From tierannasaurusrex on tumblr: "GROUNDER BELLAMY + WITCH CLARKE PLSSSS" [a spooky prompt™]

Full title of this chapter: "As If By Magic (You're The Only Home I Know)"

The witch falls from the stars when Bellamy is ten and Octavia is four, and for a witch, she's not very impressive.

For one thing, she's tiny, barely older than Octavia, and for another, though she speaks their warrior's language, she pronounces the words with a lisp.

Bellamy's the one who finds her, when he's playing in the woods with Lincoln. They hear the crash, smell the strange burning scent, and follow it through the woods to find a big metal box half-in and half-out of the creek.

There's a window of sorts, and Lincoln and Bellamy jostle each other, trying to be the first to peek through the thick, warped glass.

"It's a girl," Lincoln says.

"Shut up," Bellamy says, and cautiously presses closer to the hot metal. "It is not."

And he's right. It's not a girl, because just as he's looking at her, taking in her little face, the blood trickling from her temple, her eyes snap open.

Her irises grow bright silver and she looks straight at him.

When he and Lincoln wake up, they're a good twenty feet away from the box, and the witch is crouched next to them. Her eyes, blue now, plain blue, are fixed on him while he pushes himself to a sitting position, eyeing her warily.

"You scared me," she says primly, but the 'r' in scared sounds more like a 'w.' "I didn't mean to."

Bellamy sighs. He's good with English, and he's been taking lessons, but when he replies, the words come to mind and out of his mouth almost too quickly.

Almost magically.

"Just don't do it again, okay?"

"Okay," she agrees, and stretches out her hand to help him to his feet. He takes it, and her palm is soft and pale in his, and his hand suddenly feels like it's been dead asleep, and is coming back to life again all at once.

She tells them her name is Clarke, Clarke Griffin, and Bellamy thinks it's fitting that she shares a name with a magical creature.

"I'm not a creature," she says hotly when he tells her this. He's thirteen, and she's eight, and the healer who had taken her in uses Clarke to heat the water in the middle of winter to boiling hot, to coax the tender spring buds of the herbs they need for medicine, to put the injured to sleep so they can be stitched up. "I'm a witch."

"You're something," he says, and tugs her braid. He'd been the one to teach her how to do it. Now her fingers are quicker and defter than his, and she comes up with new twists and braids to teach Octavia nearly every week.

She'd taken to their language, too, and was better with Trigedasleng after a day than Bellamy was with English after years.

"I'm a witch," she'd told him when he'd complained about it, how unfair it was. "I'm magical, dummy."

"Shouldn't there be limits to what you can do?" he'd griped in response. "How is it you can learn languages, knock people out, and make things grow...shouldn't there be something you can't do?"

She'd shrugged, and told him she'd let him know as soon as she found out what that something was.

They haven't found it yet, though. She and Octavia play in the creek in the middle of winter because Clarke can warm the water until it feels like a hot bath, and she makes shapes in the fire to go along with whatever story Bellamy tells over dinner, and the animals always do what she asks them to, as if they understand.

"You're annoying," she retorts when he tugs her braid again, and flicks his hand away like a fly.

Clarke is eleven, and he's sixteen, and she's declared that she's in love with Octavia, who just turned ten a month ago.

"I think you're a little young for love," he tells her over lunch, and she smacks his hand before it can reach the complicated braid her hair is in today.

"I think you're a little young to be so cynical about true love," she replies, tart, and Bellamy snorts, and regrets teaching her the word 'cynical.' "But you don't see me being rude about it."

"How do you know you're in love?" he tries.

Clarke shrugs. "She's nice, and she's pretty, and she's my best friend, and she makes me laugh, and she smells good."

Reluctantly, Bellamy smiles.

"And," Clarke adds thoughtfully, "I like kissing her. It's nice, and soft."

Bellamy makes a face. "Ugh." What is he supposed to do with that information? He feels like there is something in the rules, about threatening and making sure his little sister doesn't get her heart broken. But he loves them both; he doesn't want Clarke to get her heart broken either. "Ugh," he says again, for lack of anything else to say.

Clarke pats him on the shoulder. "Grow up, Bellamy," she says kindly, and leaves him to his food.

A week later, Octavia and Clarke decide that kissing is nice, but being in love is too time-consuming for their busy schedules; they just can't deal with it right now. Clarke makes it rain a little bit, to commemorate the sad end to their love affair, while Octavia holds her hand and watches solemnly; then they steal some of Bellamy's favorite dried fruit while he pretends not to notice, and spend the evening talking about how pretty Keri is and how funny Miloh was yesterday until they fall asleep.

When he's eighteen, and she's thirteen, Octavia and Aurora go to visit Octavia's father at the sea like they do every spring after the first thaw, and Bellamy stays home in TonDC. He used to feel jealous, feel the slow curdling distress in his gut that his sister got a father and he got nothing, and then he'd feel guilty, too, because he loves his sister, and she deserves a father more than he does.

Then Clarke had looked at him, her eyes turning dangerously grey—not silver, not yet, but it was a warning—and told him he was being an idiot. "You have a mother, and a sister," Clarke had said, voice clipped. "I have a memory of warm hands and the scent of antiseptic."

Bellamy's shoulders had hunched in, and he'd mumbled apologies until she rolled her eyes and elbowed him gently.

"Try and be grateful for what you have," she'd said. "Not angry about what you don't."

So he'd worked on it, because even though she was still small, Clarke was smart, and strong, and a force to be reckoned with, but most importantly, she was his friend.

And this year he'd sent his sister and mother off with strong hugs and a soft yank to Octavia's braid, which earned him a furious look, a kick to the shins, and a quick kiss to his cheek.

They were meant to be gone for two weeks.

Thirteen days later, a sudden snowstorm causes everything to freeze again. It used to be that something like this would be devastating for them, but now Clarke is here to keep the crop seeds they've just started to plant from dying. It exhausts her to do it, the constant drain on her powers, but he makes sure she gets food, water. Naps when the days are at their warmest, and the crops can handle the temperature for a while on their own.

Fifteen days after his mother and sister leave, the snow is just a thin crust on the ground, and it's been cleared away from their crops, so Clarke can finally stop, sleep.

After sixteen days with no sign of his family, even Clarke looks worried, and she helps him convince the heda that a search party is worth the lost time with spring planting.

"You know I can make up for any lost growing time," she says, brows drawn together.

Anya doesn't move but for the smallest twitch of her jaw. They all know what Clarke is, have all benefitted from what Clarke is, but most of them don't particularly like to acknowledge it.

"You've never had to do so on such a large scale," Anya points out coolly. "The herb garden is hardly the size of the spring planting."

Clarke huffs. "That doesn't mean I can't do it," she snaps, and her hair frizzes up with the sparks she gives off. Bellamy reaches out, touches her elbow to calm her. She settles, a little, but continues to glare at Anya rather than look at him.

The muscle in Anya's jaw twitches again at the obvious display of Clarke's abilities manifesting. "Fine," she says. "They'll leave at dawn."

But Clarke is shaking her head. "We need to leave now," she says. Her voice is strained, her face pinched with worry. "I have a bad feeling," she admits softly, and Bellamy's heart freezes.

Clarke doesn't often have feelings about things, and when she does, the feelings aren't always bad. But they're always true.

He looks at Anya, anxious, sick, and wants to cry when the woman just nods sharply at Clarke's statement. "Very well."

They find them in a cave nearly a day's journey from TonDC. The snow is thicker here, the air colder. Clarke falls twice, slipping on the icy ground, before Bellamy takes her hand.

Aurora and Octavia are curled together, faces tucked in each other's necks to minimize exposure. All extra clothes from their packs are on their bodies, and even the packs themselves are draped over them for whatever warmth they can offer.

Next to them is a pile of wet, icy wood that they clearly couldn't get to catch fire.

"No," Bellamy says. "No, no, no, no." He lets go of Clarke's hand and drops to his knees next to them, carefully rolling them away from each other. They're pale, cold, which is wrong, they're supposed to be pink-nosed and pink-cheeked and shivering from the cold, not pale and still and quiet.

Their lips are blue.

"Bellamy." Clarke's voice is a whisper, and he rubs tears from his face with the back of his hand as he continues to try to wake them up. "Bellamy."

"What?" he demands, shooting her a furious look. She's blurry, but even through the tears he can see the luminous glow of her eyes.

"Move," she says, gentle, and for a second, he doesn't react, just stares. Then he scrambles to the side so she can kneel, place one hand on Octavia's face, the other over his sister's heart.

"She's still alive," Clarke says. "Her heart is still beating, just slowly."

Her eyes go soft, unfocused even while they continue to glow. Her body, on the other hand, is tense, every bit of her intent on Octavia. The stray hairs from her braid start to lift, crackling with electricity. Then, suddenly, there's a loud crack, like when lightning split the old oak tree on the edge of the village in the last thunderstorm, and all he can see is white. When Bellamy's vision clears, Octavia's eyes are wide open, her chest heaving as she gasps in air, and her face is flooding with good, healthy color.

"O," he chokes, and gathers her up in his arms. "O."

"Bell," she breathes, and hugs him back. Weakly, tired, but she's hugging him back.

"Now her," Bellamy says to Clarke over Octavia's head, still clutching his sister to him. "Please, Clarke, now her." His mother is so quiet, so still.

Clarke looks sick, exhausted. But she stretches her hands out to Aurora, rests them gently on her skin and clothes.

But nothing happens. Clarke's eyes glow, and her hair lifts, and she starts to tremble, straining, but nothing happens.

"Clarke!" Bellamy yells, and Octavia starts to cry into his chest.

"I—I can't," Clarke whispers, stricken. "She's already gone."

She looks at him, at Octavia. Her face is covered in a terrible grief that somehow seems worse than his own. "I'm sorry," she says, faint. Then she passes out.

Lincoln carries Clarke, because Octavia's still too weak to walk and Bellamy's busy carrying her. The others carry Aurora's body on a makeshift stretcher, and they walk until they're far enough from the cave that Bellamy doesn't feel like he's going to be sick. They make camp in a tight copse of trees, scraping the snow off the ground and pitching tents around the fire they make with dry wood from their packs.

Lincoln tucks Clarke into a bedroll, still passed out, then talks to Octavia to keep her awake long enough to get some food into her. It's been days since she's eaten.

Bellamy focuses on dinner, gathering food from everyone's packs. Dried meat, onions, potatoes go into the pot with water, and the second the meat is soft enough to eat he ladles a bowl for his sister.

She inhales it, and then a second bowl, and then he wraps her in a bedroll and tucks her in next to Clarke. After a slurred, "Love you, Bell," Octavia drifts asleep almost instantly.

Bellamy smooths a hand over her dark hair, then glances at Clarke, out of habit and because he just can't help it anymore.

She saved his sister.

But she didn't save his mother.

But she saved his sister, and he loves her for that.

He lets the others finish the stew. He's not hungry. Instead, he goes to lie down, and slips between the girls so he can feel them both breathe.

Clarke wakes him up in the middle of the night.

Her eyes are tired, tired blue, no hint of grey or silver or magic. "I'm sorry," she whispers to him, over and over, and the sound is what draws him out of troubled, confusing dreams. "I'm sorry, Bellamy. I'm sorry."

She still looks so exhausted, so young. And he's reminded, that even with her powers, her abilities, the village depending on her more and more to keep them alive and health and safe—she's only a thirteen-year-old girl.

He puts his hand on her cheek; it's cold. "I know, Clarke," he says. He tries for gentle, but his voice comes out rough. "I guess we've found your limit."

Her face crumples, and Bellamy pulls her closer, letting her burrow into him as tears soak his neck.

Their house feels empty without Aurora, and after a few months of living like that, Octavia begs him to ask Clarke to move in with them.

"She's lonely," Octavia says, and when she clutches her elbows, holding herself tight, it's clear she's not just talking about Clarke. "She needs us."

Their healer had left to go to a different village after the spring trades, a village that had no healer. Even though she was the one who had taken Clarke in, given her a home and food and learning when the little witch fell to the earth, she didn't offer to take Clarke with her. She just told Clarke that she'd already learned all that she could teach her, and there was no point in two healers staying where only one was needed.

"If she lived here, we would get bothered all the time," Bellamy points out. "Anyone with a splinter or a cold would be knocking on our door in the middle of the night, looking for her."

"Do you really care?" Octavia asks.

Clarke looks surprised when Bellamy comes into her house when she's working and tells her she should pack her things, move them into their house.

"Why?" she wants to know, raising an eyebrow as she grinds herbs.

"It's quiet," he says. "We want the company."

"Ask Lincoln," she says promptly, and stares hard at her mortar and pesetle. Lincoln's mother had died when he was born, and his father died last year—panther attack.

"He snores," Bellamy replies. "Really, he shakes the house," he insists when Clarke gives him a look. Plus, his friend is different than Clarke. He does well, alone with his quiet little house. If he asked, Lincoln would move in with them, but only because he'd think they needed him, not because he wanted to.

"Why?" Clarke asks again after a moment, serious this time. "I have a perfectly good house right here."

There are a lot of answers he could give that would all be true, but only one is the right one.

"Because we love you," he says. There are others in the village who would take her in, give her a place with them if they thought she needed it. They keep quiet about her powers, but even if they don't like to talk about them, they like Clarke. "And we want you close."

But the other villagers don't know her, don't know to think that she needs people, home, family around her when she has a perfectly good house and all the healing knowledge to make sure she's a valued part of the village.

But he knows her, because he loves her.

"You'd better not snore like your sister does," she tells him finally, and he gives her a small grin.

"Oh, I do. Even louder," he says, and she groans.

When Clarke is eighteen, he's twenty-three and Lia starts to flirt with him.

Bellamy has no clue what to do. His sister mostly laughs at him when he tries to ask for help, and then when she leaves to visit Lincoln and Bellamy asks Clarke about it, she just stares at him coolly.

"Do you wantto flirt back?"

He shrugs, uncomfortable. "I don't know."

Her chin lifts, and even though she's a good five inches shorter than him, it feels like she's looking down her nose at him. "I can't help you unless you figure it out."

She goes back to coaxing morning glories to grow around the slats of her headboard, and Bellamy flops onto her bed with a sigh.

"How have you never kissed a girl before?" Clarke wonders aloud. "Or even flirted with one? You're old."

He props himself up on his elbows so he can glare at her.

"I don't see you flirting with anyone," he retorts, and then feels himself pale a little when she raises an eyebrow.

"That doesn't mean I haven't," she says calmly, and holds out a hand until a blossom obligingly drops into her palm. She tucks it into her hair, the bright purple hue of the petals making her eyes seem impossibly blue. "It just means you're oblivious, or that I just have the decency to not broadcast my business to everyone," she adds, pointed. She nudges him until he scoots over, makes room for her on the bed. She picks up the book he'd given to her for her last birthday and opens it to somewhere near the middle.

"Whatever," he mutters, and ignores the deep-down contentment that fills him when she leans against him, soft and warm and smelling like flowers. "It's not exactly easy to just make out with girls when I've got you two living with me."

Clarke snaps the book shut, startling him. When she turns to look at him, she's glaring, and her eyes are that deep grey.

"Don't ever use me as an excuse," she says furiously. "I refuse to be held responsible for the unhappiness you cause yourself. You're the one who wanted me to take the empty bedroom, and you can tell me to leave at any time."

"That's not—" he tries, but then her eyes brim over a little.

"Is that really what you think?" she says. "That I'm just a teenager you have to deal with? Who gets in your way with girls?"

"What? No!" Bellamy says, panicked. "No. I'm sorry, that's not what I mean at all. Please don't leave."

"What did you mean, then?" she says.

Uncomfortable, he shifts. "Just—I don't know. You're right, it was shitty and I was blaming you for no reason. It's kind of embarrassing, I guess, being the total failure at romantic relationships that I apparently am. My little sister is better at it than I am, and I've got a six year head start with nothing to show for it."

"Nothing?"

Bellamy flushes, thinks of the way he'd panicked and told Lia she had a bug on her shoulder when she'd leaned in as if to kiss him, and then how he'd slipped away before she could realize there was no bug.

"Nothing," he says.

Clarke rolls her eyes at him. "That's easy enough to fix," she tells him, exasperated, and just as Bellamy frowns, opens his mouth to ask her what she means by that, she sets the book on the ground, turns to straddle him, and kisses him full on the mouth.

Bellamy is frozen, terrified and aroused and utterly confused about how what is currently happening came to be a thing that is actually happening, in real life and not just in his dreams.

Hesitant, he starts to move his hands toward her hips, but she pulls away before he can touch her.

"Um," she says, and drops her gaze. "So, yeah. Now you've got something to show for it."

She seems—almost embarrassed, and when he tilts her chin up so he can look her in the face, he can see she's biting the inside of her cheek.

Carefully, while she watches, he closes the gap between their mouths. She's still for a few seconds, and with each one he grows exponentially more nervous and realizes why she seemed embarrassed and pulled away from him, if his frozen shock made her feel anything like this.

Her lips are soft, smooth from the balm she mixes up to prevent chapping, and when he slides his hand around to cradle her jaw, her skin feels warm and delicate.

His mouth tingles where it touches hers, and she tastes like magic when she finally opens her lips and kisses him back.

He'd be content to kiss her forever, probably, so he's startled when she takes his hand, the one on her hip, and slides it up her torso to cover her breast.

"Clarke," he says against her mouth, helpless. "You're eighteen." It feels like something he should say, even if he's in love with her.

"I hate panther meat," she replies, and arches into his hand.

"What?" he blurts out, and her breast is surprisingly heavy in his hand.

"I thought we were listing irrelevant facts," she breathes, and grinds against him.

"Oh," he chokes, and rocks his hips up into hers.

After, she lies on top of him, draped bonelessly over him. She's cuddled against him like this before, but she's never done it naked. That part's new, and interesting, and amazing.

He loves her.

She's nice, and pretty, and makes him laugh. She smells good, and she's his best friend, and he likes kissing her, and he's in love with her.

"Is this magic?" he asks, toying with her hair. "Is it magic making me feel this way?"

Clarke props her chin on his chest, watches him seriously. "Do you think it is?"

"No," Bellamy replies, and smooths a hand down her bare spine until she shivers and presses closer. "No, I think it's just you."

She hums and rolls off him so she can curl into his side. "We've talked about the limits my powers have," she says.

"Yeah."

"We know about one," she says. "But this is another. I can't ever use my magic to change the way you feel, because I won't, Bellamy."

"I know that," he says.

"It wouldn't be real if you didn't love me because you wanted to," Clarke adds softly, and Bellamy squeezes her tight.

"I want to," he tells her, and she starts to glow. Bellamy looks down at her, startled, but she's beaming at him, no trace of silver in her eyes. Just blue, and a soft glow like moonlight that surrounds her whole body.

"I've never seen you do that before," he says, surprised. "Not even when—" He flushes, remembering her gasps and the way she shuddered when he touched her the way she showed him, and she laughs, a clear, delighted sound.

"I've never done it before," she replies, and kisses him thoroughly. "I'm not doing it on purpose. But I've never been this happy, either."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," she says. "You dummy, I love you."

"Oh, good," he says. "I love you too."

Clarke tells him later, but she remembers more about her life in the stars than she'd ever told anyone.

Her father was an engineer, she tells him, and Clarke told him their home was dying long before the calculations were run to prove it.

She could feel it, she told her father, could feel the way the bodies were changing incrementally, growing weaker with the slow decline of oxygen levels. She could feel everything.

And she could feel the ground, she'd told him too, how alive it was, with water and earth and living things—not just plants, animals, but people too.

Her father had smiled, ruffled her hair. You have such a beautiful imagination, Clarke, he'd said. It must be that artist's eye of yours.

Clarke had frowned, but let herself be tucked in bed and sent off to sleep.

And the next day, out of idle curiosity, Jake Griffin had started to run the Ark diagnostics, set his computers to running numbers.

By the end of the week, he'd run the numbers countless more times, and he felt endlessly older.

His daughter was right.

The Ark was dying, and so were its people.

So was his daughter, unless he saved her.

His only solace was that if she was right about the Ark, she was right about the ground.

So he had stolen away with her one night, knowing his wife would never forgive him for taking their daughter and sending her away. And he had put her in the tiny dropship he'd repaired, buckled her into the seat, kissed her brow with tears burning at the back of his eyes and throat.

Some of these things, she's not sure how she knows. She only knows that she does, and that they're true.

"I remember waking up, so sleepy," Clarke says. "And I called for him, asked what was going on. He just touched my hair, told me to close my eyes. That he loved me, and everything was going to be alright, because the next time I opened my eyes, I'd be home."

He must have had a little of her own gift, Clarke explains, because she'd instantly fallen back to sleep, and had slept through her father closing the dropship, through the descent to earth, through the landing.

"He told me, when you open yours eyes again, you'll be home," Clarke repeats, and smiles at him. "I opened my eyes, and I saw you."