Stronger Together | The 100 [Bellarke one-shots]

Magnetic

Clarke survived, but she was alone: her friends hopefully alive in the remainder of the Ark; her mother and people hopefully alive underground. With Praimfaya came the destruction of everything Clarke had come to know about the world.

And so she had to learn to live.

With the unique strength of her Nightblood against the radiated world, she explored the ruins of the island. She scavenged for food and technology alike, finding little of either.

Another year passed, slow and fast at the same time. Each day seemed both alike and different, her words spoken aloud to herself the only voice she knew beyond the temperamental weather and the odd creature who, like her, had somehow managed to survive.

After fifteen months of failure, Clarke finally pieced together a working radio made of a conglomeration of scavenged parts, luck, and persistence. She radioed the common frequency for the Polis bunker and got nothing. She radioed the Ark and got nothing.

Maybe she truly was alone. Maybe her friends and family and people were gone, killed in Praimfaya after everything they had done to survive it.

No. Clarke refused to fall prey to those doubts. Her people were alive. Her mother was alive. Her friends were alive.

Bellamy was alive.

Through everything – Praimfaya, her sickness as her body's cells mutated to survive, her loneliness, frustration, despair, hope, successes and failures – she had kept Bellamy tucked safely in her heart, replaying little moments she didn't think she had remembered until she had nothing left but those moments. And it was then, when she had perhaps lost him forever, that Clarke knew and admitted to herself that she loved him.

And she missed him – oh! How she missed him.

She missed Bellamy's rare, wide smile that held only the brightest and warmest of joys. She missed trying to count the freckles on his features as she tried especially not to count them. She missed his voice, deep and comforting even in their darkest moments. She even missed their fights from those early days, seemingly so small in the light of all they had faced.

She missed her mother and friends, too, but it wasn't their faces that she saw the most or dreamed about. She wanted to see them again, too, but they weren't the ones she found herself wishing to see first.

No.

Clarke missed everything about Bellamy with everything that she was.

~

Bellamy had forgotten how quiet it was in space.

Oh, there was the hiss of the air circulating in the vents and the muted pulse of electricity humming in the walls. But compared the vibrancy of Earth, going back to space made life gray and dull.

Maybe that was because Clarke wasn't there, wasn't anywhere except maybe miniscule specks of dust from what had been left of the world after Praimfaya.

Bellamy tried not to think about her very much. And for the first fourteen months after they – he, Raven, Monty, Harper, Murphy, Emori, and Echo – arrived in the discarded remains of the Ark, he almost succeeded. The fact that they had to constantly work to stay alive, to keep the Ring running, helped quite a bit.

But he really didn't know how to be lonely, not with the knowledge that Clarke was gone. Some nights Echo helped stave off the emptiness and, one time, Raven had, too. But those were nothing but moments when the loneliness was so much for them that drowning it in mindless pleasure was all they had left. Even with Monty's expertise and imagination, there wasn't much beyond the necessary amounts for survival to consume on the Ark.