The memories passed by, faster than the lightning of a storm.
The moment they woke up alone after 125 years of cryo-sleep and met Jordan.
The images of Monty and Harper on the screen of the main deck of their ship.
The two suns around which their new planet orbited.
"Be better. Do better," Monty asked them after sacrificing his life for the survival of humanity. How can they ignore their friend's last wish?
So they had done better. They had been better.
Clarke had not straightened the barriers erected by hardship and time around her heart. The barriers that only Madi could normally cross.
Bellamy had tamed the anger that was storming beneath the surface of his emotions, had refrained from exploding and saying things he could only regret.
And, for so long that they thought they had forgotten how to do it, they had worked in harmony, in symbiosis... Together. Slowly, they had opened up to each other, talked to each other, forgiven each other.
If it had taken several days for them to regain the rhythm and chemistry that characterized them before, it had only taken a few hours, perhaps even only a few minutes - if they were (finally) honest with themselves - for their feelings to resurface.
Six years of absence, one war, two ends of the world and 125 years of sleep were not enough to erase that.
Tenderness had returned first.
In the brightness of the looks they gave each other. In the blanket that the young woman would lay on Bellamy's shoulders when he fell asleep in the control room with a Clarke who refused to go to bed - not until she had reviewed the calculations made with Jordan's help for the third time - and that the young man refused to let her stay up alone. In the cup of coffee, he brought her in the early morning when she was struggling to wake up from a short night's sleep.
Affection had quickly followed.
In the damp brown sweaty curls that Clarke would release from Bellamy's eyes after their daily training. In the hand that the young man placed in her lower back when he passed by her. When he let the young woman place her head on his shoulder after particularly difficult days, and when he finally fell asleep himself, his cheek rested on the top of her head as well.
Desire, on the other hand, was not born suddenly. One day, they simply realized that the attraction had always been there.
In the spark of each of their contacts. In the passion that animated sometimes their training every morning, sometimes the disputes they encountered during any disagreements. In the feverish dreams that sometimes woke Clarke up in the middle of the night. In the impulse that seized Bellamy when the young woman smiled and her lips fervently called his own.
Bellamy still remembered the moment when he almost gave in to temptation and fulfilled all the fantasies that were played in a loop in his mind at every moment of unconsciousness and awakening.