❝you better call it, coulson, 'cause i'm starting to root for this guy.❞

-clint barton, thor

♛

BELLAMY SHOVES RATIONS INTO a bag like an apocalypse is coming for us. We may as well be leaving for months with how many of the small pouches of nuts he's dumping in the sack, which is much too big for the short distance we have to travel. Then again, maybe he's thinking ahead about all the supplies we'll have to bring back and I'm just being too suspicious of him.

I stand with my own bag slung over one shoulder, my jacket unzipped and hair pulled back in a ponytail. The air is getting crisp with the coming of fall and winter, but I can't help but feel overheated with all that's going on. The bag seems like a weight on my back that's pushing me down.

I stand beside Bellamy as he packs the rations. I would've helped, but he insisted on doing that himself, leaving me with nothing to do as we wait for Clarke.

"That's a lot of rations," she observes after watching him stuff another handful into his bag. "You realize this is a day trip."

I lift my hand and let it fall to my side with a smack. "I tried telling him that. Apparently he doesn't know how many hours are in a single day."

Bellamy shoots the both of us a look as he closes the green bin that the majority of the rations are in. He zips his bag shut and picks it up off the ground. "A lot can happen in a day."

Bellamy slings the bag across his chest and adjusts the strap on his shoulder. He briefly glances at Octavia, who stands at the door of the dropship, watching us go. I sigh and follow after Clarke as she walks through the open door of the wall. After walking a few yards, I turn around upon noticing there are no footsteps behind me. Bellamy still stands at the opening, staring at Octavia with one hand on the strap of his bag.

"Bellamy," I call, coming to a complete stop as Clarke walks on. "Are you coming, or are you just going to stand and stare at your sister?"

Octavia can't possibly hear me from where she is, but she ducks back into the ship as if she can. The curtain falls closed behind her and completely conceals the inside. Bellamy pulls his lips into a thin line. I know he's worried about what Octavia will do while he's gone, but he needs to let her be independent.

He turns and starts trailing after Clarke and I. I wait until he's beside me to start walking beside him, taking careful steps over the incline. "You know," I say as I step over a large rock, "you have to learn to let Octavia be her own person. I know you want to watch out for her all the time, but you can't. You have to let her live."

"It's dangerous out here," Bellamy responds gruffly. "I have to keep her safe."

"And she knows how dangerous it is," I point out, trying not to sigh in exasperation at how hard it is to reason with him. "But that doesn't mean you have to babysit her. She'll never grow up that way."

Bellamy's eyes lock on the ground. "Maybe I don't want her to grow up."

An hour and a half later, Bellamy, Clarke, and I have reached an opening from the woods. The trees here are a lot smaller and thinner with no leaves on their bare, skinny branches. They're barely taller than us but grow closely together, causing us to have to walk around them carefully as to not get poked in the eye.

If anyone has spoken within the last half an hour, I wouldn't know. All of my focus is trained on my small notebook that's clutched in one hand as I jot down notes with my pen in the other. I write which way we've walked, what our surroundings are, and why we decided to take the routes we did. It's more of an in-case-we-get-lost kind of thing. My years of stealing on the Ark have trained me to be able to multitask better than the average person. Though my focus is trained on what I'm writing, I'm also fully aware of what's around me.

"You know," Clarke begins as she ducks under a branch, "the first dropship's gonna come down soon. Pretty sure you can't avoid Jaha forever."

I scoff as I quickly scribble a messy sketch of the dead trees around us. The dried-up leaves crunch beneath my boots as I walk. "Watch him."

"I can try," Bellamy retorts harshly. He reaches over my shoulder and holds a branch up out of my way. I turn and raise my eyebrow in amusement.

"I knew that was there," I inform him, then focus my attention back onto my unfinished drawing.

"Just a precaution," Bellamy grumbles beneath his breath. I can practically hear him rolling his eyes. "We're here. You might wanna put that away."

I sigh and close the notebook, sliding the pen into the metal binding before reaching back and stuffing it into a pocket in my bag. We've arrived on a hill that overlooks a completely demolished area. Piles of stone and rubble surround a lake that I'm pretty certain isn't supposed to be here. The half-destroyed building at the far end looks like some sort of marble architecture, with columns holding the remaining structure up. Once again, Earth fascinates me. It's almost impossible to believe that people may have visited this place regularly so many years ago.

"The depot is supposed to be around here," Clarke explains, holding a map firmly in both hands as she scans over the area. "Somewhere."

"There's got to be a door," Bellamy says as he looks over his shoulder. It's almost as if he expects someone to be standing there, waiting to take him away right at this instant.

"Maybe he'll be lenient," Clarke says in a quiet voice. She seems to know exactly what he's saying without him having to explain.

"Look, I shot the man, Clarke," Bellamy retaliates harshly, voice sharp and words concise. "He's not just gonna forgive and forget."

"We'll figure out a way, Bellamy," I tell him as I start backing up down the hill, taking slow steps so I don't trip and tumble down it. "He's not going to execute you. I won't let him."

Bellamy glances at me briefly with an unreadable expression on his face. His brown eyes meet mine before he says, "Let's just split up, cover more ground. Stay within shouting distance."

Bellamy travels to the right side of the lake, staying on the slope of the hill while Clarke and I move closer to the water. My eyes search carefully but quickly through the crumbled stone and yellow grass. The air is crisp and smells like pine. My breath forms little white clouds from how chilly it is, and I watch it float up and mix with the overcast sky above. I've never seen it do that before.

"I just wanted to say I'm sorry for whatever I did to make you hate me," Clarke mostly mumbles as she kicks aside a clump of leaves. This takes me completely by surprise and I glance down at her with my eyes wide. She chuckles humorlessly. "Fallon, I think you've forgotten how well I know you. I can read your emotions more easily than I can read a book."

My heart gives a little clench at her words. It's almost like how we're back on the Ark, when we were fifteen and I hadn't gotten caught yet.

"I don't hate you, Clarke," I tell her honestly with my voice splintering under the weight of my emotions. "I could never hate you, no matter what you did. I just feel like you don't care anymore because of Finn."

"Finn..." Clarke trails off, her eyebrows pinching together in thought. "You're right. I have been spending a lot of time with him, haven't I? I'm sorry that we have barely had any time to catch up."

I swat my hand. "It's fine. I'm okay now, and there's nothing to worry about."

But there is. I'm way too nice to say it out loud, but I know that I'll always feel a little resentment when I see Finn. There's something about him that sets me on edge, like he's keeping more secrets than there were prisoners on the Ark. It's not Clarke I'm upset with anymore. It's him. I guess it really isn't fair, but I can't shake the feeling off that he had hurt her in some way. I can tell by the way she acts around him. She had said she can read my emotions more easily than she can read a book. That truth is the same for me as well.

Clarke kicks at the leaves again, and this time her foot connects with something hard. She doesn't even wince. Instead, she yells up to Bellamy, who is somewhere above us judging by the distant sound of his tomahawk. "Bellamy!" The noise of metal against metal stops and he appears on the slope above us. "Over here. We found a door."

I crouch to my knees in the dead grass and start clearing it away. Sure enough, a metal door reveals itself. Clarke tugs at it; it doesn't budge.

"It might be rusted shut," I inform and move a little closer, wrapping my bare hands around one of the two cold handles. We pull at the same time and it still doesn't move in the slightest.

"Here," Bellamy says, sitting at the edge with his tomahawk in hand. "Clarke, watch your foot." She jumps slightly as he hacks away at the hinges, ramming the weapon into them with such force that they break. "Okay. Give me a hand."

Bellamy grabs the handle that I hold as well, and the three of us are able to heave it open. He lets out a grunt when it's finally all the way open and the pale light from the cloudy sky shines into it. A shady-looking staircase is just barely illuminated enough for us to see.

I go first, slipping down and landing my feet on the third step. Careful not to touch anything, I balance myself and begin my descent down the steps. Countless cobwebs hang from the ceiling to the railing holding up the stairs. It looks like the depot hasn't been touched since the last humans left Earth.

Once I get to the bottom, I turn and wait for the others. Clarke rummages around in her bag and produces three lights. She clicks them on and hands one to both Bellamy and I.

"Really think this place hasn't been touched since the war?" Bellamy questions, shining his light to his left.

A sigh escapes my lips. "I can only hope so, but judging by the filth I can guess it hasn't."

A few more steps to the right lead us to another staircase. The depot gets colder, damper, and much more dark the deeper we go. Soon all we have to see with are our flashlights. The air smells stale with the rotting scent of mildew. We come across a decaying skeleton on the way down, shrouded with webs and the clothes still hanging on by threads.

"Hell of a place to die," Bellamy comments, shining his light directly on the bones. A shiver runs down my spine as the memory of the entrance to the Grounder territory returns to my mind.

That staircase finally leads to the end. It's cold as ice down here, causing my hands to clench. I didn't think to bring gloves.

"So much for living down here," Clarke says, directing her light over more spiderwebs and tattered cloths. "This place is disgusting. Damn it!"

"Anything left down here is ruined," Bellamy mutters with distaste.

Clarke leans over a large while barrel, taking a look inside of it. "They must have distributed most of the supplies before the last bombs went off."

"Hey, we have to at least look around," I tell them sharply. "We can't just give up without even trying."

Bellamy opens one of the large crates and discovers orange glow sticks. He cracks a few and lights them up, tossing them around several random areas as an extra source of light. The warm glow is barely enough for us to see, and it's still way too dim not to use our flashlights as well.

I open a crate, shining my light inside to discover orange cloth inside. I reach my hand in and run my fingers over the material. It's thick and soft to the touch. "You see? I found blankets. Do you know how much these will help during winter?"

"Excited about a couple of blankets?" Bellamy scoffs as he lets the lid of his crate fall shut with a slam.

"Well," Clarke huffs in annoyance, "at least it's something!"

"How about a canteen or a med kit, or a decent fricking tent?" Bellamy shouts angrily, storming deeper into the depot in search of things that might be more useful to him. He slaps his hand on a barrel, discovering no hollow sound that echoes back to him. He pries the lid open and dips his fingers in. Apparently whatever that's inside is nothing of importance, because he steps back and kicks the barrel down with an enraged yell.

I jump in shock and whirl around, watching with widened eyes as the container falls to the ground with a clang and some sort of oil spills out onto the floor. There are clatters of other items falling out that sound like-

"Weapons," I breathe, rushing toward the fallen barrel as quickly as I can. I almost trip over something as a result of the poor lighting. I duck down at the mouth the container and examine the contents that had fallen out with intense curiosity.

Bellamy joins me, crouching down and picking up one of the guns that lay on the ground with a chuckle of disbelief. "Oh, my God."

"What?" Clarke questions in a slightly alarmed tone. She quickly bounds over to us with a look of concern on her face.

"Fallon's right," Bellamy responds with a delighted smile, raising one of the guns up to show Clarke. "Wanna learn how to shoot a gun?"

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i left the chapter ending like this because the next chapter is super hype!! it's 3,000+ words and it's so action-packed that you'll be breathless

get excited for that!

-kristyn