Post-S3-canon-divergent (aka yet another “praimfaya? I’ve never heard of her” universe)
This is like kinda a romantic relationship but it could also be read as a close friendship if you want. I headcanon Jackson as bi.
My tag list: @ciewill @dealingdreams @shadowheron2013 @julyrubyrose @wonderland-promises @hanav @rycewritestrash @thelittlefanpire @musicnote902 @stonybnatural @earthgay2052 , @bellarkehastakenovermylife , @bellarkewriting, @astridandoddsandedds, @justbecauseyoubelievesomething (lmk if you would like to be added to or deleted from this list)
*
Physical therapy twice a week. Her leg. Her shoulder.
Arkadia retreats into itself; the gates close; for several days, no one knows that the Chancellor is dead, or who speaks for them in Polis, or what is being said in Polis, up above the blood-strewn streets. Raven watches the people of Alpha and Mecha and the survivors from Farm stagger in, tired like she is tired, shaking off a bad dream and with scrapes and scratches and bruises and aches they cannot name, which they catalogue over moonshine in the hangar deck, while outside it starts to rain.
Physical therapy twice a week. Her shoulder heals. Her leg—
When Bellamy returns, he puts on the Chancellor's pin. Abby, Kane, and Clarke stay away. Octavia stays away.
Raven gets used to the long chilly days, how each one is longer than the last, and the endless rains. She gets used to her routine. She starts looking forward to therapy sessions in med bay, and Dr. Jackson's patient hands on her. Sometimes they don't talk at all but sometimes, when he asks her how she's doing, she stares up at the shadowy high ceiling above and tells him the truth, not just about the stress and knots of her muscles, but aout her low moods, and her worries, her uncertainty like the gray wash of the sky. She asks how he is and the corner of his mouth curls up and he says, "About the same," and she tells him that's not fair: she's said her part.
They take walks together around the settlement, and some days the walks are difficult and sometimes, she feels almost like she used to, taking deep breaths of the damp air and shivering against the chill, and hardly any pain in her at all. Like maybe she's been bent up and scrambled and broken, but now she's straightened herself out and ironed out the creases and she's almost good as new. They pause at the gate and Jackson wraps his arm around her, like he wants to keep her warm. She holds her jacket closed tight and leans into him.
Arkadia is a mess of mud that never dries. The rains turn the dirt to muck and the people stomp and run through the muck, and Raven feels it dragging at her heels as she walks the same circuit around the place, again and again.
As the weeks pass, the sky grows clearer, the days warmer; the frost stops seeping in overnight. The trees outside the wall bloom with new buds. One afternoon, Raven takes the Rover out, Jackson in the passenger seat, and they drive out past the gates and past the trees. They drive until they reach a meadow where the new grass sprouts in a symphony of green, strewn over with wildflowers, fluttering with fluorescent butterflies. Jackson helps her down from behind the wheel. Even when she's on the ground, hard-packed dirt under her feet and grasses catching at her ankles, she doesn't let go. She's not quite holding on to him, not quite caught in an embrace; she's got one hand on the open Rover door and the other arm around him, and she closes her eyes tight when she leans against his chest. She feels him press a kiss to the crown of her head.
They sit out in the sun and listen to the sounds of bugs and birds; the grass tickles at Raven's arms when she lies down and looks up at the sky. Big fluffy clouds in the blue today. Next to her, Jackson is picking out white flowers from the ground.
"Did you take the chip because of me?" she asks. He pauses abruptly; when she turns her head to catalogue the stillness of him, the grass and bits of flowers poke along her cheek.
"I don't know how you could think that," he answers finally.
"I mean that's why A.L.I.E. targeted me. To make the chip seem... more appealing to people. Like if it could fix me, it could fix anyone."
"Raven, you don't need fixing—"
"Then why did I take it?" She rests her hands on her stomach, fingers curling against her shirt; she looks up at the biggest of the white, drifting clouds.
Jackson doesn't speak for a long time, and then he says, "I don't know. If I would have taken it anyway. To be honest, I can't remember what I was thinking at all."
She does. She remembers precisely the weight of the decision as she made it, like she'd fallen not to the ground but through it, deep into it, deep into a quickly sinking hole. Her leg that would never heal. A new body to live with, for the rest of her life. Pain management for the rest of her life.
"Do you still feel it?" she asks. "The bit of her—it—still inside you?"
She looks up and sees him shaking his head. "Clarke destroyed it—"
"She shut it off. But it's still there." She passes her hand across her forehead, pushing strands of hair out of her face. "Even more for me. I still feel it all the time." And: "Whatever I was when I got to Earth, I'm not that anymore."
They don't leave until the clouds start to turn ominous and gray, and the bright afternoon darkens with the threat of new rain. Jackson gets to his feet first, then helps her up. With his other hand, he presents her with a small bouquet of round, white-petaled flowers, with soft yellow circles at their centers.
Waaaay too late to be second-guessing and over-thinking as I am.
*
After the reception, the party moves to Raven's loft: glitters of starlight from the high windows, strings of lights around the room. The gallery's champagne flutes are replaced with vodka shots, slammed almost in unison along the kitchen island countertop, Clarke's friends bright eyed and grinning at each other, and so pleased. They are still in their formal dresses and their button-down shirts and suit jackets, now raging as if they were in college still, their shoes in piles by the door and the boys in sockfeet slipping and Harper, as she dances, still up on her toes as if in heels. Bellamy's hair is a mess from how many times one or the other of his friends has run their fingers through it, and his tie undone like the top two buttons of his shirt. Monty is inventing cocktails by the fridge, and Octavia is sitting on the furniture, half-dancing in place while Lincoln, one of the other artists, now so much more at ease he seems a different person, holds her hands in his hands, and moves them in inscrutable patterns through the air.
Maya’s watching them, dazed, buzzed, floating, too warm, the music and the voices a sort of alien melody all around. Jasper taps her on the shoulder and she startles. "You look beautiful," he yells, too loud, and holds out his hand, and asks her to dance.
She doesn't know where Clarke is but she likes these friends of hers, their inside jokes, the hearty way they laugh. Miller and Bellamy are practicing feats of strength, kneeling next to the coffee table and arm-wrestling, while Raven passes out another round of drinks. Murphy raises his up in a toast to the artists, and everyone stops what they are doing, and lifts their glasses, and cheers.
Maya is laughing and she cannot stop laughing. She can see Clarke by the window now, her hair coming loose now from its bun, two long strands framing her face. Starlit by the city through the window, flushed and laughing. She clinks her glass with Murphy's, tilts her head all the way back to drink.
Later, she slides across the floor, taps Jasper's shoulder, asks to cut in. He twirls Maya away and she lands in Clarke's arms. They are nose to nose now; there is a high burning feeling across Maya's cheeks and a buzzing just behind her lips. And when they lean in, they meet in wet, uneven kisses, interrupted by giggles; she doesn't know why she's so happy; why she's alight.
Clarke twirls her around and around and she forgets to anchor herself, so that she becomes easily dizzy, and trips over her own feet. "Are you trying to disorient me, Clarke?" she asks, as she balances herself with her hands on Clarke's shoulders, and Clarke curls her arms possessively around Maya's waist and stares at her, close and cross-eyed, with a devilish grin.
No one parties harder than Clarke's friends, Maya decides, by the end of the night, as it disappears into the slow curve of the morning. She is slumped against the wall and watching Lincoln and Octavia, cross-legged on the floor and playing a lazy, tired game of war. Octavia flips her card over with a flick of her fingertip. Lincoln sweeps it slowly away. Somewhere else, below her, Clarke is searching out their shoes amid the wreckage. Maya rubs at her eyes with the back of her hand. And sometime later, between the wall and the cab ride home, she starts drifting into sleep.
When she wakes, tiny drumbeats like high, ringing timpani sounds, are marching across her forehead, the backbeat of strobe lights behind her eyelids. The sun is high. She peers at it through the slats of half-closed blinds, a raw yellow yolk dripping behind the glass, and she can feel it falling there in the rhythm of the drumbeats, and the rolling of her stomach has no place in the sick stillness of the room. She turns onto her stomach, away from the light. Doesn't move again until she feels the careful, slow touch of a hand on the back of her head.
Then she looks up, a thick scrim of sleep still crusting over her eyes.
"Awake?" Clarke asks, and smiles, tentative and slow, and edges a tall glass of something light orange and too bright up past the edge of the bed.
"Barely."
Clarke looks apologetic, also cute, tries to offer the glass again. "Homemade Griffin hangover cure."
Maya rolls over again, starts to sit up against the pillows, and the timpani grows louder, angrier, beating now against her brain. "Is that how you look so...alive?"
Clarke shrugs. "Natural tolerance." She presses the drink into Maya's hand. "But it can't hurt."
Tag list: @ciewill @dealingdreams @shadowheron2013 @julyrubyrose @wonderland-promises @hanav @rycewritestrash @thelittlefanpire @musicnote902 @stonybnatural @earthgay2052 @fabianapvec @bellarkehastakenovermylife , @bellarkewriting @failing-at-being-an-angel (lmk if you would like to be added to or deleted from this list)
*
In a past life, Clarke was a princess, and Murphy was smoke.
Such is the story he tells, an easy way to explain how one moment, he can be here, and then the next, only wisps and tendrils,
—then somewhere else.
And Clarke, monarch of the deep woods, royalty of the in-between, holding court in the classrooms, the dormitories, the graveyard after dark. The clack and crack of haunted bones. She rises to the surface in the late Earth afternoon to conjure herself a throne from the hollows of ancient trees. The golden afternoon light turns her skin translucent; her steps are light as early autumn frost against the leaves. She fashions herself a crown out of gnarled tree limbs, skinned of bark. They appear from a distance to have the length and angles of skeleton fingers, eerily broken at the joints.
Out of the corner of her eye, blurred beyond her focus, she catches sight of a shape that might be a large branch, or fallen tree. Too dark against the soft and leaf-strewn ground. She looks up. And then she sees that John Murphy is standing in front of her, hands in his pockets, staring down the length of his nose at her. Appraising her.
She turns her gaze down to her work again.
The shape at her periphery grows and distorts. All around her, she can hear every tiny forest noise: the chatter of animals, the high flight of the birds. Human beings and laughter and life and the growing of moss and the whisper of spirits. The shape is dark and monstrous, jagged and sharp, larger and larger as ever-dissipating smoke, crackling like fire.
"Hoping to scare some children today?" Murphy asks, from very close at her side, and she snaps her gaze up and narrows her eyes at him. Flips her hand over, and her crown hovers just above her palm.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
He rolls his eyes. She sets her crown just so on her head, testing out its sureness, pleased with its weight. She can feel Murphy's stare, sliding down the length of her, with such unusual patience: what she has come to expect from him only in moments such as these. Their small indents of privacy, the rare minutes they spend on the surface of the world.
He's close enough to touch. He's gone. Clarke tilts her head back and stares at him, kicking his legs from his perch on the outstretched branch of one of the trees. "I liked you better," he says, "when you kept to yourself all the time. Remember those days? Before you wanted to be in charge all the time?"
Clarke hums, briefly, then shrugs. Turning her back on him reads as dismissal, is nothing but trust. She can hear the faraway laughter of schoolkids, telling stories; with a short gesture of her hand, the wind begins to blow. The leaves scatter. A scud of gray clouds shifts above them, obscuring the sun.
"Not that I don’t think it’s fun," Murphy says, from somewhere stretched and long and shadowed, to her right and up, "scaring children."
"They probably deserve it, don't they?" Clarke answers, low and wicked. "For coming into the woods?"
"Ha!"
Murphy's laughter sometimes has this bark, like a door in an old house slamming shut. He's on the ground again, has jumped with perfect lightness from the tree branch, nearly weightless, but Clarke can hear the thump of his boots against the dirt. She can feel the thrum of his voice, in his throat.
"Guess so. You know you certainly look the part—"
Wisps, and tendrils, trails of gray, a presence of no known shape, right there behind her—
His hands at her hips.
"Dressed like that." He's right behind her, against her, his nose bumping up against the back of her ear and his lips at her throat. "You only wear dresses when you want to make people think you're—"
"The Devil?"
In a flash of sun through the clouds, so dark now that they seem to threaten rain, her face transforms. Skeleton hollows for eyes and the glint of bone. In the far distance, from the ends of the earth, deep tremors of thunder sound.
"You know how most people feel better," Clarke says, as her fingertips dance light melodies across his knuckles, "when they're being led?"
"I've noticed." He presses a wide, open mouthed kiss, the shape of words, against her skin. "Though I can't say I relate."
"Well, I feel better—" She turns around in his arms. The wind whips the long ends of her dress around her ankles: white curtains, fluttering across a balcony, an inscrutable warning that sends unwarranted shivers through the bodies of the living. "When I'm leading."
"Yes, Ma'am," he answers, but the words are a drawl, and he's fisting his hand in her hair, tugging at her hair, and she's pulling him in, and she's biting his lip until he bleeds.
Bellamy/Wells, canon-divergent/post-s2, ~900 words
Tag list: @ciewill @dealingdreams @shadowheron2013 @julyrubyrose @wonderland-promises @hanav @rycewritestrash @thelittlefanpire @musicnote902 @stonybnatural @earthgay2052 , @bellarkehastakenovermylife , @bellarkewriting @astridandoddsandends, @justbecauseyoubelievesomething (lmk if you would like to be added to or deleted from this list)
*
At the gutter-end of evening, gray-cloudy twilight and bitter chill, Bellamy finds Wells, standing at the doorway to Alpha Station with his hands in his pockets. The year is edging at last from autumn into water, the dead grass and mud frosted over with ice and a thin layer of snow. Bellamy knows the expression on Wells’s face, even before he sees it, knows that it is distant and searching, because he can read Wells now as easily and as precisely as Wells himself can read the seasons. He was always first pick for Earth Skills. And he told Bellamy once, while they were making their rounds at the perimeter, that according to the old Earth calendar, these days now are the end of the year. People used to celebrate the new year, used to throw parties, and make promises to themselves.
"Doesn't seem like a very festive time to me," Bellamy answered, as he poked the toe of his boot through the morning's crackling, nearly-melted ice. Beneath it, a puddle of water was already expanding. The thin sheet broke in pieces and sunk beneath the surface of the pool.
Nor does this weather, this bleak season strike him as a proper time to speak about beginnings, or anything new. Arkadia now feels like it is coming to an end of an era, or more precisely like it is stuck, mired, in an endless middle. A pause. A taut uncertainty. When humans look back on them, as Bellamy imagines sometimes that they will, perhaps they will view this time as only part of the prologue, along with everything else he has done so far on Earth. The dropship camp, the fall of the Mountain—mere footnotes, if he's lucky. Camp Jaha, a forgotten name. What Arkadia will become, should it last—that will be the story for the ages.
He walks up behind Wells slowly, pretends he is trying not to be heard. Wells appears deep in thought, and so it is easy to pretend he is not really listening, even though he is. He always his. His thoughts could be anywhere, now; Bellamy tries to trace them, but his guesses are only the faintest stabs in the dark. Maybe he is wondering about his father, the ex-Chancellor's fool's errand, the Wasteland and the fabled City of Light. Or maybe he's worrying, as Bellamy still does, about Clarke. She’s been gone over a month now, the trail she’s left behind scattered and faint. How she’s become just another one of their ghosts in the wilderness.
When he's close enough, he grabs Wells's hands and pins them behind his back, presses up close against him and growls in his ear, "Hey. You're under arrest."
Wells twists out of the hold easily, and he's already grinning a lop-sided, easy grin when he turns to face Bellamy at last. "That's a terrible joke to play on an ex-prisoner," he says, and Bellamy just shrugs and steps aside.
"Just practicing. What do you think of the new jacket?" He grabs at the edges and holds them out, like he's showing off, trying to hide with exaggerated bravado how much wearing the Guard uniform feels like a child’s game. Even though, or because, he knows that fake bravado is the first thing that Wells will see right through.
"Nice," he answers, and crosses his arms against his chest. "Who'd you steal that from?"
"Kane gave it to me." If you can believe that. Might as well be a sick joke, another way the world has turned upside down and sideways on them, somewhere along the way from the sky to the ground. "He wants me to train some of the hundred to be part of the Guard."
Wells raises his eyebrows. Bellamy can't tell if he's surprised or impressed. "Makes sense," he concedes. "We have the most experience on the ground, and in combat with the Grounders."
"And it's nice that Kane and Abby are finally acknowledging that," Bellamy adds.
"Yeah." Wells's brow furrows, a distant expression on his face again, and Bellamy is about to ask him what else is on his mind, when he leans back against the doorway and asks, "Does he think we'll need a lot of soldiers?"
Out of the corner of Bellamy's eye, the wall they've put up at the borders of the camp looms tall, broken only by the massive front gate.
"I don't know," he admits. "If he knows more than we do... he's not sharing."
"Not surprising." Wells looks down at his boots, the squared off posture of his shoulders and the slight v between his eyebrows enough for Bellamy to feel the tension in him, feel it as if it were an extension of himself. "Can you believe we're in this place—where we don't know if we're at war or not?"
"Hey—" Bellamy steps forward, his hands on Wells's arms until Wells looks up at him and meets his eye. "A bunch of kids from the Sky Box are going to put on these jackets and be the elite. And I have to pretend that this isn't a big deal so it doesn't go to anyone's head. But it is a big deal. Makes me feel like..." He takes a deep breath, lets it go and feels light-headed, realizes all at once that outside, the last of the light has bled out from the sky and the clouds have opened up, and it has started to snow. "Makes me feel like if there is a war, we'll win it."
Wells smiles. "I never predicted you'd be an optimist," he says, and reaches up, and pulls Bellamy in.
This isn’t quite what I thought I would write but w/e.
Tag list: @ciewill @dealingdreams @shadowheron2013 @julyrubyrose @wonderland-promises @hanav @rycewritestrash @thelittlefanpire @musicnote902 @stonybnatural @earthgay2052 @fabianapvec @bellarkehastakenovermylife , @bellarkewriting @failing-at-being-an-angel (lmk if you would like to be added to or deleted from this list)
*
Of course, when Miller's boyfriend returns—after four months in the wilderness, possibly dead—Miller neither asks nor is asked, he simply brings him home. Miller's living in single quarters on Alpha Station now, which used to be the dream. Now the whole ship is only a ruin, out from which they are trying to build.
Bryan closes the door behind them and opens his mouth to speak, then doesn't. He stares at Miller instead, as if he has realized precisely what Miller has realized: that they have not been alone in a long time, that they have never been alone like this, that they have never been separated like this, and reunions are more complicated than they seem.
Miller wraps his arms around him and feels the strength of Bryan's arms, too, pulling him against his chest, the grip of his palm around Miller's shoulder, the breadth and strength of his body pressed so close that Miller aches; an intimacy that makes his muscles burn and his lungs burn, that he has to close his eyes to rein in. He has not let himself breathe out, like this, in such a long time. Never on Earth. He's half-sure he's collapsed and Bryan is holding him up. The hug feels not at all like their first kiss upon reunion did, like something perfunctory and half for show. He would never let anyone else in Arkadia see him this way, them together this way, not least because it is almost obscene. Indecent, the way Bryan grabs at him, the way Miller tries to hold him closer, the crush of his mouth and nose against Bryan's neck.
They don't sleep at all that night and they hardly talk.
Only once on the Ark did they ever make what might be called, in retrospect, contingency plans, and that was after Miller's arrest. Bryan wouldn't let him talk about his re-hearing, what would happen if he were floated, but either way, he'd be locked up nearly six months. That felt, at the time, like ages to ask somebody else to wait. Bryan held his hands across the table and looked him straight in the eye, and said he had no doubts. He’d wait if he had to wait. He’d be there on the other side of the door when Miller was released.
"Doesn't bother you, having a thief for a boyfriend?" he asked, trying to joke, and Bryan shook his head and did not smile.
"You think I haven't known this whole time?"
Perhaps because they could barely touch, then, beneath the steady gazes of the Guards, the grip of his hands was painful, the sort of touch that imprints upon the bone. Sometimes in the dropship camp Miller would try to conjure it again. Flexed his fingers and stared at them and thought about Bryan's hands holding his.
Now they have what might be an infinity of time, or no time at all, though he has to be an optimist in the good moments if he's to remain one through the bad, and they are slow with each other. He'd always imagined a reunion would be torrid and passionate and maybe violent, that he might even be angry, or that Bryan would, not at each other but at every force that had kept them too long apart. At every evening when he faltered, and thought, he must be dead. Instead they find themselves lying the wrong way around on the bed, their feet squashed between the pillows, their heads nearly falling off the edge, avoiding scars when they find them, asking no questions, kissing for so long it as if they had never kissed before, and were only learning. What is pent up in him feels stronger than the nerves he felt the first time: he knows Bryan too well, and sees the first signs of the changes in him, and he knows that he can hide nothing of himself in turn. He wants every moment a thousand-fold.
He doesn't want to think that he doesn't know what will come next.
Are they simply to presume that they are in love in the same way as before?
He has never been this man with anyone else, and he's not frightened of the way he kisses the new, hard bands of muscles in Bryan's arms, or the way Bryan holds on to the back of his neck, without strength, with only a quiet possessiveness, or the tremble in Bryan's breath that he remembers so well. Not every touch is familiar. But this sense of safety is, this well-worn trust.
This is from the same universe as my (still annoyingly untitled) Ark AU.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, outlining, and making notes for this AU but not a lot of time actually writing it. And even most of that writing was AGES ago. So this is sort of an experiment / test / warm up for me.
It’s also pretty depressing! I don’t think the actual fic is going to be depressing on this level lol so don’t let this scare you away haha.
Tag list: @ciewill @dealingdreams @shadowheron2013 @julyrubyrose @wonderland-promises @hanav @rycewritestrash @thelittlefanpire @musicnote902 @stonybnatural @earthgay2052 , @bellarkehastakenovermylife , @bellarkewriting, @astridandoddsandends, @justbecauseyoubelievesomething (lmk if you would like to be added to or deleted from this list
*
Bellamy watches the liquid shimmer, briefly rise against the tin sides of his cup as he sets it down. There's something ironic about drinking water while sitting across from the Ark's most accomplished semi-retired moonshiner, but they're in the Factory Commons, the clock on the wall says it's three in the afternoon, and he's seen a few Guards already, passing in and out on their patrol, so he has to live with what he has. Most weekends, someone throws a party down in Hydro or Tesla—the possibility of such an event matters more to him than whether or not it happens, whether or not he goes. Wanting to get hammered isn't a good look but it's also no more than the outer skin of his real mood.
Across from him, Monty takes a long drink. The video screen behind him, next to the door, flickers on.
"Good afternoon, Ark Station," the Chancellor's rich voice booms out, placid but too loud, and someone at the nearest table carefully turns the volume down. "This is Chancellor Jaha speaking. I'd like to remind you that Ark-wide elections are coming up in two weeks. The Chancellorship as well as three Council seats and six Station Representative seats are currently up for election or re-election. Please make sure that you acquaint yourself with the candidates. Voting is mandatory. Thank you."
The screen powers off just as abruptly as it turned on, and Monty turns around again. He makes a face, his tongue half-stuck out and his eyes crossed, that almost makes Bellamy laugh. It's not the expression itself that is so funny, but the surreptitious way he flashes the overdone grin—the hidden look, there and gone, there behind the Guards' backs, that only Bellamy can see.
"The Council should loosen the rules on drinking during election season," Monty says, and Bellamy allows himself a smile. Monty is the only person he knows who's as bitter as he is, though he never lets the corrosive feeling show so plainly around anybody else. Bellamy's still not sure if they seek each other out when they are already at their most aggrieved or if, together, they just more easily bring forth each other's acrid moods. A chicken or egg sort of dilemma.
"Cheers to that," he answers, holding out his cup for Monty to clink.
"I can't imagine trusting anyone who actually wants to be Chancellor, to be Chancellor," Monty says, as he sets his cup down again. "I mean, you have to be on a major power trip to run in the first place. And have a huge ego. And be naive about how shitty that job is."
Bellamy shrugs. "Might be shitty," he agrees. "At least the Chancellor has some control over—"
"Everyone on the whole ship?"
Half-smile but Bellamy can read it, like erased pencil lines under pen. Control in the sense of the power of life and death and even resurrection, of a sort—Monty tapping his finger against the side of the tin cup, his gaze downturned. His adult life like a second life.
That's how Octavia explained it once.
"Yeah. I mean, look at us." Bellamy sits back, holds out his arms for a moment, an expansive gesture for the whole room, the whole station, the whole ship. "We're going to vote for the Chancellor. And Jaha is going to win. The election's in two weeks and I already know that."
"True, but not because it's rigged. That's even more depressing."
"Mmmm."
Sometimes, he feels like he and Monty are just digging holes beneath each other's ribs.
He needs this, for every day he has to prop Octavia up, for every moment he has to be optimistic, for every role he plays and every act he puts on. But it's still fucking wretched, too.
"So, you going to vote for Mayfield?" Monty asks, more upbeat now, a buoyant, attempted normalcy that reads like an apology.
Bellamy shrugs. "Probably. I mean, she's the only other person who could maybe win."
"Yeah. That's what I was thinking too."
Maybe.
Bellamy's eyes flick down. Almost no water left in his cup, and he's not got enough ration points for any more. So he just sighs and drains the rest.
Tag list: @ciewill @dealingdreams @shadowheron2013 @julyrubyrose @wonderland-promises @hanav @rycewritestrash @thelittlefanpire @musicnote902 @stonybnatural @earthgay2052 @fabianapvec @bellarkehastakenovermylife , @bellarkewriting @failing-at-being-an-angel @jasprjordamn (lmk if you would like to be added to or deleted from this list)
*
They meet not long after Jasper starts bootlegging, running whiskey down and over the border, smuggling it into towns like Arkadia, and Polis. His biggest buyer is a guy who runs a speakeasy of sorts out of an old warehouse down below eighteenth street in the old part of Arkadia, the Ark District—Bellamy, whose beautiful younger sister, Octavia—ex-Goth girl vibe, current kickboxer, motorcycle enthusiast—was the first real love of Jasper's life.
He tells all this to Monty the first night they spend together, no more than four, five hours after they first meet. He meant to swing by, pick up, head off, but a few simple exchanges felt something like homecoming, like maybe they'd met before, knew each other in a far-gone and past-life way. He doesn't believe in past lives except in the sense that he'll believe anything under a star lit sky, with his mouth full of smoke.
Monty lives up in the mountains in the Trishan region, in a tilting wood house with a still on the first floor and a treacherous garden out back. He's a moonshiner but he introduces himself as a gardener, and tech refugee; has a radio he made himself, with a giant antenna, which tilts the same direction as the house; and a wall-to-wall bookshelf in the living room; and a kitchen that, Jasper will eventually learn, is never clean. The house is a surprise because his whole manner at first says uptight and type A, like he wouldn't be able to stand anything out of place, and maybe that's true. Maybe he just has a different sense of in place than most people. Maybe he's just been caught up in his own solitude for too long. Maybe it's just the clipped tone of his voice and how it takes him a while to relax.
In addition to the whiskey and the vegetable garden, he grows weed, which Jasper hasn't smoked in ages, which Monty shares, while they sit out on sloping Adirondack chairs on the back porch, watching the last of the sunset and listening to the buzz of summer evening in the weeds. Stay up in the forest long enough and it starts to feel a little claustrophobic. Jasper's a talker when he's high and Monty begins to unwind, to slouch, to laugh easy, and Jasper finds him funny when he turns silly and starts cracking jokes.
He tells Jasper early that he must love easy—
"Armchair psychologist when you're high?" Jasper asks him, and exhales, and watches the smoke drift up toward the deep black of the sky. No sky like this down in Arkadia, and he tells himself he needs to get out more, needs more of this real and unpolluted air in his life, in his lungs. "Or—is that what you were? In the last life?"
"I just know," Monty answers. He's still got that lighthearted smile curling his lips, which makes Jasper feel like he's falling in love. So maybe Monty was right. "I can just tell."
"That's cryptic."
Monty leans forward over his knees, and then sideways, into Jasper's space. The joint's burned down now and their fingers touch as it passes, one to the other, and Jasper watches the way that Monty's cheeks hollow as he breathes in, long and deep.
"You seem to think you're mysterious," he says, later, as he slumps back, weighted, boneless, with his face tilted up toward the stars.
Jasper's not so sure about the strange turns of this discussion, if it is a discussion. It's like trying to trace constellations. He's never known how.
"Aren't we all?" he asks. His own voice seems to echo in his ears. Maybe he'll take Monty down into the city sometime. Maybe this is only the pause, the prologue, to grand adventures. Maybe this high altitude will someday be their retreat, or their refuge. "Aren't we all a little mysterious, sometimes?"
