Work Text:
these hands pulled me from the earth
for growlery
"I thought you were a scientist, Raven. This is science."
Raven stabs her garden shovel into the ground, carelessly wiping a dirt-streaked hand across her sweaty forehead.
"This is biology, Bellamy. Agro."
Her glare is marred by clumps of mud stuck to her face.
He reaches across the row of dirt, trying to ignore how Raven doesn't startle when his fingers lightly support the side of her face, his thumb gently rubbing off a particularly offending piece.
Tries to push down the ache with how she leans into his hand, only noticeable because he spends most his time noticing everything about her.
How her big eyes become bigger as he touches her this softly. How it frightens her.
He pulls back with a smirk to ease the tension, wiggling his thumb with the dirt on it in front of her face.
She huffs and pushes his hand away from her face.
"Biology is a science, Raven. I might've only been a janitor but I did finish basic schooling."
"I'm an engineer, Bellamy, not a botanist."
He raises his eyebrows. "Oh, so you are an engineer. Coulda sworn you’ve been insisting all this time that you’re only a mechanic."
He can't help but laugh at her glare.
“That’s because engineers are elitist pieces of shit, Bellamy.”
Bellamy smiles, twiddling with the lush leafy carrot tops idly. “C’mon, don’t talk about yourself like that.”
“Bellamy—you!” Raven scoffs incredulously.
“It’s okay though,” he says, a lightness growing in his chest as he admires Raven from across the row, admires how her brown skin glows in the autumn sun, how the glint in her eye and her smile hint that maybe she’s feeling light for once, too.
“You’re my favorite elitist piece of shit.”
He fights the instinct to shy away, to smirk and smother the feelings that are hardly covered by his dumb words.
Instead, he softens his mouth, softens his posture, softens his gaze to just… show her when her eyes fly up to check his.
They tip-toe around each other on this one thing, always, but he takes this little risk, tries to show her his tender underside, ripe and ready for the taking if she would just reach for him.
Her response halts on her lips, the remnants of something sharp and teasing fading from her face.
The apples of her cheeks pink, white teeth biting into her plump lower lip as she looks down, uncharacteristically demure.
She’s framed by lush colors of harvest, the rich colors of life, and Bellamy knows she feels her strongest out amongst her stars, but he can’t help but think that there’s never been a time Raven’s appeared more beautiful than right now, completely grounded.
“You know what I’m… what I’m trying to say,” she huffs, fingers playing in the dirt. “This isn’t my science… I'm talking advanced electrical and mechanical physics. Thermodynamics."
If Bellamy had to put words to it, he’d say she seems almost nervous, unsure, and achingly young behind her bluster when she chances looking at him again.
He wishes he had an easy way to assure her that it’s okay, that their relationship has always been on her schedule, that he’ll be here for her whenever she’s ready to fall from the branch into his waiting hands.
Wherever she wants him, whatever she wants him to be, is enough.
"What about chemistry?" He waggles his eyebrows, hamming it up and giving her the break she was searching for.
She gifts him with an amused, exasperated eye roll.
"I swear, if you make a tutoring joke…" she says, but she's smiling, a small, quick thing she directs at the Earth-dusted carrot in her hand.
“So asking you to tutor me would be a bad idea, too?”
She picks up some soil she'd displaced picking a carrot and tosses it at him.
“So lame, Bellamy. So lame.”
He lounges back onto an elbow, careful to leave the row behind him undisturbed. He closes his eyes and smiles up at the sun.
“Just admit you like gardening, Raven.”
Another eye roll, he’s sure.
“All I said is that the dirt gets everywhere.”
He wonders if he can get her to come with him and wash off at the lake nearby, if his gravity has enough pull to slow her down and have her stay with him for that, too.
Bellamy shrugs, tilting his head back further. The sun caresses his exposed neck.
“Stop posing, Bellamy, and get back to work.”