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When Clarke Griffin first meets Bellamy Blake, she is 15 years old and seeking refuge from her mother’s expectations.
He is 18 and seeking refuge from responsibilities the weight of the dormant earth and the thriving ark altogether. She is the first person to break down the barriers forged since the day 12 years ago when his world came to existence. He is the first to understand the weight of a mother’s expectations, even if the unspoken contexts of their situations were miles away from being the same.
When Clarke first meets Octavia, 9 months after meeting Bellamy (it was 9 months of vigorous investigation before he deemed her worthy of knowing his secret, of meeting the sister that was all his), tears spring to her eyes to see the fruits of this man’s - boy’s - labour, the one thing he can say that is all his and just some of his mother’s. She is the one thing belonging to him that was not a hand-me-down, something that was exclusively his and always would be. Clarke cried, for the little girl who would never get a shot at life, and for the not-so-little boy who would never stop trying for her to have one.
She can’t help, at first, feeling resentment for the woman who brought both of them into the universe, knowing the rules, and the consequences for the whole family who never asked for any of this. This goes away quickly, hearing stories of Aurora from the two people who loved and admired her most. Clarke hears stories of their mother collapsing because she gave her rations to them, slipping odd bits onto plates to prevent hunger. Bellamy tried to stop her after the first time, he claims, but she still found ways to keep them going with her own food. Clarke gathers - but is not told - that Aurora sells her body when she thinks the kids are asleep, because it’s the only way a measly seamstress can get her own way around here. She sees her face sometimes, when she’s there early in the morning and Aurora slips through the door, Bellamy winces to himself and the tension is palpable. Bellamy clearly does not like the idea, but Clarke finds it wholly admirable, despite the flawed morals of the situation.
(Then again, the Ark has always been a system built entirely on flawed morals).
The resentment Clarke cannot shake, however, is the resentment of the man who fathered - if such a word even fits what he did, which she doubts - the children who stand before her on a daily basis. The children who raised themselves because their father left and their mother was behind, trying to pick up the pieces and make the ends meet.
Being with Bellamy, she learns to resent everything she would, could, should have been. The Chancellor and all he stands for. Her parents. The Privileged. The System and the Man. Clarke is logical, she sees the best in people - she knows that Jaha (as much as an Uncle to her as her own blood would have been, should it be legal and legitimate) is a good man, with the best intentions and yet she has stood with him and her parents and the other privileged and watched time and time again as the underdog is crushed beneath their collective heel. She has stood with people who stand back and allow mother's to be torn away from children in the name of men who do not live anymore - torn apart by the rules they professed to be true. She watches as families try their best to get by whilst she lives comfortably in a compartment four times the size. Bellamy makes her question everything she once saw with clarity and she doesn't regret a second of it.
It breaks Clarke’s heart to see Bellamy working his ass off and being continually disrespected as a guard, to witness Aurora discreetly selling her body because it’s the only way she sees to make things okay, to hear Octavia's whimpers as she is shut beneath the floor night after night, despite the gradually decreasing space and her increasing body.
(The Blake family - it just breaks her heart).
And then her father dies. It’s Wells’ fault, she tells herself. He was the only one who knew - besides Bellamy, who would never rat her out, never in million years, he (understandably) hated Jaha and his men and all they stood for - Wells was the only one who could have told.
Clarke is with Bellamy when they drag her away. She’s sitting in his compartment, they’re playing games with Octavia on the floor. They drag Clarke up by her clothes and roughly pin her arms behind her, Bellamy tries to resist, shouting that she’s done nothing wrong, there’s nothing happening here.
She hasn’t done anything.
Except she has, she understands that when she sees the faces of the men. The guards who she unwittingly brought to Bellamy's humble abode. The guards who know everyone around here.
And yet they do not know Octavia Blake, the girl sitting on the Blake compartment floor, looking so much like the olive-skinned boy they’ve worked, laughed, lived amongst. They look at her curiously, wondering how they know every child on this ship - besides her.
They ask her for ID and the thirteen year old little girl doesn’t know what to do. Bellamy tries to stand in the way, but they take her, too. He cannot do anything but stand - supported by two guards as they hold him back, make him watch as his world is torn away from him - with silent tears of fury and grief slip down his cheeks - it is the first time he has cried since a little girl with the name of an Emperor’s sister came into his life and he became a man, stripped of a childhood that was never really his to begin with, stolen from him by people who believed in their right to be superior to him and everything he stood for.
Clarke and Octavia will not live - both girls are too dangerous to have hanging around the ship, for completely different and yet the same reasons.
Clarke is screaming sorry as they add another charge onto her list - treason, now twofold - she’s trying to search Bellamy’s eyes but he’s just looking at her, heartbroken and falling apart. She wants to tell him to stay strong, but the words will not come - because how on earth can either of them stay strong when Jake is going to die and Aurora is going to die, Clarke is being led to solitary and Octavia is led to the delinquents? Bellamy will be alone and Abby will be alone and Clarke’s life is just falling apart.
Bellamy doesn’t say a word as he loses the three people who mean the most to him. Tears stream down his cheeks and he doesn’t bother to wipe them away because what’s the point? What’s the point in anything anymore?
He loses his guard’s job. He stands in a line of people waiting to see their loved one’s floated. Clarke walks past him as he reaches his mother’s turn. She is wearing the same pink top as this morning, when she waltzed into his compartment and nothing was wrong, she still had a father and he still had a mother. They still had each other, and Octavia and everything was okay.
Now, she has a guard flanking her on both sides, ready to transport her to the skybox. Her mother stands behind with tears in her eyes but none on her cheeks. Bellamy shakes in silent fury as he realises it was the woman that Clarke calls mother’s fault that this girl has lost her father. It is Abby Griffin's fault that Bellamy has lost the two best things to ever happen to him - it is her fault that Bellamy has lost everything he has ever fought for, he thinks as he is led past a shaking, sobbing Clarke. He is silent as his mother is taken to the chamber. He can think of nothing to say to the woman who brought him and his sister into this cruel goddamn world. He doesn’t cry as he watches her body be pulled away from his, away from everyone’s, condemned to an lifeless, weightless existence.
For 13 months is he a janitor, he works his ass off, trying to distract himself from everything that he used to hold dear.
He tries to ignore the fact that everyday brings nearer Octavia’s 18th, with Clarke’s 18th even closer. He tries to hate Clarke, he really does - but he can’t. He can’t hate the girl that stole his family because in the end, she was a part of it. And he can’t resent Octavia, either, for taking every normal part of his life and twisting it into something of her own. He cannot resent her because she might have taken every normal component of his life, she might have infused it with herself, but that’s what he wanted, and he would never change it, not for a day or even an hour. Because his life without Octavia - he had never realised this, as every memory he had was tainted (painted or decorated, really) with her, be it her laugh, her smile or tears. She was always there - was not really a life at all, moreover, it was an all but meaningless existence. Something he had to, rather than wanted to, do.
Then his old boss marches into his compartment - no longer his, his mother’s and his sister’s but never, ever his - with a gun in his hand and a million opportunities spilling from his lips. He tells Bellamy that he can save his sister - he can save Clarke. They have a chance. They can live. He tells Bellamy to take a man’s life and then risk his own and hands him a gun. Bellamy trains it on the Commander’s head, instead - but that wouldn’t help anybody. So he finds himself embedding a bullet in an innocent (not innocent, Jaha could never be innocent, not with the blood of so many on his hands) man’s stomach, climbing onto a dropship and falling to earth with about 100 other stars.
When Clarke Griffin first stumbles down the ladder of the dropship (bleary-eyed and shaken though she is) and sees him, Bellamy Blake expects a lot of things. He does not expect her to look at him like he’s a stranger. And yet that's what she does. She looks at him like she has never once laid eyes on him in her life. She asks him where his wristband is, and her forehead wrinkles in concern. She tells him he is wrong, and he continues what he was doing despite her. He lets the sister he once kept under careful wraps (literally) out into the open first (Octavia has always come first, it only seems fair) and then he watches as kids flood out of the ship from space, laughing and pushing and happy, an emotion he wasn’t sure existed on the ark. He watches Clarke amongst them, watches her heavy boots hit the earth, her eyes alight as they scan the area around her.
It’s Bellamy that takes charge (though he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t want to be here at all - but he is not leaving Octavia and Clarke and they are not leaving this camp). It is Bellamy that initiates the building of what will eventually be their community. They put up a wall and start defences.
It is not much, but it’s a start;
it’s to be his beginning in a world of ends.