I wish you would write a fic about Bellarke reminiscing about the dropship days. Who knew that those would be "the simpler times?"
this is probably not what you were looking for at all, whoops… {ao3}
Echo squeezed his hand once more and was gone. Bellamy blinked back his tears, and the realization she was right finally began to set in.
They’d argued (gently), and fucked (less gentle), and cried, and she’d ended it almost before he knew what she was saying. They were on different journeys now, the two of them, and he was lying to himself if he thought they’d have made it much farther together.
She’s put him first, so he wouldn’t have to.
His thoughts could turn to Octavia now. His little sister, now vanished and replaced by a dead eyed tyrant crowned with blood.
If he’d known six years ago what he knew now, what happiness would he have managed to find on the ring?
He closed his eyes and he could still hear the joy in his sister’s laugh the first time they’d set foot on the ground, still see the wonder in her face the first time she’d crossed the threshold of her cell, still feel the grip of her tiny hand curling round his finger the first time he’d held her in his arms.
How had she come to this? Where could he go from here?
Bellamy looked up.
His eyes met Clarke’s, and he froze.
—
Clarke glanced away.
She didn’t have a minute to waste, and yet every time she saw them together she was incapable of breathing, of moving, of thinking about anything else. How the fuck was that fair?
Whatever had happened between Bellamy and anyone else shouldn’t matter. She wasn’t his, he wasn’t hers. Whatever they had been to each other hadn’t survived Praimfaya.
She saw flashes in her mind: the makeshift shelters of the dropship camp, the gates of Arkadia, the florescent lit halls of Mt Weather, the beach by the sea….then, pushing back on her conscious thoughts, the memory of Bellamy’s hand in hers, his arms round her, his face buried in her hair–gone, all of it. Dust and ash and darkness.
She gripped Madi’s shoulders (real, solid) and moved toward him. It would hurt less the more distance she put between them. It had to.
As long as he was alive (she prayed for that, she prayed), nothing could hurt more than this.