So awhile ago I was talking about the fanfics I write to a friend, trying to get her to read some and maybe read a review and she goes, 'You know, I used to read that stuff a lot, but I don't really anymore. Oh! But you should write a Bellarke one! Yes, do that, I'll read that!" And I told her I probably wouldn't because there's already such a community of them here of people who have stood out that it's a little indimidating and also because I hate when people tell me because I'm a writer I HAVE to write this or that. Not that I wasn't going to be open to writing one if brilliance struck me with these two, and it did...at 12:00 midnight when I was doing a paper due tomorrow.
But I wrote it anyway, because I'm so excited.
Prolonged Summary (AU only that Clarke doesn't leave after season 2): After the fallout of killing everyone in Mount Weather, Bellamy and Clarke realize that the blood on their ledger is greater than imagined, and even together, closure and forgiveness seems hard to see in the future. But, after Bellamy inadvertently offers himself up to become the new 'Hades' or Lord of the Underworld- a job unoccupied since the nuclear war on earth- he begins to see familiar faces that is now his problem on finding a way across the to paradise. When Bellamy realizes he's begun to fall into the shoes of a favorite mythical god, he starts to put together the one thing that's missing from his own version of the myth; a Persephone, and Clark has an awful lot of things to work out in the underworld too. 'Modern' Persephone/Hades.
To Bellamy, books and stories were just simply magic in a form most didn't understand. But he never minded that as a child, because in a world where things he could label as strictly his was yanked away with the birth of an illegal sister, he liked having something just his. Not that he hadn't tried to tell Octavia about her namesake and all the other things, but she never seemed as enthralled as he did.
When he was a child, it was just stories from his mother. He suspected it wasn't to make her child smarter or worldlier than the others, but it was much easier to spin a tale that she didn't have to make-up herself to sooth a nervous two-year-old. His mother was never creative, despite her skills as a seamstress, and it wasn't until he was old enough to read that she revealed those wonderful tales of Achilles, Zeus, and Hercules didn't spring from her mind fully formed (Like Athena came from Zeus' head) but instead from well-worn books she kept carefully up on a shelf.
It might have ruined it for some children, the illusion of storytelling broken, but to Bellamy, he was elated. He didn't have to wait for his mother to be in a good mood to re-tell how Odyssey's wife tricked him into admitting it was he who appeared to her, but instead could read it himself. He could tell his mother was a bit relieved.
The older Bellamy got, the more he was grateful his grandfather before passing had been a curator and collector of these books on his time on the Ark, or Bellamy may have never heard of them, for few knew the stories as it were. To know such tales weren't pertinent to learning, and most terms and places were as fantastical to people as Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings book he had too. It was hard to imagine that Rome ever actually existed when they floated above it, miles and miles away.
It was awful to imagine that he would have been deprived his whole life of a passion-history and the classical myth. He prided himself that he even learned the basics of Greek and Latin, self-taught of course. For it was clear he would have never been able to allow such luxuries to enter his house, not when every combined dime of his and his mothers went to extra things to keep Octavia at least pacified. There had even been one heated discussion when he was thirteen when his mother attempted to pawn off the last known copy of Ovid's Metamorphosis because Octavia was sick and needed medicine from the black-market. It was a measly cold anyway, or else Bellamy might not have been so vocal about his anger.
"I have nothing that's mine, except these. I never asked for the other things kids have, but mom, please. These are mine. Don't you understand? They're mine."
Bellamy hadn't meant to cry then, because thirteen-year-old boys didn't cry. Yet he couldn't help it. It wasn't so much loosing the book itself, for he knew every tale by heart, but it was the thought that she had been ready to do it, give away another reminder of her father, with so little thought of how Bellamy might react, or even ask him? Maybe, if she'd asked, he mused, he might have even said yes.
But whatever he said must have struck a chord, for she never tried to sell them again. In fact, he was sure she never touched them either, not until a day before she was floated, looking over an old Roman encyclopedia with pages missing, turned to the page labeled 'Octavia'. Bellamy couldn't bear to touch that book for a long time after that.
Out of all the myths and stories he accumulated, his favorite by far was the stories of Persephone and Hades. By all means, those two shouldn't have worked. They were incompatible to the untrained eye. But there was meekness in Hades and fierceness in Persephone, the roles so radically reversed, that made it work. There were notes and a picture about some old animation that had portrayed Hades as a blue-flamed bad-guy, and Bellamy didn't care for that picture.
When he'd told his sister about it, expecting her to react with excitement like he had, she curled her nose and made a comment about how Hades seemed like a jerk and maybe the animation was right. Bellamy felt betrayed; he never had seen Hades as a villain. Just because someone worked with death didn't make him bad, nor because he maybe loved someone a little too much (and by all means, there were times it seemed Persephone loved him back), was that really a crime?
His love of the Hades myths turned him onto many times of deep thoughts about death. It wasn't a foreign idea to him. Even before his mother was floated, she'd always told him that his father was too, when he was younger. Or well, he'd died, and he'd been floated as a dead body because that's what happened. There was no room for literal dead weights upon the ark, not even ashes someone could keep in their room. It was unpractical, which a logical guy like Bellamy understood.
It still disturbed him, the whole parade of it. There were hardly enough room for shrines of the deceased, and it seemed as apart from stand-alone leaders, most people only recalled the dead within them, whatever form it might take. Some suffered silently, seemingly all right but then would break when they smelled their mother's favorite kind of food or saw someone wearing their deceased father's brown shoes. Some were in agony for days, and let everyone know. Some were in (cough, theatrical) agony for years and let everyone know. Some seemed, miraculously, unaffected and Bellamy always kept an eye on those. Someone who wasn't even effect by death in either way, good or bad wasn't someone Bellamy thought e should trust.
He was always told that they were sending their people back to where they belonged, but it felt more like an exile, a harsh sending off to the Underworld with no guide. No money to pay Chiron on the boat ride over left wondering on one side of the bank why they'd been forsaken by their family and friends, sent to a world equally dangerous and confusing, even still in death. That's what Bellamy disliked about it.
And he'd learned too from an early age, and even though the wiser he got the more he realized that perhaps his father wasn't exactly dead but had no wish to be around them, that no matter how good a kid was- that Bellamy went to class everyday, never cheated, always did his homework and helped his mom with chores, gave all his extra earnings to her to protect Octavia even though sometimes he really wanted an ice-cream cone from the main hall, and rarely ever spoke back even as a surly teen- it couldn't, by force of will and someone deserving of it- bring someone back from the dead. Not a father who was actually dead or a dead-beat deserter who might as well been.
And when his mother was floated, Zeus it hurt, but Bellamy stood and shook his head, biting his lip. Octavia wasn't even allowed to be there. The last time she saw her mother was before the party. Everything hurt, but death was as common as life.
That was something Bellamy reminded himself about on earth. After the death of kids on his watch, after the war with the Grounders, when he'd been selfish and all those on the ark had sacrificed for seemingly nothing, after everyone was killed on Mount Weather. It was all part of life. But it still didn't help him sleep at night. In his own tent, as everyone else lay sleeping soundly and for the first time in their life relaxed and eased, Bellamy stared at the holes that peeked out to the sky, not for the first time wishing he could go back to his room on the Ark where he hadn't caused anyone to die and no one blamed him. He would lay awake for hours, his mind reeling like a broken projector through all the deaths he'd caused. Zeus almighty, he'd killed children in there. Not even Clark, he'd pulled it too, he hadn't stopped it. What if this wasn't just them surviving anymore, but who they were? What if this couldn't be forgiven, not by himself or any other great force in the universe?
He never even thought of the possibility that across Camp Jaha, where Clarke laid next to her mother who slept soundly, she too was wondering the same things.
So, if you can already (or cannot tell) this story is not only a love story between our favorite leaders, but also a story of forgiveness and dealing with all the awful things they've both done. I mean, yeah, there's a ton of blood on their hands. Almost equal. Because of it, we are going to see some familiar but dead faces come back! Yay! (or not yay, depending of you disliked people with a burning passion like my hatred for Dr. Tsing)
Also the title of this 'Prota Exsileosi' is a rough translation from the Greek letters to english alphabet and it means (I think XD) First Atonement, as in they are starting a new on earth and this is the first big forgiveness that this new group of humans go through.
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