From anonymous on tumblr: "Clarke, why are you wearing Bellamy's shirt?"
"Clarke, why are you wearing Bellamy's shirt?"
Clarke pauses in the middle of organizing the books she's using as sources for her art history term paper. For one panicked moment she wonders if she really managed to screw up that bad, but when she risks a glance at herself she sees the familiar concert t-shirt.
"I'm not?" she replies slowly.
Octavia leans a hip against the kitchen table and raises a skeptical eyebrow. "Are you sure about that?"
Clarke rolls her eyes and opens her laptop. "Your brother's not the only person in the world to see Imagine Dragons in concert."
"Why are you trying to convince me you're not wearing my brother's shirt?"
"Because I'm not!" she exclaims. She's wearing her own shirt, thank you very much. She'd gotten it at the same concert Bellamy had gotten his when they'd gone with their group of friends last year, and she'd purposefully gotten it several sizes too big so she could use it as a comfy sleep shirt.
Octavia opens her mouth to argue again and Clarke narrows her eyes. "Drop it. You may be done with finals, but I have a ten page paper to write and I don't have time for this."
"This isn't over," Octavia warns, tone unimpressed, and leaves Clarke alone in the kitchen.
Clarke forgets about her roommate's accusations until much later that day. She's nearly done with her paper, and decides to leave the conclusion for tomorrow. All of her other finals and papers are done, and the art history paper isn't due for three days anyway.
She'd heard Bellamy come in at some point around lunchtime, and she pauses just before she enters the living room to make sure she's not going to give everything away the second she lays eyes on Bellamy.
They've made it this long without Octavia noticing anything.
"Hey Bellamy," she says when she sees Octavia's brother sprawled out on their couch, looking painfully bored while Octavia watches television. "Her turn to pick, your turn to suffer?"
He nods, his lips quirking up in a grin. "Save me."
Octavia tosses a dirty look at them both. "Hey, last weekend you picked a fucking documentary. I wasted hours of my life learning about papyrus. You can handle a couple episodes of Long Island Medium."
She turns back to the screen, but Bellamy keeps looking at Clarke. His gaze drifting down her legs makes her skin feel hot all over. Even though it's the middle of the afternoon and she's still in her pajamas, and even though her bedhead is probably greasy, and even though her shirt covers all the essentials, he's looking at her like he wants to eat her alive.
"Like Clarke's shirt, Bell?" Octavia says, not taking her eyes off the screen.
Bellamy jerks like he's been stung by a bee, and Clarke tries not to do the same. They're usually better about being subtle around Octavia.
"Yeah," he says warily, "since I have the same one."
Octavia hums noncommittally, and Clarke shrugs when Bellamy looks at her in confusion.
"Have fun communicating with dead people," Clarke says, and leaves them to their sibling ritual.
Finals week means that chores have been neglected and crap has started to pile up in Clarke's bedroom, so she takes a few minutes to gather up all of her dirty clothes and start running loads through the washer. While the basin fills, she sorts lights and darks, absentmindedly making a list of other chores she really needs to do.
She almost doesn't notice, so consumed with thoughts of cleaning the bathtub and vacuuming her carpet, but at the last second she snatches the grey fabric back out of the washer. It's dripping wet from being submerged in the water, but it's very obviously an Imagine Dragons tour shirt.
Clarke slowly turns it over in her hands, pulling it right-side-out again so she can look at it. Right in the middle of the list of cities on the back is a faint brown outline. She remembers singeing the shirt with the tip of the iron, leaving a little v-shaped mark.
"Why were you ironing a t-shirt?" she remembers Octavia asking when she had complained about messing up her shirt.
"Don't question my life choices," Clarke had retorted, and then had forgotten all about it.
Putting it back in the washer, she yells that she's going to shower. The second she's in the bathroom, she twists and stares at her back in the mirror.
"Fuck," she says.
She's wearing Bellamy's shirt.
The back of the shirt is pristine. The absence of the little brown mark is something Clarke could easily miss, and something Octavia never would.
She nearly jumps out of her skin when the bathroom door opens and Bellamy slips in, locking the door behind him.
"What are you doing?" she hisses at him. "Octavia––"
He cuts her off, hands clutching fiercely at her hips as his mouth takes over hers. "She just left. Bailed on me for Lincoln," he explains in between kisses. "Told me to lock up after myself."
"And your first thought was to join me in the shower?"
"Yup," he replies unapologetically.
She pinches the soft skin above his hip when he moves to busy himself with her throat, and he yelps.
"Hey!" he says indignantly. "What was that for?"
She huffs and turns around. "This!"
"…Sorry you're still clothed?" he says uncertainly.
She rolls her eyes and strips off the shirt, ignoring the faint noise Bellamy makes at the sight of her bare breasts.
"See?" Clarke says, showing him the spot. "My shirt has a burn mark."
It takes him a few seconds to drag his attention down to the shirt she's holding out, and a few seconds longer for his brain to restart and realize what he's looking at.
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"So when Octavia asked me––"
"Yup," Clarke says. "You must have left it behind last weekend." Octavia and Lincoln had gone to visit his parents for the long weekend, and Bellamy and Clarke had taken the opportunity to finally sleep in a bed together. After three months of sneaking in kisses and quickies whenever they were certain Octavia wouldn't find out, it was a relief to just be together.
But they'd slept through the alarm, and it had been a flurry of limbs and clothes as they'd dressed and Bellamy had tried grab his stuff before Octavia came home and caught them redhanded.
"Do you think she guessed why you're wearing my shirt" he asks her.
Clarke shrugs and drops the shirt along with her panties. As Bellamy inhales sharply and then starts to tug his own clothes off, she says, "I don't know. Maybe? It's Octavia."
"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it," he declares hastily, and hauls her, giggling, into the shower.
Squeaky clean with wet hair and pleasantly tired, sated bodies, Clarke leads the way down the hall, contemplating whether or not she wants to try and convince Bellamy to watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding withher. She's just opened her mouth to ask when he pulls her back against his chest, tucking his chin into the curve of her neck and nibbling.
Clarke smiles and squeezes the arms banded around her waist. "Bellamy––"
She freezes and goes silent when she looks into the living room, and Bellamy lefts his mouth a little. "What––Clarke?"
Clarke just points, and Bellamy makes a strangled-sounding noise when he, too, spots Octavia watching them from the couch, arms crossed, eyebrow arched, earbuds jammed firmly into her ears.
"We got to the bridge," Clarke mutters, then sighs. She reaches back for Bellamy's hand and together they shuffle toward their doom.
"I fucking knew it. You think you're so sneaky!" Octavia exclaims, a couple decibels too loud, when they sit down. Bellamy reaches across Clarke to yank the earbuds out of his sister's ears, and Clarke can hear the music blaring out of the tiny speakers.
"You should speak louder. I don't think the people in Europe can hear you," he tells her.
She sneers at him. "I didn't want to accidentally hear any of your sex noises," she says. "I love you and Clarke and all, but that's disgusting."
"It would have been your own damn fault," Bellamy grumbles, though he looks a bit revolted at the thought. "You were supposed to be gone until tomorrow."
"Why are you here?" Clarke asks.
The look Octavia directs at them both reminds her of the way her mother looked when Clarke was eight and the stray kitten she'd brought home without permission ended up using her mother's basket of clean laundry as a litter box. Irritated, more than a little long-suffering, but just a little bit fond.
"You two losers wouldn't tell me!" Underneath the irritation and the fondness is the faintest note of hurt, and that's what has Clarke shifting guiltily. "I had to go on a freaking stake out just to prove my brother and my best friend are together!"
Bellamy groans. "We were going to tell you, O."
His sister watches him, eyebrow still raised. "Uh huh."
"Really," Clarke adds. "We just decided to do it after finals were over and it wouldn't freak you out."
Octavia snorts. "That's a crappy excuse and you know it."
"If anybody tries to distract me from studying for this stupid chemistry exam, I'm going to set them on fire," Clarke recites from memory. It had only been the third week of the semester and Octavia had already been on edge, snapping at everyone as the stress of her most hated class took its toll.
"And then you threw your textbook so hard at the wall you left a hole," Bellamy reminds her. "I had to spend an hour fixing it."
"And then I had to spend three hours on a painting to hang over the spot he 'fixed,'" Clarke says. "And he got offended and wanted to know why I thought his repair job wasn't good enough––"
"Even thought it was," he interrupts, "and Clarke wouldn't stop talking about proper spackling technique, and then––"
He stops abruptly, and Clarke bites her lip to keep in her smile at the thought of what happened next. His hot mouth on hers as he had backed her against the wall, the way his lips had moved so carefully, belying the irritated words he had just uttered.
"Seriously?" Octavia says flatly. Clarke thinks she's about to yell at them for hiding their relationship for as long as they have, but instead the other girl says, "That's how you made your move, Bell?"
"Well––"
"And you!" She points at Clarke. "That's just embarrassing. You're going to have to tell your children that their parents got together because their aunt has no impulse control when she's hopped up on Red Bull and their mom knows too much about home repair. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
Clarke flushes, but shrugs. "Well, okay, that's probably a little premature, but if that's what I have to say, so be it."
"And you, Bell? You're totally cool telling your spawn that you got with their mom because you wanted to shut her up?"
"Sure," he says absently, and Clarke glances at Bellamy only to see him watching her with the biggest, stupidest grin on his face.
"Oh my god," Octavia says, "I can't even be mad when you guys are this pathetic about each other. I'm leaving for real."
She launches herself off the couch and hesitates before throwing her arms around the both of them in a hug.
"I love you and you're both idiots," she says, and then grabs her bag by the front door and leaves.
"You are pretty pathetic about me," Clarke tells him when the door closes behind Octavia and they're left looking at each other.
"Shut up," he says immediately. "You just talked about our future children."
"Hypothetical future children," she stresses, and when he pushes her down onto the couch and kisses her, they're both smiling.