"Bellamy? I'm back now. We had supper. But I guess you might still be having supper, it's still a little early. Anyway, I'm here." Clarke stopped herself there, painfully aware that she was, in fact, in danger of -
"Rambling yourself, now, are you Princess?" Bellamy's voice was only a little mocking, she hoped.
"I do not ramble!" She made a show of her indignation, enjoying the chance to exchange jibes like this after so long without his company.
"I know what I heard."
"Whatever." She'd let him win this one. "How was your supper?"
"The food or the company?"
"Either. Both. I want to know everything that's going on with you guys." She missed them, their company, their ability to find humour in even the darkest of times, so much that it hurt.
"OK. The food was gross. It always is. It was a lot more digestible today, everyone was so happy that you are OK that it seemed more palatable."
"Wow. I'm going to go ahead and say that's a compliment."
"It definitely is. It's basically the highest compliment I'm capable of giving. You, Clarke Griffin, have the power to render algae non-repulsive." She glowed at that. She knew he was messing about, but could feel that there was a good measure of meaningful truth wrapped up in his declaration as well.
"And you, Bellamy Blake, really know how to compliment a woman."
"Yeah, maybe I should keep practising." Her heart did a funny little hiccup at that, but she fought to keep her tone light.
"I wouldn't object. I figure you can only improve."
"Rude. Anyway, you still owe me a full account of your day."
"OK. I woke up this morning. Ate some dried apple, because we have real food here on the ground. Trod on a slug on the way to the latrine, then spent ten minutes cleaning slug guts off the bottom of my foot. Is this the kind of detail you wanted?"
"I actually hate slugs. Please don't. Really. Tell me about Madi instead?" She could hear that he was, in fact, grossed out. Bellamy Blake, freaked out by slugs – she saved that useful nugget of information, tucked it up her sleeve in case it should prove useful in the future.
"Madi is your typical seven-year-old, I suppose, but as I haven't known many seven-year-olds before now I think I'm hardly qualified to judge. She loves expeditions to the berry fields, because it means we spend the whole day together, talking, and we take a little picnic, so it's a nice change from staying home doing chores and her lessons. I'm trying to teach her to read and write and add up and things. I feel woefully inadequate and wish you were here, because this is something I know you'd be better at than I am." She sighed deeply. She had needed to get that off her chest. Raising a child was a scary business.
"Clarke, breathe. You're doing great. I've only spoken to her once but it's obvious she adores you."
"Thank you. I just always think that you'd know what to do."
"Because of O?"
"Yeah."
"Do you... do you know if she's OK?" She had known it was only a matter of time until he asked.
"I think so. I'm sorry, I know that's a terrible answer. I went to the bunker, thinking maybe I could join them, back before I found Madi. But Polis is such a mess, Bellamy. The tower has collapsed over the door of the bunker. There's no way one person could dig it out. I should know – I tried. But it's survived one apocalypse, remember. I'm sure it will survive again. I'm sorry I can't tell you anything else." She was crying openly now, and she knew that it wasn't helpful, that it was her turn to be strong for him, but somehow she couldn't quite manage it.
"Hey, don't apologise." She could hear that his voice was thick with tears too. "You did all you could, I'm sure. Thank you for trying."
"We'll get them out, when you get back." She needed him to believe her.
"Yeah, of course." His sentence ended on what sounded suspiciously like a sob. "I'm going to turn in, I think." Another strangled sob. "Busy day and all. Night night." She sat, surprised, for a moment. Sure, he was upset, but why was he running away? Did he not want her to hear him cry? Had he only wanted to speak to her to ask about his sister?
By the time she had gathered her wits and replied, with a slightly panicked "Bellamy, are you still there?" it was apparent that he was long gone.
…...
For the first hour, Bellamy didn't really think at all. He simply ran away from the Earth monitoring station, locked his bedroom door, and collapsed in a crumpled heap of grief. He was faintly aware that he could hear what sounded like a wounded animal, but never quite got as far as realising that he was the one making the noise.
For the next couple of hours, he wondered what he had been thinking. It wasn't like Clarke would have replied with a "Yes, she's fine, want to speak to her?". If she'd seen or heard from Octavia, she'd have mentioned it already. It would have been cruel not to. And it made a lot of sense, really, that she wouldn't have been able to open the bunker alone. Of course Polis would have been severely damaged. That was to be expected.
By that night, when the others were long in bed, he was thinking about how Clarke must feel now. She was probably feeling awful, he figured. She was probably blaming herself for not managing to dig them out, or for upsetting him with the words she'd used or the way she'd told him. And he'd basically run away without explaining himself, and abandoned her yet again, when he'd promised her only the day before that he would never do that again. She was, most likely, worried sick.
By the early hours of the morning, he thought that this was the biggest mistake he'd made in quite some time. The logical part of his mind protested that he couldn't have controlled his reaction, couldn't have moderated his grief, but logic had flown out of the window several hours ago.
He had been beyond overjoyed to find out that Clarke was alive. He wanted to focus on that joy, not his worry for his sister. When he spoke to Clarke tomorrow, he would make sure that she knew that.
For tonight, sleep was destined to be a long time coming.
…...
Raven was an habitually early riser, and this morning she intended to make the most of it. There was something joyful about the atmosphere on the Ring since they'd got back in touch with Clarke, and the newfound lightness in the air had her more optimistic than she'd been in weeks. Last night, they had even spent the evening together after supper, where they'd all sat round the dinner table and played cards. Well, not all of them, she remembered with a smirk. Bellamy hadn't taken part, but they'd all shared knowing winks at that and presumed that he was otherwise occupied for the entire evening by a radio date with a certain someone on the ground.
Now that they knew Clarke was alive and there was a nice patch of ground they'd be able to survive on in three and a half years, Raven's motivation to tackle the fuel problem had been reinvigorated, to say the least. On arriving at the Earth monitoring station, she picked up a board marker and set to work. Some of the notes she had written to keep Emori fooled did have a little merit, she conceded after a few minutes. Even Raven Reyes at her worst was still a better engineer than most could hope to be at their best.
She wasn't surprised when Emori appeared in the doorway some minutes later. The two of them had grown closer in recent months and become fast friends. Her inner cynic reckoned it was through lack of options and forced proximity, but if she were truly honest with herself she understood that she had been lucky to get to know Emori. She was a very bright young woman with a fierce sense of humour – it was almost like they had a lot in common, or something.
"Well that's more progress than you've made in months. Maybe now you'll finally stop procrastinating and find us a way to the ground." Raven was taken by surprise by the realisation that Emori had not been fooled after all.
"You... knew?"
"Knew that you were writing random crap to disguise the fact you had nothing? Yep. Not an idiot."
"I never thought you were. I just... Don't like failing, I guess."
"That's why I didn't let on that I knew." Raven needed to stop underestimating her friend, both when it came to intelligence and to wisdom.
"Well, thanks, then."
"You're welcome. So, looks like we'll be there in three and a half years?"
"Well, we need to be, don't we? Now that we know Clarke is waiting for us, failure's not an option." Emori nodded in acknowledgment at that, and walked towards the board. Carefully, methodically, she read each line of notes and took in the little progress Raven had made.
"So, Raven, your arithmetic is sound. No surprises there. But I think we'll have to think outside the box a bit more than this."
"I'm listening. What have you got in mind?"
"Well, I'm thinking -" She broke off as the radio crackled to life, and the question that Clarke asked left them staring at each other in confusion.
"Hi, guys? Clarke here. Is... is Bellamy OK?"
a/n Thanks for reading! It seems likely that there might be a certain amount of fluff in the next chapter...