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BLUE TRIPS
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JINNY WOKE UP WITH A GROAN as a scream pierced through the air outside her tent. She threw her cover made of insulation fabric over her head and tried to block out the noise by pressing the heel of her palms over her ears. There were people shouting in gibberish, loud ugly sobbing and hysterical laughter coming from the delinquents outside.
"What the actual fuck is happening out there?" she growled to herself before peering over the top of her covers. She could see the silhouette of someone dancing in front of her tent.
Suddenly, a face popped in through the flap and she jumped with a cry falling from her lips. "I'm telling you, the tide of the moon is equivalent to the sum of chlorophyll in the sun!" Monty told her before pausing with epiphanic thought. "I can use the gravity of space to measure the vacuum of the ground!" With that, he ducked out and left.
Jinny threw her hands up in front of her face with absolute bewilderment. "What?!"
"Commander? Commander!" Miller's voice started to wail outside, his body falling onto the side of her tent and flailing his arms against the fabric. She looked at the shadow of his figure lying on top of her displaced wall with vague disgust. "My gun won't fire! Why won't it fire?" he cried. "I just wanted to shoot the tree! The tree was being mean to me!"
She shook her head with growing perplexity before grabbing her jacket and throwing it on. The moment she stepped out of her tent, she found the entire camp to be in chaos. All the delinquents were running around like lunatics, chasing imaginary butterflies and pretending that the sticks in their hands were magic banana boats or whatever. Some people were laughing at their own hands or sobbing up at the sky.
"Hey, Jin!" Raven called, running up to her and grabbing the woman's arms. She scrutinised her face closely by the fire light with narrowed eyes. "You look... lucid."
"I just woke up," Jinny replied grumpily. "Do you know what the hell happened here?"
The girl shrugged. "No clue, still trying to figure it out. Have you seen Bellamy or Clarke?"
"They went to check out some bunker," Jinny told her before spotting Miller running around with his arms thrown in the air. "I think I better check on our prisoner since Miller has kindly abandoned his post."
Raven turned to look at the boy as he fell face first into the dirt, causing the both of them to wince for his sake. "Yeah, okay, Finn and I are gonna continue finding the source of this madness."
"You do that," Jinny responded with a nod and they parted ways. She started towards the dropship when Monty emerged from it, spouting gibberish once again about the sun and moon. "Holy crap," she muttered, turning around and heading the other way to the back of the dropship instead. She gasped in surprise when a figure suddenly crashed into her hastily.
"Oh, crap!" A voice whispered harshly.
Jinny peered through the darkness to find Octavia's wide eyes staring back at her with an arm slung across her shoulder that belonged to their Grounder prisoner. On the other side was the other Grounder boy. The three of them looked at her with pleading fearful eyes and her face twisted once again into disbelief. "What the hell are you doing?!" she hissed.
"Please, Jin," Octavia begged. "Just let him go, look at him! He's injured!"
"His people will come back to kill us all!" Jinny exclaimed quietly then pointed to the boy. "How did he get in here?!"
"No, no, no!" he protested. "We won't, I promise! Just let me treat his wounds. I swear, we won't come back to hurt you."
"Commander!" Miller wailed again from the campfire and she flinched, a headache starting to throb in her skull. The man suddenly tensed and removed his arm from Octavia's shoulders as his eyes fixed over Jinny's shoulder. The woman turned around to find Finn watching them warily but he seemed to be letting her call the shots.
"Oh, my God. Okay, whatever!" she finally relented, throwing her hands in the air again. "Just go, I never want to see you again!"
They nodded to her gratefully before sneaking out of a gap in the wall. Jinny made to go after them when the Grounder boy turned around to her. "By the way, I saw someone going after Bellamy and Clarke earlier. He didn't look friendly."
"What?" She frowned in confusion but he was already gone with Octavia and the injured man. When she turned back to Finn with a questioning expression, he merely shrugged and continued on his way.
With a sigh of resignation, Jinny quickly darted back into her tent to grab a searchlight and picked up a packet of nuts from a container nearby. She then avoided everyone else and slipped through the same gap in the wall, stepping out of the perimeter of camp and into the dark wooded area surrounding them. For some reason, there was a chill that penetrated the warm layer of her jacket and she shivered, rubbing her arms together. After another moment of deliberation, she finally switched on her searchlight and started forwards.
She had gotten a glimpse of Clarke's map earlier and clearly remembered that the bunker was less than twenty miles due south-west from the camp. As she was traversing the forest floor as silently as she was able with light quick footsteps and avoiding grassier areas, she realised that she was ravenous. She hadn't eaten a thing since the morning before Bellamy left with Clarke. He'd offered to share some of his leftover berries with her but she had passed on them. With eager hands, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the pack of nuts she'd taken from camp and popped one into her mouth. The sound of her teeth grinding against the hard shelled fruit filled her ears as she continued to walk.
Jinny didn't have a watch, so she wasn't sure how much time had transpired when she slowed down and blinked. Her eyelids felt heavy despite the fact that she had just woken up from a long nap. She must be getting old, she thought, as she ran a hand through her unkept hair.
Suddenly, a butterfly floated past her with its wings glowing a beautiful luminous blue. She remembered Octavia telling her about the kaleidoscope of butterflies she'd seen before with Atom. Jinny reached a hand out towards the insect and it landed on her fingertip. There was a pulse, as if she had just been touched by an otherwordly being, and the luminous blue from the butterfly started to seep down her fingers to her hand. Jinny blinked in bewilderment as the butterfly fluttered away into the trees where the leaves suddenly ignited in a blinding haze.
A million butterflies swarmed upwards, blocking out the moon and the night sky so that she was completely engulfed by their glow. The trees started to turn blue and the grass beneath her feet. Even her entire skin was covered in the neon paint.
Oh, shit, she thought, radiation turned her into a blue alien.
Jinny collapsed onto her knees dramatically and yelled at the mass of whirling butterflies above her. "Nooooo! Why is everything BLUE?!"
"Hey, Jinny!" She snapped her head to the side and blinked several times in surprise when she thought she heard Atom's voice.
No, it was Atom. The boy stepped out from the monstrous whirl of blue butterflies as if they were giving birth to him whole. Jinny's jaw dropped when Wells emerged behind him and they walked over to join her on the ground.
"Why aren't you guys blue?" she demanded angrily. "Why am I the only one blue?!"
Wells shrugged his shoulders. "We've become one with the butterflies," he told her.
She laughed as if it were the most hilarious thing in the world. Her dead friends were visiting her from the grave and it was totally cool. Holy shit, what if she was the one visiting them? What if she was dead?
"Is this the afterlife?" she asked them. "I'm not dead, am I? I can't be dead, I still haven't kissed Bellamy!"
Then she started to dry sob from how sad that was and started to tell the two boys in front of her that she really wished they were still alive. "No, you're not dead yet," Wells said. "And yeah, you need to kiss Bellamy."
"I've been waiting for the both of you to kiss since we met," Atom told her.
"I've been waiting for seven years!"Jinny shouted.
She flinched when she heard rustling from the other side of the clearing and a figure emerged from the dense foliage. Bellamy himself stared back at her in bewilderment and her first instinct was to warn him about the butterflies. "Don't touch them!" she told him imperatively. "They'll make you blue too and then you'll die!"
"Jinny, what are you talking about?" He looked at her weirdly before his face fell in realisation. "You ate the nuts, didn't you?"
Clarke appeared beside him then and her entire head was ablaze like a gleaming sapphire. Jinny screamed while pointing at her. "She touched them! Her head is glowing!"
"Oh, boy," the girl muttered.
Bellamy approached the woman on the ground and picked her up from the ground. "How long have you been out here?"
"I left like a little after sunset." She blinked at him, then frowned as if she couldn't quite understand his question. "I think it was like an hour ago."
"Jinny, it's been hours!" he exclaimed in horror. "Thank God we found you when we did!"
Her eyelids continued to flutter with growing confusion and she pressed her fists into her eyes while groaning. "The butterflies are so bright!" she complained loudly. "Oh, God, Clarke's head looks like it got eaten by a lightbulb! She's hideous!"
"Let's get you back home," Bellamy said with a sigh as he scooped her up in his arms. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her face into his shoulder to block out the madness. He started forwards, the rustle of his boots crossing the grass filled up the night air along with Clarke's more muted footsteps. It only took half an hour for them to make it back to camp, and Jinny vaguely realised that she hadn't gone all that far after all. Or maybe she had been walking around in circles.
"Wait," she called, clutching onto Bellamy's sleeve when he laid her down onto her nest inside her tent. "Don't go."
"Are we gonna do that thing when you tell me not to go and then we snuggle together to the morning and pretend nothing happened?" he asked with a smirk.
"Yeah," she said candidly. "I don't want to die before kissing you."
He stared at her in shock, eyes wide and lips parted with his entire body seemingly locked in stasis. Then, he finally said, "Oh."
"Atom and Wells told me that I needed to kiss you," she went on.
"In the forest?" he questioned sceptically. "Is this when you shouted you've been waiting for seven years?" She nodded sadly and a breathy laugh escaped his grinning lips. "Jin... what are we gonna do with you?"
"Maybe we should kiss," she told him. "Before the butterflies come and eat me too."
"No, we're not doing that now," he said firmly, forcibly pushing her flat onto the bed. "You're going to sleep this off and then I'm going to laugh at you in the morning."
"But you're staying, right? To protect me against the butterflies?" She looked at him with wide eyes as if she was genuinely frightened of the idea of it happening.
He sighed. "Yeah, okay, I'll stay."
When she woke up the next morning with a splitting headache and Bellamy still asleep beside her, she recalled every minuscule detail of the events that happened in the night with a loud prolonged groan. He woke up, blinking blearily around the tent before shifting his gaze in her direction. With a wide smirk, he said, "So tell me about the butterflies again."
Jinny slapped the middle of his chest before kicking his laughing ass out of her tent. He wouldn't stop smirking at her for the rest of the day.
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( a/n. )
omg, i think if this had made it into the actual storyline, it would explain why bellamy was so ready to say "i love you" to jinny on unity day because it was so obvious lmao. and honestly if wells and atom were still alive, the three of them would be the ultimate sass squad, sassing people all day long .
jaha: *breathes*
all three: *collectively groans obnoxiously*
finn: i have an idea
all three: my opinion is no
all three: clarke no
clarke: clarke yes
all three: *facepalm*
bellamy: *puts shirt on*
all three: aawww