April 26: Bellamy/Wells, Clarke, Homecoming

[kinetic_elaboration]

The 100, Bellamy/Wells, Clarke POV, vaguely reference Bellarke, S2-S3 hiatus with some alterations

~1,100 words, 32 minutes

What I’m saying is that if Wells hadn’t died, he and Bellamy would have fucked. Basically.

*

Clarke returns, battered, at the beginning of spring: no explanation, like a migratory bird who just knows when it’s time to come home. The camp has more people than she was expecting, and more buildings than when she left. Her mother bundles her off to the infirmary without question. And that’s all right, because when you’ve cut all your ties, you’re not in a hurry to greet old friends.

She does not immediately receive visitors. After she’s slept for a couple of hours, she gets bored, and she wanders out.

By the low flicker of the half-broken circadians and, more importantly, the soft glow of the moon outside, she understands that it’s night. Something so disorienting about that, living in two worlds, shifting and crackling between her past and now. The ship, and the ground. Most people are asleep and the Guards don’t patrol inside—nothing to see here—so she sticks to Alpha Station and is left unbothered.
 

In the long hallway of apartments where she used to live, most of the doors are closed, except one that is jammed and covered with a blanket hung up like a curtain over the unbridgeable gap. From this one, she hears voices. And because she recognizes them, she stops just out of view and holds her breath.

“You’re too tense,” in Wells’ calming tone. The one that means and you should be, but it won’t do any good.

Bellamy growls something unintelligible and low. She remembers that voice so well that she doesn’t even need to hear it speak in words. She doesn’t know which of them makes her heart clench up harder in her chest.

When she closes her eyes, she realizes her hands are shaking.

“We should go to bed,” Wells says, again, and then she hears something like movement. Trying to discern it, trying to guess what is happening, distracts her from that we and bed.

“You don’t have to herd me around,” Bellamy snaps, and Clarke pictures Wells, looking just the same, grabbing him by the arms and holding him still. It’s a funny sort of thing for Bellamy to say, so distinctly correct, and yet she’d never thought of it that way. That’s Wells’ leadership style, isn’t it—wanting to herd.

“Maybe I do.” Low, like a warning.

Like a fight they’re on the edge of.

And for a long moment after, she hears nothing at all.

She tries to be utterly soundless, to shuffle forward without lifting her feet, letting the metal floor echo or groan, tries to hold her breath. She opens her eyes and peers around the edge of the curtain.

They do look almost the same. Except Bellamy is in a Guard’s jacket and his hair is growing long and curling again. He’s so close, and her heart unstills and beats so hard it’s painful in the chamber of her ribs. Everything is painful, those old bruises and fears.

Wells is holding Bellamy’s face so gently between his hands and kissing him: the sort of kiss that will not break for a long time. So unhurried, beautiful and aching. Maybe it’s distraction; inevitably it’s reassurance; she watches Bellamy’s hands, just above Wells’ hips, spasm and grab and hold on tight. When they part, she imagines she hears a heady, desperate groan from him, and then they lean in to each other again.

They both loved her so deeply once, varieties of love full of unspokens and almosts. She’s always thought that if she hadn’t run, she would have been in Bellamy’s room in a day. That was part of why she left. And so this should hurt terribly and maybe it does, in a yellowed-bruise way, if she pokes it hard enough. If she says to herself enough: they really don’t need you now, they never did. But above that and louder, like a distracting white-noise machine-hum, like the ship when it’s awake, coming awake around her, she’s only fascinated. She’s only curious, intrigued.

How clawing and needy and close they are, but not hurried, not guilty, not impulsive. Instead, how familiar. They are clinging to each other. They have been for a long time.

So curious. So incredibly, indecently, beautifully hot. She doesn’t even feel guilty for watching.

She shifts her weight forward onto her left foot, and the movement is soundless, at least to her ear. But then she’s got this racket in her ears from her beating heart. And Bellamy’s a hunter, and his hearing is well-tuned and sharp.

He pulls away.

“What was that?”

“What?” Wells sounds distant, dazed. He takes a half-step back. His hands have fallen down to Bellamy’s shoulders, still link them together there.

Bellamy himself is high-alert and totally still, head up, eyes sharp, like she’s always—not loved, but wanted him best. It’s no use anyway. Her pride won’t take the hit of having been caught running.

She steps forward and pushes back the curtain and stands in the doorway of their rooms.

They stare at her blank-faced and ashen, a grayness to their skin. Drop apart. She clenches her hands into and out of fists, her arms heavy at her sides. The moment is only that, a handful of seconds. And it breaks when Bellamy strides forward and snaps, “Clarke, what the absolute fuck?”

“I’m sorry—” she starts, but Wells is talking over her, overlapping with them both.

“You’re here?”

“My mom didn’t tell you?”

“We’ve been out of camp all day,” Wells starts, and Bellamy holds him back with a warning hand, although he isn’t moving, and steps closer into the gap between them and the door.

“What are you doing here?”

In her worst visions of homecoming, he’s angry like this. Wells, she’s always known, wouldn’t be. He’s got that gentle outward nature that makes people underestimate him, underestimate that hard set of his jaw and the neutral line of his mouth that she notices now. She doesn’t know if Bellamy is angry because she’s back at camp or because she’s here, she’s been caught looking in.

She shrugs. The easier answer is the second one. “I couldn’t sleep. I heard your voices—” She looks between them. “I guess I missed a lot.”

“Yeah.” Bellamy’s voice is hard and clipped. “A lot can happen in ten weeks.”

Ten. He’s been counting.

The last time they spoke, he had dared to plead with her. Come in. One drink. She can’t remember if he’d said please but she’d heard it.

Wells is glancing back and forth, too. Then abruptly he’s striding toward her, saying something that sounds like, “You’re back,” except he’s hugging her fiercely and the words are mumbled into her hair. Other than her mother, she hasn’t hugged anyone in a long time. She wraps her arms around him and she squeezes as tightly as she possibly can.

.