He's visiting France sometime during the middle of the Ice Age the first time he meets her.
Bellamy is dressed the part: his hair is shoulder length after months of dodging his barber, his beard conquers half of his face, and he's laden with heavy fur pelts which he fashioned himself in his native time of 2196. Bellamy traveled smart; he came prepared.
The girl he notices perched in the branches of a leafless tree, however, didn't bother. She's wearing a powder blue ski coat, jeans, a knit cap with a pompom at the top, and a classic Jansport backpack with clunky headphones poking out the pocket. Not exactly Ice Age attire.
Bellamy hangs back from the stocky group of Cro Magnon he's been trekking the country with, pretending to fish for something in the depths of his buffalo skin satchel. He waits until they're a safe distance away to approach the girl and her tree. Her hands are flying swiftly across a sketchpad when Bellamy arrives at the base of the trunk. She doesn't even look up from her work when he coughs to grab her attention.
"Hey!" he yells up at her. The girl's gaze snaps from her drawing, and her blue eyes are filled with fear when they settle on him. "What the hell is wrong with you?" Bellamy whisper-shouts.
The girl blinks, jaw slack, oblivious to the wisps of blonde hair whipping against her face. "Wha-?"
Bellamy glances over his left shoulder, then his right, careful to make sure no one from this time period is around to hear them. "Do you speak English?" he asks her.
The girl's eyebrows disappear beneath her hat. "You speak English?" she balks.
Bellamy fixes her with a bored look. "Yeah," he deadpans. "I picked it up from the French cavemen I've been bunking with."
The girl frowns at him but doesn't argue. Instead she asks "are you a chrononaut?"
Bellamy hesitates, unsure of how to answer her. Chrononauts – government certified time travelers – haven't been around since before the third World War. He doesn't want to spoil her future if it's already his past.
He ignores her question and replies with one of his own. "When are you from?"
"2020," she tells him. "You?"
"2196."
"A 176 year age gap," she muses, and Bellamy can't help cracking a smile.
"What are you doing here, anyway?" he presses on. "You aren't even dressed appropriately."
She rolls her eyes, slumps against the trunk of the tree. "Sketching," she says, "and I didn't think prehistoric animal furs would protect me from an arctic chill as well as my insulated winter coat."
Comfort before security. Typical.
"First of all, it may be freezing, but we're nowhere near the Arctic," Bellamy argues. "Secondly, you're putting your life in danger by not going incognito about 1.2 million years in your past."
The girl snorts. "No one can see me up here."
"I saw you."
"Because you were looking."
"You're wearing 21st century attire in a barren tree during the Ice Age," Bellamy reminds her. "You aren't hard to miss."
She doesn't fight him, but she scoots down the branch she's sitting on until she is directly above him. Bellamy tilts his head back as far as it will go to look at her.
"Are you a chrononaut?" she asks again.
He wrinkles his nose at her. "Are you a chronoaut?"
She wrinkles her nose back. Her hand drops from her side and dangles over him. He reaches up and wraps it in his own.
"Clarke Griffin," she introduces herself. Her name rings a bell – a warning alarm, more like – but for the life of him he can't figure out why.
He gives her dainty hand a firm shake. "Bellamy Blake."
And this is how seventeen decades and two wandering souls are bridged together before Homo Erectus stands tall.
