Bellarke One Shots

Janitor Blake

A/N: I got this prompt off of Tumblr before 3x13 came out when people were wondering what the flashbacks would be about. Finally a canon-verse one!

"You've got a new cell to clean now, Blake," the man said, leering at Bellamy wickedly. "A new girl just got brought in; a little wild, a little reckless, and plenty stupid. Just like your mistake of a sister."

Bellamy resisted the overwhelming urge to punch his superior across the jaw, knowing he couldn't risk any more drops in the system. At least he could indirectly protect Octavia as a janitor, check in on her status through other workers. If he let his temper dominate, he could get floated, and who would protect O then? So instead he gripped the mop in his hand, pretending it was a knife. Screw you. I'm not afraid, he thought, thinking of his mother, and nodded. "Yes, sir."

He had to wash out the solitary confinement cell routinely; the girl who resided there was never present when he did. For the first while it was the same agonizingly boring cleaning he always did; then, one day, he walked in on a different room entirely.

Paintings blossomed across the dull gray space, and though they held no color they were the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. They showed so clearly things he'd never seen but dreamed of, animals and trees and the look of the night sky from beneath the atmosphere. They weren't the drawings of a jaded amateur trying to kill time, either; they were the sort of paintings that should be framed and put on wall; the sort that should be carefully kept and dusted; the sort that should be treasured. He didn't even know prisoners were allowed to use art tools, especially on their own walls; perhaps this girl had some high standing among them, a princess of the lot. With art as beautiful as this, he wouldn't be surprised to know she was royalty.

Bellamy hefted his mop in his hands, liking his job even less now. It was yet another way the high-class people treated everyone else like trash—this girl deserved to be enjoying the good life of the Ark, interacting with people and going to parties and being given canvases to express her incredible talent. She didn't deserve to be doomed to die at eighteen years of age like Octavia, and doomed to be a life-long prisoner like himself. He may not have had a cell, but bars still surrounded him.

It was the reminder of those bars and his current inability to escape them that moved Bellamy's hand, and soon enough he was wiping the cell clean of the designs, and all the hope and individuality that came with it. He kept his face as blank as the blank walls appearing from behind the rich grayscale, and with each push he pretended the mop could scrub away the unsettled shifting in his chest as easily as it could paint.

This ritual went on for quite a while. Each time Bellamy came into the room, gripping the wooden mop like a vice between his fingers as if it could splinter under the power of his will, he expected to be used to the art he was forced to destroy. Each time, he found he was wrong. The more he scrubbed, the stronger the art came back, as if the cell's resident was challenging him. That the best you got?

He wondered about this girl he was facing, this princess, sometimes. Well...more than sometimes. A lot. Every day, maybe. How could he not wonder about someone when he was in their room constantly? When he was one of the few who saw their expressions across the walls, the floor, the ceiling? When she could be anyone, someone he once knew even? He'd heard people discussing her, but her identity and the reason for her imprisonment were kept a secret from him. This made him a little frustrated, but it also fueled his curiosity about her, and he fantasized about what she looked like, talked like, acted like. Some days she had his dark skin but green eyes and the sort of smirk that could make your brain go into overdrive. Other times she was compassionate and blonde and could make you feel alive by just brushing her hand against yours, or bold and wide-eyed, or ready to fight back no matter what you said or did to her. It was fun to imagine her, a quiet thought in the tumult of a storm, but in the end he didn't really care about her skin tone or the tenor of her voice or if her smile crinkled up her eyes; he just knew he'd like her.