A/N: Thank you for sticking with me as I know it's been an awfully long ride. Let me know what you think of this chapter my lovelies. The more reviews I get, the more inspired I feel to write – it's bribery at its best!

Disclaimer: All things The 100 related belong to Kass Morgan and the writers of the amazing TV show – the rest is mine!

Chapter Sixteen

Bellamy

Bellamy came to his senses feeling as though he'd been beaten over the head with a baseball bat or two. Repeatedly. Blood tickled his cheek as it trailed anew from the corner of his mouth, and the wound there stung as he licked it away. He grimaced up at the smoggy sky as he strained to recall the big son of a bitch, dressed like a cave man with the attitude to match, who had been heading straight for him with his primitive weapon held high. That was before a sharp pain as something impacted with the base of his skull, and then nothing. What the hell had happened?

"There you are!" He jolted upright like a marionette with pulled strings, supressing his pained groan when his head throbbed murderously, and watched as Raven and Miller bounded towards him across the scene of the battle. Roan trailed behind them, his eyes assessing the damage wrought by the attack with what Bellamy now recognised as his usual solemnity.

He was surprised to see so much destruction himself. Fire had swept through the village whilst he had been unconscious and demolished most of the huts at the centre – a brutal but effective tactic. He looked away from the charred remains of bodies, his gut churning at the stench. The structures closest to the forest seemed to have escaped damage for the most part, and it was there the clan's survivors were clustered, seeing to the injured with faces shocked and angry and bloody.

Raven knelt at his side and reached out a hand to his forehead. "Are you okay? What happened here?"

"I'm fine." He knocked her hand aside gently and pulled himself to his feet, ignoring Miller's censuring look and extended hand, even if he probably could have done with it. Both the help and the reminder to at least be civil. But Bellamy wasn't in the mood to be civil. "We were ambushed."

He leant against the nearest tree for the only kind of support he was willing to accept, and searched the closest huddles for his fellow captives. His eyes darted from one huddle to another, anxiety increasing in larger increments when he failed to recognise a single face.

"Where's Octavia?" At their shared looks of confusion, he raised his voice. "Where's my sister?!"

As though he'd been queued by a director for maximum dramatic impact, Artigas chose that moment to stagger out of the forest, his hand clasped weakly against his bleeding side. He looked pale and liable to collapse at any given moment, but his eyes searched out and met Bellamy's with resolve he might have respected on any other day.

Bellamy wasted no time in reaching his side. "Where is she?"

"Gone." Artigas gasped softly. "I tried, but there were too many."

"I told you to look after her!" His temper hit a boiling point between one breath and the next and he unconsciously reached out to shake the younger man.

"Come on, man." Miller grabbed him and held him back. "This isn't helping anyone."

Bellamy didn't struggle, knowing Artigas couldn't take the brunt of his anger, injured as he was, yet also knowing his anger was just finding an outlet, any outlet that stopped him from blaming himself. He pulled himself out of Miller's grasp and grabbed his own head in frustration. "Ever the voice of reason, huh, Nathan?!"

"Oh, grow up, Bellamy." Raven eyed the audience they'd attracted from his heated display and he knew he needed to keep a lid on his feelings. But it was his sister. He was sworn to protect her from the unlikely age of seven, no way could he just accept that her safety was out of his hands.

"Fuck!" He kicked out at the broken remains of a smoke house roof and delighted at the awful clanging sound it made. Inside he burned brighter than the remaining fire embers with the need to act, to reap revenge and rescue his sister.

"Has anyone seen Lincoln?" Roan's calm felt a little like the stillness before a storm as he broke the weighted silence.

Bellamy looked around and sighed. Partly out of additional worry, but also out of relief. Maybe if Lincoln was gone too, then his sister wasn't as alone as he feared. The defected Trikru warrior had proven himself a loyal and protective man, a decent man, and knowing he might be doing Bellamy's job for him put things in a different perspective.

"He's not among the dead." Anya approached them with a contingent of wounded warriors, looking no less fierce for that fact. "They must have taken him too."

"Who were 'they' for that matter, while we're all feeling so talkative?" Bellamy kept the growl in his voice to a minimum.

"Reapers." said Anya.

"Care to elaborate?" he forced himself to remain still, even as he ached to ring her mono-syllabic neck.

"Reapers are made by the mountain men. They steal our strongest warriors and turn them into their pet monsters." Roan answered with cool reasoning infused in every word. "Azgeda did not suffer so much from this affliction, but Trikru does because of their proximity to the mountain."

"And so, the rogue prince returns." Having caught her attention, Anya circled Roan with a calculating eye. "There is a price upon your head, splita."

"Do you feel that you can take me in, heda?" Roan's tone was mocking enough to make every warrior bristle.

"I know someone who would be very interested in speaking with you." Anya smiled tightly.

"Speaking?" Roan laughed, the sound vibrating in his throat as though he did it rarely. "Is that what Lexa calls it?"

"We don't have time for this." Bellamy placed himself between them. "How do we get our people back?"

Anya turned to face him and he thought he saw a flash of pity in her eyes before it was covered by grief and acceptance. "Nobody comes back from the mountain."

"That's not an acceptable answer to me." Bellamy crossed his arms over his chest to show he meant business.

"Me neither." Raven and Miller stood at either shoulder, echoing his sentiment. He was shakily proud of their loyalty in that moment and something inside of him clicked into place.

He stood tall and infused his words with strength. "We didn't come down from space, survive hostile negotiations with the natives, a toxic land and all its challenges, like, say, ferocious wild dogs, not to mention a traitorous group of soldiers intent on imprisoning us, just to give up when some mountain tribe decides it wants some of our people."

"The mountain men are more like you than us." Roan said.

"Good." Bellamy said. "That means they'll understand what we mean when we say we can and will obliterate them without a second thought if they don't give us back our people."

Roan smiled faintly. "I would also guess this was a distraction from our main aim."

"Clarke!" Raven exclaimed. "You think they've taken her and the others too?"

"Too much noise." Anya said. "Too many disturbances to the peace. The mountain men don't like it when there is war – they especially don't like it when your weapons are used – guns and explosions are cause for much concern."

"So that's what Lincoln meant." Bellamy said the words aloud without thought.

"Only one way to find out." Miller said. "We track them down and wreak havoc."

"It's what we're best at after all." Raven was grinning as she spoke.

"Are you with us, or are you willing to give up on your people so easily?" Bellamy met Anya's eyes without restraint.

"I am curious to see what you can do." She nodded. "So, for now, I will accompany you."

Her warriors protested vociferously but she shut them down with a few choice words. "Borga and Hayle will accompany me. The rest of you must travel to Tondc and let Heda know the news. The injured must also be seen to."

"What happened to Nyko?" Miller asked. Bellamy wanted to kick him for giving away the fact they knew who the village healer was, but other than an assessing look, Anya asked no questions.

"He was among the taken."

"Alright." Bellamy turned and headed straight into the forest. He chanced a look back at the warrior woman with her strangely beautiful and haunting eyes. "Does this mean we have our treaty?"

"We will see, Skaikru leader, we will see."

It was enough for now, to be joined in their rescue of their people. To be hunting down the bastards who had taken his sister with every intention of making them suffer. The rest was sheer politics, and he'd leave that for his co-leader, when they eventually caught up with her.

They were roughly thirty minutes into their tense journey when a large crashing noise reverberated throughout the forest, trembling the soil, causing the branches to sway and shaking even the smallest of leaves from their anchors. When the earth settled beneath him, Bellamy turned to look at his equally mystified companions.

"What the ever-loving fuck was that now?" he said.

Octavia

It was a sad state of affairs that Octavia could think of quite a few occasions in her short life thus far where she'd been scared out of her mind. Despite that, she honestly hadn't felt this kind of sheer confusion and terror in a long time. Maybe not ever.

Even when she'd been hidden under the floorboards on the Ark – when she'd struggled with such a keen sense of loneliness and depravation, she'd known deep down that she wasn't completely alone. Her mother and brother were on the other side of the floor. Bellamy's voice was all the reassurance she'd needed to stay silent and practise infinite patience. And besides, the cubby she'd occupied for much of her childhood was familiar. A strange comfort, even. There was nothing familiar about her current situation.

All around her grounders were trussed up and practically hog tied to each other, and she was among their number, doing her best to blend in with the crowd. Lincoln and Nyko were the only faces she knew, and they'd been restrained with the other males ahead of her – herded like so many sheep through the forest. It was chilling in the extreme, the sense of impending doom. Lincoln sent her reassuring and fierce looks – the kind she would have expected from Bellamy, had she found herself in this situation with him. It helped, a little.

Then there were these new reapers – vicious, harsh looking people who made the grounders look like little Savages in contest with the adult rabid dogs they'd encountered while searching for Front Royal. The first time one of them spoke she couldn't contain her shock – she'd expected nothing but grunts and snarls based on their appearance and observed behaviour. But they were organised – they had a clear leader, and a clear idea of where they intended to take their captives.

She'd almost let that lull her into a false sense of security. They were safe for the time being – time to figure out an escape route. But then one of the grounder women had unsurprisingly decided to fight for her life – she'd found a way to free herself of the bindings and made a run for it. A bash to the head with a rock had ended that rebellion fast and hard. But that wasn't what had tremors running down Octavia's arms and quivering in her legs. The reaper, a scarred looking thing with hair so wild and overgrown only one eye was visible, had licked the bloody rock. As though that was the signal – a bell tolling 'time to feast you crazy barbarians' – they swarmed the fallen warrior and…ate her.

If she was younger, she might have peed herself in fright. But she held it in, rolling stomach and panicked mind, as though the pee might attract the sharks in the metaphorical water.

After that, there were no signs of dissent. Shocked silence on her part and a strange kind of defeat from the others. She wasn't sure how the 100 had managed to survive so long without running into these strange, new grounders, but she could only thank whatever gods might exist that they had. They wouldn't have survived if these not-grounders had been set loose among them in those first days, and she shivered anew at the thought.

Not long after the cannibalistic feast had ended, they had approached a large wall of ivy that seemed incongruous in the forest. The reapers seemed enthused at the sight of it, and she knew they had entered their domain when a naturally camouflaged door was opened to reveal nothing but darkness. She lost sight of Lincoln and Nyko once they moved into the tunnels – the always-night enveloping her and stealing all her senses but for the cold seeping into her bones.

Up ahead a light gleamed, a miraculous warmth that began the process of unfreezing her mind. Was Bellamy going out of his mind with worry right now? Probably. But that just meant he was on his way to get her – if anyone could be counted on to pursue her to ends of the earth – literally where she felt she might be by now – it was her big brother.

"Ah." A cold, calculated feminine voice murmured. "Line them up here."

The tunnel had ended in front of a metal hatch, propped open enough for Octavia to glean bright, white lights, but nothing further. She watched the woman in a yellow full-body radiation suit observe them through her clear glass viewing panel. She was pale, despite the brown skin tone that spoke of her Asian heritage, and her eyes were both assessing and dismissive at once.

Octavia found herself pushed to her knees in the dirt, but didn't so much as squeak out a protest. Looking to her right she realised she'd been miraculously placed next to Lincoln, and that small bud of hope that had arisen at the thought of her brother coming to rescue her grew infinitesimally larger.

"Whatever you do." Lincoln leaned into her, his words a mere whisper against her cheek. "Don't let them realise you're different."

The woman began a slow prowl up the line of weary warriors, like a panther stalking its prey.

"Harvest."

"Harvest."

"Harvest."

And so on. Every time she spoke, more people appeared from behind the door and dragged the condemned away. When she reached Lincoln, Octavia held her breath. The woman hesitated too, and it could mean nothing good.

"Mark this one for the Cerberus project." Her eyes gleamed nastily.

And then Lincoln was being pulled from her side, his eyes stubborn, and fearsome, and telling her to hold on because he wasn't going to be separated from Clarke for long.

"Harvest." The woman dismissed her like the others. As she was dragged away, the last in line to receive her fate, she watched the reapers drop to their knees one by one like puppies and wait for the wicked long syringe filled with bright red liquid the woman now held above their heads.

Clarke

Harsh light bled through the frail skin of Clarke's eyelids, turning her world a fluorescent crimson spider-webbed with fine veins that throbbed in time with her heart beat. She groaned and furrowed her forehead to scrunch her eyes more tightly closed. The rest of her senses came back online slowly, like a failed reboot of an old computer. Soft mattress cradling her body, slight clinical smell to the air – the kind that reminded her of the medical bay back on the Ark and all her times interning with Dr Rogers - the faint mechanical whir of an air processor, a chemical taste in the back of her throat, a large, warm hand clutching hers reassuringly.

Wait. Her eyes shot open – her pupils rapidly dilating to lessen the shock of so much white. White walls and floors and ceiling. Bright white lights. Medical equipment and…was that priceless artwork hanging on the wall? Where in the hell was she? More importantly, who in the hell had a hold of her hand, because even temporarily blinded as she was, instinctively she knew it wasn't Lincoln. Too clammy, too smooth, too tight a grip.

Clarke turned her head to the side, a deadened sensation in the base of her stomach. Floppy brown hair framed a familiar face, one she couldn't in good conscience say she was happy to see, even if it was well-known and doing a darned good impression of glad to see her.

"Finn." Her voice was raspy and she gritted her teeth. "What's going on?"

"You're safe, Clarke." Finn leaned further into her personal space, his grip on her hand tightening to the point of pain. "The important thing to remember is that no one can hurt you now."

Clarke pried her hand loose with insistent tugs and sat up. Finn reached for her pillow to fluff it up, but her warning glare must have been impressive because he diverted his hands to fiddle with the edges of the sheet instead.

"Where are we?" She searched the room for clues, finding none beyond the obvious presence of a camera in one corner and another by the door, their blinking red lights indicating they were at this very moment being recorded. More clinically designed furniture by way of a white leather sofa and coffee table filled the sparse room. The only messy things appeared to belong to Finn – a littering of empty food wrappings and water bottles, a scrunched-up blanket and indented pillow telling her he had been here a while. Set up camp as though he had every right to be in what was clearly her hospital room of some kind. "Why are you here?"

"This is the mountain, Clarke." Finn smiled in that way she used to find cockily adorable. "The people who live here have sworn to help us. They're not primitive like the grounders – they have tech, and proper schooling, and a president, and cake…wait till you try the cake."

Clarke observed the fanatical glint in his eye with a swirling stomach. "While cake sounds tempting, I'm afraid I'll have to decline. Where are the others?"

"Let me take you to them." He reached for her hand again and she drew it back out of reach. His smile turned a little sour. "You'll learn to trust me again, it'll be just like before, you'll see. I've helped you save our people – we're all finally safe."

"How long have I been here?"

"The effects of the drugs took their toll on you, you've been asleep for nearly 20 hours."

"Take me to the others." Clarke pursed her lips and pulled the IV from her arm before Finn could think to help her. Now that she thought about it her body did feel rather well-rested, so that was something.

She slipped off the side of bed before he could reach for her again, and indicated with a tilt of her head and an open arm that she was willing to follow him. He approached the sealed door, and with a quick nod back to the camera, it whirred open and allowed them to exit. She eyeballed the lens as she passed.

"Why was the door locked?"

"Some people have adverse reactions to waking up in an unfamiliar place, so they tell me." He shrugged his shoulders. "You should already know this, what with your doctors training."

"It wasn't common practise on the ark to lock people in their rooms remotely." Clarke said.

"Just easier here, I guess." Finn led her towards a dated elevator and pressed a key card to the service panel to activate it. "As you can see," he waved his key card in front of her, "once you've been accepted into their society there are no restrictions on your movements."

"Oh, I see alright." She mumbled under her breath. She saw he'd become enamoured with the idea of these people, of this place…and unfortunately, of her staying here with him. They had drugged her, and kidnapped her, however well-intentioned they thought they were, she wasn't buying it.

The elevator jolted to life beneath them and delivered them down to the sub-level fifth floor with a rumble of metal against metal and squealing brakes. When the doors clanked open, a wave of noise greeted Clarke. Contrary to what she'd expected, it was the sounds of celebration and excited conversation. They followed the plain brown corridor until it opened into a large dining area. The members of the 100 who had been in captivity with her were mingled and similarly outfitted amongst a colourfully dressed population she didn't recognise and instinctively knew were the inhabitants of this mountain. They had pale, pale skin – the kind that hadn't seen the sunlight in generations – and she started to get an inkling of the situation down here.

The assembly ate from real china plates, food taken from heaped platters, cups filled with colourful drinks. It was a little like Clarke imagined the tea party might have been in Alice in Wonderland, only with less whistling and mad acrobatics. Finn was right, there was cake – rich, chocolate-icing dripped confection the like she had never seen. It instantly made her mouth water. Priorities, Clarke, priorities.

"See." Finn's breathe was an unwelcome warmth at her ear. "See how happy they are? They're finally home, Clarke. You've done it."

"This isn't home." Clarke stepped away from Finn but turned her body to face him. "What happened to the Diana and her guards?"

Finn scowled. "They were a little less cooperative when they woke. They'll need some more time before they can be integrated with the general populace."

"Meaning?"

"Why don't I let President Wallace fill you in." Finn said. "You'll like him, he's an artist too."

A distinguished grey-haired gentleman in a three-piece suit left his spot at the head table and approached them with measured steps. He held out a pallid, fragile hand for her to shake, and not wanting to appear rude or contrary, she took it firmly in her own.

"Delighted to meet you, Miss Griffin." Wallace said. "You're devoted friend here has told me so much about you."

"He has?" Clarke raised an eyebrow.

Finn blushed and looked down at his feet. The move felt calculated to Clarke, and the uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach swelled out of control.

"I'd be interested in hearing what else Finn has been telling you." Clarke said. "But firstly, I'd like to know how soon I can get out of here."

"Leave?" Wallace frowned. Finn shifted at her side, his body so tense she reacted accordingly and tightened her hands into fists at her sides. "But why would you want to leave? You've only just awoken and it's dangerous out there, as I'm sure you can attest."

Clarke met this clever man's eyes with a fierceness he could not mistake. "Because this isn't my home, and the rest of my people are out there, in danger, as you say, and likely wondering what's happened to me."

"Sir." A guard approached, a gun strapped casually to his hip. "Cage needs you in security."

President Wallace, as it happened, did know how to look something other than genial and innocent. He sent his guard a scathing look. "Not now."

"But sir." The guard lowered his voice. "There's a problem with the new Cerberus intake – one of them is loose."

"I see." Wallace nodded his head sagely at those cryptic words. "It seems my attention is needed elsewhere at this moment, Miss Griffin. Finn will take you to the bunk room assigned to you, but I'd be delighted if you would have breakfast with me in my private quarters tomorrow. We have much to discuss."

Knowing when to feign compliance for her own gains, Clarke nodded regally. "I'll look forward to it." Not.

Wallace walked away in hurried strides accompanied by his guard. When Finn tried to take her arm to lead her away, Clarke snatched it out of reach.

"You can't have forgotten." Clarke said. "Because it wasn't that long ago. But I belong with Lincoln – that hasn't changed."

There was a nasty light to Finn's eyes before he turned away, hiding his expression. "Everything changes, over time."

"Not this, Finn." She said. "Not this."

He waved her forward, his body still far too close for comfort, as though she hadn't spoken at all, and she began to realise that being in this strange mountain society wasn't her biggest problem. Convincing Finn she didn't belong with him was starting to feel like a top priority. First though, she felt a need to discover where Diana had been taken, and Dax along with her. If they were being uncooperative, their treatment would be a good indication of what she'd be dealing with the moment she made a play for her escape.