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Clarke met Bellamy during the worst year of her life. Her dad died, and after three long months when she had finally started to feel a little okay again, it turned out her mother had secretly blown Clarke’s entire trustfund on her opioid addiction and taken any sort of stability she still had left. Then, in the same week, she found out her loser boyfriend had a whole other girlfriend the entire time they'd been together, which seemed insignificant compared to what she’d already gone through at that point, since she wasn't envisioning her future with Finn in it forever or anything anything, but it just felt like the cherry on top of her shit-show of a life. Clarke went off the rails for a bit there, and couldn't concentrate on any of her classes, so she failed half of them, and then flunked her MCATS too, kissing med-school and any sort of short-term purpose she had goodbye. Her mom got her license revoked and went to jail for being doped out on the job, and her only real friend Wells moved across the country for law school, and all in all, she was just having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad year from hell.
She went into a sort-of-slutty phase, light on the sort-of, as one does when trying to cope with grief, and life-changing and perhaps person-crippling circumstances, and tried to hit on Bellamy on one of her many nights out to the bar with ‘friends’ from college who stopped talking to her the minute she stopped partying. He was dating the bartender, so he wasn't interested, but then insisted on taking her home in case someone else might try to abuse the fact she was swaying on her legs from the five shots and the three mix drinks she'd downed so far.
He didn't say it in that many words, in fact there were more muttered words like 'naive fucking princesses ' and ‘expecting the whole word to clean up her shit’ and lots of scowls the entire time, but he drove her home, and fed her an advil and two glasses of water, and then left without another comment. Next time she ran into him, she offered to buy him a coffee for all his effort and instead of leaning away from the fact she most definitely wanted to fuck him less than a week ago, he made fun of her for it every time she gave him the smallest of openings. They bonded over Buffy The Vampire Slayer, being bi and being part of the dead parent club easily. He quickly turned into her friend, and then one of her best friends, and then definitely her best fucking friend in the entire universe. Clarke would die for him, at this point.
Her slutty phase definitely went on for a while after she met him though. It helped to make her feel better, to think about anything else, even if it was just temporary and fleeting. She told herself it was okay, because at least she wasn’t chasing the same highs as her mother. Clarke was just using her body to not feel like she was inside of it for a while. Fucked, but cheaper than therapy.
To this day, she’s still not sorry about being a slut on multiple occasions for months on an end. She’s just sorry about how reckless she was about it. Her life was on the brink of changing forever, in the worst of ways, serveral times.
After her second false alarm pregnancy scare in a month and a half ended up with her and Bellamy on her bathroom floor cradling a stick full of her pee to her chest in relief, he decided to call her out on it. He pushed out a long-suffering sigh, lifting the back of his head up from the cold tiles. "You gotta stop doing this, Clarke.”
She shrugged her shoulders, casual, her mouth still like cotton from the internal panic she’d endured for the past hellish three hours between the realisation, the denial, the phone call to Bellamy and the test. Her head pounding with last night’s hangover and her heart recovering from the last fifteen to twenty minutes of anxiety infused adrenaline. "A baby could be cute. They could give me a reason to live, or something."
Bellamy scoffed, even if he knew she was being sarcastic. "Yeah, sounds like a great reason to have kids. That's how you end up like me and my sister."
"You want kids," she accused him, heatedly, as if that’d been an actual comeback.
"Someday, maybe," he relented, although indignant, then gave her a pointed look, glancing down at the pregnancy test still gripped tightly between her fingers. He’d never judge her, not like that, but there was definitely a judgemental edge to his voice. "When I'm not in the middle of a mental breakdown and preferably know the last name of my fellow parent."
"Are you slutshaming me?"
"A little, yeah."
She elbowed him, and he broke into a grin. "Look, kids are cute. They're tiny and have adorable chubby cheeks, and say the weirdest shit. Obviously one day, when I'm ready," and Gina is, Clarke filled in, "I'll have lots of them. But they're not a pet rabbit you get on a whim because you're bored and figured it wasn’t that much work. You're stuck with them. For the rest of your life. It's a huge responsibility." Following up with what was perhaps more of his own reasoning than hers, "And not everyone is a natural at it. You could fuck them up, you know? Really bad."
"You're right,” Clarke agreed, even though it wasn't like she was planning on keeping this one anyway, if it had been positive. She just — forgot to take her pill a few times, and the guy was cute and she was just drunk enough to pretend she didn't notice he forgot to bother with a condom. She's been stupid, and careless, and she's gotten lucky so far, but one of these days she wasn't going to be and the past two years had been hard enough without a child to take into account.
He’d put his arm around her shoulders, smugly boasting, "Aren't I always?"
He texted her that night, for the first time. Clarke's head was kind of swirling from all the celebratory 'empty womb' drinks they had, and it took her a second to make out he'd sent her a link, and then another to process the video of a child in the grocery store in the middle of a temper tantrum before his text even sort of starts to make sense. Daily reminder to take your birth control pill ;) . And then when it finally did click, after another long moment, she startled herself by letting out a huff of laughter. Cute. And then, forced herself to get up from under the warm covers to yank open her bathroom cabinet and rummage through her med basket before she found what she'd been looking for.
It starts out kind of as a joke, but they do help. The videos of screeching demon babies, pictures of moms covered in shit-stains and dads with butterfly clips in their hair and a thousand yard stare in their eyes, gifs of vomiting toddlers, ruined furniture documented as the biggest campaign against permanent markers and parenthood, links to the Frozen soundtrack on Spotify and interviews with new parents ready to drop their babies down the top of the stairs because of their sleep depravity, depending on what mood Bellamy's in and how funny he thinks he's being.
Before, she figured she would just stick to girls for a while, until she entered safer waters mentally, or maybe get an IUD, but this was definitely the easier option.
It's not like Clarke hates kids. She just never had that feeling some people do where they have this internal need to push out a baby and take care of it for the next eighteen years. She likes them, for other people to have. And once she turns the whole depressed twenty-three year old without a college degree or a job or any prospects around, she even ends up dutifully taking her pill every night before bed.
Bellamy keeps texting her though. Every night, right on schedule, come hell or high water. Even when they're in different timezones because he's visiting his sister or she's backpacking through Europe, even when he's left her couch two minutes before, and even when they're fighting. It's usually a good way to test the waters too, since there's a big difference between "I don't hate you enough right now to have you end up pregnant " and "I hate you enough that I don't wish you or your genes upon any child or clump of cells, dead or alive".
She's jokingly told him there's apps for these kinds of things before, but he doesn't care. He likes feeling needed, doing big brother-y things for all his friends, including her, even if they're usually more along the lines of 'making sure Jasper doesn't drink and drive' or 'helping Raven move into her new apartment', not 'reminding Clarke she's still burdened with fertility and could conceive if not careful'. It's how she knows that one day he'll be a great dad.
And it's not like she minds the daily texts, because it reminds her that even when she's had a busy day or she's been sort of a reclusive asshole lately, there's still people who care about her. It's like a goodnight text, but less lame.
It's why it immediately strikes her as strange when one night, he sends her a video of his niece, giggling as she's fed apple sauce with a green plastic spoon. Besides the fact the apple sauce is all over her face and bib and little grabby fists, there's nothing too upsetting about it. The baby's cute, it has fat cheeks and smooth brown skin and big green eyes. Clarke keeps waiting for the punchline to come, but the video cuts off after thirty seconds, and there's been no bodily fluids or near-death experiences involved.
So, she pauses her rewatch of Queer Eye and texts him, "Is this my reminder, or just you being an annoying uncle?"
Her phone beeps seconds later. "It's your reminder." And then again, when he swiftly changes the subject, "Did you hear Monty bought a ring?" and then they just shittalk Jasper's inability to keep a secret for the next twenty minutes so Clarke just forgets about it all together.
The next day is a video of a four year old, a dog and an entire living room covered in paint, so she sweeps it under the rug, figures it's a fluke and thinks he probably sent her the wrong clip somehow the day before. She doesn't think much of it again, until a week later.
Clarke's been teaching classes at the rec centre for over half a year now, drawn to it because of the diversity and the flexible hours, ranging from mosaicing with retired old ladies and coloring in mandalas with the local grandpas to sculpting phallic clay art with bored house wives and bachelorette party entourages to doing spin art or fingerpainting with the neighbourhood kids depending on their age. She’s wrapping up the latter today when Bellamy comes to pick her up for dinner, their Thursday evening tradition, one of the only nights they both have off.
Madi is a sweet little six year old, with big blue eyes and long dark hair, and she had lingered behind like on most days. Her mom’s usually late because she works three jobs, and Clarke doesn’t mind the company while she cleans up. It took her awhile to warm up, quiet for the first few months of classes, but Clarke kept coaxing her out of her shell with soft, kind smiles and heartfelt compliments about her paintings and drawings.
“Clarke, these won’t go away,” Madi huffs and puffs exasperatedly, pleading with her in one of those desperate tiny voices like the world is ending, struggling to put more soap on her marker-stained hands because they’re too slippery.
As Clarke comes up behind the little girl to bend down and curl her hands around hers to help her get the dark stains off, she sees a movement out of her periphery. She blows a strand of hair from her face as she turns her head over her shoulder to glance at the door, slipping into a smile as she sees Bellamy leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest as he watches them.
“Just another second,” she tells him, raising her voice to carry across the classroom, just as Madi starts sobbing with frustration. At this age, their coping skills are next to nothing. They mess up a line on the paper, and they’re acting like their favorite pet died. Clarke is used to it by now.
“Take your time,” he responds, dryly, obviously amused.
“It’ll be okay,” Clarke shushes her, gently, picking up a sponge to scrub at a particularly tough spot that didn’t want to budge before, finally getting it to start to wean. She’s found it works best to remain as calm as possible, since they seem to be able to smell weakness, and once that happens, all hell breaks loose. “See?”
Madi nods, the back of her head moving against Clarke’s chest, sniffing wetly. When the marker is as good as gone, Clarke turns off the faucet, the little girl immediately turning around to bury her face into her breasts, clutching at her apron with her drenched hands. Her heart softens as she wraps her arms around the girl, holding her close as she kneels down to make the angle less killing on her back. “Sweetie, what’s wrong? They’re all gone.”
Another moment of loud sobbing, and Clarke exchanging a desperate glance with Bellamy, before she finally starts to stammer. She remains patient, letting her take her time to form her thoughts into words.
“Grandpa says tattoos are bad. Only the bad guys have tattoos. He said they’ll make you end up in prison,” she chokes out, tightening her fingers as her bottom lip starts trembling in a way that breaks Clarke’s heart. She wipes at her eye with a balled fist, trying to keep strong, but her face scrunches up with anguish anyway as she adds, “I don’t want to be away from mommy and daddy.”
Her head spins for another second before the puzzle pieces slide into place and she realizes why Madi was so upset to begin with. She usually tries not to get too involved with the way clients raise their children unless there’s actual emotional or physical harm involved, but grandpa sounds like a dick, and she has a zero tolerance for dicks. “I have a tattoo.”
“Really?” Silent tears still roll down her red cheeks, but she seems intrigued now, big watery eyes sparking with curiosity.
“Yeah,” Clarke cooes, wiping at the girl’s tears with the back of her hand before pushing up the sleeve of her own shirt and revealing a small fine line Griffin, in honor of her dad, his birthdate directly underneath. “Look.”
Tentatively, with an encouraging nod on Clarke’s end, Madi reaches out to poke it softly. The ghost of a gasp passes through her lips, and then she’s flattening her palm over it.
“You’re not the bad guy,” she prompts questioningly, then, as if piecing something together slowly, dragging her eyes back up to Clarke.
Clarke shakes her head, pushing aside all the existential dread and deeply buried self-doubt that comes floating to the surface with the innocent question, pressing her lips into a thin line as she folds her hand over Madi’s. “You don’t have to worry. As long as you’re the good guy, and you do good guy stuff, you won’t go to prison.”
The fact that the current prison system should be abolished and that Clarke has definitely been taken into custody once before (trying to punch in the window of a cop car when she went to Pride with Monty and they tried to unrightfully arrest him for public intoxication, and she figured she could show them what public intoxication actually looked like and then also spat in the homophobic cop’s face) are things she keeps to herself, saving them for a later discussion when Madi is, perhaps, a bit older.
“I wanna be the good guy,” she sniffs, a careful smile starting to form on her lips as Clarke starts untying the knot of her apron at the nape of Madi’s neck.
“That’s the best place to start.” Her smile turns into a beam, and Clarke figures the flames of this particular dumpster fire have been fanned for now.
She puts the apron with the other children’s ones before taking off her own, pulling a paper towel from the dispenser to make Madi blow her nose. Her mom rushes in with her baby brother perched on her hip then, profusely apologizing to Clarke for being late as she runs a hand over her daughter’s hair in greeting.
They leave after Madi gives her another hug and Clarke picks up her bag by her desk, making her way over to Bellamy with a hand pressed to the small of her back as she tries to stretch the tight muscles around her spine a little. “Sorry you had to witness that when we could’ve been stuffing our faces with pasta by now.”
It was her turn to pick, and they are definitely getting Italian food. She’s drained and in the need of some serious carbs.
“It’s okay,” he chuckles, and for some reason he looks kind of flustered as he takes her bag from her even though she wasn’t asking. She’s long stopped arguing with him about it after she saw him carrying Miller’s tennis bag into their apartment while they were busy strategizing their next Call of Duty session. It’s not like a derogatory sexist thing, it’s a Bellamy thing. He likes doing stuff for other people and keeping his hands busy. “You’re really good with her.”
“It’s my job,” Clarke reminds him with a raise of her brows, never too eager to receive a compliment, starting to lock the door behind her.
“No, it isn’t,” he retorts with a knowing look, that definite no-room-for-argument tone to his voice that makes it sound kind of gruff and does weird things to her body.
They walk the few blocks over to the restaurant so he doesn’t have to struggle with finding a parking spot and they don’t have an excuse to be lazy after dinner when the post-food coma urges start to settle in. He fills her in on his day; did some cleaning at the bar even though it’s his day off, worked on and nearly finished that bookcase he was making for Raven and Zeke’s study, Skype-called his sister to mostly see his niece, and then struggled to get through the first few chapters of that book she rec'd to him which he has some very strong opinions about it.
By the time he’s halfway through tearing up her choices of literature, they’re seated at one of the tables and Clarke’s filling their glasses with water. She’s still waiting for him to figure out she picks horrible books on purpose just to see him get all fired up, and presses her lips together to keep from bursting out in laughter, hiding it behind her glass as she lifts it to her mouth.
“You’re such an asshole,” he accuses her, suddenly, narrowing his eyes, and it seems that maybe today is the day. Took him long enough.
Clarke quickly takes a sip, lifting up her shoulders nonchalantly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He scoffs, indignant, nostrils flaring briefly. “Right. Torturing me with books set in the middle ages that couldn’t be more historically incorrect isn’t a favorite hobby of yours?”
“Sometimes I recommend one that is actually good, just to keep you on your toes.” She’s full-blown smirking by now.
“Go to hell,” Bellamy comments, bitingly, not particularly giving a shit that they’re in the middle of a family restaurant, as he flips open the menu and glares at it.
“It’s payback for making me gain twenty pounds ever since you took up baking as a hobby this summer,” she muses, not just because he looks really cute when angry. She has easier ways to piss him off, for sure, that don’t have her scavenging the darkest corners of the web to find illegal and mostly terrible e-books.
After he broke it off with Gina in late June, he started sleeping around. (Unfortunately after Clarke had done some soul-searching and her slutty phase had long ended.) When that didn’t fill the ache he apparently felt inside, he started baking, basically keeping his hands busy, and she was his go-to person who’s doorstep he dropped them off at since he doesn’t even like eating sweet things that much himself. Red velvet cupcakes with lots of cream frosting, chunky triple-chocolate brownies, blackberry jam pie-crust straws — he tried everything that summer, and most of it was good too because he’s annoyingly natural at everything. That, and after bringing them to her aforementioned doorstep, being plastered to her couch with her for the rest of the day while she finished up some summer classes trying to finally complete her college degree and he moped and zapped through her vast selection of channels. She doesn’t really mind that much. She likes her body regardless, but still, she needed a tactic to turn this thing back around.
“Twenty pounds? Where?” He huffs, skeptical, like he’s annoyed he now can’t be annoyed with her, giving her a once-over from across the table. His gaze is heated, heavy, and while she knows it has nothing to do with her in that way, her mind wanders, and she’s squeezing her thighs together underneath the table before she knows it.
To be sixteen with no consequences to what she eats, again. Or to be a guy like Bellamy and have a metabolism operating regularly at the speed of light. “You’re too blinded by friendship to tell, but my ass has grown twice it’s previous size.”
“No it hasn’t,” he snaps, quickly, and way too defensively, his eyes narrowed into dangerous slits.
Clarke tilts her head, eyebrows jumping with surprise as her mouth curls up in amusement. “Spend a lot of time looking at my ass?”
“Shut up,” he rolls his eyes, unbothered, looking back down at the dishes described in front of him. Apparently he’s so secure with their platonic friendship, the implication of something more between doesn’t even phase him. His jaw clenches, for a second, then he adds, “You’re gorgeous, twenty pounds or not.”
“Thanks,” she smiles rightly, amused, and because she can’t help it, there’s a victorious edge to it.
Bellamy glances up at her and then his nostrils flare, pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead briefly as he catches up to what just happened. “Jesus Christ, how do you get me to compliment you in the middle of an argument?”
“That’s just because I’m so gorgeous,” she teases, flicking his menu. “You can’t resist.”
He yanks his glass off the table with some left-over frustration, probably because he’s not completely ready to let go off all his anger in fear of looking like a push-over, tipping his head back to take a gulp of the cold water. Clarke tries not to stare at the way his adam’s apple moves, and how his tongue darts out to get a little drop of water from his top lip. Not too obviously anyway.
“Don’t worry,” she adds, mockingly, “you’re gorgeous too.”
Bellamy snorts, satisfied with himself. “I know, that’s why you tried to get in my pants literally within the first two minutes of meeting me.”
She groans, her cheeks heating despite this being the five-hundredth time he’s mentioned this over the last several years. “You need to stop bringing that back up. It’s losing it’s edge.”
“You’re still an asshole,” he reminds her, but he’s struggling not to smile, and fuck, does he have a nice smile.
Bellamy never really mentioned why him and Gina broke off, but from what she’s gathered from him and little tidbits of their friends here and there, they discussed their future and their expectations didn’t exactly line up. And ever since he refused Clarke that one drunken night, her mind has kind of separated Bellamy and any romantic and/or sexual and/or non-platonic feelings in different boxes in completely opposite corners of her mind, collecting dust, but it’s been harder to do that nowadays. He rebounded with some bitch from the ice cream parlor around the corner of his bar for two weeks — showing up late with her at his side and looking ruffled because he was doing God knows what to her in his car, taking her out on sleazy dates to the planetarium Clarke had wanted to go to for months, disappearing into the breakroom with her for thirty minutes and emerging with messy hair and a red mouth — and then the more Clarke’s blood pressure started to spike, the more she started wondering if maybe the semi-regular hook-up wasn’t a bitch and she was just jealous. Echo was most definitely a bitch, who was condescending and shady and completely hollow on the inside, but Clarke was also sort of, kind of jealous, too.
He’s kind of great, you know. Obviously he’s fucking hot, with his broad shoulders and cute freckles and stubborn curls. That’s the whole thing — he could be an underwear model, if he wanted to, and yet he’s still unexpectedly kind, and caring, and stupidly soft. He has a mean streak definitely, and can be incredibly arrogant and even more annoying once he makes up his mind about somehing, has this dumb habit of pulling authority even though nobody asked him to and he has gotten into more barfights than she can count on one hand because of his short-temper, but he’s — so hot it makes up for it. That’s what she told herself at first. That he was just so hot, that she was blinded by it, seeing the world through lust-covered glasses or whatever. That she was just mildly peeved by the fact their slutty phases didn’t line up.
Lately she’s been considering it might be more than that. That it’s also because he’s — her Bellamy, and all these feelings that have been forcefully laying dormant are starting to surface and she hasn’t quite figured out a game-plan when it comes to dealing with them. It’s one of her things, that her level of attractiveness probably doesn’t make up for, she’s pretty emotionally dense and has a tendency to pull away from people.
“You wanna share some appetizers?” He wonders, pulling her back from her reverie, still perusing the menu like they haven’t religiously been visiting this place for over a year and a half now. He’ll end up picking a pizza with extra mushrooms, and she’ll get the parmesan spinach gnocchi, and then halfway through the dinner they’ll switch to keep it interesting. “I’m starving.”
“Always,” she comments idly, and maybe it does warm her heart a little that he doesn’t give a fuck about the way she looks. Lexa never really got it, being vegan and genetically naturally skinny and running 5k for fun every day no matter what little European town they were lost in, and Finn one time just offered to go on a diet with her when she complained about not fitting into her favorite t-shirt the way she wanted to. Then again, she shouldn’t even be comparing Bellamy to her exes to begin with. He’s her friend. Her regular, non-romantic, completely platonic friend, and it’s not really fair to Lexa or Finn to compare them to him.
That night, seconds after the front door closes behind her, her phone pings with a message just simply titled REMINDER!!! She hears his engine start outside while the video buffers, because he always waits for her to get inside, and then he’s driving off as she’s watching a toddler gently pat a dog, his tail wagging excitedly. Again, she finds herself waiting for the golden retriever to bite off the baby’s hand or have explosive diarrhea in it's face, but it just fades out, and Clarke is left wondering how that was supposed to inspire her to want to take her birth control pills.
It’s not like one silly cute video has her desperate to procreate, but it kind of seems like it defeats the purpose of the text to begin with. It’s a principle thing.
Clarke doesn’t know what to say, so she just ignores it. Then the following day it’s a baby giggling as their dad presses raspberry kisses to their belly, and then the day after it’s a toddler ‘helping’ shovel the snow off the driveway before falling over, and then one howling in tune with a german shepherd. There’s a soapy baby with a yellow plastic duck, and a young child genuinely crying about how much he loves his mother, and an eight-month year old bouncing to the beat of a Spice Girl song.
It’s maddening.
She’s still faithfully swallowing her birth control every night before bed, and it’s not like her biological clock is ticking or anything, but Bellamy is the one sending these to her, and that just sort of, sends her mind places she promised herself she wouldn’t go. To squishy babies with dark hair and brown skin and freckles powdered over their noses.
Hell, Clarke wasn’t even sold on the idea of having her own children before — well, before she met him.
It’s another week of babies and puppies and live, laugh, love-ing before she dares to bring it up.
Clarke comes back from the kitchen with a fresh batch of popcorn, their rewatch of Buffy playing on the screen, settling back in beside him on the couch to shove her phone into his face. She hasn’t found an opening yet, so while waiting for the microwave to beep she stopped trying to come up with a natural segue and just pulled up her texts. “What’s this about by the way?”
He scrapes his throat after glancing at her screen, decidedly not making eye-contact as his thumb picks at the damp label on his beer bottle. “Nothing.”
“Give me a break,” she exclaims, tossing her phone aside as she bumps her elbow into his ribs, grabbing a handful of popcorn. “For the past year it’s been vomit and poop and reminding me Chuck E. Cheese is the eighth circle of hell. Remember that one of that lady hiding in the closet with her Tim Tams and the kids banging on the door like blood-thirsty demons?” She huffs, stuffing her mouth. “I almost went to the store to get Plan B, just in case.”
“Clarke,” he scolds, giving her that come-on-look he’s mastered practically raising his sister. At least he’s finally looking at her.
“You know how much I love Tim Tams,” she returns, stubbornly.
He makes this noise halfway between amusement and exasperation. “I do.”
Clarke sags back into the couch cushion and gives it another ten seconds before recounting, “The Supernanny episode with the kid who spat in his mom’s face and said he dreamed about tasting her flesh? Nightmares. For weeks.”
“Octavia used to do that,” he says with a little shrug.
“And I’m still surprised every day she didn’t end up as a serial killer.”
He glares at her, taking it personally, because of course he is, and she rolls her eyes. “Seriously. For the past year and a half it’s been bodily fluids, screaming in public places, the abolition of personal space, Wheels On The Bus being written by Satan, stepping on LEGOs and the inability for minivans to be sexy, cannibalism—”
Bellamy licks his lips after swallowing another swig of beer, lifting his shoulders again as his brows pucker together, short circuiting with the frustration of trying to translate his thought process in a way that makes sense to her. “Those are other people’s kids though. Ours aren’t going to be like that.”
Her heart lurches, but she braves through it for now. “I think that’s what they all say, and they fall in the same trap, and then before you know it, you sleep three hours a week and you have to hide your snacks and wake up with teeth imprints on your calves.”
He’s shaking his head, and for some reason he looks hurt. “Or you come home after a long, terrible day and their laugh makes your entire day better, and they continue to teach you things you had never expected, and it’s tiring, so exhausting all the time, but it’s the most rewarding thing you’ve ever done and you’ve never been happier.”
She deflates a little, her pulse finally catching up with her. “You’ve been thinking about this a lot?”
“All the time,” Bellamy confesses, immediately, his voice rough. He clears his throat again, scrubbing a hand over his mouth, looking at her a little helplessly. “But it used to just be this thing that I would want someday, you know? If I was lucky enough and I could convince myself I was going to do a better job than my mom.”
She softens, putting the bowl on her lap aside to fold her hand over his knee. “You’ll be a great dad. I know, because I had one.” He’s flustered, she can tell, and he knows her, he knows how big of a compliment that is coming from her. “You have such a big heart, and you care so much — anyone would be lucky to have you as their father.”
He flushes, barely noticeable with his complexion, but noticeable to her. “It’s just — now that I’m getting older—”
Clarke scoffs, amused. “You’re twenty-nine.”
“Almost thirty,” Bellamy points out, then his bravado diffuses again. “It’s been on my mind a lot. Especially...”
“Especially?” She prods, careful, but he doesn’t budge.
Bellamy licks his lips, glancing at her and then back at his beer bottle. His mouth opens, then closes. Finally, he says, “It’s just something I really want.”
She softens, gives him another second before squeezing his knee. “Are you ready to circle back to the fact you said ‘ours’?”
His eyes slam shut, obviously he’d hoped she hadn’t picked up on that, and he clamps his teeth together before gritting, as if it’s against his will, “I like you, Clarke.”
Her mouth dries up, but her brain refuses to let her jump to conclusions, rationalizes it. “In general? Like, as a potential mother?” Her heart is pounding so loud that the tv is drowned out and all she can see, hear is Bellamy. Maybe he is going to suggest she be his surrogate or something, trying to warm her up to the idea via text, she can’t get her hopes up.
His eyes shoot open, his brow furrowing together as he intently stares at her. “Of my children,” he blurts out, and then kind of recoils into himself, probably surprised he even said that himself.
Clarke is not ready to deal with it yet, trying to buy herself some time while her heart is hammering against her ribcage and her mind is racing trying to process all of it, so instead she prompts, “So.. the videos?”
His face scrunches up, a mixture of disgust and embarrassment as he leans forward to place his bottle on the coffee table, just to have something to do, not have to look at her. “The first time, I was watching TV and there was this blonde woman with a baby, rocking it to sleep. My mind wandered—”
She snorts, although he’s endearing and her chest feels so warm she doesn’t know what to do with all of it and she’s so close to just leaning over and kissing him. “Were you trying to trigger my maternal urges?”
“Something like that,” he replies, dry and self-deprecatory, wiping the left-over condensation from his beer on his hand off on his thigh. A small mirthless chuckle leaves his mouth, rubbing his eyes tiredly. “I don’t know, it was stupid. Just a long shot that backfired—”
Clarke sits up, her eyes trained on the side of his face as she bites back a smile. It's been on her mind, too, no matter how many times she's tried to push it away. Kids used to freak her the fuck out, but now she finds herself thinking of how cute Octavia's baby is, and how pure and sweet Madi is at the age of six, and they might be anomalies, but she thinks Bellamy's genes are more than good enough to cancel out all her fucked up-ness. He also just looks extremely good holding babies, like unfairly so. How is she supposed to keep her hormones in check when he bombards pictures of him with his neice all over social media all the time? It's terrorism, at this point. “Who says it backfired?”
His head whips back around, fast. “What?”
“I like you too,” she starts with, swallowing tightly as the pressure on her chest intensifies. It helps, that he said it first. “Well, I love you. And I think we kind of skipped a few steps here,” she’s just turned twenty-four, and she doesn’t have it all figured out, by far, but she wants him, badly, and, she doesn’t know how to describe this kind of desire, threatening to swallow her whole but the closest she can come up with is, “I want you to be mine.”
In some way, if she has that part of him, if she gives him a baby — he’ll always be hers, in a way no one else will ever have him. It’s a bit unsettling, how her brain works, sometimes, but he doesn’t seem put off, in fact, he’s smiling, grinning in that way he does when he can’t believe something is working out in his favor for once, tentative. About skipping steps, “You did ask me to fuck you in the first sentence you ever spoke to me, so I guess now we’re even.”
A surge of annoyance flares through her system of him bringing that up again, so she pushes forward onto her knees, crashing her mouth to his. He grunt in surprise, but his lips are moving against hers, sloppily and rushed and wanting, and it isn’t until a few seconds later when her tongue swipes over his lips, that he seems to snap back to reality and pulls away.
His eyes are dark, boring into hers, breathing hard. “I can’t stop thinking about it, Clarke.”
“No?” She pries, even though she already knows what he’s talking about. She feels lightheaded.
“I can’t stop thinking about you pregnant, carrying my baby,” Bellamy confesses, looking a mixture between turned on and embarrassed, with his slightly widened eyes and the tips of his ears darkened and his lips slick from her spit parted, the combination of it all driving her mad. It's possessive, what she feels for him, what he feels for her.
“Oh, fuck,” Clarke curses, feeling arousal seep from in between her thighs, probably drenching her boyshorts. Her breathing is ragged, sinful, breathy, completely saturated with need, she needs him. “I really didn’t think this was going to do it for me.”
He’s sharply pressing his mouth back to hers, and she pushes closer by swinging a leg over his lap, drags him closer by the fabric of his shirt and is rewarded with a much better angle against his lips, his tongue sliding inside easily. His warm hands splay over her bare back, where her shirt’s ridden up, and Clarke is starting to feel lightheaded with the way he’s kissing her.
“I did follow your orders and took my birth control last night,” she murmurs against his mouth, gasping softly as he ducks his head and bites at her jaw, mouthing down the column of her neck. Her hands run over his chest and along the skin of his arms, getting used to the feel of him, so different from platonic-box Bellamy, where touching him was fleeting, with purpose, the most and longest contact she got a hug hello or goodbye, or if she pushed her luck a snuggle on the couch.
“I don’t care,” he grunts, distracted, and then when she tries to kiss him again, he lets her, only for a second, before pulling back again. “I don’t care,” he repeats, panting, his brown eyes soft and almost pleading. “I need you to know I just want you. I love you. Children or not.”
“I want just you too,” Clarke promises, leaning back to drag her top over her head, tossing it aside carelessly. His dark gaze dips down to her bra-clad breasts, fingers tightening on her hips hard enough to leave bruises, then back up to her face to watch her as she confesses, “But I also really, really want you to put a baby inside of me.”
He groans, suddenly rising to his feet with her still in his lap. Clarke lets out a small yelp of surprise, wrapping her legs around his waist as he carries her over up the stairs with one arm banded around her, using his free hand to push open any doors on their way there. He throws her down on the bed with a bounce, staring down at her with dark eyes, his pupils blown. “You can stop tonight.”
Her lungs stutter, arousal pooling between her legs. “And now?”
Bellamy tugs his shirt over his head, hurling it aside. “We can practice.”
Clarke swallows audibly, pushing up into her knees. Carefully, she puts her hands over his chest, exploring his warm skin slowly. She opens her mouth to say something, but his hand comes up to cup her chin, running his thumb over lips. “Get undressed.”
She doesn’t need to be told twice, ripping her pants off and then toeing off her pink socks. She is unclipping her bra when he suddenly grabs her by the underside of her thighs, yanking her to the edge of the bed. Apparently he finished first, and he couldn’t wait any longer.
Clarke only catches a glimpse of his cock, thick and hard and glistening against his abdomen, but it’s enough to make her blood run hot with anticipation. He ducks down to kiss her while hooking his fingers underneath the elastic band of her underwear, tugging it down her legs. Once it gets to her knees she kicks it off the rest of the way herself, too eager to have him let off her mouth, taking the rest of the strap of her bra down her arm as well, dropping it over the edge of the bed and onto the floor.
His big hands immediately cup her breasts, squeezing them together. She chases his mouth as he leans back a little, but he’s glancing down to her chest, this reverent look on his face, licking his lips. He must notice her staring at him, because he gets a little embarrassed, distracting her by flicking his thumbs over her nipples and swallowing her moans with his lips.
She knows though, fingers curling into the hair at the back of his head. Her voice is hoarse, raspy with arousal, “They’re going to get really big, huh?”
Bellamy looks a little surprised, and then full of disbelief, but she smiles, encouraging, and then his eyes seem to darken even more, and he’s suddenly crushing his mouth to hers with purpose, one of his hands disappearing in between them to pet at her cunt. He slides one of his fingers in easily, and when he notices just how easy, he pushes in another.
She groans into his mouth when the rough pad of his thumb bumps into her clit, and then her back is arching into him and she’s too distracted to kiss him back any longer as he builds up a steady rhythm, working her towards the edge like they’ve done this a million times before. He’s sucking one of her nipples into his mouth when she unravels embarrassingly fast, enough pleasure washing over to make her body twitch underneath him. Fuck.
Still out of breath, she hardly registers it at first when he’s pressing kisses along the side of her face, stopping by her ear to ask her, “You okay with not using a condom, right?”
Clarke smiles, affectionate, her heart skipping a beat as she palms his cheek. Although he was ordering her around, manhandling her just now, he’s still this guy too, the one he pretends not be, and she loves him. She loves him, and the more she looks at him, the more she wants to squirm, and plead, needing him inside of her already.
He’s looking at her like he’s going to need verbal confirmation though, so she confirms, eye-roll implied, “Yes, obviously.” She runs her hands over his arms and shoulders, settling on either side of his neck. “What part of ‘I want you to put a baby inside of me’ wasn’t clear here?”
Bellamy groans, sliding an arm around her waist to hoist her back to the top of the bed, shifting over her on his knees so he can position himself at her entrance. She can feel the heat of him, so close, yet so far, and it’s making her skin feel tight, her cunt clenching around nothing.
“I wish this wasn’t practice,” he confesses darkly, gazing down at her. One of his hands slides from her hip to her mons, pressing over her clit for a moment long enough to make her bite her teeth into her bottom lip, before it slides up over her soft, lower belly. His hand is almost big enough to cover it completely, and the way he’s looking at her has her literally dripping, tapping into needs and wants and parts of herself she didn’t even know existed. “You, growing my baby here.”
“Come on,” she urges, desperate, spreading her legs invitingly, raising her knees a little. Desperate sweat coats the back of her neck. “I need you inside of me.”
Bellamy’s kissing her again as he slides into her, not stopping until he hits home, the pressure of him right there where she needs him to be, where she needs him to fill her up and give her a baby, his baby, is nearly enough to drive her over the edge again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she mutters, when he moves out for the first time, not sure she’s ever been this turned on, clawing at his shoulders to get him closer.
“Feels so good,” he rumbles, breathing hard as he slides in and out of her easily, mouth close to hers. “Doesn’t it? Knowing we’re going to do this again, and again, and again,” he practically marvels, punctuating each again with a sinfully slow roll of his hips, “Until you’re pregnant with our baby, until your belly is nice and swollen, until you—”
They both grunt as he hits an especially sensitive spot, and Clarke’s toes curl, arching closer to him as her eyes slam shut in pleasure. She’s never felt closer to anyone than in this moment.
“Look at us,” he orders, heated, waiting for her self-control to win the struggle and her eyes to sluggishly flutter back open before his eyes flick back down to where he’s disappearing inside of her. She follows his gaze, clenching down involuntarily as she watches his thick length push inside of her at the same time as she feels it drag over every ridge and fold, her cunt more than welcoming him. It’s incredibly hot, and her heart trips over itself, and she’s so fucking close all of a sudden, every pound of his pubic bone against hers sending another shock of pleasure up her spine. “Look at how well you’re taking all of me.”
“I need to come,” Clarke tells him, desperate, sure that if it doesn’t happen soon she might die, knees tightening around his hips. She needs, needs, needs. More of him, always, more. “Please. I need your come.”
“I love you, God, I love you,” he babbles in return, slamming into her hard enough to make her cry out his name. He’s all control and power, raw need, never stopping or taking it easy on her, just expecting her to keep up. Bellamy’s fingers move down to her clit, his strokes turning shorter with more force focused at the end, and she’s coming within seconds.
Clarke’s too breathless to make any noises as she passes the point of no return, sounds hitching out of her in gasps as she comes down and rides out the aftershocks. Bellamy’s starting to lose control fast, and she’s murmuring at him to let go, to come for her, to give her what she wants, when his hips stutter and he spills inside of her. His warmth fills her to the brim, another small orgasm washes over her, taking her by surprise.
After sharing a handful of breaths like that, still connected, his come inside of her as they share a loaded look, he finally pulls out of her, collapsing beside her on his stomach. Clarke runs a hand down his spine, and he feels boneless, relaxed in a way she hardly ever gets to see him.
“I’m going to miss your daily texts,” she muses, snuggling into his side. He lifts up his arm to sling it around her back and pull her closer.
A lazy smile plays on his mouth. “They have apps for that.”
She squints at him. “I’m not going to need an app anymore, now do I, smart ass?”
His eyes spring open, somehow more pained than expected. “I meant what I said,” he claims, softly. She looks at him, curious, and a little confused. He just fucked her brains out, she can’t be expected to make sense out of anything right now. Bellamy licks his lips, eyes dipping to a spot just below her chin. “I want you most of all. If you want to wait—”
She almost rolls her eyes, but it seems to require more energy than she has. Instead, she kisses his shoulder, hot and damp to the touch, which also requires more energy than it turns out she has, so it makes her huff a little. “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up,” Clarke explains, rationally. What they just did, part of it was lust, of course it was, something about making a baby turning her on in ways she didn’t know she could be turned on. But it only turns her on with him, and she wants it to be clear she’s in, all in, she’ll always be all in. “I’ve been taking birth control since I was fourteen, it’s going to take a while for my body to adjust. It’s not that easy, getting pregnant. There’s more luck involved than you’d think.”
He smiles, soft and special and all for her, adjusting his head so it’s closer to hers. “I like practicing too. Even if it’s all we do for the rest of our lives.”
She raises her eyebrows, keeping her expression soft. “But you’d really like a baby.”
“At some point, yeah. I’d want one tomorrow if I could,” Bellamy admits quietly, and then lets that linger for a moment. Another one of those self-deprecatory looks slips on his face. “But I also think it was my brain’s way of torturing and bullying me into finally confessing I love you. I could still have you in some ways, being your friend.” He lets out the breath of a skeptic chuckle. “But a child? Very hard to accomplish platonically.”
Hard, but not impossible. She laughs, at her own expense. “I thought that’s what you were going to ask me. To be your surrogate or something. Maybe platonically marry you for the adoption papers.”
He tilts his head forward to press his mouth against hers, chaste, but fond. “I love your emotional density. Best thing about you.”
“It’s not like you were dropping obvious hints before you turned my daily reminders into baby propaganda.” She quirks a brow.
“I took a risk with that one. You could’ve just decided to have a baby without me.”
“If it was going to be with anyone, it was going to be you.” She smiles, wrestling her arm free to drape it over his shoulder, bending it at the elbow to brush his curls back from his eyes. “My brain has strictly labeled ‘making offspring’ with Bellamy Blake, platonically or not.”
“I’ve never been more grateful for your obsessively coding, never-not-on, neurotic brain.”
“Our poor baby. With a mind like mine, and a heart like yours, our combined family history, that kid’s gonna need two therapists before even turning twelve.”
“We’ll just get them an iPad or something, works wonders.” He sighs after a beat. “It was killing me, thinking about how someone else at some point might accidentally knock you up.”
“The reminders really did help,” she promises, sympathetic to his anguish. Even if she didn’t know at the time, she can relate to being afraid of losing him. She lived in perpetual fear of him finally proposing to Gina, and then after they broke-up, that any of his hook-ups would stick around for longer than a night. It was hell, especially during the days she was still in denial with herself. If she knew how he felt, she never would've asked him to be at her side while she took those tests considering it must've qualified as torture, but then again if she knew, she wouldn't have had to take them at all. It thrills her a little, thinking of a near future where they'll both be happy to take one, this time actually hoping for a plus sign to show up, because this time it's theirs.
“Yeah, well,” Bellamy says, dryly, “At some point you were going so hard at it, I thought you might single-handedly beat the ninety-nine point nine percent fail-safe.”
She mock-gasps, kicking him in the shin before pulling her knee up over his hip. “No need to be jealous. If I have another existential crisis I’ll just turn to drugs.”
He huffs, mirthless, his hand sliding down to the junction of her thigh and hip, tugging her closer. His hand is warm, and big, and a fresh wave of need is already starting to prickle underneath her skin again. “Glad to hear.”
Silence wraps around them for a few comfortable moments. Her thumb brushes over his eyebrow, eyes lingering on his mouth as it stretches into a smirk while she says, “Wanna up our odds? We can be the zero point one percent.”
“I believe in us,” he agrees, readily, already leaning to cover her mouth with his.