It takes weeks, nearly months. The kids are ruined by their time in Mount Weather, by watching their friends tortured and harvested and murdered before their eyes. Jasper especially has a terrible anger burning in his eyes, and it hurts Bellamy to see the way not even Monty can make it fade.

He's not waiting for their nightmares to stop. He knows from experience that they don't. That they never will. But their people will get to a point where they can either manage to live with the nightmares, or they will drown beneath the weight of them.

She told him to take care of them, and that's what he's going to do.

Until they can take care of themselves.

Slowly, slowly, Harper stops reaching for a weapon at every stray sound. Slowly, Monty starts sleeping again, long enough that the circles beneath his eyes mostly fade away. Miller stops looking at his father as if he's waiting for condemnation, and Monroe stops waking up the rest of the camps with her cries in the middle of the night, stops apologizing for saying "it's over." Jasper looks less less angry and more broken, and Bellamy hates that he considers that an improvement, but that's the way of the ground.

It takes weeks, nearly months, before he can think about it. Their people are still healing, minds and bodies and souls.

But the day Raven can walk without pain through Camp Jaha, and the day Wick lets her walk without hovering by her side, is the day Bellamy starts thinking about leaving.

Following.

Finding her.

It takes him three days to decide, a mere hour to pack, but that's time enough for his sister to find him.

Octavia takes in the pack he's stuffing with extra rations, canteens, ammo. Her face is clean, no longer smeared with warpaint, but her eyes hold a familiar darkness that he imagines makes the two of them look even more alike than they used to.

"You're going after her," she says eventually. He spares her a glance as he checks the laces of his boots, shrugs into his coat. It's truly winter now; he needs it more than ever, and he can only hope that wherever Clarke is, she's found a way to keep warm.

"After all she's done?" Octavia says.

"What has she done," Bellamy replies, "that makes the blood on her hands any worse than the blood on mine?"

Section 17 on the Ark. TonDC. A shared pull of the lever. They are both baptized in the blood of the innocent and the blood of the damned. The new way of life they have been born into is a terrible one, but he intends to make sure Clarke knows it's still a life worth living.

Octavia's lips quirk up in the smallest smile. "Alright, then. Give me twenty."

He stops to see Dr. Griffin and Kane, saying nothing but a request for an extra coat, but the plea in Clarke's mother's eyes tells him she knows what he really means.

The coat she gives him is her own, a warm, downy one that Kane had made for her, but the older man watches in knowing silence as the doctor offers it up.

"I can get a new one easily enough," Abby Griffin says. "Take it where it's needed."

Bellamy nods, and leaves.

Octavia, Lincoln, and Raven are waiting by the gate when he arrives.

"You're not coming," he tells Raven as soon as he sees her. She has a brace again, and she walks as freely as she ever has with her damaged leg, but he doesn't know where they're going and if there is one person other than her mother that Clarke would be most devastated to see hurt, Bellamy is sure it's Raven.

"I'm not," Raven agrees, and Bellamy's shocked into silence long enough for her to keep talking. "But once you find her, you either bring her back or take us to her."

In Raven's eyes Bellamy sees no less of the devastation and the fury that he saw when Clarke came back into camp with Finn's blood on her hands, but he also sees mercy and sorrow and determination.

So he nods. "Tell the others. The ones who would want to know."

Raven lifts her chin in agreement, then turns to walk back to engineering, where Wick is waiting for her.

"Both of you?" Bellamy says, turning to his sister and Lincoln. "You could just stay here. And it's dangerous for you," he adds, nodding at the other man. "You said your people will see you as a traitor now."

"You're not going anywhere without me," Octavia says.

Bellamy watches Lincoln's eyes shift to his little sister, the warrior, and knows that Lincoln isn't going anywhere without Octavia.

He's a little surprised when Lincoln also speaks. "Clarke is my people," he tells Bellamy, and Bellamy wonders what he must have missed for Lincoln to be looking at him like that.

"Bell," Octavia says softly, suddenly, and he looks away from Lincoln to follow her gaze.

Behind them, watching them stand at the gate to the rest of the ground, are all of their people. Those they brought back from Mount Weather, their families who cried to see them again, the ones who landed with the Ark, those who saw them come back from battle.

Kane steps forward, hands Bellamy an extra pack. It's filled with a radio, more rations and camping supplies than he had felt right taking by himself, and––Bellamy looks up sharply at the crowd of watchers to search out Jasper's solemn eyes––safety goggles.

"May we meet again," Kane says quietly, the others standing in silent support behind him.

Bellamy nods. "May we meet again."

And the three of them walk away from the camp, all too aware of the eyes watching them, trying to draw them safely back through the gates.

They find her on the shortest day of the year.

It's the coldest day yet of the year, too, and a down coat has never felt as heavy as it does when it sits, unused, in Bellamy's pack.

When they first left Camp Jaha, they had walked in the direction he had watched Clarke take until she disappeared into the trees. But once out of the open, it all had felt wrong––so he thought of Mount Weather's position, and then of TonDC's, and then of the camp behind them, and then he turned and walked the way that would take him the furthest from all of them.

Bellamy doesn't think there is anyone who knows him as well as Clarke does, and when he sees the tiny little lean-to, forlorn in a clearing kilometers and kilometers away from where she left him, he finally believes that maybe nobody in the world knows Clarke as well as he.

The hastily constructed little building is barely big enough to hold a fire pit, a bed roll, and a pack––it's a cell of her own making. The pack, at least, contains recently-cooked meat and a few root vegetables, so he knows she's not starving herself to death. Clarke isn't there, though, and the thought of her so close charges his body with electricity while he stares out at the rapidly darkening woods.

"She didn't bother with much," Octavia notes, ducking back out of the shelter, and he frowns at the slight sneer in her tone

"What did you expect to find?" Bellamy asks his sister. She grew up beneath the floor, and he has always known that because she could not see much of the world, she learned to feel too much for what she could. But he has long forgiven Clarke her sins, and it's become clear to him that Lincoln has forgiven her the destruction of his own village.

He doesn't know why Octavia judges herself better suited than either of them to condemn Clarke for the destruction of TonDC.

So he says as much.

And Octavia laughs at him. It's not a happy laugh, or an amused laugh; it's bitter, and a little sad, but it's still a laugh, and Bellamy can't help but stare.

"What makes you think that's the sin I'm judging her for?" she asks him.

She was the first one to pull the truth out of him, Octavia reminds him; she was the first one he told how Clarke walked away. From the camp, from their people, from him.

Bellamy stares at his sister. "Octavia––"

"Bellamy?"

And Clarke's there, on the edge of the clearing, a dead hare hanging from her hands. Her face is thinner than it's ever been, which he hates, but the expression in her eyes is surprised instead of shattered like it was the last time he saw her. That, he doesn't hate at all.

"Lincoln? Octavia?" Clarke asks, the bewilderment in her tone growing as she spots each of them. Her gaze then goes straight back to Bellamy. "What are you...what are you all doing here?"

"Clarke." Her name is all he can say. All other words have escaped him, and he can't figure out how to tell her that he came to find her, to be with her, to make sure she has a warm coat, to make sure she's not doing this alone.

"We came to bring you home."

Their eyes all slip to Octavia, each of them except Lincoln shocked by her words.

But Bellamy hasn't seen Clarke's face for so long, and his eyes slide back to Clarke's, all the while wondering if he looks like he feels, like a drowning man seconds away from clawing his way back to the surface.

"Octavia," Clarke breathes. It is a question and an apology and a plea. Her face is mostly pale, but she has spots of bright color on her cheekbones. "I don't…I don't know that I–"

Octavia's already shaking her head.

"We don't mean we want to bring you to Camp Jaha," she says, and her voice is perhaps the most gentle Bellamy's heard in a long time. "And it doesn't have to be right now."

Does Clarke know what home really means, what it means to any of them? Home is not a place, here on the ground, because thousands of books could be filled with everything he doesn't about earth––but he knows everything about home, because it wears her face, and speaks in her voice, and walks away in her body.

"Take the time you need, Clarke," Lincoln says quietly. "Just don't let yourself be one more ghost your people lost to the war."

Clarke looks away, disappears into her lean-to set down her catch. When she reappears in the doorway, he's waiting with her mother's coat, and he drapes it around her shoulders when she's brought up short by his body in her way.

"Bellamy?" She grasps the edges of the coat reflexively, and then pulls it closer around her as the warmth registers.

"Clarke," he says hoarsely, and it's all he can do to keep himself from dragging her toward him, into him, never letting her go when she looks up at him with those wide eyes. "We did terrible things. But we did them to survive, to make sure our people survive, to get them home. It's the way of the ground."

Clarke looks at him for a long moment, glances back at where Lincoln and Octavia are watching them.

"It's too cold to travel tonight," she says eventually, and the expression on her face isn't a smile but it's a far cry from the devastation he saw on it when she left weeks and weeks ago. And then she holds out her hand to him. "Please come inside."

And she takes him by the hand and leads them both home.