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Bellamy has the idea, one night late into the summer, when it’s sticky and humid and hot (all these words they’d dreamed about for years but never imagined feeling), and the air won’t still against the skin: to escape, if only for a day.
Raven can’t hide her skepticism, as he tugs her gently from her cot. “The beach?” She stifles a yawn, and watches as Bellamy half-smiles in the darkness.
“Yeah. Why not?” His speaks, voice alight with anticipation. “Lincoln told me it’s not far from here, that he used to swim in it as a kid when the heat was suffocating, you know, kind of like now?”
She fights the smile that desperately wants to appear on her lips.
Bellamy’s settled in his skin now. Years of deception and anger washed away by the toils of war, until the boy turned to man to peace keeper. He brokers treaties with neighbouring Grounders now, works with them to save this land that humanity all but destroyed all those years ago.
Decisively refuses to be a part of the people who would dare to do it again.
A diplomatic, they call him; after which he always he ducks his crimson cheeks from view.
She thinks it suits him well.
He’s still got that disarming smile; it doesn’t hurt of course, that he can charm the pants off anyone when he wants. Even her. Even now. Especially now.
“Why not?” She supplies eventually, when the silence stretches too thin between them, and reaches for her brace.
Except his hand grasps out to stop her, and she watches his head shake in the shadows. “The salt water, it’ll rust it. Just, here--”
And he leans down towards her, and suddenly she finds herself propelled onto his back. It’s closer than she normally allows herself to be (to him, to anyone), but just this once, instead of protesting, she settles into him, enjoying the way his back muscles push and strain against her chest.
(She’ll blame the heat, if someone questions her, the intense heat that sucked everything out from between them until what remained was the same shared sharpness that always rested right beneath their skin; a biting truth of who they once were, and who they could be.)
The Rover looks different in the dimness. A beast of a machine that was hers and hers alone until it somehow became theirs. She taught him to drive, in the moments they found between the back-breaking work that was needed to get Arkadia off the ground and the softness they needed to hold in spades if they were ever going to live in peace with the people of the ground.
None of the early rises around them move as the engine roars to life. And the guards at the gate merely wave them on as the roll past them at the slow and steady pace. It immediately makes Raven suspicious.
“You planned this, didn’t you?”
Bellamy shrugs his shoulders from behind the wheel, as dawn begins to peak at the horizon. “You needed a break. We both did.”
She hums in reply, her lips pressed together in thought, and Bellamy glances towards her. Raven can see him just in her peripheral; he’s always there, just on the edge but never too close, floating in her orbit like she’s the sun and he’s desperate to soak in everything she is.
It pulls on her heart with an unexpected heaviness; overwhelming her senses until she closes her eyes and folds into herself. Deep down, she’s always known. He hovers and holds and fixes and mends for what feels like the entire world, but always, always falls back into her path.
Like a comet chasing a star across a galaxy.
(And, worse, she knows she’s just the same.)
Dunes cresting on the coastline draw her from her thoughts, and beside her Bellamy laughs as she pushes herself up in her seat, suddenly longing for this place that she’s never dreamed of, never seen.
She gasps, as it comes in to view, all pale and delicate yet roaring with life. It reminds her of space, and the thought sends goose bumps down her back and into her soul, because she aches for the brilliant life and vast emptiness of nothing that space was, and yet here, here on earth, there is something so very similar, yet so drastically different.
Just at their fingertips.
Bellamy pulls the rover to a stop, and she pushes the door open instantly, and breathes in the air. It’s cooler here, tainted with salt and sand and something new. It’s an experience, she thinks, something to catalogue and archive and hold close to her chest, because the good ones were few and far between for a while, and most of them just made her ache for the stars.
But this; this draws her in and pulls her close, her heart expanding as the night sky turns from ashen grey to muted cream and yellow, signifying another day, another dawn.
Beneath her feet (her shoes forgotten, left behind with the heat of the night) grains of sand mingle with grass and grate at her skin, the sensation unlike anything she could’ve thought up while they dreamed of earth during History in school.
(Did they ever mention the beach, she thinks, as she pushes herself to a standing position and lets the sand sink deeper, deeper between her toes, or were they too concerned with teaching them antiquated skills they believed would help them survive?)
Her eyes flutter closed as she soaks in the breeze, soft and sweet and cool against her sticky skin. She senses Bellamy next to her, and the back of his hand presses against hers, tenderly at first, and then more and more until her eyes sweep open and she looks towards him.
Only he’s looking out, towards the horizon, where the sky has turned to pinks and purples, and the boundless water seems to stretch on forever. They breath in time, in, out, in, out, and eventually she tugs his hand into hers, raising it against her dry lips.
The gesture startles him from his reverie, and this time she laughs, as he looks down towards her.
“What, you thought you had the monopoly on grand gestures?”
The words linger between them; lost in the soft silence of a new morning. Then it breaks, and his lips tilt into a smile, and her heart swells in her chest like a crashing wave.
“Come on,” Raven motions towards the water. “I mean, we did come all this-”
Bellamy’s arms wrap tightly around her, and the end of her words are engulfed by a squeak of shock as he tugs her up against his chest. He moves slowly over the dune, down onto the damp sand, feet squelching into the softness, before coming to stand at the waters edge.
From where Raven sits nestled in Bellamy’s arms, she can only hear the movement of the waves, pushing and pouring against the shore, trickling forward onto the sand, lapping slowly against his feet, so she twists and turns (and whines at his laugh) until she’s met with the far horizon, with brilliant bright yellows and oranges making their way into the morning sky.
The water, by contrast, is deep blue, almost black. Looming like space, dotted with starlight rays in the small waves that crest with the wind. She can sense his hesitation, his trepidation; a step forward could be a deep drop to the bottom of the ocean.
But between them a moment is shared (vivid and dazzling and all so new) and with the smallest of nods Raven urgers them forward: and Bellamy takes their first shared step into the sea.
Raven can feel the push of the tide against his body, feels his muscles contract when it gushes past him in slow, strong waves. She can hear the way it crashes against his skin, drumming and roaring past them with echoes lasting long after it has gone.
For the smallest of moments, she thinks they’ll be swallowed, only then she glances down and sees all that the water has swallowed is Bellamy’s calf, and barely at that, and she realises then the slant and the slope of the world is a thing to behold; steady, gentle, forgiving in ways that the vacuum of space was not.
Bellamy stops then, a few feet from shore, water splashing between his legs; a moment of awe for the things on earth that may never change.
Only Raven is impatient, watching him soak it all in, missing out on all the touch. She too, wants to feel the tide push against her skin.
“What’s it feel--” She begins to ask but shrieks and tightens around him as Bellamy drops her down towards the water, and it splashes in waves against her back.
He pulls her up, and she feels it slipping down her back in long weighted drops, pulling the thin fabric of her shirt towards the edge. She breathes out, as the cool envelopes her body, the sweet tang of salt tightening her skin.
The ocean, it turns out, feels like forever.
She laughs, deep and content, and he whispers against her neck, “Want to do that again?”
She smiles, and pulls back, then pushes her lips against his, soft at first, and then deeper and deeper until his hands are under her shirt, tight on her waist, and her tongue is tracing his lips.
She screams as he loses his balance, and they both fall backwards into the ocean, submerged by the waves for the briefest moment before surfacing and sitting quiet in the shallows.
Raven nods, as he pulls her towards him, straddling his lap as the waves pool around them. “Yes,” she sighs, pushing wet hair from his eyes and cupping his cheeks, “Let’s do that again.”