#wellamy

Nor does this weather, this bleak season strike him as a proper time to speak about beginnings, or anything new. Arkadia now feels like it is coming to an end of an era, or more precisely like it is stuck, mired, in an endless middle. A pause. A taut uncertainty. When humans look back on them, as Bellamy imagines sometimes that they will, perhaps they will view this time as only part of the prologue, along with everything else he has done so far on Earth. The dropship camp, the fall of the Mountain—mere footnotes, if he's lucky. Camp Jaha, a forgotten name. What Arkadia will become, should it last—that will be the story for the ages.

He walks up behind Wells slowly, pretends he is trying not to be heard. Wells appears deep in thought, and so it is easy to pretend he is not really listening, even though he is. He always his. His thoughts could be anywhere, now; Bellamy tries to trace them, but his guesses are only the faintest stabs in the dark. Maybe he is wondering about his father, the ex-Chancellor's fool's errand, the Wasteland and the fabled City of Light. Or maybe he's worrying, as Bellamy still does, about Clarke. She’s been gone over a month now, the trail she’s left behind scattered and faint. How she’s become just another one of their ghosts in the wilderness.

When he's close enough, he grabs Wells's hands and pins them behind his back, presses up close against him and growls in his ear, "Hey. You're under arrest."

Wells twists out of the hold easily, and he's already grinning a lop-sided, easy grin when he turns to face Bellamy at last. "That's a terrible joke to play on an ex-prisoner," he says, and Bellamy just shrugs and steps aside.

"Just practicing. What do you think of the new jacket?" He grabs at the edges and holds them out, like he's showing off, trying to hide with exaggerated bravado how much wearing the Guard uniform feels like a child’s game. Even though, or because, he knows that fake bravado is the first thing that Wells will see right through.

"Nice," he answers, and crosses his arms against his chest. "Who'd you steal that from?"

"Kane gave it to me." If you can believe that. Might as well be a sick joke, another way the world has turned upside down and sideways on them, somewhere along the way from the sky to the ground. "He wants me to train some of the hundred to be part of the Guard."

Wells raises his eyebrows. Bellamy can't tell if he's surprised or impressed. "Makes sense," he concedes. "We have the most experience on the ground, and in combat with the Grounders."

"And it's nice that Kane and Abby are finally acknowledging that," Bellamy adds.

"Yeah." Wells's brow furrows, a distant expression on his face again, and Bellamy is about to ask him what else is on his mind, when he leans back against the doorway and asks, "Does he think we'll need a lot of soldiers?"

Out of the corner of Bellamy's eye, the wall they've put up at the borders of the camp looms tall, broken only by the massive front gate.

"I don't know," he admits. "If he knows more than we do... he's not sharing."

"Not surprising." Wells looks down at his boots, the squared off posture of his shoulders and the slight v between his eyebrows enough for Bellamy to feel the tension in him, feel it as if it were an extension of himself. "Can you believe we're in this place—where we don't know if we're at war or not?"

"Hey—" Bellamy steps forward, his hands on Wells's arms until Wells looks up at him and meets his eye. "A bunch of kids from the Sky Box are going to put on these jackets and be the elite. And I have to pretend that this isn't a big deal so it doesn't go to anyone's head. But it is a big deal. Makes me feel like..." He takes a deep breath, lets it go and feels light-headed, realizes all at once that outside, the last of the light has bled out from the sky and the clouds have opened up, and it has started to snow. "Makes me feel like if there is a war, we'll win it."