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Bellamy found her cell entirely by accident.
It had been on one of his first recon trips to scavenge parts for the algae farm. Raven had ordered them to search ‘every damn corner of the godforsaken ship’ for the necessary components, otherwise she’d make their life hell. Not that any of them were unaware just how hellish their life would be if they didn’t get their oxygen system up and running, but the threats seemed to help Raven more than anyone.
As desperate as the mission was, Bellamy decided he would be the only one to search the Sky Box. He hadn’t missed the way Harper had avoided going anywhere near the corridor of Go-Sci that led there, or how Monty still woke up crying in the night, calling out Jasper’s name. Raven was too busy welding and greasing and worrying to search. Echo and Emori didn’t know enough about living in space yet to send there, and Emori wasn’t letting John out of her sight, not even now. So Bellamy shouldered the responsibility.
He wandered for hours amongst the empty cells, despite finding little of value for Raven to use. That he was looking for something else--something equally important--did not occur to him until he was staring at it.
Her cell was as gray and dim as any of them, but bleakness did not settle into his bones as it had upon viewing the others. Instead, he walked over the threshold into a world that now felt more like home than the metal walls around him. A calm river to his left, a shadowed tree to his right, and there, underneath the tip of his boots, a silver moon sketched against a black, starry sky.
Bellamy suddenly found it hard to breathe, and try as he might, as much as he forced his lungs to expand and contract, to make himself inhale and exhale, he could not make the pain in his chest stop. It was if--
The air could be toxic.
A choked sound escaped his lips and echoed in the empty cell. His eyes burned. Bellamy reached out, wanting to trace it all, to put his fingers where hers had been, but he had no idea where to begin.
He didn’t know how to do this without Clarke.
How long he stood there, staring at the world she had built for herself from nothing--alone, she had done it alone that first time, because they hadn’t known each other then--he didn’t know. It was only when he could breathe again that he looked at the moonlit sky beneath this feet once more and slowly walked away.
It was entirely on purpose that he told no one about the discovery.
He was the last to return that day, and everyone was already busy talking about Monty’s major accomplishment of breaking into the storage facility. Raven almost cried when she saw the haul he brought back. It was there first real victory back on the Ark--aside from arriving in the first place--and losing Clarke was still too fresh for all of them. So he didn’t say a word about finding her cell that day.
The next weeks were a blur of following Raven’s orders, staying out of her way when the system sprung yet another leak, or enjoying the small moment of respite when something finally did work. There was barely time to sleep, let alone talk about things unrelated to their immediate survival. He did almost tell Monty about the cell, once, but the words just couldn’t seem to come out when he tried. Bellamy asked him about how Harper was really doing instead. A visit would be distracting, for them and for him, he decided. It wasn’t time to tell them--not yet.
Not until the algae farm was up and running, and he still had not said a word about finding Clarke’s cell, that Bellamy realized he had no more excuses for why he wasn’t telling them about it. That night, once everyone had drifted off to their rooms, he finally revisited it. The Sky Box was bigger and emptier at night. His footsteps echoed more loudly than before, and it seemed to take twice as long to find his way around. Just as he began to panic that he had imagined finding her cell, there it was.
Door still wide open, just how he had left it.
Drawings still covering every inch of wall, just how she had left it.
Sleep wouldn’t come to him that night, he knew. So he walked to the back of the cell, settled against the wall with his blanket around him, and just looked. He took it all in, all of her thoughts and dreams displayed where everyone could see. Even now, even after she was gone.
He only managed to keep it a secret for the first year.
Murphy was the one who found him in her cell the morning of their three hundred and thirty-sixth day back in space. It wasn’t Bellamy’s first time falling asleep in her cell, but it was the first time he hadn’t returned to Go-Sci before the others were up. He blamed Monty’s alcohol and his poor imbibing decisions the night before for that mistake.
As Bellamy wiped sleep from his eyes, cursing at being kicked awake, Murphy just stood there, looking. Then he snorted.
“I bet the princess wasn’t even punished for defacing her cell.”
“Get out.”
Murphy ignored his anger. “Raven’s looking for you.”
Bellamy didn’t move for a moment, then sighed and rose to leave.
“I’ll lock up behind you, dearest!” Murphy called after him in a high-pitched voice.
By dinner, they all knew about the cell.
“I want to see it,” Raven demanded. He nodded, and then felt Monty put his hand on his arm.
“Just once,” he said softly. “We know it’s...well, we just want to see it once.”
“You can see it however much you want,” Bellamy said with a shrug and ignored the knowing, sad look Monty gave him in return.
They went after dinner, and what unnerved him most about it was not that the others were seeing it, but rather how quiet it was. Five people in one room--Emori and Echo had stayed behind--and not a sound was heard besides the occasional intake of breath. Somehow, when it was just him, it didn’t seem so still and sad.
They looked, and they looked, and they remembered Clarke. Eventually someone started speaking, quietly, about what she had drawn in this corner, or then someone talked about how that sketch reminded them of something they had seen on the ground. Memories flooded back and voices rose, until suddenly, they remembered the last, hard truth--she was gone--and then it was quiet, oh so quiet, again.
Harper was the last one out, and she squeezed Bellamy’s hand in farewell. He squeezed back, looking up to see tears in her eyes.
“We all miss her,” she whispered, but her voice trailed off at the end, as if there was a second part to her sentence that she didn’t dare say out loud.
The next night, when Bellamy walked in the direction of the Sky Box after dinner, instead of the hallway where everyone else’s bedrooms were, no one questioned it. Because they knew, just as he did, that while they all missed Clarke greatly...he missed her more.
After a year and a half of falling asleep to telling himself stories about her sketches, he finally asked Raven for an extra tablet.
“We don’t have an extra tablet.”
“What’s that one for?”
She scowled. “Backup parts. Echo keeps shorting hers out.”
“Well, if you give me that one, she might learn how to take care of hers, instead of making you fix it again.”
“I need parts to fix whatever’s broken, smartass.”
He frowned at her, and something in his expression must have given him away, because with a sigh she relented.
“I’m taking it back for parts if she damages something that’s beyond my ability to fix,” she warned.
Bellamy checked that there was a storage chip for the device and then nodded in agreement. He took it back to his room right then, but he didn’t pick it up again for another few days. When he did, it was only for a few minutes, because he didn’t know where to even begin with what he was trying to do.
Finally, on their thousandth day back in space, after laughing and crying, mourning and reminiscing with his friends, Bellamy finally knew where to begin. In her cell, three years after leaving her behind, he took the tablet in his hand and hit record.
“No matter where you live--in space, on the ground--life is shit. Unsurprising, if you listen to the Greeks, since Chaos came first in the universe. Then Chaos got it together enough to give us Earth, Hell, and Love.” He laughed briefly, roughly. “Suddenly it all makes sense, doesn’t it?”
That was how he began telling the histories: first of the Greeks, because it was the one he knew best. Then of the world before space, and then of the Ark, because whoever might listen to his attempt at record-keeping would need that for later. The most important (and painful) parts came next: the story of the hundred, of coming to the ground and almost being beaten by it, of mistakes and betrayals and losses, of faith and friendship and hope.
Eight months of talking into the tablet in the late-hour darkness and somehow, it got easier. To think about the ground, and Clarke, and his sister, and all of the decisions--good or bad--he had made there. And when there was no more history left to tell, finally, Bellamy almost felt like peace, real peace, might just be achievable for not just the others, but for him too.
He should’ve known better, he thought, after the Eligius ship attacked.
The Elgius ship was small, so the prison cells were communal.
Bellamy quickly acclimated to Murphy’s snores, and he appreciated being able to talk to Monty about their strategy for keeping themselves alive. They quickly got used to speaking to the women by knocking in code on the walls that separated their cells and whispering through air vents when the guards were asleep. What Bellamy couldn’t seem to adjust to, however, was no longer seeing Clarke’s drawings.
The bareness of the cell walls taunted him. Sometimes a shadow caught his eye, and he would turn, expecting to see broad charcoal smudges or straight silver lines. Instead, he saw faded paint and too many scratches to count on the panels. It unnerved him, not having that little last piece of Clarke around him anymore.
Months passed, and it only got harder. Now, talking of escape made Monty anxious and Murphy irritated, and Bellamy could barely keep his hands still most days. His fingers itched to trace the sketched shapes that had become so familiar to him, or to feel for the hidden pocket on the side of his pants where the storage disk was.
Both were out of his reach--the first for good, the second for now. He may have lost Clarke’s artwork when the Ark had taken Eligius’s fire, but he still had their history--his, and Clarke’s and Raven’s, and Monty’s, and Octavia’s, the history that was all of theirs--stowed safely away.
If they managed to take that away from him too, he wasn’t sure what he would do.
The ground was as bright as he remembered.
After over a year as prisoners on Eligius, three months recovering from their successful coup, and another three orbiting the healing Earth while they prepared the ship for re-entry and landing, it was almost unbelievable to Bellamy that they were really, truly back.
Seven people had returned to space, and seven had come back. Bellamy had managed to not let any of them die, or go insane. He had done it; her death had not been in vain. So when fresh air hit his face for the first time in six years, Bellamy laughed.
He laughed, until he heard Raven scream. The sun blinded him as he whipped around, looking for whatever borrowed trouble had come to greet them. He blinked, saw Raven running, heard Monty yell, felt Harper clutch his arm in a death grip--and then he saw her.
She was on the ridge, radio falling from her hand. Bellamy watched as she tumbled down the steep slope and ran like lightning, crashing into Raven with a force that he felt in his bones. They fell to the ground, laughing and crying and screaming. His breath suddenly felt too big for his body, and then he couldn’t stay still.
Bellamy bolted for Clarke, where she was lying on the ground with her other friends’ arms tangled around her. Jagged pain ripped through his chest when he paused in front of them--hell, he had gotten bad at running--and then she looked up.
He hadn’t forgot what her eyes looked like, he realized: big, blue, and full of hope. Bellamy held out a hand, she grasped it, he pulled, then suddenly, they were only an inch apart.
“You’re late,” she murmured.
“Guess you missed me then, huh, princess?”
She smiled in wonder, and then her face crumpled. Tears spilled over onto her cheeks, and he pulled her in close as she sobbed.
I thought you were dead.
He hugged her even tighter, and she curled her fingers into the fabric of his jacket.
I thought you were dead, too.
Six years apart, and they still understood each other better than anyone else in the universe.
Bellamy would have held her until the world stopped turning, but then a small, unfamiliar voice called out her name, and she pulled away. They all turned to look at the girl who stood yards from them, wary but curious.
“Madi,” Clarke said, a deep warmth in her voice. “Come here. It’s alright.”
Once the girl was next to her, Clarke took her hand, smiling, and said, “I have some people I want you to meet.”
Six months later…
“And that one?”
Bellamy turned his head to look where Clarke was pointing. When he found the constellation she meant, he replied, “Cassiopeia.”
“Oh. I knew that.”
He laughed, rolling over on his side and propping his head on his hand. “I’m starting to think you brought me out here for something other than stargazing.”
Clarke did not succeed in suppressing a smirk. Bellamy reached over to brush a stray curl from her forehead. Before he pulled it away, she caught it and kissed his palm.
“Guilty.”
With another chuckle, he leaned down to kiss her. Her lips were warm despite the coolness of the autumn night. They kissed once, twice, and then Clarke was pulling him closer. She ran her hands down his sides as he rubbed his thumbs against her hip bones.
“Too cold?” He whispered against her cheek.
“That’s why I brought blankets.”
Smiling into the crook of her neck, he slid his hand beneath her shirt at the same time she started to push his jacket off. They were far enough from camp that no one would stumble on them, and a heady warmth filled him at the thought of being with her out here, amongst the trees and in the moonlight.
What felt like hours later, when they both lay breathless, her on top of him and a blanket over her, Bellamy let his fingers wander across her back. He traced the still-familiar shapes--the river, the tree, the moon rising above the treeline--onto her skin, feeling her shiver as he did so.
“You’re doing it again,” Clarke murmured into his shoulder.
“What?”
She pulled her head up to look at him. “That...thing. You’re drawing shapes.”
“I am.”
“What are they?”
His heart swelled as he looked at her curious expression. “I’ll tell you later.”
“Tell me now,” she pleaded teasingly.
“Later,” he teased back. “I’m too damn comfortable to move, and I have to show you something first for it to make sense.”
“Fine.” She wrinkled her nose, and then buried her face back into the crook of his neck with a happy sigh. “But only because I’m too comfortable to move too.”
Bellamy let out a small, quiet laugh, and wrapped his arms around her again. He would tell her later, after he got the storage disk from his things, and a tablet from Raven, and the courage to show Clarke what had truly kept him sane all those years in space.
But for now, he just held Clarke close, reveling in the joy of being together with her under the starry sky.