AN: First of all, thanks for the response on the first chapter, and an extra big thanks to those of you who took the time to review – your comments made my day!
Moving on with the story, and switching to Bellamy's POV in this one. Some references to Becho, but hopefully not too much – that relationship has to be dealt with and I'm trying to do it as carefully as possible, so please, no negative comments on Becho in general…
As always, I don't own the characters or anything related to The 100.
-2-
Bellamy reluctantly lets his arm fall from around Clarke's shoulders and steps closer to Jordan, who's starting up a computer on one of the desks in the bridge.
"All of Dad's notes on the farm should be in here," he says. "I helped him a lot with it when I was a kid, before they put me in cryo, of course, but I want to go through them before we start working on it. Refresh my memory a little."
"Sure," Bellamy agrees, looking over Jordan's shoulder as he pulls up a file.
He nods as his eyes run down the page. "OK, so like I thought, Dad harvested the entire farm so there would rations for us once we woke up, and then he let it lie in fallow, sort of – the plants are still there, but only below ground. I'm sure you remember how long it takes to get them producing."
"It took your dad a couple of months on the Ring," Bellamy replies. "But we can do it?"
"Absolutely. Dad's left good instructions – he was always such a worry wart."
There's a hint of sadness in Jordan's voice, but mostly fondness. Bellamy remembers how particular Monty had been with the algae farm on the Ring, not really letting anyone else, except for Bellamy, help out with it, and he knew that was only because Monty was worried about him.
"I think it's probably more about the farm than him not thinking you could do it," he offers. "He was always kind of territorial about the farm while we were on the Ring."
Jordan chuckles. "You could be right about that. OK, so we'll take a look at the farm together, see what needs to be done. Should we wake up Raven first, fill her in on the whole situation?"
"That might be a good idea," Bellamy says. "Clarke?"
She doesn't respond, so Bellamy turns away from Jordan and the computer to find her staring out the large window, hand raised in front of her as if she could reach out and touch the planet below them. The image tugs on something deep inside him and he's overcome with an almost violent desire to do whatever it takes to ensure that this new world, their second chance, will treat her better than the first one did. She deserves it, and he's determined to see it happen.
She's clearly enthralled by the view in front of her, and he doesn't want to spook her by raising his voice, so he joins her at the window again, placing a hand gently on her shoulder to get her attention. She turns her head at the touch, a soft smile on her lips and God, he's missed it. He returns it and squeezes her shoulder once.
"We were talking about waking Raven up," he says. "We need to have a look at the farm, get some work done there to get it up and running again, but we figured it might be a good idea to get her caught up before. What do you think?"
"Yeah, that sounds like a good plan," she agrees. "How does that work, Jordan? You already woke us up so I'm assuming you know how to do it."
"I just need to get her file up in the system in the cryo chamber," he replies. "It'll only take a moment."
"So, let's go?" Bellamy says, eyebrows raised in a question.
Clarke nods quickly, but the smile slips off her lips and he can see some sort of hesitation in her eyes.
"Of course."
He gives her a long, scrutinizing look before turning to Jordan.
"You go ahead, get everything ready," he tells the other man. "We'll be there in a minute."
Jordan nods and leaves the bridge. Bellamy waits until the door closes with a soft swoosh behind him before turning back to Clarke.
"What's up, Princess?" he asks when she doesn't say anything after a moment, the old nickname falling from his lips effortlessly. Clarke doesn't seem to notice, though, her eyes on the floor between them, her teeth worrying her bottom lip in a way that is not at all cute and certainly doesn't make him want to tug her lip free so he can either sooth the sting with his lips or pull it between his own teeth… Focus, Blake, not the time.
He doesn't know what he and Echo are, not really, but they are something, and he's not going to be that guy. When things between them had started, it had been just sex – they'd both been in a bad place when the day they were supposed to be able to go back to the Ground came and went, and Raven finally told them all that she hadn't been able to figure out a way to get them down with the little fuel they had – at least not one that wouldn't result in a fiery crash.
After that, they'd sort of fallen into a routine where one of them would seek the other out once or twice a week, usually late at night. Sometimes they'd fall asleep together after, but one of them would always leave before the other woke up in the morning, and it had been fine. What he needed at the time and, he hopes, what she needed too. He doesn't like to think he was taking advantage of her… He cares about her, of course he does, loves her even – she's family at this point – but it's not like they ever had the whole relationship talk. Would he call her his girlfriend? His thoughts turn to Gina, the only person who's ever really had that title, and it just… doesn't fit. Still, they are in a relationship of some kind, and Echo deserves better than him moving on to someone else while she's locked in a cryo pod.
Not that he knows Clarke would even be interested in something like that with him, but a guy can hope.
"I just… I pointed a gun at her, Bellamy," Clarke finally says, voice small, pulling him back to the present.
Ah, there it is. That ever present guilt that's been a part of her, of both of them, since Mount Weather… maybe even longer, especially for him. Atom, Wells, Charlotte… the list goes on and on.
He tries to make light of it, shrugging casually. "I think most of us have pointed guns or some other weapon at each other at this point, to be honest." It's only a half-joke, since it's more or less true. He doesn't have the mental capacity at the moment to go through all the people he calls close friends or family that have had a gun or sword pointed at him at one time or another, or has tried to kill him in some other way, but it's safe to say it's the majority.
"That's not even funny," Clarke grumbles, crossing her arms over her chest and taking a step back, his hand falling from her shoulder.
Bellamy has to focus very hard to keep his eyes on hers and not let them wander down. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and sighs.
"I know. I just… we left you to die, Clarke." He still can't say it without those dark, horrible images from his nightmares back then coming back in full force. The death wave washing over her, turning her into nothing more than dust. Her broken body disintegrating on a radiation soaked planet. He has to shake his head to get rid of them even now, when she's right there in front of him, a physical reminder that her sacrifice wasn't as final as he'd thought for six long, painful years. "I know you didn't actually die, but still. I think you get a bit of a get out of jail free card after that one."
Clarke shakes her head vigorously. "But I don't want that to be an excuse. I did what I did because of Madi, and I…"
"And Raven will understand that," he interrupts her, before she can launch into whatever she's about to say. "Trust me, if anyone gets doing everything for the people you love, it's Raven. Remember why she even ended up on the Ground to start with."
He can tell that she does, of course she does. Finn was as much a part of Clarke's life as he was of Raven's, if only for a short time.
"It's not the same," she still insists.
"No, it's not," he admits, running a hand over his face as he contemplates what to say next. "Look, I know I can't tell you what to do but just… talk to her. Let her see your side. I think she'll surprise you."
Clarke's shoulders slump and she buries her face in her hands for a moment before meeting his eyes again.
"It just sucks," she says tiredly. "I spent six years waiting for you guys to come back and when you finally did, it was nothing like I thought it would be."
It was nothing like I thought it would be either, he almost says. Not like the scenarios that would play out in his mind on the nights on the Ring when he was too tired or too empty or just too lonely to push the thought that maybe, just maybe she had survived away. There had been so many different ones – her just standing there, outside the rocket's door, when they landed, a dry took you long enough as a greeting; them stumbling upon her among the trees while looking for water or food, you're alive mumbled in disbelief amongst the returning seven; her saving them from some mutated beast out to get them, an amused not even back for a day and already getting into trouble and a laugh his first taste of her voice after years of trying to remember what she sounded like. Almost every time he indulged himself with these fantasies – because he had been so sure that they would never, could never be reality – the actual scene had been different. It had always ended the same, though, with them wrapped tightly around each other, fingers clutching at limbs or pieces of clothing, words whispered into hair and skin – I missed you, I'm so sorry, I love you, please don't leave me again.
"What did you think it would be like?" he asks after a moment, shaking the old thoughts away. He hopes she doesn't catch the way his voice trembles slightly.
Part of him wants to know, but another part wonders if it will just be too much. Knowing what Clarke thought about, how she imagined their reunion would go, if she had hoped for that elusive something more just like he had, might very well be the straw that breaks the camel's figurative back.
Madi's words – she called you every day for six years – run through his mind, and he knows he should take the opportunity to bring that up as well. He doesn't think the girl was lying, she had no reason to, but he needs to hear it from Clarke herself and, more importantly, why. Why him? Why did she never give up, not even when the five year time frame passed and they didn't come back? Why had she never lost hope? There's a small, insistent voice somewhere in the back of his mind that keeps saying that he knows why – for the same reason that he never stopped looking for her while she was gone after Mount Weather, the same reason he put her name on that damn list before the end of the world. The same reason some infinitesimal part of him refused to accept that she was really gone while he was on the Ring.
"Not with us on opposite sides of another damn war, that's for sure," Clarke mumbles after a moment.
Bellamy puts any thoughts of the radio calls aside for the moment. They'll have time to talk about it later.
"But now that war is over, and there are no more sides," he says, voice determined, trying to convince himself as much as her. He desperately hopes that he's right. "So can we please go wake up our friend and watch her freak out over having been asleep for over a century?"
He's glad when that actually gets a laugh out of Clarke and makes a mental note to do what he can to get her to laugh more often. God knows she deserves it. And if it puts a warm feeling in his stomach, well, nobody has to know that.
"OK," she agrees. "Let's go."
Jordan's standing by a control panel just inside the door to the cryo chamber, Raven's file pulled up on it with various numbers – heart and respiratory rate, body temperature. He looks from Bellamy to Clarke when they enter.
"All good? We ready for this?" he asks, and they both nod.
Jordan turns back to the control panel and taps a large, green button on one side of the screen before turning to face the chamber. Moments later, the lid on one of the pods, about twenty feet down the walkway between the two rows, starts to open, and all three of them make their way over to it, Jordan trailing a little behind.
Raven's eyes are already open when they reach her and she gives them a blinding smile.
"Man, it's good to see your ugly faces," she says. "Feels like I've been asleep for a decade."
Bellamy can't help the chuckle that escapes him, and then he makes the mistake of looking at Clarke, and it's clear that she's just barely holding it together. When she meets his eyes, they both burst out laughing, really laughing, a hold-your-side, tears-streaming kind of laugh. Raven's eyes widen and she looks like she's seriously thinking that they've finally lost it, and maybe they have. God knows they probably should have long ago.
Bellamy pulls himself together first, wiping away a few tears that escaped during their laughing fit and rubbing Clarke's back to help her regain control.
"Try over a century," he tells Raven, who looks even more confused as she pushes herself into a sitting position.
"What? Monty said ten years, we were supposed to wake up when the Earth had regenerated and we could go back. Did something go wrong with the tech? Because I checked all the systems myself and they were just fine, if he messed up in some way I swear I'll…"
Her voice fades as Bellamy shakes his head, all amusement gone now.
"There's someone you should meet," Clarke says, stepping into the conversation and gesturing Jordan forward to join them.
Raven's eyes narrow at the unfamiliar face.
"OK, I'm pretty sure you weren't on this ship when we went to sleep, so someone better start explaining what the hell's going on here soon," she says, voice hard as steel and arms crossed over her chest. If she hadn't still been sitting in the cryo pod, Bellamy's sure she would be tapping a foot impatiently against the floor.
Jordan holds out his hand, which Raven hesitantly takes after reassuring nods from her friends.
"It's nice to meet you," he starts. "I'm Jordan Jasper Green, and you have been my hero since I was three years old and Dad told me about how you and Uncle Jasper rigged the Dropship to blast off during the first war with the Grounders."
"Monty seriously told you about that when you were three?" Clarke questions and Bellamy chuckles.
"I bet Harper loved that," he says and Jordan shrugs.
"It was our little secret."
Raven just stares at all three of them, trying to put all the pieces together, and Bellamy can tell when it finally clicks for her.
"Are you seriously telling me that Monty and Harper put off cryo sleep to have a kid?" she asks, turning to Bellamy. "Where are they? I'm going to give them a piece of my mind." Her head snaps back to Jordan. "Not that you don't seem like a great guy, but decisions like that aren't just made all willy-nilly."
Bellamy takes a step forward, reaching out to squeeze her arm in preparation for what will no doubt be a shock.
"Raven, they didn't put it off…" he starts, "they just didn't do it."
She stares at him for a long moment.
"What do you mean they didn't do it? What are they… they're just… they're gone?"
Bellamy feels a lump in his throat as her voice breaks on the last word, and is grateful when Jordan once again takes charge.
"Mom and Dad decided to stay awake, to live on the ship. I think they wanted to get back to the time you guys spent on the Ring, they always talked about how happy they were there," he says, a wistful smile on his face. "They had me a couple of years after you guys went into cryo. And then, when I was about eight, Dad realized that the Earth wasn't coming back."
Raven's eyes widen impossibly. "It's not coming back?"
Jordan shakes his head.
"When Dad figured that out, he started trying to hack into the Eligius system, which he apparently managed to do eventually. They had put me in cryo by then, so I don't know how he finally did it. But he found out what that secret Eligius Three mission was about – they weren't mining like Eligius Four, they were trying to find a planet with oil, since Earth was running out. And they found it. It's in the Goldilocks zone of a binary star system, which means it should be suitable for humans, a sort of Earth equivalent, I guess. So Dad plugged the coordinates into the ship's system, set everything up so that I would wake up when we'd reached the planet and…" He pauses for a moment. "Mom was already gone by then and I guess he just didn't want to go on without her."
Silence fills the room for a long moment, each of them lost in their own thoughts. Raven's the first one to speak and Bellamy's relieved to hear that insatiable curiosity that he has always connected with Raven color her words again. He knows she must have made a mental decision to put her grief over Monty and Harper aside for the moment and focus on the situation at hand, just like he and Clarke have silently agreed to do.
"So we're there?" Raven asks, eyes darting around the room as if it will give her some kind of hint. "At this planet that's supposed to be like Earth?"
Jordan nods enthusiastically. "We are. Come on, I think it's easier if we just show you."
He holds out a hand to Raven again, this time to help her down from her pod, and then leads the way out of the chamber. After a moment, Raven falls in step with Bellamy, leaving Jordan and Clarke a couple of feet ahead of them.
"So how long have you been awake?" Raven asks.
"Uh, a couple of hours, I guess," Bellamy replies, and Clarke looks over her shoulder to nod in agreement. "Jordan?"
"I woke you two up as soon as I woke up myself, after I read the message that Dad left me with instructions, so about the same for me," he replies.
"And why exactly were you two the first ones to be woken up?" Raven asks, not sounding put out by it, just curious.
Jordan shrugs without turning around. "That's what Dad wanted, I don't know why."
Bellamy can tell that Raven's about to ask something else, but at that moment, they enter the bridge and are met with the window showing their new planet, and instead, she just stops short, mouth hanging open in awe.
It's just as breathtaking as when he and Clarke first saw it – can it really be only a few hours ago? – and again, Bellamy's filled with a profound hope that maybe they can actually do it this time.
Raven takes a step, then two, closer to the window, eyes sparkling with unshed tears.
"Oh my God." It's just a whisper, but somehow, Bellamy thinks, it summarizes the whole situation perfectly.
AN: There we go, chapter 2 and some of Bellamy's perspective and his feelings in general.
I don't know if I'm downplaying the Becho relationship too much? I've gone through the scripts for season 5 and there's not much about them, really... So I might have chosen the easiest option, that it's basically just sex, because I just can't see anything more substantial between them... wishful thinking, I guess! Anyway, let me know what you think!