December 29: Bellamy/Wells, Clarke, Homecoming IV

[kinetic_elaboration]

More of this.

Bellamy/Wells, 760 words, 20 minutes

*

When Bellamy wakes the next day, he’s alone in his bed, and Clarke is gone from the couch. He sits up blearily, rubbing at both eyes with the heels of his palms. The pillow is right where they left it, the blanket they lent her folded neatly beside it, her shoes missing. Barely a trace of her, which is what he should have expected, but it’s a dull hit to the center of the chest just the same.

Wells is already dressed for the day, sitting at the desk and lacing up his boots.

“Never thought I’d be the one to sleep in,” Bellamy mumbles. His voice is still thick with sleep, and when he runs his hand through his hair, he can feel it sticking up, curled and mussed from his pillow. 

 

Wells just laughs. “It’s not exactly late,” he answers. “I was going to wake you before I left.” He gets up, crosses the room and sits down again on the bed. Bellamy pulls him in for a kiss without even thinking. For the first time he realizes how tightly wound he was, how he’d slept with his limbs locked, his nerves on edge, because the kiss is something to melt into. Wells’s arm around him, something to lean in to. 

“That was—” Wells clears his throat, smiles a little just at the corner of his mouth as he pulls away. “Quite some good morning kiss.”

He snorts, light under his breath, and leans in for another, shorter kiss. “Good morning.”

Wells runs his own hand through Bellamy’s chronically mussed curls and then stands up again. “She was already gone when I woke up, if you’re wondering.”

“I wasn’t.” He was. And Wells knew as much, so he doesn’t even bother to argue the point. “Do you, uh—do you think she went back to med bay?”

Wells shrugs. “If she didn’t, Abby will drag her back there soon.” He pulls his jacket off its hook and shrugs into it, and Bellamy just watches him, not making any attempt to get up himself. “Are you going to go look for her?”

“No.” His brow furrows. His body still aches, and he has the impression of half-remembered, faint dreams. “What would I say to her anyway?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.” He has his boots, his jacket, nothing else to put on, but he’s still lingering by the door like he’s not ready to leave. 

Bellamy understands that feeling.

“You should talk to her, though,” Wells adds, quieter this time. “Camp’s not big. She won’t be hard to find.”

“And say what?” he asks again.

“Anything. Yell if you want. Get into a big fight.” He smiles, like the memory is somehow a fond one. “You’re good at that.”

“Yeah, just like old times.” The unspoken, Bellamy thinks, is that sometimes their fights felt like foreplay. And he and Wells haven’t exactly talked about exclusivity, but somehow he doubts that it’s within their unwritten rules for him to hook up with Wells’s best friend, Arkadia’s prodigal princess, not forty-eight hours after she makes her ignominious return home. 

He doesn’t want to do that, anyway. He doesn’t want to mess up a good thing. And he doesn’t want to yell at Clarke, or even talk to her, or see her, because now that she’s no longer softly sleeping on his couch, she’s nothing but a gaping, angry wound again. One he’s been desperately patching up, one he’s been waiting to see heal.

Maybe it almost was. Most days he just took it for granted that he’d never see her again. He couldn’t say it out loud to anyone but Wells, but he was starting to believe it in his heart of hearts.

“If you don’t find her, she’ll find you,” Wells says, and breaks him out of his reverie.

Bellamy looks up sharply. “Or you.”

“I have meetings all day,” Wells answers. “Your shift doesn’t start till after dinner.”

“Yeah, okay, Chancellor Wells.” He tried to call him Chancellor Jaha once, but that’s a raw wound, too. “Too busy for your best friend. I think the power has gone to your head.”

“Not Chancellor, just a loyal worker in the new camp Arkadia,” Wells answers: his usual refrain. He walks over one last time, one last kiss—one last request to “just talk to her, okay?” and then Bellamy is watching him walk out of their door, only the perpetual gap in the broken machinery and the view of the hall beyond left in his wake.