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It begins during the second generation of people living on the Ark. Children are born color blind, with no explanation, no birth defects to create the issue. They continue to be color blind until they meet someone, a certain someone, and then their eyes adjust and their world immerses in color.
After everyone realizes this, they pass it off as a response to the radiation from space. They say this is just natural selection, nature finding soulmates in the form of seeing color. It never changes, and people live knowing that everything would be okay once they find their soulmate. But, sometimes, nature doesn’t work the way everyone wants it to.
Clarke isn’t afraid of love, she looks forward to it. That is, until the day she meets Wells Jaha, and he tells her how pretty the blue bow is in her hair. He knows she is his soulmate, but Clarke’s world doesn't erupt in color when their eyes meet. She feels pity for him, but that doesn’t stop them from becoming best friends. They spend almost everyday together. Thelonius and her mother actually think they might be soulmates, that Clarke just refuses to open up to them.
Then, Wells turns in her father, and he gets Floated. Clarke vows then that she will never fall in love, not after witnessing her mother’s eyesight return to all the greyness it once was. She cries for her father, she cries for her mother, and she wonders about Wells, she had never felt such strong hate for someone before. She would have laughed at the irony of them being polar opposites if it was a different situation, but it isn’t.
Then, Marcus Kane arrests Clarke for treason.
Then the Ark sends her to the Ground.
When she came to in the Dropship, she was seething to find Wells sitting beside her. Soon, her outlook completely changes when she meets the Spacewalker, Finn. It’s like her entire world shifts. Clarke blinks her eyes a few times at him, taking in the color of his clothes as he speaks to Wells. She doesn’t let it show, though, because even though her eyes fill with a spectrum of colors, her heart tightens with sadness.
After Wells dies, and Monty makes all the wristbands go out, Clarke lets herself feel again. She tells Finn she wanted it to be him, that she knew he was her soulmate, that he made her see color. When they were out watching the night sky, Finn whispers in her ear that she made him see color too, and her heart soars.
It isn’t until Clarke meets Raven Reyes that her world shifts again. She helps Raven out of the pod, cleans her wounds, and tells her everything she can about the Ground. Until she sees Finn wrap Raven in a warm embrace, and kiss her softly, she sees color. After that, her world descends into a sea of grey once again.
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Bellamy knows he won’t find love. He knows he’ll end up like his mother, because that’s what she tells him when she comes home late, her breath reeking of moonshine. It’s what she says when Octavia is sleeping, and he is trying to finish his Earth Skills assignments. Bellamy know his world will always be dull and grey, just like Aurora Blake’s. So he dedicates his life to keeping Octavia safe. He keeps her quiet during surprise inspections, shares his rations with her so she gets enough to eat. Sometimes he imagines what color her eyes are. They don’t look dark, like his do when he looks in the mirror. But Bellamy doesn’t stress on that often, because he knows he’ll never find out. So he sticks to his life saying: Your sister. Your responsibility.
One day, Bellamy decides to do something good for Octavia. He lets her go outside, to the masquerade dance. She loves it, he can tell she’s having the time of her life. When the solar flare warning rings throughout the Ark, his throat falls into the pit of his stomach. When Lieutenant Chumway tells Octavia to ID herself, his heart shatters. When she gets taken away to lockup, and Aurora gets Floated, his life stops having meaning.
That is, when Lieutenant Chumway, now Commander Chumway, offers him a deal to get onto the Dropship to be with Octavia, he jumps at the request. Even if it means killing Chancellor Jaha, being able to see his sister again is all the motivation he needs.
Bellamy stands at the door of the Dropship, hand on the button to open it, when a voice yells for him not to open it, that the air could be toxic. He turns and what he sees makes him falter. A girl, not 20 feet away, with what was always described to him as blonde hair and blue eyes. Bellamy smirks as an attempt to seem indifferent to her, but he is screaming inside, because his mother was wrong.
But, after a few hours, he realizes she wasn’t, isn’t, even after her death. Clarke, this girl that makes his world completely different, enamours herself with the long haired hippie. After that, Bellamy makes sure that Clarke doesn’t realize his feelings for her, that she never will.
He convinces most of the camp to remove their wristbands, so the Ark won’t follow, so they won’t kill him. He tries to take Clarke’s wristband, too, but she’s like fire and he refuses to be burned.
Raven Reyes comes down, and Bellamy doesn’t help her, he just takes her radio and flings it into the river. When Clarke demands for him to help find it, he obliges, not for the Ark, not for the 300 people who will die, but for her.
He notices that she distances herself from Finn now, and Raven seems to have taken her place under his arm. He tears himself between happiness and sadness. He wants to have hope Clarke will realize it’s him she’s looking for, but he never wants to see her hurting.
Bellamy has never killed anyone. He only kills Dax because he hurt Clarke. Bellamy begs Dax to kill him, but it’s only when he slams his foot into Clarke’s stomach that Bellamy picks up a bullet and slams it into Dax’s jugular vein.
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Clarke watches as Bellamy shoves the only thing he had into Dax’s neck. Even in the dark, she can see her eyes react to the color of the freckles on Bellamy’s cheeks as he crawls up beside her. She asks if he is okay, and she pleads with him to come back to camp, to stay, with her. Clarke tells him she needs him, and it’s true. She thinks it’s strange that she notices how courageous he is now, instead of before, when she was busying herself with Finn.
In the cold, wet rain, Clarke pulls herself up into a higher sitting position in the mud and presses a kiss to Bellamy’s lips. She decides that if this is what a soulmate is, she’s glad it’s someone who leads people naturally, someone who stands tall when facing adversity. She’s glad it’s Bellamy. Bellamy breathes heavily as he crawls to Clarke, the adrenaline leaving his body, leaving him shuddering in the cold. He stares into her clear, blue eyes, shining in the moonlight for seemingly one last time. Then she asks him to stay, to come back with her. She calls him brave. Bellamy opens his mouth to protest when her warm lips press against his, and all the words that were on his lips are forgotten in an instant. If this is what fire tastes like, Bellamy doesn’t mind being burned.