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“Hey, are you coming?” Clarke asks from the front door.
Bellamy pauses the video game he’s been playing all morning and looks at her over his shoulder. She’s bundled up in her big winter coat with ear muffs on and her mitts tucked under her arm as she does up her boots.
“Coming where again?” he asks, kind of distracted by how she looks buried under layers and layers of clothing.
Clarke sighs, exasperated, and he knows he should be paying more attention to their plans, but his thoughts always somehow drift back to Octavia and how she’s not here to do it with them.
“Christmas tree shopping. With Raven and Zeke. Come on, Bell, don’t tell me you forgot.”
He sighs, and looks down at his ratty old sweatpants he should have thrown in the wash at least two days ago.
“You did, didn’t you?” she asks, and maybe it she wants to sound upset, but all Bellamy really hears is the disappointment in her voice and how it makes his heart tighten painfully.
“Clarke…” he starts, already knowing she’s not going to buy whatever excuse comes out.
“Next time,” she says with a shrug, and leaves their apartment with a frown still distorting her features.
Somehow, being let off the hook almost makes it worse. She’d started off December planning all sorts of activities with their friends and bugging him to come along no matter how much he told her that he’d only bring everyone down. But he’d secretly liked that even if he was being a bummer, she still wanted him there. Clarke just accepting that he doesn’t want to come along stings a little more than he thinks it should.
But before he can spend too much time thinking about it, he unpauses the video game and goes back to shooting zombies or Nazis or whatever it is that he’s fighting. It probably says a lot about the state of his mental health that he doesn’t even care enough to stop and think about what game he’s playing, but casting Octavia out of his life has taken its toll on him, even more so now that it’s Christmas.
He zones out and let’s the gunshots from the TV fill the emptiness in the room. Bellamy is still smashing buttons on his controller when the front door opens a few hours later.
“Hey,” he calls to Clarke, hearing her shuffle out of her winter clothes.
“Hey,” she mumbles and heads right to her room. The door shuts, and Bellamy is left in a quiet living room again.
It’s only an hour later, once his stomach starts rumbling and he realizes he hasn’t eaten all day, that he notices not only that it’s dark outside, but that Clarke had also come home empty-handed. In all the years they’ve lived together, they’ve never not had a tree.
He pads down the hallway to her room and knocks softly before pushing the door open. Clarke is in one of his old college hoodies that’s four sizes too big for her and sitting up against her headboard, watching a movie on her laptop with the volume down low. She looks up when he comes in and brushes her sleeve-covered hands over her eyes. Has she been crying?
“You okay?” he asks quietly, even if it’s just the two of them.
Her room, dimly lit in fairy lights behind gauzy curtains, feels like a whole different world, apart from the rest of their kind of shitty apartment, and he doesn’t want to break the spell.
She forces a smile, even though her eyes are still shining. “Yeah. Stupid sappy movie.”
The room goes quiet. It’s been too long since the last time they had a normal conversation, and he knows it’s his fault. He pushed her away after Octavia walked out of his life, and he can’t expect her to hang around waiting for him to come to his sense. Except that now that he’s starting to wake up, this creeping sense of panic just fills his chest at the thought that he might have pushed her too far and lost her.
He swallows. “No Christmas tree?” he asks, like he hasn’t already noticed how empty the living room is.
She shrugs. “Nah, you haven’t really been in the Christmas mood this year, and there’s no point in me paying for a tree and dragging it home only to have to decorate it and then throwing it away in January. We can skip the tree this year,” she says with another forced smile.
But Bellamy knows how Clarke is about Christmas. He knows how she loves to make a day of going to the farm and finding the perfect tree for their apartment. She always looks forward to coming home and warming up with hot chocolate and pulling out the decorations and telling Bellamy where to hang them on the tall branches that she can’t reach.
And he knows that he’s the reason she looks so sad. A pang squeezes at his heart, tightening in his chest and making it hard to suck in a breath. He’s the one making her this sad, and he hates it.
“Want to bake some cookies? I think there’s sprinkles in the back of the cupboard if you want to decorate them.”
She shakes her head, still not really meeting his eyes. “No, I’m okay.” And the way she says it makes his chest feel even tighter. “I’m just gonna finish this movie.”
He wants to say something, offer any kind of support, anything to bring her smile back and not feel so guilty. But he doesn’t know if he has the words to do that, so instead, he asks, “What are you watching?”
“The new Deadpool. It’s half over,” she says, clearly dismissing him.
He stands up off her bed, but turns back to face her with his hand on her doorknob. “You sure you don’t want to come bake with me?”
“I’m okay,” she says, already having unpaused the movie.
It’s not until he reaches the kitchen that he realizes that she hadn’t been crying because of the movie. He pulls the ingredients for his mom’s famous sugar cookies out of the cupboard with renewed determination. He needs to fix this somehow. For Clarke.
Once he gets started, it’s easy to go through the motions of measuring out the ingredients and mixing them together. It’s not as mindless as the video games, but it’s mindless enough that he can get it done without focusing too much on the fact that he’s doing this alone, that Octavia’s left him, and that Clarke is disappointed with him.
The first batch of cookies in the oven fills the apartment with a smell he only associates with Christmas, and it’s a lot. For a second, he has to stop and breathe, swallow down the lump building in his throat, and keep going, switch out one pan of cookie for the next, cut out more snowflakes and Christmas tree shapes.
When he’s done and the oven is off, he takes a plate of decorated trees and white and blue snowflakes to Clarke’s room and knocks on her door. When she doesn’t answer, he walks in tentatively. Her lights are still on, her laptop turned towards her on her bedside table, movie title screen playing on a loop. Clarke’s slumped over, his hoodie pulled up nearly over her nose, fast asleep. He puts the plate down on her desk as quietly as he can and walks over to shut her laptop.
“Clarke, come on. You’re gonna have a kink in your neck in the morning,” he says, a hand on her shoulder.
She mumbles something incoherently and slides further down the bed. He fixes her pillow and pulls the blankets up around her before reaching for the light switch and turning off the fairy lights.
“‘Night, Clarke,” he whispers.
She mumbles something again, and he smiles. Bellamy takes the plate of cookies back to the kitchen and puts them on their tiny dining table in the corner while he cleans up the kitchen, does the dishes, and packs up all the cookies into plastic freezer bags.
Clarke’s already gone, probably to the gym with Raven, when he gets up for work the next morning. He stretches and pulls a mug down from the cupboard to get his coffee, and that’s when he notices the plate of cookies still on the table that he’d forgotten to put away. There’s a tree missing from the plate, crumbs and sprinkles on the table. He starts his day with a smile.
His class is working quietly and he thinks he might actually have a few seconds to himself to look up something he’s been putting off all morning. He moves from his desk to the computer at his work table and before he finishes logging in, a student comes up to ask a question about the review assignment.
“Jordan,” he sighs, “we went over this last week.”
“I know!” the boy says, “but I had so much chem homework and maybe sorta didn’t do the readings.”
Bellamy gets it. He tries not to give his students too much homework because he knows the amount that they get in some of their other classes. Mostly, he just assigns what doesn’t get done in class so they don’t fall behind.
“Well, that’s what the review is for. Do you have your textbook?”
He walks his student through the material and points out helpful information in the textbook before sending Jordan back to his seat. Bellamy looks up at the clock. Half an hour left to the period. He still has time.
It’s easy to find what he’s looking for on the Target website, and he throws a couple things into his cart before going to check out what he really wants. The first tree on the page is almost ten feet tall and way too big to fit in their living room. So he keeps looking. He knows it won’t replace a day of going out and finding the perfect tree, but he wants to make up for the way he’s been acting and show Clarke that he really does care about Christmas. On the third page of his Christmas tree search results, he thinks he finds the perfect one.
It’s small, only about five and a half feet tall, and a little scrawny, but for some reason, it works. It feels like them . It’s far from perfect, but something about it feels right. It’s big enough that they can spend the evening decorating it, but short enough that Clarke can put the star on top without having to drag one of the kitchen chairs out into the living room. It’s little, like the family he’s found with her.
The sound of students laughing pulls him from his thoughts about Clarke and family and he looks up to find more than half the class no longer focusing on their review assignment. One girl near the front laughs again and tries to turn it into a cough and cover her face with her hand.
“Want to share with the class, Madi?” Bellamy asks, a little stern.
She giggles again. “Why are you buying a thirty dollar fake Christmas tree?” she asks, and the class laughs again.
“Um, Mr. Blake?” one of the shier students says. “You left the SmartBoard on.”
Bellamy feels the heat rise to his cheeks but does his best to look unimpressed when he addresses the class. “A Christmas tree is a Christmas tree, regardless of how real it is or how much it costs. Not everyone can be fortunate enough to have the biggest, nicest tree for the holidays, and it would serve all of you well to remember that. What’s important are the people that are going to be there to celebrate with you. Without them, the tree means nothing. It’s just a tree.”
And without Clarke, Christmas is just another day of the year.
“Now get back to work. You have fifteen minutes left,” he says, reaching for the remote and turning the projector off.
He picks up the tree and decorations he’d set aside along with a few things for dinner before heading back to the apartment. He leaves the tree in the trunk of his car, wanting to surprise Clarke. He hears music coming from her room down the hall when he lets himself in, and the sound of her laugh drifts through her open door. He’s glad that she’s in a better mood.
“Hey,” he calls, toeing off his shoes. “Have you eaten yet? I picked up food on the way home.”
Someone pads down the hall toward him, and he only has a second to think about how the footsteps don’t sound like Clarke’s before Raven rounds the corner and flops down onto their living room couch, propping her feet up on the armrest.
“Hey Blake,” she says with a smile.
Clarke comes out of her room to join her friend, followed by Harper and Murphy’s new girlfriend, Emori. She smiles when she sees Bellamy. It’s not as forced as when she was trying to convince him that she was fine while crying in her room. He can’t help the smile that crosses his lips at the sight of her happiness.
“Hey,” she says coming over to kiss his cheek while the others settle on the couch around Raven. “You’re home late.”
“Had some errands to run,” he says, holding up the bag of groceries.
“Oh, I’m sorry! I totally forgot to text you,” Clarke says, running a hand through her hair. “It’s girls’ night and we ordered pizza!”
“It’s okay,” he says, putting the bag down to turn around and hang up his coat. He’s hoping she won’t see the disappointed look on his face at the thought of the tree still in his trunk that he won’t be able to bring inside tonight. “I have some papers to grade anyway.”
It’s not that he doesn’t want to bring it in while Clarke’s friends are here, it’s just that decorating the Christmas tree has always been something he’s done with Clarke, and something about this year made it feel even more important that this be something he share just with Clarke.
“Do you want pizza when it gets here?” she offers, almost as an afterthought.
“Nah,” he says with a shrug. “I’m good.”
“Griffin!” Raven calls over the back of the couch. “Let’s go! Stop flirting and get over here before I finish all of these cookies.”
Clarke slinks back looking sheepish and goes to join her friends. She takes the decorated Christmas tree cookie Harper offers her before settling between her and Raven on the couch with her legs crossed and turning on the tv.
He puts the groceries away and heats up leftover pasta from last night before taking his messenger bag and dinner to his room to settle in for a night of grading he wasn’t planning on getting done for another work or so. He’ll just have to set up the Christmas tree another time. The calendar on the wall stares back at him when he looks over. It’s already the nineteenth.
The apartment has been quiet since girl’s night with Clarke busy finishing up a project at work and all the year end assignments Bellamy has to grade before Christmas, so they really don’t talk about Octavia or the absence of Christmas trees or anything about Christmas at all, really.
And that’s what leads to Bellamy sitting on their living room floor on Saturday afternoon, discarded box off to the side, ornaments scattered around him, head in his heads. The tree is a mess. It’s cheap and barely has any green on the branches to hide the metal rod going up the middle. It’s just a sham, like his sorry effort to fix Christmas.
“Bellamy?” Clarke says from behind him.
Her voice is quiet and uncertain, and Bellamy doesn’t want to turn around to look at her because he’s going to have to explain what this is.
He feels her more than sees her sit down beside him and lay her head on his shoulder.
“What are we doing?” she asks, her hand on his knee rubbing comforting patterns.
He looks up and meets her wide blue eyes. Clarke is looking at him with curiosity and a little bit of concern.
“I don’t know,” he sighs. “I’ve been so down about Octavia leaving that I didn’t even notice it was almost Christmas, and then when I did, it was because we were supposed to do something and I was letting you down. And then the other night when you were crying I realized how much of an ass I was about the whole thing.
“So I got this tree from Target because I didn’t go with you and Raven the other day, and I knew we’d never have time to go get one, but it’s the worst tree I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t even look like a tree. It’s just some spiky green metal and plastic that I was going to decorate to surprise you, but it’s just all a mess and I’m debating putting it all away because I ruined everything.”
Clarke’s eyes are brimming with tears and he wants to reach out and wipe them away. Instead, he leans forward and presses his forehead to hers.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.
She hugs him tightly, her hands fisting into the fabric of his Henley. “You didn’t ruin Christmas, you absolute dork,” she says fondly.
Bellamy pulls back to look at her. “So then why were you crying?”
“Because I miss you!” she says as if it’s the most obvious thing. “I was really excited to get to spend some more time with you, but you were so sad about O that I didn’t want to push it, but I missed you!”
Clarke’s face is lit up with the goofiest grin, and it’s hard to keep a matching one off his own. He can still make this right.
“Wanna decorate this ugly fake Christmas tree with me?” Bellamy asks.
Clarke jumps to her feet and pulls him up. “I get to put the star on top!”
The decorating takes up the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening. They order Chinese food when Clarke’s stomach starts rumbling and eat sitting on the floor in the living room while Clarke plans out where she’s going to put the rest of their ornaments.
“Wait!” she says around a bite of sesame chicken. “I didn’t put up the most important one, yet!”
With the ornaments and the garlands up, the tree looks almost like an actual Christmas tree. Clarke puts her plate down and scrambles over to a box without getting up. Bellamy watches her with a fond smile as she rifles through the box, looking for something.
“Want help?” he offers.
“Nope! Found it!”
Clarke gets up and hangs an ornament dead center on the Christmas tree. It’s a picture ornament Raven gave them when they first became roommates. In the middle of the ceramic star is a picture of Clarke and Bellamy from college, taken at a party, where Bellamy is smiling as Clarke plants a kiss to his cheek.
“That’s the most important one?” he asks as he watches her admire her handiwork.
She twists back to look at him. “It’s my favorite.”
His heart does a weird sort of stutter he’s not quite used to yet, one that’s been happening a lot around Clarke. He holds his hand out and she rejoins him on the floor, cuddling close to his side.
“Thank you,” she says softly.
“For ruining Christmas and not doing a good job fixing it?”
It’s meant to be humorous, but deep down, he needs the reassurance that things are okay between them.
“Bellamy, I don’t care about some stupid tree. That’s not what’s important about Christmas.” She turns to face him and her thigh is pressing against his. His heart stutters again. “This is what’s important. I love decorating with you, and baking, and building silly gingerbread houses and eating them. I love getting to spend time with you when it’s just the two of us.”
She takes his hand and Bellamy laces their fingers together. He can’t look away from her, away from the look on her face and the honesty shining from her eyes.
“Clarke—“ he says, his voice rough.
She leans forward and for a second, the terrifying possibility that she might actually kiss him runs through his mind, but she ducks her head at the last second and the moment passes.
“I just didn’t want to miss out on this time with you.”
Bellamy wraps his arm around her shoulder and pulls her tightly against him. “We’ll make up for the time I wasted. You’re going to be so tired of me.”
She grins. “I could never be.”
“Is that a challenge?” he asks, pressing a kiss to the crown of her head.
She only giggles.
“Hey! No peeking!” Clarke says, shoving him over.
It’s Christmas Eve, and they’re sat at the coffee table in the living room, a book set up as a divider between them as they build their gingerbread houses.
“Clarke, you got a gingerbread lighthouse . I don’t even have to peek. It’s taller than the book,” Bellamy laughs.
“It was cool! A gingerbread lighthouse, Bell!”
The excitement lights up her entire face and he can only smile. They’ve spent the entire week packing in as many of their usual Christmas traditions as possible, and now that it’s almost midnight and the twenty-fifth, the gingerbread houses are the last thing on their list.
Clarke brushes her hair back, and her fingers leave a strand white icing in her bangs. Bellamy smiles fondly and reaches forward.
“Wha—“
“Hang on,” he says, playfully swatting Clarke’s band away from his wrist. “You have icing in your hair.”
“Oh,” she says, a pink blush rising to her cheeks.
He wipes the icing away, and when he looks back up, she’s still looking at him, blue eyes wipe and lips slightly parted.
“Bell,” she whispers, making his heart do that stuttering thing again.
He leans forward, watches as her breath catches, and runs his thumb along her lower lip.
“I’m sorry,” he says for the millionth time, hand cupping her cheek as his fingers slide into her hair.
Her voice is quiet when she speaks. “Stop apologizing and just kiss me.”
So he does, soft and slow. Her lips taste like sugar and spice, and he sighs against her lips.
“Merry Christmas,” he whispers.
She sighs and hums happily, tucking her face against his with her eyes closed. “This,” she says, her hands playing with the hair at the base of his neck. “This is a good Christmas.”
He chuckles and brings her mouth back to his.