A long overdue chapter!

"Hope you enjoyed the show"

Bellamy fought the urge to charge back into the makeshift cell at the mirthless chuckle he heard through his earpiece, choosing instead to rip it from his ear and stalk towards the room Monty had setup their base of operations in.

The room was as he'd last seen it, the monitor blinking the same frustrating message, situation unchanged with the targeting system and Echo's mission. He sat himself down and stared hard at the machine, wiling it to update and give him an opportunity to focus on something other than the rage and frustration swirling in the pit of his stomach at the exchange he'd witnessed between Clarke and McCreary. At one point, Monty ducked into the room and handed him a radio, explaining that he and Murphy were monitoring the same bandwidth and could check in with him if anything changed. After that he'd been left alone to stew once more, listening mindlessly to the idle chatter between Murphy and the others crackling over the narrowband.

He sat there for what could have been hours before the hatch opened again, Octavia approaching him with a frown and Indra trailing behind her faithfully. Bellamy gave his sister a long look, and the two siblings exchanged frowns in silence for the next few moments before Octavia spoke.

"Word is, you had a bit of an altercation, brother," she started. Bellamy said nothing, taking care to keep his expression as blank as possible. Octavia's gaze flickered to the tick in his jaw as his teeth clenched, and he thought he saw a hint of a smile cross her face.

"It's nice there's still some of the same old Bellamy in there after all, but I've got to wonder what he said to bring out that side of you," she contemplated, tipping her head to the side to consider him. "You seemed determined to keep a level head over the past few days. For him to have gotten through that facade so easily... I'm surprised"

Bellamy shifted, letting out a frustrated sigh and looking away from her.

"It wasn't anything, Octavia," he deflected. "Clarke was in there with him and-."

"Oh that explains it," Octavia interrupted, smirking broadly at him, her eyes widening with the realization she'd had. "You always were quick to react when you thought Clarke was in trouble," she concluded almost brightly. Bellamy watched her move around him in the room, coming to stand behind the monitor to face him front on. She sobered quickly as she considered him, her tone becoming derisive.

"Does she still need you coming to her rescue?" She asked, eyes hardening. "Still your princess?"

Bellamy's eyes flickered between the monitor and his sister's stare, a heavy feeling starting to settle in his chest. Her tone echoed McCreary's questions to Clarke, and it pulled him back into the rage he'd been feeling earlier.

"What do you want Octavia?" He queried coldly.

"Nothing you can give me, apparently," she returned quickly. She considered him for a moment longer before letting out a sigh of her own. Whether from frustration or exhaustion, Bellamy couldn't tell. "I'm just here to tell you that we'll be moving the prisoner up top within the hour. We won't be letting him fight in the pit. We're building gallows instead, so people can see what becomes of those sympathetic with the enemy." She kept his gaze as she spoke, letting the information seep in before slowly making her way back to the door.

"There's no great wisdom you or Clarke have to offer me in regard to McCreary. So his usefulness has run its course. You clearly have no way to get him to tell you anything," She continued, shaking her head dismissively as she moved around the room. He heard her huff out a laugh and turned to meet her eyes again, seeing a mirthless smile spread across her lips.

"Besides threatening to beat his head in, that is," she jeered, cocking her head to the side again as she stared him down. "And I'm more than capable of doing that on my own."

Despite her tone, her eyes softened as she reached the door and her smile dropped, a look of what Bellamy could almost describe as sympathy taking over her face.

"You might want to stop trying to protect everyone, big brother. We all spent a long time learning to live without you down here. The world has moved on."
Indra lingered for a moment after Octavia left, casting him a worried look of her own before sweeping out behind her Bloodreina.

Bellamy stared after them, a frown etched deeply across his brow. His mind stalled, stuck between all the different ways people had told him same thing in the space of a few short hours. The world had changed after he'd abandoned it… it had moved on, it didn't need him to protect it anymore. All that amounted to was something Bellamy wasn't willing to put words to; something he wasn't willing to lose, despite years of thinking he already had.

His mind wandered for a second before he reeled it back, conjuring visions of Clarke's warm skin under his fingertips a few nights previously, the way her lips had pouted at his teasing only hours earlier.

Bellamy gave his head a fierce shake, standing from the bench and moving to head out from the bunker. He radioed Monty to take over in front of the monitor before leaving, mind cloudy and unfocused as he progressed through the hallways with no true destination in mind.

Clarke was by the rover again, this time alone. Her encounter with McCreary and Bellamy had left her more unsettled than she cared to admit, and she'd reacted instinctively, itching to run away and regain her bearings. She'd hopped into the rover and had shifted it into gear moments before she realized there was nowhere to go; settling instead for driving it to the furthest border of the makeshift campgrounds, facing the direction of the valley. She'd sat behind the wheel staring at the scorched landscape ahead of her and had lost track of time, weighing her options once again. Her thoughts circled around and around to the same conclusion. They were trapped.

Madi found her shortly afterwards, letting her know that she'd be with Gaia at the temporary construction site the grounders were erecting within the ruins. Clarke had asked what it was for, but Madi didn't know, saying that she'd only been told that the novitiates were helping to cart supplies. Clarke had seen her off with her customary farewell of "be careful," and had set about busying herself with the Rover.

Now, she was counting bullets; shifting each slug with her thumb before dropping it into the box she normally kept under the driver's seat.
In the last few days the rover had been drained of its supplies, and she found the haphazard state of the vehicle increasingly vexing. The handguns she normally stored overhead the driver's seat had disappeared, and the preloaded clips in the console were gone too. So she was taking inventory, carefully noting each lost item and growing increasingly irritated at the situation she found herself in.

She knew her friends had needed supplies to mount their rescue attempt, and normally she would have been more than relieved to know they were properly protecting themselves. But the last few days had left her reeling in more ways than one, and the unexpected pilfering of the rover added to the sense of theft she was feeling over the whole situation.

What was hers had been taken from her, and logically she had no right to ask for it back. No right to feel the deep lurch inside her chest every time she thought of all the things she felt some sort of ownership over. But the lurch came anyway, each time she pictured the main source of her dejection. So, she tapped into the earlier frustration she'd felt at his interference with McCreary. His stupid arrogant assertions. The moronic way he'd manhandled her. His idiotically cute freckles and his dumb beautiful mouth.

Her frown deepened, and she started tossing each bullet more forcefully into the box, thinking instead of the possible routes the conflict could flow towards. The optimist in her hoped there could be a parley between the grounders and the Eligius crew. But the realist was already planning an escape for herself and Madi. There were some natural cave systems that she'd found a year or so back, and while supplies were sparse, it might be possible for them to survive there for a while if needed. Or at least it might be somewhere for Madi to hide while Clarke figured things out.

Clarke sobered further, halting both her planning and her movements. There were so many other factors at play now. So many more people she had to consider the survival of. Her mind wandered again to Bellamy, the family he would refuse to leave behind. And Madi, pledged to serve Octavia and her mission as a member of Wonkru. Clarke felt her mind shifting back around to her earlier conclusion, they were trapped.

McCreary was trapped… momentarily. His hands had been lashed to piece of rebar exposed in the shitty ruin they'd jostled him into moments earlier. The handcuffs were gone, replaced with a piecemeal rope that smelt like stale blood and rot. Through the decaying walls, he could hear the unmistakable sound of construction, no doubt the gallows their Blodraina had been crowing about earlier. The doorway was blocked by a hulking grounder he'd heard referred to as Tendo.

But McCreary saw him as no more than a temporary impediment to his freedom. Although his exact thoughts weren't nearly as finessed or free from expletives.

The truth of the matter was that McCreary prided himself on being, above all other things, tenacious. It had led him in and out of trouble all his life, and had turned him into a creature of unshakable ferocity. It had turned him into a man of honed instinct when it came to survival… a man with a keen ability to sense weakness in others.

And since his arrival to the bunker, McCreary had been inundated by weakness. The quiet desperation of the bunker's young leader, the perverse nihilism of the boy who had captured him… and above all, the shared weakness of the lone survivor and her wayward champion.

That was the weakness he thrived on. He saw the way it tethered them together in the few moments he had watched them. The way they carried it in the strained composure they tried to keep around each other, the martyrdom they seemed to perversely drown themselves in.

McCreary watched the two of them and felt a strange sense of glee at the prospect of tearing them apart. If he were a different man, born of a different time, he might wonder where his motivations for sabotaging such a tenuous connection stemmed from. Instead, he felt only a pressing need to insert himself as close to its nucleus as possible and bear witness to its inevitable doom.

It was this motivation that bore him through the tedious hours he'd spent locked up in the bunker, and his subsequent transfer back to the surface. His survival, of course, was always near the forefront of his mind, but it was the thought of raining down emotional devastation on his new enemies that filled him with joy.

It had been especially satisfying watching the boy, Bellamy, break in front of him. He'd been thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to make the girl squirm as he crowded her against the table, but seeing the rage flooding Bellamy's eyes was just as sweet.

That was the sort of weakness McCreary loved, the kind that distracted you from seeing what was right in front of your face. It was exactly that weakness that had allowed him to slip the knife from the young man's belt without anyone noticing.

He'd relished the weight of it in his boot ever since. And now, as he finished slicing through his restraints, carefully watching the back of the temporary impediment guarding the door, he smiled.

Bellamy found himself watching the construction of the gallows once he'd left the bunker. It was a strange sight. Either the grounders didn't know what gallows were, or Octavia had used the words without knowing herself. As it was, the structure seemed more like a stage. Pieces of sheet metal and concrete had been brought to a clearing close to the centre of the ruins, and they'd been piled carefully to create an elevated platform sturdy enough for the weight of five or so people.

The only part of the structure that remotely resembled gallows was the pole they'd built the platform around. But even that looked like a means to secure someone, rather than hang them.

He'd seen Madi and some of the other children as they'd helped to scavenge the supplies. She'd met his stare with a guileless look but hadn't stopped to talk to him. She did stop with a few of the children, however, to stare and whisper at the guard standing in a doorway at the other side of the clearing. He'd watched them as they took turns walking as close to the doorway as possible, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever lay behind the man's hulking presence.

He'd looked on in fascination for a while longer before moving further through the ruins, finally catching a glimpse of the rover as he made his way to the outskirts of the campgrounds.

Clarke was busy counting supplies again, and Bellamy watched her from a distance, contemplating the way she carried herself with no one else around. Before long he found himself moving towards her, feeling determined and weary at the same time.

She stilled at his approach, and he watched the way her shoulders tensed as he moved up to settle against the rover. She looked up after a moment to meet his gaze wearily, and he tried giving her a tired smile in greeting.

She didn't return it. Instead her eyes searched his for a moment, brow furrowed, before she frowned further and turned back to her work. Bellamy continued to stare at her profile, noting the way she brought her bottom lip between her teeth while she sullenly continued sliding bullets into the clip in her hand.

"What do you want Bellamy?" she asked finally, not looking up. She chucked the loaded clip onto the seat in front of her, picking up another to repeat the process . Her movements seemed fluid and practiced, and Bellamy imagined it was something she could probably do in her sleep. It impressed him, but there wasn't much Clarke could do that didn't impress him at this point.

"I wanted to apologise. For how I reacted back there," Bellamy started, trying to gauge her reaction. "I shouldn't have lashed out at you like that. I thought McCreary was trying to hurt you, and I reacted." It was a lie, but Bellamy didn't need Clarke to know that. She didn't need to know that every word coming out of McCreary's mouth made him sick to the stomach. That the thought of McCreary touching her in the way he'd inferred made Bellamy want to break the prisoner's teeth.

"I just wanted to make sure you were ok." Another lie. It left a foul taste in his mouth. But there must have been something in his tone that sounded like contrition, because Clarke's gaze was softer when she looked up at him again. He wondered if he was imagining the way her eyes misted as she continued to stare at him. She looked away and gave her head a gentle shake.

"Bellamy," she murmured, and Bellamy was sure there was a quiver to her voice. "I appreciate you looking out for me. But you don't need to do that anymore." She was still looking away as she spoke, and as she paused she huffed out a sigh and focused on the half-finished clip in her hands again. "There are other things you need to prioritize. You've got people you need to be looking after now. And I-," she started sliding the bullets into the magazine one by one.

"I've been looking after myself for a long time," she nodded to herself, and Bellamy saw her face harden again. "I get that you can't help jumping into big brother mode whenever you see someone you think needs help, but I've learnt to live without that." She thumbed another bullet into the clip. "And you're not always going to be there to save the day. So I don't want that from you. I can't let myself indulge like that."

Bellamy frowned, and he felt himself growing annoyed at her tone, suddenly indignant at her seeming dismissal of him. He moved forward to cover her hand with his own, halting her movements and forcing her full attention back on him.

"Indulge?" He asked, almost incredulously. "In what? Asking for help?" His grip tightened around her hand, and he found himself scowling at her, unsurprised to see her glaring back at his tone. "Listen Princess", he hissed, the nickname leaving his lips reflexively. "You don't get to dictate who I decide to help. You're pissed that you might have to rely on someone else again? You don't get to decide that you're done with me like that."

Whether it was the nickname, or his tone, his words seemed to unleash something in her, and Bellamy watched her glare turned scornful. She wrenched her hand from his grasp, abandoning her task to face him head on and shove him against the rover.

"Done with you? Fuck you," she spat at him. "I spent the last six years waiting for you to come back." She shoved him again, "knowing that you would come back." Another shove. "I spent six years with a hole in my heart because none of you were by my side. Because I was waiting for you to come home." She stepped back from him, shaking her head as her mouth crumpled.

"What did you do? You thought I died? You mourned me?" Clarke scoffed, almost mockingly. "You buried the thought of me in the ground and moved on. You spent the last six years making sure there wasn't space for me in your life. You leave me out of every decision you've made since we got to the bunker, and all of a sudden you can't handle the thought of me not wanting your help?" She went to shove him again, and the frustration in his gut blossomed into desperation.

"That's not what happened," He returned, fiercely. He let her shove him again and brought his hands up to trap hers against his chest, spinning them until her back was braced against the rover. A moment later he had her wrists held in one hand as he moved to grasp the back of her neck with the other. His fingers carded through her hair as he brought their faces closer, forcing her to meet his eyes. Somewhere behind them a commotion was kicking up in the ruins, but he ignored it, matching her angry gaze with the growing desperation of his own.

"I never let go of you," he continued, voice a near whisper. "Every move I made up there, I imagined what you would do. What you would think." His fingers tightened in her hair, and he kept his eyes locked on hers, holding her gaze. "I missed you every day. You were my best friend."

Clarke met his stare for a moment longer while he held his breath. But whatever she saw in his eyes had her shaking her head gently, and Bellamy watched as her face crumpled into sadness. She tipped her head back, her eyes closing and her lips pursing tightly.

"Clarke," Bellamy pressed, wanting badly to know what she was thinking. "Say something, please." She just shook her head, her bottom lip starting to tremble. "Please," he repeated.

*...*

The blaring of a warning horn broke through the moment, and Bellamy tore his gaze upwards to start scanning the sky. The radio at his side crackled to life, and Murphy's voice hissed across the narrowband.

"Bellamy, we've got an incoming ship."

Bellamy grabbed at the radio, stepping away from Clarke to search the horizon. Before he had a chance to reply, Murphy continued.

"And I don't know how they did it yet, but we've got the backdoor open to the eligius system. Monty's working on disabling their targeting system as we speak." Bellamy dropped his eyes back to Clarke's, catching the startled look she threw his way.

"Echo," Bellamy started, continuing to meet Clarke's eyes. He saw what looked like hurt flitter across her face before her eyes hardened. "Is she ok? Did she make it out?"

"I don't know," came the reply. "But that ship is coming in fast from the reports I'm catching down here. People are losing their shit. You need to get back down here ASAP."

Bellamy scanned the sky again before answering, unable to spot the ship that had the grounders scrambling.

"Alright, I'm heading down now. Let me know once you've got everyone together. I'll be bringing Clarke." He returned his gaze to her as she took a determined step towards him, her mouth settled into a frown as she began to direct a question at him. He continued radioing, cutting her off before she had time to interrupt. "Is Madi in the bunker with you?"

The answer came almost immediately, fraying Bellamy's nerves as he saw Clarke's worried frown intensify.

"Not yet," Murphy's voice crackled. "There are a bunch of kids that just came down with that Gaia chick, but she's not with them". Clarke's face crumbled further into a scowl, and Bellamy grabbed at her as she went to dash away from him. He pulled her back to him by the upper arm and held tight as she went to pull away again, radio forgotten in his other hand.

"Just wait a second," Bellamy pleaded in frustration, squeezing his fingers gently around her arm. Clarke was already turning her body away from him in protest, but he continued to pull her closer until he was practically hugging her arm to his side.

"I've got to look for Madi," Clarke returned, looking incredulously at his hand. "You need find out what's going on with the ship and Echo. Don't wait for us." She turned again to leave and Bellamy didn't hesitate to pull her back, bracing himself as she crashed against him, her face inches from his own.

"That is not happening Clarke. You have a bad habit of disappearing on me completely whenever you go off on your own." Clarke started to protest, and Bellamy continued, cutting her off. "We'll find her together, I'm not letting you go."

She was about to protest again when a new voice cut her off.

"How beautiful…"

They both turned sharply to find McCreary standing a few feet away, covered in blood, a gun levelled at their legs. He wasn't alone.

"I hate to interrupt such a heartfelt moment, but I was hoping to catch a ride. I even brought some precious cargo just for you Clarke." McCreary's mouth curled into a mocking grin, and Bellamy watched the blade in his hand shift against the neck of the young girl braced against him.

Bellamy's chest tightened as Clarke whispered Madi's name desperately, the grounder horn blaring around them.

Sorry it's taken so long for me to post an update! Hopefully you'll still want to see where this goes despite the show having moved in it's own direction since the last chapter! But if it makes you feel better, I've banned myself from spoilers until this story is done, so I'm only hurting myself by drawing it out!