Chapter Text
One day the world just falls apart.
.
It starts with some girls on a late night news show, some channel that nobody ever watches. Bellamy thinks that’s kind of funny, because he’s generally the only one to watch these sort of programs, they’re always about forgotten murders and abductions, stories that barely get told.
No one takes them seriously at first, just another bunch of loonies in a line up of conspiracy theories and whack jobs, but soon they are on talk shows again and again. The same story.
Witches.
Bellamy had laughed when he’d first heard. Witches, the stuff of fairytales. He’d grown up with practically no parents, just a dad that smelled like liquor and left as soon as he had the first chance and a mom who cried herself to sleep at night and looked at him with mascara stained eyes and saw his father’s face instead of his own and flinched when he came near.
He’d raised himself and then Octavia when the need had arisen. He doesn’t believe in fairytales.
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Bellamy doesn’t really think that anything will change with this stunning announcement. It’s not like the girls have proof, just some grainy cell phone videos. It doesn’t seem like anything, but soon people start disappearing.
Bellamy thinks he doesn’t know anyone who's a witch, can’t imagine that he does, but people are getting arrested left and right and soon he discovers that he does. Old classmates, the girl he had a crush on in eighth grade, their local Congressman--he sees the Congressman’s family on tv, the way that his daughter cries, she can’t be more than fourteen, but she punches one of the government guards when they try and take her dad and hits and kicks until they have to get two guys to restrain her and he doesn’t care anything about witches, but he kinda respects her--are all accused of having magic and are carted away. The witches come out of the woodwork and he’s not sure if all of them have magic or not, but people just keep disappearing. Scared people do crazy things, he thinks, and people are terrified.
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One day a witch appears on live tv. All of the news channels broadcast the footage--it’s supposed to be a success story or a show of power or something, but really it’s just people staring in horrified fascination at her face. A live witch. She glares back at the audience with fierce kohl rimmed eyes. Government guards hold both of her arms back, but she barely seems to notice. She looks like the witches Bellamy would have imagined when he was little if he’d ever cared to imagine them, all braided hair and hollowed cheeks and snarling teeth.
She smiles and one of the guard’s head explodes, the blood splashing across the background, staining the white walls and all of the people around her. Bellamy covers Octavia’s eyes, because she’s fifteen, too young to see bits of brain matter scattered across the screen, but she shoves his hand off with an exasperated, “Seriously, Bell?”
The crowd goes wild, panic ensuing in the press room, but the camera remains on the witch’s face as the remaining guard drags her away. Her face is coated with blood, but she’s smiling, white teeth gleaming. He can hear her laughing through the pandemonium and he feels a shiver down his spine.
He doesn’t know when he started living in a nightmare.
.
The world becomes a war zone.
The government steps up their patrols. They start recruiting anyone who wants to join. Bellamy is in his last year of school and he watches most of his friends either join the recruiting center or get taken away. Some of them stay in school, but the hallways are emptier now than they used to be. People are scared. He stops trusting anyone, relying on anyone. He goes home every weekend to look after Octavia. His mom is out all the time, she rarely comes home anymore and Octavia needs him. That’s what he tells himself when he shuts himself off from the rest of his classmates, stops smiling at girls anymore, stops caring for anyone but his family. It’s safer that way.
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His phone wakes him in the middle of the night. He rolls over, feeling a jolt in his chest when he sees Octavia’s name on the caller id.
“O?” he picks up.
“She hadn’t come home, Bell.”
She’s crying so hard he can barely make out the words, “It had been a week and she hadn’t come home, so I went looking for her.”
“What happened?” he asks her, “Octavia, what happened?"
“I found her body ,” she whispers and he feels his world realign.
.
The funeral is small, just him and Octavia, but that’s all they need anyway. Octavia clings to his hand and cries when they drop what’s left of their mother’s body into the pit. Bellamy feels his eyes tighten, but he doesn’t cry. He’s too mad to cry.
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He drops out of school to move back home. Octavia protests, but he shushes her.
“I’m going to take care of you,” he says and eventually she stops fighting him.
He joins the guard as soon as he can. He wants to hit someone. He wants to kill someone. He wants to find the witch that killed his mother and he wants to destroy them. He may not have always been the best son, but he can do this.
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He spends most of his time hunting witches, picks up extra shifts when he can. He tells himself it’s because they need the money--he’s the only one supporting them now, and Octavia graduates from high school in a year and she should really go to college-- but really he just can’t stand to be home. He can’t look Octavia in the eye anymore.
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At first, it’s just a job. Something that he does. But then he starts getting a kick out of it. He starts liking it. He learns to know the witches better than they know themselves--he knows how they think, how they move, how they live. He knows them.
They don’t kill the witches, not officially. They find them and they turn them in. Nobody tells him what happens to the witches after that, but Bellamy has a pretty good idea. He doesn’t like to think about that part, but he remembers the way that Octavia had sounded on the phone, the cadence of her voice as she’d whispered “I found the body” and he doesn’t feel as bad anymore.
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Octavia starts lining her eyes with dark liner, the blue and black a fierce contrast. She dates a solemn boy that’s too old for her. She doesn’t introduce them, but Bellamy sees him drop her off some nights, sees him hold her to him too tightly at the front door, like she’s precious, like she hangs the moon. Bellamy clenches his fists and misses his mother.
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Octavia’s not home when Bellamy returns from his shift and when she does return, her makeup is smeared and the smell of smoke clings to her.
“What are you doing, O?” he asks her.
“None of your business,” she retorts, stumbling when she tries to walk down the hallway.
“Your business is my business,” he says.
He thinks that he sounds in control, but she just laughs.
“You’re not my father, Bellamy,” she coos.
Her eyes are out of focus and she doesn’t see the way that he flinches.
“I know that,” he says and it’s true.
She doesn’t remember their father, but he does. He’s not his father. He’s not. He remembers the way his mother had looked at him-- how she’d seen a different man in his eyes and how it had made her hate him, had made her fear him-- and he’s glad of that fact. He is.
“Then don’t try and act like you fucking are, okay? You’re never even home. I guess that makes you like dad in some ways then,” she’s breathing hard, pupils dilated.
And maybe she’s right in some ways, because he finds himself getting angry. He feels like he has all this energy building up inside of him and nothing can stop it, it's just an unending tide of fury. He can’t control it, but he has to. He has to.
“I’m providing for you, while you’re off doing god knows what, I am providing for you. Do you see these bills on the table? I’m fucking taking care of it, okay? And I’d rather not worry about you while I’m out there risking my life to put food on the table.”
“I’m not a baby, Bellamy” she says all fierce pride, but she is. She doesn’t know it, but she is.
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One day she she just doesn’t come back.
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He waits and waits, but she’s nowhere to be seen. He goes to all of her usual haunts, interrogates the girls who used to be her friends, beats up her dealer, searches and searches, but he can’t find her. She’s his baby sister, and he can’t find her.
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You wouldn’t run, would you, Octavia? You wouldn’t run from me.
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He knows the drill--they just disappear. No one knows where, not even him, they’re just gone and once they’re gone, there’s no coming back.
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The day after she goes missing, he shows up to work and the door is locked. He tries his key card and the light shows up red. He swipes it again and again, frustration mounting, swiping and swiping, harder and harder, and the buzz always sounding no, no, no. He slams his fist against the door, but is only rewarding with a stinging pain in his right hand. If he needed any confirmation of where Octavia is, he has found it.
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He hears whispers of a rebellion brewing. He keeps his ear to the ground all the while watching the money trickle down the drain until there’s nothing left. He gets a job working as a janitor at the college where he used to go to school. It’s humiliating, but he needs the money and he finds he has nothing left to lose.
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He sees a girl watching him in the hallways of the school, all pale skin and furrowed brow. There’s something familiar about her features, but it takes him awhile to place why. Then he realizes that she’s the Congressman’s daughter, the one that had fought the guards, the one he had thought was brave. But she’s not a gangly fourteen year old anymore. She sure as hell is not.
He rewatches the clip of her dad being arrested, it’s been four years since he’s seen it, but he’s still struck by the terror in her eyes, the protectiveness in every line in her body, the fierceness in her movements. Clarke Griffin, he thinks, Who are you Clarke Griffin?
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“See something you like, Princess?” he asks her one day when she’s watching him and he sees a blush spread across her cheeks. It’s adorable as hell.
“Are you Bellamy?” she asks.
He starts.
“How do you know my name?”
She looks around the hall with worried eyes and presses a piece of paper into his hand.
“I’ll explain everything,” she whispers, “but not here, okay?”
He unfurls the paper when she’s gone, sees an address and a time scrawled in messy green script on the crumpled page. He tells himself that he’s not going to go, but at the appointed time, he finds himself showing up. What has he got to lose anyway? Everything, a voice whispers, but he ignores it.
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The address is an abandoned warehouse. He thinks that’s sort of cliched, but whatever. If it’s effective, whatever, though he senses that it’s not. He knows that this is the first place the guard would go looking for some kind of underground activity, better to hide in plain sight, where less people are looking. It’s only when he realizes that he’s plotting strategy that he discovers that maybe he’s thinking about helping.
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The group gathered at the warehouse is a collection of teenagers-- some are ragged, dirt covering their skins, clothes worn and tired, and others, like Clarke, look put together.
“You,” he says, catching sight of Octavia’s boyfriend and stalking over to him and wrapping his hand around his throat.
He hasn’t seen him for months. Months and months and Octavia is still missing, but this boy, he’s still right here. He’s right as rain, while Bellamy’s baby sister is god knows where having god knows what being done to her. He doesn’t move, just stares at Bellamy with level eyes and doesn’t lift a hand to defend himself, doesn’t even try to say anything. It infuriates Bellamy.
He feels a hand on his arm, pulling him back, and he looks over with angry eyes and sees Clarke.
“Stop it,” she hisses and he sees something of the girl that would attack four armed guards rather than let them take her father away.
He drops his hand, steps back from the boy, tries to distance himself from his anger.
“Lincoln was the one that suggested we call you in,” she says, “he said that you used to be a guard and that you would help us.”
The boy just shrugs. Bellamy can see bruises in the shape of his fingers forming around his throat.
“Help you what?” he asks.
“Help us survive, help us win,” she says and there’s something about the sincerity in her face, a sort of idealistic earnestness, that is obnoxiously appealing.
“And why would I do that?” he asks.
“Because,” she says and it’s like she knows exactly what buttons to press, “we’ll help you get your sister back.”
He doesn’t want to allow himself to hope, but as he looks into Clarke’s face, her eyes that intreat him to be the kind of person that could be a savior, he starts to. Maybe just a little bit.
.
For a resistance it’s not as much as he had hoped. Everyone there besides him is younger than eighteen and they’re all frightened. Most of them have lost people to the witch hunts, most of them are scared. Clarke won’t tell him whether any of them actually are witches or if they’re just stowaways, cast offs, those left behind.
“Would it matter?” she asks, avoiding his eyes.
“Damn right it would. I’d like to know who i’m dealing with.”
She purses her lips, but doesn’t reply.
“Still don’t trust me, Princess?”
“Should I?” she counters.
He wants to say yes, but it’s been awhile since anyone had faith in him.
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In the end, he resorts to guessing. He supposes that at least some of the inner circle are witches. There’s a kid who wears glasses and is always conferencing with Clarke over scrawled bits of paper, words and drawings spread out between them like no kind of maps he’s ever seen that, that he thinks is a likely candidate. Lincoln, he reckons is probably a witch. Bellamy’s always thought he seemed kind of threatening--it’s partially the scowl and partially the muscles, but there’s something more there, something that says back off, something that screams unnatural. He thinks at first that he doesn’t really know what Octavia saw in him, but sometimes he sees him bringing food to some of the younger of the hundred, face gruff, but hands kind, and he catches a glimpse.
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He gives Clarke a ride home after one of the meetings, dropping her back at the dorms.
“How’d you get involved in this rebellion anyway?” he asks her.
“What do you mean?” she asks, and he’s not looking at her, but he can almost see the expression on her face, eyebrows turned down, eyes questioning. He doesn’t know when he got to know her well enough that he could picture her face.
“I mean, you’re just a kid.”
He can feel her bristle.
“I’m eighteen,” she says.
He laughs. He remembers himself at eighteen, his first year in school, the year that the video had come out. It seems like several lifetimes ago.
“To answer your question,” she says stiffly, “It was my mother’s idea. She’s heading a bigger rebellion, but communication is hard, we never know who is listening and it’s important for someone to look out for these kids. They need something to hang onto.”
They’ve arrived at the dorm. Bellamy parks the car and turns to look at her. She’s looking out the window and even though he had just called her a kid, he thinks she looks a lot older than that. Older than most people he knows.
“That’s an awfully lot to take on for yourself, princess,” he says, the nickname slipping of his tongue with more affection than he intends.
She turns towards him and when they’re eyes meet it feels like something that Bellamy hasn’t felt since Octavia went missing, maybe before that.
“Somebody’s got to do it,” she says, and he knows that she believes that. Sometimes he’s still shocked about how much of a good person she is. She doesn’t seem real.
“And you think we can trust them? The witches, I mean.”
Something in her eyes tightens. He’s not sure what he said wrong, but he feels the moment closing.
“They’re just people, Bellamy,” she says, and opens the door and gets out of the car.
“Thanks for the ride,” she says, closing the door and leaving without looking back.
.
One night one of the boys brings out some homemade moonshine and the kids drink more than they probably should. Bellamy swigs from a bottle, but mainly just watches the mayhem. He sees Clarke standing to the side and goes to stand beside her. She’s not drinking, just watching the rest of them with a soft smile.
“Too good to have any fun, ehh princess?” he asks.
“No,” she retorts, taking the bottle from his hand and taking a swig and then almost blanching. “That’s disgusting.”
“It is at that,” he says, “and it’s mine.”
He tries to take the bottle from her, but she brings it to her mouth again, lips curving into a smile around the bottle and he’s probably not supposed to be looking for a variety of reasons, but he is.
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He starts to train them into a fighting force. They don’t know much, but they’re willing to learn. Clarke gets them guns, he doesn’t ask how, he thinks he probably wouldn’t want to know, and he teaches them how to shoot
He thinks that Clarke doesn’t really like him knowing something that she doesn’t, so she works extra hard, trying to act tough for everyone else.
“Here,” he says, stepping behind her and adjusting her stance, lifting her elbow and turning her hips.
Her back moves with her intake of breath and he can feel it against his chest. He should step back, should give her space, but instead he gives them a moment of shared air and when she hits the target and offers him a brilliant smile, he lets himself smile back.
.
“So, when’s the attack coming, princess?” he asks at one of their meetings.
He’s leaning back in the chair, feet propped against the table. Clarke looks up, her eyes flicking down to his feet and then back to his face.
“Off,” she says, pointing.
He raises his eyebrows.
“These are important documents, Bellamy,” she huffs, “Feet off.”
He complies with a smile. He was only doing it to get her riled in the first place.
“Attack plans?” he prompts.
“We’re working on it, but there’s a lot of guesswork involved. And our forces are,” she pauses, “limited at best. We can’t afford to lose men.”
“I signed on thinking that we were rescuing my sister. So far, we’ve done nothing. What are we waiting for?”
“We’ve all lost people,” she hisses and for a moment he thinks back to the crying fourteen-year-old she’d been, “I’m trying to make sure we don’t lose any more.”
“The clock’s ticking, princess,” he says.
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In the end, the attack is kind of impromptu. The information comes in fast and there’s a narrow time frame and before they know it, they’re moving out. They’re sitting in the back of the truck, everyone piled in and crushed together, when Bellamy suddenly notices how young everyone is. They’re all scared, holding guns in their laps, clutching the ends like if they let go they’re going to die. Bellamy hopes he isn’t sending them off to their deaths. He hopes that Octavia is there. He meets Lincoln’s eye across bed of the truck and he sees his thoughts reflected in the other man’s eyes. Please be alright. Please be alright. Please be alright.