinery to repair, Luna’s ascension ceremony to plan, and daily reports from ALIE’s mansion where Raven and Monty have gone to access her core programming code.
There are so many things to do, and Marcus would do them all if he could.
He wears himself to the point of exhaustion every day. Clarke worries about him – she has been, he strongly suspects, tasked by her absent mother with reporting on whether Marcus is eating and sleeping properly. Abby returned to Arkadia with Jackson, Nyko, and her rather unlikely new recruit, John Murphy, to tend to all the Grounder and Skaikru wounded. She took one half of a paired short-wave radio with her, so they talk every night before bed; but it isn’t enough to keep the voice away once he closes his eyes.
Sleep does not come easy.
There is no degree of exhaustion sufficient to let him drop straight into the dreamless slumber he craves with an addict’s desperation. He is forced, always, to endure the nightmares first.
Nightmare, rather.
Singular.
It is always the same.
“You must apply a minimum of five pounds of pressure per square inch in order to collapse his trachea,” says the voice, in that gentle murmur. “This will cease airflow to his lungs and collapse the carotid arteries, causing brain death in approximately three minutes.”
She is not giving him instructions, not really. She is in full control. She is merely narrating, describing what must be done and then guiding him to carry the task out. He is a passenger inside his own body, carried along with no resistance as ALIE floods his mind with pleasant sensations. It feels good to hold the smooth skin of a throat beneath his hands, gripping with firm and consistent pressure exactly where ALIE tells him to. The leap of a frantic pulse beneath his thumbs, hammering wildly in blind animal panic, feels soothing and musical to him.
The voice continues its warm reassurance. “He is dangerous. He must be subdued. Hold him down. He will not hesitate to kill you if it is required of him, Marcus. Do not forget that he permitted you to come near to death once before. He gave you nothing but pain. He stood by while you were imprisoned. I, only, offer you freedom, a life with no suffering. A life with no past, only the future. You will lead your people to peace, Marcus Kane. This is all you have ever desired. All you must do is kill Bellamy Blake.”
He wakes in a cold sweat, heart pounding, the sensations so harrowingly real that he feels a violent wave of nausea clench at his stomach. He flexes his palms, open and closed, open and closed, staring at them in the faint shaft of moonlight slicing in from the high window of his room until it finally sinks in that he does not hold Bellamy’s dying body in his firm, unyielding grasp.
The unknotting of every muscle in his body, as he slumps back against the pillow in relief, leaves him shaking and trembling from head to foot. The fog clears from his mind, the sour bite of rising bile in his stomach begins to settle, and he says the thing over and over and over again in his mind until it finally begins to feel true:
Bellamy Blake is not dead.
Marcus did not kill him.
Clarke went into the City of Light, and found the killswitch, and stopped him just in time. Bellamy is alive, and seems astonishingly to have forgiven him, and whatever sins Marcus Kane has committed in his past, whatever suffering may befall them in the future, he has at the very least been spared from this.
He does not know how he would go on living, if Clarke had been three minutes too late. If he had felt that leaping pulse beneath the pressure of his fingers go slow and still and then stop altogether, if the warm skin inside his grip had gone cold. If he had returned to himself and seen nothing left of Bellamy but a body on the floor, marked by his own hands.
The weight of Marcus Kane’s lengthy catalog of sins is a heavy enough to bear without that one.
The memory of narrow escape is torture enough.
Bellamy sees, and knows, and keeps his jacket on.
With the collar raised, and the zipper fastened all the way, it is mostly possible to hide the marks of Kane’s hands around his throat - dull gray and purple shapes, like shadows grafted to his skin.
The bruises are fading, bit by bit, but not quickly enough. Still, Bellamy himself has mostly forgotten them. His injuries were not severe, he’s perfectly able to report in for work crew, and so he has ceased to think of himself as one of the wounded. His throat aches, sometimes, and his voice is one shade more raspy than before; but who would complain of such comparatively minor symptoms when Kane and Indra and six others have jagged, rust-tainted gashes piercing clean through their very wrists?
So Bellamy wears his collar up to avoid adding one more wound to Marcus Kane’s total, and goes about the business of forgetting.
Except that today, he doesn’t.
Today he leaves his jacket behind, by mistake.
Marcus is at the desk in Lexa’s study, reviewing Raven’s schematics and mapping them onto Roan’s topographic survey of the sector they are considering for the relocation site. It’s a bright room, full of windows open to the breeze, and for the first time in days, the sun is shining, filling the room with light. Marcus, too, took off his jacket, hanging it on the back of his chair, feeling the warm sunlight melt through the thin cotton of his t-shirt to warm his skin with something that feels like possibility.
The map is more promising than he had feared, and Raven’s report this morning was full of hope. Abby is scheduled to call in shortly, so he can tell her the good news. He feels peaceful. Content. The voice is so far away he half-believes she might finally be gone.
The knock at the door startles his gaze upward, and all the air goes out of his lungs, and the fragile peace is shattered by the absence of the jacket collar.
The light hits it just right, as though drawing his attention on purpose. The smooth, round twin shadows of his thumbs, symmetrical on either side of Bellamy’s throat, dusky purple-gray like the skin of a plum. “Kill Bellamy Blake,” he hears ALIE’s voice murmur into his ear, and he feels his fingers twitch involuntarily. Muscle memory. He can still feel the terrified thud of Bellamy’s heartbeat pulsing wildly against his own hands.
A map on Bellamy’s skin, marking the place where Marcus tried to kill him.
The sharp clench of nausea hits him with the force of an earthquake as Bellamy holds out the video pad in his hand helplessly, uselessly, while a baffled Abby on the screen says “Marcus? Marcus?” over and over again.
But Marcus does not hear her as he rises from the table - so forcefully the chair crashes to the stone floor behind him - and bolts to the open window, where he is suddenly, violently sick.
It is Clarke, later – though he doesn’t know it – who takes the bucket of water and rinses the window ledge clean.
It is Clarke who calls the emergency council with Bellamy and Abby to discuss what they ought to do.
“Mom, I don’t think he’s slept since you left,” she says, and Bellamy nods, confirming. He has watched the shadows beneath Kane’s eyes grow deeper, the tremors in his hands grow more acute.
Bellamy Blake knows a little something about how it feels to be haunted.
Bellamy understands better than anyone the anguish of desperately searching for even a wisp of sleep inside a thicket of thorny, violent dreams.
“You have to come back,” Clarke pleads with her mother. “I don’t think he should be by himself at night anymore. I’m worried about him.”
Marcus Kane is the leader of the thirteenth clan, the head of Skaikru as recognized by the alliance, and Clarke needs him by her side for this plan to work. But the further Kane unravels, the less she can cover for him successfully, and she has reached the end of her rope.
The pain on Abby’s face is unbearable to witness. She is miserable at the thought of Kane’s silent suffering, but she has a line of patients half a mile long in urgent need of care - too many for Jackson to treat on his own. It might be as long as a week before she can afford to leave Arkadia and come back to Polis, even just for a few days.
After Clarke is called back to her flamekeeper duties, Bellamy and Abby regard each other through the screen for a long time in thoughtful, anxious silence.
“It’s my fault,” he finally says to her, because he cannot say it to Kane and because there is no one else to apologize to. “It was warm, and I took off my jacket.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I usually – with the collar up, you can’t really see – But I forgot. Today I forgot.”
“You did not do this to him,” she tells him sternly, with a firmness that pulses with something like anger – though he knows her well enough to know it isn’t for him. “You are not responsible for what happened. Neither is Marcus. God knows we’ve all done enough things to feel guilty for without adding more to the list.”
“How do I fix it?”
“You can’t,” she says, in a gentler voice. “You can’t fix this, Bellamy. But you’re a good man for wanting to try.”
“There has to be something I can do.”
Abby sighs. “He needs to sleep,” she finally says. “Start there. If there’s anything you can think of. He’s starting to crumble, and if we lose Marcus, we’re all lost.”
Abby is the person closest to Marcus Kane in all the world. She is also the co-Chancellor, and a doctor. So when Abby says that getting Kane to sleep is an emergency, Bellamy knows she is giving him permission - encouragement - to take any drastic measures he deems necessary … even at the expense of crossing lines he would never, ever otherwise cross.
Bellamy is a private man who keeps his private sufferings to himself, and he recognizes a kindred spirit when he sees one. Kane is the same; he works through his own pain quietly, alone, and in his own time.
But they simply don’t have time for that right now.
And so that night Bellamy does something that would feel, in any other circumstances but this one, like a nearly unimaginable violation of the careful boundaries their relationship with each other has always maintained.
He sheds his guard uniform - that thick rustling jacket and heavy canvas pants and clunky, heavy boots - and he leaves them beside the bedroll in the room where he, Bryan and the Millers have been sleeping. Clad in the t-shirt and boxer shorts he sleeps in, divested of any clothing that might possibly make noise, he makes his silent way down the hall and up the cold narrow stairs to Kane’s room.
He opens and closes the door without a sound and makes his way to the man’s bedside. He’s asleep now, but restless; Bellamy can see his fingers curl inward slightly against the heavy fur coverlet, and he swallows hard.
He knows exactly what those fingers think they’re touching, deep in the illusory fog of terrible dreams.
He knows exactly why Marcus Kane can’t sleep.
He doesn’t have long to wait.
Bellamy kneels beside the edge of the bed, watching Kane sleep, waiting for the thing he knows is coming.
Still, it startles the life out of him when it does.
Kane sits bolt upright in the bed, raising shaking hands to his face, whispering “No, please, no … Bellamy … no … please, no …” over and over again. His face is naked with anguish, breath hoarse and ragged, and he does not realize he isn’t alone.
“Hey,” says Bellamy gently. “Hey. It was a dream. You’re okay. Everything’s okay. Go back to sleep, Kane. You’re okay.”
But it doesn’t do any good. Kane seems hardly to hear him, barely registers awareness of his presence. He’s still trembling, wide-eyed, still inside the terrible dream, and no reassuring words from Bellamy can penetrate the fog.
And so Bellamy does the only thing left he can think of to do.
He does the thing he always did when this happened before - he does the thing he always did when Octavia woke in the night, cold with sweat and gasping in fear, and looked to her brother for comfort and consolation.
Bellamy does not know how to erase ALIE’s voice from Kane’s mind, but he knows what to do with someone in the grip of a nightmare, and Abby gave him permission, so he simply does it.
He pulls back the covers and climbs into the bed and takes the shaking, frightened man in his arms, guiding him back down onto the mattress.
“It was just a dream,” he murmurs, running soothing hands up and down the man’s bare arms, his touch gentle and calming. “You’re okay. You’re okay. It was a dream. That’s all. She’s gone, Kane. She’s gone, and it’s over, and she can’t hurt you anymore. But you need to sleep, okay? So I’m going to stay right here with you, and you’re going to close your eyes and everything’s going to be all right. I promise.”
“I almost killed him,” Kane whispers, still half-dazed. He doesn’t seem to understand who Bellamy is, or what’s happening. But he settles against the pillows obediently, like a child, just the way Octavia did, and he lets Bellamy hold him and stroke the skin of his arms and rub his back, just the way Octavia did, until the tension begins to fade away and the ragged hyperventilation of his breath smooths back down into something like peace.
Marcus sleeps with no dreams.
It only lasts for a few hours, but it’s a start.
Marcus wakes a few hours before dawn, but not because of ALIE.
It isn’t fear, this time, but the absence of it, that pulls him back into waking. It’s the feeling of warm breath on the back of his neck and the weight of a body - a man’s body, not Abby’s - curled protectively around his own.
Not at all unpleasant, but certainly unexpected.
He disentangles himself enough to roll over onto his other side, and is startled beyond all reason to find Bellamy Blake in his bed.
For one awful moment he thinks he’s back in ALIE’s clutches, that this is some dark terrible second chapter to his dream. His heart stops beating, that sick frenzied panic churning at his stomach.
Is this -
Is he -
But no, Bellamy’s chest rises and falls, perfectly regular; his breath is deep and steady, ruffled at the edges with the faint hint of a healthy snore.
Marcus isn’t dreaming, then; though that does not make him any less confused.
He watches the boy sleep for a long moment, brow furrowed, trying to remember. It comes back to him finally, in scraps and flashes. The bruise, he remembers the bruise from this morning, how he felt the sight of it following him everywhere he went for the rest of the day. And he remembers the nightmare - recurring with clockwork regularity and a grimly particular vividness - followed by the same frightened waking and trembling hands as every other night.
But with something different this time, he suddenly remembers.
This time there was a voice, warm and low and very gentle, telling him over and over that it was going to be all right until his petrified, panicked mind finally began to believe it.
And then he had slept.
Marcus wonders how many times the little girl who lived beneath the floorboards woke in the night with bad dreams, and how many times the brother who cared for her rushed to her bedside to take her in his arms and soothe her back to sleep.
He wonders if anyone ever did the same for the little boy, who surely must have had nightmares of his own.
He wonders how many people forget this side of Bellamy Blake. Beneath the armor, beneath the recklessness and dogged strength and impulsive courage, beneath the prickly exterior honed over decades to push everyone but his sister away, there is still a child who only wants to hold everyone he cares about inside his arms and keep them safe. It is easy to forget - even Kane has forgotten, more than once - what a profound capacity for love he carries inside that guarded heart.
Bellamy’s dark eyelashes flutter blearily open just then, and he looks up at the unexpectedly-awake man next to him.
“You okay?” he asks Marcus.
“I’m okay,” Marcus assures him sincerely. Then, after a pause, “Without meaning to be rude – “
“What am I doing in your bed?”
“I was wondering that, yes.”
“You’ve been having bad dreams. You aren’t sleeping.”
“I’m fine, Bellamy. I really am. I don’t have it any worse than anyone else.”
“I’m the one you don’t have to lie to,” says Bellamy, rather unexpectedly, and Marcus blinks in astonishment. His voice isn’t unkind, but it’s firm and unrelenting. “Out there, in front of everyone else, I get it. You’re tired, I’m tired, we’re all tired. Nobody sleeps great these days. Not with so much on all our minds. You want to play it off with everyone else like you’re in the same boat, that’s fine. But in here, where it’s just me and you, you don’t have to do that. You can say it out loud. You’re having nightmares about the things that ALIE made you do, and you can’t sleep. But you’re unraveling, Kane. You can’t keep going like this.”
Marcus looks at him, stunned with some mixture of astonishment and grief. It’s been a long time since anyone has spoken to him so bluntly.
But Bellamy doesn’t stop there. He reaches down and lifts the other man’s hands in his own, and then he does something astonishing.
Gently and precisely, he wraps Marcus Kane’s hands around his own throat.
“No,” Marcus whispers hoarsely, shaking his head desperately, but Bellamy ignores him. Kane’s hands are big, powerful, the skin a dark tawny gold, and they’re pliant in Bellamy’s grasp. He places them carefully against his skin, lining the pads of the thumbs up precisely with the shadowy blossom of the marks they left behind. He can’t see the marks on his own throat, of course, but he can do it by feel without looking.
He may not have the same nightmares Marcus does, but he still remembers too.
“Bellamy, what are you doing?”
“She’s gone,” says Bellamy gently. “Look. Kane, she’s gone. It’s over. The danger is over. You can touch me right here, in the same place, exactly where you did then, but it’s safe this time.”
“Bellamy – “
“I’m safe with you,” Bellamy insists. “Even with your hands around my throat. You’re still just as strong as you were then, you could still crush my windpipe and kill me in a second, but you won’t. I know that you’re not going to hurt me. I trust you. Hold onto that, Kane. Hold onto this feeling. You can put your hands right back in the same place, but this time it’s okay. Because she’s gone.” He unwinds Kane’s hands from his throat and gives them a comforting squeeze before letting go. “I’m not afraid of you,” he says softly, and from the way every bone and muscle in Marcus Kane’s body collapses in relief simultaneously he knows it was the right thing to say. “I was afraid of her. I was never afraid of you. You didn’t give me these bruises. ALIE did. You didn’t hurt me. ALIE did. I’m not afraid of you, Kane. Not now, not ever. I wouldn’t be here if I thought there was anything to be afraid of.”
Marcus has nothing to say to this.
His eyes are wide and dark, some violent clash of emotions roiling in their depths, and the faint glow of moonlight illumines a telltale shimmer at the corner of his thick dark lashes.
“It’s safe now,” Bellamy tells him again, and this time it begins to get through.
Marcus doesn’t resist as Bellamy coaxes him back down onto the pillows, curling up on his side to drape one arm protectively across the older man’s chest. He’s big and warm, his broad firm back reassuringly solid where Bellamy’s forehead rests against it, and it’s nothing like holding the slender little wisp of his young sister in his arms, but it’s also exactly the same.
“Sleep,” he tells Marcus gently.
And Marcus does.