Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The radio was mocking her.

She knew that that sounded crazy, but it was. Every love struck, heart achy, crooning Christmas jingle that crackled through the speakers was another—very personal—jab at her life. She wasn’t even listening to a Christmas station for crying out loud.

She jabbed the radio’s power button with her finger, slamming it off. She didn’t need to add the jolly tunes of the season to the list of things that the day ruined.

With the radio off, Clarke was left to her thoughts. Which was a place she absolutely did not want to be. It was a place her mother often frequented—oh god her mother. She had to tell her mother. Where else was she going to go? She wasn’t just going to go back to her apartment and sit alone all Christmas break, but her mother?

No. No, that wasn’t an option.

With one last check on the gas gauge, Clarke switched lanes and pulled off on the next exit.

***

Eventually she’d had to turn the radio back on though.

She needed it to block out the sound of a giggle that wasn’t her own coming from his bedroom, and the memory of the thudding of her blood coursing through her veins because she knew exactly what she was walking into.

And the sound of the creaking of the door as she opened it slowly in order to give them time to make it look like it wasn’t exactly what she knew it was,

And the sound of Finn calling after her to wait,

Or the sound of her feet hitting the pavement as she ran, even though she hated that she was running because only cowards run and she should have stood tall as she turned on her heel and left but instead she bolted from the room as if she wasn’t even worth a proper exit,

And the sound of her key as she shoved it into the ignition and her car as it scraped across the icy parking lot,

And the sound of her blasting the air conditioning in the middle of December because she suddenly felt like she was boiling, and she needed to cool off before
she melted completely into a puddle.

So she’d turned the radio back on, and let the Christmas songs about love and happiness and being with people who give you love and happiness wash over her until her mind hardened enough for her to not even notice them anymore, because she couldn’t notice anything anymore. Nothing except the road, that’s all she could focus on because anything else would be too much. So she focused on the road.

And when her car went careening into a huge mound of snow before it sputtered and died she most definitely did not focus on the fact that the peppy yet whiny tune of Last Christmas was blaring through her speakers as her car made camp three miles from where she was planning on going. And she was absolutely not focusing on the fact that her cell phone had no signal.

***

Three miles was a lot farther than Clarke had ever imagined. Three miles in the snow--no not snow, a blizzard, and she felt as if she was hiking the Appalachian Trail. Or Mount Everest. By the time she was halfway, she couldn’t feel her hands anymore. Her feet were cold, but not quite numb because she could still feel the snow seeping into the tops of her boots, since the snow was higher than the length of her shoes. Her coat seemed to be more of a wind catcher than a wind breaker, and she was pretty sure about half the skin of her cheeks has peeled off from the incessant battery from the cutting wind.

Once she got to the cabin, at the end of the long white road, she raised her hand—covered by a glove which was completely soaked through—and pounded on the door. Then she collapsed her forehead onto it, and waited for Octavia to answer.

“How can I help—” she heard someone say as the door swung open and she toppled forward, landing on their chest. “Clarke?”

She looked up, bracing her hands on his chest—and how warm it felt against her frozen palms—and saw Octavia’s brother Bellamy staring down at her, eyes wide, hands automatically moving to rub warmth up and down her own.

“Clarke what the hell?”

“Car—snow—crash—walked—three miles—” Clarke was shaking so hard, she couldn’t put together full sentences before her jaw started snapping up and down, trying to generate some heat.

“Shit,” Bellamy said, wrapping his arm around her shoulder, ushering her through the doorway. “Let’s get you inside, Clarke. Why the hell would you walk three miles in the snow? You should have called me.”

Clarke just shook her head, and tried to focus on the warm air flowing through the house, and the heat crawling onto her back from Bellamy’s arm.

“Phone had no signal,” she whispered. “Octavia?”

Bellamy had walked away from her, moving past the mud room without saying anything. She moved to take off her shoes, and peel off her soaked gloves and jacket before he came back holding out a thick blanket. He wrapped it around her shoulders holding it closed in front of her as he stood staring at her, concern flooding his eyes.

“Octavia got stuck at school. Her flight was canceled. All the flights were cancelled actually,” his expression turned playful. “Don’t know if you noticed, but we’re sort of in the middle of a blizzard.”

“Ha—freaking—ha,” she gasped out.

Bellamy had begun guiding her into the living room where she saw a down turned book on the coffee table alongside a mug. He started leading her over to the stairs and she pulled away from him in confusion.

“You need a hot shower and some clean clothes, princess.” She pulled the blanket closer to herself and followed him to the master bedroom. He pushed open the door to the en suite bathroom and stood outside until she wandered in.

“I’ll, um, I’ll leave some clothes for you outside the door,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said, and shut the door and stripped out of the rest of her wet, sodden clothing.

Chapter Text

Bellamy was in the living room when she had finished showering and changing. He’d left a pair of his own sweatpants and a sweater outside the bathroom door for her to change into. She had hesitated when considering her bra and panties. Her underwear was mostly dry, so she slipped that on (knowing that she would have put it on even if it hadn’t been dry—there was no way she was going to walk around in Bellamy’s pants commando), but her bra was still completely soaked, and she shivered when she thought about trying to strap it back on, so she bunched it up with the rest of her cold, wet clothing and slipped the sweater on without it.

She hadn’t been to the Blake’s cabin in years. It was somewhere she had gone every year as a kid with Octavia and Bellamy—mostly with Octavia while Bellamy towered over her intimidatingly, his three years on her seeming like a much bigger deal in middle school than they did now in college.

But every winter, here she’d be at least for a few days after Christmas to ring in the new year with the Blakes, making snow forts and sledding and drinking hot chocolate, playing pranks on Bellamy as they became sneakier, or as the years went on, ignoring the sounds of Bellamy’s guests in his bedroom as they crept by in the middle of the night to finish off the rest of the good desserts before someone else got a crack at them.

Now, standing on the bottom step looking at Bellamy reading in the living room, she felt like a stranger. She hadn’t come here since her first year of high school, and now here she was, about to graduate college, and she could barely recognize the person sitting a few feet in front of her. She was a new person in this house, and Bellamy was a stranger to her, and a bigger mystery than ever.

It’s not like she never saw him, she did. When she was home on breaks she always spent more time at the Blake’s than at her own house, so she saw him plenty.

They talked occasionally too, a phone call here or there, usually relating to Octavia, but they would always chat about themselves for a minute or two. But this seemed like entirely different context.

Shaking her head she cleared her throat and called out to him.

“Hey, um, is it okay if I use your dryer? My clothes are still pretty wet.”

Startled he snapped his book shut, clamping it down on the finger he had been using to mark his page. He winced for a fraction of a second before jumping up and reaching for the pile of clothes in her arm.

“Oh, you don’t have to—,” she started but he just shook his head.

“It’s fine, go grab something warm to drink. There’s coffee or tea.” There was a ghost of a smile on his face. “We may even have some of that hot chocolate you and O used to guzzle as kids, if you want it.”

***

She did chose the hot chocolate, for no other reason than she was feeling particularly nostalgic. The past suddenly seemed like a much better option than the present.

She took her mug of cocoa, and sat herself down on the couch Bellamy had been reading in moments before. She rubbed her hands over the familiar furniture—after all these years everything about the cabin was the same.

(Almost everything).

Bellamy plopped down next to her, raising his feel to rest on the coffee table. She curled her feet under herself, shifting a bit to face him.

“So what happened?” he asked.

That was the thing about Bellamy. No matter what age they were, or how long they spent apart, he always had an uncanny ability to read her like an open book—a fact which horrified her most of her life, as she was always afraid of the moment when he would finally call her out on her huge crush on him. That secret seemed to be the only one he never caught on to though.

“Walked in on my boyfriend—well ex-boyfriend, now—having sex with someone else.”

She never felt the need to lie or beat around the bush with him. (Well. Almost never.)

Bellamy’s jaw dropped, and his nose wrinkled in disgust. “Merry freaking Christmas,” he muttered to himself.

She barked out a laugh at that, glad that he wasn’t trying to be comforting. Because to be honest? Clarke wasn’t sad—she was pissed. And she needed someone who would understand that. Octavia would have been pissed for her, but would have been careful broaching the subject with her. Her mom would tell her that she should try to work it out anyway. Bellamy was the only one who really got her when this kind of stuff happened.

“And a happy New Year,” she replied bitterly, raising her mug to him.

“I think you’re missing something in there,” he said after she took a sip. He disappeared into the kitchen and returned a moment later with a bottle of whiskey, pouring a bit into Clarke’s mug.

“To shitty people, and crappy days,” Clarke toasted.

“To blizzards,” Bellamy said.

Clink.

***

Bellamy wasn’t entirely sure what was going on with Clarke. It had been a few months since he had seen her. With Octavia off in college, Clarke’s visits to their house became less and less frequent, restricted to whenever their school breaks lined up with each other. And it had been years since she’d been to the cabin with them for Christmas.

He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t missed having her around. She’d always sort of…gotten him. As kids they argued all the time, there was hardly a day that didn’t end in them bickering, but as they got older it turned friendly and teasing.

(Sometimes, he even used Octavia as an excuse to call her. “Check” to make sure everything was alright, pretend Octavia didn’t tell him everything. It was small, but it was something).

They were never close like she was with Octavia, the three years between them always seemed to matter when they were growing up.

(He didn’t feel like they really mattered now).

And maybe it was selfish, but he was glad for whatever twist of fate brought her to the cabin that day. He missed her.

“Hey,” she interrupted his thoughts. “You haven’t put up a Christmas tree.”

He glanced over at the corner of the room by the fireplace where the tree usually stood. He’d gotten out the boxes of decorations, and stacked them in the
corner, but he hadn’t actually put any of them up yet.

“Oh, yeah. Well O and I always put it up together,” he explain, even though he knew she knew that. “When she called to say her flight was cancelled, I just didn’t bother.”

Clarke looked at him, appalled.

“You were going to have Christmas without a tree?”

“Well, I was planning on having a relaxing holiday to myself, but them the abominable snowman showed up on my doorstep.”

She smacked his arm playfully, feigning shock at his words.

“Okay,” she said through her laughter. “But I’m here now and I refuse to have Christmas without a tree!”

So half an hour later, with the old fake tree dug out of the attic, Bellamy was being ordered around by Clarke, who was telling him exactly where to put everything. Every ornament, every decoration, every light.

“You know this is my cabin, right? I should get some say in where everything goes.”

“Here,” she said, tossing him the star for the top of the tree. “You can choose where to put that.”

***

He had to admit, the house cabin looked better now that everything was up. (He obviously wasn’t going to tell Clarke that, though. God, that would inflate her ego.)

When she slipped away to the kitchen to make some more hot cocoa, he ran up to his room, and pulled a small wrapped box out from his duffle bag. He tucked it under the tree silently and went back to his book.

She came back into the living room and handed him a mug. (She’d not forgotten the whiskey this time, he noticed).

“What’s that?” she nodded over to the tree.

“Why, it’s a Christmas tree, Clarke. What do they teach you at that fancy school of yours?”

She shot him a look. Setting his mug down, he moved over to the tree and grabbed the box from beneath it, handing it to her.

“It’s your Christmas present. I brought it to give to Octavia. You guys usually see each other on New Years, right?”

“You got me a present?”

He felt a blush creep up on his neck.

“Yeah,” he tried to sound casual. “Don’t get too excited it’s nothing huge.”

She grinned.

“Wait here,” she told him.

She ran upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, and then returned down a minute later, with a similar small box in her hand.

“Merry Christmas, Bell,” she said handing it over to him.

“Technically, Christmas isn’t until tomorrow,” he pointed out.

She waved him off, and sat back down on the couch next to him, reaching for her present. She peeled the wrapping paper off carefully and pulled out a little gray box. Opening it, she lifted out a long necklace, with a thin gold pendant. There was an owl engraved on the pendant. She lifted it up around her head and pulled he hair out so it wouldn’t tangle in the chain.

It looked ridiculous against his big chunky sweater that she was wearing, but she was smiling, so he figured she didn’t care.

“It’s beautiful, Bell.”

“The owl is the symbol for the Roman Goddess Minerva. You know, Goddess of Wisdom and arts and crafts. Seemed fitting for you.”

She pulled him into a hug and then pushed his present into his hands. “Open it!” she commanded.

***

Clarke was the tiniest bit nervous about her gift for Bellamy. He would like it she was sure, but it was…well, he might think it was too personal.

(After his blush inducing explanation of his necklace, though, she thought it might be less of a risk).

He lifted off the top of the small black box she’d handed him (she hadn’t gotten a chance to wrap it yet) and pulled out a watch.

“Wow, this is really nice, Clarke.”

“It was my dad’s, actually.”

(And maybe she had been lying to herself for a while and it had stopped being a stupid crush a long time ago, and maybe this gift announced that quite plainly, and maybe she didn’t care anymore).

He looked up at her, and then back down to the watch, and Clarke was sure this was the only time in her entire life that she had seen Bellamy Blake speechless.
He opened his mouth to say something, when a shrill ringing broke out from the coffee table. It was her phone.

She glanced down at the screen at the same time Bellamy did, both seeing Finn’s name flashing across the screen.

“You gonna answer that?” he asked her.

“Nope.”

Bellamy waited another ring to say anything more.

“He may want to fix things you know,” he told her quietly. Clarke sighed.

“I really just…don’t care.”

And she didn’t.

Obviously she had liked Finn. He seemed like such a great guy. He was nice and he was funny and smart, and he was sweet to her while they were together. But she didn’t feel heartbroken when she found him cheating on her. Yeah she felt hurt, but she was mostly pissed. And sitting here, with Bellamy she just couldn’t be bothered to care anymore.

“Were you in love with him?”

Bellamy’s question shook her out of her thoughts.

“No,” she answered immediately.

His eyebrows raised.

“I wasn’t,” she confirmed. “Really. He was just nice.”

“Until he—wasn’t.” Bellamy pointed out. Clarke huffed out a laugh at that.

“Yeah, until that.”

Bellamy seemed to be studying her—probably trying to decide how truthful she was being. She felt her face heat under his gaze and decided she didn’t want to talk about Finn any more. She scrambled for something to say.

“What about you?” the words were forming before she could really think them through. “Any adventures of the heart to speak of?”

He breathed out an awkward laugh.

“Uh, not so much,” he said. His brow furrowed a bit and he shifted to face Clarke entirely. “Actually, Clarke…”

Suddenly the air felt very different, and Clarke had a feeling the secret she had kept safe from him all those years might not have been very safe after all. And maybe next week he’ll have changed his mind, and she’ll have to go out and find someone needy and foolishly devoted who would never get bored of her; maybe he will have left and gone on to something new, removed himself as an option, but she still had this one moment and she maybe she wasn’t thinking straight but she wasn’t about to let the minutes tick by any more, so she reached out and laid her palm on his chest and decided that she was done pretending it was ever a secret at all.

“Bellamy,” she breathed and he leaned his forehead down on hers.

Chapter Text

All he could feel was the pressure of her skin of his forehead, and the heat it was spreading down from his cheeks to his neck, all the way through his core.

A tiny part of him thought that maybe he should just pull away, snap the magnetic pull between them, make sure this was right, that he wasn’t just a rebound or a way to get back at the guy who slept with someone else behind her back on Christmas Eve. But then he felt that knot, the one that was permanently lodged in his ribcage, tug him towards Clarke and he was afraid something in him might break if he pulled away.

He wanted to be closer, to touch her, but he had no idea what to do. His brain had gone fuzzy the second she breathed his name and he felt like while his heart was beating out in overdrive, his brain had flipped a switch and he was incapable of thinking anything but closer, closer, closer.

His hand moved from his lap, brushing his fingers over the nape of her neck, again and again when he felt her shiver in response, then, drawing them away from her skin, he tangled them in the soft strands of hair, pressing his palm to her neck and just holding her, close, feeling her breath trickle over his skin.

He was very aware of every part of him that was touching her. Where her hand lay on his chest felt like it was on fire, her hand burning through his tshirt, leaving a red mark on his skin.

“Bellamy,” she whispered again, and he had to shut his eyes when his heart stuttered at the way his name sounded on her tongue.

“Clarke.”

He opened his eyes to find a pained expression on her face, eyebrows knit, nose scrunched up, eyes squeezed tight, and the knot in his chest felt like it was pushing back, cracking his ribs, and he had to peel his hand away, feeling colder with each finger that left her skin, and lifted his forehead away from hers.

“Clarke?”

She looked up at him then, and he got his first real look at her face since she’d rested her hand against his chest. It was flushed pink, and her eyes were blown wide and he wondered exactly what she was thinking because her expression wasn’t giving anything away.

Her fingers had inched up, and started playing with the collar of his t-shirt.

“You gotta give me a clue here, Clarke.”

She bit her lip, nodding. Then she dropped her hand from the collar of his shirt and gingerly grabbed the hem, rubbing her thumbs back and forth across the sliver of skin she had exposed, thinking. Seeming to come to some sort of decision, she nodded once more and pushed his shirt up, bunching it under his armpits, and then shoving at it some more until he got the hint and drew it over his head.

Dropping his shirt onto the ground, he brought his hands to her face and brushed the hair that had fallen across her eyes, tucking it behind her ears.

“Your turn,” he teased, indulging a bit, dropping his nose down to her cheek. He felt her smile push against him and then her hand were reaching for his, tugging them down from where they rested against her face, guiding them to the hem of her sweater.

He slipped his hands under it at first, feeling her soft stomach against his hand, and felt the heat on the back of his neck shoot to his core again. She arched up into his touch and he let out a shivering breath. He shifted so she was leaning against the arm of the couch and slip down, pushing the sweater up her torso, putting his lips in place of where the soft knit fabric had been moments before. He watched in fascination at the skin beneath his lips turned pink and hot and he pressed his lips to her stomach again and again and again. He wondered if she noticed the same thing happening to the skin of his back where her fingers were burning patterns into his skin.

She pushed him off her stomach for only a moment to tug her sweater the rest of the way off, and he propped himself up above her, arms on either side of her waist, drinking in the sight of her in only his sweatpants beneath him. The reality of their situation started to hit him.

“So,” he said, blushing. “What now?”

Smiling she laced her fingers behind his neck and tugged him back down to her.

***

She knew he was getting tired. They were laying side by side, squished together on the cushions of the small couch. He was lazily playing with her hair and she felt his breathing start to slow beneath her head. She, in contrast, had never felt more awake. Every part of her was tingling, the memory of his breath and his mouth and his hands on her from moments before ghosting over her skin, ensuring she would not fall asleep for a long time.

She nudged him with her elbow. “Falling asleep on me, old man?”

He chuckled. “Not a chance. Don’t want to give you an excuse to slip away.”

She blushed harder at that. She wasn’t sure what all this was to him, and she wasn’t sure she was quite ready to ask him. She wanted to lie there, nestled close, feeling his fingers brush against her skin for as long as possible before popping the bubble.

So hearing him say something like that threw her completely.

She pulled herself up a bit, straining against his arm around her at first as he momentarily tightened his grip on her, before loosening it as he realized she wasn’t getting up completely. She propped herself up above him, half over his chest, and stared down at him. He had an easiness about him that she wasn’t used to seeing in him and she had a tiny flicker of hope that it was because of her.

“No?”

He shook his head. “Nope.” He smirked.

“And what about when you get bored of me?”

His laugh startled her, shaking beneath her.

“How about when you get bored of me, Princess?”

She paused before answering. She liked watching him smiling playfully up at her, and she didn’t want to be the one to break the spell, but she also didn’t think she could play along for much longer if that’s all it was to him.

“How honest do you want me to be right now?” she asked, dipping her chin down onto his chest.

He nodded, stroking his fingers back up and down her side. “Go on.”

“Alright,” she took a deep breath. “I…I’m afraid I’m going to freak you out right now, to be quite honest. Because this thing between us, whatever it is, well it’s just that I—”

She cut herself off, trying to figure out exactly what to say.

“I just don’t want it to only be a one-time thing, I guess is all,” she settled on. She added in a quieter voice, “It’s kind of something I’ve wanted for a long time.”

Bellamy’s face got a bit closer to hers before he dipped and pressed his lips to her neck. He slid his mouth up brushing his lips up against her ear.

“How long?” he breathed onto her ear, sending shivers down her spine. She felt all the breath leave her body and she couldn’t believe anyone could have this effect on her. With the stuttering of his heart beneath her, she clung to the hope that she had a similar effect on him.

“Come on Clarke,” he teased, smiling against her neck. “How long?”

She let her head fall down to his shoulder. “Far, far too long,” she gasped out.

“We should probably make up for lost time then, shouldn’t we?”

“Mmm,” she nodded. “How long do you think that’s going to take?”

He flashed her a wicked smile. “Oh, well, at least until the new year, I’d say.”

Clarke smiled and pulled herself off of him, grabbing his hand and pulling him up after her. She made her way to the staircase, walking backwards, forgoing their clothes on the floor by the couch.

“We should probably find some place more comfortable, then shouldn’t we?”

Bellamy nodded vigorously, and she decided not to focus on the frantic beating of her heart or the pulsing of her blood through her veins, but the steady blush creeping its way between her freckles as she pulled him up the stairs behind her.