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They're hurtling upward, pushing through the atmosphere and breaking into the void of space before Bellamy starts to feel the weight of his choice. Raven's already outside the space ship, fixing the landing issue and getting the door to open and it's all moving so fast that his brain is still fixed on that one spot where Clarke should be sitting.
He can still see the closing of the doors, the shutting of the hatch.
There's one horrible beat where Bellamy is hollowly aware they're all about to die, and she's all alone, and she didn't have to be. If Bellamy was going to die, anyway, he wants to be able to look at the blue in her eyes as the world fades away. He wants that to be the last color he sees in this life.
“I left her behind,” he lets himself voice the words, the pain. “I left her behind and we all die, anyway.”
He watches the lights of the Ark spark up, ignite and come to life and for that split second there's immeasurable joy inside of him that pushes him through the next minutes. This last gift from Clark, he can't waste it.
Then they're all struggling for breath on the inside of the fallen Ark, making that final push and getting that tick, tick, tick hiss of air pushing through the vents before they suffocate.
They lay on the floor, sucking oxygen back into their lungs.
He doesn't notice the rest of them getting off the floor and starting to move out of the gateway of the Ring until he's the last left, laying on his back still trying to make the air move through his lungs in a way that doesn't hurt.
“Bellamy, let's go get these suits off,” Raven says gently.
Raven hunches over him and puts a hand on his arm. It's not conscious but Bellamy shrinks back from her, shrugs her off.
“We did what we had to do,” she offers, doesn't blame him.
Raven's words make it hurt more, they're too close to an echo of a memory.
“It had to be done.”
“I bear it so they don't have to.”
“What I have to do, like always...”
She stands back up and crosses her arms. “If we didn't leave then...”
We'd all be dead.
Raven didn't need to say it, because he knows it is true, and also because it still does nothing to dull the stale taste in his mouth.
But he follows her out of the mouth of the porting dock and into the husk of the Ark.
He watches the Earth from the large window of the Ring as the ground gets enveloped in orange and brown, the plume billowing up until the whole Earth is swallowed and invisible through the thick of it.
It's over now, it was over before this moment but there's a finality in watching the death of the Earth from the safety of the Ark's window.
“She saved us again,” Raven is saying next to him, eyes wet. “Do you think we can do this without her?”
No, he wants to scream.
But he swears his chest still feels warm from the press of Clarke's hand, and his forehead tickles from where she brushed it.
He has to be better than this grief he feels pulling at him, threatening to rip him open and create a gulf inside he'll never heal.
“If we can't then she died in vain. And I'm not going to let that happen.” He says the words as strongly as he can, because he's going to need to repeat them over the next few years. “Are you with me?”
Raven turns to him and there's a fire lighting her face, a determination setting in the clenching of her jaw. “Always”.
Bellamy closes his eyes and pictures his sister, ten years old and face lit up as Bellamy talks to her of the myth of Prometheus. Octavia, a small little toddler with fat legs pounding against the floor of their Ark room as she chases him around the table and giggles.
“We will meet again,” he promised to her.
“I'll be waiting,” Octavia had sworn back.
He's always used his sister like a tether, the tie that binds him to his place in the world. It's what's propelling his feet forward, forcing him to stuff down the contents of a nutrition pack passed the tightness in his throat.
The others don't say anything about Clarke but their faces are drawn whenever they talk to him. He catches them dipping their heads together and whispering in his direction when they think he isn't paying attention.
It's already the dead of night when they dock into the Ring and even later by the time they each find a room and a bed. He's pushing nearly a day awake on only a handful of hours of sleep. He's too numb to feel much at all by the time he shuffles his way to his own room and bed. That first night it's easy to slip away into the exhaustion that overtakes his body.
It's the first full day there that it's almost unbearable and his chest feels like it can't suck in anymore air, though his traitorous lungs keep betraying him.
He says the right words when the seven of them are all huddled together. He sees the fear still reflecting in Echo's eyes, the grief in Monty and Harper as they hold hands, the uneasy way Emori and Murphy stay back from the rest. He sees the way Raven pushes it all down, stoic. He needs to be strong for them, to be the reassurance that they will get through these five years together.
Everyone is treading around him carefully, like they're back at the Dropship and it is those first few days of uncertainty where he thought leadership meant the guy with a gun.
Monty and Harper keep shooting him glances like he's a wounded animal they're trying to decide if they should put down.
“It'll get better,” Monty says to him, and Bellamy knows he's thinking of Jasper when he says it.
Harper gives him a sad little smile and squeezes his hand as they walk passed.
He goes with Raven to the airlock chamber room to make sure everything goes smoothly for her second spacewalk. She wants to check the air scrubber unit from the outside. The airlock chamber is broken off into two sections, for safety reasons. There's a first sliding door that opens with a push of the button, unlike most doors on the Ark that are motion activated and open automatically. The doors lead into the smaller room, where the actual airlock hatch is located. The sliding doors have glass at the top that let him peer in and watch Raven the whole time. There's a panel on the wall next to the airlock hatch, one last safety mechanism.
Raven smiles at him, all teeth and sparkling eyes, and for one small second nothing hurts quite as much in the wake of his friend's unbridled joy.
“Okay, here we go,” she exclaims, slipping the helmet over her head and locking it in. She goes over to the panel and activates the airlock door. A small countdown starts on the monitor panels near each door.
TEN SECONDS TO AIRLOCK OPENING.... NINE SECONDS TO AIRLOCK OPENING...
The sliding doors of the larger chamber room make a shuddering sound as they lock in, unable to be opened from either side until the airlock is closed again.
When the countdown ends the hatch doors slowly open. Bellamy stares into the gaping stars and black of space, opened up and framed in the metal mouth of the Ark.
He starts wondering if he could float far enough down from here to make it back to Earth. He'd be dead and burnt, maybe just ash but, God help him, he'd be back with her.
He's startled when Raven lands back in and closes the hatch back up.
He spends his day between overseeing the maintenance on the air scrubbing unit, setting up the algae farm, and beginning a rationing system. It's after all that he finds himself inside the airlock chamber room again, Raven's space suit hung up on the rack by the far left wall.
He hits the button to open up the sliding doors and steps into the belly of the airlock. There's a window up above the opening hatch and Bellamy finds himself looking out at the outstretch of stars in front of him.
He thinks of Octavia, fifteen and scared, as the guards have her by the arms and are yanking her away from him.
His fingers graze the panel that opens the airlock hatch and he releases a shuddering breath. The doors would lock behind him. The countdown wouldn't matter, his friends wouldn't be able to save him, because he's in the room with the safety override panel.
This time he thinks of Clarke, eyes so sad and bathed in sweat as she tells him to use his head and keep everyone alive.
He backs out of the room like he's being chased, the sliding door slamming behind him and he closes his eyes. He starts pacing in the larger room of the airlock chamber, back and forth. He starts going in a zig zag to give himself more room.
He keeps going until Raven pages him over the sound system, her voice funny as she calls him over to the control room.
“Bellamy, get your ass up here!”
“What's going on?”he asks, when he gets to Raven.
Her arms are crossed around her stomach and her face is pinched. Her eyes dart to the monitors behind her before she looks back at him. There are 10 rows of live feeds from around the Ring, all showing different corridors or main rooms.
He hadn't noticed them earlier.
There's one of the airlock chamber.
Raven doesn't verbalize anything, but her face is drawn and her lips a hard line as they go over the details of cleaning up the air scrubbers and start making a list of all the other broken pieces of the Ark they need to fix to survive.
He tries to go to sleep in his bed that night, but as soon as he drifts away Clarke finds him with her sad eyes and her hand pressed against his chest. It hurts even in his dreams and he sits up in bed with an ache in his heart. He's terrified to close his eyes again, afraid she'll find him there.
It was suffocating being alone, the familiar hum of the Ark engines in the background.
He falls asleep again but this time it is so much worse. She's falling apart in front of him, screaming and screaming as the radiation disintegrates her body and she reaches out a hand to him.
He goes back to the airlock, after that, his feet moving in that direction before he realizes what he's doing. He'd stared at the ceiling for two hours after waking the last time but all he saw were two blues eyes staring back at him.
So, he goes back to the airlock chamber and he moves inside that room until his thighs ache and he feels faint. He doesn't go passed the main room into the airlock hatch again. He doesn't trust himself.
Octavia, her face smeared in blood and breath shallow from the radiation exposure but wrapping him so tightly in her arms he could cry with relief. “I knew you'd come through...”
He needs to shuffle to his bed by the time he's done but he doesn't care. He blacks out as soon as his head falls against the pillow and he's thankfully too worn out to dream.
Time starts to pass around him in spurts and stops. He can't always remember the sequence. It's all muddled together.
Bellamy starts spending more time in between everything else pacing the floors of the airlock chamber. He keeps his voice steady when he gives out orders and he doesn't miss a single meeting, a single responsibility. But he gives himself this one comfort, afraid he'll break in half if he doesn't.
Murphy has taken to spending a lot of time near the airlock chamber, sitting on the ground right next to that set of sliding doors. He makes himself busy cleaning out one of the air filter pads they were working their way through doing maintenance on. He has a pile of rags, a bottle of rubbing alcohol and some Q-tips they found in a medicine cabinet he's using to help him do the work.
“What're you doing here, Murphy?” Bellamy growled, the first time Murphy interrupted his pacing.
Murphy's face didn't flinch. “Well, the air filter pads on the air scrubbers haven't been cleaned in a while and Raven said...”
“What are you doing here, in this room?”
“What are you doing in this room?” Murphy counters, voice flat. “It's a small ship, Bellamy, full of seven people. We're bound to bump into each other some.”
It's a reasonable argument and Bellamy doesn't have a good one to offer back, so he doesn't say anything more. Instead, he glares at Murphy one more time before stalking away to go find Raven.
When he goes back later Murphy is there again, this time with Emori sitting next to him. Her eyes are fixated on the air pad she's cleaning and she doesn't bother to acknowledge him
Bellamy doesn't want to let them watch him be unglued, this room the only place he allows the pain to show.
He's tried to cut this out of his routine, to just fall asleep on his own, a few times. But he ends up drenched in sweat, startling out of sleep by the nightmare of watching her die or, worse, the playback of his memories of her.
So he tries to ignore them and paces back and forth in the small cabin of a room, the motion comforting. If he keeps his body moving, it eventually buckles under the strain and he can fall into dreamless sleep later that night.
He's thankful they let him keep to himself and leave him to his empty footsteps against the floor of the Ark as they work.
“Clarke saved Emori's life, you know,” Murphy offers up with no preamble on the fifth day Bellamy finds him there. “Twice.” Murphy shakes his hand back and forth in the air, his nose crinkled. “Though I only halfway count the first time.” Murphy shrugs. “And I guess she kinda owed me, too, so...”
Bellamy stops his pacing and looks at Murphy. Murphy's working hard to keep his face blank but the twitch in his cheek betrays him.
“I never told her,” Bellamy whispers out, because this is the first time anyone has dared to say her name or even talked about her to him since Raven and him stood next to each other, staring down at Earth,
Bellamy can't elaborate, afraid saying the words too plainly would break him.
“You didn't have to,” Murphy said sincerely, all his usual scorn and mockery gone from his face.
Then, like it never happened, Murphy is dragging an alcohol dipped rag down the face of the air pad again, back to work.
He's not sure what day it is he finds Echo in the airlock chamber, three large bins of nutrition packs and dried protein shakes sitting next to her on the floor. She's busy cataloging them, her eyebrows drawn together as she sorts them into piles on the floor. She's taking up a lot of space, more than Murphy or Emori did and he's left with less room to pace.
“Is this really the only place in the whole damn Ark you can be?”he spits out, and he wonders – not for the first time - how he agreed to take her up here in the first fucking place.
But he knows why and he doesn't really want to think about it, because the reason why hurts, too.
“Clarke's the reason none of you left me to die,” Echo says matter-of-fact, as though this is an explanation. It's unsettling, like she can read his mind. “And then you saved my life.”
It's so jarring and weird of an answer to why she's in the airlock that he doesn't have anything else to say. He snaps his mouth shut and contents himself with the small room she's left him to move inside.
By the evening she's gone, with her overly large bins and space imposing but Murphy is back with his damn air pads. Is he the only one cleaning all of them? Bellamy wants to scream but he just stews inside and keeps his feet moving.
He only catches Raven in the airlock chamber room once and it's as she's leaving. His shoulder bumps into her frame before he can slow his momentum.
She's guilty, for whatever reason, the emotion written across her usually stone face. “Bellamy, shouldn't you be checking the CO2 monitoring unit with Monty?”
“It's already done,”he says, irritated at the questioning.
“Okay. Well, why don't you go grab something to eat?" she suggests, before hastily walking away.
He doesn't find her in the airlock chamber again but, now, every time he steps into the room a small chirping alarm rings throughout the Ark.
Monty and Harper move their bedroom close to the airlock room.
He stops ever being alone for long in the airlock room, even in the dead of night when the Ark is quiet and everyone else should be sleeping. Monty will show up blurry eyed with a book in his hands.
“Monty?” Bellamy had questioned, the first time it happened.
He had waved the book at Bellamy, sheepish. “Just couldn't sleep. Though I'd read for a little bit.”
Monty falls asleep half the times Bellamy finds him there, his face leaning up against the doors of the airlock hatch, mouth hanging open and his book laying splayed with its spine facing up on the floor.
Bellamy stops by Harper and Monty's room on his way back to his own, gently tells Harper to go bring Monty back to bed because he's going to sleep.
He spends each morning with Raven huddled over an old blue print of the Ark, the part that wasn't the Ring cut off from the map. She's targeting “areas of concern” and places she thinks need to be reinforced if they're going to get through this without the Ark breaking apart around them.
Raven hovers around him at their meetings together, making dry comments about the tired rings under his eyes and the gauntness of his cheeks. She shoves extra nutrition packs in his hands and glasses full of water. But she pulls back when she senses his irritation and she doesn't linger when she passes by and sees him in the airlock chamber.
There's both a sturdiness to Raven and a distance. She feels like his rock and like a ghost, all at the same time.
He has a mid-day meeting each day with all seven of them over a meal of nutrition packs, the algae still growing slowly. He gives the orders, they follow them, and they continue on this way.
Bellamy gives them nothing less than whatever is left of him. What's gone he pushes away, like the dreams and nightmares he's running from each night.
The overhead starts to crackle, funny static coming in and out and garbled sounds breaking through.
Time still moves in out of context frames in Bellamy's mind, so when it happens he's not sure if its been weeks or months since he was last on Earth. He thinks three months, but he's not really sure.
He's in the control room before Raven but she's not far behind, bum leg and all.
“What is that?” Bellamy asks, looking to Raven for an explanation.
He feels the first rush of relief since he's been in space that it could be the bunker and maybe he could talk to his sister.
Raven is already turning dials and adjusting meters, cleaning up the noise. “I don't know...”
“Calling Ark...” The words start to filter in, as the static is picked away by Raven. “... You.. Me?”
“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” Raven is chanting, biting her lip as she moves her hands fast to grab onto the signal.
“Raven...” Bellamy pleads, watching her with his heart hammering in his chest.
“Calling Ark Station, can you hear me?” the voice comes in, crisp and clear. “Calling Ark Station, can you hear me?” It's unmistakably female, but it's not Octavia, and he only dares to allow himself to hope a little...
He can't breathe, holding his breath as Raven's startled eyes catch his own.
“This is Ark Station,” Raven responds, picking up the radio receiver in her hand and pressing on the button. “This is Raven Reyes, who is this?”
“This is Clarke,” the voice breathes, tired. Then, more assured, “This is Clarke.”
He staggers back as Raven stares at the radio receiver with disbelief. He can hear the footsteps in the hallway pounding behind him as their friends make their way to the control room.
“A-Are you alright? Is everyone alright?” Clarke asks after a long beat has passed, both Raven and Bellamy still too shocked to move. “Is Bellamy there?”
Bellamy's hands feel numb as Raven hands him the receiver, her eyes brimming wet.
“Clarke..” he pushes through dryness in his mouth, and her name is a prayer.
“B-Bellamy!” She sounds so relieved. “I-I didn't know if you guys had made it.” Her voice is breaking now, and he can tell she's trying to keep from crying. “The comm link shorted out and I didn't know...”
“Clarke...” he breathes, let's the syllables wash over him. “We're fine. We're all fine.” He looks around the room, at the seven faces full of wonder huddled behind him. “You saved us.”
Bellamy spends the next couple of hours having to share Clarke, all of them passing the radio receiver along to talk with her. They'd all felt the shock of her death, the resonating vibrations of her sacrifice for them and now they just wanted a piece of her alive and okay.
He'd be resentful, and impatient, if he wasn't grateful for the chance to sneak away. Bellamy can't stop his hands from trembling and there is a cold sweat making his shirt stick to his back. His knees buckle as soon as he's around the corner and away from the control room's radio, though her voice is still echoing her responses against the steel of the Ark.
He ends up slumped against the wall and the sobs welling out from him are making it hard to breathe, are shaking his entire body while he tries to calm himself down. They feel like dry heaves because even as his entire body is coursing with the force of his pain there are still no tears, just empty shudders.
It's every emotion he couldn't let himself feel because he wasn't sure he would have been able to recover.
She's alive... she's alive... she's alive...
He's vaguely aware when someone sits down beside him and drapes a solid arm across his back. They're saying something but he can't hear it over the buzzing in his ears, the desperate pulling of air into his lungs.
It's then that the tears actually come down, big giant wet trails to match the gasping of his breath and the pinching in his chest. He doesn't know how long he's sitting there, someone holding him like a cord back to the world.
It's that arm squeezing his shoulder that pulls him back, that helps him tunnel his way out.
When he can see again through the watershed Murphy comes into focus beside him, arm still slung across Bellamy's back.
He's not sure, anymore, with Murphy - if he is surprised at him in or not. Murphy knew all about bottling up the pain, knew what it could do to a person when you let all of those ugly things you push down out to the surface.
"She's okay, Bellamy, " Murphy affirms, knowing that Bellamy needs to hear it. “She's alive.”
Bellamy says it out loud, “She's alive.” Bellamy's breath is evening out, coming out in little shudders but measured now. He closes his eyes and let's himself picture her face, her eyes, the way she smiles with a corner of her mouth lifting up. “She's alive.”
Murphy pulls his arm down, but he stays there with Bellamy as they both listen to the sound of Clarke's voice move through the ship.
He's not sure how long Murphy sits with him there on the floor in the hallway but Bellamy gradually begins to have control again, to feel like he can stand up without the ground tilting beneath his feet.
He pulls himself to stand back up then offers a hand down to pull Murphy up, too. He wants to say thank you but it doesn't seem good enough so Bellamy says nothing.
Murphy eyes him careful, scrutinizing. Then, Murphy smirks. "Maybe you could stop circling around the airlock now."
Bellamy laughs, the tension breaking. “You're such a dick, Murphy.”
“Yeah, I am,” Murphy agrees, easily.
And Bellamy knows Murphy understands he really means thank you.
It's calmed down a bit by the time he makes his way back to the control room. Murphy didn't follow him back that way, instead heading to his room in search of Emori. Only Raven is still there, receiver in her hand as she's grilling Clarke about the details of setting up the radio.
“Hey.” Bellamy places a soft hand on Raven's back as he comes to stand behind her. “How's our girl?”
Raven's flashing that all teeth smile again, but he shouldn't be surprised. Raven talks tough but he knows Clarke is just as important to her. “Badass, like usual.” She grins. “Clarke reconnected some old wires to a ham radio and remembered how I reconfigured the one we used to talk to the Ark from the Dropship. From memory.”
Raven is animated in the way solving a problem always fills her with life and energy.
“Sounds like Clarke.”
It feels so good, to just be able to keep saying her name and not have it feel like a wound.
“Are you guys still there?” Clarke sounds tentative.
“Yeah, give me one minute and then I'm handing you off to Bellamy,” Raven says into the receiver, smiling.
Bellamy feels his stomach flip-flop, nervous at Raven's words.
“Bellamy...” Raven starts, her smiling fading. “I'm sorry I couldn't be there for you. I-I didn't know what to say to make you feel better.” She swallows. “And when I looked at you all I saw was Finn.”
“I don't...”
“All I saw was the pain of losing Finn,” she clarifies when she sees his confusion. “I didn't know how to go back there again.”
He puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes. “Hey, I didn't need anyone. Okay? I was fine.”
She raises an eyebrow but doesn't keep pushing it. She's Raven, so she just moves forward instead. She picks up a headset from the dashboard and then puts it in his hands.
Bellamy turns it in his grip and realizes it is a reworked headset from one of the radiation suits, only a curved piece of metal has been added to the tip like a headband and the metal wrapped in fabric from the outside of one of the suits.
"I've rerouted the signal wave so now it only sounds directly over the control center, not the entire Ring. When you hit the comm link on your headset it automatically syncs up to the radio channel Clarke it communicating with us on. But you'll only be able to hear each other when you do that."
Bellamy clutches the headset in his hands. “Raven...”
“It doesn't work like a regular radio receiver,” Raven continues. “Once you hit the comm link until you switch it back off all of your words and noises will travel down to her as a continuous audio. Like a video connection. ”
He's overwhelmed by the generosity of his friends for the second time that day. “Thank you.”
“Not a problem.” Then she's gone out the door and he's putting the headset on, nearly woozy with anticipation. He hits the comm link of the side of the headset.
“Clarke... it's Bellamy.” He waits, holding his breathe.
“Bellamy, I know what you sound like.” She's teasing him.
He shifts in the seat of the control room and decides he'd rather be back in his room.
“Give me like five minutes, okay? I'll let you know when I'm back.”
“I'm not going anywhere,” she jokes.
He covers the space between the control room quickly, his long strides making it easier. His gaze doesn't flicker when he passes the airlock chamber. He feels almost giddy, the headset clenched in his left hand as he opens the door to his room.
He takes off his belt then his boots. He's pulling off his socks when Clarke's voice startles him.
“Bellamy, what are you doing?” Clarke's asking, her voice confused.
He picks up the headset and realizes he forgot to shut off the comm link “Sorry, I was just changing.”
“What are you changing into?” Clarke asks, even more confused. “Are you still in the control room?”
He settles down on his bed, leaning back on the pillows and spreading his legs out down the length of the bed.
“No, I'm in my room. It's just you and me, Clarke.” He's not sure why his words make his pulse pick up. “Raven set up a headset for me. I'm the only one who can hear you right now.”
The radio is silent and, now, it feels so intimate. It's just him and Clarke, alone in their own universe.
“Bellamy,” she says in a strangled voice, then clears her throat. “That's... That's great!”
“You sound tired, Clarke.” He wets his lips. “What's really going on?”
She sucks in a breath and let's it out. “I got... hurt pretty bad. I just made it back before the wave hit me but I broke open my helmet on the way to the lab.”
He tenses and he doesn't want to really know. “Clarke, how bad is it?”
“It's not that...”
“Clarke, please,” he begs. “It's just you and me.”
It's that reminder, he knows, that will make it easier for her to share her burdens and be honest with him. She's never shared with him completely, but he knows for a fact he gets more of her than anyone else.
“I had radiation burns on 70- 75% of my body right afterward,” she finally says in a monotone voice. “It's why it took me so long to set up the radio.”
He feels sick at her words, even though it's nothing he hasn't imagined. He's already seen the image of her in his nightmares, radiation covered skin disintegrating before his eyes.
“Goddamnit, Clarke...”
“But they've already started to heal a lot,” Clarke comforts. Even in her pain she tries to soothe others. “The first few weeks were really bad but now I'm just tired a lot.”
“That's good, Clarke.”
He wouldn't ever tire of saying her name, of letting the letters fall off his tongue. Not now that he knows she survived and she's down there. A few hours again the name Clarke had been like a gut punch to his stomach, a name he tried think about and hear as little as possible. Now he wanted to repeat it over and over again until his voice went hoarse.
"Bellamy... I'm scared." She sounds so small and wounded.
And Bellamy thinks he understands, because after feeling fresh air fill his lungs, and being surrounded by a forest even his rover couldn't cover the Ark's metal walls feel like a tomb. Not even that year he spent alone, without Octavia or his mother, had felt this empty - like the blackness of space might open up and swallow him into it.
But at least he has the others, and they can take comfort in each other. He has taken comfort in them, remembering the ways they held quiet vigils over him as he grieved.
And how he has Clarke again, and the chance to see her once they get back down to Earth. That's a comfort he can cling to now, a hope bubbling inside his chest and starting to become real the more he talks to her.
"Clarke, listen to me, okay? You don't have to be scared because you are not alone.” He closes his eyes so he can picture her face as he talks to her. He imagines the blues in her eyes turning that sea green. “I will stay on this damn thing 24 hours a day if I need to, alright?"
"Okay."
She's quiet and they both let the silence fill up all with all they don't say.
When she speaks again her voice is raspy and wet. "Bellamy...”
“Yeah?”
“Will you tell me a story?”
Bellamy smiles, settling down in his bed even more. Yeah, he could do that...
For the first night since they got back on the Ark Bellamy doesn't fall asleep because he physically needs to stop moving. He's not hunched over on the floor of the airlock chamber or collapsed in the middle of his bed, all his clothing still on.
He's turned on his side, the headset still hanging from his ear and the restlessness completely gone from his body.
He dreams again and they don't wake him because dreaming is no longer painful and full of everything he will never have.
He's shooting down through the sky, the spaceship shaking and his friends cheering as it touches the ground. It's all in gray and their faces are blurred. He's not even sure how he knows it is Raven who first opens the door and bursts out.
His hands are trembling as he unbuckles his own belt, then he's shooting out the door himself. Even the blue of the sky and the sprouting grass of the meadow is grays, blacks, and whites. It's beautiful but he's not sure how he knows that without the color.
His feet are touching the ground of the Earth for the first time in five years but he's not focused on that. There's a streaking hot line of blonde and blue heading right toward him. Then, his arms are full of Clarke and she's holding him so, so close and he can smell the rain and the grass on her skin. He can taste the Earth on her lips, even though he doesn't kiss her, yet.
When he pulls away to see her face the rest of the world is still muted behind her but it doesn't matter, he's not looking away from her, anyway. He doesn't need to see the color because she's the part of this world that bursts with it for him.
She's saying words to him he already knows but feel so good to hear. Then, he's cupping her face and he is tasting her lips. But she doesn't taste like the Earth, she tastes even better - like coming home.
Across the expanse of space, the burning orange of the once blue sky, in the charred but still standing remnants of Becca's lab Clarke is sleeping, too. She's clutching the little frankenstein radio to her chest, the receiver still gripped in her fist. The sounds of Bellamy's peaceful breathing keeping the demons at bay as the noise vibrates against her stomach.
She allows herself to dream, too.