Archive of Our Own

 It’s a nice day. It seems particularly beautiful.

It’s probably nothing special. She’s probably just in a good mood.

She lies on her back in the grass, and she looks up at the canopy of leaves as the sunlight dapples down, and she wants to draw it.

Madi places a crown weaved from grass on her head and then announces she’s bored, and Clarke watches her head back to the village with a fond smile.

She reaches for another berry.

The sound, the crinkling and the static from the radio she gave up on years ago, nearly stops her heart. She grabs it from the grass beside her, and she waits, holding it, afraid to breathe.

And the voice, so well remembered and so loved, hoarse and deep and disbelieving and alive, comes from between her hands.

“Clarke?”

Clarke had hoped.

She had hoped, but in a way that had required her not to think about it.

She blamed her radio when they didn’t respond. She blamed the radiation. She blamed the atmosphere. She blamed the comms systems on the ring.

It couldn’t be because they weren’t alive.

She needed them to be alive.

She told Madi stories of them. At first it was mostly just to keep herself sane, but Madi loved them, and so she told her more. Clarke drew them all, showed Madi pictures of the people who would be coming back for them, and she hung them up in her cabin, and she hoped.

It’s not something she acknowledges consciously, the fact that she hopes for Bellamy the most. It’s a reality, it’s a fact of her life, and ignoring it goes all the way back to when Lexa pointed out, not incorrectly, that she worried for Bellamy more.

But ignoring it cannot change the fact that there is a difference between the way she carefully traces the charcoal lines of Raven’s face, and her mother’s, and Octavia’s…and when she’s drawing Bellamy’s. She can know this and refuse to acknowledge it at the same time.

She can call him every day on the radio and still say that she’s calling all of them.

She can dream of him at night, of his voice and his face and his dark eyes and his freckles, and she can say that she misses her best friend.

But when his voice comes through the radio, when he says her name, when she feels her entire body react, light up, like she’s suddenly filled with carbonation, like every nerve ending in her body has fired at once, she has to acknowledge it.

She loves him.

It was too terrifying, before, to think she might love a corpse floating above her on a cold and airless ring. Too scary to think that she may have wasted so much time not thinking about him when he was right beside her. Too impossible to think that she could love someone so much and that the power of that love might not be enough to save him.

“Clarke?”

His voice shakes, and the radio goes blurry with tears, and she presses down the talk button.

“Bellamy?”

It’s all she can bring herself to say, and then she waits, her fingers trembling on the radio, holding it like she held him the last time she saw him, her hands interlocked behind its back. There’s nothing for seconds, whole seconds, and she’s terrified that she has finally lost her mind until he says, hoarser than before, broken in the middle of her name, a hitched breath that speaks of barely contained sobs.

“Clarke.”

She pulls her knees to her chest, and she holds the radio, and she lets those tired tears fall. The kind that only ever come at night, when Madi is asleep and the loneliness is louder than usual. Except this is the exact opposite feeling.

“Are you okay?” she asks him when she can. “Are you all okay?”

“Yeah, we’re all…” He pauses, and it’s gratifying and relieving all at once to hear that he has to swallow back emotion. “We’re all okay. Raven and Murphy were just here. Do you want me to...?”

“No,” she says quickly. She blushes, can feel it pink on her face. “No, not yet. Just...I’m so glad it was you.”

“You’ve been calling me,” he says. There’s so much in his voice. “I figured it’s about time I returned the favor.”

She laughs into the radio, and she realizes that she doesn’t know what to say. She settles for, “I’m so happy you’re alive.”

There’s another long quiet patch, and she starts to feel some anxious threads, wondering if the radio has stopped working, or if she imagined all of it, or…

But he finally says, “Clarke, I’m so sorry I left you behind.”

There are tears heavy in his voice, and if she was there, she would hug him. She would hug him tight and press her face into his shoulder, and she would hold him because she needs it as much as he does.

But he isn’t here, and so she has to tell him.

“I’m not sorry,” she replies. “Because it means you all survived. And I refuse to let you apologize for that.”

And there’s another long stretch of silence then, but this time she knows that it’s because he doesn’t want her to hear him crying.

(Her heart is so full.)

“Bellamy?” she asks.

“I’m here,” he says. A promise.

“Bellamy, I mean it. I’m so happy you’re alive.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, and she can hear his smile. “I’m happy you’re alive, too.”

There’s a silence that she doesn’t know how to break, and then the next thing she hears is a sudden burst of sound, Raven’s voice continuing some already begun train of thought “-just plug this in here and she should be able to hear all of us without us fighting over the mic. Clarke?”

“Raven!” Clarke replies, overwhelmed already.

“Only downside to this is that we can’t hide the fact that we’re all crying,” Raven laughs, and her voice does sound a little watery and uneven.

“I’m not crying,” says another voice. Murphy.

“Shut up,” Raven shoots back. “He’s practically crying, Clarke. Don’t listen to him.”

“Hi, Murphy,” she says. There’s something about all this that’s too much, imagining all of them standing around.

“It’s just the three of us,” Raven says, quickly, like she can tell what Clarke’s thinking. “Just had a breakthrough a few minutes ago and sent Murphy to grab Bellamy so he could be the first. The others don’t know yet.”

“Is Bellamy still there?”

“I’m here,” he says again. Still a promise. It’s exactly what she needs to breathe easy again.

“I’m so…” she starts, but she can’t figure out how to finish.

“Yeah,” Raven says gently. “I think we’re all feeling the same. How about this. One at a time, okay? I’ll kick these two assholes out of here, and we can have everyone come in, one by one. Does that sound good?”

Clarke closes her eyes and smiles, and she doesn’t bother to fight back the grateful tears. It’s been so long, but they still know her.

“Yeah,” she says. “That sounds perfect.”

Raven gets to go first, because she was the one who fixed the comms on the ring and because she thinks she can get a better connection set up if Clarke does some light mechanical work on her end. She uses the first few minutes of conversation to tell Clarke all about it, which Clarke doesn’t follow at all. But she follows along when Raven talks her through setting up a connection to the rover. It’s different from the radio, and they can both talk at the same time and sound can come through. Raven’s voice fills the small space when she’s finished, and Clarke has to cover up a sob. She can hear everything so much better than over the radio, and she doesn’t have to hold down the talk button for Raven to hear her. It’s crisp, the sound almost as good as being there. She can close her eyes and imagine Raven working, can hear the sounds of wires and papers and pencils being moved around as Raven tidies up her workspace so it’s ready for the others to come in.

“There,” she says once it’s all set up. “Now you can’t hide the fact that you’re crying, either. Fair’s fair.”

Clarke laughs, and she wipes her eyes.

“I can’t thank you enough for this,” she says. “For all of it.”

“And you think it’s any easier to thank you? We’re all…” Raven trails off.

“I know,” Clarke says, and she hopes that’s the last anyone mentions it. She didn’t do it because she wanted them to be grateful, or because she wants them to worship her, or because she thinks she has earned the hush in Raven’s voice, like Raven thinks she’s talking to a martyr.

She keeps one eye on the village through the windshield, but Madi hasn’t reappeared. She’s probably napping, or drawing. Clarke is privately glad, and she wonders if that makes her selfish. She can’t wait for Madi to meet her friends, to get to know all of them. But she wants this for herself, first. She wants to be the Clarke they left behind. She wants them, at the beginning, to be just for her.

Most of Raven’s conversation is about the way the ring runs. She asks about the bunker in a way that says she’s going to work through how to get it open. She talks about the various electrical systems that keep them alive. Raven and Clarke have never really been the kind of friends to sit around talking about their emotions, and it’s a relief to Clarke that they don’t start now. She asks about the rover and talks Clarke through fixing the funky wheel well issue on the back left tire, and that’s the kind of thing Raven does to help the people she cares about most. That’s how she shows it. She hasn’t changed.

Murphy comes back next for a quick one-on-one, and he’s no less sarcastic and no less funny than Clarke remembers. He seems less harsh, less biting. He thanks her for what she did for all of them, especially Emori, but he doesn’t dwell on it, and she wouldn’t want him to, anyway.

He asks her about food, mostly, and she laughs harder than she has in months when she asks why he’s so hung up on her diet and he explodes with almost four years of barely contained loathing for the algae.

She pulls the basket of berries into her lap and shakes it around.

“You hear that?” she asks, a wicked grin on her face.

“I hate you,” he says.

“A full basket of juicy berries.” As Murphy groans in frustration, she feels like a kid again, grabbing a handful and shoving them into her mouth so that when she talks, he can hear them. “Delicious.”

His bright laughter confirms that she was right. He is lighter than before.

“You’re a fucking asshole, Griffin,” he says.

“I missed you too, Murphy,” she replies.

Monty and Harper decide that the one at a time rule doesn’t apply to them, but Clarke’s almost glad for it. Harper is sweet and earnest, and she keeps things from being awkward. She keeps Clarke from mentioning Jasper, too, which she knows she would be tempted to do if Monty was alone. She also knows it would be a mistake. There are some things better said in person, and Monty sounds so happy. He’s thriving on the ring, and when Clarke mentions the algae, there’s something of the Monty from the dropship in his voice.

“Don’t get him started,” Harper says fondly. “Seriously, he’s a wizard. But he’ll talk for hours about this.”

“Some other time, maybe,” Clarke promises. “It sounds interesting.”

“Yeah, okay,” Monty says happily, surprised, like he hadn’t thought she’d want to speak to him. “I’d love that.”

Harper asks Clarke about Madi, and Clarke says that she reminds her of Octavia sometimes, and both of them laugh.

“Jeez, and here we thought you were living the high life down there,” Harper teases. “An Octavia about to go through puberty. Good luck with that.”

“Yeah, well. By the time she’s really going through it, you’ll all be back here with me and we can suffer together,” Clarke points out. Monty seems surprised by the joke, and he laughs harder than it probably warrants.

“I can’t wait. I’m gonna be such a good dad.”

“No you won’t,” Harper giggles. “Bellamy’s the dad. We’re uncles and aunts. Or maybe we’re the siblings! Remember when everyone called them mom and dad at the dropship?”

“Yeah, I think we’re done here,” Clarke grumbles, and Harper laughs again, delighted, and the sound fills the small space of the rover, and Clarke can’t stop smiling.

Then it’s Emori, and it’s awkward for a number of reasons, made worse when Clarke asks how she and Murphy are doing. She’s expecting something dry and hilariously biting about Murphy as a person, and instead she’s met with silence and the rustling sound of someone fidgeting.

“John and I didn’t last,” Emori says gently. “But it’s...it’s okay. This, talking to you, actually…ever since he and Raven and Bellamy shared the secret that you were alive, and that you were talking to us all these years…I guess it made sense. John and Raven were so secretive, and I think it made me realize that we didn’t fit a lot earlier than I would have otherwise. But it’s nice to know that you were the secret they were keeping.”

Emori asks about the trees, and about the birds, and about Madi. She’s the only one who asks about the time before Clarke found Madi, when she thought she was the last person on Earth, and Clarke has trouble getting through it. Emori pretends she doesn’t notice, and she seems gentler, after. Like Murphy, safety and peace on the ring have changed her, tempered her edges and made her softer than she used to be.

When Echo enters the room, she isn’t alone either. She’s with Raven, who says, “she can hear you.”

“What, now?” Echo asks.

“Yeah. Anywhere in the workshop. But the mic’s over there, so get closer.”

Clarke laughs a little, and she hears a small huff from Echo in response, the sound disbelieving.

“She spends like fourteen hours a day watching old movies, but radios are beyond her,” Raven says in a tone that speaks of fond smiles and rolled eyes.

“It isn’t that much,” Echo protests, her voice too loud, too close to the mic, and Raven’s laughter is sudden and bright, surprising.

“This is why I came with you,” Raven chides. “Here. Try that.”

“Clarke?” Echo tries, at a much more normal volume, and Clarke’s face is starting to hurt from all the smiling.

“I’m here,” she says. “Hi, Echo.”

“I’ll be outside,” Raven says. “Don’t touch anything, you fucking menace.”

Echo laughs gently and waits until the door closes – Clarke can hear it, and she closes her eyes, imagining the warrior she remembers. She won’t be the same, Clarke knows. But Clarke didn’t know Echo very well before. It’s almost like talking to a new person.

“Thank you,” Echo says. She doesn’t make a big production of it, but she’s earnest, and Clarke loves her for it.

“I’m glad you’re doing all right,” Clarke says.

“It wasn’t easy at first. We were all slow to trust. It was lonely.”

“I can imagine,” Clarke drawls, and Echo chuckles. Clarke can hear her settling into her chair.

“I shouldn’t take much time. Bellamy has been waiting in the hall, and as you can imagine, he’s anxious to take a second turn. Raven will probably kill him within the week, if he keeps lurking around outside her workshop to talk to you. I will do my best to protect him from her.”

Clarke smiles privately, her heart swelling with something she’s terrified to name.

“I’m sure he can find something to keep himself busy,” she says.

“You would be surprised. There isn’t much to do. Raven was exaggerating, but I…” she laughs a little, and it sounds bashful. “There wasn’t much to do, at first. No one wanted to talk to me. No one could even look at me. It was obvious that they were all thinking I should not be there. It should have been you, with them.”

“Echo…”

“I would never deny it. It was true. None of them said it, but they didn’t have to. I tried to make myself useful, and I taught the ones who wanted to learn how to fight. It was good for them. Keep their minds off everything, keep their bodies strong. But the days are long here, and it was less lonely when I was watching the archives.”

“I did that a lot as a kid,” Clarke says. “I didn’t have many friends. Only one, really. Unless my parents count?”

“Probably not,” Echo says, which makes Clarke laugh again.

“How are they?” she asks, sudden. Of all of them, she can only trust Echo to tell her the truth.  “They’ll tell me everything is good. But how are they?”

“Bellamy…” Echo starts, then trails off. “They are all doing better, now. It’s not to say that we don’t still miss the ones we lost. But it has been a long time, and we have been able to make a family. But you being alive is a gift to all of them. All of us. We didn’t know each other well, but I know you now through all of them, through what you have made of them. And I am grateful you are still here. You were a ghost to them. You never really left. They have always needed you, and it will be better now that you’re here, but it may take some time before they know relearn to talk to you.”

“Thank you, Echo,” Clarke says, and she feels a relief she didn’t know she needed, to hear that it’s okay if she doesn’t know exactly what to say at first, and that things will be different. It has been years since she has talked to them, and when she thinks about how she has been apart from them for longer than they knew each other, it makes her feel a tiny bit panicked, a knot of anxiety deep in her heart. It’s been so long.

But Echo is right. She was a ghost, but now she isn’t. And they will make room for her new life in the same way they did for her death.

When Echo leaves, Bellamy comes back.

“I told Raven the first one didn’t count,” he says with a smile in his voice, and Clarke remembers what Echo said about him being nervous, being fidgety, out in the hall. She can imagine it, and it makes her smile.

“I would’ve backed you up,” she says. “That wasn’t enough.”

“I’m here whenever you need me,” he promises.

“I don’t know if need is the right word. I’m doing okay, Bellamy. But I always want to talk to you.”

It probably isn’t as monumental as it feels, this statement of choice. But they haven’t had the chance for quietly claiming one another. Spending time together, working together, it was always about what was right, about what was good for everyone.

But Clarke has lived for years now without the quiet comfort of her best friend by her side. Like something removed from her heart that she learned how to live without. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t want it back.

She wants it back so badly.

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, and it’s quiet, thoughtful. “I know exactly what you mean. Now tell me about Madi.”

Raven doesn’t say that Bellamy’s the one who comes up with the idea, but Clarke assumes it was him, because once it’s ready, three days later, he’s the one who claims it first. Then again, it might have been Raven’s plan to keep him out of the workshop.

It’s a portable radio, a two way thing that’s lightweight and unobtrusive, and Bellamy clips it to his sleeve. Clarke can hear the sound, the surprisingly intimate rustle of fabric.

“You there, Clarke?” he asks. Clarke holds the radio to her lips.

“Present,” she answers with feigned seriousness. Madi rolls her eyes at her. She’s been doing that a lot lately. It seems unfair. Like, aren’t the teen years supposed to start at thirteen? Clarke’s not prepared to deal with this level of attitude.

“Perfect,” Raven says. “Okay, so there’s nothing I can do to make your access more portable than it is, Clarke, sorry. Still gotta press to talk, and you can’t talk and listen simultaneously. But when you get into the rover you can still…”

“Flip the toggle next to the camera controls and talk like a normal person, yeah. Got it, by now, Raven.”

Now she rolls her eyes towards Madi, and Madi giggles.

“Raven’s just how you said,” she says, over the sound of Raven sassing back – forgetting yet again that Clarke asked her not to say fuck so much.

(Sure, she and Madi are the only two people on the planet, and it doesn’t really matter, but Clarke’s doing the best she can! And if that means adapting all the rules she remembers her own parents enforcing, then so be it.)

“She’s happier than I remember,” Clarke says, and Madi rolls her eyes again.

“So I can take her anywhere in the ring?” Bellamy’s voice asks, sounding lighter than Clarke has ever heard it.

“Yep. For roughly thirty-six hours until the battery drains. It needs three hours to charge fully, and I’ll throw the charging station in the common room, but we can carry her anywhere we want her to be.”

“This is amazing, Raven,” Bellamy says.

“I figure we’ll just keep it broadcasting all day. Not that we expect you to be nonstop on the radio, Clarke. But if you want us, we’ll be here. If no one’s got you with them specifically, we’ll keep you charging in the common area, and you can listen to all of us bitching at dinner. I’m also definitely going to draw a face on the radio so we can all pretend you’re in a small robot body now. It’ll be fun!”

Clarke loves this idea, loves the fact that she’ll always be able to hear their voices when she needs them. She doesn’t have to cry quietly through the lonely moments anymore. She can just turn on the radio and close her eyes and be with them. Even if she doesn’t feel like talking.

“I don’t know what to say,” she says to Raven, after Bellamy has been called away to help Monty with some heavy lifting.

“You don’t have to say anything. That’s kind of the point. I just figured it might be nice to have the sound when you need it. I listened to all those calls, you know? And I know how the loneliness ate away at you. And I know you’re too stubborn to ever admit it. Open channel seems like a good way to help you out with that.”

“It is,” Clarke says. “You’re still the best.”

“Yeah. Don’t I know it.”

“She said you were lonely,” Madi says at dinner, worried, and Clarke feels terrible.

“It’s not that,” she says. “It’s not that you aren’t enough. But people…” she sighs, trying to think of a way to say it. “People need other people. One person shouldn’t just have one other person. I don’t want that for you, and I don’t want it for me, either. Do you understand?”

“I guess,” Madi says, non-committal.

“Think of it like this: you know how annoyed you get with me sometimes? Wouldn’t it be nice to turn on the radio and complain to Harper about it? Or, Monty, he knows more about plants than anyone I know! He can help you with expanding your herb garden.”

“Will they want to talk to me?” Madi asks, and Clarke sees the insecurity at the heart of Madi’s defensiveness. It’s not just that she’s afraid she isn’t enough for Clarke. As long as Madi can remember, she and Clarke have shared everything. And now here’s this new thing that she’s afraid she can’t have a part of.

“Of course they will,” Clarke says. “You’re awesome.”

“Ugh,” Madi mutters.

“Fine. Logical answer? Seven people isn’t all that many, you know. They’re probably dying to talk to someone new after having a couple of years of just each other.”

Madi seems to accept this a lot more easily, and she brightens.

She really is my kid, Clarke thinks. It’s mostly amusement, but there’s amazement, too. It’s so cool that she can have this kind of an effect on someone so young. That she’s teaching Madi not just facts or survival or stories about her friends but she’s teaching her shit she doesn’t even mean to teach her. Personality and little quirks she notices sometimes.

It’s a feeling that Bellamy would know better than anyone else, from helping to raise Octavia, and she feels this private, aching little thrill: next time she gets on the radio, she can talk to him about it! It’s that easy.

It feels less overwhelming as the days go by. There’s a selfish, silly part of her that’s disappointed every time she calls and it’s not Bellamy on the other end. She wants to talk to all of them. She does. But Bellamy...

She’s always been good at pushing those feelings down, so she does, but there are times when it’s hard.

Like every time Bellamy is talking to her as he walks around the ring, and the way he says “we’re going to the movie room” or “we’re going to the kitchen” if someone asks him where he’s headed. Like she’s there, like she’s with him. Still attached at the hip, only now it’s the sleeve of his shirt. Her heart squeezes every time.

Or like when Harper and Monty are chatting with Madi, and Harper’s sweetly pretending to be enthusiastic about Madi’s crop yields, and Madi calls her out on it, and Monty chuckles and says, “man, Bellamy’s gonna love you,” and Clarke believes him, believes that Bellamy will be good for Madi, will be good for them both, will complete their little family.

Or like when Murphy’s on “Clarke duty”, hilariously recounting every play in an old Barcelona game he’s watching. Clarke knows she and her dad watched it maybe five times because it’s such a good one, and she doesn’t really need the commentary, but she’s laughing hard at Murphy’s attempts to remember the names of these long-dead players (mostly resorting to calling them things like Small Mouse Man, Tall with Beard, Arm Tattoos Guy). And she hears the door to the movie room open and Bellamy ask “is that Clarke?” with a youthful kind of joy that reminds her of the first time she heard his voice after he went into Mount Weather. She has to swallow back tears before she can answer.

She would have thought it would be easier when he’s not with her, looking striking and sad and strong. Looking like the boy she needed after Charlotte jumped from that cliff, and the boy she’s needed every day since, whether she’s realized it or not. There’s an effortless beauty to Bellamy that Clarke has always appreciated. As an artist, maybe, but it’s more than aesthetic appreciation. It’s a beauty at the heart of him that made him glow brighter as time went on. Made him stick out all the more, beyond the freckles and the dark hair that had everyone in camp swooning over him.

She remembers the shock of his fingers brushing hers when he took the spike from her hand after they tortured Lincoln. Not the first time he had touched her, but the first time it had felt like that. Soft. His eyes, too, had been gentle.

No, it’s not easy being in charge, and in an ideal world she wouldn’t be. But with Bellamy by her side, it was better. And with his voice on the radio, she feels something close to normal again, except she craves him now in a way she didn’t let herself crave before.

Because Bellamy was an unacceptable loss, and she saw the way relationships crumbled and turned bitter on the ground. She saw the way Finn’s love turned him hard and Lexa’s love got her killed. She saw what losing Lincoln turned Octavia into, and she saw what losing Maya did to Jasper.

She saw and knew and experienced these things, and she never let Bellamy fall into that box because the panic she would start to feel at the thought of him being gone...

He was too many things to her, and she couldn’t let him become another. He had to be something else, something separate.

Maybe it’s harder now to shut off that part of her brain because there seems to be the safety net of physical distance. It doesn’t matter what my feelings are, she thinks. He isn’t here, so I can’t kiss him. I can talk to him and look at this picture I drew of him, and I can imagine his hands on mine, and my fingers curling through his hair, and his smile. I can do that, and it’s okay, because he’s safe. He’s safe in space, and I can’t break him or corrupt him or get him killed.

 Maybe she would keep fighting it if he was here, but he isn’t, and so she doesn’t.

When she’s fallen in love before, it has always been a sprint. A stumble into feelings. A breathless arrow through the heart like in some dumb old cartoon. But with Bellamy it’s something else. Something that has been built more carefully, slower, with more of a foundation. With Bellamy it has been a marathon, and she knows she’s getting closer to the end.

The panic comes now not because she thinks she will hurt him with her love, will somehow kill him via madness or knives or bullets. The panic comes because she’s letting herself fall without knowing what’s beneath her, and she knows now that she has climbed too high for it to be a safe landing if there’s nothing down there but rock.

“Wait,” she says, sleepy, registering something. Bellamy has been murmuring softly for the past few minutes, because she asked him to describe his room to her. Madi is asleep in their cabin, and Clarke snuck out to see what the others were doing when she couldn’t drift off. At first she just turned on the radio, so they wouldn’t know she was there, but when it was just the soft sounds of pages turning, she knew it was Bellamy, and she climbed into the rover.

Raven’s rover idea has helped her more than anything. The sound coming out of all the speakers. It’s like a sensory immersion. Like her friends are all around her. It’s exactly what she needed, at first, and it’s exactly what she still needs, and she feels bad for being surprised that Raven is the one who thought of it. Raven has always been wonderful, but she’s always been about as emotionally intuitive as Clarke herself.

Then again, maybe that’s exactly why Raven knew what would help her start to recover from such a long period of relative isolation.

So Clarke had climbed into the rover and flipped the toggle, and said “hi, Bellamy” the way she always did. He chuckled and said she was getting better at identifying who had the receiver, and she reminded him that he was the only one who spent so much time reading the old copy of Les Misérables that was left on the ring.

“It’s a long book, Clarke,” he had chided quietly, gentle humor in his voice that was so new.

Sometimes he reads to her from it, especially the parts about Enjolras, because she told him that the rebellious leader of young men reminded her of him, and he had laughed and countered that the idealistic rich kid standing up against tyranny had always made him think of her. But with her eyes closed in the rover she found that she wanted to imagine him better, and so she asked him to describe his surroundings, and that was when she heard it. This strange scratching sound that she sometimes hears when Murphy has Clarke’s speaker clipped high up on his shirt.

“Wait,” she says. “Where am I?”

“Put you on my collar so we could talk quietly. Why? Is the sound weird?”

“Bellamy!” she nearly shrieks, and she hears him laughing.

“Jesus, Clarke. I’ve got you on the lowest setting and you’re gonna wake up everyone. What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Bellamy,” she whispers instead, very serious. “Bellamy, do you have a beard?”

There’s a pause, and then he laughs. Loud, startled. It’s brief before he reins it in, but she can still hear quiet, huffing chuckles.

“Seriously?” he asks. “How could you possibly know that?”

“Murphy scratches his a lot when he’s thinking, and I asked him what it was! It makes a weird static sound. I thought the radio was acting up! I can’t believe you have a beard and you didn’t tell me.”

“My hair’s a little longer too,” he offers. “Not as curly. And I feel like I’m getting wrinkles. I’m pretty sure I look old now. You’re not gonna recognize me at all.”

“No, shut up,” Clarke scoffs, distracted. “I’m sure you look perfect. Just, hang on.”

She rummages for her spare sketchbook and the charcoal she knows is back here somewhere. There’s a silence on the other end of the line, and she wonders if it’s weird that she called him perfect until he sort of clears his throat and asks, in that awkward Bellamy voice she so well remembers, “so, uh, what about you? Any big changes?”

“Well, the radiation gave me a second head, but other than that I’m the same.”

“Funny.”

“I’m funny now, too. That’s another thing.”

“You were always kind of funny.”

“Pretty sure you’re the only one who thought that.”

“Yeah, well, we got each other. Get each other. Still do.”

“True,” she says with such obvious satisfaction that she’s almost embarrassed by it, so she starts drawing.

“Do you have a beard now?” Bellamy asks. “What is that?”

“I’m drawing you with a beard.”

“What?” He’s laughing, but again there’s something unbearably gentle in his tone. “You can just draw people from memory like that?”

“Yeah,” she says, stopping before saying especially you even though she wants to. “You’re easy to remember.” She should definitely leave it at that. “You have a nice face.”

Well, so that’s worse, but Bellamy laughs again, and she can pretend that’s a normal, friendly joke to make.

“My hair’s shorter,” she says, an offering. “Above my shoulders. Sort of choppy. You know, because a kid did it.”

“I remember what that’s like. I’m lucky you never saw me on the Ark when Octavia decided it would be funny to fuck up my whole head. You never would’ve taken me seriously after that.”

“I’m sorry, have you been under the impression that I ever did?”

“Don’t make me come down there,” he says warningly, and it makes her laugh even harder. They’re both laughing, almost giggling, and seems so impossible after everything for Clarke to feel this light.

It’s like, the bad things are still there. The things that still keep her from sleeping on nights like tonight. But there’s a peace around them and between them and within them that wasn’t there before, and she’s just so happy that she gets to share it with him. These past few years have been mostly good, almost impossibly so, and the only thing that was missing was him.

All of them, obviously. But him, more.

She stops drawing and looks at her rendering critically. She’s not sure if it’s exactly right. She drew him looking more dignified than he probably does, but…

“It’s not terrible,” she decides, and he laughs again.

“Is that the verdict?”

She traces her pinkie finger along the line of his jaw, obscured now by the dark beard. She drew it short, neatly trimmed. He doesn’t seem like the type to go for a full one.

“It’s okay,” she decides. “I’d have to see it in person to make an accurate judgement.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, quiet. “Well, we’ll be down there soon enough, and you can render your full sentence. I’ll shave it if you hate it too much.”

When the quiet moment drags, he goes back to describing his little room. But his voice doesn’t last long before it’s drifting off, getting lower and less precise until he stops talking entirely, and the sound of his sleeping fills the rover.

She could drift off here, she realizes. She could close her eyes and imagine crawling into bed beside him, in the little room he just described. She could nestle close and press a kiss to the underside of his jaw. His beard would tickle, probably. She would listen to him breathe until she fell asleep.

She doesn’t want to leave Madi in the cabin by herself all night, even though Madi would just scoff and roll her eyes if Clarke said that – she used to be terrified of the dark, but she’s so aggressively over that phase of her life that now she hangs out in the dark without lighting a candle just to prove she can. Still, Clarke can’t risk her waking up and finding Clarke gone.

She powers down the rover and takes the radio with her, and as she settles down into her room, crawling into her bed…

She turns it on at first just to see if he’s still asleep. She would feel guilty if he woke up and she left so quickly. But it’s still his quiet breathing, deep and low.

She feels like a child as she lays the radio next to her on the pillow and closes her eyes. It’s not the same as the rover, but it’s nice to listen to someone breathing as she falls asleep. Ever since Madi insisted on having her own room, Clarke hasn’t had that, and the silence can sometimes be suffocating.

She tells herself that it’s not especially good because it’s Bellamy.

They settle into a routine. Clarke calls every day, usually more than once. Sometimes Madi wants to confer with Monty and Harper, and some days are lazier than others if the morning hunting and foraging goes quick enough and their chores are easy. At first, Clarke expects her friends to get tired of carrying around the speaker and keeping her and Madi entertained when they call but they never stop sounding excited to hear her voice. A few times, she turns on the radio to hear movies playing, and Echo’s low voice will pepper her with questions about them, since Clarke was the only one who had a good viewscreen when she was still on the Ark. And if it’s something Clarke hasn’t seen, Echo will tell her the plot with surprisingly insightful analysis, and then Clarke can tell it to Madi later as a story.

And sometimes she’ll turn on the radio and catch Raven and Emori bickering and joking over some piece of equipment they’re trying to fix, and it’s fascinating to hear Raven talk to this girl who she barely knew when they went to space. And it’s isolating and yet not at the same time, because she knows that they would both love to have her in the conversation if she wanted.

Sometimes she does join, but often she doesn’t. Hearing them is sometimes good enough, and sometimes she just needs to reassure herself that they’re still there so she’ll check in even if she doesn’t have the time to talk. Sometimes it’s curiosity that makes her stay quiet. Like the time she turns on the radio just in time to hear Murphy say, “well, better than when we were just helplessly listening to her. I’ll never forget that fucking face he made when…”

“I know,” Raven sighs. “At least now we can help her. Still. I wish we could do more.”

“We all wish we could do more,” Murphy replies, and then he says, “I’m gonna move the Clarke robot to the common room for dinner. You want anything?”

“Braving the common room without already knowing who's in there?” Raven teases. “What if you run into Emori?”

“I decided maybe it’s time I stop being a little bitch about it,” Murphy replies.

“That’ll be the day.”

“Nice.”

“Hey, you like me for my unwavering honesty, remember?”

“Nah, that’s not even like top ten on the list.”

“Oh, there’s a list?”

“Yeah. Top fifteen. Top twenty-five if I’m counting body parts.”

“You’re disgusting. Get out of here.”

Then there’s laughter, and she just keeps listening. She’s fascinated by these new dynamics – and still a little too nervous to be laughed out of the room if she asks about the weirdly sexual bickering between Raven and Murphy – and so she just lays there under the stars and listens while her friends filter in and out of the common room. She doesn’t want to go into the rover tonight. She holds onto the radio and reminds herself that she can talk whenever she wants.

She can’t decide if it makes her feel more or less lonely, to know that they’re all up there without her. Going about their lives.

But it’s a passing thing, the sadness that falls over her when she thinks about everything she has missed. Because she’s been down here, with her own life, and her own family. She's happy with Madi, was happy even before she found out that the rest of her friends are alive. And it’s not as if she would have wanted them to be miserable up there, frozen, out of reach. Sometimes it’s tough to be reminded of the distance and the years that separate them, but none of them want her to feel lonely or forgotten. All she has to do is reach out, and there will always be someone reaching back.

“Hi guys,” she says into the radio.

“Clarke!”

“Hey, Clarke!”

“There you are!”

“We were just wondering when you were gonna show up.”

She holds the radio to her chest, and she breathes, and she smiles.

Just reach out. Just tell them when you’re lonely. Just ask for help.

Distance doesn’t have to mean separation.

It’s Harper who starts her down the road into finally saying something to Bellamy.

Harper, more than anyone, likes to hear about Earth. She and Emori both ask a lot of questions about it, about what it looks like and what it feels like. But Harper likes descriptions, and Clarke gets better at it the longer she talks to her. She’s always been a more visual person than a verbal one, so it can be tough, but Harper’s such a sweet girl that it doesn’t bother her much even when her descriptions are lacking and Harper giggles at her when she stalls out or says something weird.

“Madi’s so proud of her flowers,” Harper says after Clarke has spent some time describing the garden that Madi loves so much. “I told her I’d help her figure out the real names for the ones you couldn’t already teach her. Monty’s very excited to be able to tell her their scientific names. I think he thinks he’s gonna teach her Latin, honestly. But I like the names she came up with best.”

“Yeah,” Clarke says, laughing, glancing out the window of the rover to make sure Madi’s still content, digging away in her new plot of dirt, where she wants to expand her herb selection. “She’s gotten more creative, though we still have the “Yelly Belly” plant over by the church that she named in year two. I have no idea why she thought that was a good name for it. It’s terrifying, but she won’t let me kill it. I’m just waiting for it to gain sentience.” She hums, pretending to think it over. “Then again, she has always wanted a pet.”

“Is Yelly Belly the creeping vine one with the mean-looking flowers?” Harper asks.

“That’s him.”

“Oh, it's a him?”

“Yeah, I don’t know. It’s her garden. I don’t make the rules.”

“I’ll have to get more in depth with her system next time we chat. Really nail down what she’s got going on. I’ve got most of it plotted out, but there are still some plants we haven’t identified yet.”

Clarke's almost surprised, but then she realizes that she shouldn’t be. It’s not just her who’s sitting around imagining what they’re doing. The others are thinking about her, too.

 “Hey,” she says, without really thinking. “You guys were listening to my calls, right? Before Raven figured out how to talk back?”

She means to ask Harper how it was, back when they couldn’t respond. She knows that it must have been difficult – she caught that snatch of Murphy and Raven talking about it, and she’s been wondering what call they were talking about that apparently had Bellamy looking so upset that it distresses even Murphy to think about.

But Harper says, “oh, no. We only found out you were alive maybe a month before Raven got the radio working? Raven and Murphy didn’t tell anyone for a while. I know all the old calls are backed up on a drive. I think Raven keeps it on a necklace.”

“What?” Clarke knows she sounds snappish, incredulous, and she feels sorry for it because it’s Harper, who doesn’t deserve it, but the shock of it is too sudden. “You thought I was…?”

“Dead?” Harper offers quietly. “Yeah.”

“For that long? Why did they…?”

“Um, I mean. Raven could probably tell you better than I can. It’s just…you have to understand, Clarke...”

“I’m not angry,” Clarke assures her quickly. “I just don’t understand why they wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Bellamy was…in the beginning, Clarke, Bellamy was really bad. And in the beginning, from what Raven told us, you were pretty bad, too. And Raven decided that she needed to protect the one she could protect, and that was him.”

Something swirls inside Clarke, some understanding. The way Bellamy’s voice shakes sometimes when he talks to her. The way he always joins whatever conversation she’s having and always wants to know everything. The way he takes the speaker every night before he goes to sleep, just in case she needs him. The way he seems to remember every detail of her calls, almost like he had listened to them more than once, or maybe like he had only listened to them recently. 

“Harper. How long did Bellamy think I was dead for?”

Harper is silent for so long that Clarke has to wonder if she's going to answer at all, but finally she says, “til about a day before the rest of us found out.”

She doesn’t know why she’s so confused by that. She doesn’t even know what it changes, what she’s so upset about. But after that, she does her daily check-in with Bellamy, and then she says that Madi needs her, and she doesn’t talk again.

She listens, instead.

She listens as they eat dinner. Monty talks about Madi’s herbs and Murphy snaps at him to stop talking about good-flavored things when they’re eating shitty-flavored things, and Clarke wonders how they could have let Bellamy go that long without knowing that she was alive.

They’re laughing at dinner, talking at dinner, and she wonders if things were just as normal when she was gone. Was Bellamy just as normal when she was gone?

Had he started to forget about her?

It feels damning, she thinks, and maybe a little embarrassing, that he was up there moving on, reshaping his life to cut out the pieces of her that were left behind when she died, while she was down on Earth discovering just how full of him her heart truly was. It feels like they’ve gone in opposite directions, and even though a day ago she would have said that there was nothing wrong between her and Bellamy at all, it feels like there’s a wall between them now. A moat. A canyon. Something separating them that she didn’t even realize was there at first.

How could she not have noticed?

Murphy would tell her she’s being dramatic. Madi would roll her eyes. Raven would call her a fucking idiot. But she can’t help it, can’t help but wonder how Bellamy feels.

He loved her when he was on Earth. She became sure of it as the months and years passed and she was left to dig through all her memories. She had wondered over the past weeks of renewed contact if he could still love her, and every conversation since had led her to believe that he could, that he did, but this new information…

Things have changed for him, haven’t they? She was dead. He had been living in a world in which she was dead, and he must have been trying to forget her. His dead best friend.

Had he succeeded?

She thought that they were falling back into something, but for him, it’s been a reforged connection. Something broken and then patched sloppily back together.

She’s not sure why that’s different, or why it matters, but it feels like it does.

“Bellamy, I…” she starts, that night, and she can tell that he’s startled by the suddenness of her voice. She’s been listening to him breathe, listening to him turning pages of the book, and she has to say something.

“What is it?” he asks, worried. She deflates. She doesn’t even know what she wants to say.

“Nothing, I just…um. I’m just glad you’re there,” she says.

He laughs a little, and she hears it now, the wry twist of it, the sound that’s almost bitter.

“You have no idea how happy I am that you’re alive,” he says in return.

It eats at her, after, and she knows she needs to say something. But she’s never been good at this, at verbalizing, and it’s difficult because now it’s all she has. She can’t mention it when she’s with the others, obviously, but she gets scared when it’s just she and Bellamy at night. Sometimes she doesn’t even let him know she’s there. Just listens to him and wonders what to say. Sometimes she does talk, but she never asks him what she needs to know. She can feel a distance between them now, and she doesn’t know how to cross it, so she pretends that nothing’s wrong.

Because technically nothing is wrong. That’s the part that’s so frustrating.

It’s not like she’s not still happy with this, with all of it, but it feels like she pressed pause on something. Her heart still longs for him at even the slightest sounds. His laughter and his sighs and the quiet murmuring sounds he makes when he’s drifting off to sleep.

You could have that, when he comes back, she tries to tell herself. You could have all of it. You just have to reach out. Distance doesn’t have to mean separation.

 But what about grief? What about the acceptance of grief? What if he moved on and learned to love her memory? All she is is a voice on a speaker. An imprint. A reminder and a remainder of the friend he left behind. Her words come through the speaker, but she isn’t really there. Does Bellamy love her? Or does he love the girl he remembers? Is he just tending to her memory now?

She knows he would never do it on purpose, but she wonders. Are these conversations, for Bellamy, what seeing Lexa in the City of Light was for her? A way to say goodbye when he didn’t have the chance at closure before?

It doesn’t always feel like it, but sometimes it does, and Clarke has always been so afraid of feeling too much and not receiving anything in return, and she hates how hesitant she feels now.

She talks to them, and she can forget it. She can watch Madi tramping around in the woods with the radio and a long stick, going through fighting moves while Echo describes what to do. She can listen to Monty recite scientific names for the plants in Madi’s garden and then help the two of them come up with silly nicknames that play off the Latin words. She can join them in the rover for dinner, she and Madi teasing the others about their meat and berries while the others eat algae and groan and threaten to float her speaker if she doesn’t shut up.

It’s the quiet nights with Bellamy that make her wonder. You were a ghost, Echo had said. She hadn’t realized that she had been a ghost for so long at the time. Now she wonders if Bellamy carries her with him so often because it’s his burden. Leaving her behind was hard for him, leaving her to die even more so. What if the speaker he clips so often on his shirt is just a physical totem, a mechanical scar, something to show he carries the weight of her death even still?

One morning, Madi’s getting over a slight cold and finally sleeping. Bellamy had talked to them through most of the night, because Madi’s apparently about as grumpy a patient as Octavia was when she was that age, and she always liked to hear stories. Clarke had drifted off listening to the two of them talk about myths, and now she’s headed back to the rover to see what the others are up to and to charge the long-dead radio.

She slips it into the cradle and turns it on to see who has the speaker, and she can tell that it’s Raven from the sounds of tinkering and the annoyed, murmuring curses that fall from her lips. Clarke smiles and toggles the rover’s comms on.

“Hey,” she says.

“What’s up?” Raven asks. She’s still bright and happy to hear her, but Clarke loves how casual the greetings are, now. She’s no longer a novelty for them. Her presence is a fact. It’s not a surprise.

“Madi finally conked out, so I’m taking a break.”

“She doing okay?” Murphy asks, and Clarke realizes that she sort of assumed already that he would be here. If it isn’t Emori in the workshop, it’s Murphy, and Emori is always more effusive with her greetings. Murphy’s the type to lurk in the background and then say something only when he has something to say.

“She’s fine. Not a very good patient, but she’s fine.”

“Yeah, Bellamy mentioned she’s been giving you guys hell,” Raven chuckles. “I remember that time a couple years ago, when she was still pretty feral, she really did a number on you.”

“Oh, God,” Clarke groans at the remembrance.

“That was so fucking funny,” Murphy snorts. “What did you call her again?”

“A lot of terrible words I’m not going to repeat, but I think you’re referring to ‘kitten with panther claws’,” Raven says.

“I’m so glad my pain could bring you joy like that,” Clarke drawls, and Murphy snorts.

“Well, you were so relentlessly miserable most of the time. We had to take our joy where we could.”

She’s quiet for a moment, preparing herself, because she knows that there isn’t going to be a better time to ask this.

“Hey, about that,” she starts, and she hears Raven sigh.

“I know that voice,” she says.

“What voice?”

“Your mom voice,” Murphy answers.

“I think we’re in trouble,” Raven confirms.

“I just…Harper just told me the other day. I guess I didn’t realize that you had…that you, um. That you let everyone think I was dead?”

“Fuck,” Raven says. Clarke can hear her sitting down in the squeaky seat at her desk. “Um. Okay. Yeah. That was the call I made.”

“Why?” Clarke asks. She knows what Harper said, but she wants to hear it from Raven, too.

“Well, okay. Um. So.”

“Jesus, you’ve actually rendered Reyes speechless,” Murphy says.

“Shut up. I’m just trying to think of how to put this. Look, Bellamy probably won’t tell you, because he’s Bellamy, and I feel bad telling you because I know he would probably rather I didn’t, but he was a fucking mess about you being dead, Clarke. Not out loud, in the open. He did everything he needed to, and he kept us all going, and he was Bellamy. But only when we needed him. Whenever he had too long to himself, you could just…you could just see it in him.”

“Monty stopped producing moonshine like three months in because we all got sick of hearing how fucking suicidal Bellamy got when he was drunk enough and started talking about how he abandoned you and Octavia,” Murphy says. It’s said surprisingly gently, for Murphy.

“Oh,” Clarke says, because she doesn’t know what else to say.

“I kept telling myself that I’d tell him about you when I fixed the problem. But I couldn’t fix the problem, and Bellamy was still a mess, and you weren’t doing much better. Murphy finding out was an accident, but he agreed with me. If you want to give me shit for it, that’s fine. Bellamy already sort of did.”

“What changed?” Clarke asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Harper says she found out about me about a month before you fixed the radio. Why did you decide to tell them?”

Raven sighs, and Clarke can imagine she and Murphy looking at each other, communicating without words.

“Maybe you should ask Bellamy about that,” Raven says slowly.

“You know I won’t,” Clarke points out.

“Right. You’re a dumbass like that. I just don’t really know how to put it.”

“We, uh,” Murphy starts, snorting again.

“Echo made her, um, interest in Bellamy known,” Raven says delicately. “And we knew that even if it was a casual fling, Bellamy would never forgive himself if he slept with her and it turned out you were alive and pining away after him the way he was pining away after you.

Clarke’s face flames immediately, heat flashing, embarrassment filling her.

“No, I...” she starts, but Raven isn’t done.

“Trust me on this, okay? It took him three years to even smile often enough that it wasn’t a big fucking deal when he did, and every time someone said your name, he would just…look, speaking as someone with a shitty amount of experience in this kind of thing? I know what it feels like to lose someone I loved, all right? So just…accept it. Bellamy loves you.”

She gets a little defensive near the end, so Murphy takes over.

“Seriously, I wish you could have seen his face when he heard your voice for the first time. For like three days he walked around blissed out from listening to those recordings nonstop.”

“Clarke, I know it’s not like it was our place, but you should know we were gonna cockblock him until eternity if we had to.”

“Not just for you, though,” Murphy points out.

“No, absolutely not. I mean, you know how self-loathing he is. We had to save him from the agony of being unfaithful to your memory.”

Murphy gags a little, and Clarke has to say something.

“You know we weren’t...we weren’t anything, right?” she asks. “Before, on the ground. We weren’t...”

Raven scoffs.

“Shut up,” she says. “What’d I tell you? They’re both idiots.”

“We were idiots too, remember.”

“Yeah. Were. Past tense.”

“I had to suggest Echo ask out my ex before you realized I was being such a mopey douche because you were oblivious and not because I was still hung up on Emori.”

“So this is a thing,” Clarke says. Raven cackles.

“I’m pretty sure I literally greeted him with 'there's my sexy bitch' the last time you were with me, Clarke!”

“I didn’t want to assume!” Clarke protests, and Murphy groans.

“Good lord, no wonder you’re still dragging this shit out with Bellamy. You’re more oblivious than Raven.”

“She probably just can’t believe I’m in love with someone who’s such a moral disease.”

“Aw, I love you too, dick.”

Clarke laughs a little helplessly and leans her head back against the seat. For some reason, this little display of both aggression and affection is what does it. She wants that. Not whatever bizarre thing Raven and Murphy have going on, necessarily, but the ease of conversation when everyone's feelings are known. The absence of tension. Knowing where you stand.

“I’m going to have to talk to him, aren’t I?” she asks.

“Please,” both Raven and Murphy say, in unison. Flat and unamused. She laughs, but quietly dreads it.

“Okay, that’s it,” Raven sighs. “Get out, Murphy.”

“Excuse me?”

“She still has doubts, so I’m gonna get sappy.”

“Enough said. Later, Clarke.”

She can hear Murphy leaving the room, and Raven mutters, “every fucking time there’s a hint of emotion, he throws up a peace sign and bails.” She sounds fond, though. Fonder than Clarke has ever heard her get, and it makes Clarke feel…

It’s like a physical sensation. A physical longing. I miss Bellamy. I miss him so much.

“Raven,” she starts.

“Have you ever seen Bellamy cry before?” Raven interrupts.

“Um. Yeah. I’ve…a few times.”

“It’s fucking brutal, right? But it was something he only ever did when he hit the moonshine, because he knew we needed him. Those first few months, I really do think that we were the only thing that kept him together. He felt responsible for us, and that meant he couldn’t fall apart like he wanted to every time he thought about you and O. And even after, when he started to be more like himself again, he was…he was different. And oh my god, the amount of times he mentioned you. Clarke didn’t die so we could come up here and kill ourselves with careless electrical work. Clarke died so you could be alive and eating algae so stop complaining about it. Clarke, he missed you so much. We all did. I don’t mean to say that we didn’t, but for him, it was like losing a limb. Okay?”

Clarke knows the feeling. She knows what it’s like to wake up and realize that the person you counted on was just gone. First with her dad, then with Wells. People who felt necessary to her very essence who were ripped away. It was more than just love. It was something you thought you needed and then were suddenly forced to cope without. She lost Bellamy after Praimfaya. He lost her and his sister.

“I was dead,” Clarke finally says. “What if he can’t...what if we…”

“That’s what I’m saying, Clarke. You weren’t dead. Not to him. He mourned you like you were, but he refused to let us forget you. He kept you alive in everything he did. In every decision he made, he kept you with us.”

You were a ghost, Echo had said, and Clarke hadn’t considered that ghosts are very different from memories. From, well, echoes. Ghosts are there, are a facet of someone that sticks around when they shouldn’t. Ghosts aren’t gone. Ghosts are what happens when death doesn’t take, when it isn’t enough to remove someone completely, when a presence is strong enough to linger.

“I was a ghost,” she says aloud, and Raven sighs.

“Yeah. I guess. And then you weren't. And I thought, and I’m not just saying this, I literally thought I’d broken him when I played your calls for him for the first time. I’ve never seen him cry like that. It was like he hadn’t been breathing since you were gone, and then suddenly remembered how. He blames himself for leaving, but I’m sure you could figure that out. He knows he had to, but since when has that stopped any of us from hating ourselves for the shit we’ve done?”

“Oh, Bellamy,” Clarke sighs, so sad suddenly, imagining it.

“Just tell him, Clarke,” Raven says. “I’m actually, you know, happy for once, so let me give you advice. I know you haven’t had the easiest time with love or whatever. But when you take chances like this, when you open your heart…shit. I can’t believe you’re making me say this garbage. But when you feel it, you know. You just have to let yourself realize that Bellamy isn’t Finn, okay? And he isn’t Lexa. Just like Murphy isn’t Finn, and he isn’t Wick. You’re not the only one with a history that hurts. And it’s so much better to try and fail than it is to wonder what would have happened if you didn’t try at all, okay? I promise you. I promise you that I have done everything in my power in the past few years to try and help you. Even fucking the dude who shot me is technically somehow related to the fact that I just wanted you to be okay. Sort of. If you squint. I told Echo I was in love with Bellamy to cockblock her, Clarke! Do you have any idea what that did to my dignity? So you can trust that when I tell you that you have nothing to worry about with Bellamy, I have your best fucking interests at heart. I've spent the last couple of years dealing with both of you being disgustingly in love with each other even when you’re not on the same planet anymore, so just put me out of my misery already and start having gross radio sex. Okay?”

Clarke wipes the tears that are clinging to her lashes, and she laughs.

“No promises on that, but I’ll try to at least talk to him about it, okay?”

“Good. I’ll hold you to that.”

Finally they move into comfortable territory again, as Raven talks about her adjustments to the temperature controls that everyone’s been bitching about, and Clarke once again wants to thank her, but doesn’t quite know how. And it makes so much more sense than it did at first, that Raven is the one who sees what she needs. She can’t imagine what it must have been like to carry the secret of Clarke’s survival. To listen to every single message, knowing that there was nothing she could do to help. She knows a little bit about one-sided radio calls, of the hopelessness of them.

“I’m so glad it was you,” she says, when some time has passed and they’ve talked of other things. “I know it must have been hard. But I’m really glad that you were the one who listened.”

“Yeah, Clarke,” Raven says, soft at last. “I’m glad it was me too.”

The only thing left, then, is to talk to Bellamy.

It’s not that she doesn’t procrastinate. At this point, she’s pretty sure that even Madi realizes that she’s putting off having some kind of Big Talk with him, because her eyerolls seem so much more on point and devastating, lately.

Then again, maybe she’s just projecting.

It’s hard not to feel pathetic when she keeps missing opportunities. Bellamy’s quiet murmurs before sleep, or his more upbeat chats as he jogs around the ring and she eggs him on while lounging on a hammock.

Because it’s not like he doesn’t say things that make her think he wants it to go a certain way. Like when she says the thing about lounging on a hammock eating berries and she can actually hear his breath falter before he says, “Jesus. Are you sure you’re actually alive, or did Raven come up with some terrifying, perfect AI of Clarke to fuck with me?”

Clarke ducks her head to hide her blush, still not quite used to the fact that she doesn’t have to.

“Wouldn’t put it past her,” is all she says, and he laughs, and she actually bites her lip and giggles, but she doesn’t say anything else, and she can practically hear Raven screaming at her from orbit.

It’s weird that when she finally does break, it’s a perfectly normal evening chat. He doesn’t sound all ruffled and sleepy, which is when she’s at her weakest for him. And it’s not like they’ve even said anything particularly flirty or weighted or sad. It’s the first chance they've gotten to really talk all day. Madi was feeling chatty earlier, during dinner. She told the rest of the crew about the time she tried to befriend a creature that she’s pretty sure was a fox and wound up with her arms scratched to hell, which she tried to hide from Clarke because she knew Clarke would make her stop trying to tame the fucking thing. It was a great dinner, all of them teasing Madi and making her laugh, and Clarke’s still feeling this residual warmth that isn’t at all like the kind of softness that usually tempts her.

And Bellamy’s talking, too, the sound of his voice all around her as she sits in the rover. It’s not like he’s quietly breathing while she thinks about kissing him and comes closer and closer to blurting out everything.

It’s just him, just Bellamy being Bellamy, and it turns out that’s her weakness even more than anything else.

“I’m telling you,” he says, and she can hear him getting comfortable on his bed. “It’s going. I have to hold the book basically right up to my nose to read the words.”

“It’s like a thousand pages of tiny print!” Clarke reminds him with a laugh. “Plus, you know it’s not fair to exaggerate when I can’t see you. I bet you’re reading it the same way you always do.”

“Are you calling me a liar, Clarke?”

“Little bit. Anyway, I don’t know what you want me to do about it.”

“Nothing, I’m just…”

“Whining?”

A small huff of a laugh.

“Yeah, I guess. You weren’t on yet, but earlier Echo told me I probably needed reading glasses. Which was,” he laughs. “An extremely helpful suggestion, as always.”

“Where exactly are you supposed to get glasses?” Clarke asks.

“Oh, I asked her. Apparently “the twenty-first century” was a good time for glasses. I can’t tell if she’s watching too many movies or just spending too much time with Murphy and Raven. Either way, she’s turned into even more of a smartass.”

“Yeah, I got that impression. She asked me if I wanted her to pop down and babysit one day when I was on my last nerve with Madi.”

Bellamy laughs loudly at that, a hearty, booming sound, and she feels the warmth of it spread through her.

“I don’t know,” he says, and she hears him toss the book aside. She imagines him pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose the way he does when he has a headache. “I keep telling you I’m getting old.”

It’s something about the way he says it. Because he’s not, obviously. He isn’t even thirty yet. He isn’t old. But it’s the weariness in his voice that reminds her how old they’ve all been for such a long time. She barely remembers what it feels like to be a child, to feel safe, without endless worrying. He’s not old, but he’s almost thirty, and it strikes her suddenly how fucking lucky she is to have had him in her life for this long. She missed him so much. She still misses him in moments like this when his voice is too close and the rest of him too far. But he has survived longer than he had any right to with the way he constantly puts himself at risk, and he’s joking about blurry vision and reading glasses and growing even older than this, and she loves him.

It’s almost out of her lips. Just blurted, graceless, but she has to do it right.

“Bellamy,” she starts. Hesitates, but then she remembers all the times she should have said something before. And what if the radio dies? What if something happens to him? Fear of future awkwardness cannot be allowed to lead to future regret. Not again. “Bellamy, Harper told me the other day that you thought I was dead for…for a long time.”

Bellamy’s tiny, stuttering intake of breath hurts to listen to.

“I, uh. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I thought you knew that already.”

“I thought you and Raven and Murphy kept the secret together.”

She can hear him sitting up, and she can hear him breathing heavily, like he’s warring with himself, like he can’t decide what to say.

He breathes in, a sharp breath. Okay, he whispers, obviously to himself, obviously not realizing just how good the acoustics in this rover are.

“I’m not sure I want to talk about it,” he admits, and she can hear the raw honesty in his voice, and she knows that it’s still fresh for him. Her heart aches for him, and her heart aches for herself, because she knows she has to keep going.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I don’t want to make you talk about it. I just…it kind of made me feel weird for a little bit.”

“I thought maybe I’d done something to piss you off,” he says, and she feels awful. She didn’t think he would notice. She probably should have known better.

“No. It just made me wonder about some things, but Raven told me I was being an idiot, so.”

“Yeah. I get that treatment a lot, too.”

It’s this delicate balance. She feels like they’re standing together on the edge of a cliff, hands linked, looking at each other to see who’s going to jump first so the other can immediately follow.

She suddenly remembers Lexa and the grounders on the other side of the table, before Lexa had become who she was to Clarke. She remembers swords being drawn and remembers feeling helpless to stop it, and she remembers the table being shoved aside, and Bellamy stepping in front of her, arm outstretched to keep her back.

What was the plan? she had wondered later, when he was gone into the mountain and she feared that she would never see him again.

But she’d always known: there had never been a plan. He wasn’t even armed. It was instinct. He would do anything for her. He would have died to protect her, and he didn’t even think before doing it.

“When I was down here,” she says, speaking quickly, almost rushing. She’s the one jumping in front of him, this time. “Before you talked back. I would think about you up there, and I would imagine what you guys were doing. I needed to. I needed to believe that you were still out there, especially before I found Madi, before I found hope. Because you – and the others, too, but…but mostly you – you were out there, and you would be coming back.”

“Clarke,” he says, sudden, like it’s involuntary.

“And when I messaged you, every day, I imagined you listening.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What could you possibly be sorry for?” she asks, her laugh tearful. “You’re always sorry. I’m not asking you to be sorry, Bellamy. I’m telling you that you saved me. Talking to you, forcing myself to believe that you were out there, not letting myself doubt. Bellamy, you’re the reason I made it. And I can’t imagine…if I had thought you were dead, if I thought you weren’t coming back…”

She hadn’t meant to cry. She actually thought she was doing pretty good right up until she wasn’t, and then her throat is clogging up and her eyes are stinging with tears.

“I know,” he says, and he does, and he’s crying too. “I’m sorry anyway.”

She laughs again, groans, and she knows he can hear that she’s crying, but she doesn’t care.

“Shut up,” she says.

“When Raven told me, I don’t think I’ve ever felt…I couldn’t believe it, at first. She was playing me one of your messages, and I couldn’t let myself hope. I had to tell myself that it wasn’t real, or that it was old, or something. Because I couldn’t get my hopes up. I couldn’t deal with thinking you were okay and then learning that you weren’t. When she told me that you were still alive down there, I…”

“I know. She told me.”

“She’s a smartass too,” Bellamy says quietly, and she has to close her eyes so that she can imagine his face. The expression on it. The sadness in his eyes. If he was here, if he was with her, he would reach out and hug her now. She’s sure of it.

“I missed you so much,” she says. “But I had hope. I’m so sorry that you didn’t. And I was afraid, when I found out, that it meant…that it changed something. That you learned to live without me and now I’m just…here again. And maybe that would be hard to deal with.”

“No, Clarke. I- I listened to every single message, once she gave them to me. And I heard…” he hesitates for so long that she’s sure he’s going to back down. She hears a whispered fuck it before he says, “I heard love in every single message. Clarke, tell me if I’m wrong. Because I can’t…”

“Bellamy,” she says. It’s almost a sob. “Bellamy, of course I love you.”

Neither will talk about the crying mess of a talk again, because neither are the type to cry through conversations, or confessions. Neither are the type to cry at all, except they have reached their limit, and they cannot contain it anymore.

Neither are the type to give their friends the satisfaction of ever letting them know just how pathetic they are about each other.

Then again, neither are the type to come out and state their feelings, but they can’t seem to stop doing that, either.

When he asks her when she knew, when she fell in love with him, she has to admit that she doesn’t know.

This is after, when most of the tears have been spent, when I love yous have turned into I’m sorrys have turned into I’m so happy you feel the sames.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” he asks, teasing. She's sure they’ll stop being disgusting eventually, if only because the others might literally float the speaker if they don’t knock it off, but she sort of likes the saccharine sweetness of this hushed conversation. It’s not very them, but she thinks they can deal with it for a little while longer.

She might sort of ruin it when she primly answers, “hindsight bias, Bellamy. I’m pretty sure I’ve been in love with you for a while, but since I didn’t realize it at the time, I can’t tell you when it started. Because now that I look back, I even love you in the beginning, and I know that's not right.”

“Yeah, god forbid,” he laughs.

“When did you realize it, then?”

“Now I don’t want to tell you.”

“I’ll just assume you’ve been madly in love with me from the moment you met me.”

“It definitely wasn’t then,” he cautions, and she laughs again. “But, Jesus. Close enough.”

“Aww.”

“Shut up.”

“No, it’s sweet. I mean, I definitely thought about fucking you on, like, day four on the ground, but…”

“Jesus, Clarke.”

“What? Not like I would’ve done it, but I thought about it. It was a weird first few days, and you were older and hot! I had been in solitary for a year! You and most of your harem were prime fantasy material. After the first couple of weeks, though? Definitely would have done it.”

“This is deeply unfair.”

“Yeah, well. Raven planted the idea of radio sex, and I kind of want to try it out. Probably not right now. Wanted to get the, uh, eternal, undying love conversation out of the way first. But it’s something I’m hypothetically open to, for the record.”

Bellamy laughs again, and she can imagine him. Bearded, apparently. Maybe his freckles are gone, or less visible, but she imagines them still bright on his face. Stretched out on his bed, the speaker on his chest. His eyes would still be slightly puffy and red from all those very embarrassing tears, the way hers are when she looks into the rearview mirror. He’s beautiful, she knows. She doesn’t have to see him to know he’s beautiful.

“I love you,” he says, sudden.

“Yeah, we established that. I love you too.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy repeats, a small, pleased smile in his voice. “I just wanted to hear you say it again.”

They don't necessarily tell anyone, the next day, but everyone seems to know. Raven and Emori joke about disinfecting the speaker, just in case, ignoring Clarke's protests that they didn’t even get around to the radio sex part. Echo tells Clarke that she's holding her hand up to the receiver for a high five, and Clarke presses her palm against the radio to return the gesture. Murphy makes a joke about little baby radios running around the ring that manages to be both horrifying and sort of sweet. Harper congratulates her on finally having the guts to tell him, and Monty reveals that he always had a theory that she and Bellamy had been secretly together since that first Unity Day. Clarke's not sure how they all know, but she figures it must show on Bellamy's face as much as it shows on her own. Madi takes one look at her and asks if she should start calling Bellamy 'dad' now.

“You don’t even call me mom,” she points out, and Madi rolls her eyes.

“It was a joke, Clarke,” she says.

It isn’t like it’s always easy for all of them, after that. Bellamy worries when she's injured or sick, and she worries when one of Monty's attempts at making a more palatable algae results in a violent illness that makes all of them miserable for a week. She misses them, especially as Madi starts pushing for more independence and they argue more. She misses them when the fifth year rolls around and they still haven’t figured out a way to get down.

She misses them because they are all apart, but there’s a peace that never fades because their voices are still with her, and because they are still together. She and Bellamy, still, are doing this together despite everything in existence trying to tear them apart.

“I’ll be here when you figure it out,” she assures Bellamy, when he’s frustrated and hopeless. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He does come for her, but he isn’t the first.

There’s panic in his blood that has his hands shaking as he pulls himself out of the ship, as he stands on solid ground again.

He told her to hide. He told her to take Madi and run, but they lost contact and he doesn’t know if the prisoners found her first.

Except, out of the darkness, she comes.

If she’s six years older, she doesn’t look it. She looks perfect, untouched by time, and he would think he was hallucinating except the others see her, too.

Harper gasps first, giddy, but she doesn’t move forward, and Bellamy realizes in some distant, shocked way that it’s because Clarke’s eyes are locked on his. They’re giving him time to go first, but he can’t move for far too long, because she’s here. She’s actually here.

The shock only lasts for another heartbeat before he’s rushing forward, before she's meeting him halfway and colliding in the middle.

He hugs her tight, lifts her off the ground with the force of it, and she’s laughing and saying his name over and over again. He registers a little girl who must be Madi rushing to the others, squealing as she jumps into a grinning Echo's arms. He loves Madi fiercely in this moment for pulling the attention off him, so he can swipe at the tears on Clarke’s cheeks with both trembling thumbs, so he can press his lips to hers, so he can deepen the kiss without an audience, without worrying. Clarke is crying, and she tastes like salt and strawberries and mint, and she feels just like he remembered when he crushes her in another hug.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” she reminds him.

And yes, there are things still to do. There are people still to save, and people still to fight. That has always been the way of things, and he’s furious and devastated that it’s still the way of things now, but he refuses to give up this moment.

“I know,” he says, and he kisses her again. She’s still soft, her hair choppier and shorter and bleached a little blonder by the sun, but her eyes are still like a clear sky and her smile still thaws every frozen part of him.

She still looks every bit like a princess from an old story.

When she pulls back to look at him and takes his face in both hands, she grins. Impish and light and exactly like he imagined all those nights talking on the radio, when it was easiest to will his mind to conjure up what she might look like now. She’s here like he never left, and he’s still so fucking sorry he did.

“It’s all right,” she says, and he thinks she must have read his regrets on his face until he realizes that she’s stroking her fingers along his cheeks. He laughs.

“So I don’t have to shave?” he asks, somehow managing the words without bursting into tears.

“Maybe eventually. I miss your whole face. Your little scar.” She kisses the spot above his lip, and he stifles a sob and a shiver as he lowers his head, pressing his forehead against hers. He’s afraid to close his eyes.

“Fair enough,” he says. “I love you so fucking much.”

“Yeah,” she says, and her smile is soft and glad. “I love you too.”

There are miles yet to travel, and things yet to learn, and horrors yet to come. Bellamy knows this even if he doesn’t know the specifics. He knows there are still so many things left to do.

But his forehead stays against hers, and his arms stay around her, and he lets several more heartbeats pass.

They have earned this. They deserve this.

He’s home.