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Stray wafts of campfire smoke start setting a wrinkle into her nose. She doesn’t think anything of it. When her bed begins to lure her mind blank and her body limp earlier than usual, she charts it off to mere exhaustion.
Clarke doesn’t worry about the cramps at first either. The sharp pains that jab at her abdominals are hardly pleasant, but – well, there are far more pressing problems at hand than her PMS.
It’s not until nausea takes to coiling through her stomach that Clarke scrambles to remember the date; that calendar days start strumming against her mind like lead bullets.
“Oh, God.”
Knees shuddering, she only barely manages to lower herself onto her makeshift bed before they give out entirely. And she can’t blame the fatigue or the cramps or even the nausea for forcing her down. Those are only symptoms. Signs of a – Clarke’s hands tremble into a chokehold around her legs – of another condition altogether.
This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening.
(Logically, she knows that it very much can be. That it very well might be.)
Breathe. Just breathe.
Clarke’s every breath cuts her throat jagged. She waits for the pain to numb before choking out a long exhale.
Okay. She can do this. She just has to think about this practically, critically. Objectively.
She might not have a precise calendar on hand, but she’s near certain that she should have had her period over a week ago. On its own, that would be incriminating enough. But it’s not on its own. It has plenty of company – company like the fact that, for the past month, she’s spent far more nights in Bellamy’s tent than her own. Or that she can’t claim any hard certainty over how long the birth control injections they gave her on the Ark were meant to last.
Clarke’s forehead crumbles down against her kneecaps.
If any other girl came to her with these symptoms, she knows the diagnosis she’d give. Pregnancy. The word sets her stomach churning with a queasiness she’s not entirely ready to chart off to morning sickness. And, were she dealing with any other girl, she’d probably have possible next steps rushing towards the tip of her tongue. A groan scrapes through her gritted teeth. The only next step, she can conjure for herself is clenching her eyes shut.
(Or telling Bellamy. She has to tell Bellamy. Oh, there is not one bit of her that wants to tell Bellamy.)
So, of course, when the flap of her tent rustles open, it just has to be him that strides over to her.
“Hey, Clarke, I was—” Even with her eyes still locked shut against the dirt of her denim, she can pinpoint the exact moment he registers the sight of her scrunched up on the ground like a crumpled piece of scrap mettle. “What happened?”
(It should be a question; it doesn’t sound like one. The words shoot from his mouth like throwing knives, any infliction either forgotten or abandoned.)
Slowly, she lifts her head. It takes her another moment to set her shoulders straight, and another still to face him. He’s crouched beside her on the floor by the time she does, hand darting towards her chin and gaze intent on claiming hers.
She shrugs away from both.
“Clarke. What the hell happened?” He scans her body from forehead to ankles, doubtlessly searching from some mark or bruise of explanation. Something to avenge. “Someone do something to you?” If possible, his tone goes darker. It’s the threat lurking behind the question, the unspoken demand to know whom he needs to hurt, that finally pushes Clarke towards him.
Remarkably, she manages to keep her hand steady when she grasps his.
“No, I— No one did anything.”
“Right. So you’re just hiding in your tent, huddled on the floor for the fun of it.” He tangles his fingers tight around her palm. “Damn it, Clarke, why won’t you look at me?”
Because she doesn’t want to. But that’s neither reasonable nor fair, so Clarke blinks her gaze towards him regardless.
He has a way of seeing too much when he looks at her. Illogical – not to mention impossible — as it may sound, she half-believes he’ll know exactly what’s wrong with her the minute she looks at him. As if her irises will flash with a glaring “I Might Be Pregnant” sign and give her away entirely.
But he just keeps working his fingers around her wrist, raking his eyes over every inch of her face. “Bellamy, I…” She swallows, mind flashing absurdly back to the poisoned blade she’d pulled out of Finn’s stomach during their first weeks on the ground. Just get it out. “I’m late.”
“Yeah, I got that.” Except his fingertips don’t bother to pause against her skin, and his voice remains slow and gritted, and she’s not sure he got anything at all. “You said you’d be in my tent a half hour ago, Princess. I figured you got held up helping some idiot who tripped and sliced his knee open. Now? Now I’m worried.”
Dragging her lower lip between her teeth, she shakes her head. “You should be.” She jerks out a breath, steadies her voice, and forces herself to maintain eye contact. “My period is late.”
His jaw slackens then clenches in the span of a second. One more second, and it clenches tighter. His grip freezes firm around her arm, fingerprints digging deep marks into her skin. His shoulders tense. As far as Clarke can discern, all of him tenses. Turning as frozen and hard as the rest of him, Bellamy’s eyes never flinch from hers. Granted, she’s not entirely sure that’s a conscious effort on his part; it could easily be nothing more than an effect of the shock.
Gradually, his free hand works its way up into a pace against his forehead. “Hell…”
“Yeah.” She tries to ease her arm from his grip. Jerking a look down at her hand, he relaxes his hold slightly enough to allow her skin oxygen but not a bit looser. “Hell.”
Her tongue darts against her lips, ludicrously desperate for the taste of Monty’s moonshine. From the look on Bellamy’s face, finally settling from unwavering intensity to wide eyes and a strained brow, he wouldn’t turn down a shot either.
Clarke brings her knees closer to her chest. She can do this. Practically. Critically. Objectively. Get all the information out, then come up with an appropriate course of action. It’s what she’d do for anyone else. “I can only assume that the shots they gave us in the Ark have worn off – which means that we need to warn people. Who knows how many are already…” Her lips indulge a brief quiver before pressing hard together. Pregnant. It’s a clinical term, hardly a curse, but the word stays clogged in the back of her throat.
“Clarke.”
She barely registers his voice.
“And we’ll need some kind of herb for birth control. I’ll ask Monty about it tomorrow, see if there’s any plant or flower or recipe we can find.” Careful to keep her next words fluid and flat, she goes on. “He might know of something with abortive properties too.”
All at once, callused fingers wrench back around her hand, clenching an ache against her bones and her skin into folds. “Clarke.”
She realizes a beat late that she’d lowered her eyes to the ground once more. It takes her another beat to raise them back to Bellamy’s. By the time she does, his face has worked itself back into hard lines, most of which soften at whatever he sees in her expression.
Clarke keeps her own eyes almost painfully wide, begging her eyelids to refrain from blinking. She needs them open, needs them dry, needs them hurting, so long as it means she’s not crying.
Slowly, as if she’s some species of spooked rabbit, he pulls her to his side, moving one palm against the back of her hand and the other to fit the curve of her cheek.
His voice remains stiffer. “Is that what you want? Something with abortive properties?”
No. Yes. Clarke swallows both words, keeping perfectly still and unusually tense against his touch. “I don’t know,” she says finally, cautiously. “Isn’t that what you want? I mean, God, Bellamy, we’re just – We never prepared for this. How are we supposed to have a baby with everything that’s happening? And here. We don’t have a real doctor or real technology or any clue if there’s leftover radiation that could end up giving it two heads.” The pad of his thumb hiccups in its pattern against her cheek. “For example.”
“It’s not going to have two heads.” If it weren’t for the strain still tangible in his voice, she’d almost say he’d choked back a laugh.
“Fine then. Let’s assume that everything’s fine, that there aren’t any problems with the pregnancy, that I have this baby.”
Bellamy slants his eyebrows at her.
“I would have had a baby. We would have a baby.”
“I’m no doctor, Princess, but I’m pretty sure that’s a standard side effect of pregnancy.”
Hands clenching at her side, Clarke raises one to knock against his chest. “Can you be serious about this for one minute and just tell me what you’re thinking?”
He catches her fist with one of his own, fingers wrapping warm and firm around hers. “You’re right. We didn’t prepare for this. Not for this, not for anything since we stepped out of that dropship.” Despite herself, Clarke heaves a sigh against the pattern of his fingertips. “We haven’t had the luxury of preparation for a while now.” The corners of his mouth turn. “Unless you’re holding out on me.”
“This is different.”
“Yeah. This is a lot. And, hell, maybe I’m a hypocrite. Maybe, if it was anyone else, I’d be all for finding some plant and ending it here. Not putting our camp through two teenagers trying to take care of a baby, when I’d only trust half of them with a pet rock.”
A sob and a smile slip through the barrier of Clarke’s teeth before she can stop them. “And since it’s not anyone else?”
Shoulders slumping slightly, his eyes skirt across her tent’s beaten ceiling before returning to rest on her face. “Look, I – I’m not going to tell you that this is easy. Or convenient. Or not a hell of a lot to process right now. But we can do this.” He tilts his head, a flicker of a smile falling onto his mouth with the motion. “I raised O, right? And that was without the added bonus of having gone through puberty.”
Gulping, Clarke strips her cheek of the comfort of his palm, only to feel his fingers combing circles into the back of her neck a moment later. “So you can do this. I’m not – do you know how much experience I have with kids?”
“I’m assuming you mean beyond the entire camp you’ve helped keep alive.”
Clarke’s jaw trembles and locks. “Not all of them.” A cliff’s edge slices against her mind, the memory of the small figure that plummeted from its height still managing to wind her.
“Hey.” Somehow, even with both of his hands stretched across her skin, the hold he keeps on her gaze seems the tightest. “That’s not on you. That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it.”
Her eyebrows curve towards her brow. “Oh, do I.”
If he notices her sarcasm, he chooses to ignore it. “Just like you know that you haven’t gone a day without taking care of someone since we landed on the ground. That you didn’t have to take charge – hell, that I didn’t make it easy for you – but you did anyway.” She doesn’t realize her fist has uncurled until she feels Bellamy’s fingers tangle among hers with a squeeze. “Just like you know that we make a damn good team.”
Curling herself against his chest, Clarke feels a shrug work its way from her shoulders to her mouth. “That I do know.” Even if certainty abandoned her over everything else (and she’s fairly sure it has), she’d still be positive of that.
His mouth presses down against the dried sweat coating her forehead. “We’ll figure this out, alright?”
A murmured yeah slips from her lips, stowed away on a short breath. For the first time in nearly an hour, the stress burrowed deep into her shoulders eases a fraction. “We’ll figure it out.”