The title comes from Hozier's "Like Real People Do" which I listened to on repeat while writing this.

Honey just put your sweet lips on my lips
We should just kiss like real people do

i.

The trees were bare now. All day, flocks of shapeless black birds would crowd the branches and then, with a start, flee with a sharp flap and flutter. Until they landed on the next one. They swarmed like a plague, sometimes blocking out the sun completely, peppering the sky with their squawking and relentless flapping. And when they converged, those little black specks, it was like a black smudge in the sky.

Bellamy wiped at his forehead with his sleeve. It was cold, but small beads of sweat had broken out along his brow. He looked up, every day was a hazy grey now, and the sun flickered like it'd be snuffed out for good, like maybe it wouldn't rise again tomorrow, it was so tired.

He wagered he could work out ten more good swings before it sunk into twilight, so he brought down his axe and split another log, and another, and another. He allowed himself only the lingering dim blue light, clinging to the sky for dear life, as his beacon back to camp. He dropped off his load of firewood to his barrack section and began to make the rounds.

He found Murphy preparing the kindling. "How is it tonight?" he asked.

Murphy shook his head. "Not looking too good."

Bellamy let his face slack and fall for just a moment before pulling it back and giving a curt nod. His nightly check in, determining what the night ahead of him was to hold, had become the new routine over the past few weeks. Tonight meant he picked up two plates of food from the canteen and walked them back to their section. Murphy would have the fire roaring by then.

After dark was hard for her. By day, no one at camp had cause to suspect anything was askew. Sure, she would walk by and some would step back with a slight jolt in their step. But she just glowered and continued on, head held high and chin up. It was business as usual, and she tended to it all, shrugging off her mother's futile attempts at concern and simply focused on the task ahead.

Though Bellamy could fill pages with the small nuances of difference he noticed in her by day. A flicker in her eyes that didn't belong, a tug on her lower lip with her teeth that didn't fit the current conversation they were having, the way her hands wrung together now when they had always been so still.

When night fell the dark invaded, seeping in, through, under and around. It was unstoppable. Even he felt it, like an entire sky of those birds, transformative and ghastly, filling their chests and weighing them down like rocks pulling a body down into a river.

Truth was, Clarke wasn't sleeping. If she did at all, she would sleepwalk. Monroe had woken him one night to tell him she'd found Clarke nearly stepping into the dying fire by her tent, barefoot and shivering. Bellamy had gently coaxed her back to bed so as not to wake her, since she was sure not to get back to sleep if he did, and then parked in front of her tent for the rest of the night. Since then he'd tried to keep watch as well as he could.

He found her wandering the perimeter of the fence, a new habit that formed when staring at the fire until she saw red streaked stars had seemingly stopped working.

"Got you dinner," he said, lifting the bowl in his left hand up to signal which one was hers.

"Not hungry," she murmured and turned away from him. Her fingers ghosted along the wires of the fence, dancing just inches from the soft humming that held the promise of the explosive voltage underneath. Her face was like a blank page.

"Ok," he said and backed away.

She took a seat next to him by the fire some time after he had settled in and begun to eat. It always took her a while to get from one place to the next at night. He handed her her bowl without looking up. She took it and held it on her knees.

"You know what I told Charlotte," Bellamy said after a while. He cleared his throat. "I said slay your demons, kid. Since she was afraid. You won't be afraid if you fight them off."

He let the memories of Charlotte flow over him for the first time in a long while, ones he knew they both shared. The swell of anger and regret rose in his throat, her wide and desperate eyes flooding his vision.

"But we don't have demons, do we? We have ghosts." He turned to look at her, surprised to find her gaze fixed on him already, steady as ever, with only the whitecaps of the stormy waters underneath flickering through. "Difference is you can't kill ghosts. They just haunt you."

Charlotte was a ghost. She was a ghost they shared.

"Sure to be a lot more before our time here is through," he added somberly.

Her lips, drawn tight and thin, parted and the bottom quivered. "I don't think I can carry any more," she said, shaky and crackly. Like the fire.

Later, as he lay wide awake and staring at the grey wrinkles of his tent he knew she would be too. Somehow the thought made him feel less alone. He wondered if she felt the same.

He wanted to tell her what she did for him. He wanted to tell her that she kept him from being alone, and she had no idea what that meant to him. What she meant.

ii.

Bellamy had lived completely alone for a year of his life. What once was a clamorous, cramped space filled with laughter and stories and Octavia skipping around its perimeter, desperate to push the walls wider and wider and wider, had become an expansive and endless vacuum of silence. It filled up every corner of the room until he felt like he might drown in it. Emptiness, it turned out, was achingly full.

It was the worst part of his day, coming home. Worse than emptying the trash bins or mopping the hallways. Worse than being invisible except to be critiqued. Hey kid. You missed a spot. Worse than calling the people who floated his mother and locked up his sister sir or ma'am. At least there was noise in all of that. Noise was better than the crushing silence that greeted him. Hi, honey. Welcome home and remember, this is all your fault.

He took to wiling away the evening hours downstairs in the canteen where the people from his station and the neighboring stations went after dinner for games, cards or craps, and general socializing. Sometimes there were meetings. Sometimes there was music. Sometimes there was a stealthy barrel of moonshine going around.

Bellamy sat in the corner, just soaking up the noise. The noise was good.

He hadn't had any close friends in school, out of necessity, but he was always popular with boys and girls alike. The boys, because he knew how to rile them up and corral them with effortless ease. In a world where he was surrounded by women, he found men simple to understand. The downside was that they swiftly grew boring and too easy to control.

Women were infinitely more interesting, and he saw endless depths in them and wondered why other men around him didn't seem able to. He knew them as formidable beings, and no woman was like another. He saw this in the way Octavia had fire in her veins and his mother had still waters. But they both had resolve that could cut you down to size in an instant.

He discovered an entirely new spectrum of women in school, when girls began to flirt with him and make plans to meet in the electrical closet. It was there that he memorized their bodies in the dark and learned to kiss like he was running out of oxygen. (They were).

But intimacy remained foreign to him. He never felt closeness. Everyone but Octavia and his mother had to be kept at arm's length. He supposed maybe that's what made him so desirable, such a conquest. He'd have traded it all in, though, if he could. If he could be close to someone and have that instead of all of the emptiness.

And now, without his family, that emptiness grew. His so called friends from school barely acknowledged him. Turns out boys didn't take to following a charismatic former cadet in a janitor's uniform. Girls he once knew with his lips to their necks and hands under their shirts passed him in the halls without so much as a glance.

One night, as he sat in his corner and sipped from a cup of moonshine, an old friend of his mother's pulled up a chair and put her hand on his thigh under the table. She promised him the world, and in this case the world was getting word to Octavia and a reliable report back. She promised him this as her hand crept higher.

And so Bellamy went to bed with an older woman in exchange for favors. What that meant wasn't lost on him, even as he made her feel wanted and needed and less alone. He knew how to do that. He had just wished that what he faked for her sake he could also fake for his.

But even as one woman became two, three, four, he couldn't serve his own empty need. He fulfilled theirs, and they paid him generously in new clothes and more frequent shower rotations and rations and information on Octavia.

And still he was alone. Alone with a woman's hands in his hair and alone when he finally shut out the rest of the world and tried to remember what his home had sounded like before all of the quiet.

iii.

What Clarke Griffin meant was the promise that he wasn't alone in the world. In just a few short months he had Earth, he had his sister, and he had Clarke, who looked at him and really saw him.

He wasn't a brother to her. He wasn't a son, or a lover. He wasn't a weapon to be wielded, or a rebellious tyrant. He wasn't even a leader. When she looked to him she somehow saw Bellamy. As he had always wanted to be seen.

Maybe that's what took him to her tent to check on her that night. Maybe he just needed to be close to her. To sit next to her or to hold her while she slept. So she wouldn't be alone in this. So he wouldn't be alone.

When she wasn't there he felt a a rush of hot panic coarse through him and cloud his thoughts. The camp was deathly silent, long into dreams, save for the rustling of his pack as he shoved his things inside. With the click of a clip into his gun he was off.

Bellamy didn't know how he knew where she would be. Something tugging in his chest pulled him towards her and he followed, unquestioning.

The night was damp, almost muggy for how late in the year it was. But a cool mist that would burn off by the time the sun got to it was lingering in the air with a silver sheen from the moon's light.

By now the perimeter of their old camp was teetering on collapse. Moss and weeds covered the fence and split through the wood. He could just make out the dark outline of the drop ship over the walls. At this hour of night, when it was so late and so quiet and the moonlight cast a soft and ethereal shimmer on all that it touched, it didn't seem quite real. It felt like a ghost. Bellamy wasn't sure how a place could feel like that, but it felt far away and eerily out of place, reminding him of a time that was long dead.

Clarke was kneeling outside of the camp's walls, in front of the long row of raised mounds and just left of center, where he knew Wells lay.

Her ears pricked and her head shifted to the side when she heard him approach, but she didn't turn to look at him. Bellamy had barely been able to hear his own boots on the ground, like this time of night erased all that was earthly. But she had heard him. He clasped a hand on her shoulder and she shrugged into it like she had done once before.

"Hey," he said with a low rasp. "You all right?"

She shook her head and looked down.

Bellamy shrugged his gun and pack off and sat down to face her, forearms balancing on his knees. "It's not safe out here like this. I would have gladly come with-"

"I wanted to be alone," she said.

Bellamy swallowed his words.

She was still looking towards the grave and wouldn't face him. Her hair fell in front of her so he couldn't make out her profile and she was still save for her hands. They were digging into the soil, which was soft and pliant enough to be molded but not enough to turn to mud. She was digging her hands into the dirt and churning them over, letting it slip through her fingers before burying them once again.

"What do you think he looks like down there?" she said finally.

His eyes flicked to the mound of dirt. Grass has started to peek through in patches. "You wanna dig him up and find out?"

She looked at him then and he nearly smiled, but forced the corners of his mouth down. Her lips were parted and her eyes were shiny and dark. Bellamy knew by now that when she looked like this she was wearing all of her pain and sorrow on her face. When her eyes went flat and her lips pulled thin and tight he knew he was talking to a different version of herself. Lately he welcomed any time her features opened and bended like this.

"He's the only one who's here. The others, they're just…"

"Ghosts?" he finished.

Wells. Her dad. Finn. In a way, Wells was the only one who had stayed. Maybe that was fitting.

"I just want to feel them," she said and her voice cracked. "I want to get closer." A sob took over, her face crumpled, and she slumped into the ground. Cheek to earth, she lay there and clawed her nails through the dirt, trying to reach for a hand that wouldn't come, trying to reach for anything.

That was the thing about ghosts, they could walk right through you.

Bellamy reached for her hand and joined it in the soil, locking his fingers in between hers and tugging her back, back towards him. "Clarke," he urged gently, but she seemed worlds away, possibly worlds deep.

He pulled her up, limp and shaking, and nearly into his arms. His hands found themselves framing her face, translucent and pale in the light of the moon and smeared with dirt. Her hands gripped his forearms to hold herself up.

She was crying, softer now, but enough to hear it clearly in her voice. "I feel so empty, Bellamy. And it's not hollow it's just so much. And it's heavy. And it pulls me down and I can't take it anymore. I can't stand it anymore."

"I know." He wanted to offer her something, anything. But he had nothing to offer. Nothing that he believed could help, anyway. His company? His presence? And so he just held her up, stroking her cheekbones with the rough pads of his thumbs.

Her eyes were seeking. Back and forth. Darting fast and fervent.

She lurched forward and pressed her lips to his, desperate and needy. He froze. For a moment he tried to process the feeling of her lips on his, chapped and salty from tears, and why they felt so perfectly befitting to him.

Then he pulled away. The sound she made, like she had lost her source of oxygen and was suffocating, lost in space, nearly broke his heart.

"Clarke," he gulped. His throat was so dry. She was so close she was almost out of focus. "You're upset and sad and grieving. You're lonely. Okay?"

Her hands were flat against his chest. "Isn't this what people do?" she asked with a fragility he had never heard escape her before.

Bellamy hesitated, let himself hold his breath. "Yeah," he said on his exhale, careful not to disturb the night air. "Yeah, it's what people do." If she heard the sadness in his voice, she didn't question it.

And when she kissed him again, this time with all her of anguish, his chest hurt. But he couldn't deny her anything. And after all, he wasn't that guy.

Her arms wrapped around his head, shrouding him in sweet blindness where all he knew was the taste of her lips. He found the dip in her lower back and she arched into him like a bow. His lips left hers and found the underside of her jaw, and behind her earlobe, before deciding on the pulse point in her neck. She gasped sharply for air before her palms were on his chest again and she was pushing down into the ground and straddling him.

She ground herself against him, the friction sending sparking electricity through his nerves. He tried to pull himself up towards her but she pushed him back into the ground, hard. Instead she bent forward, nails digging into his chest and laid her lips, open mouthed and vicious, on his adam's apple. Bellamy's head fell back and he strangled a groan, hands pressing firm into her hips like he might fall into a cavern if he let go. She was leaving marks on him.

But her movements were erratic and overwrought and he could feel her losing direction and giving way to entropy.

He used his grip on her hips to flip them over, and she groaned when her back hit the dirt and he settled himself in between her thighs, pressing the bulge in his pants against her and feeling the waves of heat from her core travel through him like osmosis.

Clarke reached for the zipper of his pants and fumbled with the button hastily. He caught her wrists in one hand and pinned them above her head.

"You sure?"

She squirmed. "Come on," she ground out. "I want this." She looked at him, hard and determined, like she was daring him to go gentle and ruin the whole thing.

Not I want you. I want this. It was always I want this. He let her go and let his jaw set and his features harden. With her hands freed, she had his pants pushed down around his hips in minutes, while he tugged hers off, underwear and all. She lifted her hips and he thrust into her without warning, burying himself to the hilt inside of her. Clarke cried out and bit down into his shoulder to stifle it.

This was it. The cavern. He had let himself fall and now he was lost within her walls and would never find his way out. He would just keep falling.

He fell into a rough, staccato rhythm, designed to keep her crying out and raking her nails down his back and never falling into a lull. It was working for her, fast and rough, as her cries twisted in her throat and escaped in strangled moans while he buried his face into the crook of her neck, willing the softness of her skin and the smell of her hair, like pine, to transport them somewhere other than next to the graves of eighteen people.

He felt her muscles tense around him and he reached his hand in between them and pressed against her clit. Her hands grabbed his ass and pulled him deeper into her and he obliged, thrusting harder until her head snapped back and her hair splayed all around her and her hands made tiny fists in the earth. For a moment she was suspended in time, silent and frozen as the moonlight bathed over her skin, and then she imploded and collapsed in on herself, shaking slightly. He came with a few thrusts more and collapsed against her, joining her in the aftermath as if they had just created a black hole.

Bellamy rolled over and onto his back, feeling the cold damp seep into his back. They looked up at the stars, sharing each other's ragged breaths.

"What are you thinking?" she asked him.

"About gravity," he said. "Pushing us down into the dirt."

He wouldn't tell her he was also thinking about his stomach eating itself, churning over and over, wishing she hadn't done this to him.

"And?" he said expectantly.

She sighed, her hand on her stomach sinking down as it deflated. "A little less heavy."

Maybe he had taken it from her, like transference. Maybe what he offered her was an exchange. He released in her enough absolution that she could breathe more easily, even if for an hour or two while the earth still slept and nothing was real. Just a shadow of the moon's tides. And he took back all of the heavy emptiness into his heart with a pang. It was a sharpness in his chest that reminded him that she used him, just like the rest. That he was alone once again. And that he couldn't blame her for it. That they couldn't mutually heal each others wounds or save one another from whatever pasts they came from that neither knew of. That kind of pang.

"Hey," she said, breaking into his thoughts. "Don't you ever love me. Okay? You know what happens to men who love me." She said it in her deadpan way, that only lightly masked that she meant it in all seriousness.

"I won't," he said.

He lied.

Hope you liked and/or were destroyed by this. Reviews are like chicken soup for the soul and also upcoming college AUs!