Maybe (Maybe Not)
DISCLAIMER: I don't own a thing. This was written for the purpose of entertainment only. The quote below does not belong to me.
In one timeline we kiss but the stars don't come down. In another you set a world on fire for me but I perish in the flames. Another and we're strangers on a busy street, brushing by close enough tobsend each other reeling off balance but not stopping. Somewhere there's a final space where your hand on my face is the punchy climax to an epic saga, where the way our mouths meet takes the breath right out of people's throats. One universe has us right, of all the millions stacked on millions. So it's not this one. I can live with that.
[...] Maybe we'll come across each other at the turning of the century, racing across the breaches between worlds. I'll build my life on that maybe.
- Elisabeth Hewer
It was there, in her blue eyes, plain as day. They had stopped needing words a long while back.
Don't worry. We've got this. I see you. I hear you. I know you. I trust you. I -
The first time he'd felt it, it had been overwhelming. Now, it was a reassuring constant, but never something he could get used to.
The others thought he was in love with her. It wasn't quite like that, it wasn't quite that simple, but they weren't wrong.
He loved her. They loved each other.
But this kind of love wasn't the kind that needed to be confirmed by any worldly institution; not the kind that needed to be consummated - perhaps not even the kind that needed to be put into words (and they sure as hell had never tried to say it).
Their connection didn't stem from any sort of physical attraction, and maybe that was the beauty of it. In a world where, day by day by day, they were relying on animalic instinct to keep them alive, they had found someone who didn't trigger any of these urges and yet had become more important than anyone else.
It was, for whatever that was worth in the blood and mayhem of their days, the most true and pure feeling he could imagine. He tended not to dwell on the concept too much, because he couldn't quite shake the feeling that he wasn't worth it - that something so powerful, something so inherently good, couldn't possibly have been meant for someone like him.
(Of course, the same went for Clarke herself.)
Clarke, he'd thought in the beginning, belonged into another world, a world nothing like his own, and that they should even be able to coexist had been an utopian idea.
(If they had remained on the Arc, had their lives gone on the way they had been, they would have probably brushed past each other a handful of times as the years went by. If, say, he'd actually bumped into her then, she might have thrown him an annoyed glance. He might or might not have muttered a "sorry" that he didn't mean, she might or might not have said some empty phrase along the lines of "no big deal", and they would have gone their separate ways. Acknowledging each other's existence only to the point of being vaguely aware of the number of people on board with them.
Back then, he hadn't been a murderer. Actually, the fact he'd been hiding his mother's crime aside, he'd been a model citizen. He'd been modest and smart and hard working and there had been no one's blood on his hands, and perhaps he would have deserved her then.
But that would have never even crossed his mind, because Clarke was privileged and educated and brilliant and the kind of self-righteous all these things tend to make a teenager. She would have wanted the kind of lover who could explain the world to her, who had read even more books than she had and listened to the right music and whose vocabulary was vast enough to properly express his awe at her drawings.
Bellamy wasn't and had never been any of those things, and back then he surely wouldn't have cared.)
But that was not the world they lived in.
In this world, he had shot his chancellor and made children hurt each other and he'd let hundreds of people die to protect his sister.
In this world, Clarke had cut a man's throat in cold blood, she had allowed torture and bombings and sent children to war.
They had made all the hard, miserable choices and shouldered the consequences. (So none of the others would have to.)
Between the two of them, they could probably be made responsible for more than a thousand graves by now.
In this world, he was a mass murderer, and Clarke, even if she wasn't that, was a war criminal.
In this world, they needed each other, ridiculous though that seemed sometimes. They had become strangely alike, and fit together like pieces of a puzzle wherever they hadn't.
Maybe that was how they had become so close. Maybe things that fit together as perfectly as they did were forced together by nature.
He wasn't good enough for her. That was a fact.
But he knew that nobody would ever be quite as close to her as he was - because it was also a fact that no one but them could ever really know what they had done.
They could only ever share their burden with each other, and no one but them could ever truly understand. She was the only one he'd ever believe if she said "I know how you feel", and when he lay awake at night, haunted by the dead - by his victims - the only memory that helped him breathe was her voice. "You are forgiven."
He knew she felt the same.
Maybe, if there was more time, they could be in love. Maybe, if there was more time, they could be together.
(Maybe, in that world, they would even be happy. He liked to think they would be.)
Maybe, in this world, this was all they would ever have. Just the fact that, when they looked at each other, they knew.
(Don't worry. We've got this. I see you. I hear you. I know you. I trust you. I -)
Maybe this was all they would ever have.
(Then it was more he had ever thought he still deserved.)
If this was all they would ever have - then it was enough.