to_survive | (no subject)

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Today's workout had been a tough one, but Bellamy's starting to enjoy it, especially with Sassy's classes moving just beyond comfortable. He has quite a few tender spots on his outer thighs forming, and a bruise on his arm Clarke will probably fuss over, but he feels good. It's something to do, a way to feel like the life he'd known before Darrow isn't completely slipping away.

And if, for whatever reason, they find themselves back in their world, he won't be completely useless.

The weather is comfortable, cool in the shade and warm in the sun, much more preferable to the winter they finally seem to be coming out of. With his gym bag slung over one shoulder and hair still damp with sweat, Bellamy enjoys the moment as he waits outside the gym doors. He considers going over to Raven's later to check up on her and wonders about dinner with Clarke, all things that have become oddly normal and even domestic.

If only Octavia could be here to share it with him.

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It's another day where I don't want to leave the gym. On days like this, it's because I feel the most like myself when I'm twenty, thirty feet above the ground and my world crystalizes down into a goal, into the mask of surviving and staying safe. The world and all of its other difficulties are far away from me until I jump, swing, tumble my way back to earth.

When I fall into the mats, I notice the clock above me and realize that my shift is almost over and Bellamy is expecting me. Sitting up, I look across the gym and see him through the glass doors.

He's not surprised, not really, when he looks back through the doors to see Tris is still on the mats like the world isn't passing by on the outside. Bellamy doesn't have much of anything else to take up his time, and besides, he has Raven to check in on and generally pester on a daily basis via phone in addition to Clarke.

So he grins when he sees Tris looking out at him, and waves. He's going to give her shit for it, but he doesn't mind.

I don't bother to do anything more than clock out and take my jacket from behind the desk, my wallet and keys zipped into the pockets. Jogging over, I pretend to be embarrassed that I've gone over but we both know it's a token display. "Sometimes I forget that time doesn't stop just because you're high off the ground," I admit with a wry smile.

"I'm gonna start charging you for my time," he tells her, pulling his bag higher up on his shoulder. "Especially when I'm hungry after a workout. My time and stomach are precious, Tris."

"I'll go into the computer and cancel your membership," I say, wagging a finger at him like it's really a threat. "But if you're really that distraught, I guess I could just treat you. There's a hot dog cart not far from here."

"I have no shame in telling on you to Shevaun," he threatens right back. It's mostly an empty threat; Shevaun is just as scary as she is personable, and there are days Bellamy isn't sure whether he likes her or fears her more.

"Hot dog cart does sound good. So does you treating."

I laugh and ball up my hands into fists as if I'd actually hit him like this. "Come on, I'll buy you a real lunch. Call it a bribe." In the Factions, there was no 'treating' a friend to lunch. Either families took turns cooking or their factions had commissaries like Dauntless had. Presumably Dauntless families had taken turns cooking, at least.

Maybe they'd picked who cooked that night by throwing knives at a board.

"I'll take that bribe," Bellamy says with no shame whatsoever. He doesn't have a job and doesn't really have need for one with what little he lives off of, but that doesn't mean he'll turn down an offer when presented with one.

He shifts his bag from one shoulder to the next, and looks at Tris expectantly. "Lead the way."

Giving him a playful half-bow, I show Bellamny a few shops down the block to a sandwich shop that Four likes to take me often. The food is good and the place isn't so crowded, all blonde wooden tables and the constant aroma of freshly-made bread. I wonder if Bellamy will find this place as comforting as I do.

"Order at the counter."

Bellamy resists the urge to reach out and ruffle Tris' hair as they take off. He's relatively sure she'd karate chop his hand away if he tried something so patronizing, but the urge is often there; she's small and delicate-looking, but fierce where it counts, and there are half moments when his mind tricks him into thinking she fills the space Octavia should have.

Ultimately, it just makes his heart ache more.

"I will never get over how much of everything there is," he says to Tris once they're inside. He hasn't quite stepped up to the counter yet but is instead staring at the menu above it. "And the fact that most of it exists at all."

I catch a tangle in his expression, like he's stopping himself from making some kind of joke and I flash him a returning smile before gesturing him ahead of me. "I already know what I want," I explain. The cheese sandwich and tomato soup is the simplest option on the menu but it's good cheese, good bread, good vegetables and all of its simplicity makes it obvious. It also makes it homey, comforting.

"I know how that feels," I say, shaking my head. "We had...enough but the other factions always thought everyone else had more that they weren't sharing. Especially my birth faction."

Matthias takes a little longer with his workout than Bellamy, mostly because he's sort of obsessed with both the bicycle machine and the showers. So when he leaves, it's in a clean shirt, his short hair damp, holding an already half-eaten banana.

"Sorry about that," he says to Bellamy with an apologetic smile, shifting his gym bag over his shoulder. "Want to get lunch on the way back?"

"Absolutely," Bellamy agrees wholeheartedly. There's something about a decent lunch after a workout; he's hungrier (for obvious reasons) and the food tastes that much better. "Have you figured out a favorite food yet, or are you still exploring?"

"I don't think I've tried everything yet," Matthias says with a tiny grin. The grocery store is so large, and there are so many different kinds of foods and meals to make. "But so far I think pizza. What's yours?"

Bellamy grins, glad to be proven right once again about pizza being universally loved. How could anyone not enjoy it?

"Pizza," he says brightly, "and steak. We didn't get much meat when I was growing up." They got their protein, sure, but never in any way that was as appetizing as he's discovered food can be.

"I like steak as well, though it isn't new to me," Matthias says, and suddenly he realizes how hungry he is. Steak isn't exactly a post-work out lunch, but he's tempted. "I grew up with a hunting family, so there was plenty of meat, but it was mostly animals like reindeer and rabbits. Farming cattle is difficult in Fjerda because it's so cold most of the year. There is imported meat, but it's rare. An indulgence."

And thus, not exactly a staple of drüskelle meals, but he has tried it on a few rare occasions.

He likes hearing about the world Matthias came from; it sounds similar to what he imagines old Earth had been like centuries before his own time, and it's always odd when he compares it to his own life growing up on the Ark.

They'd looked back on humanity as a whole and thought they'd done so much better when in the end, they'd only made things worse.

"Hey, you had meat," he points out brightly. "I didn't have real meat until a year and a half ago."

Irradiated and mutated as the animals on the ground had been, it was still one of the best meals of Bellamy's life.

"None at all?" Even among the drüskelle there was fish because of the ocean. "What did you eat, then? Grains and produce?" he asks. He realizes he knows very little of Bellamy's life before Darrow, but if he lived with malnutrition before coming here it surely doesn't show now.

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