Work Text:
Some people see with their hands.
Clarke remembers being young, on the Ark, and watching her mother suture a gash on the forehead of a woman with milky white eyes.
“I forgot to feel for the door,” she’d laughed. “I’ve been blind for forty years, living in the same apartment, and I didn’t check to see if the door was open.”
And after she’d gone, Abby had explained to Clarke what it meant to be blind. That it happens, people are born that way because of the thin air or radiation, that sometimes it’s an accident. Young Clarke, the one who had solar flares and supernovas at the tips of her fingers, whose clothes were always covered in charcoal or paint or ink, she couldn’t imagine how someone could live and not see.
“They do see, Clarke. Some people just see with their hands.”
And Clarke never really knew what that meant. Until Bellamy. Until her sight, the sense she’s always coveted most, is not enough.
She loves his freckles. And maybe she can’t feel them, but some nights she lives for the way his face crinkles under her touch when she traces them with her fingers, a smile stretching his cheeks.
She loves his voice. Not only the way it sounds, but the way his chest vibrates under her hands when they’re talking after the sun has gone down, the soft way it makes her feel alive.
She loves his scars, because they match her own. Neither of them are proud of the things they’ve done, but her pink shining marks are mirrored on his body, and it makes her feel a little less alone in her penance.
She loves that he’s warm. Loves the friction of his rough hands on her bare skin. Loves the way he feels solid and steady beneath her touch.
Some people see with their hands. Now she knows.
Bellamy knows Clarke has a thing about hands. He never complains, because he’ll never be tired of the way she touches him, always so deliberate, fingers traveling over his skin. He didn’t really understand it at first, but then he found himself doing it too. His thumb skimming across her cheek, the beauty mark above her lip, watching her mouth part slightly, automatically, at his touch.
He loves the way her hair feels, sometimes a strand pinched gently between fingers, sometimes a handful tangled wildly around his fist. He knows she likes that too, has the marks on his back to prove it.
He loves the way that there are parts of her that are still soft, even after everything she’s been through, loves the way her eyes glaze over when he finds them.
He finds his hands on her more often than not, a new instinct to be touching her, always. He knows her better for it, can close his eyes and perfectly imagine every facet of how she feels.
She sees him with her hands. And he loves her with his.