Please note the rating change. Written for Day Two of OneYearOfThe100 Week: Favorite Male Character's POV

He thought he'd been angry before. When he had forced himself to put one foot in front of the other, toward Camp Jaha, away from her. When he drank twice his share of moonshine because she wasn't there to drink her own. When he walked through camp every day, and their people all looked to him, because he was the only one left.

Bellamy didn't expect to be angry when he finally found Clarke. He thought he had finished with that, that he had quietly spent all his anger on missing her and once he found her, even that anger would stop.

He was wrong.

He realizes that now, after a couple days spent in the tiny lean-to with her. The four of them had suffered through sharing the tiny space the first night––Bellamy's still not sure how they all fit, but it had been cramped to say the least.

The next day Lincoln and Octavia started to build their own shelter. In a mere couple of days, it is sturdier and warmer looking than what Clarke has been living in for weeks, which just goes to show how pitiful her attempt at shelter had been.

That's when some of the anger starts trickling back into his gut.

And it stays there, hot and steady and weighing him down like the rocks he takes from the fire to put under Clarke's bedroll because she won't do it herself. It's the dead of winter and she won't keep herself warm, so Bellamy grinds his teeth and does it for her.

It stays there when Octavia and Lincoln announce their intentions to head back toward Camp Jaha with news of Clarke––they're too far away for the radio's range, and their people are all waiting for word, for directions. It stays there when Octavia cuts off Clarke's protests with a single motion, and when Lincoln's gaze shames Clarke into staring down at her hands.

It stays there when the two leave camp early in the morning, and throughout the day while he pries from Clarke small details about her time alone, and until dark when she goes into the lean-to, despite the fact that the newer, better shelter stands empty for the night.

Bellamy knows her, and he'd already laid the warm stones in the crappy little hut's bed, as much as he wishes she would have proved him wrong and taken the warmer place for the night.

He breathes in the frigid night air for a few more moments, trying to drink in the cold to cool the heated anger churning in him, and he thinks maybe he's succeeded as he turns and follows Clarke into the lean-to.

Clarke's taken off the coat and her shirt, and if things were normal between them, if the war had never happened and they'd never done the things they did, maybe he would have stuttered and averted his eyes, or made some kind of joke about behavior unbefitting a princess, but that's not who they are now. Now, he looks at Clarke and sees the ridge of her spine, the obvious lines of her ribs, the way her pants are barely hanging onto her hips. Every night until now, when he enters she's usually already wrapped in a hodgepodge of furs from the animals she's been surviving on. He's never seen this much of her body.

"What the fuck, Clarke?" he says, and dimly he knows his voice is too loud, louder than it's been in a long time, and Clarke jumps at the sound of his voice, snatches her mother's coat up from the floor, holds it in front of her.

"Hey!"

"I took care of them. I kept up my end of the bargain," he says fiercely.

"What the hell are you talking about? What bargain?" Clarke asks, and she's frowning as if she doesn't know, as if she doesn't get why he's so angry with her.

"May we meet again," he hisses at her, and she stumbles back from him as if he's struck her.

"Bellamy?" she whispers, and he ignores the way she clutches the coat even tighter to her bare torso, because the fire and the stone and the fierce, fierce anger that have been pulling him into the ground for days now are finally rising up.

He thinks that maybe this is the same kind of power that leveled cities and turned people to ash or to statues or to memories.

"How were we supposed to meet again if you let yourself die, Clarke?"

But if he is Vesuvius, Clarke is not his Pompeii.

"Screw you," she snarls. "This is not me letting myself die, Bellamy." She tosses the coat down again and stretches the skin of her stomach with her fingers. "This isn't letting myself die," she continues, voice darker than ash clouds, darker than I am become death. He stares at the jagged pink mark of healed flesh that she frames between her hands, the kind of wound that would only have healed with stitches, and some stupid part of him wonders where she got the supplies, and how much pain she must have been in as she sewed herself up.

"This is surviving, Bellamy," she says, and her words slip sharp from her mouth like shards of glass, and he's almost surprised neither of them are bleeding, standing so close in the little room.

He swallows hard, looks from the scar to her eyes, and she doesn't move.

"Surviving isn't the same as living," he says eventually, and her eyes close briefly.

"I'm doing the best that I can," she says, and her voice breaks, and so does his anger.

"You don't have to do this alone," he says, and steps closer to her, places his hands on her shoulders and feels the way they tremble beneath his touch.

"Bellamy," she says, and her own hands brace themselves on his chest.

"We can do this together," he says, trailing one hand from her shoulder to her elbow to her wrist, until he's holding her hands in place over his heart.

When she leans up, presses the gentlest kiss to his cheek, he thinks that the last unbroken part of him will shatter when her lips leave his skin. But the sinking in his gut turns to a giddy surprise when instead of embracing him, instead of walking away, instead of leaving him behind, she traces a line from his cheek to his mouth.

"Together," she whispers, and he doesn't know if he's ever tasted anything as good as that word straight from her lips to his.

So then he kisses her, really, finally, kisses Clarke, and when she shivers he uses it as an excuse to pull her closer.

And when she pulls at his clothes with the hands still pressed to his chest, he tugs them off while she undoes her own bra and pants. When they're both bare, they tumble down onto her bedroll, and her lips curve against his.

"It's warm," she whispers.

He will spend the rest of his life on the ground keeping her warm, Bellamy thinks frantically, dragging his lips from her mouth to her throat to her collarbone, because it's only fitting to repay the favor. Because she is warm beneath him, skin heated where it touches his, soft and slick and hot between her legs when he slips a hand between them.

He realizes then that he hasn't been truly warm since that day in the sun, drenched in sweat and and exhaustion and a bone-weary triumph. Since the heat turned to ice on his skin and in his lungs the moment his forgiveness wasn't enough for her.

The smallest fragment of anger blooms again, not enough to stop him from this, to keep him from her, but enough that when he enters her, gentleness is the furthest thought from his mind.

Her body arches up into his and her nails, ragged and unkempt, tear at his skin when she scrabbles for a hold on his back; he darts forward and swallows the rest of her wordless hiss with a different kind of kiss than they've shared so far. Clarke doesn't seem to mind the hard pressure of his mouth, because she just turns her head to better breathe while she nips sharply at his lips. Somehow the taste of blood that blossoms between them isn't surprising; it's just the way of the ground, and even if what is happening between them is always bloody and dark, he'll take it, because it's still warm, and it's still alive, and it's still them, together.

It's fast, and rough, and sloppy, and the opposite of anything he'd ever allowed himself to imagine when he thought of Clarke like this, but when has anything between him and Clarke ever gone as planned?

Then her legs wrap tightly around his hips, and she slides one hand up to grasp his hair while the other snakes down to touch herself, and when he snaps his hips harder against hers, she comes apart with a whisper of his name. And Bellamy follows after her, muffling the near-sob of her name in her hair.

He'll always follow Clarke Griffin.

(Who is he trying to kid?

He's been following her from the beginning.)

Author's Note: I actually meant to mark "The Way of the Ground" as complete when I posted it, but messed it up. But all of your kind reviews, favorites, and follows helped inspire me to write a second part. I hope you enjoyed!