Chapter Text
Welcome to your life
There's no turning back
Even while we sleep
We will find you
BELLAMY.
The first time Bellamy Blake sees Clarke Griffin, she is vandalizing the walls of her prison cell.
"Prisoner 3-1-9, face the wall," he says in a gruff voice. It's the voice he's learned to use with criminals—dark, imposing, laced with authority.
He was given a brief overview about Clarke before being given this assignment—daughter of a council member and the (former) lead engineer. She is elite on all counts: born and raised on Alpha station, the least-ratty clothes available, and plenty of ration tickets. He can see the way she is different from him and everyone else from Factory Station. How her skin has a healthy glow and her hair is well-kempt. Bellamy can't help but be annoyed at the fact that even in prison she remains next to flawless while the rest of them scrounge for scraps.
Typical.
But this girl, no matter how high ranking, is no different from the other delinquents in the Sky Box now, and he won't treat her like she is.
He stifles the little satisfied smirk he feels coming on when she jumps violently at his booming command. Serves the privileged little girl right for doodling all over the pristine walls.
"What is this?" she demands, eyeing the cuffs he unhooks from his belt. "No, no, I don't turn eighteen for another two weeks, it's not time yet—"
"I said, face the wall." Bellamy's hand hovers over his stun-stick, ready for a fight. He's escorted a few delinquents to their trials now, and he's concluded that any teenager can be completely docile while in prison, but then explode into violence the second they realize they're headed toward their likely execution. Bellamy's gotten a few black eyes in the past to prove it. His superiors just laughed whenever he came back with a new shiner, saying that it happened to the best of them. It was the quiet, cooperative ones that seemed to do the most damage, they had told him.
He watches the blonde girl shake her head furiously, and prepares himself to take her down if he has to.
"Clarke, honey, please stay calm," a quiet, soothing voice says from behind him. He recognizes the woman as Abby Griffin when he turns to investigate. One of the Council members who will preside over this girl's preliminary hearing.
He wonders if there's some sort of protocol for this—for having a Council member's child being the one on the chopping block—but he snorts when he figures that it's probably never happened before. The privileged don't get into trouble with the Council. They had too many connections, too many advantages over the regular grunts.
That is, until they floated Jake Griffin, the alleged traitor, two months ago. It had sent the ARK into an uneasy disquiet. Now no one is safe from the Council and Chancellor Jaha's reach.
(Bellamy understands what that means more than anyone else, considering the secrets he is forced to keep).
"Mom?" Clarke Griffin collapses into the older woman's arms, and Bellamy tries not to look away. "Mom, what's happening? They've decided not to wait, haven't they? They're floating me before I turn eighteen—"
"No," Abby takes her daughter's face between her palms. "No, Clarke. They aren't floating you. The Council has decided to use a new parole system for the underage offenders. You will be the first to try it."
"Parole? What does that even mean—"
"Councilor Griffin," Bellamy interrupts. He coughs when the near identical looks of annoyance turn his way. "Ma'am, the Chancellor and the other council members are waiting." He knows he's being a hard ass, but showing up late to the girl's hearing won't look good to his superiors. It's imperative for him not to stand out in any way, to not be too good or too bad at his job. Blending in is essential, and Clarke Griffin being late because she wants to chit-chat with Mother Dearest isn't doing him any favors.
"Right, of course," the older Griffin concedes with a nod. She allows Bellamy to step forward and lock a pair of cuffs around the younger girl's wrists. "Clarke, I'll talk to you after your hearing, okay? I'll be there the whole time, sweetheart."
He steers the girl toward the door to her cell, and tries to ignore the small hands shaking beneath his palms.
CLARKE.
"Clarke Griffin, the Council has decided to release you under supervised parole pending your trial in two weeks when you come of age."
Two weeks. Fourteen days is all she has. Then the Council will decide if her life is worth the oxygen spent on her.
She knows that the odds aren't in her favor.
"I understand," Clarke says blankly. This was the last thing she'd been expecting when the guard barged into her cell earlier that morning—when her mom had come to see her for the first time since she was arrested months ago.
"We have assigned an armed guard to escort you to and from your classes, which you will continue with your age group. You will also continue your medical training. He will monitor all of your social interactions, and your behavior. He will report directly to the council about your activities."
In other words, they would remove the chains from her wrists only to lock her into even stronger ones—these would be shackles that move, breathe, speak. That Judge her worthiness to live on the ARK.
"He has also been authorized to use deadly force on you, should you show any signs of criminal activity or aggression. Do you understand what that means?"
"Yes," she says, her voice sounding smaller than she means it to.
Clarke sees the guard that escorted her to the hearing shift a little in the corner of the room. He's been silently watching the proceedings since he removed her hand cuffs and deposited her in front of the council members and Chancellor Jaha. She wonders if the thought of a teenage girl being beaten makes the dark-haired guard squeamish.
Not that it matters. One guard's opinion won't save her now.
"You will not speak of the incident that led to your incarceration," Chancellor Jaha continues sharply. But his face softens a moment later. "I know this must be difficult, considering what happened to your father—"
"Don't you dare talk about my father," Clarke snaps, finding her voice once again. The Council balks at her tone, leaning in to whisper about the upstart teenager: the traitor girl that they should have floated but couldn't because she was underage. Abby seems to squirm in her Councilor's chair. Clarke ignores them all. She only has eyes for the man standing at the head of them—the man who killed her father.
The murderer sighs. "Miss Griffin, the flaw your father found in the ARK's oxygen system was fixed. There isn't any need to cause panic by spreading false rumors—"
"But you still killed him!" She shouts. "You fixed the problem my father wanted to expose, but you still floated him!"
"Because he committed treason—"
(The Chancellor is speaking slowly, as if trying to soothe a child throwing a temper tantrum. Perhaps that's exactly what she is, Clarke muses silently).
"—The same crime you were planning to commit with him. We must maintain order here Clarke, and that means upholding our laws. Treason is punishable by death. It's the only thing that has kept the ARK alive this long."
Clarke's eyes slant away. She can't argue with him. On the ARK, there is only so many resources available—only so much space. As the Deputy Resource Officer on the ARK, her father had explained things very carefully to her when she was young: in order to survive, everyone had to cooperate. There is no room for law-breakers.
She understands that now, but it still leaves a bile in the back of her throat. What her father (and she, by extension) had wanted to do wasn't a bad thing—the people, their people, had a right to know that their lives were in danger.
Or so they had thought. A few days after her father's execution, Clarke had gotten a notice from the Council. The problem Jake Griffin had found with the oxygen replenishment system hadn't really been a problem at all. Just a simple redundancy coding that could be removed from the program and rebooted. Their best engineers and programmers were working on it.
It took less than three days to fix the complication that her father had died for.
At first, Clarke had refused to believe them. Jake Griffin was the most talented engineer on the entire station. He wouldn't have made such a huge mistake. He had checked and re-checked the system, looking for solutions, and had concluded that there was no fixing it—that the system failure would spell out their doom in a matter of months when the oxygen ran out.
The Council insisted—spelled it out for her, showed her the lines of code that she barely understood, but could decipher thanks to the few lessons her father had given her. The problem was solved, they told her. There was no flaw.
Jake Griffin had died for nothing.
Soon, she will also die for nothing.
(Ironic, isn't it. They are surrounded by light-years of empty space just outside the station walls. But there is no room to allow Clarke Griffin, The Traitor, to live.)
Jaha stares her down.
"Do you understand the conditions of your parole?"
"What's the point of this? You'll just execute me when I turn eighteen. Why not lock me away with the other delinquents until my trial?"
Abby Griffin winces from her seat. "That isn't certain. Your parole officer will be watching you, and will give a statement at your trial concerning your character and actions during your parole," she tries to smile encouragingly at her daughter. "It's a new system we want to try with the juvenile offenders—to give them a better chance," her mother repeats.
Clarke knows better than to take comfort in her mother's words—traitors aren't allowed to live on the ARK—but she feels a little ray of hope for the other teens locked away in the Sky Box. If anything, she hopes this new method of parole works for them. She never met any of them, as she'd been in solitary confinement, but she had watched her fellow delinquents from the little window in her cell door as they mingled in the common area below. They had laughed and hooted and fought like regular kids, but she could recognize the defeat in the hunch of their shoulders and in the blankness of their eyes.
It is the same sense of hopelessness that all of them share—that Clarke feels at this very moment, standing in front of the seven people who would decide her fate in fourteen days.
At least something good might come from her impending execution. Some of those kids can't be older than thirteen. They deserve a second chance—a fresh start. Even if she can't hope for the same.
"I ask again," Jaha is saying. "Do you understand the conditions of your parole?"
Treason is punishable by death. You will not live past eighteen.
"Yes, I do," Clarke answers, because there is nothing else left to say.
"Good," Jaha slams the gavel onto the table, and it rings in her ears like a gunshot. "Mr. Blake, please step forward."
The dark-haired guard from before walks toward her, and she watches him carefully. He wears the standard issue uniform, adorned in a heavy jacket and combat boots. The electric stun-stick swings from his belt menacingly as he strides into the center of the room like he owns it.
"Miss Griffin, this is your parole officer, Mr. Blake. He will be shadowing and escorting you until the date of your trial, where he will be a character witness to the Council."
Mr. Blake is tall, and with his slicked-back hair he seems older—maybe in his thirties. When he approaches her, she has to tilt her head back to meet his dark eyes, and for some reason that feels like a defeat—like she's giving him ground that she doesn't wish to surrender.
He smirks down at her from above, as if he can read her thoughts, and she can't explain the instant feeling of hostility she has toward him, or why it zings through her veins and heats her blood until it's boiling under her skin. Maybe it's the judgment—the superiority she sees in his face, evidenced by the haughty tilt of his chin. Or perhaps it's the corner of his lips—that quirk up into a crooked smile that looks more like a snarl when he catches her glare—that sets her off. She only knows that the longer the guard stares down at her with those unreadable eyes, the more the burning animosity seeps into her bones.
He holds out his hand.
She doesn't accept it.
Mr. Blake just smirks at her, as if he isn't surprised at her reaction.
Jaha clears his throat, and Clarke turns away from her new warden.
"Now that we've established that, Clarke Griffin, you are dismissed from this hearing, and are hereby summoned to appear before this council in two weeks time to determine the punishment for your crimes." He slams the gavel again, and Clarke resists the urge to lunge for the damn thing and throw it at the nearest breakable object.
Instead, she turns and heads for the exit. For a moment, it feels strange, like she will be tackled and taken back to her cell any second. Just for a second she contemplates running down the halls, stretching her legs for the first time in months, relishing in the slightly-more-open space, but then she hears Mr. Blake follow, and her delusions of freedom fly out the air-lock doors.
As soon as the Council Chamber doors slide open however, she wishes that Mr. Blake would just haul her back to her cell. Because just outside the chambers, her (former) best friend is loitering, waiting for her.
"Clarke, I wanted to talk—"
"You shouldn't have come here, Wells," she says, cutting off whatever pathetic excuses he's about to make. Her heart begins to pound as emotions surge through her. Rage. Loneliness. Betrayal. She had trusted him—trust that only came with years and years of bonding and friendship—and it had shattered in less than a second when he went behind her back, told his father, the goddamn Chancellor about her own father's plans to be honest about the ARK's condition. Then she had watched her dad die, because her best friend couldn't keep his mouth shut. Couldn't keep his promises.
Humiliatingly, she feels tears begin to well up.
"Look, I know I made a mistake. I didn't mean for Jake to be arrested—"
"They didn't arrest him, they killed him!" The people still gathered around them startle at her shout, but at this point she doesn't care. Wells looks at her like she shot him.
Good. Then he knows how she had felt when she watched her father get sucked into the black, empty vacuum of space.
She gets in his face, shaking off whoever attempts to grab her arm to stop her.
"If you ever talk to me, or come near me again, I will make you regret it. Do you understand?" she says menacingly. The words are quiet—meant for Wells' ears only—but she must say them too loud, because a few council members gasp at her violent threat.
Clarke may have just sealed her own fate, but she can't bring herself to care. They're going to float her anyway. What's a girl with an expiration date care about the trivial matters that get her there?
This time, she allows the strong grip on her arm to direct her down the hallway. She looks up and sees Mr. Blake smirking to himself.
"What?" she demands.
"Nothing." He shrugs, drops the smirk, and leads her back to her quarters.