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They aren’t surprised the first time it happens, or the second time, either. It had been too early for them to even start to hope.
The third time stings a little, but they power through. No one in Camp Jaha has experienced more than three so far. They start to hope.
Then it happens a fourth time, and they start to break.
The fifth time it happens, the blood doesn’t even bother him anymore. Once he registers that fact, Bellamy can barely make it outside their cabin before he’s heaving into the bushes.
When he stumbles back inside, where Clarke is fucking helping clean up as if their child didn’t just die inside her, he gathers her into his arms and they collapse together onto the floor, sobbing.
The others leave them in silence.
“Is this my punishment?” Clarke cries into his shoulder. “For all that I’ve done? Is this what I deserve?”
He tries to tell her no, but how can she believe him? He barely believes himself. He is starting to think that this might be their cross to bear, their penance for all of their sins. Damned to a life without creation, only destruction.
“How fucked up is it that the one thing I’m supposed to be able to do, I can’t, and the one thing I’m never supposed to do is all I seem capable of?” Clarke sobs so hard she starts to choke, and all Bellamy can do is hold her tighter. “What is wrong with me, Bellamy? All I can do is kill people.”
Any answer he offers falls on deaf ears. Nothing he says can change her mind.
She starts taking her tea again the following week. A small part of Bellamy is relieved. For as much as he desperately wants a child, it must have been taking a toll on her body. He can’t risk losing her, not again.
It’s a while before they can make love again. For the longest time their couplings had been focused on making a baby, and now every time they got remotely intimate one or both of them would start to shut down.
The first time they are together again is at the end of their hottest summer yet. They trek a few miles outside of camp to a spring Bellamy had found with his hunting party. They spend the afternoon in the cool water, laughing and basking under the sun. It is the first time they had both felt truly happy in months.
They dry off on top of the large boulders bordering the water, and as the sun sets, they fuck until they are too exhausted to continue.
The first snow of the winter is cause for celebration. Raven makes sure that their cups are always full to the brim, and Clarke holds Octavia and Lincoln’s newborn son for the first time. She only cries a little bit, but she hands the boy over to Bellamy with a grin and presses a kiss to his small, soft head.
“He smells like pine,” Clarke tells Octavia, and her sister pulls her in for a bone-crushing hug.
That night they both get drunker than they had in a long time, and they fall into bed in a fit of hysterics. Bellamy can hardly get his pants off and Clarke laughs at him until her bra gets tangled around her arm, but they finally remove all of their clothes. She doesn’t realize it until a few weeks later, when she’s heaving onto the pure white snow, but she had forgotten to take her tea that day.
“I’m so fucking scared,” she whispers to Bellamy that night. He aches to flatten his palm over her stomach, but he doesn’t want to risk upsetting her further, so he curls it against her side instead. “I won’t be able to handle it if it happens again.”
“This time is going to be different,” he vows. “I feel it.”
He expects a rebuttal, for her to shut him down and tell him not to feed into false hope. But instead she moves his hand so it’s cupping her stomach and covers it with her own.
She feels it, too.
They don’t allow themselves to get excited until she starts to show for real. The ice is starting to thaw and the birds are chirping again. It has been four months, and everything is looking good.
One night, Bellamy crawls down the bed until his face his level with her stomach. He presses his lips to the skin above her navel and whispers,
“Hey there, baby. It’s me. I’m your daddy, and I love you so much.”
He talks until the sound of his voice lulls Clarke to sleep.
At the start of her fifth month, Bellamy brings Clarke lunch in their med bay and she hands him a list. In typical doctor fashion, her handwriting is all scribbles, and he struggles to piece the words together.
“Are these new plants?” he asks, squinting at the paper.
“I’ve been thinking of some names,” she says nonchalantly.
Bellamy looks back down at the list, his throat tight.
“You’ve got another thing coming if you think I’m going to let you name our child Mildred,” he says finally.
Her eyes light up. “That was my grandmother’s name!”
“Exactly.”
Her head tips back as she laughs, and he loves the sound so much that he can’t help but surge forward and kiss her senseless.
They decide on Jacob for a boy, but they can’t quite settle on one for a girl.
At roughly seven months into the pregnancy, Bellamy wakes up to a sharp pain in his lower back.
“The fuck?” he mumbles, rolling over to face Clarke and rubbing his back. “Did you kick me?”
Clarke purses her lips and tries to hold back a grin. “Wasn’t meee,” she sings softly.
Bellamy stares blankly for a moment before gasping. His hands immediately cradle her swollen belly, and after a few moments he feels a good, strong kick against his palm.
“Someone loves their daddy,” Clarke says, wiping away the stray tear that fa down Bellamy’s cheek.
She is midway through her eighth month when she goes into labor.
“It’s too early,” Bellamy mutters to himself as him and Lincoln ease Clarke onto their bed.
“It is early,” Lincoln agrees calmly, “but not so early that I would be worried. There have been babies delivered earlier that have survived.”
But will she? Bellamy bites his tongue and nods.
“Stay with me, please,” Clarke whispers. He turns to stroke her hair, to say that he will be right there with her, when he realizes she wasn’t speaking to him.
Ten hours later, Bellamy catches his daughter as she slides out of Clarke and into his arms. Her eyes are closed tight as she wails, and she’s covered in blood and amniotic fluid, but he is certain he has never seen anything more beautiful in his whole life.
Lincoln cuts the cord and disposes of the placenta while Bellamy hands his baby over to Clarke. She is covered in sweat and her eyes are barely open, but she tucks their child into her arms and looks down at her like she is the most precious thing in the world.
Together they pour over her body.
“Ten perfect fingers, ten perfect toes,” Bellamy breathes.
“Two perfect ears and a perfect little nose,” Clarke finishes.
She is small, smaller than Octavia when she was born, but her piercing cries tell him that her lungs are strong and he can feel her heartbeat through her little chest.
“She is beautiful,” Lincoln says with a smile. “Have you thought of a name?”
Bellamy presses a kiss to Clarke’s forehead. “Whatever the hell you want,” he tells her.
She traces the slope of their daughter’s nose with a careful finger. “I think I have an idea.”
Up on the Ark, babies were very small. Their limited resources assured them that the babies got the proper amount of nutrition, but there was no room for anyone to get extras. A lot of the babies were almost too small, and they were the ones that were always sick. Most of the babies in Bellamy’s station were that way. A chubby baby was a sign of health that not many were lucky enough to have.
“My God,” Bellamy says, dumbfounded.
“I can’t believe it,” Clarke gapes.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” he asks, eyes wide.
“Never.”
Bellamy looks back at his daughter, now six months old, and bops her on the nose. “You, Amelia, are by far the chubbiest baby in the whole world.”
“In the whole universe,” Clarke adds, blowing a raspberry on Amelia’s exposed belly. The baby shrieks and grabs a fistful of Clarke’s hair.
It seemed to happen overnight. One day Amelia was an averaged-sized baby and the next she was this little dough ball. Her cheeks were huge and the rolls on her legs seemed to go on for days. Bellamy and Clarke can’t get enough of her.
“Okay, my little lump of love,” Clarke says as she scoops Amelia into her arms. “Time for a bath!”
They decide to stop after four kids. Bellamy is nearing forty and Clarke won’t stop teasing him about the grey hairs that appeared in his thick dark locks, even though he knows she loves them. Jacob had arrived two years after Amelia, and three years after him was Hera. Five years later, as a surprise to everyone, Wells was added to the mix.
Their cabin has since been expanded to house their extensive progeny, but more often than not Bellamy and Clarke wake to find one, if not all four, of their children snuggled in bed beside them.
Some mornings Bellamy might wake up with a foot practically lodged in his spine, or Clarke might have someone sleeping on her hair, but it doesn’t matter.
They wouldn’t change a thing.