Chapter Text
Bellamy has a habit of spurting out random facts and stories (usually about history) to Clarke throughout the day. He’s not even sure she listens anymore, just vaguely pays attention so she can hum in the appropriate places and be calmed by the sound of his voice. She gets her payback in the middle of the night, anyway.
It’s 3am and there is about zero per cent chance of Bellamy falling asleep. He can hear Clarke’s brain ticking over. It’s not really all that surprising; Clarke is constantly analysing or worrying or just thinking. She keeps huffing before throwing her body around to face in a different direction.
It’s not like anything will change when Clarke manages to fall asleep—she sleep talks, a lot. Because even when her body is essentially hibernating, Clarke’s brain is still going a million miles an hour. (It’s both intriguing and terrifying. Intriguing because she will have full conversations with him, answering him with the weirdest shit. One time she blurted out ‘what if we all have nine lives, like cats, but they stuff us in coffins before we wake up again so we have to live the rest of our lives out underground?’. Terrifying because she asks shit like that and it takes him a few minutes to realise she’s asleep, after which, of course, he debates whether that’s where zombies come from. Also, sometimes she’ll open her eyes and stare right through his fucking soul and it gives him the creeps.)
He decides to humour her, anyway, because he has work tomorrow and he can’t get to sleep while she’s practically humming like an old laptop starting up.
“What’s up, Princess?”
His words are all she needs, apparently, to release all of her pent up thoughts.
“Okay, so, our kid—our hypothetical, no pressure, possible kid—like, wait.” She takes a moment to organise herself, because even though she’s been mulling over this all night, she evidently hasn’t gotten around to figuring out how to actually voice her thoughts. It’s endearing, really, and he catalogues it in his mind because a completely awake and functioning Clarke would never be this jumbled. “Say we had a kid. Boy or girl, it doesn’t matter. Do you think anyone would even like it? Like, no offense, but it wouldn’t have very good role models in terms of friendly, happy parents. I mean, the only friend I had for the first fourteen years of my life was Wells. And every friend after that only started becoming close with me because they had to, you know? Monty had no friends in Bio, Jasper is friends with anyone Monty is friends with, I literally threatened Maya the first time I met her, Raven was tired of hanging out with boys and I was pretty much the only other girl she knew, even you hated me at first.”
She’s counting everyone off on her fingers and it’s honestly a little depressing. He goes to cut her off but she’s too deep in her train of thought to even notice. She’s not even looking at him; her wide eyes are trained on the ceiling.
“And, yeah, you were pretty popular in school but that was because everyone was scared of you. You were also a dick, and I was a little bit of a dick, so our kid will probably be, like, Dick-Two-Point-O. Or King Dick. The Dickiest.”
He can’t help it anymore—he bursts out laughing. It’s just so ridiculous. If it wasn’t already apparent that Clarke is tired it definitely is now. She would normally never bring this kind of stuff up, no matter how much it was bothering her, because she would think it’s too fickle. Clarke glares over at him, offended. “I’m sorry, it’s just—that’s what’s been bothering you so much? That our kid will be a massive dick? Clarke, we haven’t even talked about kids yet.”
Clarke is still frowning at him when she says, “Yeah, that’s why it’s hypothetical. I was just wondering.”
He doesn’t tell her that wondering doesn’t usually include this much anxiety, and that she’s closer to stressing.
“Even if our hypothetical child is a dick, we will always love it. And that counts, right?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she says, her frown smoothing out. He knows where her mind is right now; the father he never got to meet, the mother who died too early and left him and O without a parent, her father who loved so hard until, he too, was taken from the world. He reaches out his arms and Clarke instantly shuffles her way into them. He runs one hand through her hair and slides the other under her pyjama shirt so he can rub large circles over her back.
“Honestly, I think anything we create will be pretty damn great. And who cares if no one likes them? No one liked us and we’re still happy and pretty fucking brilliant.”
“Yeah,” she murmurs, tucking her head under his chin. “We really are.”
+
Three years later, a heavily pregnant Clarke (who is taking up over two-thirds of the bed) whips her head up to stare at Bellamy. He's reading, and still has his lamp on so he can see the glassy quality to her eyes, which is her I-am-asleep-but-somehow-managing-to-stay-alert look.
"You know what?" she blurts. "I hope our kid is a dick, like a really big asshole. And then, when they say something really... dicky, I can be like, 'yeah, that's my kid'. I'll be so proud. I want them to be just like us. Dicks."
He just grins and places his hand over her protruding stomach. "Yeah, The Dickiest."
+
Clarke gets her moment five and a half years later at Aurora's first day at school. The parents get to stick around until recess, to help the kids get settled in. Aurora sucks up to the teacher for most of the time they're there. It's so Clarke, and Bellamy tells Clarke as much, earning him an elbow to the stomach. Only half an hour before the parents are supposed to leave, Aurora finally decides to join a group of other kids, rather than spend the whole day with the teacher. They're all gathered around a pile of primary coloured foam blocks, making castles and shit. One kid is hoarding all the blocks with archways, and it's apparently pissing Aurora off.
"Your supposed to share," she lectures. She swipes one of the archway blocks from part-way up the kid's castle, causing a bunch of it to topple down.
"Hey!" the boy cries, gathering up the blocks that were spread everywhere by Hurricane Aurora.
"You're being rude. You don't need all of the blocks like this," she tells him, handing the block to a skinny boy sitting next to her, who timidly accepts her offering. "You need to be a big kid and learn that sharing is caring." She says 'sharing is caring' as if it's some sort of inspiring message, like she got it straight of the mouth of Buddha, or something.
"She's so pretentious," Clarke breathes, a wide grin spreading across her face.
"What a dick," Bellamy agrees.