Y'all ever wonder if Bellamy ever thought about Jasper after he passed? Like laying down at night and maybe he starts crying thinking about the first few days on earth where Jasper was always by his side, eager to help, eager to please. Or maybe he catches himself wrapping his own arms around his body where Jasper's once were when they hugged. When he feels like no one is there for him he tries to remember what it was like to have Jasper around, always ready to help and listen. How easy going he could be and how annoyingly charismatic he was. I like to think Bellamy Blake just thinks about these things sometimes.
K so like it kills me everyday a little more that we didn’t get any Murphy & Jasper moments after Maya’s death cause, like, Murphy knows what it’s like to loose people you love and then become a piece of shit and be seen a selfish? Plus they both don’t have any family? And they love alcohol? And they have a crush on Bellamy? And Abby’s their mom? We were robbed????
~700 words, canon divergent (Jasper lives, and also btw no one goes to space), post-S4
For Anon.
Want one? Send me a pairing and a word
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When they start building permanent houses in the new Arkadia, Jasper signs up to work on the crew. Real physical work. Long hours in the sun until his muscles ache, his hands hardening with callouses, sweat shining across his forehead and nose.
He always thought he'd be the sort to work with his mind. He always thought, he always thought. He’d be a chemist on the Ark or something.
Some days he still can't trust his brain. And every day he needs to wake up to feel the sun and the wind and smell the grass and flowers, to know that all of this is real. That he's made it through years of dark and dismal tunnel to the other side.
Mostly.
After a day of work he should collapse onto his bed (the same mattress he slept on in the bunker, a thin pallet bed that still smells of the underground) and sleep the dreamless deep sleep of the dead. But instead he sits outside in the grass with his ankles loosely crossed and his knees pulled up to his chest and tilts his head back and gazes at the stars. The night air is crisp and cool. The sky ink-black and the stars sharp and blazing.
"You're going to catch a cold," a gruff voice behind him says, but he doesn't startle. He tilts his head all the way back until his neck aches. From this angle, he can just about make out Bellamy, standing behind him, awkwardly tilted and upside-down in Jasper's view. He's holding out a Guard's jacket for him.
"Thanks, Dad," Jasper answers. It's maybe a little mean, calling him that. Especially because that's not really how he thinks of Bellamy at all.
Bellamy just grunts and settles the jacket over Jasper's shoulders, then sits down next to him. He's still dressed in his work clothes too, and he's wearing an identical Guard jacket of his own. Except that he's earned his, and Jasper's is just on loan.
He pulls his arms through the sleeves and wraps it tight around himself. It's a little too big, and far too heavy; he feels like he's swimming in it, or buried underneath it. "Mmmm," he hums, and hunches his shoulders upward, and wraps his arms around his knees.
"You did good work today," Bellamy says. It's obviously a remark just made to fill the silence but it’s a high compliment too. The currency of Bellamy's life is hard work.
"I know. It feels weird to wear this thing." He tugs at the edge of his sleeve. "Not sure I like it."
"You ever think of joining?"
Jasper's face contorts, and he looks at Bellamy, trying to discern his real meaning by the expression on his face. But it's too neutral. "You'd even trust me with a gun?"
"Yes." Bellamy, a font of forgiveness. "It's been a long time, Jasper."
It doesn't feel like a long time, except in the sense that it feels like an endless time, and maybe this is something Bellamy would understand—or maybe it isn't. "I wouldn't want one anyway." Even this is too hard to explain. So much life taken, and for so little. He won't do it again. If someone came to attack them again he'd surrender with his hands up. But saying something like that would only worry them—Bellamy, Monty, the rest of them. "That's your life."
Bellamy makes a noise something like a grunt and scoff mixed together, and then, inexplicably, he reaches over and rubs briefly at the back of Jasper's neck, a gesture not quite comradely, or brotherly, too tender for that, yet also too awkward and too distant to impart any more intimate affection. Before Jasper can even quite register it, he's crossed his arms against his chest again. "I don't have much choice in that," he says.
To that, Jasper could say that they have come too far to still be binding their own hands with talk of obligation and hard-hearted duty and cold loyalty, but he doesn't. He just lets it wash over him, this realization. The knowledge that Bellamy is stuck in his own tunnel, too.
