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“Back it up, guys!” Bellamy yells at the incoming delinquents, all crowding the smalls pace in which he was standing, right by the dropship door. He turns around and glared at them, waving out a hand to signal for them to get away, basically. They’re actually moving, he thinks, allowing himself for a second to go back to his janitors job and thinking about the lack of speaking and listening techniques there. They move even quicker, however, when they hear the blonde bombshell clambering down the steps from an upper level. Everyone spins to look at her, Bellamy included.
“Stop!” She calls, climbing the last few rungs of the ladder. “The air could be toxic.” She adds, jumping down from the last rung and barging her way to Bellamy. Bellamy rolls his eyes.
“If the air is toxic, we’ll all be dead anyway.” He counters, looking at her evenly. He’s seen her before and he’s sizing her up, trying to figure out where. She opens her mouth, about to argue, but he’s already turned around with his hand on a lever to open the door when another voice catches his attention.
“Bellamy?” The voice more familiar to him than his own says, his head swivels towards her. There she is, climbing down the last few steps of the ladder facing the one used by the blonde just before her. His lips part as the face that looks so similar to his appears in his vision, this time joined by a body, rather than floating alone, like in his dreams. He hears a faint “That’s the girl they hid under the floor.” accompanied by whispers from the rest of the teenagers - children really - but he ignores themselves, knowing that he’s higher than them, that he’ll get himself and Octavia away from those voices and staring eyes eventually.
“My God.” He mutters as his sister stands in front of him, tears in her eyes, face upturned to see his. She’s grown so much in the last year - she’s so beautiful, he thinks, watching her face for any signs of dislike or blame in them, but he sees nothing in her eyes but love and surprise.
“Look how big you are.” He hugs her tightly, and this phrase, meant to leave the lips of people far older than he, should have been the first clue to him and everyone around him - namely his sister - that Bellamy Blake has changed, as would be understandable for a man who has lost everything and is left standing himself, in the debris.
“What the hell are you wearing?” She demands, eyebrows furrowed. “A guard’s uniform?” Of course, she knows that he was kicked off of the guard a year ago, when she was found out, of course she’d be confused to see him in a uniform.
“I borrowed it.” He tells her, adding, “To get on the dropship. Someone’s got to keep an eye on you.” His voice is fond, as is the chuckle that follows, as he offers her a watery smile and she embraces him tightly.
“Where’s your wristband?” The same voice as before asks him as Octavia pulls away from him again, turning to glare at the blonde.
“Do you mind?” His sister spits, much to his amusement. “I haven’t seen my brother in a year.” Bellamy licks his lips, glancing down at his little sister - not so little anymore - acknowledging the mistake. Here come the questions, and the stares. He thinks, mind backtracking through the past year - the whispers and stares as he walked past people - he never wanted that for Octavia, but it seems he doesn’t have a choice. He never did.
“Brother?” Someone in the crowd asks. “No one has a brother.”
“That’s Octavia Blake!” Someone else speaks up. “The girl they found hidden in the floor!” Bellamy’s now experienced in keeping calm and fighting against his annoyance in situations like this, but apparently, the skybox taught Octavia nothing of the sort in the past year. She flies away from Bellamy at whoever was speaking, and only Bellamy’s quick reflexes - learned from his training in the very thing that ultimately led to his sister being taken away - catches her and holds her back.
“Let’s give them something else to remember you by.” He tells her, which catches her attention.
“Like what?” She demands in a murmur.
“Like being the first person on the ground in 100 years.” He smiles at her, an innocence that he didn't see, didn't' think possible at this point lighting his eyes, and she can’t help but smile back, eyes lighting up. Bellamy turns and this time the blonde girl offers no argument - Bellamy had half hoped she would, just so he could argue with her again, he’d found he quite liked the sparks that flew when they argued, even when it was just two ones spoken between them - when he pulls the lever down, allowing the dropship door to open.
Everyone is stunned, and when he looks at his sister, he happens to - incidentally - see the blonde girl, eyes wide in wonder and surprise, as are his sister’s and everyone else’s, but for her it’s different, it’s like she’s dreamed up this world - they all have, haven’t they? - 1000 times and created it 100 times and none of them have quite compared, Bellamy would quite like to know the story behind that look, but he’s too proud to ask, so he concentrates on Octavia - he is there for her and her alone, after all. Her grey eyes are wide and her lips parted as she takes the first tentative steps towards the ground, stopping to take a deep breath and swallow the air and he’s surprised that nobody takes her over - they know what’s good for them, he supposes - as she walks to the end carefully, finally stepping off with a small jump onto the ground, throwing her arms in the air - he can’t see her face now, just the back of her head - with a triumphant shout of “We’re back, bitches!” Bellamy has a good mind to scold her for swearing - 16 years of being a pretty much single parent (a childless father, essentially) and raising her forms habits that aren’t easily broken - but he refrains, watching her instead with a smile on his face.
He finds himself watching the blonde girl, too. He watches as she jumps lightly off of the dropship door/ramp, her boots embedding themselves in the ground, looking around in astonishment, he doesn’t miss how the Prince of the Ark watches her from behind and he waits carefully to see what happens with them. He shouldn’t care - hell, he doesn’t care, but he watches anyway, he watches how this girl dismisses the boy with disdain and he thinks that he’ll never have a shot with her - like he ever wanted one.
Later, it takes for that random kid - Finley? Some shit like that - to call her Princess for him to put the pieces together. She’s Clarke Griffin, Princess of the Ark. He saw her twice on the Ark.
Twice he saw her, twice he hated her, but the second time he couldn’t help but pity her. The first time he saw her, he saw a spoiled privileged kid in the library joking with her friend, leading the life that his little sister should live. The second time, however, he saw a lost girl, condemned and locked up in solitary by her own mother (as the story went) and waiting to die, the way too many other kids were, the way he'd hoped his sister would never be.
The way his sister ended up just days later.
He thought about her, this blonde girl, a few times after Octavia’s capture and his mother’s death — he had nothing else to think of, after all. He thought how she was probably dead, how he didn’t know her birthday but she looked about that age. He wondered what she did to deserve solitary — what was so bad that she wasn’t even allowed to socialise before her death?
He guesses he’ll find out.