If he were any other guy, Clarke'd be on that like white on rice-hot and good at orgasms and apparently he's smart too, like serious smart, hoo boy-but he's not just any other guy, he's Octavia's brother, and two weeks after the infamous bar hookup she looks up from her phone and says, "so they're offering Bell the visiting history professor position for next semester," with this kind of jeez, awkward face, and Clarke sighs and thinks, aaaand another one bites the dust.

They've been kind of existing in a weird limbo place between friends and more anyway, which mostly translates to discreet coffee dates at cafes too far away from campus to walk to. "I would've told you that I was here to interview," Bellamy says, "but I didn't know you were a student when we met, and then, well," and Clarke shakes her head quickly and says, "no, it's fine, I get it," and sips her mocha and tries not to look as disappointed as she feels.

It gets awkward for a second, but then Bellamy shakes his head, like he's irritated, and catches her eye. "We could still be-" then he winces and cuts himself off. "I can't believe I was about to say that," and Clarke laughs, "no but really, I don't want to-"

"Me neither," Clarke says, relieved, and then it's a little better. Maybe she can't have him the way she'd wanted at first, but she can still have him, and that's alright. She can live with that.

So with that new affirmation in mind, Clarke sets about on her new mission of making Bellamy Blake her actual friend, and not just a weird former hook up/"we almost dated" acquaintance, which actually, goes fairly well. He won't start teaching until the spring, of course, but he's started to attend the History department meetings, and he'll usually drop by and bring them food since he's got kind of a weird complex about feeding them ("mother hen," Octavia says sagely, "he's always been paranoid about my calorie intake, you should've seen him when I was little.") and he's also looking for an apartment in town, so she and O are helping him with that too, and it turns out that they have some stuff in common besides orgasms after all.

They bicker almost constantly at first, because he's got strong opinions about, like, everything, which just so happens to be one of those things they have in common, and how is Clarke supposed to just let it go when he's so wrong? It's against her nature. Octavia thinks they've started to hate each other and starts shooting them worried looks when she thinks they're not watching, until this one night when Bellamy drives them out to Northampton to shop for a new futon for their room, and they have a big blow out over brands in the middle of Wal-Mart while Octavia pretends she doesn't know them, and it only ends when Clarke stomps her foot on the ground and says, "damn it, it's just a futon Bellamy, why does this even matter," and he just goes, "I...have no idea," and then Clarke bursts into laughter at the baffled look on his face, and anyway, Octavia stops worrying after that.

The first time he actually gets angry with her is when he finds out that her mom's the dean, to Clarke's bafflement ("you didn't already know? We have the same last name," she says, and Bellamy rolls his eyes and says, "you've never actually told me your last name, Clarke," and-oh yeah) and he doesn't speak to her for a week. Octavia goes back and forth between sympathizing with him-because yeah, it's not ideal-and being irritated because what the fuck, how did you not know her last name Bell, God you're such a man sometimes.

It's then that Clarke starts to think she might be in over her head a little, because that week is actually kind of horrible, she can't concentrate on anything and there's a weird twinge in her chest every time she checks her phone for messages and finds none from Bellamy. He forgives her eventually, of course, after she leaves him this embarrassingly sincere voicemail, and texts her back a stubborn not-apology that says, okay, i might have been a little dumb about the last name thing, but the damage is still done, because now she knows she likes him, now she knows how invested she is. It's not good.

It can't happen though, and so Clarke does her best to ignore it, which is difficult considering that they've made a habit of long, extended text conversations most days, that he always remembers to get a separate thing of veggie fried rice for her when he orders Chinese food, that she'll lose her train of thought because she's too busy staring at the veins on the back of his hands or the freckles on the back of his neck. If this is what pining feels like, like a football player's doing push-ups on top of her chest, she's not into it at all.

It all comes to a head one night when he bribes Octavia into helping him move into his new place, and Clarke comes along because she's a weak, weak woman, and she's unpacking some boxes in the bedroom while he and O bicker about the TV placement in the living room, and comes across a bunch of his old essays from graduate school. She doesn't mean to read them really, she's just curious and intends to just look, but the top one is about Augustus and Clarke remembers Octavia's story about how Bellamy named her, and so before she knows it she's working her way through his thesis and Bellamy's wandering in because it's been like forty-five minutes and they've been wondering if she's dead.

"Oh," he says in surprise, and Clarke blushes because wow, invasion of privacy much, and says, "I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to-" but he just shakes his head and waves it off.

"It's fine, it's not like you can't find it on JSTOR anyway," he says, and lets her take it home with her to finish reading it, in the interest of shared, educational knowledge or something, and Clarke almost wants to laugh because her motivations are not nearly that pure or noble. Like-if he only knew, right?

She doesn't have much experience reading academic papers in his field, let alone one as complex as a graduate thesis, that digs deep into the politics of Augustus' reign and, in particular, the influence Octavia wielded over his policies as his adviser, and her divorce and subsequent war against Marc Antony and Cleopatra and her shared grief with her brother over the death of her son and how all the lines between personal and political became so bloody and intense and blurred that even the biographers recording these histories couldn't tell them apart, and Clarke might not grasp some of the more complicated stuff, but she feels moved anyway, from the passion he obviously put into this, from the way he talks about these people like he knows them.

She stays up until two o'clock in the morning to finish reading it and then takes it with her to her classes the next day so she can go back over the parts she didn't understand, dog-earing the pages and underlining the parts that she finds particularly interesting. It becomes a fixture in her backpack, along with her day planner and the little bag of spare pencils and highlighters, and she finds herself taking it out and reading it when she's bored or needs a break from whatever she's actually supposed to be studying, scrawling little comments in the margins and a big list of questions, on the very back page, that she means to ask him when she gets the chance.

Octavia almost catches her with it once but Clarke flips it over before she can see the title, ashamed of herself for having such a weird secret but not wanting to really confront it anyway. Not like it matters either way, because a few days later, she's at his place using his kitchen to make some "sorry about the breakup" cookies for Jasper, and her phone goes off while she's washing butter off her hands and, without thinking, she asks him to grab it for her, forgetting that the thesis is in her bag, and-yeah.

"You actually read it?" he asks, sounding surprised, and Clarke nods, glad he's facing away from her so she can make mortified faces at the sink. "You-wow, you...really read it."

"Yeah, uh," Clarke says, trying to sound nonchalant, and shuts the water off with her elbow. "It was interesting. Whatever."

Bellamy doesn't reply, just keeps flipping through it with this sort of...unreadable look on his face. Clarke winces and looks at the wrinkled, well-read pages and finds a whole new thing to be embarrassed about.

"I had some questions, and," Clarke says slowly, and Bellamy looks up sharply, and she continues, "um, on the back," and he flips it over and grins like he does when he manages to beat Octavia at cards and says, "okay, questions I can handle," and pulls a chair up to the kitchen counter.

So Clarke finishes her cookies while Bellamy explains how the Roman Senate works and the significance of naming-and renaming-in the Roman imperial tradition, and why they still call that time period the Pax Romana despite it containing one of the most famous wars in popular culture, and how Augustus usually gets the short end of that stick anyway since Shakespeare decided to turn him into a villain and Octavia into a victim, respectively.

"She gets underestimated like that a lot, actually," he says, "the Cleopatra/Antony legend being what it is and all, most people either mischaracterize her or overlook her completely, which is ridiculous considering the influence and power she wielded in Roman society and politics, and not just through her relationship with her brother, for that matter-I mean, her role in the Battle of Actium alone-"

"Yeah, I mean, that's only your thesis statement and everything," Clarke teases, "but no, seriously, it's like-was this typical, back then? Because the way movies and books tell it it's like, if you were a woman you were either barefoot and pregnant or enslaved, and-"

"Oh man," Bellamy says, "you've got so far to go, grasshopper," and gets up to go pull some books down from his shelves for her.

She almost burns her cookies because she's too engrossed in his explanation of Octavia and Augustus' propaganda campaign against Antony and Cleopatra, and the complex effects it had on Octavia's contemporary reputation, and it's only when she runs into the kitchenette to take them out to cool that she realizes how shaky her legs are, how her stomach won't sit still and the flush on her cheeks isn't from the oven.

God, she thinks forlornly, and takes the opportunity to duck into the bathroom to splash water on her face, and when she comes out Bellamy shrugs a little sheepishly and says, "sorry, I got carried away, I guess," and something sort of-breaks, in Clarke's head, and before she can second-guess it she's marching over and kissing that rueful look right off his face.

Bellamy grabs her hips and doesn't even hesitate to kiss her back, and then it gets just, frantic, and they're grappling at each other's clothes and Clarke feels like she might die if she doesn't get her hands on his skin right now, and when she pulls away for air he's already got her jeans undone, because of course it's the same for him, of course she wasn't alone in this, she doesn't know why she thought that, even for a second.

"Okay, so, did she really adopt Cleopatra's kids?" Clarke asks, as a joke really, but Bellamy laughs as he's pushing her down onto back on the couch and says, "yeah, part of the propaganda thing, plus it neutralized Antony's heirs and helped solidify Julio-Claudian rule," and Clarke moans and grasps desperately at his shoulders, and thinks, oh.

They fuck twice in the living room and then Bellamy picks her up and carries her to bed, where they fall into a dead-sleep nap for four hours. Clarke wakes up from a dream about Augustus, the first Emperor, and wakes Bellamy up so he can fuck her again, and she muffles her cries in the pillow and thinks about the Battles of Philippi, about division of territory and how even the smallest, most inconsequential decision can define an empire, later on down the line.

"So, I guess we're doing this," Bellamy says later, as they're feeding each other Jasper's cookies, "I mean, it's not like-you're not my student, you've never been my student, and-"

"We'll figure it out," Clarke assures him, not wanting to think about it now, not when there's so many questions to ask, so much history left to cover. She takes a deep breath and wraps an arm around his waist and says, "Can you tell me more about the Constitution? Like was it actually written down, with protections, like ours, or was it just pretty much up to the emperor as far as what rules they followed?"

Bellamy smiles, like a promise, and lifts her up onto the kitchen counter so they're face to face, and says, "more the latter than the former, it's kind of complicated," and Clarke wiggles a little closer, ready for this, ready to listen.