It surprised him how much seeing Jasper the next day after his shift made him feel better. Jasper usually made Monty feel better when he felt like ass, but Jasper was currently recovering from a surgery Monty hadn't been a fan of. But when he went to visit him, Jasper was still coming off the high of the painkillers they'd given him post-op, smiling inanely and talking about how pretty Maya's fingers were. It went a surprisingly long way to quieting the memories of Harper's helpless whimpers in his mind.
He had planned to stay the better part of the morning but Jasper, the eternal lightweight, had passed out again not twenty minutes after Monty had shown up, and the medical staff had seemed pretty sure he'd stay that way for hours at least. Besides, while the distillery wasn't up yet, he still had a lot to prepare for the mash solution that would eventually become alcohol; stealing pounds and pounds of sugar and cornmeal would not be easy in a tightly guarded camp. Still, he lingered a few minutes longer, and even stopped by the airlock to check on Maya and her dad before heading out.
Clarke and Bellamy were walking out of camp several meters away when he left Medical, and when they waved in greeting, he smiled and waved back and felt good about it. It felt like a step forward.
This entire day felt like it could be a step forward. And it only got better when he got to his and Miller's spot and found a group of 5-6 extra people. He couldn't even be annoyed that so many people now knew about the place when Miller was standing back and directing people on where to dig, where to be careful, and periodically consulting the list he had written up.
"Hey," Miller called as he approached. It drew the attention of the delinquents in the rubble, who all yelled out a cheerful mix of greetings. When Monty looked confused, Miller grinned and said, "Apparently there's some interest in getting the Unity Juice flowing again."
Monty grinned back at him and surveyed the small group.
"We've already got a few things from this list," Miller reported, "though I'm starting to think this pile of crap is just a pile of crap. What we've got already came from these guys' tent areas. And if it's not here, I don't know where we're going to get some of this other stuff, although Fox somehow managed to get her hands on the little airlocks you need for the barrels."
"Ah, yes!" Monty exclaimed, his fists coming up for a half-fist-pump. The list was almost evenly split between the most mundane items that would never be missed, like plastic or glass jars or tubs, a way to generate heat to boil the mash, etc., and things they'd be lucky to ever be able to find, like the airlocks. "Speaking of difficult things, I snuck this out after my shift." Monty said, revealing the soldering iron he's kept hidden inside the length of his jacket's sleeve. "I'll bring a battery from Mecha when it's time to use it."
"Nice," Miller said, taking the iron and placing it with the small items set aside against the wall of Alpha.
"Now we need to deal with the mash."
The irony was that if they'd been on the Ark, this would have been Monty's wheelhouse. He was born and raised on Farm station, he knew every in and out and had smuggled out what he needed undetected for years before they caught him. But here...
"Don't worry about it, I've got Monroe and Harper on that. We should get the first shipment soon."
Monty didn't understand but sure enough, not an hour later, Monroe and Harper were back with three other delinquents carrying satchels over their shoulders.
"This enough for the first batch, bossman?" Monroe asked, flipping her satchel's cover to reveal at least a pound of dried corn kernels.
"If you all got that much? Definitely. Won't be huge, but it'll be enough," Monty said excitedly. "It just needs to be ground."
"Give me a hammer and you'll have it in an hour," Harper said, her eyes alight with promises of violence.
"We really want more of a grinding motion, but I like your enthusiasm," he said. She cocked her head to the side and shrugged to indicate she understood.
"I'll be taking another group out for the sugar when the shifts change," Monroe continued, handing her satchel off to Harper to dump with the rest. "And I caught up with Octavia before she left - she's going to get us some fresh water, so we don't have to worry about taking that from camp."
Monty grinned and looked at their growing pile of supplies. "What a difference a day makes."
"Just gotta find the right cause and people will trip over themselves to sign up," Miller said with a lazy smirk.
Unfortunately, that morning marked the peak of their luck. Monroe had trouble getting any decent amount of sugar; cornmeal could believably be used in great quantities for bread, but they weren't exactly in a position to be ending each meal with a dessert so justifying pounds of sugar wasn't working, especially since the Ark had found small, wild corn fields they could start farming but there wasn't exactly a repository of cane sugar around given that it had never grown in this half of the continent. Yeast was even more precious and no one in the group even knew where its stores were being kept.
They had also exhausted their options for materials pretty quickly after that first day. They had all the common things, they had Fox's airlocks, and a few things Monty could take from Mecha and replace later, but they still needed a thermometer and copper tubing and he had no idea where they'd get them.
They went a few days without anything to add to their little pile and Monty was starting to think it was a sign to stop. The food stores were small, and if they were hoping to bring in the inhabitants of the other stations, they'd have to be carefully rationed. And there was a reason the parts were hard to come by, they were literally living in a disaster area, camping out like the refugees they were. Just because it was a step-up for Monty and the rest compared to the early months, that didn't mean the new inhabitants of Earth should go without for the sake of his promise to a friend.
Things weren't getting better at his shifts in Mecha either. Monty went in every morning, staying longer and longer until he was in real danger of being spotted. He'd tried to set a quiet alarm but he would get so focused that he wouldn't hear it. Raven and Wick had started coming in earlier, to relieve him in person, but they brought news he wasn't happy to hear.
The first piece of news was that the long-range radio was finally working. Monty already knew that because he'd been the one to flip the switch the first time. Then, Chancellor Griffin and Kane showed up and he'd had to rush out the back way. He'd learned later that while the radio had been operational for hours, and they'd been transmitting every hour on the hour, there had been zero response. From anyone.
The second piece of news came a few days later from Monroe, who'd been told by Octavia that between the expected trajectories of the stations and the Grounder knowledge of the area, they'd been able to map out at least four probable locations for for their missing stations. Unfortunately, the Grounders' knowledge amounted to "it's too dangerous, we don't go there". They'd been in meetings with the Camp Jaha higher-ups for days trading intelligence and trying to find a way to get there safely, but the knowledge ate at Monty, and he was interchangeably anxious and relieved that he'd never gotten a look at that map; he didn't know if he could sit around the camp knowing where his parents might be and not try. He just had to have faith in Clarke and Bellamy, and the others. They didn't let anything stop them from rescuing the mountain prisoners, and they wouldn't rest until they found their surviving people either.
But in the meantime, Jasper was still Medical, Monty was still attempting (and failing) to sleep in the Jordans' tent, the work he was qualified to do in Mecha had all but dried up, and the still was going nowhere.
That's how he found himself pacing outside the entrance of Clarke's tent the next day while she held a meeting. He was sleep deprived, biting his lip raw, and trying to come up with a convincing argument for why she had to let him join in the council (or whatever they were calling it now) again. He'd wanted time for himself away from this side of things but it was fine, he was fine, he needed to be involved again. He needed to know what was happening, he needed to do something or he was going to scream and run for the gates on his own.
Finally, the meeting ended and Commander Lexa and her Grounders left, barely deigning to glance at him, and he was about to rush in when Clarke followed them out. She looked surprised but happy to see him and Monty thought he could probably string together the words he needed to get in on this, but then she said, "Hey, I've been meaning to come find you. Miller told Bellamy you needed this."
She pressed a long thermometer into his palm, which he quickly slipped up his jacket sleeve on reflex.
"Where-"
"Don't worry about it," she said, and if Clarke wasn't worried, he wasn't either.
"Thanks," he said, dumbly, as if that's what he had come to see her for.
"Thank you," she said with a mischievous wink before jogging away to catch up with the Grounders.
At least it was something to add to the pile.
He hadn't visited their spot in a couple days, having had no reason to without more supplies, but when he got there he found it was very different from how he'd left it. A large tent had been erected, for one, and inside was what had once been a haphazard pile on the dirty ground but was now a work space that could rival the one he used in Mecha. Everything was laid out on three metal tables shoved together, and it looked like every piece had been meticulously cleaned. And from the far corner of the tent came the faint but distinctive smell of the fermentation process well under way; the girls had been able to get the sugar and yeast.
His hand curled tightly around the thermometer, though carefully. It wouldn't do to break one of the most important pieces. Gently, he laid it on the table next to one of the funnels.
"Okay," he said aloud. "Let's get this party started."
He cracked his fingers and reached for the metal lid that would be modified to fit a cork-protected thermometer.
He wasn't disturbed until hours later, long after he'd prepared all he could prepare and sat himself down in one of the two chairs that had been set up in the corner and stared, eyes unfocused, gazing in the general direction of his half-built contraption.
"Wow," Miller said, after pausing upon seeing Monty in the tent. "That certainly looks like progress."
"I have to go to the drop ship," Monty murmured through the index fingers propped against his lips, eyes not moving.
"Forget your favourite socks?" Miller asked, his tone disbelieving.
"I need the copper tubes from the other still," he replied.
"It's not happening," Miller protested.
"I need those copper tubs, Miller," he insisted, a faint buzz of anger worming its way into his chest.
"We'll get them somewhere else, Monty," Miller said, stressing his name mockingly. "I don't know if you've noticed but we've gotten every other impossible thing on your list. We'll get this too, it'll just take a little more time."
"Time," Monty scoffed. "We have less of that than anything else."
"What?"
"We're not going to find those tubes in Camp Jaha, Miller," Monty said, springing up from his chair and throwing his arm out towards the camp. "Do you know how precious copper is? It's in everything, but it's vital to everything. Medical uses it for gas, Maintenance uses it for plumbing, Farm will be using it for refrigeration. You open up almost any necessary system and you're going to find copper. We're literally surrounded by it but you can't just rip it out of the walls and expect people not to notice. Not to mention it's needed. This other crap, people can get around it or we've got extras for months to come, but anything using copper is going to be important and we can't just steal it. We may be delinquents but we're not…we're not that."
Miller looked stunned, but he didn't argue.
"I have to go to the drop ship," Monty repeatedly, far more calmly than he should have been after such an outburst. He picked up the satchel he'd packed hours early when he'd first realized what he'd have to do, but he didn't make it to the tent flap before Miller's body was in the way.
"You're not going out there," he insisted, his face gentle and understanding but unyielding, all in the perfect ratios to piss Monty off.
"Get out of my way," he said, pressing his hands to Miller's shoulders to move him without trying to shove him. Miller easily grabbed his wrists and dislodged his hold.
"We need that tubing!" Monty all but yelled, trying to tug his wrists out of Miller's hands and feeling a familiar helplessness claw its way up his throat and threaten to choke him. "Don't you get it? This still doesn't work without that tubing. All of this was for nothing without it. Everything you did is meaningless without it. We need it!"
"The drop ship's been declared off-limits, it's not safe, and we don't need booze more than we need you," Miller said, his voice rising too.
Monty yanked harder and his wrists were finally released, though they were immediately sailing back towards Miller to properly shove him this time.
"Oh wow, off-limits? I am completely shocked," he yelled sarcastically. "Is there any area outside these gates that isn't off-limits? For months we wandered blindly around these woods and got picked off by Grounders and acid fog and poisonous food and somehow we survived that but now suddenly we can't step four feet out the gate without a 90% chance of death? My ass. They are out there and stumbling like we were and they're going to be picked off by whatever the hell they landed in and we're just sitting here. I have to go!" He shoved hard against Miller again but his forearms were trapped this time, by gentler hands than before. Gentle enough that he grew confused and didn't struggle out of the grip immediately.
"They?" Miller repeated pointedly. "I thought you were going for the drop ship."
"I-" Monty's brain tripped when he replayed what he'd just said. "I was. I am. The tubing…"
Mortifyingly, Monty could feel his face crumpling, so with a shaky sigh, he let his head drop heavily to his chest. Neither said anything for a few moments, but Miller slowly released his forearms from between them to have the room to step closer. Close enough that Monty's forehead was naturally resting on his shoulder, which was a blessing because he was really so tired. Monty could feel Miller's fingers lightly over his back, barely pressing into his shirt as if he wasn't sure if he was allowed and Monty wanted to show him he was, but he was too comfortable to move.
"I didn't want it to be for nothing," Monty whispered into Miller's shirt some time later.
"It won't be," Miller replied quietly.
"It will be," he explained matter-of-factly. "I can't substitute the copper for anything else, and there's no usable copper outside of the drop ship still. If we can't get to it, we've got nothing but broken promises and shattered expectations."
Miller snorted unexpectedly, which jerked Monty's head off its resting place. When Monty looked up to glare disgruntledly at him, Miller's eyes were laughing and his lips were pursing as if he was keeping in laughter.
"Shut up," Monty said, swatting his side ineffectively. "I'm obviously sleep-deprived."
"Obviously," Miller agreed with exaggeration.
Monty was about to rest his head on his shoulder again for no other reason than it felt good, but Miller took his arm and turned him towards the other end of the tent where some sleeping bags had been left.
"Get some sleep," Miller ordered, letting Monty flop down onto one of the unrolled bags and unzipping another to act as a blanket. "Leave the copper to me."
"You can't go out there alone," Monty said, sitting up to physically stop him from leaving.
"I'm not going anywhere," Miller replied. "I'm not about to get eaten by a triple-headed lion or whatever the hell else is out there waiting for us."
"Then where-"
"You're sleeping," Miller interrupted, pushing him back down onto the sleeping bag. "I'm worrying about the details."
Satisfied that Miller at least wouldn't be leaving on a suicide mission, Monty agreed, though it was mostly lost in a gigantic yawn. He thought for a moment that he should be getting up and going to the Jordans' tent before he fell asleep. And then he thought for a moment that Miller's shoulder would probably be even more comfortable lying down. But he was unconscious before he could act on either thought.