A/N: It's Christmas on the Ark, and Clarke made it to space with her friends.
*Please note, this is probably as close to a drabble as my wordy ass will ever get.
Bellamy frowned as he scanned the numbers on the tablet in front of him.
"Raven, are these air quality numbers right?" he asked, walking into the engineering station.
He expected to find Raven, and maybe Monty, pouring over the computers or maybe tinkering with something they were trying to fix, like they usually were, so he stopped short when he looked up to find Raven, Monty, Harper, Murphy, Emori, and Echo all crowded around one of the tables talking and maybe even giggling excitedly.
The noise all stopped abruptly when he rounded the corner.
"...what's going on?" he asked warily, the tablet all but forgotten in his hand.
"Nothing," Murphy said, a smirk on his face that made Bellamy instantly nervous.
"What did you do?" he asked, his 'dad voice' making an appearance.
"Nothing," Murphy again insisted, grabbing Emori's hand and tugging her with him out the door.
Bellamy watched them go, then turned back toward the others, his eyebrows raised in question.
Raven stood up from her chair quickly, nearly tripping over her leg brace, she was in such a hurry. She took the tablet from Bellamy's hand. "I think this is from the solar storms we've had recently," she said, walking over to the large wall of computers she commanded. "I'll run some tests, do some simulations, make sure nothing will get out of the acceptable range."
"Okay. Thanks," he said, always grateful for her scientific knowledge, but still wondering what the delinquents had done now and how scared he should be.
Ever since they'd become trapped in a tin box in the sky, with little else to do but grow algae and recycle urine, some members of their group had taken to practical jokes.
And really, he couldn't blame them. They were usually harmless and provided a break from the monotony, not to mention a morale boost, even if it was just for a few minutes, but he had to confess, he was getting a little sick of being the recipient of most of their pranks, along with Clarke.
Just because they were the parents of the group did not mean...
...yeah, okay, maybe they did deserve it.
But if he had to spend 30 minutes looking for his boots in the closed off sections of the Ark again while trying not to freeze to death and using an oxygen mask, he was going to have Raven superglue Murphy's favorite deck of playing cards to the outside of the window the next time she did a planned maintenance spacewalk.
"Bellamy, I think Clarke was looking for you. Something about rationing," Monty said, not quite meeting Bellamy's eyes.
Bellamy frowned, almost sure he and Clarke had come to a decision on that yesterday, but it would be just like her to suddenly have a new idea that she wanted to discuss with him. " Where is she?" he asked.
"I think she's in her room," Harper supplied helpfully, taking a bite of the gummy, jerky-like substance they'd made out of some dried algae to eat as a snack.
Bellamy nodded, turning around and heading down the hallway.
He knew the delinquents were up to something, and he was half expecting Murphy to jump out and scare the shit out of him, so he was frankly relieved when he made it all the way to Clarke's room and hadn't encountered anyone trying to give him a heart attack.
He found her door open, as it usually was, unless she was sleeping. He put his hands on the frame, leaning inside as he knocked on the wall. "Hey, you wanted to see me?" he asked.
She frowned, getting up from her desk where she'd been working on something. "No," she said, walking towards him.
"Monty said you wanted to talk about rationing..." he began, then turned toward a noise in the hallway in the direction he'd just come from. He found everyone standing at the end of the hallway, grinning.
"What..." he began, just as Clarke leaned out her doorway to see what he was looking at.
"What's going on?" she asked for him.
Raven cocked a hip, crossing her arms over her chest as she smirked, pointing above Bellamy and Clarke's heads.
They both looked up, half expecting to see a bucket of something disgusting that was about to spill down on their heads.
Instead, they saw...well, he wasn't really sure what it was.
It looked like a clump of mold, hanging from a wire.
"What the hell is that?" he asked, looking at Clarke, but she was decidedly not looking at him, her cheeks tinged a becoming shade of pink.
"It's mistletoe, dumbass," Murphy helpfully supplied.
"Mistletoe?" Bellamy asked incredulously, squinting as he looked closer.
It looked more like a wad of algae with something red stuck on it.
"Okay, fine, it's algae with pieces of red glass glued on," Raven exclaimed, throwing her hands up in the air. "Point is, it's the closest thing we have up here in exile-land, it's Christmas, and we've decided it counts as mistletoe."
Bellamy just raised an eyebrow at her, really wanting to debate the glob of mold's classification as a Christmas ornament, but when he opened his mouth, she only grinned wider.
"You do know what you have to do, right?" she asked, sarcasm heavily infusing her tone.
Bellamy paused, his mind working at triple-speed, because he'd been so taken off guard by a wad of their food being hung on the ceiling, he hadn't stopped to grasp what it meant.
Mistletoe...kissing...Clarke.
Oh, shit.
He glanced back at the girl in front of him, and noticed she was even redder than the last time he'd looked, and he finally understood why.
"I...that's not...that's ridiculous," he stammered, feeling his palms starting to sweat immediately.
"No breaking the rules, Blake. You two are under the mistletoe. Now kiss," Murphy insisted, his voice laced with a challenge. "Or are you too chickenshit, even when we literally set it up for you?"
Bellamy tuned out his friends, because he really didn't care what they thought right now.
All he cared about was the opinion of the girl in front of him.
The girl he'd wanted to kiss for over a year but had never found the time or the courage to go after.
It had gotten even harder to keep his feelings for her a secret once they were in space, around each other constantly and with little else to do but hang out with each other in extremely close quarters.
But he'd managed, mostly because she'd never made a move either, and he was terrified of messing up what they had.
And now...she was standing just inches in front of him...and he was supposed to kiss her.
It was tradition.
It didn't have to be weird.
If he'd ended up under the Kindergarten arts-and-crafts project with Harper or Raven or...hell, even Monty, he would've made a big production out of giving them a smacking kiss, probably to raucous catcalls, and everyone could've had a good laugh over it.
But this was Clarke, and he wasn't sure he could kiss her like it meant nothing and then move on with his life as though his entire world hadn't tilted on its axis.
Honestly, he wasn't sure he wanted to kiss her if it didn't mean the same thing to her that it would to him.
And maybe, maybe he would've been brave enough to take a chance, but she was still blushing furiously and looking somewhere near the door jamb, so he was pretty sure she wanted nothing to do with this.
He tried to hide the fact that his heart was cracking open in his chest. "Guys, come on, Clarke doesn't want to kiss me. I'll take my punishment. What is it this time? Dinner from the bottom of the algae bucket? Week without..."
"What did you say?" Clarke asked quietly, finally looking up at him rather intently.
"I said I'd take the punishment for both of us. It doesn't matter. I can..."
She put her hands on his upper arms, dragging him into her room, both away from prying eyes and out from under the mistletoe.
Before he could even blink, her lips were on his.
He froze, in shock and unable to process until her hands slid into his hair and her tongue ran across his lower lip, and then his body took over, arms wrapping around her waist as he kissed her back for all he was worth.
They traded sweet, yet obviously hungry kisses, lips grasping at each other, neither wanting to let go.
Finally, she smiled against his lips, pulling back slightly to stare into his eyes. "Bellamy...I do want to kiss you," she whispered. Then, more forcefully, "How could you think I didn't?!"
"You...do?" he asked, his brain still not quite caught up and afraid to believe this was really happening.
She nodded. "I have for a while. And it has nothing to do with mistletoe," she added, for some reason intent on making that clear.
And suddenly, he understood why she'd pulled him out from under the glob of algae that was passing as a Christmas make-out inducer.
She didn't want their first kiss to not mean anything either.
He smiled, splaying his hands more firmly across her back as he leaned in to kiss her again.
Before he could, they heard the clomp of boots, followed by Murphy's voice. "So you two finally get your act together, and you don't even let us see it?"
"Gross, Murphy. What are you, some kind of creep?" Raven asked, even though she was right beside him, staring into Clarke's room with a grin on her face.
Bellamy looked at Clarke and, at her nod, he used his foot to kick her door closed.
"Dammit, guys! We just want you to be happy!" Harper insisted from the other side of the door.
Clarke wrapped her arms more firmly around the back of Bellamy's neck. "We're getting there," she called back, just before she leaned up to kiss him again.
A/N: Do you love me for the Christmas fluff or do you hate me for making you think about how amazing Bellarke trapped on the Ark for 6 years could've been?
Whoops. :P