July 7: Bellarke, Backyard

[kinetic_elaboration]

Bellamy-centric, implied Bellarke, Modern AU, ~620 words, 23 minutes

For the prompt “Location: Backyard” from my, uh, 2023 July Break Bingo. Also pretty shamelessly Banned from the Back Porch by Saves the Day and ALSO kinda just me writing about today’s weather.

No idea how I feel about it but it exists.

*

Sometime after sunset, roughly quarter to nine the second week in July, Bellamy finally steps out onto the back porch. Through the front windows of the house, which faces west, the light is pure golden and streaked with pink, the clarity of the sun sinking down, but out back everything is an even, muted, twilight blue. Dusky, on the edge of deepening to night. 

The sliding glass door sticks with humidity and age. He has to put his shoulder to it, to get it to give way. As soon as he’s out, he closes it again behind him. Immediately, his glasses fog over from a humidity so strong, so thick, it’s like mist. As he wipes them off on his t-shirt, he tries to breathe in of this heavy, wet, cloying air and it smells deep of rain and dirt and trees, and of summer and heat. 

 

He puts his glasses back on. Now he can see that there are real wisps of fog rising up off the ground. Most of the light already comes from fairy lights around the perimeter, marking out the same square yard as the high wooden fence does; they will bring a sharper light when the sun completely sets and it’s just night-heat left, the soft stuff he never expects to feel after nightfall. But he always does. And if it weren’t for the party, weren’t for all the people in Raven’s backyard talking and laughing and sometimes yelling, from the picnic tables, from groups standing, scattered across the uncut grass, he’d be able to hear only the steady buzzing like a loud scream of the cicadas, the bugs in the grass.

Rain storms have been passing over town all day. Short, heavy flashes of rain, then just the humidity, the heaviness in the air of promised downpours. The weather has cleared now, mostly, but the trees’ leaves are still weighted with rain, and drops of it splatter sometimes down onto the porch, with that same heaviness, cutting intermittently through that mid-summer heaviness. 

“Fucking hot out,” Murphy’s voice says, from the porch railing, where he’s sitting with his back against the side of the house. He’s talking mostly to Raven, but calls this out louder, looking Bellamy’s way. 

He turns toward him, briefly startled, less unmoored.

“Really fucking hot,” he answers. “Humid.”

Raven hands him her drink, a temporary sustenance. It’s ginger ale and it buzzes down his throat.

As he gives it back to her, he happens to look out over the backyard again, the last of the large gulp still simmering in his mouth. A stray moment. And that’s when he sees her for the very first time.

He’s not a love at first sight guy. Or anything so sappy. But man, this girl. 

She’s standing by the closer picnic table, and he’s caught her laughing. A big, open-mouthed laugh, un-self-conscious and loud. She’s wearing her blonde hair loose and it’s become wavy and wild in the heat; he watches as she pulls it back, the revelation of the expanse of her neck. 

She looks bright, he thinks, glowing in the hazy blue light that’s deepening in front of him: sweat along her skin, flashing the pale skin of her bare legs, laughing again. 

His whole life coalesces. Sweat along the top of his lip, sweat at his hairline, the aftermath of carbonation in his throat. The buzzing of the cicadas and the buzzing in his head. The mid-tone blue of the light after sunset, before nightfall, the first glint of fireflies, and the splatter of rain, and the breathless air. 

He’ll ask who she is, in a moment. He’ll talk to her soon. 

In a moment.

“Really, really, fucking hot,” he says again, under his breath.