Chapter Text
The first time it doesn't happen, she can't even tell if she's happy or sad.
Bellamy is quiet around her, so easy and soft-footed she wants to shake him, no, stop, you fucking stop. You wanted this.
But it didn't work out, and she isn't, and she hates him a little when he sits behind her that night, and starts rubbing her back to ease her period cramps.
"If you're not sure, we can stop trying," he says at one point, and she almost barks in response.
"I'll never be sure."
(It's easier, you see: thinking of his thoughts and not of her own.)
***
The next month, she is four days late, and that's when she panics, panics right in front of Monroe's little Tim, and watches the kid run to get an adult like she's a character from some very bad movie. The nearest adult turns out to be Octavia, so at least she gets that: a solid arm around her middle, but none of the worried glances, and concerned questions replaced by a mug of cold water.
Sometimes Raven really loves Octavia.
They don't really talk, because there is nothing to talk about. Raven isn't sure how much Bellamy told his sister, and she doesn't care either way, but she doesn't want to go into any details herself. Ostensibly, everything is plain and simple: they need to start having more children, or else their village is screwed, and it looks bad when Raven and Bellamy, being unofficial leaders, do not take one for the team. She is twenty five now, old enough to understand numbers, sixty adults, eleven children, and time trickling down, new people moving in fast, but not nearly fast enough.
(Apart from Octavia, there are now three other girls in the village who have brothers. Raven doesn't count. She buried hers years ago.)
***
She starts vomiting her guts out in the middle of winter, and this is it, this is really it, how romantic: she retches, and Bellamy holds her hair back for her, dips his hand in the snow to press it expertly to the nape of her neck. They should do this more often.
She can hear him worry from where he sits at their work table, and for a moment, she wants to believe that she is the kind of person that would do this for him, grit her teeth and give him the child he craves so much it makes him volunteer almost every time anyone in the village needs a babysitter.
There is a half-finished loom in their cabin, a project she works on whenever it's too cold to go outside. A Grounder woman showed her how to build it in exchange for a good knife, and so now she's fiddling with frames and levers so Bellamy can operate the whole thing easily, warp and woof, no more sewing for scraps. See? She is devoted. She makes things for him.
Oh, what a load of crap.
***
She is already large come late summer, a lot larger than she should be, or maybe she just seems like this because most days, no one really notices how small her frame actually is. She's sitting on the grass with O and Monroe, mending fishing nets with furious precision, look at her, just look at her, so composed and calmed down, nothing like the mess from a year or five before. She can do this. Oh, she so can do this.
(She dreams of her mother that night, and stares her down hatefully, for the first time in her life revelling in Rosa's blank stare and idle fingers, happy and triumphant and easy.
Then Rosa catches her hand, and her gaze is focused, wickedly smart in a way that Raven doesn't want to remember, a sharp eye fixed on her stomach the way it used to fix on Finn, or Zero-G books, or Raven's insolent face.
I don't know, little bird. Can you?)