a/n So I made it about three whole days after finishing Bellarke in a Bunker before I started writing this chapter. It's set five years after the death wave, so three years after the epilogue. I hope you enjoy!
Murphy is still Murphy three years later.
At least, he thinks he is. He wonders, sometimes, in the moments when he volunteers to wash the dishes after their evening algae or when he leaves Emori a cheerful note in her toolbox if, perhaps, he might have accidentally reinvented himself as John. But maybe that's no bad thing. And he's alright, really, this new John. He's still fundamentally extremely selfish, still out for his own best interests. He's just realised that, sometimes, his best interests are served by the people he loves being happy, too.
So it is that, as they make their final preparations to leave the Ring and board the rocket he is, of course, very sarcastic – because that is his thing – but he knows and his friends know that his tasteless humour is the sticky stuff that binds them all together.
"The pilot looks nervous. That's reassuring." He tells Emori as she suits up and prepares to guide them back to the ground. He's aware he's being rather blunt, but tact is not really his thing and, besides which, he's not altogether happy at the idea of his absolutely badass girlfriend looking rather wobbly.
"I wonder why that might be."
"Nothing to worry about." He shrugs for effect. "If it goes wrong, we'll be dead before we have chance to notice."
"Cheers, Murphy." Raven shoves him affectionately with her shoulder. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."
"You're welcome. Reassuring that we're going back a week early, too. I'm sure that's totally safe."
"It is, I told you, I checked a thousand times. The radiation levels are fine. And don't worry about flying, Emori. You'll do great. You've been practising for years." Raven hugs her friend and then heads to do some last minute flight checks, leaving a silence between them that, once upon a time, he thinks he would not have known how to fill.
"She's right." He tells Emori quietly. "I know faith isn't my strong suit, but I have faith in you."
…...
Of course, they make it to the ground in one piece – has he mentioned, recently, that his girlfriend is a little bit incredible? - and Raven makes them sit there for a good fifteen minutes while she checks all sorts of things that he, for one, finds completely uninteresting. They're here now, and it's not like they can just hop back into space again if she doesn't like the radiation numbers. He's pretty convinced they should just get on with opening the door and living their lives. Echo obviously agrees with him, and even Harper and Emori are looking distinctly shifty.
"Are we done, Reyes?" He asks in a pause between miscellaneous electronic bleeping noises. "Can we open the door already?"
"Shut up, Murphy. One last check." She returns her attention to the screen in front of her and he finds himself rather peeved. After all, he doesn't really know how to open the door, so he's currently essentially a hostage of her obsessive caution.
"You're wasting your time. If anything's wrong we're dead anyway." He tells her cheerfully, but Emori shushes him affectionately so he resolves to make his complaints under his breath from now on.
He's still grumbling quietly a couple of minutes later when, with all the pretentiousness of Jaha at Unity Day, she announces that the doors may, in fact, be opened.
"Anyone got anything better than we're back, bitches?" Monty asks to laughter all round as Emori gets the door open and they begin piling out into the sunshine.
His laughter dies in his throat the moment he sees them, of course. It should come as no surprise, after the routine of annual flares and given Emori's utter faith, but all the same his jaw hits the floor at the sight of Clarke and Bellamy. Or, perhaps, his jaw hits the floor at the sight of the two children with Clarke and Bellamy. He freezes in place, one foot on the ground, one still on the steps, at the sight of the four figures standing just metres away with broad smiles crowning their faces.
"What's the hold up?" Echo grumbles behind him, but he's not entirely capable of explaining it to her. Instead he finds himself, of all things, running towards Bellamy as if they are some kind of long lost brothers.
Maybe, in a funny kind of way, they are.
He throws his arms around him in a rather overenthusiastic way that he quickly begins to find a bit embarrassing, so he claps him on the back a couple of times and then pulls away. By now, of course, he is no longer congesting the door to the rocket so Raven and Clarke are hugging and, it has to be said, crying really quite a lot, and Harper and Monty are next in the queue to wrap Bellamy in a hug, and Emori and Echo are milling around grinning openly, and there is a lot of laughter and a lot of weeping and, all in all, a lot of emotion which he's not sure the old Murphy would have been entirely comfortable with.
It takes him longer than it probably should to remember the children.
The older one, the girl, perhaps just approaching her teens, has a firm hold on the toddler's hand and the two of them appear perfectly content to just take in the scene with broad grins stretching their cheeks. Neither of them, he notes, seems in the least confused or surprised by recent events. Bellamy has finally managed to extract himself from Monty's embrace so John decides to take advantage of the opportunity to ask what the hell is going on here.
"You going to introduce us?" He asks with a deliberate air. Clarke turns at his question, too, and now everyone seems to be standing around staring a the two dark-haired children. He raises his brows enquiringly and waits for his friends to introduce these new additions.
He waits in vain. Clarke is half way to opening her mouth when the girl begins to speak.
"I'm Madi." She says, as if that explains anything, before indicating the young boy. "This is Gus. You're Murphy, of course, and that's Emori. Echo. Raven. Monty and Harper. And obviously these two are Clarke and Bellamy, but I hope you remember that."
"She takes after her mother. Likes to take charge." Bellamy comments with a chuckle, and he finds himself reaching the rather obvious conclusion he should have arrived at the moment he saw them through the open door.
"A good shot like her father, though." Clarke adds cheerfully, and he finds himself a little taken aback at meeting a Clarke Griffin who teases easily.
"How -?" Monty asks, expressing everything that they are all thinking but are not quite capable of saying. After all, the girl seems too old for the maths to work out, but in her mannerisms and the light in her eyes she is so obviously their daughter that he cannot quite make head nor tail of it. Another giveaway, he thinks, is the way that since all the hugging stopped she has gravitated straight back to stand in the middle of Clarke and Bellamy, looking rather as if she has grown up fitting into the perfect space between their shoulders.
"Meet our family." Bellamy says, as if it is the most natural thing in the world, while his friends visibly struggle to get their heads around this concept. "Madi's eleven. She likes shooting things, but also poultry husbandry and spear fishing. We met her when we moved here just after the death wave."
"Gus is three." Clarke tells them with evident pride. "Short for Augustus, of course." She rolls her eyes in Bellamy's general direction. "He likes stories and digging in the mud. We ended up with him in a more... conventional way." She blushes at that even as Bellamy sniggers, lips pursed in a vain attempt to repress the sound. John cannot help but meet his eye and wink, at which he starts to snort. And then Harper is giggling, and Monty starts chuckling openly, and before they know it all of them are laughing out loud while Clarke wraps an arm around her daughter's shoulder and attempts to look stern.
"I knew it." Emori says when she has recovered her composure enough to speak coherently. "I knew you'd finally get it together one day."
"I called it first." Harper argues with spirit.
"You're wrong." Monty informs her mildly, hand wrapped around hers. "I have you all beaten."
"We should have kept a book." Raven suggests, and he finds himself nodding in agreement.
"What can I say?" Bellamy drops a kiss on Clarke's cheek without missing a beat. "She was worth waiting for."
…...
Murphy has his suspicions that this whole helping Bellamy fish thing might be rather a ruse. He is clearly contributing less than nothing to the task of catching dinner, and Bellamy is evidently competent enough to feed them all single-handed, and he distinctly remembers Madi being fond of this activity. He is forced to conclude, therefore, that he was invited out here in the interests of some kind of sickeningly sentimental post-reunion conversation.
That doesn't seem to have happened so far, though. This five-years-later Bellamy seems rather quieter, calmer, more content in his own company than the brash young man he first landed with. He perches on a rock, adding fish after fish to a fast-growing pile, and John is left to gaze at him with undisguised curiosity.
"You going to tell me when you got into meditative spear-fishing?" He almost explodes when they have been silent for the best part of an hour.
"You going to tell me when you got out of being a pain in the arse?" He counters mildly, eyes fixed on the water.
"What?" He wasn't expecting that.
"It's been almost four hours since you landed and you still haven't openly insulted anyone. You haven't made a single crude comment about Clarke and me. And when I asked you to come fish you didn't even argue. What happened up there?"
He pauses for a while, because he's not really sure how to explain.
"I have a family now." He opts for in the end. "I'm part of something bigger than just saving my own skin. And then there's Emori. I know it sounds stupid but – I think probably I'd do anything for her."
"Yeah." He concurs quietly, and spears another fish as if it is as natural to him, now, as breathing. "I think that happened to me, too. The whole family thing."
"It's not exactly news that you'd do anything for Clarke though." He offers and his friend nods in agreement. "Your boy, Gus – he looks just like you. At least you know she's not been shagging anyone else." He teases, happily retreating from the subject of relationships back to his usual theme of inappropriate humour.
"Please. She wouldn't want to." Bellamy responds easily, with something of his cocky smirk of almost six years earlier.
"Just as well, it's not like she had a lot of options."
He gets a fish thrown at his head for that.
…...
Dinner that night is a cheerful – albeit rather fish-based – affair. They build a fire and huddle round it in the fresh spring evening, and roast their food over the flames, and eat until they are satisfied, relishing their first non-algae meal in what feels like half a lifetime. When the meal is over they linger happily around the fire, settled comfortably amongst those they love. John slings his arm easily around Emori's waist, and she draws affectionate circles on his thigh, while Raven and Echo share a blanket and try to pretend that they are sitting no closer than strictly necessary, resolutely avoiding each other's eyes. Monty and Harper sit holding hands in their quiet way and seem rather enthralled by Gus, who is toddling around burbling merrily while his obviously doting sister trails in his wake. And then, of course, there are Bellamy and Clarke, seemingly oblivious to the company as they sit on a blanket, her back nestled into his chest, her fingers entwined with his where his hands rest on her waist. He's about to make some sarcastic comment to Emori about how they seem to be losing in this contest to see who can be the most demonstrative couple, but then Bellamy starts brushing aside Clarke's hair and kissing the back of her neck a little too enthusiastically and Raven makes her opinions known.
"Guys, please. It's great that you're alive and all, but cut it out."
"They're just happy together, Raven." Echo snaps.
"Well, I think it's unnecessary."
"Of course you do."
"Raven, Echo, it's fine." Clarke shuffles out from her seat between Bellamy's legs and goes to retrieve Gus from Harper's side instead. "I'm sorry, we didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."
"It's been a while since we've had an audience." Bellamy adds apologetically.
"Not true." Madi corrects him immediately. "I've been here for years. But I guess I was rooting for you to get together right from the beginning."
"Moving on, Madi." Clarke suggests with a warning tone.
"I want to hear this story." John finds himself jumping into the conversation.
"You do not." Clarke informs him firmly.
"Actually I think I do."
"Madi thought we were some married couple." Bellamy starts telling them, and Clarke shoots him a fierce glare. "Before we were even together. I'm not sure why, but Clarke's always found that a bit embarrassing."
"You basically were a married couple even then." Their daughter pipes up cheerfully and he finds himself warming to this sparky child. "And you were already way too into kissing. It was an easy mistake to make."
"It's always been an easy mistake to make." Emori says what they're all thinking.
"It seems to have turned out for the best in the end." Monty suggests, ever the peacemaker.
"I'd agree with that." Clarke confirms and, seemingly abandoning her resolution to placate Raven, she scoops her son up into her arms and settles back into Bellamy's embrace.
a/n Thanks for reading! My plan for this story is to look at the relationship between Spacekru and our fave family, the opening of the bunker, and the arrival of Eligius. Next chapter up soon!