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“What the fuck?”
Bellamy startles himself with his words, so it’s not really surprising that Clarke’s staring back at him, mouth open just wide enough for him to see the tips of her teeth. But he’s pretty sure he’s justified.
He’s spending the last Friday before classes start at his favorite bookstore, double checking that they have the Odyssey translation he wants to teach this semester. It isn’t really isn’t that unusual, in and of itself. Griffin’s is five blocks off campus, local and cozy in a way that makes him just feel good about supporting it. He appreciates the giant overstuffed chair tucked into the back corner, the way every aisle marker and door bears a print of the mythic eagle-headed winged lion, and the way the simple espresso machine they keep on the counter gurgles even when it’s not in use.
Octavia would say he appreciates the cute blonde shop owner most of all and, well. Clarke certainly doesn’t hurt. They’re friendly, that’s all.
But what he hadn’t been expecting as he turned the aisle towards the cash register where Clarke was working was to see her surrounded by things . Small, floating, humanoid things, about the size of his hand and each individually suspended in a soft green light, one perched on the shoulder of Clarke’s light cotton sweater and three lazing in the air around her.
Bellamy shakes his head, as if that will have some effect on what he was seeing.
“Just...what the fuck?”
Clarke straightens and the things disappear, though the glass of water near her bubbles and three white flowers suddenly bloom on the countertop bonsai.
“Okay, could you really not be the tiniest bit cool about this?” She pushes herself up on her tiptoes, looking around his shoulders like she’s checking for anyone else in the store, then falls down on her heels before crossing her arms.
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t prepared to be confronted with glowing orbs of light today.”
Clarke cocks her head, considering. “Have you never seen them before?”
He snorts. “Um, no. But I’d really like to know what the hell is going on if you could, I don’t know, inform me? If we’re being overtaken by aliens, it’d be nice to have a head’s up.” He glances back at the bonsai as he speaks, checking and rechecking that the flowers are still there, because seriously, what the fuck is happening?
Clarke studies him for a moment longer and he fidgets, one hand rubbing his neck and the other crammed into the pocket of his jeans, then she nods, sharp.
“Okay. Come with me.”
She grabs the base of the bonsai to prop the pot against her hip, yells for her employee, Monty, to take over the register, and leads him through the back aisles of the store to a door he hadn’t noticed before.
The room behind it is small and dark, even when Clarke turns on the light and it’s all cast in a hazy yellow glow. There are shelves of books lining the walls, old and worn and brown leather like he likes them best, and a grouping of mismatched armchairs and a loveseat surrounding a claw-footed table in the middle. Clarke sets the plant down on its surface and sits in one of the chairs, carefully tucking her feet under her until the frayed hems of her flower-print pants are hidden. Bellamy still feels tense and off balance, but he can’t help looking around a little bit in awe as he claims a seat of his own.
“Tell me what you saw.”
He scrubs a hand over his face, feeling the rasp of stubble move against his thumb. “I don’t know. It was like...Tinkerbell, I guess? Except bigger and glowing. Is this the part where you tell me we’re all actually androids and I’ve broken the system and have to be exterminated?”
She snorts. “No, not exactly.” Clarke watches his face as she reaches out and gently grazes the petals of one of the flowers clinging to the tree, letting the white fold onto her palm as it shifts and changes until, suddenly, Bellamy’s looking at one of the creatures again, glowing and hovering over Clarke’s hand as if it had been there all along. It looks fierce, arms crossed and tiny eyes sharp as they glare at him, but it doesn’t move from its perch.
“You see her?” Clarke checks. He nods dazedly and Clarke nods at the being, curling her hand back towards the plant until the flower appears again and her palm is empty.
“Wait, ‘her’? What is she? Er, what are they, I guess?”
“Sprites.” Bellamy blinks back blankly at her answer and she continues. “Fairies? Similar idea to nymphs, but tiny?”
He’s an associate professor in the Classics department--he’s familiar enough with mythology to understand what she’s referencing, but… “How?”
“It’s magic, Bellamy.” She says it gently, as if she can somehow not startle him with this answer, but he’s pretty sure he passed ‘startled’ into ‘dumbstruck’ as soon as the magical glowing creatures transformed into flowers. “You have to have magic of some kind to see them.”
“I-- magic?” He takes a deep breath and scrubs at his face again, tries to decide which question is actually worth asking. “How could I have magic and just be finding out? I’m almost 30--I’ve read Harry Potter, that’s not how this goes.”
Clarke shrugs, settling back into her seat. “It can be dormant. You have to inherit it from somewhere in your family history, but it’s like...it’s like speaking another language. You need to practice it, need to hear it and have it around you to let your memory know that it’s there.”
“Okay, then what am I supposed to do now?”
“You learn.”
So he does.
Clarke meets with him almost every evening, after his classes have ended and her store is quiet or closing and she can leave it in the hands of one of her employees. She’ll accompany him to that same back room and show him small white magics--pieces of flora that grow suddenly or a trail of stars that hangs in the air for a moment--or he’ll grab one of the books lining its burgeoning shelves and sit at the counter, reading about the history of sprites and witches and the power of the earth while she works.
It’s less overwhelming than he would have expected, this new world he’s discovered, and he knows that’s in large part because of Clarke.
She’s patient and comfortable, answering any questions Bellamy has or tossing volumes at him that will have a better explanation than she does. The sprites like the river delta their town is nestled next to, the touch of sea brought in on the breeze; its vibrant ecosystem’s life begetting life. Magic isn’t the same in every person, every lineage, drawn to something different in each person it calls home. Bellamy decides his probably comes from his father’s side, a man who swooped in and out of lives like confetti until he dissolved entirely.
And he learns about more than magic.
He learns about her.
That Clarke first felt her magic at age 13, when a cut on her best friend’s bicep wouldn’t stop bleeding. That her stepfather owns the space her store is built in, and she convinced him to lease it to her with a desire to see out her father’s dream of rooms and rooms full of books. That she wears her fair hair in braids on days she doesn’t want to wash it. That she doesn’t like mayonnaise on her sandwiches, and can never decided if she likes salt and vinegar chips, and prefers eating chocolate chips straight out of the bag to the effort of baking cookies.
That she is soft, and steel, and a magic all her own.
Clarke learns about Octavia, the trials of helping raise himself and her, and his weakness for Junior Mints in return.
After a few weeks of him just studying, learning what he can and familiarizing himself with the reality of something mystic in his everyday world, Clarke flips the locks on the shop’s doors and leads him to the back room. Bellamy flops onto the loveseat, and she places a light bulb in his hands as she sits next to him. He looks between it and her face, placid and expecting with one eyebrow raised.
“What’s this?”
“A light bulb. You know, like when you have a good idea?”
Bellamy rolls his eyes because it’s definitely expected of him. “Yeah, I got that. What’s it for?”
“For practice.”
Clarke holds her hand over the bulb and it begins to glow, filament warming up and shining brighter and brighter, until the space is cast in the white of its light. She flicks her wrist and the bulbs moves to settle above the palm of her hand, then settles against her skin and dims.
She returns the now unlit bulb to Bellamy’s hand. It’s still cool to the touch, just glass against skin, lacking the heat that usually comes with incandescence. Because it was all her. Clarke was the power.
She knocks her shoulder against his.
“Try it.”
“I wouldn’t even know how.” It feels like the first time he was asked to tie his shoes again, presented with all the information and knowledge but completely overwhelmed by the practical application of it.
“You just try.” Clarke grabs the bulb again, holding it like the base is screwed into her hand, and leans into him. She smells like lilac and warm earth. It makes his heart trip, just a little. “Look, we’re all just particles, moving around the universe in certain configurations. That’s all this light bulb is, too. Witches used to light candles to first try out their magic; now we use these. It’s all just energy, either way.”
She folds his hands so they’re cradling the bulb, her skin smooth and pale against his own. Her face is earnest and so sure, so certain in her belief of him that something inside of him flips at the sight.
“It’s all just energy, Bellamy. You can do this.”
He searches her expression for any sign of doubt, for any sign this has all been some crazy dream in which he gets to have things too good to be true in his life. When he finds none, he closes his eyes.
The weight of the bulb in his hands is easy to focus on. He concentrates on the place the glass meets the metal, their different scratch and smoothness against his skin, the places the shape of it curves.
A well peeks open inside of him.
It’s different than he imagined it would be, magic. He was expecting white hot satisfaction, flashes of knives and tingling limbs. Power, wild and apparent, coursing through him.
Instead, it’s easy and warm, like stepping outside on the first true day of spring and feeling the sun taste his skin. Like the honeyed tea his grandmother made settling in his stomach. Like laughter between friends.
Like Clarke.
“Bellamy,” she breathes, as if pulled by his thoughts. He peers through his lids slowly, uncertain what he’ll find, but it’s the bulb, shining strongly and steadily as it balances to stand against the palm of his hand as if pulled by a string, and Clarke’s grin on the other side. Laughter and disbelief bubble out of him, and the light flickers for a second, bulb wiggling against his palm, but it steadies, continues to beat out easy white light so that the grain of the coffee table is stark and apparent, the pupils of Clarke’s eyes tiny and sparkling amidst all that blue. She’s laughing too.
Then he’s on his feet and his arms are full of Clarke as he spins them around as best he can in the small space between the claws of the coffee table and the edge of the sofa, giddy and drunk on the feeling of madness and magic and success. He hears the bulb shatter against the floor beside them and stops, setting Clarke down on her feet and brushing away the strand of her hair that had curled into his mouth.
“Oops?” His grin is sheepish, but still bright.
She just laughs and tugs him back down to the seat, pulling another bulb out of a bag he hadn’t noticed by her feet.
“Try it again.”
Bellamy looks at her, and she’s glowing.
Bellamy makes it through his classes and office hours the next day, but just barely. He’s fucking giddy with this, with the fact that he can make things brighter with just his mind, with the fact that he, of all people, can bring light.
He picks up an order of the chicken flautas they both like from the food trucks that park off campus and walks through Griffin’s door, bell chiming over his head, no later than 5:43. There’s no part of him willing to pretend he can stay away until closing tonight. Clarke laughs and shakes her head at him, but grabs them each plastic forks and a bottle of water from the mini-fridge in her office and gestures for him to sit at the extra stool she’s taken to keeping behind the counter for him. It makes his chest go a little bit tight every time he sees it.
When he’s finished his food and can’t keep his leg from bouncing, Clarke shoves him towards the back with a light bulb in his hand and tells him, “Practice! ”
So that’s what he does.
For the next week, he practices over and over again, turning the light on and off repeatedly until he feels like he can predict and control it. Clarke helps, grounding him when he needs it and managing to keep him both encouraged and pragmatic.
Bellamy works and works until he can stand in a circle of 10 separate bulbs and power them on and off in whatever patterns Clarke throws at him, magic running to them in streams, individual and interconnected.
The day after he’s mastered that, Clarke’s bouncing on her toes outside the door as she waits for him. She grins when she spots him and grabs his hand.
“Come on!”
“What are we doing?” Bellamy trips after her as she pulls him, catching himself and smiling at the wild waves cascading down the back of her head.
“You’ll see.”
She leads them around the corner, up a set of stairs, and opens a door at the top of it. Bellamy had been concerned that Clarke never seemed to lock doors aside from the main one in her shop, until she had explained that unlocking them without fishing out her keys was a benefit of magic.
They walk into a small apartment, what he realizes must be Clarke’s from the way it smells of her detergent and lilac and the scent that’s just her, always trailing in her wake. It’s dark except for a lamp turned on in the corner of the living room, illuminating a row of plants that line the windowsills--lavender and sage and rosemary, growing wild and weaving in their pots, interspersed with the crystals Clarke likes best for healing.
“Stay here.”
She squeezes his hand once they’re past the threshold of the room. There’s a bandage around her finger where she nicked it with a box cutter while restocking, and Bellamy feels it move against his skin just before she drops it, her hand soft and warm. The lamp is extinguished, everything swallowed up in blackness, and he can hear her move back towards him, can tell she’s somewhere closeby from the way his skin always vibrates slightly around her, but he’s not sure exactly where.
“Turn on the lights.” Her voice floats out over the dark, carrying smoothly through the space.
“What do you mean?”
“The lights in this room, in this apartment--turn them on. You can do this.”
Bellamy closes his eyes for a moment, takes a deep breath and centers himself around the tap to his magic. He reaches out, searching for the places in the space that bear the energy markers he’s come to know from his practice, noting them in his mind, then opens his eyes. Opens the flow. Wills them all to turn on.
He can’t see anything but white for a second. Then the light softens and there’s Clarke, standing right in front of him, so close he’s surprised he couldn’t feel her breath against his skin. She’s smiling, bright and true, her eyes starting to crinkle at the edges and the mark above her lips pulled upwards in her delight.
Everything around him, in him, rings in perfect clarity.
“See?” she says, soft. “I knew you could do it.”
He smiles back for a second, all the lights in the apartment humming through him, then takes the half step forward that puts their entire bodies in alignment. His hand cradles her face instinctively, thumb tapping lightly at her birthmark, and he watches her, eyes carefully locked, as he leans in slowly.
But Clarke’s more certain, as always, pushing up on her toes so her old painted Converse squeak against the wood of her floor, but Bellamy doesn’t care, can barely notice, because she’s nipping at his lip and softening her mouth against his, wrapping her arms around his neck to tangle in his curls.
He swears the room spins for a moment, camera panning around them like some kind of rom-com, but he can feel this in his bones, can feel her curves pressed against him and the warmth of her body under his hands, can feel the easy glide of her lips against his, the tease of their tongues, can taste her lip balm and smell her shampoo.
He can feel the place where her magic reaches out to weave with his.
When they pull back, just enough for their noses to brush and their teeth to clack as they try to press another kiss through their grins, the lights are floating. The lamp’s cord is pulled taught from where it almost touches the ceiling, brightness shining out from the crack underneath every door. There are tiny specks, like fireflies or the place dust gets caught in the evening sun, hovering between it all; coating their hair and their skin so that Clarke glows, beams like a light of her own, like the sprites that still flutter around her near full moons, like the first time he illuminated that bulb in the back room of her shop.
It’s awe-inspiring, and amazing, and exactly, exactly right.
They are a universe all their own.
Bellamy pulls Clarke back in so that their lips meet again, heart and magic together bursting out of his fucking chest. She moves him towards her room and he lets the lights dim, staring down at where she lays on the bed with her hair in a halo, stars twirling around her, gorgeous and happy and every image of art he ever had as a child. She tugs his hand, and he slots himself down beside her.
It’s easy, what he feels like this; affection soft and sure and flowing through his veins. It’s warm and steady; earth pillowed between his fingers, strong and malleable, new and old all at once.
It’s simple. It’s right.
It’s just like magic.