Work Text:
He turned his head discreetly to the side in time for him to see her lips stretch, and her features fall into a softer embrace, her head tipped at a slight angle backwards, her golden locks falling back further, and he couldn’t help but marvel at the way the dim lights hit her, how she managed to illuminate the little light that fell, banishing away the shadows.
She was always smiling, Clarke Griffin. An ability few possessed, floating in space, lost to the stars. He loved watching how her sparkling green eyes would dissect the darkness, tugging at it, pulling it apart to find the light that she was sure would stem through. It seemed that Clarke Griffin would be able to redeem a mass-murder, with just a single glance.
Though still her optimistic perspective was not of that to be confused with naivety. Clarke Griffin was not unaware to the ways of the wicked, though to him it seemed she did not look for the foreshadowing darkness, and though she understood it was there, she tried to find the light to diminish it.
Clarke Griffin exerted goodness, and purity, and anything left in the world that was good, that was right, and that was just. She was still young, yet to be tarnished by the scars of false hope, the dream of something more than the Ark, a system of surviving, but not living.
He recalled memories of when she was a youth, how she had confronted and comforted a sobbing grown man, somehow at the same time.
“There is nothing. Nothing in this godforsaken world. We’re all just a punchline to a big, elaborate joke. We’re all just a joke! “He’d spoke grimly, on that of darker days.
Clarke had then rose from her seat, a tiny girl with such a look of determination on her face, that Bellamy, an adolescent himself, had leaned back further in his chair, not expecting the fortitude in her words that were soon to spill from her lips.
“We’re not forsaken. And we’re not a joke. We are survivors. And you clearly can’t see how big an achievement that is to us. Can’t see the height of the walls we’ve overcome. Twelve stations, formed not in the bounds of despair and hopelessness, but in the need to come together, and to stich ourselves up, to find solutions and to repair, and to survive. We are not represented by our mistakes, or by things that go wrong, but the things we are able to succeed in, the things we excel in. We’re not forsaken, and we’re not a joke. We are survivors. We are more.”
In that single moment, as Bellamy had started at her in awe, this was the moment he had truly grown in understanding, in just how awesome Clarke Griffin was.
Because as she had spoken those words, she had been little more than a child, and already she was adamant in herself, in what she chose to believe was right, and already she fought so hard to distil the presence of woe that hung dimly over their heads.
He saw the child in the girl had not changed, and as she had developed, he noted her eyes had stayed the same. They blazed bright in the darkened place, firm with righteousness, deflecting that of wrongness or the sinfulness that seemed to be growing in places high and low.
And for that, he was just a little bit in love with her.