"Both. Templars and mages both." Bellamy looks straight ahead with fixed concentration, and doesn't surrender to the temptation to turn a glare on Lexa again. Templars escorting mages, templars with mages held in a kind of captivity. No one gets it. How little it all mattered. "And what the commander is failing to leave out is that I disagreed with her stepping in and deciding he needed punishing. It wasn't her right. He was one of ours. We'd have handled it."

Which is what ended up happening, in a very roundabout way. Another decision Lexa forced someone to make; another decision she would resent them for, if their roles had been reversed. Would Bellamy have gone easy on Finn? Who knows. If their roles were reversed, would Bellamy have killed elders and children? Well, he did. They did, because Lexa forced their hand. That's what he's really thinking of, and thinking of the way that fault works, how far back and back and back it all goes.

"That's all in the past now," he says to Leliana, in a way that suggests it very much isn't. "But we learned from the past. I learned, from the past. And that's why if she's hanging around here, she better have a damn good reason for it. Because I learned not to trust her, or any of her people."