( yeah, i'd rather be a lover than a fighter )

[baring]

who: bellamy blake (baring), clarke griffin (skaikru), her adopted people, and YOU! | ( 3 open prompts, 1 semi-closed )
when: mid may, post-party
where: various locations
summary: there's no getting around the fact that clarke's been here for months. there's also no getting around bellamy's refusal to leave her side. time to face the damn music and figure out a new normal.
warnings: blanket warning for the 100's everything. nothing graphic or violent planned but the meta of both bellamy and clarke will probably go to some dark and unfortunate places. feel free to opt-out here on his permissions post.

I'M IN NEED OF A SAVIOR, BUT I'M NOT ASKING FOR FAVORS. | clarke griffin + bellamy blake ( VARIOUS LOCATIONS, SEMI-OPEN TO EVERYONE BUT EBALON AND LA PLUMA 🙃 )

( friends, enemies, casual acquaintances, neighbors, and begrudging allies — you've all met clarke griffin, right? 5'5", blonde, best described as fucking reckless and angry, but like, with a purpose. she's been here since the beginning, jumped off the serena eterna and very publicly died against the side of pirate jenny's galleon. got her arm chopped off in the televised battle royale, and recently took a pair of lobster crackers to the captain's head while sitting in his lap in the middle of a party. basically always looks like she's about to cry, punch someone in the face, or grind her teeth so hard they crack under the pressure of all her anxieties. bleeds black blood, still looks a little crispy from maybe-dying in a nuclear apocalypse. exudes an air of forlorn loneliness, and begrudgingly started making friends. only really gets excited about antibiotics and chocolate cake. doesn't wash her clothes enough, has been the doomsday caller on the corner insisting they were all going to die from day one...

well guess what, you're about to start see her smiling. a lot.

small, still-sad smiles; like tragic inside jokes are being passed back and forth between her and the young man who arrived just recently, and seemingly immediately glued himself to her side. and her to his.

catch them walking through the hallways together, oddly mirrored images of emaciated, battle weary youths. or spot them sitting in a corner table of the dining halls, her picking at a sparse plate of meat whilst he hunches over a bowl of soup. or maybe you see the two of them out on deck, clarke gesturing all about like a tour guide — look, that's where pirate jenny swelled from the sea and almost drowned us all; that's the direction the skiff from the island returned from; there's no fish in the sea; that's the bridge up there; here are the most strategic points i've found in the event of an on-board war, etc — while bellamy takes it all in with a perpetual air of disbelieving acceptance. they're probably also found in all and sundries, clarke shoving bottled water, prepackaged snacks, and soap into his arms before giving him the rundown on how to "check out", despite no actual money being necessary. or maybe at the mouth of the newly erected tommy bahama's, neither complaining about the gaudy patterns all that much — still not quite over the novelty of new and clean.

anywhere along the ship, those few who have become friends and confidants may be flagged down by clarke with an almost unnatural air of enthusiasm. anyone else who approaches will be politely greeted, and introduced to — )

This is Bellamy.

( unless it's ebalon or la pluma, in which case clarke's immediately clamming up, and putting hands on bellamy to usher him away. )

MY WHOLE LIFE I'VE FELT LIKE A BURDEN. I THINK TOO MUCH AND I HATE IT. | LIBRARY, OPEN.

( if there were any informational texts to be found, clarke would already have them stashed and earmarked. that isn't good enough. what purpose does a library have, if not to help people educate themselves?

bellamy has to see the library with his own eyes and make his own judgment call on whether it's useless. he trusts clarke; this isn't about that. it's about books. actual physical copies of books were limited on the ark, rarities in the form of personal collections that either passed hand-to-hand or were kept aside, criminally untouched in private collections. most texts were accessible via tablet, presuming you had the credentials. classes were generally lectured from flawed memory, arbitrarily passed to the next generation by word-of-mouth. he runs his freshly scrubbed fingers over the spines, skimming titles and authors in quiet wonderment. is this what people on earth had, before? stories that weren't crumbling to pieces, water or fire-damaged, missing pages?

he pulls several in his rummaging, opening them to thumb through the pages, puzzling over the binding on hardcover copies.

up and down a ladder, he inspects the uppermost shelves as well, probably with a goofy smile on his face.

just wait until he tells octavia ab—

expression darkening, he closes that particular book in a snap and stows it away where he found it. eventually, less sulkily, he winds up cross-legged on the floor with a semi-circle of books around him. the running theme seems to be shakespeare and any roman-themed ( greek will suffice ) fiction he can find.

when he isn't surveilling the ship, collecting supplies like a retriever and/or following clarke like a menacing shadow, he can be found descending down the literary hole with tunnel vision. he's either startled out of his reverie with a, ) Did you say something?

( or more inquisitively, disturbing another reader to ask, )

Fifty shades of what now? ( SQUINT ) But there aren't that many.

( please humor the man. he is clearly handicapped by a lack of taste, what with that shirt, those socks and really impractical khaki pants that are too tight and without nearly enough pockets. )

I'M SO USED TO BEING IN THE WRONG, I'M TIRED OF CARING. | TUAVA ( BUT CAN BE TWEAKED TO WHATEVER BAR ), OPEN.

( you ever have one of those nights where you can't stand anyone or anything? you can't sleep because you're too exhausted but too alert to give yourself permission to rest? can't eat it away, can't shower it away? in a hopeless attempt to cross everything off the list, he even tries jogging in start-and-stop laps around the sports deck. the runner's high gives him a head rush stronger than any deprivation while an alarm was blaring in space. all it does is make him miss raven and echo, and being knocked flat on his back repeatedly. so naturally, he runs that much harder to steal the wind from his own lungs. bellamy exercises until his hands are on his knees and he's a heaving mess, concerned he's about to lean over the railing and hurl up his soup from dinner earlier.

the edginess lingers after his second shower of the day, doesn't go swirling down the drain with his shampoo like he wishes it would.

he wanders the many shops and entertainment without any real direction in mind, giving clarke her first real solitude since his arrival and allowing himself to shake out the feelings he's been bottling up on purpose.

his feet lead him to a whiskey bar of all places. he stands in the entry for a whopping thirty seconds—don't do this, you don't do this—and then he shrugs off the little voice in his head that reminds him incessantly of his responsibilities ( how clarke needs him to be strong, how their people are probably waiting for them to come home ). but for the next hour, bellamy wants to sit slouched in a loveseat with a leg drawn up, bent at the knee but preoccupying the entire piece of furniture with how he's spread out. a half-full glass rests on his thigh with his hand over it. if anyone happens to look up or moves to sit across from him, he'll raise his glass in answer. but, he doesn't have much to say.

he's spent the last six months playing clue in his head, wondering who would kill who with what and where, if he didn't unplug the oxygenator first because they could all be so aggravating in close quarters. only, for tonight, he misses them. because for the first time without octavia in his life, he still had a family. there were these people around him constantly, filling a wound in him.

lamely and without more than a tired smile, he tilts his head to the side and gestures with his free hand. )

Can I buy you a drink? ( sorry, friend, he's running on empty. )

LOVING NEVER GAVE ME A HOME, SO I'LL SIT HERE IN THE SILENCE. | ADULT POOL, OPEN.

( reasons why we do not drink in our ripe old age: The Hangover. The Hangover, different than a hangover ( lowercase ), finds you, cracks you over the head with the nearest blunt object ( a flamingo-shaped bookend ) and plays some god awful bubblegum pop song on a loop until you die. maybe that latter part is more the serena eterna than bellamy, but he can't be sure this song wasn't on maya's ipod that jasper inherited. was it? is this hell?

when he accomplishes crawling ( yes ) out of bed and finding a pair of shorts, he blearily stumbles to the pool deck for some much needed sunshine with some weird sandals and chunky pink, plastic sunglasses. his curls may or may not be defying gravity in whatever manner they please. the towel around his shoulders like a cape is the closet bellamy gets to locating a shirt in his zombie shuffle to one of the beach chairs.

forty-five minutes later and this man is staring at the water like an uninterested cat, nodding off in his chair. this is what the kids are calling suntanning, right? unintentionally falling asleep and gaining more freckles? okay, cool.

except every time he almost falls asleep the umph tiss umph tiss starts up and he jumps, heart-racing, panic! at the pool, party of one. )

This is not what dreams are made of. I've got to get out of here.

( ABORT PLAN!!!! ABORT!!! it's too late, he's standing at an unfortunate time, rising as someone approaches to sit next to him and now here they are, nose-to-nose(ish) - height differences, you know. someone flails, there's grabbing, a teeter-totter effect and then maybe this ends in a meet-cute and not murder. that happens, doesn't it? surely, two people can plummet into a beach chair and not go to battle. )

Comments

savior.... (extremely questionable)

[fonomena]

[Jade has stopped by All And Sundries himself today--is present within the small storefront even before Clarke and Bellamy arrive, actually, preoccupied with the stationery section towards the back until voices both familiar and not snag his attention and sideline it a bit. --Not enough to immediately move him from his spot in front of the shelves of nautically-patterned souvenir notebooks, necessarily, but plenty enough for him to cast an idle glance over. To note with interest as Clarke piles all manner of supplies in the arms of the young man beside her, chattering away on uses and priorities for each item with...an enthusiasm that is a rather unusual fit on her, honestly.

Jade's surely far more accustomed to seeing her more tense than not, anyway...yet here she is now with an entirely new spring of energy in her step, as she ushers the stranger to the cash register and starts walking him through the payment process. Hm.

Still, even if he doesn't exactly go out of his way to draw attention to himself, it's not exactly like Jade tries very hard to conceal his presence either. By the time they're done with the cash register he's picked out a couple of packets of ballpoint pens, and started thumbing through one of the more expensive notebooks to test the quality of the pages between his fingertips (always too thin, most of these, ever a far cry from the proper parchment he'd really rather taken for granted in the stationery supply shops back home); Clarke seems to catch proper sight of him around this point, and as their steps grow closer instead of fading through the entrance Jade looks up at both of the two of them properly, flipping the notebook shut between his hands.]

Is that so? This is a new face, around here...the two of you are fast friends, then? --Or perhaps reunited friends?

[Certainly, there have been plenty of instances of passengers finding associates from their own worlds here...and just judging by Clarke's demeanor alone, Jade can already take a fair guess at the answer he'd probably bet on about now. Jade's attention affixes promptly enough on Bellamy's features as he offers a pleasant smile and polite nod of his head at the introduction, doing little to hide the idle curiosity in the assessing cast of his glance. (Unnaturally red, behind the glasses--or is that just the lighting, in here? Great question...probably nothing to worry about.....)]

[baring]

( by the time they’re through playing pretend at the cash register, bellamy has a bag full of miscellaneous items. some that clarke pushed into his hands, others that he swiped because he thought they might have a use beyond their intended purpose. he’s no engineer so he is once again longing for two of his closest friends ( and legitimate heroes ) to tinker with these items for him, alongside him up until the moment they unanimously tell him he’s getting in the way and slowing them down. it’ll take him a lot longer to figure out another utilization but he will, considering they have a bit more time on board between excursions and appearances of their dreadful captain - according to clarke.

pulled by this reverie with a slow exhale and clarke presenting him to someone new, he interjects with an unfunny partial joke, partial reflex to keep what’s important to him close to his chest. )

We met in the lounge. ( would not be surprised if clarke speaks over him to tell the truth. she has that advantage: time and established trust, presumably. bellamy is perplexed by the red tint of this man’s eyes and has no sense of self-preservation when it comes to manners of all things; he stares. not just at his eyes, but they’re distinctive. unless that’s? a ship thing? the what are you is on the tip of his tongue. )

[skaikru]

( well, surprise surprise — )

Yeah, and just instantly hit it off.

( completely flat, little to no affect.

jade curtiss is, relatively beyond doubt, a decent person. for as little as everyone here knows about one another, it comes down to measuring a person by their actions more often than not. the first time they'd met, she'd absolutely decked him in the face and bloodied his nose, but he'd hit her right back — and then levelled a spear tip at her throat. a gun had been drawn and the evening (early morning) had still ended in coffee and bagels. the second time they'd met had been while the world rocked beneath their feet and death howled in chorus with the winds whipping around pirate jenny's monstrous form. he'd prevented her second watery death that month, and when assaulted by furniture sliding across the atrium floor, he'd taken the brunt of a coffee table breaking across his back so she didn't have to. he'd helped natsuno too. he'd chased after rita mordio when she'd fled into the foliage on the murder island. clarke had seen how he'd died, and how he'd tried to protect her too...

so long story short, clarke no longer dislikes the man. he's pretty alright.

but none of that changes the fact her own kneejerk reaction — at least when they're not speaking one on one about the likelihood of mass slaughter, or prying each other from the wreckage of a ship about to sink in a storm — is still unbridled sass.

still, her joke may be undercut by just how closely clarke inclines her head towards bellamy, a mockery of an aside. )

This is Jade. He keeps a spear in his arm and calls it magic, but it all comes back to phonons and vibrations.

[fonomena]

[It's true in a tenuous sense that there's some form of established trust, here...the sort of trust that only emerges from duress for a fact, still a bit miraculous just by sheer virtue of how remarkably rocky that first encounter had sure started out. ...Which might explain why a general sort of prickliness has tended to persist, in more casual interactions. No, when there isn't a terrible storm at hand or mass murder afoot, there are lulls in idle passing encounters--or more direct visits, on those (frequent) occasions where Clarke tries to access Natsuno in his room and ends up having to snark her way through the older and ruder roommate that occasionally opens the door instead--where idle barbs of sass sure tend to be swapped about...

And now is no exception, clearly, which--is actually quite fine by Jade? There's a flicker of the more familiar Clarke of the ship, at any rate, if not still mildly more pleasant against a backdrop of camaraderie with someone who's clearly a close friend at the least....]

Very fast friends, then! How very heartwarming to see. [A humored lilt, here, bordering on sardonic; the dry joking has been detected and taken in cheery stride, apparently.] It does look as if Clarke has been rendering herself a very effective tour guide so far, at the very least...

[The staring on Bellamy's part assuredly isn't going unnoticed, of course; Jade returns the eye contact very directly, pleasant smile unwavering--as if any particularly relevant odd colorations weren't already slightly unsettling enough, you know. He could take a few guesses at some reasons behind the staring, too...as he gets a sense it doesn't just have to do with the teal uniform he's wearing presently--some sort of evident military bent in the sharp lines of the design, to any eye more familiar with noting such things. Bellamy wouldn't be the first to wonder about his eye color here, though Jade has found himself receiving far fewer remarks on it on the ship than he might have back home. Probably something to do with the myriad variety of passengers present in this place...but for newcomers, well. Perhaps some staring is to be expected all around...

Still, Clarke's introduction and brief summary in turn are at least enough to sideline Jade's attention at length.]

Now, it ought to be clarified--I'm more personally inclined to call it a fonic arte. "Magic" remains a terribly layman sort of term... [An airy sigh!! As his shoulders shift in a small sort of shrug. (It should be noted that his arms sure look entirely normal and spear-free at least externally here, setting aside the long uniform-matching gloves he's wearing presently....) Focus shifts back over to Bellamy, as he decides he may as well clarify.] Though it's also a term used more frequently aboard this ship, so some flexibility in description has been necessary. I am a fonist--a practitioner of fonic artes. And my primary field of study is fonology--the mechanics of fonons, which Clarke here does summarize quite well enough. They are particles of vibration which make up matter alongside atoms...to put it about as succinctly, anyway.

[A beat, perhaps rather courteously provided for Bellamy to absorb all this; some people have an easier time of it than others, all told...]

--But I'm sure you've probably already encountered plenty of phenomena and passengers far stranger than this on your familiarization with this ship so far, hm?

sorry for the delay! the plague got me.

[baring]

Yeah, she’s been incredibly thorough. Hasn’t tripped once. ( the bar on evaluations of a successful tour is low. he would give five stars to anyone that didn’t try to kill him during the onboarding process. a man with more civility would blink here, shamed to a flush in the cheeks at having been caught red-handed, staring. bellamy keeps jade’s gaze unflinchingly, scrutinizing his appearance with a critical air. it’s needless, he can’t make sense of the irregularity ( to him, in his experience ) by vision alone. he doesn’t blurt it out mid-conversation, he has some grasp of tact upon occasion.

clarke’s rundown is simpler to follow in that the words follow each other, should make sense, but leave bellamy staring at jade’s arm trying to figure out where a spear would be hiding, and where it would rupture through. all together, it’s a pretty gross image he’s concocted. )

We are layman. ( seriously, talk down to him. magic is the stuff of happy endings. for all his wonder, bellamy’s been convinced of one thing: magic isn’t real. nothing will save you when you’re at your wit’s end, broken and bleeding, begging for mystical intervention, nothing but yourself. he wrestles with skepticism and envy, kept at bay only by a natural curiosity. his convictions are not easily forgotten, he’s trying to pardon them for clarke and each one of her friends. )

Strange is relative. Every person I’ve met has challenged my concept of normalcy. I haven’t lived by the parameters of normal for some time now. ( yeah, a bizarre comment to make without context. ) It would probably freak me out more if I woke up and discovered we could actually live here peacefully. No games, no tests, just life. I’ll get my head around fonology when I'm done being confused about storefronts and cash registers actually being here.

Society's weird. I'm actually more willing to believe in magic than that.