Chapter Text
Sounds have a way of echoing through The Ring, bing-bang-booms that send them all on high alert, and Raven’s scream is no different. It reaches every corner, it streams from every wall and down his spine, and Bellamy has never run so fast in his life. Nothing on the ground ever pulled that kind of terror from him, and he thinks: if she’s hurt this is the end of us. If she’s hurt we’re going to die, and for the thousandth time Bellamy wishes Clarke were here.
If wishes were horses then beggars would ride, his mother always said, and so Bellamy’s steps eat up the corridors and through the doorways, praying she’s only dropped a wrench on her toe or found a solution to getting them back to the ground.
A good scream, something happy--just for once, just for once.
He hears the voice, a ghost’s voice, before he sees Raven, before Echo’s open mouth is in his line of vision. “Wish I knew you guys could hear me,” the ghost says, “it would be so much easier if I knew you were alive.”
Something sick rises in Bellamy’s stomach when the ghost says, “I miss you all so much,” she laughs a little, hollow, exhausted, “even Murphy.”
“She’s alive,” Emori breathes, “holy hell, Clarke’s alive.”
“The nightblood would have worked,” Raven’s voice is shaking. “It would have worked and we’re up here like a bunch of idiots, separated from our people…”
“We’d’ve had to kill Luna,” Murphy’s just as pissed. “We’d’ve had to kill her, just like they tried to do to Jasper and Monty in Mount Weather.”
“She ended up dead anyway,” Emori is ever-practical, sidesteps the irate Murphy. “Nothing we did changed that.”
Murphy stares at her, horrified at her train of thought. .
“Are you kidding? We tortured her in Becca’s lab for days. She could have been a totally different person--an ally--but instead we took and took until there was nothing left and she hated us.”
Raven’s hand rests on the radio, and Bellamy finally catches his breath enough to whisper, “can we talk to her?”
Echo gives him a sharp glance, heartache written in her eyes. He wants to tell her that everything will be the same, that Clarke being alive will change nothing. He wants to tell her that when they fell into bed together he wasn’t lonely, he wasn’t depressed, he wasn’t missing the soft curls he used to tangle his fingers in, the neck he buried his nose next to when he was sad.
He wants to lie to make Echo feel better, but the truth of Clarke’s fate has him flying high.
Clarke’s alive, and if they manage to get back to the ground, he’ll put his arms around her and never let go, Echo or no Echo.
Guilt sits in his gut like a rock but when Echo takes his hand he smiles at her.
They may never get back to the ground, after all, and his feelings for Echo aren’t fake. They’re just...small...when he compares them to the stomach flip, natural ease, deep-in-the-heart need he feels when he hears Clarke’s voice.
Hurry, Clarke said, as they set off in opposite directions, and he’s spent the last three years wondering if she knew then that she wouldn’t make it back in time.
Everyone is staring at Bellamy--Harper’s eyes wide as the moon--and he finally says again, more urgently, “Can we talk to her?”
Echo’s shoulders are stiff, but she nods and says quickly, “how can we let her know that she’s not alone?”
Echo hid her kindness so well on the ground--but there is a softness to her now, an empathy. Bellamy loves her resilience and her compassion, fell in love with her more easily than he could have imagined.
She misses Roan, and her position within his ranks, but she’s finding her own place on The Ring.
And Bellamy will devastate her, break her into tiny pieces--because of Clarke.
Clarke.
Clarke.
Raven has the radio in her hand, holding it out to Bellamy, and everyone stares.
“No,” he tells her finally, his mouth dry. “You do it.”
“Ring to Clarke Griffin,” Raven sounds like something’s stuck in her throat, like she might cry, “Ring to Clarke Griffin, come in, Clarke Griffin.”
Clarke’s talking nearly immediately, and for one desperate, holy second Bellamy thinks she’s heard them: “Madi turned 11 today,” she’s fiddling with something in the background, and it knocks together. “She doesn’t really know when her birthday is, but she says it’s around the first cold day,” her laugh is a chilled thing itself. “We could see our breath today, and had to start up the fireplace, so we made a fruitcake with berries and sang Happy Birthday. Luckily I’d scavenged a bracelet from Becca’s lab and saved it--she was thrilled, and didn’t ask where it came from.”
“Who the hell is Madi?” Murphy asks, brows furrowed together.
“Another Natblida?” Emori nibbles on her thumbnail, “I mean, it has to be. No one else could have survived. Her kru must have been keeping her hidden.”
Echo looks sad, her mouth an exaggerated frown, more unhappy than Bellamy’s ever seen her. “Can you imagine being a child, being alone when Praimfaya swept over? I wonder how long it took Clarke to find her…”
“Maybe she’s the one who found Clarke,” Emori rubs her arms. “Clarke isn’t exactly a Grounder, she could have been wandering around a little blind for the first couple of weeks.”
“Clarke probably would have spent the first little bit of time in Becca’s lab and the lighthouse bunker. Especially if she got--” Bellamy breathes deeply, can hardly stand to imagine--”if she got hurt, burned, in Praimfaya.”
He doesn’t want to think about that, wants to always picture Clarke as that fresh-faced girl he argued with in their first days on the ground, wants to always see her as Princess.
Raven drops to the ground to fiddle with wires, flaps a hand at them: “I need some space to fix this, and you’re all breathing down my neck. Bellamy, Emori, stay, everyone else go.”
Emori kneels next to Raven, Bellamy drops into the captain’s chair, swiveling like a child.
From under the controls, Raven says, “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get us back down there, Bellamy. So your immediate heart eyes at the sound of Clarke’s voice are causing friction for no good reason. And Echo--”
“I know,” Bellamy snaps. “I know, okay?”
Clarke’s speech goes on: “It’s probably really pathetic that I keep making these calls. But it’s been three years, and Madi is only a child. We went through so much together, and I just miss you, Bellamy. This is keeping me sane.”
Emori looks stricken; this isn’t a call for the whole ship. This isn’t a call for Clarke’s friends. This is a call for Bellamy, specifically.
“There are a lot of things I wish I’d told you. Instead, you’re hanging there in space--I hope--and I’m in the Rover, counting the days until five years are up.” She sighs. “743 days, if you’re wondering.”
Bellamy wasn’t wondering, there’s a giant calendar in the mess hall, and every day he marks a bold black X through the previous date. It marks when he’ll see his sister again, it marks when he can go in search of Clarke.
“743 days, and it’s not like you’ll have to look very hard to find us,” there’s a smile in her voice, “we’re in the only patch of green you can see. Praimfaya must have just skipped right over us. It’s beautiful. Madi calls it Shallow Valley. There’re flowers and berries and vegetables everywhere.” With another laugh she adds, “I’ve become a pretty handy fisherman. Madi taught me.”
Clarke goes quiet for a moment, then a false brightness takes over. “I should really go to bed soon...I’ll call again tomorrow. Obviously. Like I have every day since I found the radio. I um...I miss you. I know I already said that but...I miss you.”
There’s something to the way her voice rasps over the word “miss” that gives Bellamy a sharp pang. It’s as if she wants to say another word entirely.
I miss you too, he thinks, rubbing his fingers across his brow. I miss you too, among other things.
Raven’s sitting up, and she pats his knee. “I know how you’re feeling, but there’s a lifetime in between us and her right now. There’s no use in getting upset about it--I’ll do my best to fix the radio in the meantime.”
Emori gives him a hopeful, sunny smile as he’s leaving, and his heart cracks a little. This is his family, they’ve been living together for three years. They should be enough, they should--
But they simply aren’t, and never have been. He loves them, but every time he remembers Clarke’s urgent, “Hurry,” and he knows, deep in his soul, that she should be there--
It breaks him, and no one understands that, not even Raven.
“I know you miss her,” Raven says quietly to his back, “I know you miss her, but we have lives now, we’re intertwined. And she’s not part of that, not really.”
“She should have been, though.” Bellamy finds himself slouched in the doorway. “She should have been here, and instead she’s alone.”
“She’s not alone,” Emori’s reaching for something to make him feel better. “She has the little Natblida.”
“It’s not the same--a child? No one to really lean on?” Raven’s face is twisted a bit, she looks like a mourner at a funeral. “It’s better than nothing, but it’s not the same as...one of us.”
Here is the guilt: He should have waited, he should have risked everything, he should have stayed behind and pinned every hope he ever had on surviving. He should have taken Clarke and gone to the lighthouse bunker, she could have, no, she would have, figured out how to save him from the radiation. She’s always been so good at that, Clarke has, so good at plans and promises and living through the worst.
Raven slams a screwdriver down on the countertop: “I know what you’re thinking. Quit it. You’d only be dead--she would have had to watch you die. At least this way it’s up in the air--she has hope. At least this way we might get home, she might see you again.”
We might get home.
Raven has spent three years insisting that they will get home, leave it up to her, she’ll solve their fuel problem, she’s the brains of this operation, nothing to worry about. But as the months pile up she’s increasingly frustrated, staying up all night. Dark circles sit under her eyes, she’s thin and drawn.
743 days, and it’s clear Raven’s unsure that she’ll make that deadline, or any other, and Bellamy can’t, he just can’t, entertain the possibility that he might never see his sister again, he might never see Clarke, that her last words to him might always be hurry, that he might have always abandoned her on a hostile planet with nowhere safe to retreat.
And Octavia--
He can’t even think about Octavia. Did she hear him when he said “I love you, too,” -- did she know how proud he was of her?
He leaves Raven and Emori to take out their frustration on the console, makes his way towards his bunk. Echo’s in the tiny room, cross-legged in the middle of the bed with a book, and he tries to pull up a smile for her, God, how he tries, but it’s useless, worthless as all his wishes and maybe-if-I’d-onlys. Her head tilts at him: “Wanna spar?”
She kicks his ass every time, but maybe it’ll get out some of this pent-up aggression, so he reaches out a hand, watches her unfold gracefully.
He loves her, he would swear to it, but it doesn’t feel big enough, it doesn’t feel real. Not when he compares it to the sinking, painful twist in his stomach when he heard Clarke’s voice, not when he’s realized that the ghost who’s been haunting him is not a ghost at all but someone he can scramble his way back towards. Not a loss at all, as he’s always thought of it, but a woman who’s been trying to reach him for three years.
Echo’s asked him, maybe a half-dozen times, what will happen when they reach the ground. He’s always insisted nothing will change, that he’d defend her to his sister, that they have made each other happy and they’ll continue to do so. But Bellamy knows, with an awful feeling that Echo knows too--that was before they found out Clarke is alive.
Bellamy can’t concentrate, can’t focus, is on the ground in moments, Echo’s knee on his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he says to her tense face. “I’m so sorry.”
A sad smile ghosts over her lips, she touches his cheek with her palm. “I knew it would be like this.” Echo lifts a shoulder, “I just thought we’d be on the ground before it mattered.”
I thought I’d have you for 743 more days, she means, and he can’t blame her. He planned to find comfort in her for those 743 days, too. And that’s unfair, that’s cruel, for a man to love a woman conditionally.
She doesn’t seem hurt. She seems resigned. She sits next to him and covers her face with her hands for a second, then she says: “Roan gave everything to save your sister, to make her the winner of the conclave. So it’s not only your sister who needs to forgive me; I would need to forgive her, too. And I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that. Every night I think to myself that I need to let that go, that it was his choice, that he put his own life on the line.” Echo sighs. “But when I think about Octavia, ruling the bunker in his stead--I’m so angry, Bellamy. All this time later, I’m still so angry.”
Bellamy sits up. He’s a little shocked, didn’t know Echo felt this way.
Echo meets his eyes. “I always knew this was going to be our bubble. Here, on The Ring, we could have each other and we could be what passes for happy--with our algae for supper, you know? With our sparring matches and holding each other through the nightmares. I knew when we got back--if we got back--we would never be able to overcome our ghosts. Yours is Clarke, and she’s alive. But mine is Roan...and your sister is the reminder that he’s never coming back.”
Pieces fall into place. Echo’s loyalty wasn’t just that of a spy to her king. She was in love with him.
How has Bellamy never realized this before?
“I’ve found so much...comfort...in you, Bellamy. But this was never going to be forever, no matter how many times you insisted otherwise.”
He reaches for her, but she’s on her feet in a flash. “I’ll move my things. Emori needs a roommate, now that she and Murphy are on the outs.”
“Echo, we can still--”
“What, have sex? Pretend nothing’s changed? That isn’t like you, Bellamy. I won’t be your foray into casual relationships.”
Bellamy bites his cheek against a smile: “You should have known me when we first hit the ground.”
“When you were trying on a persona as a chauvinistic, bullying asshole?” At his surprised look she gives a laugh: “I’ve heard the stories from Harper and Raven.”
“Are we...can we…?”
“Still be friends?” Echo reaches out her hand, pulls Bellamy to his feet. “We were always meant to be friends, Bellamy, going all the way back to Mount Weather. When we tried to make more of it--I think that’s where we went wrong.”
“I don’t regret it,” he wraps his arms around her, and she leans into his embrace.
“No,” she tells him softly, “I don’t, either.”
The bunk feels empty without her, cold, and the thin blankets seem to give off no warmth. Sometime hours after Bellamy closed his eyes and swore he was going to sleep, he throws the blankets on the floor, frustrated, and puts his boots back on.
Raven is probably still up in the console room, so he makes his way there and finds her, as he suspected, on her back with an assortment of screwdrivers and wirecutters in her hand. He pats her knee, and she grumbles: “I’m trying, I’m trying. And you hovering over me isn’t going to help, Blake.”
“I’m not hovering. I just can’t sleep. And you’re the only other person awake.” Bellamy props his feet on the counter. “Echo’s bunking with Emori now.”
Raven’s quiet for a beat. “Yeah, I figured. You should’ve seen your face, Bellamy. All that hope and heartbreak. No one could compete with Clarke, when it comes to you.”
“I thought she was dead,” Bellamy runs a hand through his hair, glad Raven can’t see his face. “I was almost sure. I always planned to look for her when we got back, but I never really let myself believe that she’d be there.”
Raven fidgets under the desk, restless. “I did.”
“You never said,” he’s reproachful, annoyed, and she slides out to face him.
“Bellamy...you’re not reasonable when it comes to Clarke. And you and I, we’re the ones who made the decision to leave her behind. It’s--a lot of guilt, you know? I was thinking about it, and I know Clarke. She would have fought, she would have done anything to survive. At some point I just decided that she’d be there when we went home. And I was right. As long as she survives the next 74...2 days, she’ll be there with Madi, and it sounds like she made a home. We can be part of that.” Her eyes are hazy, she looks exhausted. “Trust Clarke to have found the only living human after the apocalypse.”
“There’s still everyone in the bunker.”
“Who can’t come out for another two years. And that’s if--” Raven bites her lip, breaks off.
“I know. If the bunker was secure. If they lived.” Bellamy beats a tattoo on the seat. “What do you think? About the bunker? I mean…you believed in Clarke. Do you believe in Octavia? And Abby? And like, Jaha?”
“Jaha’s fucking insane, hasn’t Murphy convinced you yet?”
“My sister isn’t insane.”
“She might be, after five years down there, Bellamy. You need to…I think we’ve been feeling two sides of the same coin, kind of. You believe in Octavia, you think she’s alive, and somehow going to turn out okay, despite everything. I believed in Clarke, I thought she was alive and somehow going to turn out okay, despite everything. And I was right, and it feels amazing–”
“But you think I should lower my expectations?”
Raven offers him a hand, pull-me-up. “I just think…that two miracles is a lot of miracles.”
Bellamy’s mouth twitches. “Rae…I see it differently. If we got one miracle, why wouldn’t we dare to hope for another?”
“If I’m gonna hope for a second miracle, that particular miracle will be that we can get back to Earth alive.” Raven squeezes his hand. “Octavia can be third, though.”
It doesn’t happen often, but Bellamy pulls her close, in a hug he wouldn’t dare to give anyone else. “I know you’re gonna get us back, Raven. You don’t need a miracle. You just need to be you.”
The radio makes them both jump, Clarke’s voice in the silence between them, almost as if she were listening. “I can’t sleep,” she says, very quietly. “Madi wanted one bedtime story, and then another, and then when I got to the best part of the third, I realized she’d fallen asleep. You were a knight, and I was Rapunzel.” She laughs a bit, but it’s hollow again. “The fun part of telling Madi stories, is that she’s never heard any of them. I guess our fairy tales didn’t survive with the Grounders. If I think about that too hard, it’s sad. Our stories survive with me, though. Mine and yours, and Monty’n’Harper’s, and Murphy keeping me alive with his bare hands–” Clarke sniffs. “And Raven, God, all the times she saved our asses? I can’t let those stories go.”
Raven buries her face in Bellamy’s shirt.
“Listen, Bellamy, if you can hear me, can you tell her I still believe in her? I know she’s gonna bring you back.” Clarke sighs deeply. “I just…really need you to tell her that, tonight. ‘Cause it’s been a long time, and I know you’re all probably getting a little stir-crazy up there, and doubting yourselves and each other, but that’s counterproductive, that’s pointless. And…” Bellamy can hear her moving restlessly as Raven sobs with frustration under his arms. “And I told Raven once that I would pick her first. I need you to tell her I still would. I do. I pick her first, for getting your asses back to Earth, you with me? Okay? Tell her that.”
Raven’s breath hitches, and on Earth, Clarke’s does, too. “I don’t know why I’m crying, I’m really alright. I don’t want you to think I’m not alright. I’m just…tired.”
Raven pulls away, wiping her tears furiously, loping off down the hall. “Me too, Clarke,” then she spins back to Bellamy. “Don’t tell any of the others I cried, Blake, or I’ll cut off one of your ears while you sleep.”
Bellamy sags into the captain’s chair. Clarke says, “I can never tell if I hope you hear all of my messages or none of them.”
And Bellamy says back, “I won’t ever miss another, Princess, you can be damn sure of that.”