a/n Thank you to everyone who has read, reviewed, followed and favourited this story. You are all excellent folks. Happy reading!
As Clarke tried to teach Madi how to weed their small vegetable plot, she found herself noticing that she was, for the first time since her father had been floated, feeling truly happy. Not in a jumping-for-joy sort of way, of course – she didn't think happiness was like that for her, not anymore, not since she lost her innocence and naivety by the wayside of her struggle for survival on this damn planet – but in a calm, warm, content sort of way. In a way that felt really quite a lot like one of Bellamy's hugs, now she came to think about it.
They'd fallen into a comfortable routine over the last few days, the schedule they kept on the Ring and the habits they had adopted on the ground fusing nicely together into a slightly odd long-distance family life with their evening radio calls at the centre of it. Sometimes Bellamy called alone, sometimes with the whole crew. Sometimes during the day someone else would get in touch – most often Raven and John, of course, brimming over with questions about Emori's pregnancy, but even Echo had called a couple of days ago, with some utter rubbish about just wanting to say hi that failed to veil a surprisingly fierce desire to know how she might best look out for the young woman who was expecting.
All in all, she thought, as she caught herself on the verge of destroying a perfectly good carrot seedling through pure inattention, she was beginning to feel like part of a kru for the first time in quite a while.
"Clarke? Can I ask you something?" Madi piped up, clearly less than thrilled with her morning lesson and distracted teacher.
"Sure, Madi." She replied absently, preoccupied now with wondering how it was that dandelions were so good at surviving apocalypses.
"So you've told me loads of stories about Murphy and Emori and him declaring his love in the middle of a lab and now them having a baby, and you've told me about Monty and Harper falling in love when that horrible ALIE woman was trying to take over, and about Lincoln saving Octavia from his own people. But you never tell me anything cool about you and Bellamy." There was a pleading tone to the child's voice that made Clarke freeze, understanding all too clearly where this conversation was going. "When did he first tell you he loved you?" She concluded by asking, with all the naive simplicity of her seven years.
Clarke took a calming breath, and wondered whether there was, in fact, any good answer to this can of worms. How did one go about explaining the complexity of real, confusing, adult relationships to a small child?
"I suppose our relationship isn't quite like those other ones." She decided to lead with that because it seemed to be the simplest place to start. "He doesn't tell me he loves me," she continued, wondering quite where her own tongue was taking her, "because he doesn't need to. He shows me instead." She concluded, realising for the first time as she said it that it was, in fact, true.
"What do you mean?" Asked the girl, whose world-view apparently only permitted clear-cut confessions of love.
"He helps me with difficult things, supports me when I have to make tough decisions. Once I had to kill a lot of bad guys to save our friends and he wouldn't let me do it alone." She supposed that was about as child-friendly as a description of his support at Mount Weather could get. "He forgives me when I make mistakes, but also tells me when I need to hear that I'm wrong. He tries to help me find happiness when I'm sad. And he always, always, protects me, no matter how scary or dangerous that is for him."
"I see." Madi said thoughtfully. "That does sound good. Maybe even better than yelling in the middle of a lab."
"Yeah." Clarke agreed, staring vaguely into the middle distance, dandelions long forgotten. "I think it is."
"Do you do that for him, too?" Madi's curiosity was apparently not yet exhausted.
"I try" She agreed with a wry smile. "But I don't always do well at it."
…...
Emori had expected to hate having people worrying about her condition all the time, had expected to feel patronised and trapped and at least a little smothered. It was one of the reasons she had kept quiet for so long, knowing that as soon as she put the news out there she would become someone who needed, in the eyes of her crewmates, to be looked after.
To her surprise, it turned out it wasn't all bad.
John hadn't become a new man overnight, of course – frankly, she'd have been horrified if he had – but he seemed to have decided to use his wits to make people laugh, now, more than to belittle them, and she rather liked that. And she definitely rather liked the way he made a point of spending some time together, just the two of them, every day, even if it was just to sit and chat about how her latest project with Raven was going. He had unfortunately also adopted an annoying habit of following her around asking if she needed to sit down or whether she'd got enough to eat or if she was feeling OK, but thankfully he'd dialled that back a bit since Echo had cheerfully slammed him into a wall and told him to let the woman breathe. That particular incident had also had the unexpected side effect of Echo starting to join John and Bellamy for their training sessions, and this morning at breakfast they'd talked Harper into giving it a go too. It appeared that their crew was starting to come together as a family, ready to welcome this new addition they all seemed to be anticipating just as eagerly as she was.
"Are you listening to a word I'm saying?" Raven asked, somewhat irately.
"No." She answered promptly, because, in fact, she hadn't been.
"I'll start again then. So, to convert the rocket from hydrazine -"
"Emori." John interrupted as he entered the room, hand outstretched in invitation. "We're getting out of here. Come on. Romance calls."
"Excuse me, Murphy." Raven was apparently not pleased with this development. "We've got work to do."
"Screw you, Reyes." He offered surprisingly cheerfully. "She needs to rest."
Emori stifled a giggle, knowing that rest was decidedly not what he had in mind, and shrugged apologetically in Raven's general direction as she allowed herself to be led from the room.
…...
Bellamy was getting better at doing productive things with his time rather than sitting at the radio worrying that Clarke might disappear again. This afternoon, for example, he was joining Harper and Echo for a lesson in how to speak Trig that he was only too happy to admit could be going rather better. He'd had the basics mastered for a while, could say who he was and that he was a skyperson, but it seemed there was rather more to it than that.
He breathed a sigh of relief when Raven strode into the room looking determined. Perhaps he could help her with whatever it was and come back to his Trig lesson another time.
"Bellamy, radio. It's Madi for you." She announced, and he felt his heart jump into his throat. Why would the girl be radioing him in the middle of the afternoon? The only reason that sprang to his mind was that something had happened to Clarke.
"What happened?" He asked in a panic, jumping to his feet and striding towards the door.
"Hey, relax." Raven reached out and caught his arm as he made to walk past her. "Nothing's happened. I asked that before I came here, idiot. Clarke's fine. I think the kid just wants some father-daughter bonding time."
"Wha- what?" That last sentence had rather caught him by surprise, he thought.
"You heard me. Get going." She made a sort of flapping motion with her hand as if to herd him through the door. Feeling slightly dazed, he complied, and found himself seated before the radio before he quite realised what had happened.
"Hello? Madi?"
"Hi, Bellamy."
"Raven said you wanted to talk. Is everything OK?" Raven had said everything was OK, but even so, he was going to need to hear it from Madi as well.
"Yeah, everything's fine. Clarke just went out for the afternoon to get some special medicine plants and she said I should stay here and pluck some pigeons. But that's boring so I called you instead." He sighed in relief.
"Don't blame me when she gets mad at you." He warned her with a chuckle.
"She never gets mad at me." She said with simple confidence.
"How's your day going then, Madi?" He asked, wondering what, exactly, they were supposed to talk about.
"I had lessons this morning. Farming then reading."
"I've just come from a lesson too, actually. I'm trying to learn Trig."
"How's it going?"
"Not well." He admitted. "How were your lessons?"
"Reading was cool. Clarke writes me all these stories about you guys and then we read them together." His heart melted a little at that, as he imagined her alone down there keeping them with her through her words.
"That does sound fun. Which is your favourite?"
"It used to be Murphy and Emori but I have a new one now. Clarke told me it this morning."
"Yeah?" He prompted her, relaxing into the conversation. It was every bit as straightforward as he remembered from raising his sister, the art of sitting back and letting a small child prattle away.
"Yeah. My favourite story is about you and Clarke, now. And how you love her so much that you help her do difficult things, and once she had to kill a load of bad guys and you were there so she didn't have to do it alone." Well, that changed things, he thought. She had really told Madi that? It did sound like the child was quoting from an actual conversation.
"She told you about that?" He asked, slightly at as loss.
"Yeah. She told me all about it. About how you don't have to tell her you love her, because you show her." He welled up a little at the thought, but he also found himself coming to a sudden decision. He did have to tell her, actually. She deserved to hear the words as well as see the signs. "I want someone to love me like that one day."
"I hope you find someone like that too, kid. It's pretty great when you do." He cleared his throat and continued. "It sounds like she missed out the most important part of the story, though. The part where she does the same for me." He couldn't quite believe he was having this conversation with Clarke's daughter, rather than Clarke herself, but it seemed there wasn't much to be done about that now.
"I asked her about that. She said she tries but she doesn't always do it very well."
"She does it perfectly." He responded, surprising even himself with the conviction in his voice. "Sometimes I think I don't do it well enough. Sometimes I let her down." He admitted, picking idly at the corner of the table with his nails and trying to pretend he wasn't having this conversation with a seven-year-old.
"What do you mean?"
"I left her behind, Madi." He choked a little on the lump in his throat and tried again. "I left her there and came up here without her. And I can't undo that, now. However long I live, I will always be the man who left her behind." This had been his deepest regret for the last year and a half and he felt beyond vulnerable letting it out into air and space like this. And to a gossip-prone child, of all people.
"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that." Madi told him, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. "She's happy you're safe. And she met me, so that was good."
"Yeah. That was definitely good."
"And she said one of the ways you two show your love is by forgiving each other, so I'm pretty sure you're all good."
He didn't think he could reply to that, so he swallowed deeply and took a moment to move the conversation back to safer ground. "I'm looking forward to meeting you properly when we land."
"I can't wait! Will you teach me how to shoot? Clarke's been trying to teach me but she says you're a lot better. Also she says that seven is a bit young to start learning properly."
"Well, she's right on both counts there." He agreed with a grin firmly restored to his face.
"And she says you used to tell your sister bedtime stories. Will you tell me bedtime stories when you get here? But I suppose I'll be eleven then, and that might be a bit old for bedtime stories." She sounded rather downcast at the thought.
"How about this evening I tell you one when I call Clarke?" He suggested without hesitation. "I'm pretty sure stories still work over the radio."
"Would you do that? I'd like that."
"Then let's do that." He decided. After all, it was probably the only useful thing he could do as such a long-distance foster father.
…...
Clarke was only too happy to sit and listen as Bellamy told Madi the story of Theseus defeating the Minotaur. She couldn't help but feel that he seemed to be dedicating quite a lot of time to how invaluable Ariadne was to the whole operation, and how useful it always is for the hero if a very cunning woman is in love with him, and she grinned at his obvious analogy. It seemed that Madi hadn't been lying about the content of their conversation this afternoon. She'd been mortified, at first, on discovering that the child had taken it upon herself to interrupt Bellamy's afternoon and torment him with a rather impertinent choice of topic, but it seemed no harm was done. On the contrary, Bellamy sounded almost overjoyed as he told his story, but then again, the hero did vanquish the beast, so she supposed a little joy wasn't out of place.
"Thanks, Bellamy. Clarke was right. You are good at bedtime stories. I can't wait to learn how to shoot." That, she thought, was something of a non sequitur, but she'd take it up with him later.
"You're welcome, Madi. Sleep well."
"Goodnight, Bellamy." Madi stepped away from the radio and pulled her into a hug. "Night, Clarke."
"Night, Madi." She watched the girl scamper from the room and then picked up the handset.
"Thanks for doing that, Bellamy. You've made her week."
"No problem. I was honoured to be asked."
"How was your day?" She settled comfortably into her chair and looked forward to learning what he'd been up to.
"I love you." He informed her instead of answering her question, taking her rather by surprise, and then he continued in something of a rush. "I hear you already worked that out, but I wanted to tell you as well."
She allowed herself a couple of seconds to observe that the sunset seemed to have suddenly grown more beautiful, and the chair more comfortable, and the loneliness in her heart more manageable. It was funny, she thought, how knowing something and hearing it said were not quite the same after all.
"I love you too." She responded easily once she realised he was probably holding his breath on the other side of the space in between them. "I hear that's not a surprise to you either."
"To get back to your question, my day just improved dramatically."
"You still need to work on your compliments." She accused him with a grin.
"It doesn't sound like a complaint when I can hear that you're smiling."
It seemed that she could no longer keep anything at all hidden from this man.
a/n Thanks for reading!