a/n Hello and welcome to a request for an alternative to S7 where Clarke and Bellamy go into the anomaly and see what life would have been like if they'd run away together in episode 1.08. Huge thanks to Stormkpr for betaing. Happy reading!

Clarke is confused, and that doesn't happen very often.

She's survived a lifetime of unexpected risks and unforeseen disasters by thinking on her feet, but right now, all she wants to do is sink to the forest floor with her head in her hands. She doesn't know what she was expecting, when she walked with Bellamy into the anomaly, but it sure as hell wasn't this.

They're on a planet that either is Earth, or looks and smells and even tastes very much like it. The sky is blue. The sun is shining. The birds are singing, sweet and true.

Clarke and Bellamy are crouching behind a large bush and waiting as a pair of exuberant toddlers wobble into the distance.

"This is... interesting." Bellamy states mildly. That might just be the understatement of the century, she thinks.

"That's one word for it. What do you think we should do?"

He looks at her sharply. "Isn't that your area? Deciding what to do?"

She huffs. "You managed without me well enough in space. And when Josephine was in my head. And when you decided to -"

"Yeah. Well." He swallows thickly. "I was joking. Sorry. Bad time to joke."

Yes. Yes, it is a fantastically bad time to joke. Because the thing is that those two toddlers that have just disappeared out of sight were not just any old toddlers. The pair of them both had Bellamy's skin tone, freckles dusted across their cheeks. The little boy even had familiar curls, and the little girl kept on calling him Gus as she chased him down the track.

Clarke has seen some strange things in her time. So it is that she does not stop to question whether these are really Bellamy's children. They look, sound and act like his children, so that is who they must be.

"We should go after them." Bellamy suggests quietly. "Just to make sure they get home safe. Their parents can't be far away."

By their parents, he presumably means himself. Or some future version of himself.

And Echo.

That's what hurts the most. Clarke knows they are together – of course she does. She saw them kiss in the desert all those decades ago. But somehow, she's allowed herself to forget it, once or twice, recently. She even began to hope, when he dropped everything and left Sanctum to save her, that perhaps there might be a future for the two of them after all.

No such luck. It seems the anomaly has decided to show her the future, and the children Bellamy will go on to have.

Well, then. If he is determined to ignore the obvious parentage of these toddlers, she can do that, too.

"You're right." She agrees, nodding and standing up from her hiding place without a second glance.

She should have learnt her lesson by now, she curses, as she is greeted by an up-close view of a stranger's oddly familiar face. She has had enough experience of surviving on her wits that she should know to look before jumping headfirst into trouble.

In her defence, she's a little distracted, just now.

"Mum?" The stranger – a girl of perhaps twelve years old – asks, visibly surprised, stepping back in a fluster. "What are you doing here? I told you, I'm fine with the twins."

"Twins?" Clarke repeats, because focusing on that is easier than wondering why this girl called her Mum.

"Yeah. I've got them for the morning, remember? So you and Dad can have some time together. Are you – are you OK? Why have you cut your hair?"

"My hair?"

"Mum, please. You're scaring me. What happened to your hair? Why are you looking at me like that?"

Clarke is still struggling to form a coherent sentence when Bellamy appears from his hiding place and joins the conversation. "Shouldn't we run after the twins before they get into trouble?"

The girl nods, flustered, frowning deeply at Bellamy. "I'm going. I'm going. But you know it's only the sandpit up there. How much trouble can they get into?"

On that note, she breaks into a jog. Clarke meets Bellamy's eye for scarcely a heartbeat before making haste to follow.

The sandpit is just around the corner, it turns out, and the toddlers – the twins, Clarke corrects herself silently – are already playing happily.

"It's a good sandpit." Bellamy offers mildly.

Clarke shoots him an unimpressed look.

"What? It is." He gestures towards it. "Looks like an old river bed?"

That is the point where their new companion snaps. "Dad. Stop wittering about the sandpit. You were the one who found it in the first place."

"I was?"

"You were." She insists, nodding firmly. "What's happened? You have a beard? And Mum, your hair? And why are you both acting all confused?"

Clarke takes a deep, calming breath. Perhaps she wasn't right to presume these were Bellamy's future children with Echo after all. Perhaps she could get away with getting her hopes up, just a little – or rather with sinking into the pain that comes with understanding that there is some dream or delusion or alternate reality where she does end up with Bellamy after all.

Perhaps she ought to take control of the situation.

"We're acting confused because we are confused." She says to the girl, as softly and patiently as she can manage. She thinks of how she would want a stranger to talk to Madi, if ever she found herself in a similar situation.

"Why?" The girl asks, her eyes beginning to look damp. "Why – why don't you know me?"

"I think there's been an... accident." Clarke opts for in the end. "Or perhaps a mistake. We went into a temporal anomaly and we ended up here. I think this might be our future?" She asks, uncertain, almost afraid to let herself wish for it.

The girl sits down, heavily and suddenly, on the edge of the sandpit. The twins are playing a little way off and seem unconcerned with their parents' new facial hair or unexpected presence.

"It can't be your future." The girl says. "You don't look young enough now. Or – or old enough in my time. You were only eighteen when you had me, Mum."

"Eighteen?" She repeats, stunned.

"You're – you're our daughter?" Bellamy speaks up after a long silence, sounding bemused. "Mine and Clarke's?"

The girl rolls her eyes dramatically. "I'm Julia. Nice to meet you, Dad. Yes, you're my father. Yes, Clarke here is my mother. What gave it away? Something about the way I keep calling you Mum and Dad?"

"I think what your father is trying to say is that this is all very unexpected." Clarke says smoothly. "In the time and place we came from, we're not together."

Julia gapes. "Not together?"

"Not together." Clarke nods briskly. "You Dad has a different girlfriend, in fact."

"So, what, you broke up?" She sounds horrified, her lip trembling.

Bellamy answers that one. "We weren't ever together." He explains, and Clarke doesn't think she is imagining the wistfulness in his tone.

Bizarrely, Julia actually starts laughing at that. It's not the reaction Clarke might have foreseen – she was beginning to fear that the girl might break down and have a good old cry.

"You've never been together? You must be joking. Even if you've come from some different world, I can't imagine a world where you two have never loved each other."

"I didn't say we've never loved each other." Bellamy mutters, voice low. "Just that we've never been together."

Now it is Clarke's turn to gape in shock. He cannot mean to imply what she thinks that implies, surely? If he does mean that, why has he never said anything? Why has he never expressed any real interest in a romantic relationship with her?

"That's mad." Julia informs them briskly.

Bellamy gives the ghost of a smile. "It is a bit, yeah. We're still close though. Your Mum will always be important to me."

No. This has gone on long enough. Clarke is right here, and she won't have her daughter – and the father of her daughter – discuss her romantic life as if she is not a participant in her own destiny.

She sits up straight and looks her daughter in the eye. "Julia. Could you tell us more about this world and our story here? We need to work out what happened. And I don't think it's a good idea to go looking for your parents. I'm not sure how that would turn out, having all of us in the same place at the same time."

Julia is only too happy to oblige. Clarke gets the impression that she is quite fond of her parents and doesn't mind talking about them in the slightest. "You – they – my Mum and Dad, they've been together since Mum was seventeen and Dad was twenty-three."

"You said Clarke had you when she was eighteen?" Bellamy asks, tone earnest.

"Yeah. She turned eighteen not long after you got together. They got together. I'm sorry, this is strange for me."

"Don't apologise." Clarke rushes to reassure her, laying a tentative hand on her arm. "You're doing great."

Julia smiles a little. "Great. So I came along when you hadn't been together very long. And you wanted more kids, but it didn't work out for whatever reason. Dad always said it was the stress – there was always another war to fight or the world to save. He was always trying to take the weight off her shoulders but you know what she's like. You know what you're like."

"That does sound like Clarke." Bellamy agrees with a wry grin.

"Anyway, so the twins were born about three years ago. Mum and Dad were over the moon."

"And their names?" Bellamy asks, eager. "Gus? And...?"

"Rory."

"Rory?" Bellamy repeats, some emotion in his voice that Clarke cannot identify.

"Yeah. Short for Aurora. Dad and Mum argued so much about that – I think it was the only time I've ever really heard them fight. Dad kept saying that they didn't have to name a kid after his mother, that it wasn't fair or whatever. But Mum insisted. Said that Dad's mum would be proud of him."

Clarke swallows, thickly. In this alternate reality, not only does she have children with Bellamy. She also has the kind of honest and emotional relationship with him she has always dreamed of. That shouldn't come as a surprise, of course. It's not likely that they would have three children without being openly in love. But all the same, it's nice to hear Julia confirm just how deep their feelings for each other run.

What the hell is she supposed to do now?

"We should get home." She decides at once, all business. "Sorry. Thanks, Julia. It was lovely to meet you. But we're obviously not supposed to be here. You have your parents, and the twins, and we should get back to our world." She cannot allow herself to stay here and dream of what she cannot have any longer. She starts scrambling to her feet.

"Hey." Bellamy stops her with a gentle hand on her forearm. "Slow down. Can we just – I have one more question for Julia. Please. And then we can try to get home. Just stay here for one more question?"

Clarke ought to be strong enough to say no to that. She ought to be able to cling to her sanity and stick to the rules. She ought to be able to say no when the man she has loved for centuries begs her to hang around and ask questions about a reality far removed from their own.

But Bellamy Blake has always been her weakness.

She sinks back to the floor and nods her agreement, not daring to open her mouth for fear of what might come out of it.

He visibly swallows, then turns to ask Julia his question. "How did we get together? I've – I've wondered a few times, in our world, whether there was anything I could have done differently. Whether maybe there was a universe in which we got together. So I just – please. Can you tell us?"

"That's easy. That's my favourite story. You asked her to run away with you, and she did."

"I did?" Clarke asks, surprised into speech.

"Yeah. Soon after you landed, the two of you were exploring a supply depot. You got into a fight with one of the hundred – a guy named Dax. And then you had some emotional conversation, and then you asked Mum to run away with you." Somewhere along the line, Clarke notes, this has stopped being a conversation about them and Julia has instead started referring to the pair of them as you.

"She would never have done that." Bellamy argues firmly. "She's too sensible. She wouldn't drop everything and run away with me like that."

"She's very sensible apart from when it comes to you." Julia corrects him firmly. "The other winter you sprained your ankle and she didn't let you out of the house for a month."

"That does sound like something I would do." Clarke cannot help commenting.

"You – you would?" Bellamy turns to ask her, all surprise.

"Yeah." Clarke swallows. "Julia has a point. I'm not very sensible when it comes to you."

"You're saying you would have run away with me, if I asked you?" He looks somewhere between deeply shaken and thoroughly overexcited at the idea.

Clarke swallows stiffly. She has no right to even have this conversation, let alone to answer that question honestly. But she and Bellamy do not make a habit of lying to each other, and she thinks maybe it's past time she became a little more open on the matter of her feelings for him.

Steeling her resolve, she nods.

His eyes light up at that, even as they fill with tears. "I didn't know." He mutters damply. "I never knew. God, I'm an idiot. We could have had all this." He gestures to the toddlers, still happily occupied in the sand. To Julia, a wise young woman whose parents must be proud of her.

"You still could." Julia dares to whisper into the heavy silence that follows.

Clarke shakes her head. It's too late. He has Echo, she has Madi. They are not those same naive youngsters who set out to that supply depot so many years ago.

Bellamy, however, is nodding.

"I guess I know why the anomaly took us here."

"What do you mean?" Clarke cannot help but ask.

"We needed to see this. The anomaly knew that or something, right?"

Clarke snorts. She's pretty sure temporal anomalies don't have conscious thought, but it's a nice idea.

It would be kind of beautiful, she thinks, to go around believing that the universe wants her and Bellamy to get together.

While she is still in her thoughtful daze, Julia starts talking again. "Go home. Go on, both of you. You've got things to sort out, and I'm fine watching the twins. That's what I told Mum and Dad when they tried to come out with us this morning, and that's what I'm telling you now."

Bellamy nods, a thoughtful knot in his brow. "You're a good big sister to them. Remember to live your own life, too."

"You sound like my Dad. He's worried I'll spend my whole childhood worrying about my siblings like he did."

"He is your Dad, more or less." Clarke points out, surprising even herself with her levity.

"How is Octavia? In this world?" Bellamy asks the question then bites his lip.

So much for one more question, Clarke thinks. There is no way she can drag him home before Julia answers that, not given how turbulent his relationship with Octavia has been since Praimfaya.

Julia surprises them with a hearty laugh. "She's great. She was over with her kids the day before yesterday. Her youngest is a year older than the twins."

"She's – she's OK? Even though we ran off all those years ago and – what – left her?" Bellamy sounds rather uncomfortable with that idea.

Julia fixes him with a glare that makes Clarke realise, very abruptly, that she resembles her mother at least as much as her father after all. "She's fine. Really. You don't need to worry about her all the time. When you left, Miller and Monty ran things for a bit. And then your sister and Lincoln negotiated a deal with Indra and – yeah. Everything turned out OK. Everything turns out OK, even if you two get on with being happy instead of drowning in responsibilities."

"Bellamy?" Clarke asks, quiet, smiling gently.

"Yeah?"

"I think that was our own daughter telling us to lighten up and live our lives."

He gives a short bark of laughter. "Shall we go try that?"

She nods. "Time to go home?"

"Time to go home." It is Julia who confirms it. "Go on. Go be happy. And Dad? Maybe shave while you're at it."

Bellamy gives a slightly longer laugh, at that, as he gets to his feet and reaches down to help Clarke up. But she finds, all at once, that things are moving too quickly for her, now. She's not sure she wants to go home again, only to find that this has all been a dream or some figment of her imagination.

She's not sure she wants to leave without ever getting to know her beautiful baby twins.

"Can we – could we say hello to Gus and Rory first?" She asks, suddenly shy.

Bellamy presses his lips into a frown. "I don't think that's a good idea, Clarke. We'd scare them. We look like their parents but not." She swallows down her disappointment as he pauses and takes a ragged breath. "And anyway, I'm not sure I want to spoil the surprise. I want to meet them when it's time, you know? When – when we have twins of our own."

Her eyes dart up to his face. Is he serious? It shouldn't be surprising, she thinks, that he plans on them having a family together, not after everything they have just seen and learnt and said.

But all the same, it still feels too good to be true.

"You really mean that?" She asks him, trying not to let her heart leap out of her chest.

"Of course I mean it." He swallows. "I want it if you do. I think – I've always wanted it. But I wasn't sure we were allowed to look for our own happiness."

"We are." She nods firmly, fighting down tears of sheer joy. "Julia just told us that, remember? I want it too."

"Then let's get home."

They take their leave of Julia, and thank her for her time, and wish her well for the future. It's an odd kind of farewell – a farewell to a beloved daughter they barely know – but it is easily overcome by the eager anticipation of getting home and starting their life together.

Somewhere along the line, as they say their goodbyes and walk back down the dirt track, Clarke finds that Bellamy seems to have taken her hand. That's OK, she decides. It is something she will be able to get used to.

As they fight back through the undergrowth, and find their way back towards the anomaly, Clarke is rather less confused than she was when they arrived.

In fact, she decides, today is a day that has made perfect sense.

a/n Thanks for reading!