#drjuliaheller

His memories are like a missing tooth that his tongue keeps reaching for, to remember when he could smile without feeling her loss.

“You never come home,” Octavia complains on the phone when he calls. “It’s like you forgot the directions or something.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy jokes in response. “Where do we live again?”

Octavia laughs, every time, with the wild abandon she’s always taken with her as she approaches life. Her joy drowns out the fact that he’s silent on the other end.

- -

When asked to describe her childhood home, Clarke Griffin always ends up describing the Blake household. How there was always bread in the oven and a bed made for her, and a hand reaching out, ready to grip hers so hard it hurt and tell her that she was okay. His hand.

Clarke forgets what color her real room was, she only recalls the powder blue of his bedroom walls, the little latch she would flip on his window to climb in from the oak tree outside. She can’t picture her childhood truthfully unless she imagines sitting next to him, feeling warm even during the biggest snowstorm to ever hit her town, their feet swinging off the edge of their branch among the whirling snowflakes.

She doesn’t call home, because if she did it wouldn’t be real, it wouldn’t be the number Clarke still had at the forefront of her mind, the ten digits she’d repeated to herself over and over on the first day of second grade. Clarke used to leave him voicemails, playing the Spice Girls into the receiver and giggling uncontrollably. If she called home, it would just be her mother on an empty landline, saying all the wrong words.

Bellamy had always felt the most like home to her. Clarke had been drifting for years.

- -

They come home because Octavia asks, both of them. She’s grown rounder over the months, and with the date looming closer, she writes them a heartfelt letter that reads “I’m actually about to create a very real, very human baby, so if you don’t come home and tell me how cute it is you’re fucking dead to me.” Needless to say, they arrive days later.

Clarke stays in the town hotel, because her mother is still telling her to pick up a scalpel every time they interact and Clarke isn’t interested in going through the motions. Bellamy stays on the couch because he doesn’t have the heart to sleep in his old bedroom. They’re fully prepared to spend the days conveniently avoiding each other, all activities carefully planned to eliminate all possibility of chance meetings. They don’t account for the nostalgia, for the suffocating memories that emerge with each breath and each blink.

Clarke begins climbing just as Bellamy opens his window, and they breathe in the crisp air and each other.

“Hi,” Clarke says, settling onto the branch.

Bellamy coughs.

“It’s… God, it’s just like I remember, isn’t it?” She laughs again, because she was always the one laughing and he was always the one too busy to stop and listen to the joke. That’s part of the reason it hurt so much, he thinks bitterly, because when he finally stopped to wait she’d already left him behind. And, yet.

“Fucking exactly,” he mutters. I’m still in love with you, he wants to say, because they’d never lied to each other when they were in the tree. But his words are stuck in his throat, clogged with years of loneliness and forward motion. “Why are you here?” comes out instead, a poor substitute for the truth.

“There’s going to be another kid growing up in this house soon,” Clarke answers, because she’s always had an answer to everything. “They’re going to call this place home.”

Bellamy looks into her face, at the blood in her cheeks and the depths behind her eyes.

“I miss when this was home. When you were home.”

Clarke’s hand is resting on the bark, inches from his own, and without thinking Bellamy reaches out and loops his pinky around hers. “I wasn’t the one who screwed that up, Princess,” he says softly. The shuddering breath that she takes in response reopens the hole in Bellamy’s chest that he’d learned to sew shut long ago.

“I thought it would be better,” Clarke whispers. “If I lost it all at once instead of waiting until later.”

Bellamy is assaulted with memories of black ties and crying parents and a mahogany casket. Of Jake Griffin teaching him how to fly a kite and how to catch a firefly in a jar and how, if he stepped on the bit of the branch closest to the trunk, climbing trees was easy. And then, one of Clarke, her eyes red and angry as she climbed higher and higher in their tree, like if she reached the top she could see her father again amongst the clouds.

“How’s that working for you?”

“It’s really shitty,” Clarke answers, and her voice is trembling again. “I miss home.”

Bellamy wraps his arm around Clarke’s shoulder, and she’s once again tucked into his side like she’s the only thing that has ever fit and ever will. “Not anymore,” he says into her hair.

When they get too cold, they climb in through the window, into the powder blue of Bellamy’s bedroom, and fall asleep in a mess of limbs, at peace in the little corner of space they’d tucked away in each other and finally come home to reclaim. Octavia finds them the next morning, Clarke’s hair knotted beyond belief and Bellamy with his face against her neck, breathing in the scent that used to linger on his pillow.

They grin lazily at her, the smiles coming easier than they had in years.

“I should cut that fucking tree down,” Octavia mutters as she stands in the doorway, accompanied by the smell of baking bread.