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Everything was lusher on the ground. Skin seemed rosier, somehow, flesh plumper, more real, as if the clean oxygen filled their bodies like air filled parachute sails, making them pregnant with life.
And the colors, they were vivid, brighter, purer than Bellamy could have ever imagined. In their tin prison in the sky, the sun had seemed to leech the color from their world, leaving them awash in stark chrome and lifeless grey.
Sex was better on the ground. Up above, all had been rushed, passionless, something sweaty to fill the long hours of the After.
That's how time was for Bellamy then, up in the Ark. There was the Before, when his life was cocooned in secrets, when he was a soldier, with something to fight for, and the After, when his only battles were against stubborn stains, and drawstring jumpsuit knots that fought his fumbling fingers in dark corners.
Bellamy's first was a girl whose name he barely knew, with damp skin and stringy hair and dark oil beneath her fingernails. She left black thumbprints on his cheeks. After it was done, when she receded through a pressurized door, he scrubbed at them until his skin was red raw. When he shook his head his eyes stung. It was loneliness; a fate he had condemned himself to as the only fitting punishment to his betrayal.
But that was all before the ground.
That was before Clarke.
~
The ground was full of noises. It was this that kept Bellamy awake at night, at least at first. In the Ark, there was the pale hum of the life support systems, the strain of a system bloating and rotten at the seams, and the quiet knocks of his sister, the sounds of their own secret language from beneath the floor.
They started with Morse code, but it evolved, took on the imperfections of a language of secrets, of jokes, and of traps. Each rap of knuckles against metal was purposeful, deliberate, knowing.
On the ground, there was no oppressive hum. The forest came alive with noises of all kinds; the calls of a thousand thousand insects and animals, the creak of wood shifting in the wind, the heavy rush of air, the slow trickle of distant water. It was all so suggestive, so sensual, so completely and utterly alive. Bellamy Blake did not know what living was until he set his feet upon the earth.
Until he came home.
~
Growing up, school had been a relic of a forgotten time, when there were seasons and weekends and houses with roofs and yards to bring homework back to. And yet, be it the desire for civilization or the mere fear of who they would become if they let the infrastructure come down, kept the practice in effect. The last of humanity’s seed, gestating in a metal coffin in the sky.
Books were rare, and storybooks rarer, but Bellamy found his escape in history, his attention rapt as their teacher regaled them with tales of battles waged in another world, long long ago. They learned of the Americans with their revolution against the tyranny of a distant government, oppressive and unknowing, of the endless wars of Europe, fought in the name of long dead flowers that bloomed now in history's name alone, and of the greatest warriors of all, the Romans and the Greeks.
How Bellamy loved the stories of Athens, and then of Rome. With eager eyes he would listen to how Rome was built on promises to be the greatest civilization to exist. Though he usually fiddled and fidgeted, his fingers would clasp and still as Bellamy leaned forward, anxious not to miss a bit of how its promise of democracy, of a equality became a cancer that ate its heart away, poisoning Rome's citizens rather than preserving them. Then one man, a soldier, a conqueror, had the courage to wrest Rome from her complacent laurels and throw her into a new age of progress and prosperity, and they wore his name like a crown for centuries, in celebration, in awe.
Caesar.
He gave Octavia the name of a princess, of Caesar's sister, but even as a child Bellamy knew no matter how regal her name may be, she would live always with the shadows of the floorboards beneath her eyes, and the stain of their secret on her heart. He could give her a princess’s name, only. No more.
~
The first moments on the ground were exquisite, despite the fear thrummed through Bellamy's veins. The others reveled in the sunlight, following the rays that strung through the bower like a maypole's ribbons, but Bellamy planned. The spell would break soon as thirst crept between parted lips, and hunger chewed at their insides. There would be followers, soon, and leaders, and he knew which he would have to be.
It wasn't hard to spot the competition, other hungry eyed boys with old bruises on their knuckles and anger in the set of their jaw. They needed a leader, or else they would tear themselves apart. They needed a Caesar.
Bellamy knew he would not go unopposed, for what great leader ever was, but he had expected a knife at his side, a spear at his throat, dirty hands to spill dirty blood and steal his title in the night. He had not expected Clarke.
Clarke was the sun's reflection in a scalpel blade, golden and glittering, sharp and clean. Bellamy knew that one glance from her cold gaze would see the dirt beneath his fingernails that years of scrubbing could not hide. She would see that he fought for his composure with every breath, and any second his facade of leadership would come crumbling down. After all, she had the bearing of one born to lead, and what was Bellamy but a traitor, a pretender, with blood on his knuckles that would never come dry. Certainly, she would call his bluff, see through his fraud, and rip him down to his proper station, the way those born to her position always did.
Instead, Clarke Griffin challenged him to lead.
There was a time when Bellamy had thought Octavia royalty, but that was before he met Clarke. She was effortless in her command, stern eyed and effortlessly controlled. Everything Bellamy fought to be, she seemed to manage without breaking a sweat. She spoke, acted, as if she expected to be listened to, to be respected, and in turn she was.
It made sense. Clarke was bred to it after all, daughter of a councilwoman as she was. Even locked up, she fought to preserve the system that handed her everything on a stainless steel platter.
Their generation was supposed to be a stillborn one. They would live their lives in service of supposed descendants who could return to a renewed earth, in this prison as penance for the crimes of their forebears. And for what? So that when they did finally return to the land below, they could live exactly as they had before?
There was so much Bellamy had sacrificed, had betrayed to give Octavia something better than a metal hole in the floor.
~
When you live a life of service, you learn to read people. You learned to see in the set of someone's shoulders what they expected of you, in the weight of their hips and the swing of their boots who they thought you were. The eyes of his betters would meet his forehead, and Bellamy would bite back that rebellious sigh, the little note of contempt that he learned to swallow, no matter how bitter the taste. It was for Octavia's sake, for his mother's, that he hid his hatred.
As hard as he tried, Bellamy never quite got used to not being looked in the eye. When he was a soldier, no, a cadet, for he never was a soldier truly, he was seen. His slicked back hair and the gun at his hip made him formidable; he wore the privilege of his uniform like a hair shirt, feeling it itch, knowing at heart that each person he passed saw him for what he was. An impostor. One of the lower class, of the underbelly of the Ark, unsuited for duty, for power. He was certain they could see his mother's machinations in the sweat on his forehead, and the lies he held against his skin. Even his heartbeat was strung with secrets; 'sister,' it beat, 'sister sister sister' until it was all he could hear.
He was born to treachery, that he knew, and so he betrayed. Of course there were good intentions in his twisted heart, but he knew what those intentions paved, knew it as well as he knew the inescapable machine hum of the Ark, its thrumming heartbeat, that rang in his ears and never once ceased. Bellamy killed his mother and doomed his sister to a prison cell and himself to the status he knew himself worthy of - cleaning other people's shit.
There was no escape from servitude, just as there was no escape from this metal cage, no escape from this unlived life they were forced into at the behest of their wasteful progenitors. At least that's what Bellamy had thought. That was before Commander Shumway had handed him the key in the shape of a gun, and the promise for vengeance and freedom in one sweet breath. All Bellamy had to do was pull a trigger.
Was it any wonder he said yes?
~
Freedom was raw at first. It chafed at Bellamy's wrists like the cuffs the hundred children wore, keeping them fettered to the Ark, to their gaolers, their tyrants (their families, their homes). He'd awake at night to the blessedly random sounds of the forest about them and find his wrists rubbed raw, self-inflicted manifestations of his guilt, his stresses.
It was easy to turn the teenagers around him against the Ark, easy to say the words they all longed to hear. "Whatever the hell we want!" was no easy thing to chant, and yet he got them chanting, screaming, pulling off the last of their chains before they thought enough to stop. All except for Wells Jaha and Clarke Griffin.
Wells was easy. He was in love with the golden girl, a perfect Prince to the Ark's chosen Princess; his eyes followed her in some gross combination of love and sacrifice. It was a look Bellamy knew well, for found it in his own eyes when he saw Octavia.
'What have I done for you?' it says. 'What else will I do?'
Clarke is another thing all together. Bellamy found himself wanting her approval, of all things, wanting her companionship. With Clarke by his side, ruling felt easier, for that's what he was to do. She understood him the way few other people did, understood the way ruling went. She took to freedom like she was born to it, saw the holes in the things he built and bore through them until she was standing on the other side.
When a common enemy appeared, the type with spears and bows, the type that makes a group stronger just to have something to fight against, Clarke saw what was needed to be done. Bellamy found himself warmed by this, as he was when she slipped a dagger into the pale flesh of Atom's throat and sang to him Death's sweet song.
He hadn't known he had respected her until that moment, hadn't realized quite why his eyes followed her as she strode about their crude camp, doing what she pleased when she wished to, giving orders like she was born to it. Respect was never something that had come easy for Bellamy, especially not amongst the ruling class, and yet he felt it for her. He wanted for Clarke what he wanted for himself: freedom and power, yes, but it was more than that. Bellamy wanted Clarke to see the world they lived in for the house of cards it was, he wanted her to topple it, to commit to building something new, something better.
Until Clarke, Bellamy had thought he would have to build it alone.
~
Bellamy had never believed in absolution, at least not for himself. He was countless times a traitor, held death in his shadow and faithlessness in his heart.
His first betrayal, his biggest, was of his mother and sister both. Bellamy had been too eager, too drunk on his own power. Not yet a guard, Bellamy had thought himself invincible, a David against the Goliath Ark, the one that mocked his sister and held them prisoner both. "
He should have known better than to play the hero. Bellamy was no David; he was Jonah, and the Ark his whale. It swallowed him whole and held him in its stomach, but instead of whalebone ribs, his bars were chrome bolts and steel crossbeams and the hum in his ears that never lets him forget his prison walls.
Bellamy had seen his second victim only twice before in person: once when he floated Bellamy's mother, and again when he shot his mother's executioner with a gun and watched as the bloodstain bloomed upon his chest. Had he a mop in his hand, Bellamy might have swirled it around until it whispered away, but instead he had a gun.
'Et tu, Bellamy,' Jaha might have whispered, had he known his assassin's name, but Bellamy was a ghost, not a great man, not yet.
Tucking the gun back into its holster, he melted back through the halls, head down, another anonymous guard, and marched his traitorous heart back to where it always belonged, where his mother had shackled it, at his sister's side.
(His sister, His responsibility.)
Of course, it was not just Jaha's blood on Bellamy's hands. He also wore the blood of the hundreds of souls floated because of his cowardice, his crimes. And those on the ground as well, Atom, Wells, Charlotte, perhaps even Murphy.
In the face of his treachery, of the hundreds of shadows of the dead in each of his footsteps, Clarke forgave him. She did it like it was easy. Like she meant it. Like it was deserved.
Clarke offered him salvation and he took it, eager as a child.
~
When Bellamy dreamt of her, it was in daylight, though the night itself had been dark. Her hair was a halo of gold against satiny green, the ground lush with growth.
"You want forgiveness?" she choked through chapped pink lips, "fine I'll give it to you. You're forgiven, okay?"
Clarke needed him. She ensnared him with that word, need, like his Mother had so long ago. Bellamy knew the weight of responsibility, and though he had thought he could break it, he could feel the tie to Octavia, clear and strong as fish line, the tie to all of his people, to those that would die if he abandoned them. Was he more monstrous if he left them to their fates, or led them there?
Always in his dreams, she said those words. Her forgiveness cooled his aching brow, it wrapped around him as he slept, soft and tender as a newborn. Forgiveness. Could she possibly offer such a thing, when she knew the magnitude of his crimes, and mean it?
In life, she had been bloodstained and fight weary, but in the dream forest she was unmarred by the blood of his transgressions. Dax was only the latest victim of his treachery, and yet she forgave him still.
Bellamy craved that forgiveness, and hating himself for it all at once. That he should need it was weakness, but once he had a taste of Clarke's light, he did not want to give it up.
Sometimes, in his dreams, her forgiveness came as a kiss, her breath a mere whisper upon his lips, her phantom hands soft as a breeze against his scruffy cheeks. "I need you," the dream would whisper, "I forgive you. I can't do this alone."
~
The fog was thick in the camp when Bellamy woke; it pressed up against his bare skin like a damp sweater, sodden and heavy. He could feel the spectre of his dream, of Clarke, lingering with the sleep that clung still to his lashes, though the sun had already begun its daily journey across the sky.
It was novel, still, the sunrise. There were no true sunrises in space, and no books or stories could truly capture the way the sun’s rays streaked the sky with violet, then pinks and finally vibrant orange that painted the clouds and awoke the world with light. Not this morning, though. Today the sun rose far above the dense mist that coated their camp, filling their tents with watery light.
Glancing beside him, Bellamy saw the coarse blonde hair of one of the older girls. She had a name, and Bellamy had known it certainly the evening before, but in the dim light of this grey morning, he found himself at a loss. Her back was bared to him, smooth skin giving way to the sharp lines of her collarbones, and hair like flax, curling with sweat about her shoulders.
It was easy to pretend she was someone else as she slept, her body rising and falling with quiet breath. She shifted beside him, curling her naked body around Bellamy, as if she sought comfort. Stifling a yawn, Bellamy allowed himself to be held, his muscles tensing with the unfamiliar gesture.
He had felt the weight of Clarke in his arms for only a moment, but it was a vivid one. Here in his makeshift bed, the emperor’s own tent, with a willing, pliant body beside him, he replayed it again in his head: his arms framing hers, the gunshot, her sharp intake of breath, and the look of unbidden glee, of unfettered power as she saw her aim was true.
And after, after Dax, after she risked her life for his worthless one, after she poured his soul into her hands and caressed it with calloused palms, he had held her then, too. Or perhaps Clarke had held him, blood streaking their twined fingers, her hair matted against his chest.
Shaking the stray arm of last evening’s companion off his chest, Bellamy rose and began to dress. Soon the heat would burn off the fog and the day would begin, and he could spare no thought for the sweetness of memory. Today could be the day the grounders attacked. He needed every spare ounce of focus, of will power, to be the leader the hundred needed.
It took all he had to be Bellamy Blake.