Chapter Text
Bellamy first meets Clarke Griffin at his final callback for a pilot he actually thinks he has a pretty good shot at landing.
He hasn’t been told much about the show, other than that it’s some kind of teen dystopian thing, which will no doubt get picked up by The CW. The character he’s auditioning for is named Isaiah, and he’s this gallant, noble prince who’s supposed to come from another land and sweep the main character, a feisty-but-sheltered princess, off her feet. Bellamy thinks he’s done a pretty good job of pulling that off so far. He’s definitely made sure to slick his hair back and sit up straight and smile charmingly a lot. So far, the casting crew has been into it.
But when he walks into the room for his final callback and sees Clarke, who’s already been cast as the princess, he loses his footing and spills his hot coffee all over her shirt. He tends to turn into a klutz around hot girls, and there’s Clarke, all blonde surfer waves and tantalizing curves and mischievous lips, so it’s really not his fault. It’s the universe’s.
“Oh, shit,” he says. “I’m so, so sorry.” He then makes the classic mistake of instinctually trying to help clean it up, which really just means he rubs his tiny paper napkin against her chest for a few seconds before she swats him away.
“I got it,” she says, short.
“Jeez, I was just trying to help,” he says.
“Non-consensual groping, not so helpful,” she spits.
He will never bring coffee to an audition again.
The casting director and showrunner and a few other producer-types stream into the room to sit behind their table before Bellamy can somehow convince her not to hate him.
“Oh, good,” says Marcus Kane, the showrunner. “You’ve already met.”
“You could say that,” says Clarke, through gritted teeth.
Bellamy scrubs a hand across his face. There is literally no way he gets this part now. What’s her problem anyway? It was clearly an accident. He apologized and obviously he wasn’t intentionally feeling her up. Now she’s going to ruin his chance at a huge part? Well, fuck her.
“Why don’t we get started?” says Kane.
The scene is easy enough, and Bellamy has studied it relentlessly. It’s the first time his character and the princess are alone together. He’s supposed to be placidly charming and she’s supposed to be coyly charmed and there should be a lot of half-smiles and blushing.
Instead, her first line, “What are you doing here?” – which is supposed to sound surprised and impressed and breathless because he managed to find her alone – comes out like an accusation.
And he feeds off of it. Somehow, this perfectly nice scene turns into a clash of wills from their shift in tone. At the end, when she says, “I should go,” and turns to leave, he’s supposed to stop her by catching her arm, then kiss her on the hand before she runs off. Without thinking, he catches her hand and hauls her flush against him. She lets out a little gasp and he can feel the coffee from her shirt soaking into his. He brings the hand he’s still clutching up to his mouth and kisses her knuckles firmly before releasing her.
They stare at each other, breathing hard, until Kane startles them out of it with a, “Wow.”
It finally hits Bellamy how royally he has screwed this callback up.
“Sorry,” he says, “that was… I just… I’ll go now.”
“Don’t you dare,” says Kane, rifling through some papers on the table.
Bellamy glances sideways at Clarke, who is looking at Kane like he just sprouted a new head.
“What, you think he’s our Isaiah?” she scoffs.
“Absolutely not,” he says, brandishing some papers. “Try this scene on for size.”
They both step forward and grab a page from him. Bellamy studies it for a moment. The only lines are for the princess and someone named Jax. He assumes that’s supposed to be him. They’re arguing. It’s perfect. This part, he can maybe get.
They do the scene, and even though he only had a few seconds to look it over, it feels good. At the end, he steps so far into her personal space, looming over her, that she steps back and knocks over her chair. But she recovers, delivering the final line while stepping even farther into his personal space, grabbing the front of his shirt in her fist and tugging him down so they’re practically nose-to-nose. Unconsciously, he glances at her lips. He can’t help it.
There’s silence for a beat, and everything fades away except for her too-blue eyes and her breath mingling with his and her hand on his chest. Then everyone else in the room bursts into applause and whistles and hoots and Kane is pulling him away from Clarke to hug him.
Kane ruffles Bellamy’s hair, loosening it from its style. “Oh yeah,” says Kane. “He’s definitely our Jax. I was starting to think we’d never find him, but he found us.”
Bellamy looks around, and every face (except Clarke’s) is beaming at him like he’s the second coming. He tries to remember the casting notice for this Jax character. Wasn’t he the rebel leader, or something like that? And wasn’t he just a recurring character, not part of the main cast? Why is this such a big deal?
“I’m lost,” is all Bellamy can think of to say.
“Okay, Bellamy, I’ll level with you,” Kane says. “Jax won’t be a main character to start. But if this show does as well as we think it will, you’ll be a series regular in no time.”
“Still lost.”
“Today’s teenage audience wants to feel like they see something we don’t. They want to ship an OTP that will allow them to post a ‘started from the bottom, now we here’ gif on Tumblr someday.”
“Are you even speaking English?”
Kane sighs. “Isaiah is a red herring. The audience will think we intend for him and Princess Lila to end up together, but we don’t. They will, predictably, throw their support behind Lila and Jax and they’ll think it’s some kind of grassroots movement. Meanwhile, we’ll work the long game with Jax and deny the crap out of it at Comic-Con.”
Bellamy chances a glance at Clarke, who is pacing. He’s pretty sure this is the first she’s heard of all this. She seemed pretty convinced Isaiah was really the love interest.
“I think I get it now,” he says. “So I got the part?”
“If you’ll have it, it’s yours.”
Bellamy pauses, nodding, as though thinking it over. “Where do I sign?”
Everyone laughs, except, of course, Clarke.
“We’ll fax everything over to your agent first thing tomorrow,” says Kane. “There’s one thing we have to agree on first, though. With both of you.”
Clarke stops pacing and joins them by the table.
“You two - ” Kane says, pointing back and forth between Bellamy and Clarke “ - cannot date each other. You can’t hold hands at a Lakers game, you can’t be seen canoodling at a café, you can’t get snapped by the paparazzi walking a dog together – nothing. We want the audience to be completely desperate to see your characters together, and a real relationship between you two could completely kill the desperation.”
Clarke lets out a slightly terrifying bark of laughter.
“You are in absolutely no danger on that front, Marcus,” she says. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
Bellamy tries not to be offended. But, you know, fuck her.
“She’s not my type,” Bellamy says, sour. “Scout’s honor.”
And generally speaking, she’s not his type. In the past, he’s always gone for leggy brunettes who are hot in a kind of angular, scary way. So it’s not a lie. But it would be a lie if he said he hadn’t already pictured her naked more than once.
They glare at each other, both with smiles that are more like grimaces.
“Great,” Kane says brightly. He steps between them and slings an arm around each of their shoulders. He’s looking back and forth between them like a proud father (not that Bellamy would know what that would really look like). “This is going to be fucking epic.”
Bellamy closes his eyes and prays not to screw this up.