( the world outside is wrong — the sun and the sky should both be working in tandem to destroy all remaining life on the planet. there shouldn’t be a planet. he shouldn’t be on solid ground at all. in fact, he should be dead, reclaimed by nature. somehow, that finality doesn't come for him, which is probably the luckiest he's been in years. first, he wanders to the front window of the shop he sprinted into to get out of the weather and peers in dismay at the courtyard. it just doesn't make any sense. the intact buildings, the electricity, the survivable surface. the next action he takes is to secure the door by pushing a heavy table in front of it. not the best blockade in existence, but someone would still have to crawl over or under, or take the time of pushing it to follow him. it'll do. either way, he'll get an alert via sound and a heads-up is the only thing he can hope for.

not being able to shove the pieces of a puzzle together hasn't slowed bellamy down before, so it won't now.

he takes what he needs, eventually moves from one shop to another, scrambling for resources in short order. he finds a long screwdriver in a toolbox under a counter and snatches a backpack right off the wall to stow water in. food is a necessity, yet not at the forefront of his mind. who's running these shops? where did the hot food come from? why hasn't he encountered a single other living person?

the one conclusion he has is that he needs to get the hell out of town. armed with said screwdriver at his side, he steps through the archway and into the fog. he gets spun around five times before he growls in frustration and slaps a hand against the stones. does it solve anything? no. does he feel any better? also no.

but it does put him near enough that he can hear more footsteps in the fog and he backs up, raising his empty hand as a means of careful communication. )

I'm not looking for trouble. ( he does not ( and will not ) disarm himself, all the same. he doesn't want trouble, but he won't flinch away from it. )

( the shadow play is disturbing in ways that all stories from the ground are. where there are people, there is sure to be treachery and murder. it isn't exclusive to living on a planet, plenty of life in space consisted of doing whatever it took to survive. this is no different. he watches the performance until he can't gleam anything new from it, save for the minute changes that add scarce little to the narrative. what narrative? whose narrative?

as it goes on, bellamy's expression turns more and more sour, assisted by the stray wanderers that file into the theater. his shoulders go from a firm line to sinking, curling inward defensively, paranoid in his absorbance.

quick to anger, slow to vulnerability, he rises from his seat the second he feels the anguish overtake him. without explanation, there are tears streaming down his face. he swipes at them furiously with the back of his hand, mixing tears with dirt. for any person with a sense of compassion that dares to approach him or so much as look in his direction, he snaps: ) Stay away from me.

( or, after his ascension of the stairs to get to the projector and smash it on the floor, )

No one should have to watch this.

Ⅰ.
( once, he wouldn't have been caught dead stacking more burdens on his shoulders. he would've heard screaming and let them work it out themselves. people slow you down, people get you killed or worse. now, he understands that no singular person gets through war alone. you need someone watching your back. trust is a commodity, yet without it, no one makes it through the dark. this is the decision he's had to make after climbing out his bathroom window in the middle of the night, leaving literal hell behind him.

he doesn't make it far on foot. no matter how far he runs or what alley he turns down, there's something snarling or gurgling ( choking on water, on oxygen ) in the shadows. whatever he ends up doing, he knows one thing, he can't stop moving.

bellamy can't look it in the face again. )

We can't stay here. ( here, crawling through a ventilation system with the rats and grime, waiting for something to climb up and join them. ) We have to keep going. Those things are outside. It's not going to take them long to figure out how to get in and when they do, we can't be trapped up here.

( when he reaches the end of the shaft, he kicks open a vent and drops down first into a currently quiet room. )

Quickly. Let's go.

Ⅱ. cw: animal death, violence, blood, body horrors via radiation
( logic tells him that the dead are incapable of rising again. well, there's no place for logic in these streets. the paved stones run red and wet, condensation or blood; he doesn't stop to investigate. there's no rhyme or reason to explain how shambling scorched, irradiated, half-skeletal beings are managing to remain upright. he can't process what he's seeing because to do that, he'd have to stop and attribute a former face to this horror.

to reflect upon all the people he left behind so that he could live.

the thing that follows him now wears only the headpiece of a hazmat suit with cracked glass, somehow completely obscuring what's inside of the mask. there's only darkness inside to match the darkness out here. it's the same creature that burst through the door of his apartment, more jutting bones than skin. he tells himself that they don't leave black pools of blood, it's an illusion, carefully paired with the burned state of the rest of their body.

but he can't stop seeing it when he closes his eyes.

he's running out of ammunition and every time he fires a shot, he's not only losing more, he's sending a metaphorical flare into the sky to pinpoint his exact location. his jacket's torn at the bicep, sleeve entirely gone and there's a strip of fabric tied roughly around his arm to slow the bleeding.

bellamy's temporarily resting in the large kitchen of what appears to be a restaurant, with an insistent thumping coming from inside a walk-in freezer. from the sound of it, something is throwing itself against the door, over and over again. perhaps the sound draws you in, but maybe you're here for the same reason he is: stockpiling weapons.

bloodied meat tenderizer in hand, gore intermingled with freckles across his face, he sniffs loudly. there's one collapsed dog in the dining room and another near the corroded drain in the floor. )

Don't open that.

honestly, HUGE content warning for the 100's everything ranging from war, murder, violence, genocide, betrayal, and all other horrors you can probably think of. i will gloss over this as much as i can generally speaking but as this is a horror setting and his manifestation will dredge up very particular memories and trauma, it may come up in threads either in meta or conversation. fair warning for dark themes getting extra dark! you can hit me up over at talldarkandgay if you have questions, etc.