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The showers on the Ark only run for five minutes, and around the four-minute mark the water turns cold, reminding you that your time’s almost up. It’s not enough time to take your time, really only enough to scrub yourself once over and rinse off in the last frigid sputters, but it’s what Bellamy, like everyone else from Skaikru, is used to. He could do it in his sleep, with time to spare.
It’s enough time to get off in, if you’re quick about it, and use the sense of urgency caused by the imminent threat of freezing water to your advantage. After almost three years, the process is rote, borderline mechanical, and while it’s technically stimulation, it has become largely void of physical—much less mental—enjoyment. It is, in a word, dismal.
Bellamy stands still under the spray for a few seconds, contemplative. He tries to call up something, anything, erotic. When he bothers to try to imagine anything, to pretend he’s somewhere else, he’s never sure where he’s supposed to be, or who he’s supposed to be with. On the ground, on the Ark, or some weird in-between. The who is even more complicated, so he usually doesn’t linger on it. She’s easy enough to call to mind, tall, dark-haired, ambiguously faced. A voice saying, “Bellamy.”
Then, unbidden, he thinks of standing in front of the industrial sink in the kitchen as he had only an hour before, washing dishes with Echo, her face turning towards his as she met his eyes. They’ve washed dishes together countless times, but this time he didn’t fall into it as easily as he usually does. They had to stand close enough that their shoulders brushed, him scrubbing and her rinsing and drying. He remembers noticing the shift of tendons in her neck, long and elegant, as she looked at him.
Then, earlier in the day, when they sparred—she’d pinned his shoulders to the floor with her thighs and he remembers looking up the length of her and thinking—
“Goddamn it,” Bellamy says, opening his eyes, only to blink again when water runs into them. He can’t, not about Echo. It’s—well, maybe not wrong, it’s theoretically harmless, but—he can’t. It feels a bit like reaching inside himself and opening up a drawer stuffed with emotions too complicated to deal with at present, or possibly ever. She’s his friend, and he’s long since stopped trying to debate that, even with himself.
The showerhead makes a sputtering sound, but Bellamy’s already reaching for the knob and shutting off the spray. He busies himself drying off, only to realize he’s left his nightclothes in a bundle by the sinks. He wraps the threadbare towel around himself and exits the stall, not paying much attention to anything at all until he gets his boxers and sweatpants back on. It’s only when he reaches for his shirt that someone clears their throat.
“Fuck,” Bellamy says, whipping around. Echo stands near the entrance, watching him silently. In the literal instant between when Bellamy meets her eyes and when he reacts, he sees her expression change, but he doesn’t have the time or the presence of mind to read into the way her brow furrows. “How long have you been standing there?”
“I just walked in,” Echo says, slightly miffed. “Your modesty is spared.”
Bellamy rolls his eyes, but he can’t exactly be mad at her. “Sorry,” he says. “I just—didn’t hear you. Or see you.”
“I’m good at that,” Echo says. She crosses the room then and stops at the sink to the right of the one he’s claimed. She deposits a small mesh bag on the counter, presumably containing bathing supplies, the same soap and shampoo they all use. She unties the scrap of fabric binding her braid, then begins combing her hair out with her fingers. Preparing to wash it, he supposes. With hair as long and thick as hers, she probably has to shampoo it over the sink, as painstaking as that process sounds.
Perhaps it’s because he’s now hyperaware of her presence, but her movements seem stiff. She’s also overly aware of him, or at least he thinks she must be, judging by the way she’s refusing to look either at him or at herself in the mirror. He’s hit with a brief, irrational thought that she might know, somehow, that he’s been thinking of her. Not even just now, but all day. Sometimes it feels like she can take one look at his face and know exactly what he’s thinking, which is still sort of terrifying.
“Hey,” Bellamy says lightly, without any plan in mind other than to smooth things over so he can put on a shirt and make a somewhat graceful exit. “You’ve seen me in less. It’s okay.”
This might have been the wrong thing to say, but it’s true. Besides, they’re both adults. It’s not weird that they’re standing inches apart, him half-clothed and her in a tank top and leggings.
Echo doesn’t tense up, but she’s near enough that he can feel it, sense it somehow, the split second when she hesitates. Just as quickly, though, she looks up, meeting his eyes in the mirror. “That was different.”
She looks away again, this time meeting her own eyes in the mirror as she continues combing through her hair. It doesn’t look that tangled, really, or dirty—there hasn’t really been much of an excuse for any of them to get dirty in a few days. Sometimes there’s grease or grime to wash away, but lately they’ve all been at a loss for things to do. Maybe that’s why he can’t stop watching her pull her fingers through her hair—nothing else to do.
“Different,” Bellamy repeats, even as a part of him—maybe his self-preservation instinct—says stop, don’t. He’s suddenly even more conscious of his own near nudity than he already was.
“I didn’t know you then,” Echo says. She doesn’t sound like she wants to continue talking, her tone a little stiff, but her expression is calm; she just stands there, twining her fingers through her hair. Send me away, Bellamy thinks. Tell me to leave you alone. Clearly, he’s lost whatever control he might have had over the situation, and possibly his mind, too.
“But now you do,” Bellamy says, aware of how painfully stupid he sounds. “So you’d think it’d be less weird, really.”
Something about this moment feels like it’s stretching on longer than it should, like they’ve entered one of the wormholes of deep space that he remembers learning about as a kid—time is slowing down.
“Is that so,” Echo says, with that infuriatingly even tone she gets sometimes, as if she’s immune to petty things that affect everyone else, like awkward tension. “Because it seems as though you’re the only one struggling with this.”
Bellamy feels his mouth twist, without his permission, into a smile. “Maybe I’m a little uncomfortable.”
Echo turns her head, finally meeting his gaze outright. “Then perhaps you should go,” she says, lightly. “If that will make you comfortable.”
He doesn’t want to be comfortable. He doesn’t want to be bored, or alone, and he doesn’t want to go. He thinks this, and then suddenly he’s leaning in, closing the space between them, and kissing her. His aim is a bit off-center, neither of them having really been prepared for what he was about to do, but she tilts her head to correct them, her lips parting under his easily.
Now he understands that very first look of hers, before he freaked out. She not only lets him crowd her against the counter, she pulls him flush against her, running her hands from his upper arms to his shoulders and then down his back, along his sides, making him shiver. She wants him.
He’s operating purely on instinct when he nudges her up onto the counter, which she perches on unsteadily, one wrong move from slipping backwards to sit in the sink. Her legs cinch around his hips, pulling him impossibly closer. They break for air only when one of them has to snatch a breath. This isn’t real, Bellamy thinks, although she feels very real, her mouth and hands and thighs. It can’t be.
Echo breaks contact suddenly, their lips separating with a soft, obscene sound. “We can’t,” she says. Her eyes seem very dark, darker than usual. “Not here.”
Their rooms are too far away, much too far. Some part of him balks at the idea of suggesting it, unwilling to calm the frantic energy of the moment. He’s not sure which one of them he’s actually worried about frightening off. “Hold on.”
“Don’t,” Echo says, her eyes widening slightly, but he’s already sliding his hands under her thighs and lifting. She tightens her grip on him, with a huff by his ear that’s either amusement or annoyance, and he picks a shower at random and carries her into the cube of space.
He has to set her on her feet so that he can turn slightly to shut the door and lock it, though it offers little protection in the event that one of their friends actually walks in. Their heads aren’t visible over the door, but their feet definitely are under it.
He’s barely turned his head to look at her before Echo’s kissing him again, one of her hands at the nape of his neck. “This is insane,” she says when she breaks the kiss, her eyes still slightly wide. “Ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous, sure,” Bellamy says, backing her against the wall. “‘Insane’ seems a little strong.”
“Oh, shut up,” Echo says, then gasps, softly, when he starts mouthing at her neck, her hand sliding up to grip at his hair.
She’s right, of course. This is ill-advised at best, and Bellamy can feel the most rational part of himself demanding that they stop, right now, and reconsider their actions, or at least move this elsewhere. That part of him, however, is currently being overruled by a large majority, and Echo isn’t stopping him. Instead, she’s pulling off her shirt, tossing it aside, and pulling him in close again.
He doesn’t really think about it before he drops to his knees, but he looks up at her, watches her blink rapidly a few times, like she’s struggling to process what’s happening. Bellamy tries not to grin. “You okay?”
“Shut up,” she repeats, gritting her teeth, but she allows it when Bellamy begins untying her boots.
By the time she’s out of her leggings and underwear, he’s too impatient to wait any longer, gripping one of her knees and lifting her leg up over his shoulder. Echo doesn’t wobble, perpetually graceful, but she does have to grab at the slick wall to her left for balance. “Watch it,” she says, but this protest wilts when he turns his head to mouth at her thigh. He needs a shave; a few days’ worth of stubble rasps slightly against the soft skin.
Bellamy licks into her like he’s starving for it, and he almost feels like he is, although that’s the sort of melodrama that only makes sense when you’re having sex. Her breathing is fast but quiet, and she’s staring down at him, her expression transfixed. A couple minutes and he slips two fingers into her; she lets out another one of those gasps, and then he crooks them and she’s gone, thighs tensing as she comes. He’s more than a little surprised, although he supposes it has to have been at least as long for her as it has for him, unless something’s been going on that he doesn’t know about.
He eases her leg down gently when she tugs at his hair, then stands. The showerhead brushes the top of his head and he moves closer to her. “Do you—” he says, unsure of what he’s asking even as he speaks. “Should I—”
“Be quick,” she says, and then her hands are on his shoulders. For a moment he thinks she wants him to kneel again, which he doesn’t mind, but instead she just grabs hold, her expression expectant. He lifts her up and presses her back against the wall for support, and then her hands are fumbling between them, her weight shifting until she manages to ruck his pants down to his thighs. It takes a bit of maneuvering, but the first slow push in is worth it, and Bellamy holds still for a moment, savoring it. The only thing he can hear over the sound of his own ragged breathing is her shuddery intake of breath.
“Bellamy,” she says, voice hushed, her face tipping forward slightly. Their eyes meet, and then he’s moving, hips snapping as best he can in this position. It’s rough, maybe too rough, but she only clings tighter, their frantic breaths mingling between them.
At this pace, he can’t last, but he’s following her lead—be quick. He tries to kiss her again, but it’s sloppy. She bites his bottom lip, possibly by accident, and he says “fuck” and comes, essentially in unison. It’s sudden and good, so good that for a moment all he can do is press her body against the wall and shudder through it. One of her hands smooths over his hair, incongruously gentle given how tightly he’s hanging onto her.
It’s that thought, the realization of how lightly she’s touching him, that makes him realize how hard he’s gripping her thighs. He relaxes his hold, and she unfolds her legs from around his hips, dropping lightly to her feet. She still has her socks on.
Echo meets his eyes momentarily, and for a few seconds neither of them says anything, silent in a state of mutual did we really just do this. Bellamy opens his mouth to speak just as Echo says, “I should probably shower.”
“Right,” he says. His voice sounds funny, oddly hoarse, too loud in the small, echoing space. “Well, I’ll get out of your hair.”
She makes a face, a little wrinkling of her nose that he wants to dissect but doesn’t. He slips out of the stall and heads for the sink, pulling on his shirt hastily now that Echo isn’t standing around to watch. The knees of his sweatpants are damp, water having seeped into the fabric when he knelt on the floor. He only glances up at the mirror once, finding himself flushed and wild-haired when he does.
She hasn’t come out of the shower to retrieve her things before he leaves, which seems sort of childish, but then so does fleeing the scene.
He goes back to his room, seeing no one else on the way; he doesn’t allow himself to think, although that’s really all that’s left to do. He can figure out what to do next in the morning, but for now he gets in bed, tablet in hand, ready to do an evening check of atmospheric reports. He doesn’t mean to, but he wakes up the next morning with the tablet lost in the sheets. He’d slept harder and more dreamlessly than he has in a long time.
Breakfast is quiet the next morning, but not because of any lingering tension between him and Echo. That’s there, of course, but nobody seems awake enough to comment on it. Bellamy eats his algae slop as slowly as he can stand to and deliberately does not look at Echo any more than he normally would, although he does cave and watch her walk away from the table, her hair long and shiny where it drapes down her back.
They spar shortly after breakfast every day, after any daily chores have been taken care of. He meets her in the sparring area to find her holding the long PVC pipes they use in place of swords. It’s smart; perhaps a bit of low-contact sport is what they need today.
They move through their stretches in silence, and Bellamy looks mainly at the floor. Clearly he can’t be trusted to look at her for very long.
“Ready?” Echo asks as she stands. It’s been so quiet for so long that he almost jumps.
“As I’ll ever be,” Bellamy says, getting to his feet. He means it to sound casual, but he sees her brow furrow as she picks up a pipe.
“No need to sound so grim,” she says, after a second’s pause. She backs away and looks up at him, rolling her shoulders before bending her knees slightly, readying herself. “We’ve done this hundreds of times before.”
“I know,” he says, matching her position, albeit slightly less enthusiastically. Then, cursing himself even as he speaks, he adds, “But not after what happened last night.”
They’re going to have to address it at some point. She’s his friend; they’re grown-ups. He’s getting too old for this sort of thing, anyway.
She takes one stalking step forward, her expression neutral. “Obviously.”
“Echo,” Bellamy says, exasperated. She ignores him and swings, and he has to parry or risk getting whacked with a pipe.
Now it’s her turn to be uncomfortable; he should’ve expected that she might shut down on this. It occurs to him now that she might not have had the same heavy, restful sleep that he did afterwards, might not have woken up this morning feeling pleasantly drowsy instead of exhausted. Maybe she doesn’t want to talk about it because she didn’t enjoy it as much as he did, despite all his second-guessing. Because he did enjoy it, a hell of a lot; it felt like the best thing that has happened to him in years.
Echo slips under his outstretched arm and is behind him with the pipe at his throat before he has time to blink, much less turn around. “You’re dead,” she says, in his ear. There’s a hint of familiar playfulness slipping back into her voice, probably because he hasn’t pressed the issue.
“Not yet,” he says, elbowing her in the ribs. She grunts, and he breaks free of her hold, turning to face her. The pipes crack together loudly, vibrating in their hands, and Bellamy grins. Sparring with her is the best part of most days, and despite everything, today’s not much different.
Echo doesn’t go easy on him unless she’s teaching him something, but today she’s even more focused, more fierce. Her movements have always held the kind of fluid grace that he’s never truly been able to compete with, usually only holding his own against her through brute force. Her cheeks are pink, the hair at her temples slightly damp. Bellamy only notices this, of course, when his back slams into the wall hard as she corners him, pipe once again at his throat.
“Now you’re really dead,” she says, raising her eyebrows at him.
Funny, because he’s very conscious of his pulse thrumming in his ears. She looks at him for a few seconds, both of them breathing quickly. He knows she’s going to kiss him before she does because her gaze flicks down to his lips and lingers there. She kisses him softly, more softly than they kissed the night before, but then she sucks on his bottom lip and he groans, loud and sudden.
She pulls back, lowering the pipe. He lets go of her waist, which he must have grabbed unconsciously. “We should go somewhere else,” she says, because of course it’s already decided that they’re going to do this again, and of course they can’t do it here, where anyone could amble in and see them.
Bellamy nods. “Follow me,” he says.
She clearly expects him to lead her to his room, but his room is across the hall from Monty and Harper’s, and they like to keep their door open when they’re just hanging out, an invitation for others to come by and talk for a while. Her door, next to his, isn’t any less noticeable.
She hisses his name when he beckons her into the electrical closet, which is nothing but a long, narrow room with walls of blinking panels. “Have you lost your mind?” she asks, when he shuts the door behind them. “Better yet, have I?”
Neither of these questions stop her from going to her knees, though, and without any warning. He’d consciously left the overhead lights off so as not to attract attention from the corridor, but he can sort of see her, her face illuminated by the soft blue lights along the walls. He can hear her, the soft huffs of breath and slick sounds of her mouth, until his head falls back against the wall behind him and he loses track of everything.
They could do this, he thinks as he backs her against the panels, one hand slipping down the front of her pants and the other cupping the back of her neck for something to hold on to. They could do this, make each other feel good all the time, and it wouldn’t have to be weird.
Bellamy hears noise from the hallway and Echo stiffens against him, her breath hitching. He recognizes Murphy’s drawling voice, which is good, as he’s not likely to investigate an electrical room. Both he and Echo go still nevertheless, holding their positions as Emori responds to Murphy, who replies, their conversation as quick and shifting as a swordfight. The sound gets distant before tapering off altogether.
Despite the situations he’s gotten himself into in the past twenty-four hours, Bellamy’s not really one for exhibitionism, especially not in quarters as close as the Go-Sci Ring. There’s a certain adrenaline that comes with listening as someone passes by outside, but it’s tempered by a thorough awareness of the possible consequences.
“Bellamy,” Echo breathes, and just like that he’s back in it, focus snapping back to her like it never left. It doesn’t take her long to come, his fingers working her over, mouth hot on her neck. She grips his waist for a few seconds afterwards, and he wonders if, for a moment, she feels unsteady. Her eyes, irises almost black in the near-darkness, are on him as he raises his hand to his mouth and licks his fingers.
“This is insane,” she says again, her voice soft, but this time it’s not a complaint.
He doesn’t spend any more significant alone time with Echo that day, or most of the next, aside from when they spar. Not because he doesn’t want to—he does. But he also doesn’t want to push his luck. They still haven’t talked about it, which means he doesn’t know where they stand. It’s not an unfamiliar predicament to find himself in when it comes to Echo.
Evening on the second day, however, means it’s their turn to wash dishes again. It’s been a long day; Bellamy spent the better part of it helping Monty and Harper with the algae crop, and then sat at the comms for two hours monitoring the radio, which always exhausts him emotionally, if not physically. The others are still at the table, talking and playing cards, but the silence he falls into with Echo in the kitchen is comfortable and oddly welcome, even after all the radio silence.
Echo’s elbow bumps gently against his forearm as she picks up a sudsy plate from the sink, and she murmurs an apology. She smells faintly of the laundry detergent they all use, even over the acrid scent of the dish soap he has his hands in, and her body is warm next to his. He feels a profound, momentary urge to lean into her, to rest his head on her shoulder for a bit. He doesn’t, but it’s a near thing.
It makes a certain kind of sense, he supposes, as he hands her another plate. Aside from the occasional fond gesture or hug from Monty, Harper, or Raven, he hasn’t really been touched by anyone in years. Sparring with Echo is the most consistent source of physical contact in his life at the moment. It makes sense that his base desire for human contact, despite his efforts to ignore it, would eventually find an outlet with her. Plus, he’s always known she was beautiful, even when that beauty seemed to be of the wild-animal, deadly-force-of-nature kind.
“You’re looking very serious,” Echo says, interrupting this train of thought. The look in her eyes when she glances at him reads like slight concern, but she keeps her tone light. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Bellamy says, realizing he’s been scrubbing the second-to-last plate for several seconds longer than necessary. He hands it over to her. “Just thinking.”
“Thinking,” she repeats, as she sprays the plate clean with the sink hose.
“Yeah,” he says. “About—this.”
“Washing dishes?”
He huffs. “You can’t really play stupid with me, you know that, right? I know just how smart you are.”
She presses her lips together, trying not to smile. “Fine,” she says evenly, as she picks up a rag to dry the plate with. “What about it?”
Now he’s slightly at a loss; he hadn’t expected to bring this up again now, but he really hadn’t expected her to allow it. “Just—you’re okay with what happened, right?” he asks. “I don’t want things to be weird between us. Ever.”
Echo glances at him, and the furrowing of her brow tells him she’s thinking of the same thing he is—how long it has taken for this peace between them to develop. It still gives him pause sometimes, that feeling, but he wouldn’t risk it for anything. “I don’t want that, either. But I trust you.”
“Trust me?”
“To not—make it weird, as you would say,” she says, avoiding his gaze now. “Do you trust me to do the same?”
This, to him, sounds like a tacit way of saying she wants the sex to continue; he knows better than to expect her to come right out with it. “Yeah,” he says. “I do.”
She looks at him again now, her expression difficult to read. He’s not sure what she expected him to say, but maybe it wasn’t that. Either way, she permits it when he leans in to kiss her, her eyes fluttering shut just before he closes his own.
They stand there for a few moments, kissing. Bellamy shifts to face her, one of his damp hands brushing against the small of her back unthinkingly; one of her hands comes up to card through his hair. They stay like that until a sudden burst of laughter from the other room startles them apart. By the sound of it, Raven and Murphy are entertaining the group with their usual antics.
“We can’t keep doing this in public,” Bellamy says wryly. “So to speak. Unless maybe you’re into it.”
She blinks at him, then turns back to the dishes. “I thought you must be.”
He laughs, although something about her response gives him pause. If there’s one thing he’s learned about Echo in the years he’s known her, it’s that she loves—or at least very much likes—to please. He’s seen the quiet happiness in her face when somebody thanks her for helping them with a task or doing them a favor, although she’ll always respond to gratitude with some variant of “it was nothing” or “of course.” It makes sense, given what he’s put together about her upbringing, the life of servitude she fully expected to lead. The idea that she might have gone along with something because she thought he enjoyed it almost makes him wince, from a strange mixture of both affection and discomfort.
“Well,” he says, instead of trying to articulate any of this. “It was fun, but not really because of where we were.”
At this, she does smile, and he smiles back.
It’s easy enough for Bellamy to beg off joining the others at cards, and although Echo lingers to avoid attracting attention, within thirty minutes they’re in his room and she’s riding him like she has a score to settle. It’s like scratching an itch he’s been ignoring for days; it should scare him, how much he already craves this after going so long without it, but he can’t concentrate on that now. There’s nothing he wants to think about less than the years he’s spent in solitude in this same room, this same bed.
He thinks of switching positions to spare Echo from doing all the work, but her hands are planted firmly on his chest, both for support and to keep him where he is, and she doesn’t seem to be flagging. In the low-light he can see that she’s biting her lip, but she’s still making quiet noises of exertion and pleasure, probably when she can’t help it.
“You don’t have to be quiet,” Bellamy tells her, his voice coming out rough. “Not now.”
This is almost true; they don’t have to be quiet, but they can’t be loud, as the walls are thick but not too thick. Echo doesn’t say anything, but she does let out a gasp when he shifts and grips her waist, urging her down harder, then a hum of pleasure when he moves one hand to touch her clit. She moans out loud when she comes, with a full body shudder, and it’s the best thing he’s seen or heard or felt in a long time, longer than he cares to remember.
Afterwards, Echo climbs off him and takes a few seconds to collect herself, and Bellamy tries to do the same. Mostly he watches her where she sits next to him, her body facing halfway away. His eyes catch, for some reason, on the jut of her shoulder, and he’s sitting up so that he can lean in and kiss her there when she begins scooting towards the edge of the bed.
“Hang on,” Bellamy says, startled and, oddly enough, slightly offended. “You don’t have to cut and run.”
Echo pauses, looking over her shoulder. “What?”
“I mean,” Bellamy says, taking the part of himself that feels stung and shoving it down, “do whatever you want. Just—don’t rush off on my account.”
She smiles, then bends down and picks her panties up from the floor. “I was just putting my underwear back on,” she says.
“Don’t do that on my account, either,” Bellamy says. She scoffs, but he can tell she’s smiling, even when she turns to continue looking for her clothes.
She lingers for about ten minutes, during which time she gets fully dressed and he puts his pants back on. They make a little small talk about what the others are probably doing—playing spades and arguing, the playful bickering having devolved into several actual squabbles in the heat of competition—and what they’ll probably do tomorrow—Echo’s going to help Murphy and Emori clean the kitchen—but for the most part, the comfortable silence returns.
When she rises to leave, Bellamy—somewhat illogically, as it’s a matter of a few steps—walks her to the door. She pauses in the doorway, finding the corridor empty, and looks back at him.
“Good night,” she says.
“Night,” Bellamy replies, and then she turns and walks away, simple as that.
He goes to bed immediately, now thoroughly drowsy, but not before telling himself, see, it’s not weird. Not weird at all. The only thing that was weird, actually, was him not wanting her to leave.
Unsurprisingly, life is better when you’re getting laid regularly.
He’s been sleeping better. It gives him something to look forward to every day, both the release of it and the simple human contact. It is, overall, not a bad setup, assuming they can iron out some of the details as they go.
Echo continually gets sort of cagey afterwards, maybe because they usually hook up in his room and she’s wary of overstaying her welcome. But after the first time in his room, she at least doesn’t bolt anymore. Over the course of a week, they fall into a routine of sitting together and talking afterwards, decompressing at the close of day. A couple days they don’t talk much at all, instead sitting quietly until one of them gets up to leave.
On the eighth night, he notices that she’s favoring, ever so slightly, the left side of her body. When she gingerly bends over to find her underwear in the pile of clothes on the floor, he has to ask, “Are you okay?”
She moves aside a shirt—his, by the look of it—and finally comes up with the intended article of clothing. “Of course. Why?”
“You’re sort of—stiff,” Bellamy says, still watching her from where he sits leaning back against the bulkhead.
“It’s nothing,” Echo says. “Raven came down hard on me when we were sparring, that’s all.”
“I heard her bragging about tackling you,” Bellamy says, and Echo huffs a laugh. “Said she almost had you.”
“I don’t know about almost,” Echo says evenly, and Bellamy grins. Raven’s personal goal is to become skilled enough to earn a submission from Echo; it hasn’t happened yet, but sooner or later it has to. Even Echo’s body, honed as it has been for fighting and killing, is not invulnerable.
“Come here,” Bellamy says, and Echo shifts to look at him. The range of motion in her neck must be slightly limited, because she turns her upper body instead.
When he beckons, she moves closer to him on the bed, curious. She leans in to kiss him briefly, which he allows, although that’s not what he had in mind. “Turn around, face the other way.”
Now she looks skeptical, although she must have guessed by now where he’s going with this. He doesn’t allow himself to dwell on it for too long, just moves so that she can sit between his legs, which are covered by the bedsheet.
She doesn’t tense up when he puts his hands on her shoulders, although he half expects her to; she does, however, huff again, amused. “That’s kind of you,” she says when he kneads lightly. “But I think your hands would be more useful in other places, at other tasks.”
“Thanks, I feel special,” Bellamy says dryly. “Where does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t hurt, it’s just a little sore,” Echo says, almost indignant. She raises her right hand, though, and indicates the general area of her neck and left shoulder. Bellamy doesn’t move directly to her neck, instead lingering at her shoulders for a while, just kneading. He’s never been taught how to do this sort of thing, obviously, but he at least has the sense to do what he’d want done, which is a soothing circular pattern.
Even Echo, martyr that she is, can’t play at being above a shoulder rub forever. She drops her head forward after a minute or two, her breathing even, and Bellamy can tell she’s relaxing into it, albeit warily. She flinches slightly when the heel of his hand presses into a sore spot, but she doesn’t protest.
Bellamy’s oddly soothed by this, too, even though he’s ostensibly the one in control here. He feels almost like he’s fallen into a trance as he moves his hands, letting his thumb press firmly into the muscle at the nape of her neck, which she seems to enjoy, judging by the way she exhales. When his fingers twine loosely through her hair, she leans her head back against the pressure of his hand. One of her hands rests lightly on his knee, and though the sheet separates their skin, he can still feel her thumb tracing mindless circles there.
He kisses her shoulder without really thinking about it; it feels like the right thing to do. “I was wrong,” Echo says then. Her voice is soft, tone relaxed and warm. “This is an acceptable use of your hands.”
Bellamy smiles. “You should probably go easy tomorrow, sparring.”
It’s the mention of tomorrow that does it: the reminder that something exists beyond this, whatever this is. Echo takes her hand off his knee and inhales quietly. “I should go,” she says, as she glances over her shoulder at him. “Get some rest, that is.”
“Right,” Bellamy says, dropping his hands from her shoulders. They feel heavier than they did before, somehow, sitting awkwardly in his lap like he doesn’t know what to do with them.
He busies himself as Echo gets dressed, locating his pants and putting them on, then picking up the tablet from his bedside table. He looks up when he can tell she’s ready to go and sets aside the tablet, screen still locked, on the bed. Walking her to the door is a habit that he hasn’t been able to break yet, but she allows it every time.
“Thank you,” she says, on the way.
“No need,” he says, pulling up short as they reach the doorway. “I wanted to.”
She looks at him, her hand on the door handle, and then leans in to kiss his cheek quickly and lightly. She doesn’t meet his eyes again as she opens the door and steps out.
Solar flares always seem to put Echo on edge, for reasons Bellamy doesn’t quite know. She gets even quieter than usual, and she’ll spend the rest of the day after looking sort of grim. To him and the others, except perhaps for Emori, flares are a routine inconvenience, a normal part of living in space. If he had to guess, he’d say Echo doesn’t quite trust the Ark’s flare shelters to protect them from what she probably thinks of as the slow, painful sickness that came before Praimfaiya, but that’s just a guess. Either way, it doesn’t surprise him when, after a class X flare has them all sitting in the flare shelter for two hours after dinner one night, she shows up at his door.
He fucks her from behind, can tell she’s too keyed up for anything more complicated than that, her gasps and little cries muffled but audible where she’s pressing her arm against her mouth. Afterwards, when he heaves himself over onto his side to lie down next to her, it’s almost too easy to keep his arm loose around her waist and gently tug her over with him. She goes without complaint even though they’re both sticky with sweat and still trying to catch their breath, and for a few moments they just lie there, chest to back.
“Baby.”
Bellamy cracks open his eyes, although from this position all he can really see is the back of her head. “What?” he says, befuddled.
“You called me ‘baby,’” she says. She’s slightly too still; Echo has mastered the art of not fidgeting, even slightly. “During.”
In the three weeks that they’ve been doing this, he’s figured out that Echo’s kind of weird about sex, sometimes. She likes it, apparently a lot, judging by the fact that she’s been here every night this week so far. But she doesn’t talk about it, at least not explicitly. But then she hardly ever talks about anything to do with herself unless it’s clearly relevant to a matter at hand, and sex is one of those things that’s just as much about you as it is about the other person, no matter what it seems like in the moment.
“Did I?” Bellamy says. He’s kind of been operating on instinct alone, at least for the past several minutes. Although he does kind of remember mumbling fuck, baby, you’re so wet, part of a flow of almost nonsensical, stream-of-consciousness dirty talk against her neck as he rocked into her from behind. God only knows what came out of his mouth, and none of it particularly inspired. This line stands out, though, because she’d actually whimpered into the pillow in response. “Maybe I did.”
“Why,” she says, when he clearly doesn’t feel the need to elaborate.
A small part of him panics, because that’s a question he doesn’t know how to answer truthfully. He’s almost positive that he doesn’t have to explain the concept of a term of endearment to Echo, but the very idea of saying the words term of endearment out loud makes him balk. Something about her tone soothes that part of him pretty quickly, however. She’s calling him on it, yes, but in her this does not compute voice, not her you’ve crossed a line voice. That tone would probably immediately precede her leaving the room, and she hasn’t moved to disengage yet. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s just a thing people say.”
“Strange.”
Bellamy rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling now. He lifts his head up slightly so that he can see the side of her face; the corner of her mouth twitches upwards, a sign that she’s probably fucking with him, at least to some extent. “It isn’t strange. I mean, it’s not literal. Come on, all the old movies you’ve seen now, and you never picked up on somebody saying that?”
She presses her lips together, trying not to smile. “Never. It’s sort of—ridiculous.”
“Well, if you don’t like it, I won’t say it again,” Bellamy says lightly, but Echo doesn’t say anything, still withholding her smile. She meets him halfway when he leans down to kiss her, though, and then she does smile, which essentially confirms that he’s going to do it again, as many times as she’ll let him.
There are a few close shaves—like the morning he realizes he has a hickey and has to pass it off as a nick from shaving like a kid, or the time they’re making out in the sparring area, again, and Harper appears so suddenly on her way to the kitchen that Echo only halfway manages to make it look like she’s actually just got him pinned. But overall, after close to a month, things are still good. Time seems to be moving more quickly than normal, although that’s probably because what used to be time spent largely alone has now been replaced by time spent with her.
When she doesn’t show around her usual time in the evening, he heads to her room, only for his knock to go unanswered. He’s walking back to his room, having decided to wait for her there a little longer in case she’s showering, when he sees her coming down the hallway from the opposite direction.
“Hey,” he says, stopping where he is as she continues to approach. Then, curious, “What’s that?”
She holds up the item in her hand, and he sees that it’s a heating pad from medical, the cord trailing close to the floor.
“You alright?”
“Yes,” she says wryly. “Or I will be, in a few days.”
“Right,” Bellamy says, nodding. He did grow up with a mother and sister, after all, although back in those days you couldn’t just take what you needed from medical and leave. There’s a beat as they linger a few feet from her door and look at each other, not quite an awkward pause, but on the way there.
Then suddenly Echo’s moving, walking past him to reach her door. “Come on,” she says, with a little shrug of one shoulder. “But don’t get excited.”
Bellamy laughs and follows her. “You know,” he says as she opens the door, “I don’t really care.”
She rolls her eyes at him and steps into the room without deigning to respond, but he’s pretty sure her cheeks have gone slightly pink.
If he’d known they weren’t going to have sex, at least right away, he’d have brought the tablet with him, so as to do his usual evening check-in with the ground. With the radiation in the atmosphere, the best their systems can provide is a readout of general atmospheric conditions, but it’s better than nothing. Now, though, he just watches as she collects a pile of clothing from the table across the room and carries it to the bed, then sits down and pulls the blanket over her lower body, tucking the heating pad about herself before turning it on.
“Clothes?” he says, approaching the bed and sitting down on the other side before bending down to take off his boots.
“I’m mending them,” Echo says. When he turns around, he sees that she’s already threading a needle. “Some of mine and some of Monty and Harper’s.”
“I could help,” Bellamy says. When she looks up at him, he says, “My mom was a seamstress. I know how to put on a patch.”
“Do you?” she asks, dropping her gaze to somewhere around his middle. When he investigates what she’s looking at, he finds a hole the width of two fingers at the side seam of his shirt.
“That wasn’t there this morning,” he says. When she looks skeptical, he adds, “You could fix mine, too, if you want.”
“You can have the needle when I’m finished,” Echo says, returning her gaze to the sock she’s darning.
“So you’ll do Monty and Harper a favor but not me?” he asks, leaning back against the headboard and raising his eyebrows at her.
“Yes, because Monty and Harper are bad at fixing their clothes, and you, apparently, are not,” she says, but she’s laughing now, distracted again as she looks at him. “If I’d known you were going to require entertaining, I wouldn’t have invited you in.”
“Famous last words,” Bellamy says, and she rolls her eyes before putting down the fabric in her hands and reaching for the small set of drawers built into the wall next to the bed.
She withdraws a book from the top drawer and hands it to him. “Here,” she says. “Amuse yourself as you see fit.”
Now it’s his turn to roll his eyes, but he accepts what she offers and leaves her alone for the time being; he’s yet to meet a book he wouldn’t at least look over. It’s one he’s seen Harper with a few times, falling apart and written in a language none of them can read, a relic from a culture probably long dead. Its only redeeming quality besides its historical value is the fact that there are a lot of pictures, mostly of plants and a few landscapes.
He examines the book for a few minutes, lingering in the section on flowers, something he remembers in the least amount of detail from his comparatively brief time on the ground. He’d seen mostly wildflowers, pretty but sort of plain, ubiquitous from one meadow to the next, and it was winter most of the time he was there anyway.
Next to him, Echo makes quick work of the pile of clothing by the light from the fixture next to the bed. By the time he’s reached the landscapes, she’s gotten up and set it aside, apparently finished, and dimmed the overhead lights. Bellamy reaches a page that’s been marked by a piece of material, which he recognizes as the strip of cloth Echo uses to bind her hair when she wears it in a braid or ponytail. When she gets back on the bed and makes herself comfortable again, Bellamy indicates the page. “This where you stopped?” he asks, wondering if she might want it back to look at it before bed.
“Yes,” she says, oddly serious as she looks at the page. “The mountains.”
Bellamy looks at the top picture on the page; it’s a picture of a cragged, snowcapped mountain, beyond it nothing but clear blue sky. The only image of a mountain he can quickly call to mind is Mount Weather, but Azgeda lands, stretching farther north than he ever traveled, were probably mountainous throughout. “This look like anything you know?”
“No,” she says, shrugging. “Not except for the snow. That I know well.”
Bellamy holds his tongue. He wants to say, when we get back to the ground, you’ll see mountains again. She might, in that admittedly uncertain future, but they won’t be home anymore; her home will be where she makes it. He also does not say, when we get there, I want to see some mountains that don’t remind us of people who died.
“Come here,” he says instead, and for once she moves closer without any argument or skepticism. She lies down against his side, the heating pad between their bodies creating a pleasantly cozy warmth, and puts an arm across his middle.
They flip slowly through the book together, talking only when one of them comments on a picture. Echo has a habit of tracing over the pictures with the tip of her finger, not just to point something out but to reach out to the image itself, as though she can touch it and feel something other than paper. The last thing Bellamy remembers before his eyes get too heavy to keep open is her finger on the page, her voice, low, near his ear.
Bellamy wakes up alone, which isn’t unusual. He must’ve slept hard, because his mouth feels cottony and the blanket is neat on top of him, not twisted around his legs like it gets if he sleeps restlessly. It takes him a moment to realize that the blanket is not the nubby gray one he keeps on his bed but the faded blue quilt from Echo’s.
He looks around, squinting against the light from the overheads—they’re almost at full brightness, indicating that it’s past time for him to be awake—but she’s not there. The pile of clothes is gone from the table. The picture book, he notes, has been put away.
By the time he makes it to breakfast a few minutes later, the others are already halfway done, spooning green slop from their bowls with the usual amount of enthusiasm. “Morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Raven says as he drops into his usual seat across from her. “I was wondering if someone needed to go check for a pulse.”
“I appreciate the concern,” Bellamy says, rolling his eyes at her as Monty fills another bowl and passes it down. He’d have woken up before anybody got too concerned, but if someone had knocked on his door, there would have of course been no reply.
When he looks at Echo, she seems to have just looked away, her eyes now on her bowl. Only then does it occur to Bellamy that what happened last night was, in fact, out of the ordinary, and the realization hits him like a slap. It hasn't even been a month and he’s already broken the one unspoken rule they’ve adhered to faithfully, which is that despite all the sex and the occasional cuddling, they don’t sleep together; every interaction is temporary.
It’s one thing to fall asleep in someone’s bed after you hook up, but to just go there, just to be with her—friends don’t do that. Or maybe friends do, maybe they could, but Bellamy can’t, not with her, and not have it feel like—something. Something else.
It’s all adding up, suddenly. The desire to be around her that was suddenly so hard to ignore after that first time, the comfort he gets from just sharing space with her, calling her baby and holding each other, all while pretending that this was just an arrangement of mutual convenience for them. Pretending he could do this with anybody but her. It makes a strange kind of sense, now that he realizes how hard he’s been having to work to explain this away to himself.
Having come to the breakfast table late, he’s left with plenty of time to run through these thoughts, robotically putting bite after bite of goo into his mouth once he’s alone at the table. By the time he comes out of the kitchen, having faced Murphy’s baleful look when another dirty bowl is added to the stack for him to wash, Echo’s already in the sparring area.
“Hey,” he says as he walks over to her, conscious of Murphy and Emori’s presence on the other side of the kitchen door.
“Hey,” she says, glancing up at him from where she’s bending down to touch her toes. The PVC pipes are on the floor near her feet. She doesn’t ask if he slept well; she would know.
“You could’ve woken me up,” he says, raising his eyebrows.
This time she doesn’t look up. “I wanted to let you rest,” she says, moving into the next position. “I would have come for you, eventually.”
Bellamy has little choice but to follow her lead and concentrate on stretches. Finally, after about five more minutes, Murphy and Emori come out of the kitchens, talking to one another. Emori gives Bellamy a friendly nod from where he sits, midway through his stretches, and he nods back, then watches as they head down the corridor.
Echo stands, and Bellamy does the same, as he’s not really keen on doing this from a seated position. “Hey,” he says again, thoroughly loathing himself. “Can we talk?”
Echo’s gaze flicks toward him, her expression instantly wary, before she looks away again. “Must you always do this now?”
Bellamy sighs, exasperated. “Sorry. Is that a yes or a no?”
“Neither,” Echo says, picking up a pipe and backing up a few steps. Bellamy deliberately does not do the same. “But I’m assuming you’ll forge ahead anyways.”
Her expression is stiff, composed. He probably shouldn’t have opened with can we talk—it’s enough to set anyone on edge, and Echo is easily spooked at the best of times. It’s too bad there isn’t really a gentle way to say hey, I like this thing we’re doing too much, and if you don’t feel the same, you should let me know before I dig myself any deeper.
“Look, Echo—” he says, reaching up to rub his brow, more for something to do than anything else.
“Bellamy,” Echo says, her voice quiet. She looks at him briefly, but her expression is still stiff, almost frozen. “Don’t. Please.”
“Don’t what?” he asks, now more confused than anything, although frustration is beginning to mount. “Don’t rock the boat?”
She just looks at him, and he sees it in her eyes then, the same panic he can feel gaining traction in himself. Whatever he has to say, she doesn’t want to hear it, so she’s not even going to let him get it out. He opens his mouth to speak, trying to hold her gaze, but she’s already looking away. She drops the pipe, which lands on the floor with a whack and rolls away, and she’s breezing past him before he can keep up.
“Echo,” he says, loud in the large, open space, and she—one of the bravest people he’s ever met—just walks away.
He doesn’t see her for the rest of the day, but then he also doesn’t see much of anyone. Raven stays in her workshop, tinkering, with Murphy and Emori hanging around to distract her and perform any minor tasks she needs done. Monty and Harper head to their room after their usual duties with the algae farm and shut the door behind them, which effectively means disturb at your own risk. Bellamy spends most of the day sitting at the comms, listening to static and watching the readouts fluctuate gently. At least here he can force himself to contemplate other things, other people, even though there’s nothing to dwell on regarding the ground that he hasn’t already spent years going over and over again.
On a slow day like this, when there are no big chores to take care of and all there is to do is shoot the shit, most of them have usually talked themselves out by dinner. Conversation only picks up again if they play cards, which provides something to focus on for at least a couple hours.
Echo looks only at her food through dinner, eating slowly and methodically, not that Bellamy’s studying her too closely. When Monty brings out the deck of playing cards, she stands, takes her bowl to the kitchen, and heads for the exit.
“Echo,” Emori calls after her. “Poker. You owe me a rematch.”
“Yeah, after she wiped the floor with us last time,” Murphy mutters.
Echo looks over her shoulder and smiles faintly. “Nodotaim. I’m turning in.”
Bellamy doesn’t miss it when Emori’s gaze flicks toward him, and Raven’s, too, but his own eyes are focused on Echo. She meets his gaze, very briefly, then heads on her way. If she’s asking him to follow her, it wasn’t loud enough.
Poker is fun, but not very; he doesn’t win, but he does alright, not that it matters since they’re playing with imaginary wagers. He’s not going to Echo’s room afterwards, and he’s not sure he’d open the door for her if she came to his. That thought keeps him at the table with the others, but the game breaks up at a reasonable hour, and gradually the others start to traipse off to bed. Harper touches his shoulder lightly as she passes, and Monty looks like he wants to say something, only to be tugged along. Bellamy hides a wince as they murmur their goodnights; perhaps he and Echo have not been nearly as subtle as they thought.
Raven, the last one left, asks from the doorway, “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Bellamy says, standing up from the table before she can get any ideas. Raven’s not generally one for heart-to-hearts, but it’s not out of unkindness. “Of course.”
“Right,” she says, after a beat. “Night, then.”
He nods. She leaves, and he waits until the familiar sound of her footsteps has become inaudible before moving, as though magnetically pulled, to the observation port. He recognizes how dramatic he’s being even as he knows he can’t, or won’t, stop himself. He’s allowed to lick his wounds for a little while, at least, with nobody watching. Things will be awkward for a time, and then gradually they'll find a new normal, but for now he gets to sulk.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bellamy says, nearly jumping out of his skin. It’s Echo, of course, standing a few feet behind him with her hands crossed loosely behind her back, as though waiting to be called into a meeting. Sneaking up on him, as usual; she’s good at that.
Anybody else probably would have looked amused after scaring the hell out of him so easily, but she has the decency not to. She’s still dressed from the day, although she’s taken the usual little braid out of her hair, which now waves loosely around her face. He looks at her with what he hopes is a neutral expression, betraying nothing, but there’s a certain feeling of inevitability in the moment as she moves closer. Like it always would have come down to this, sooner or later, here or down below, somehow.
“I’m sorry,” she says, after a little pause. Blunt as ever.
“For what?” he asks. Not out of cruelty; if she wants to talk, finally, he’s going to let her lead.
Her mouth twitches into something wry. “I was a coward.”
He looks away, back at the ruddy Earth below. That’s not the kind of thing she’d say lightly, and he knows that. “What were you scared of?”
She comes closer again, this time drawing up evenly with him in front of the window. “Of hearing you say that we had to stop,” she says. “That this had to end.”
He pauses. Inhales. “Why would I say that?”
“I don’t know, Bellamy,” she says. Now a hint of frustration slips into her tone, like he’s being deliberately obtuse, but just a hint. “Because I’m me, and you’re you, and we have—history.”
“Yeah,” he says, glancing at her. Her eyes are fixed on the glass, but she’s not expressionless now. She’s Echo, collected and sharp but soft in spots he realizes, now, that he’s touched. “We do. But now it’s my turn to apologize.”
“For what?”
“For not telling you to get your head out of your ass this morning,” Bellamy says, watching the effect of these words ripple across her face, first as hurt and then confusion. “For being a coward, because I couldn’t just come out and tell you how I felt.”
It doesn’t take her long to process this; she’s too clever not to put it together, even if she is scared. “Say it now, then.”
“I care about you,” he says. “More than I told myself I could. The only reason I would put a stop to things is if you didn’t feel the same.”
Echo swallows, then nods, looks at him and holds his gaze. “I,” she says, “have never felt for anyone what I feel for you. Ever.”
It’s easily the most intimate and revealing thing he’s ever heard her say, which is why he has no idea what to say in response, so he just nods sort of emphatically and kisses her. He feels it when she sighs into him, relief making her go almost limp for a moment before she moves, arms lifting to wrap around his middle and pull him in.
They just kiss for a while, her back against the viewport, until eventually he pulls away. They’ll move soon, but for now they just stand there, foreheads brushing, sharing breath. “You know,” Bellamy says. “If we just talk about this kind of thing in the future, we won’t run into this problem again.”
She rolls her eyes, but she laughs, too, leaning her head back against the glass. He looks at her, backlit by the soft orange glow of the Earth, and is not afraid to think of the future.