July 26: Bellamy/Wells, Clarke, Homecoming III

[kinetic_elaboration]

More of this!

~800 words, 24 minutes

*

In the darkness, Bellamy lies on his side, waiting to adjust to the near-total black of the room. Only the glow of the emergency lights on the other side of the door break the color up to gray. He’s somehow formed this habit, over the last several weeks, so subtly and stealthily that he didn’t realize he was doing it, of talking to Wells every night before they go to sleep, and that habit pulls on him now. But he’s too aware of Clarke on the couch on the other side of the room. He finds himself listening for her breathing, trying to make out if it’s steady enough to indicate sleep, wishing he knew if she snored or made noises when she dreamed. Anything. 

To listen better, he holds his own breath.

Without their usual conversation, the hard knots in his back don’t unkink, the stiffness in his shoulders stays taut and steady. 

 

He knows Well is still awake because the whites of his eyes are shining, as he skips his glance back and forth across Bellamy’s face.

“You okay?” he whispers, just about as quietly as he could whisper and still hold a chance of being heard. Lucky they’re so close. Then he moves a little closer still, and curls his arm around Bellamy’s waist.

Bellamy lets his breath go and in the exhale leans in so that his forehead presses against Wells’s. He knows he’s in deep because he doesn’t even lie. Even to Octavia, he would have lied. Even to Wells when they first started sharing the room, when Wells would ask him friendly questions like that and he’d say yes, I’m fine.  I have to be, if he was really in it.

This time he shakes his head. “No.” How’s he supposed to be okay? A ghost walked in on him. Someone he’s mourned, someone he convinced himself was dead.

And that’s just the wide, general outline of it, the obvious pain. Because fuck, she saw them. He never thought he’d have to explain to Clarke that he’s somehow started a thing, an indescribable thing, with her best friend, so he never practiced it, never thought how it would go. If he had, he would never have assumed it would be like this.

Wells is holding him steady with a hand to the back of his head, just strong enough that he feels safe, not so hard that he can’t breathe. 

Bellamy expects he’ll say something like this is good or she’s back—something of the feeling he obviously had, hugging her like that, like she’s the prodigal daughter back from her own self-imposed exile. If he were a better person, Bellamy would think of it like that. The anger in him isn’t what he wants.

But instead, Wells only murmurs, still so low: “Just feel it.”

Fuck.

Bellamy’s breath comes out shaky. 

“You’re going to end up in the middle of this,” he confesses. 

Somehow, Wells finds this funny enough to laugh. “We’re all in the middle,” he answers.

“You’ll have to be the politician about it.” He pulls back a little, so that Wells loosens his grip, and sinks down on the mattress until he’s resting now against Wells’s chest. He slides onto his back, Bellamy on top of him.

“That’s kind of what I do,” he answers, with a neutrality to his voice that Bellamy finds fitting.

“Yeah.” He plays his fingers at the hem of Wells’s t-shirt. Sort of funny but he’s never known this kind of intimacy before, the quiet of it, and it seems impossible that he should have it now and impossible that he should have ever known so little that he could not even dream of it. “But not with me.”

Wells’s chest rises and falls with a deep, deep breath. “I know,” he says finally, hesitantly. “I promise… like we said before. I won’t hold anything back with you.”

Bellamy nods. Over Well’s shoulder, he can make out the couch and Clarke’s quiet, unmoving figure on it. She looks asleep. She’s not at an angle to see them, anyway. Maybe she can hear them whispering but she can’t make out the words, he thinks. Still, a part of him feels like this softness is tinged with obscenity, that nothing so private can be shared even this obliquely without somehow taking on a different cast. 

In the haze of exhaustion, it all feels unreal. That’s Clarke on his couch. Back from the dead. 

When his eyelids feel heavy, he closes them. He’s too cold in the ship, too warm under the blankets. In his sleep, he’ll roll away from Wells’s body and eventually, he knows, he’ll wake up, and they’ll be pressed back to back in the two-person bed.