Work Text:
He comes alive to the sound of scraping. Around him the earth is warm and whispering. Wake up, it tells him. She needs you.
I’m awake. I’m here, he answers, and the ground hums back. Good.
He smiles and wiggles his fingers and toes. The earth shifts around him. A reprimand for his eagerness. Wait, it says. She comes.
He holds as still as possible. It is hard to wait when he knows she is so close and she needs him.
But his patience is worth it when he gentle fingers brush earth from his cheeks. Her touch is the first he ever feels and he never wants her to stop touching him.
He opens his eyes and stares up at a girl with sky for eyes and sunlight in her hair. “Hello,” he says and sits up. Clods of earth fall from his clothed torso into his lap. He laughs and shakes his head so more dirt falls from his hair.
The sky-girl screams.
He frowns. Why does she fear? He will not attack. He will not hurt her. Never hurt her. She called for him. He is hers. He says as much and the sky-girl gapes at him.
“What do you mean?”
He means to answer but he sees the blood on her fingertips. Slowly he reaches forward. He does not want to startle her. She does not pull away so he takes her hands in his. He kisses the tips of her fingertips. Gently. He will not hurt her. “You have been digging too much.”
It is then he notices the mounds spreading all around them. Many. Fifty, at least. Perhaps a hundred.
She sniffles and a tear escapes down her cheek so he does not ask who the graves belong to. Instead he brushes the streak of wetness away. “You’re sad. I don’t want you to be sad.”
And that’s a good explanation for his existence. She’s sad. He’s there to help her be un-sad. Him and one other.
He flips to his knees and starts to dig next to his hole.
“What are you doing?” Sky-girl asks. She watches with eyes round, though he thinks now from confusion or curiosity, no longer fear. Which is good. He does not want her to be afraid either.
“You don’t want me to leave my sister in the ground, do you?” he replies, surprising himself with the words. He didn’t know he had a sister, but as soon as he says so, he knows it is right. He has a sister. And she is waiting.
He pulls away the earth in large scoops. The sky-girl tries to join him after a few minutes but he does not let her with her bleeding hands. Together, yes, he wants them to work together. He likes them together. But not if it hurts her.
So alone he unearths his sister, wiping smears of mud from around her eyes, until she blinks them open, green and bright, and he knows her.
“Hello, Octavia.”
“Hello, big brother,” she says. “Now move so I can climb out of this dirty hole.”
His Sky-girl makes a soft sound. It is not a laugh, not yet. But he is determined to win one from her. To win a hundred. A million. As many laughs as there are stars in the sky.
He and Octavia stand and slap dirt from each other’s clothes and hair. It flies around them in puffs of dust that make them both smile.
His Sky-girl watches them. “Are you truly real? Not me finally going crazy?” she finally asks. Her voice is soft as if she does not believe what is before her.
He takes her hands again and places them on his chest so she can feel the strong heartbeat thumping there and the warmth of his body and the soft huff of his breath as it puffs along her cheek.
“Don’t I feel real?”
“Yes,” she says. Her voice is shaky and breathless and her cheeks a little pink. He thinks perhaps he likes that color of her best. It is hard to decide between the blue of her eyes and the gold of her hair. But the pink makes something in him flutter.
“Good. Because I am very real.”
She smiles up at him and he is the earth basking in the warmth of the sun.
“Do you have a name?”
“Bellamy,” he says, though he didn’t know until it fell out of his mouth, but yes, that’s right too.
“I’m Clarke.”
“Clarke,” he repeats and is rewarded with another little smile. He takes her hand in his again. He is still careful of her injuries. He will fix them as soon as he can. All of her injuries. Even the ones he cannot see.
“I still don’t understand how you can possibly exist,” she says.
“You were alone,” Octavia explains. “So the earth gave us to you. Now none of us are alone.”
His sky-girl’s nose wrinkles. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Bellamy shrugs. “That is how we work. We come alive for the people that need us and who we need.”
“Who is we?”
“Grounders. We are people from the ground.”