[ She's sharing these memories of Lincoln willingly. Bellamy realizes that, but the urge to turn his face from them still rises. It's too much. It's undeserved. He'd cared for Lincoln, but he'd stood by and let Pike push him and his people into a cell. Octavia's accusations had been fueled by anger, but they had only been an echo of what Bellamy believed himself. ( You're the reason he needs saving. ) The bittersweet progression of memory burns like salt in an open wound instead of soothing like a balm, and he flinches when it's cut short.
Lexa doesn't blame him. That simple reprieve is surprising, but he suppresses the need to question her about it. She's in his head. The desperate need to save Lincoln, Kane and Sinclair had propelled Bellamy out of Arkadia, had broken wide the fissures of doubt in Pike's rule that had been cracking since he'd pushed to attack the village. He'd delayed and he'd stalled and people had died because of it. He runs a hand over his face, back through his hair. His sweat-damp curls stick up wildly. There's a dissonant moment where he can't differentiate between her feelings for Clarke and his own, punctuated by a wash of nausea which is only partly because of the blowback from his powers and partly from the sense of feelings and thoughts briefly blurring.
What he did and didn't mean to do never mattered. He'd babbled that he hadn't meant to bring death to innocents before when confronted with a field full of imagined Ark workers and it had rung out hollowly then. Lexa's pragmatic assessment does little to chip away at Bellamy's ample store of guilt. ]
What I meant doesn't matter, [ Though that's a statement that refers to more than a single guard, a tacit acknowledgement of his sins even if he can never quite bring himself to speak more specifically of them to her. ] And we didn't get what we needed.
[ The entire infiltration had been for nothing. A waste. As necessary as the altercation had been in the moment, it doesn't alleviate the regret that followed after.
She'd made promises to Clarke, explicit in a way Bellamy never had been with her. But he tries. He's trying now, attempting to change course even in this strange, removed world. He can try to be careful, but getting a handle on this kind of ability seems as difficult as controlling his thoughts. The fallout would be more disastrous than a revealing slip of memory. ]
Next time we can't fail.
[ Whatever came next. It's hard to think about the next step when grief and anger are so thick in the air, muddying the shared consciousness of the Hive. Even as much as Bellamy tries to hold himself apart from it, he can't escape the slow bleed of emotion dragging against his own. ]
no subject
Lexa doesn't blame him. That simple reprieve is surprising, but he suppresses the need to question her about it. She's in his head. The desperate need to save Lincoln, Kane and Sinclair had propelled Bellamy out of Arkadia, had broken wide the fissures of doubt in Pike's rule that had been cracking since he'd pushed to attack the village. He'd delayed and he'd stalled and people had died because of it. He runs a hand over his face, back through his hair. His sweat-damp curls stick up wildly. There's a dissonant moment where he can't differentiate between her feelings for Clarke and his own, punctuated by a wash of nausea which is only partly because of the blowback from his powers and partly from the sense of feelings and thoughts briefly blurring.
What he did and didn't mean to do never mattered. He'd babbled that he hadn't meant to bring death to innocents before when confronted with a field full of imagined Ark workers and it had rung out hollowly then. Lexa's pragmatic assessment does little to chip away at Bellamy's ample store of guilt. ]
What I meant doesn't matter, [ Though that's a statement that refers to more than a single guard, a tacit acknowledgement of his sins even if he can never quite bring himself to speak more specifically of them to her. ] And we didn't get what we needed.
[ The entire infiltration had been for nothing. A waste. As necessary as the altercation had been in the moment, it doesn't alleviate the regret that followed after.
She'd made promises to Clarke, explicit in a way Bellamy never had been with her. But he tries. He's trying now, attempting to change course even in this strange, removed world. He can try to be careful, but getting a handle on this kind of ability seems as difficult as controlling his thoughts. The fallout would be more disastrous than a revealing slip of memory. ]
Next time we can't fail.
[ Whatever came next. It's hard to think about the next step when grief and anger are so thick in the air, muddying the shared consciousness of the Hive. Even as much as Bellamy tries to hold himself apart from it, he can't escape the slow bleed of emotion dragging against his own. ]