Disclaimer: I do not own any part of The 100, and I'm grateful to those who do for creating this universe and story. Reading bellarke fanfics has been helping me get through a difficult time in my life, and I hope that my fanfic will bring some enjoyment to people's lives. :)

...

Her father's death-no, murder-followed by a year in solitary had changed Clarke. Her prior willingness to fight had diminished, replaced by a defeatist sort of resignation. And while during her confinement she had at times felt intensely lonely and longed for company, she now found herself experiencing a far greater than usual sense of discomfort at being in close proximity to so many people in her age group. She especially did not appreciate Wells' presence beside her in the Exodus ship. Clarke had started to wonder if perhaps Wells had gotten himself arrested because he felt guilty about causing her father to be floated, but then she realized that she didn't care why Wells did what he did and that she wasn't about to let go of her anger at him. Her father was dead and unless Wells was going to bring him back to life he would get no forgiveness from her.

She looked around at the other people strapped into the seats of the ship. Naturally all of them were under 18, all of them criminals in one way or another, and apart from Wells it seemed to her that none were members of the elite social class which Clarke belonged to. That realization filled Clarke with a certain degree of unease. There were tensions on the Ark between the social classes, and she suspected that many, if not all, of the others joining her on their probably fatal trip to Earth would justifiably feel some combination of envy, resentment, and perhaps even hatred towards her and even more so towards Wells, the son of Chancellor Jaha. Already she could see some of the others giving her and Wells hostile looks. Oh well, there is no use worrying about this now. Like as not we will not live long on Earth, and if we do might be Wells will get the punishment he deserves for getting my father killed. Clarke felt a stab of guilt at that thought, but pushed it down just as she felt the Exodus ship jolt as it detached from the Ark and began its descent down to the Earth.

The monitor switched on and Chancellor Jaha was speaking to all of them, informing them about the military base on Mount Weather that was supposed to contain enough resources for them to survive for some number of years. For all they know, it's all been taken or contaminated with radiation. I wonder if this is how they justified not giving us any substantial survival gear or resources. We're going down there with little more than the clothes on our back, and not much of those either.

One of the boys unbuckled the straps securing him to his seat and was showing off by doing various maneuvers made possible by the zero gravity environment. Let's see how cool he'll feel when we enter the atmosphere. Then, two more boys followed his example. Clarke felt particularly uncomfortable speaking up in this environment, but at the same time she felt a duty to say something all the three boys were endangering themselves.

"Get back in your seats, we'll be entering the Earth's atmosphere soon and you could get hurt without those restraints to secure you to your seats!" Clarke yelled with all the social graces of someone who spent a year in solitary. Naturally they didn't listen, and it was not long before the re-entry began and the floating boys were thrown violently against the walls of the ship. Clarke couldn't see if they were okay, but it seemed like either their flying bodies or the re-entry itself had damaged the ship's systems. Clarke let a small, bitter sounding laugh escape her lips. It doesn't matter, in all likelihood we'll soon all be dead anyway.

Clarke's whole body felt the Exodus ship's impact with the ground, and she had almost bitten her tongue during the impact. She unclasped the restraints that held her to her seat and made her way to look at two of the three boys who had tried to impress the others with their zero gravity acrobatics. They were dead now. She looked at the third boy, the one who had been the first to start showing off. "Was it worth it?" She asked him and walked off, not waiting for an answer. A crowd started to gather beside the door separating them from Earth. So here it is. Our long lost home. I wonder how long it will take for us all to die Clarke thought, all the while hoping the Earth was survivable.

A boy-no, a man stood in front of the door. He was obviously older than 18, and he was wearing a guard's uniform. Why is a guard here with us? Then, suddenly a girl ran to him, screaming "Bellamy!" and threw her arms around him. He lifted her and spun her around, asking her what kind of big brother he would be if he let her go down to Earth all by herself. Clarke heard mutterings in the crowd about how people didn't have brothers and then something about the girl in the floor. She must be the illegal second child who was hidden for so long. The girl seemed to have heard the mutterings and became angry, but the man-Bellamy-held her back saying something to her that made her stop. With that he opened the door and Clarke found herself blinded by all the bright, green light that she momentarily had to close her eyes. When she opened them again the floor girl was on the ground, surrounded by green and light while her brother was looking at her and smiling warmly. So many trees, this must be a forest. Clarke exited the ship, followed by Wells who started to say something to her.

"Why are you talking to me? Do you think I want to talk to the person who killed my father?" She could see her words had wounded Wells, and briefly felt guilt as she recognized some unfairness in them, but she pushed the thought away. He deserves to feel pain.

"Look around us Clarke, we're surrounded by actual criminals who hate us just for who we are. We need to stick together." She saw some truth in that, but wondered if the radiation might kill them before any conflicts with the others had time to arise. Anyway, in the event that the Earth was survivable Clarke intended to keep her head down and wait for the rest of their people to come down. She had a hard enough time socializing with her upper class peers on the Ark-and the year in solitary did not improve her social skills-and she thought that attempting to relate to and befriend lower class delinquents would be a futile effort. She was about to respond to Wells and tell him that he deserved to be hated, when it hit her that something was very wrong.

Clarke took out the map of their landing location that her mother had given her, spread it out on the ramp connecting the inside of the ship to the ground and looked around her. They were supposed to be on a mountain, but they weren't. The place they were supposed to land, the one with all the survival supplies, was to the north of them. She was reluctant to draw attention to herself, but this was about their very survival and Clarke felt like she had no choice but to say something.

"Hey, everyone, listen up!" She tried to speak as loudly as possible while still sounding authoritative. No one seemed to pay attention except the man in the guard's uniform. His name is Bellamy.

"Is that how you were taught to address your subjects, Princess?" He said, a hint of amusement in his deep voice that carried better than hers, and at the sound of which people started paying attention to their conversation.

"We did not land where we were supposed to land. This is not Mount Weather." She held up her map, and pointed to their current location. "We are here, whereas the mountain is over there." Clarke pointed at the map again, and then pointed at the mountain that peeked through the trees to the north of them. "We have to get moving if we are to reach it by nightfall."

"And why should we do that?" Bellamy asked her.

"Because that's where the survival supplies are, haven't you noticed that we have nothing? We need food, shelter-"

"And you expect us to go and get it for you, don't you? How about the privileged do some work for a change?" The man continued, looking at her and Wells with everyone listening now. Clarke had expected this, but she still found the hostility unsettling. She sighed.

"No, I expect all of us to go and get it for ourselves. To live. Even if Wells and I went there by ourselves, we couldn't bring back the supplies for everyone. Do you want to survive or not?" She looked at Bellamy, and then looked at those who had gathered around them.

"Does it look like any of us are dying?" He asked, clearly not intending to make the trek to Mount Weather, and continued speaking.

"And how do we even know there are supplies there? You may trust Jaha, but I don't. The ship provides us with shelter for now, why should we leave it for something that might not even be there?" Clarke had no answer for him, there was a certain logic to what he was saying. Perhaps staying near the ship was better than hiking through the unknown, likely radioactive forest that lay between them and Mount Weather. Yet, they didn't even have water. She looked hopefully at the others, but clearly they did not find her convincing, and frankly she was not sure she found herself convincing. The only person who seemed to be agreeing with her was Wells.

...

Clarke was used to people listening to what she had to say. Doubtless part of that was due to the status held by her parents, but her peers on the Ark knew-and indeed respected-her own achievements at least as far as her success in education and her apprenticeship under her mother were concerned. She might not have been an outgoing girl, or the sort of girl that boys liked to chase, but she was the girl who everyone expected would follow in the footsteps of her parents and in doing so rise high in the hierarchy that existed on the Ark.

Here on the ground Clarke was out of her element. The other kids tended to be from lower class families, and many of them had committed real, violent crimes. Instead of the respect she had been accustomed to, she was treated with mistrust, resentment, and outright hostility. Clarke could not exactly fault any of the kids for this, as their lives on the Ark were likely harder than her own. And while she had been slotted to follow in the footsteps of her high status parents, their opportunities on the Ark would have been very limited even if they had not committed any crimes. It would have been surprising if they had decided to follow me.

At the same time, Clarke was not surprised at how it took Bellamy only a week or so to win the attention, respect and even allegiance of many of the others, particularly the stronger and more masculine boys. She was reluctant to admit it, but although he was young she saw in him some of the same same natural leadership qualities that she had seen in her mother and in Chancellor Jaha. However, while Bellamy seemed to have the capacity to inspire many of the others to follow him, he did not seem to be using his influence to help them to survive. She wondered if she should talk to him, but considering the attitude he had towards her, she thought it would likely be pointless if not counterproductive.

One thing that was the same on the ground as it was on the Ark was Clarke's standing amongst girls as far as boys were concerned. Apart from Wells, who was her childhood friend and until his betrayal like family to her, boys tended not to pay much attention to Clarke. It's not that Clarke was unattractive, but whether it was her looks or the way she carried herself she simply didn't draw male attention the way some girls did. On the Ark, it was something she had become accustomed to, and indeed something she had resigned herself to and moved on from-except on those rare occasions when she had a crush on a boy who inevitably failed to notice her.

When she was younger Clarke figured that if she was going to matter and be someone-and there was a time when she wanted to-the way for her to do it was to excel in activities like her apprenticeship. That was then, back when it was important to her to be special, to be better than others. She seemed to have grown out of that. And about time, Clarke thought with some degree of amusement, realizing that here on the ground she was not going to be important or special for a good long while, unless being especially resented counted. Eventually, she thought, the rest of their people would come down, and she would be the "princess" Bellamy liked to refer to her as, back on track to become someone in their society. What was a bit stranger to her is that she no longer cared about that, and apart from being reunited with her mother, the main appeal of the rest of the denizens of the Ark joining them on Earth was the arrival of people who were skilled at building a functioning society: the farmers, the engineers, the workers of all types, and even the ruling class. Right now our society consists primarily of delinquent kids ruled by a leader with a "whatever the hell we want" mentality, and I wonder if that "we" is how our King refers to himself in private.

It was then that Clarke saw Bellamy and his boys taking off their own wristbands and those of others. She couldn't even say she was surprised. Clarke figured Bellamy was power-hungry, and given that it made a twisted sort of sense for him to want to make The Council believe that the Earth was not survivable. After all, if the rest of their people came down he would fall from the top of the society to the bottom, he might even be in trouble as he was not supposed to be on the Exodus ship. She had a brief moment of sympathy for him, but was overcome with rage at the thought of his selfishness and desire for power causing those on the Ark as well as those on the ground to die. They were just kids, most of them lacking the knowledge and experience needed to form a functioning society.

As much as Clarke wanted to avoid drawing attention to herself, she knew she had to stop this. It was the right thing to do, and with that thought she walked toward Bellamy with resolve.

"What are you doing?!" Clarke exclaimed, her voice hoarse with lack of use.

Bellamy didn't answer, he only looked at her, smiling an amused and smug smile. Murphy, Miller, and some of the other bigger, tougher boys Bellamy managed to get to follow him regarded her with hostility.

Clarke raised her voice, she needed everyone in the camp to hear this. "Do you realize why we were sent down to the ground? Do you-"

"To save more resources for royalty like you, Princess." Bellamy interrupted her, putting a certain degree of disdain on the word "Princess".

Clarke noticed a wave of anger rise in the others at that. I shouldn't be surprised, this is the consequence of rationing. Unused to talking to such a hostile audience, Clarke decided to ignore them and stick to what needed to be said.

"If they just wanted to save resources, they would have floated us. Do you think they wasted an Exodus ship for fun? Do you even know how many Exodus ships the Ark has?" The doubt on Bellamy's face gave her encouragement. "Oh, but don't you worry, at the rate you're going they will be floating people to save resources."

"What do you mean?" Bellamy asked, uncertain.

Noticing that she now had everyone's attention, and that it was for once not hostile Clarke continued, now speaking to the whole group.

"Life support aboard the Ark is failing, and that is why they sent us here to see if the Earth has become survivable. If you let Bellamy take off your wristbands, the people on the Ark will think we are dying and that the Earth is not survivable. They will begin killing people to stretch life support in the hopes that it will buy them time to fix things. Hundreds will die." Bellamy's face showed shock and something that might have been guilt.

"Oh, and don't think 'royalty like me' will be the ones culled." Clarke added bitterly. "It will be the workers, the ordinary people. Oh, to be sure the 'royalty' will justify it to themselves in terms of importance to the survival of our species or something along those lines, and I would wager they will carry out the killings under the guise of an accident to avoid social unrest, but that is how it will be." At this she turned to meet Bellamy's eyes. "So do you want to become a mass murderer just so that you can be the big shot around here instead of having to defer to those who rule society aboard the Ark?"

Bellamy stiffened at that. Clarke wondered if she had been too harsh as it was extremely unlikely that he had known about the state of life support aboard the Ark, but she could not stop now.

"And it's not only those aboard the Ark that will die, what do you think will happen to us? Look at us! How many of us know anything about surviving down here?" She looked at Bellamy's boys, asking: "Are any of you engineers? Farmers? Do you know how to build structures in which we could survive the winter? Do you even know how cold it will get here in time?" She turned her gaze back to Bellamy. "If you make the Ark think we're dead, you won't just be killing them, you will be killing us." She stopped at that, thinking that surely that would have convinced them. How could it not. Bellamy took a long look at her and began to speak, albeit his voice was less certain now than before.

"Sure you would like it if the rest of them came down, Princess. You would suddenly rise up from a nobody to a high ranking member of society. Your own mother is on the Council, and you look like you've been raised from birth to follow in her footsteps." Bellamy walked past her, looking at and addressing the rest of the hundred. "But how will it be for the rest of you? They said they will forgive your crimes, and assuming they keep their promises, what kind of place in society do you think they will allocate for former criminals? Perhaps they will let you pick up trash after those like her." He looked at Clarke. "Is that the kind of life you want?" He paused, giving them a moment to think. "And it's not as bad as the Princess here is making it out to be. Some of us do have skills", he looked at Monty, "and more importantly we can learn. Hell, perhaps even the Princess and the Prince here can teach us everything they learned while they were being groomed to rule us", Bellamy said somewhat reluctantly while looking at Clarke and Wells. "We can build our own society. It might be harder and take us longer, but it will be ours. We will not be on its margins, relegated to serving the privileged like Clarke." Quite a few people seemed nodding at that and lining up to have their wristbands taken off. Clarke felt like she was losing to Bellamy again, and this was too important for her not to give it all she had.

"Oh yes, I am so privileged that I was kept in solitary for a year to keep me from completing my father's plan to warn everyone on the Ark of the impending failure of the life support systems and the possible need to sacrifice some of the population, and my father was so privileged that they floated him!" Clarke retorted, her voice breaking with emotion. "Part of the reason that life on the Ark was as hard and limited as it was is because of the limited resources available to us there. It is different here. We are on Earth. Look around you! There is enough room for everyone. If this society ends up not being to your liking, perhaps some of you could split off and start your own, and don't you want your friends families aboard the Ark to experience Earth?" Clarke's voice was filled with desperation. "Please don't condemn some of our people to death and others to a meager existence on the Ark when the Earth is survivable!" More people seemed to be listening to her now and clutching their wristbands, while Bellamy looked conflicted and tense, as though he was struggling with himself. Clarke felt that this was as much of a victory as she was going to have, and with that she walked off towards the drop ship where she could be alone.

...

As he watched Clarke disappear into the drop ship, Bellamy looked at the line of people who still wanted to have their wristbands taken off. "We're done for now, go to sleep." He said with a deliberate and authoritative tone to his voice, hoping it would not look like he was changing this mind to take Clarke's side on the issue. In truth, he did not know what to do. Clarke's revelation about the state of life support on the Ark took him aback, he did not mind too much letting a few more generations live their lives out on the Ark before they came down. Sure he felt some guilt at the thought of denying them the opportunity to experience life on Earth, but he steeled himself against such doubts by remembering his mother's face before she was floated, and of the life Octavia had to live, first in hiding and then imprisoned just for being born. He thought that perhaps the inhabitants of the Ark deserved to be denied the opportunity to return to Earth as a payback of sorts for the monstrous system they had all participated in creating. But did they deserve to die? Doubtless some of them-particularly those in power-did, but he knew Clarke was right when she said that they would not be the ones to be culled. It would be people who were like his mother, like him, like Octavia, who would lose their lives while the privileged continued on. And while he did not want to be killed for killing Jaha, he did not think he could live with himself if he condemned hundreds of others to die so that he may live. I could always leave before they come down. It would be hard, but I could make it. Perhaps I could take some people with me, and we could start our own society free from the influence of the Ark's elite. He suddenly felt a strange and pressing need to tell someone, to be understood, to be forgiven. He thought of Octavia, but dismissed that thought as he did not want to burden his younger sister with this and a part of him was afraid at how she would react at the knowledge that he killed Jaha. He told himself that he did it for her, and he had, but he was afraid that how she saw him would be permanently changed and not for the better. I am a murderer.

"Bellamy?" He turned to look at Harper, one of the girls who had been sharing his bed recently. She was undoubtedly attractive, and although he sensed she was not the nicest person, he didn't care. She put her hand on his forearm, and this seemed to draw some jealous stares from a few of the other girls, quite a few of them very attractive. They would not have noticed me on the Ark, well, at least not unless I had risen high enough in The Guard. Bellamy thought, but he was not bitter, he figured that it was just the way of things when it came to women. Here on the ground he was a leader of sorts, and that made girls notice him. He wondered how Harper would react if she knew what he was, that he had killed, that he was selfish enough to keep other people from returning to Earth just so that he may live.

"Harper, I did something bad to get down to Earth, and I've wanted to keep those on the Ark from following us down here." Bellamy said.

"Oh? Well that doesn't sound bad." She responded, caressing his forearm. "Hey, do you want to go somewhere more private?" She asked.

"Maybe later." Bellamy responded, disappointed. In truth, he didn't expect much from Harper. He looked past the fire, ruminating on the issues when he saw Clarke standing in the doorway of the dropship. She seemed to be looking in his direction, but not really seeing him. Somehow Bellamy thought she would give him quite a hard time if she knew what he had done to Jaha. He considered telling her, confessing to at least some of it. I'm being an idiot for even considering this.

...

Clarke stood at the entrance to the dropship, looking over the camp. Her gaze settled on a group of pretty girls around Bellamy, one whom was touching him and she was fairly sure she had been sleeping in Bellamy's tent. She sighed a resigned sort of sigh brought on by an all-too-familiar feeling of not being part of the sorts of activities typically enjoyed by the more outgoing and attractive of her peers. Bellamy's girls were all exceptionally beautiful and sexual, which she supposed was fitting for the sexual partners of the sort of leader of their "tribe", such as he was. Am I jealous of them? Clarke wondered. No, I have no interest in being one of Bellamy's conquests, and his efforts to take off people's wristbands shows that he is power-hungry and selfish to the point of being willing to let people on the Ark die rather than relinquish his new found power and rise in status. Nevertheless, Clarke couldn't help but feel that a certain part of the human experience was closed to her. She was the serious and responsible type, not liable to be thought of as easygoing. She wondered if males thought of her as too masculine due to her natural instincts to speak up, to take responsibility, and to lead. She certainly could not imagine herself hanging on Bellamy's arm and being submissive to him. Why am I even thinking of this? Clarke went back into the dropship.

As she rested somewhat uncomfortably on one of the remaining seats she thought that she should make some effort to make friends. Briefly she wondered if she should make a tentative peace with Wells, but the memory of her father made her blood run hot and she put the thought out of her mind. Wells seemed always to be nearby, she wondered if he was trying to be available to protect her from the criminals if need be as a way to atone for what he did to her family.

She heard footsteps at the entrance to the ship and jumped, all too keenly aware of the presence of rapists amongst the hundred. Clarke immediately looked for a weapon and settled on a fragment of metal with a certain sharpness to it that she knew she could use to do some damage in the right circumstances. She had been an apprentice under her mother and knew where the weak points of the human body were, but she was not under the illusion that she would be likely to win a fight against a man. She was clutching her "knife", her hands sweaty when she saw Bellamy. She relaxed somewhat, as she doubted that the guy who had women throwing themselves at him and who at least made a show of protecting his little sister would rape her. He looked at her, and then he looked at how she was clutching her weapon.

"I'm sorry I scared you." His voice had a sincerity in it that Clarke found surprising. "You know, you really shouldn't be here alone. If I wanted to hurt you that 'weapon' of yours wouldn't have stopped me." Clarke started to think of how she should respond, but Bellamy kept talking. "Why don't you and Wells stick together, aren't you friends? I notice him looking at you a lot."

"Wells and I are not friends." Clarke snapped, in a tone that suggested she was not going to discuss this further.

"Okay, it doesn't have to be Wells, I'm just saying that it's not good for a young woman to be alone down here." Clarke was confused, why was he saying all these things. Why was he even here. She briefly wondered if he might be offering himself as company for her, but dismissed the thought as guys like Bellamy rarely thought of her that way.

"I think I'll take my chances." Clarke said. "Why are you even here?" Before Bellamy could reply, Clarke heard more footsteps.

"Is he bothering you?" A voice called out, and Finn came into view. "You know Bellamy, you already have enough girls, you should leave some for the rest of us."

"It's nothing like that." Bellamy replied. Of course not, why would he bother with me when Harper is waiting for him by the fire. Clarke thought. "Nevermind." Bellamy said, and walked off.

"So do I get a thanks?" Finn asked, but did not wait for her to respond. "You know, he's right that you shouldn't be alone here. You're welcome to hang out with Monty and Jasper and I. And you know, maybe we can make the trip to Mount Weather and see if there is anything there for us."

"Thanks." Clarke said, smiling at him and remembering what it was like not to feel alone.

...

Serves me right for being an idiot, I don't even know why I went there. Why should I care what Clarke of all people thinks of me, and it's not like she would have considered my desire to avoid death for what I did to Jaha a much more noble motivation than the lust for power she seems to see in me. And it's not like I could have trusted her not to tell Wells that I murdered his father. Bellamy walked back to the fire, his guilt and desire for acceptance and understanding fading and excitement rising at the sight of Harper and one of her shier friends who was looking at him and blushing.

...