Chapter Text
She doesn’t knock first. That’s how it starts.
No privacy in quarters that small, not for working-class people like the Blakes. Two stations over, the Jahas live in a space six times this size, the kid’s got his own room. Chancellor perks. But the Blakes have one room for sleeping, and only two beds, so Bellamy shares with his sister. But he’s 20 and every once in awhile he needs to be alone for a few minutes and the cramped little bathroom – size of a closet, basically – is all there is.
It’s easiest standing in the shower. More room, and the mess goes down the drain. Less awkward that way. One hand braced against the wall as the other one moves. Quick quick slow, quick quick slow. He has this down to a science. He’s so tired, he’s tired every day, he’s tired from the minute he wakes up until the minute he falls asleep, but Mom and O can’t see it. (Can’t let them, more like.) Always tired. And every once in awhile, he just needs a moment of release. Sometimes it’s the flask of illegal moonshine behind the bed that he swiped from a party. Tonight it’s this.
Everything falls away – O, Mom, work, the Ark, their small gray life – and he lets himself just feel. Hand slick and swift. Clutching himself with firm sure fingers. So good. A pure good thing, just for a minute. Pleasure. Simple and easy and all his, a thing he doesn’t have to share.
He doesn’t hear the door open, he’s too far gone to notice anything besides the bliss of friction and the rising pressure. He comes hard and quiet, lips pressed tight closed to choke back the groan, forehead resting on the cold dry steel of the shower wall as he catches his breath.
She waits politely to let him finish. “What are you doing?” she asks, calm and curious, the way she asks about books he shares or stories he tells her, the way she asks when she wants to learn things. He flushes hot red and hastily zips back up, embarrassment coming out as anger.
“Nothing.”
“You’re in the shower with your clothes on. And no water.”
“I wasn’t doing anything, O.” He brushes past her almost roughly back into the room. She turns to watch him, arms folded.
“You were doing something,” she observes. “Because you were smiling.”
This is mortifying.
“Is it like when you come home from work and your shoulders are all in knots?” she asks helpfully. She’s trying to understand. “And I give you a backrub and it hurts for a minute and then it feels better, and you feel better. Is it like that?”
“No. It’s nothing like that.”
“You were making the same noise.”
“Drop it, O."
“No, it’s nice,” she says, smiling. “It’s a nice noise. It’s your happy sound.”
“I have a happy sound?”
“You don’t use it much,” she points out wryly. “But it’s there. It’s how I know you like Mom’s bed better than our bed.”
His brow furrows. “What’s that mean?”
“When she’s gone at night. When I sleep in our bed and you take hers. Sometimes I can hear you, making that sound.”
“O –“
“Is that what you’re doing?”
He thinks about denying it, spins through some different options, maybe it’s easier to lie. But fuck, Mom’s never gonna teach her this, she’s already 15, and even though he’s not quite sure what chance there is for a life for her outside this room, he hasn’t given up hope yet that there’ll be one. Which means boys. (Or girls. Or both. Whatever. She doesn’t know yet, how the hell should he know?) And she’s not a kid, even though they sometimes treat her like one – he can’t pin this on Mom, he knows he does it too.
Someone’s gotta explain this shit, and nobody in the world loves her more than he does.
Just another of the fucked-up tasks that falls on your shoulders when you’re in charge of raising your sister in secret.
He sits her down on the bed and fumbles through the basics. She hasn’t been to school, but he has, and he’s also had sex, so he knows the classroom stuff and the bedroom stuff enough to more or less get through it. But she doesn’t actually care how babies are made, waves that off impatiently to get back to the real question.
“How do girls do it?”
“What?”
“To themselves. Like you were doing. I don’t have a, mine’s different. How do girls?”
“You can just . . .” He mimes, helplessly. “With your fingers.”
“How?” Impatient. A little cross. Never likes being told things, has to see it herself. “Show me.”
“I can’t.”
“I don’t mind,” she says easily, unzipping her jeans to tug them down. “I saw you and it didn’t bother me.”
“You weren’t supposed to,” he says, annoyed and embarrassed, but she shimmies out of her pants and lies back on the bed. Already gotten her way, just waiting for him to concede. “O, it’s not something . . . brothers and sisters don’t . . .”
“Well, you’re not explaining it very well, so just show me once so I’ll know and then you can go be weird about it somewhere else,” she sighs, like she’s the one irritated at him.
For fuck’s sake.
And since she isn’t relenting, and since they’re alone the rest of the night, so at the very least there’s no chance he’ll have to explain this . . .
“Here,” he says, relenting and gritting his teeth and really really trying not to think about this too hard, as he gently takes one of her hands in his. They go inside the patched blue panties together, where it’s all soft skin and downy fur.
He tries to remember he’s just teaching her a lesson. She asks questions about the world. He answers them.
This one he’s just answering on her body, that’s all.
She’s bone dry, so he starts with that, maneuvering her fingertips to rest on her clit, then removing his hand fast enough to convince himself he has plausible deniability. “Girls have to be wet first, or it doesn’t feel good,” he explains. “It’ll take a minute. But I think like . . . I think this is the good way.”
“Just touch it?”
“Yeah. Like with your fingertip is good. Little circles.”
“For how long?”
“Long as you want,” he says. “If it feels good.”
She wrinkles her nose, considering. “It doesn’t feel like much of anything,” she says doubtfully. “I think I’m doing it wrong.”
There’s only one thing he can do, and he resists as long as he can, trying not to look at the way she’s looking at him, trying not to think about how she deserves to have a way to shake off the weight of a terrible day too, but she doesn’t have an Ark full of other teenagers like he did to explain the things you need to have explained.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll show you.”
He bumps her hand aside and finds her clit. He’s done this a couple times, but not many, so it’s kind of a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind thing, but O’s fingers must have been in the wrong place or something because when he presses down with the tip of his finger, she makes a sound.
A happy sound
“You okay?”
She nods. “More, please.”
And that’s how it begins. “More, please.” It’s that simple.
The lesson lasts the rest of the night. It gets easier when he gives up pretending, sheds jeans and kicks off boots and curls up warm and gentle next to her. He feels her grow slick around his fingers, talks her through it as he goes so he doesn’t scare her, dips one finger into the tight opening and soothes her down when she clenches in panic. He goes slow, lets her get used to him inside her, kisses her hair, reminds her to breathe, waits for the “More, please” before moving on.
It takes her a long time to come, but he’s patient. He takes his time, does it right. Fingers crooked deep inside her, thumb circling her clit. Forehead pressed to hers. Watching her. Making sure she’s all right.
Octavia Blake’s first orgasm is a pretty good one, and he’s kinda proud. She squirms up into him, pants a little, squeezes around his fingers, so he knows she’s close. When it hits her she inhales sharply, fingers clamping tightly around his forearm.
“Oh,” she says breathlessly. “Oh.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m good. Promise. Really good.”
“Was it like . . . what you thought?”
“I don’t know what I thought, but I liked it.” She smiles at him. Her lips suddenly press dry and warm against his. He’s been carefully avoiding kissing her, but she doesn’t know where any of the lines are so she doesn’t care about crossing them. She just knows she’s happy and she feels good, and she likes kisses.
And just like that he’s hard again, pressed into her hip, praying she won’t notice, praying she won’t ask.
Don’t ask, O. Because if you ask I’ll tell you. And if I tell you you’ll want to try. And if you try it on me, then I’m not teaching you. And if I’m not teaching you, we’re just having sex.
He gets half his wish. She doesn’t ask.
Instead, she rolls over a little, fumbles around with her hand until she finds it, and looks at him. “People can do it to each other, right?” she asks. “I mean this way.”
“O – “
“I want to hear the happy sound again,” she says, smiling, and then he’s lost.
No idea what she’s doing, but she learned this from watching him, the way she learns everything. Firm grip, swift strokes. She walked in on him at the end, when he was going hard, so she assumes that’s just how people do it. He chokes back a groan, hips rocketing off the bed.
It’s so good.
It’s so good.
“Slow down a little,” he stutters. “If you, like . . . if you switch between . . .”
“Like fast sometimes and slow sometimes?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” she says, and does it perfectly.
She’s so smart, so quick, her eyes miss nothing. She sees him flinch a little when her fingers brush the ridge, so she experiments a little, makes him almost cry out. She laughs. So damn pleased with herself. She likes showing off for her big brother sometimes, likes reminding him she’s as smart as he is, letting him know how fast she can pick things up. Learned to read early, learned to sew. She thinks this is the same. Look, I figured it out.
When he comes she’s surprised, but not horrified. This part she watched in the shower, she knows to expect it. He gets a cloth from the bathroom and cleans everything up, the real world returning.
She can tell, watching him gently wipe her sticky belly clean with his damp rag, that there’s something about this they’re hiding. It doesn’t bother her. She’s used to that. Just one more piece of Octavia Blake that nobody’s supposed to know exists. He wipes away all traces, and she accepts it, because that’s reality.
But he doesn’t make them put their clothes back on, and he doesn’t get into the other bed. He comes back to her. Takes her in his arms, holds her against her chest.
“More please,” she says sleepily, head drooping onto his shoulder.
He kisses her hair. “Tomorrow.”