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“You know there are less depressing places to sleep in, right?”
When Bellamy blinks his eyes open, the first thing he sees is a charcoal painting of a city. Then he turns his head to look at Murphy standing in the doorway and frowning disapprovingly at him. Bellamy shakes himself and rolls off the tiny cot.
It’s been a month since they got to the ring and they’ve managed to seal off all the leaks, which means they can now walk everywhere without wearing a spacesuit. Their oxygen-generator is working surprisingly well considering their not-so-smooth take off and the fact it wasn't supposed to work for a space-station, and the hydroponic farm is producing repugnant algae again. They’re running low on protein packs, but it seems like their crops will be ready in time for them not to starve. All in all, they’re on a remarkable streak of good luck.
Bellamy pushes past Murphy and into the corridor.
“Where are you going?” asks the younger man burying his hands into his pockets to fumble with whatever he’s stashed inside them.
“For a run.”
He takes off to the left, knowing that Murphy’s heading right, out of the skybox and into one of the maintenance closets him and Emori have claimed as their sleeping quarters.
All the way to the other end of the skybox he feels Murphy’s eyes on his back. He runs faster.
He runs the whole length of their ring twice, sometimes three times a day: one endless corridor that takes him twenty minutes to cross. The rest keep out of his way when he runs, and it’s just him and the sound of his boots clanging on the metal floors, urging him to run faster, to outrun the oppressive noise that won't let him forget where he is.
It’s been a month. Fifty-nine to go before spacekru can attempt to go back down. One thousand and ninety-five more days before he can feel the dirt beneath his boots, the sun on his face.
He passes through the control center, their new make-shift engine room, the small farm that will keep all seven of them more-or-less fed; what’s left of Alpha Station’s Exchange; through a long corridor flanked by supply closets and airlocks and back into the skybox.
Heart hammering in his chest, he pushes faster.
Five minutes.
Bellamy remembers the forests around the Dropship. Arkadia might have been bigger and more advanced, but whenever he thinks of home, it's always the Dropship. Not because he was in charge there. God knows he made some mighty mistakes, he lost almost - all - of his people there. But that was the first place where he could be himself, and people looked up to him; they respected him and -maybe - cared. The forests around it were the first taste of freedom he got, and he misses them.
Ten minutes.
Nights were weird on the ground. Bellamy would sit alone in the dark of their square - because they had a square - looking up at the stars and listening. The Ark was never silent: there was always the hum of machinery, the clanking of metal on metal, the random intercom messages. On the ground, there wasn't silence either, not really: wind and trees and random critters. But sometimes, in the dead of night, he would feel this sense of vertigo because where was the hum of machines? Where was the metal? The older children had a lot of trouble adjusting to the lack of mechanical noises. To him, it was like moving a joint that had been locked in place all his life.
Fifteen minutes.
In the ring everything is new and sort of old. He's been here. Has seen everything there is to see, done most of what one can do. On the ground...
Bellamy remembers the first time he experienced the lake. It was during that first week when no one knew quite how to navigate the world. It was difficult grasping the lack of walls around them. The concept that they could set off and walk. And keep walking. And spend years walking, and they would never get to the end of the world. The ground was strange, too. The Ark was always in movement, rotating slowly and evenly. The ground was stubbornly still. That made the delinquents wobble around, running into trees until they got used to the sudden depth of the world and the fact that this soft mushy ground was still.
The first time Bellamy found a lake he quite literally walked off a cliff and into a body of water: cold and fresh and the shock of it had him paralyzed for a moment. He nearly drowned. When he managed to swim up, the light reflecting off the surface was blinding, the density of it, the smell and the taste. Everything in that lake had him hooked.
Twenty minutes.
He's back where he started. End of the loop.
His world was infinite. Now he's on a hamster wheel. Trapped and suffocating and he wants to weep at the loss of his freedom.
***
Spacekru eats together for some reason. They set up a sort of dining room next to the control center, and munch silently on their algae and vitamin sticks.
Bellamy looks at the six of them and his heart aches.
Six. His world has been reduced to these six people sitting around the room:
Murphy and Emori who keep to themselves, always careful, always on high alert. Murphy fiddles with stuff. He carries small bits and pieces in his pockets to keep his hands busy. Emori is learning tech with Raven whenever she isn't holed somewhere with her boyfriend.
Raven who is always up and about, fixing this and that to make their life more comfortable, teaching Emori and sometimes Echo, trying to find a way to generate enough fuel to go back home.
Monty who isn’t eating enough and Bellamy doesn’t know how to help him. He's like a shadow of his beautiful young self. He's teaching Bellamy to tend to the farm because they all need something to do and there isn't much to do up here.
Harper who has taken to explore the vent systems, crawling up and down the shafts to tire herself as much as possible. Still, whenever she gets back to her and Monty’s quarters, Bellamy can hear them fighting.
Echo who looks pale and sickly in the harsh white light, who has lost the most weight since they got here, her eyes sunken and rimmed in dark circles. Sometimes she just stops, eyes wide and terrified, hands shaky. Sometimes she snaps out of it after a second, others it takes her a few minutes. Bellamy doesn’t know how to help her either.
But then again none of them are really equipped to help anyone, are they? They set out to conquer the world, to build a better life. But they failed, and now they're but shells of what they used to be. Or maybe this is what they really are. Stripped of their youth and enthusiasm and wonder, the only thing that's left is this shell.
After dinner, he wanders over to the airlock where his mother was floated. He can see Earth through the large windows and his heart aches. It doesn’t look any different than before they went down; more overcast, less green, maybe.
His sister is down there, stuck inside a bunker with the rest of humankind. He misses her terribly, hates that he can’t help Raven try to rig some sort of communication system to talk to her. They've tried, but the scrap Murphy and Emori salvage is too damaged.
***
“Want to join me for a walk?” Raven smiles up at him, already clad in her spacesuit with her helmet tucked under an arm.
“I’m good.”
Spacewalking is her thing, her way of coping, like Harper’s crawling through the vents and his running. He’s never spacewalked and sometimes wonders what it feels like. But he can’t take that from her.
“I need you to hold the tools for me,” and that’s the first time she's insisted in over a month.
“I thought you wanted to teach Echo to do it.”
“She had a panic attack and then never came back to try again. Spacewalking is not for the faint of heart.” Of all the words to describe the Azgedan warrior, "faint of heart" is not one Bellamy would have ever used.
“Come on!" Raven pats him on the back "It’ll be fun.”
There aren’t many things he can do inside the ring that he hasn’t done already. Hopefully, this will take his mind off things.
The suit is a little too tight around his shoulders, but it fits well enough. Bellamy feels heavy and clunky as he follows Raven out the airlock where his mother was floated. When the doors open, he's struck by a flash of fear. What if the suit malfunctions and he gets sucked out of the airlock and into the void of space? He remembers his mother's face: eyes wide and mouth open in a breathless gasp. Is that how he's going to die?
Then he's weightless, and Raven smiles at him, nodding her head towards the blackness of space. She walks but he swims out, and it reminds him of the lake.
This is worse than running.
This is better than running.
Bellamy swims after Raven. Raven doesn't need him for whatever work she needs to do on the hull of their ship, but he holds the tool box for her and stays close, trying not to get lost in the sensation of floating, in the view. There shouldn't be such a difference, but there is.
"How are you holding up?" asks the mechanic through their closed intercom system. Bellamy has to fight the urge to wince.
She shouldn't be worrying about him. It's not he who is permanently crippled or had a brain tumor, who had to witness his best friend kill himself, who was tortured and drained of his blood. What has he lost, really? His sister is down there safe and his... Clarke is a nightblood. She'll have ridden the death wave out and will be out and about by now.
“Fine.” Because it's true, he's doing Ok. He misses earth, but they all do. He misses his freedom and would rather not see the place where his mother was floated every day. But they all lost someone, and he has had years to deal with what he did to his family.
“Monty’s not sleeping,” Raven says conversationally. “Harper is driving herself to the point of exhaustion.”
He hums and nods his head. He’ll have to talk to them at some point. Bellamy isn't sure what he can do, but there must be something.
“Murphy’s having difficulty controlling his anger. I think the only reason he hasn’t snapped at anyone yet is that he’s afraid we’ll float him and Emori.”
Bellamy swallows. There’s nothing he can do to reassure Murphy, and he knows it. He’s always on thin ice with the young man. For a while, he thought they had become, maybe not friends, but allies. Then he chose the grounders over skaikru - chose Kane and his sister over skaikru - and that small understanding they had built shattered. He knows Murphy’s memory is long and gaining his trust is a difficult task. Still, he would like to reassure him that nobody's floating anyone.
“And Echo’s flashbacks are getting worse.” Raven hands him a screwdriver to hold. “And the only thing that’s keeping me sane are these walks. So I am asking you again: How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine, Raven.”
“You don’t look fine.” She stops whatever it is she’s doing to look at him. “I know you’re sleeping in Clarke’s cell. I know you keep staring out the airlocks and I know you’re worried sick.” He nearly doesn’t feel Raven’s hand through the thick spacesuit and his long-sleeved shirt. “Talk to me, Bell.”
“Everything is gray.” He blurts out. “And too cold. Was it always this cold?”
“I don’t know.” She chuckles and looks down at Earth. From here it looks like they could just swim back through the void. “It’s strange how many things are not as I remembered them. And it has been only six months since we left.”
“How much will we have forgotten in five years?”
Will they have to readjust to the sun again? Bellamy remembers seeing spots for a whole week, being nearly blind for a few hours when the sun was at its zenith. Walking on the soft, uneven floor, finding food, hunting... Will that all be gone in five years?
What about his sister? She changed so much during that year she was in lockup. But now… Now he will go down and find a stranger.
What about Clarke? Will she remember him? Will she even care?
“Sinclair used to say we forget the bad things and keep only the good ones,” Raven says wistfully. Bellamy doesn’t answer. If that’s true, something in all of them must be broken because they’re trapped in the bad stuff.
“I miss the sun,” he says, looking down at Earth and God, she’s so beautiful! “I miss the sun and the woods.”
“I miss boar.” Raven says and they both chuckle. “and Murphy’s cooking.” When he looks at her with a frown, her smile grows. "You never got to try it, but let me tell you, he's a mean cook!" Bellamy can't imagine the angry delinquent cooking.
***
That night Bellamy brings the bottle he found in the control center and rounds all six of his people closer together. He takes a generous swing and says before he can lose his nerve: “I am glad there are no mosquitos in space.” He remembers Jasper’s goofy smile when he said something like that. Could he have done something to prevent what had happened to the young delinquent? Maybe if he’d said something different, maybe if he’d…
The rest look at him like he’s insane. Bellamy sets the bottle in the middle of the table they’re all gathered around. Raven frowns her lips. “I am glad there is no killer A.I. in space, ” she says after a moment and takes a swing of the bottle.
Monty shakes his head, grabs the bottle by the neck and drinks. “I am glad there’s no killer fog in space.”
Harper’s fingers brush his when she takes the bottle from him. “I am glad there are no jobby nuts in space.”
Monty looks horrified at her, and she ducks her head, a fat tear rolling down her cheek. She offers the bottle to Murphy.
“I am glad we're safe.”
“I am glad I’m alive,” whispers Emori, her fingers loosely intertwined with Murphy’s.
Echo opens her mouth. Closes it again. “I am glad the mountain is…” her eyes land on Bellamy and she snaps her mouth shut with an audible click. “I’m glad the ra-di-a-tion sickness has passed,” she says instead.
Bellamy nods.
“I miss the woods.”
Raven gives him an unimpressed look. “I miss my lab on the island.”
“I miss Jasper,” whispers Monty, because he’s braver than Bellamy.
“I miss Monroe.” Harper takes two swings of the bottle. No one calls her out for cheating.
Murphy passes the bottle directly over to Emori who bows her head. “I miss Otan.” He kisses her brow.
Echo doesn’t drink, but she says, a single tear rolling down her cheek: “I miss my brother. He was a good man.”
They keep going even after the bottle is empty. They talk until they’re all either in tears and unable to continue.
Bellamy learns that Murphy’s been eating only once or twice every few days because the mere idea of having to eat nutrition-packs has him choking down bile. He learns that Monty is angry: at Harper for still entertaining the idea of killing herself, at himself for not being able to help his friends and at Jasper for leaving him alone. That Raven thought being up here would feel like returning home: a place where no one was trying to kill them, where they would be safe, but instead she feels like she’s trapped in a tomb, every corner reminding her of Finn. That Echo has trouble separating the tech in the ring from the tech in Mount Weather. Raven confesses that Finn saved her life when he got arrested for something she did when over eighteen.
Bellamy takes a deep breath and whispers: “I never told her I’m in love with her.”
Nobody asks him who he's talking about. It's a small mercy.
***
One night, when he’s lying sleepless in his bed, Echo steps into the room. She sits on the floor, running her fingers over one of the charcoal paintings, her sword across her knees. She leans her back against the side of his bed.
“I’ll keep watch,” she says, softly, without looking at him. “You sleep, I’ll slay your nightmares.”
In his nightmares Clarke’s choking on blood, skin blistered, eyes milky-white. She’s pounding on the bunker’s doors, begging his sister, Jaha, her mother, Kane, to let her in. They never do, and then he comes back to find her corpse draped over the hatch.
He jerks awake, feeling less rested than he did when he fell asleep.
Echo’s curled up on the floor, hands over her ears and knees pressed up against her chest, head bowed, nose buried between her knees. She’s lying on top of the picture of a vast forest. The bottom half of a deer peeking out from beneath her left foot. She’s fast asleep and doesn’t stir when he picks her up and tucks her into his bed like he’s done a thousand times with his sister.
Bellamy sits by his desk and crosses another day off. Just one thousand eighty-four to go.