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Kane had sent her away.

He had removed her from his security detail, had called her murderous, said she wasn't a warrior. And then, he had sent her away. She had been dismissed for doing her part to keep the peace because he didn't like the sight of blood on his hands, as if Kane was innocent.

Octavia had been in a bad mood coming into camp, and it only worsened during Monty's announcement, audible even outside the gates. She doesn't remember what number she was, though she is fairly sure it was one of the first. She remembers Bellamy's was one of the last. Someone blissfully unaware helpfully lets her know where her brother is as soon as she's inside Arkadia's walls.

"What the hell did you think you were doing?"

Her voice is pitched even lower than usual when she sees Bellamy in the stock room, hands in white-knuckled fists at her sides.

He doesn't turn. He doesn't even stop what he's doing, shelving a collection of objects held against his chest with his other hand.

When he speaks, he shoots for stern; he lands somewhere between that and tired. "Planning a last resort. You wanna yell about it too?"

"No," and she doesn't sound the least bit sincere, "but maybe you want to explain how my name was at the top of the list, because I know that wasn't Clarke's bright idea."

Clarke wanted engineers and doctors and women that would end up having a lot of children. Not warriors, not Grounders, not any other thing Octavia considers herself to be. This wasn't Clarke. This was Bellamy, and she hates it.

I didn't ask for any of this.

Bellamy does pause then, if long enough to shoot her a look over his shoulder.

"Sounds like you already have your answer."

It was obvious: your sister, your responsibility. But it goes farther than responsibility; Octavia is his sister, and he loves her, and no matter how strained things are between them, he'll always put her life first. All the more so, with how strained things are between them.

She looks like she wants to hit him, and if this day keeps getting worse she just might.

"What gave you the right to decide that for me? After everything you've done?" Her voice is low, still, teetering on the edge of trying to keep her volume down. Every word she has to speak with him feels like gravel in her chest. "Were you even going to use your spot if no one else found out?"

That's enough, at least, to get him to turn, a few pairs of binoculars still in one of his hands.

"What do you want me to say, O? You want me to apologize for putting you on the list? Because that's not going to happen." He'll apologize for nearly anything else, but something that could protect Octavia? The alternative is never an option. "Besides, I'm not using that spot, and I don't care who knows. After everything I've done," and he's sure to meet her eyes as he echoes her, "someone more deserving can have it."

Then he adds, as he turns, "You're welcome."

For putting her name down. For choosing not to go inside. Whichever she prefers.

"You think dying is gonna make up for it?"

She hadn't expected a response like that, somehow. Everything he does now blindsides her, because she's trying so hard not to see him, because every time she does, she sees Lincoln. Every corner of this camp, every line on Bellamy's face, every mark on her own, Lincoln is there. Lincoln is on his knees with a gun to his head. Lincoln is just a body laying in the mud and she's too far away to do anything about it.

It's better not to look, but that isn't helping her now, so she sees through anger instead. Advances and invades the space around him like this is conquering something, like this is progress.

"You're a coward, and you don't get to be a coward anymore," and she is pushing him back as much as she can against the shelving, arm up across his chest. "You don't get to die and leave me here," her voice cracks, just barely, and she compensates by shoving him, "and pretend you're being noble. You're not."

"Who says I'm making up for anything?"

Maybe he doesn't want to be stuck in Alpha Station for five years. Cooped up, with nowhere to go, no out. He didn't hate it at first like Octavia, even when his only memories of being there was having a loaded gun in his shaking hands. That had been in space; they were on Earth now, and they could give the place whatever meaning they wanted. But now --

Here is the Chancellor's office, Pike's old war room. There are the corridors he walked down; there's where he imprisoned Grounders; there's where he planned atrocities. And Bellamy was there too, everywhere, and he helped him do it all. He never liked the medbay before, but he spends less time there than ever.

He had the chance to give Alpha Station new meaning, but it's still just filled with his mistakes. There's no such thing as making up for what he's done; there's just the question of whether he's going to use up resources or not. He wouldn't want to waste the oxygen even before Pike, not since the culling.

("You're gonna have to earn it.")

Octavia shoves him and he moves back on instinct, shelves biting into his back when she pushes him. The binoculars fall out of his hands, but he barely notices.

"Since when do you care?" he asks, and shoves back -- not hard, but to try to get her off him. "You can't even look at me. You'll get your wish: you won't have to."

"Screw you," is all she manages to get out before backing away with another shove, harsher this time, and she glares right into his face out of spite.

But as soon as they're separated again, her eyes are on the ground, too wide and darting across the floor. On the binoculars, on Bellamy's muddy boots, on the scratches and dents incurred during landing. She keeps seeing Lincoln's face, his blood, and she wants to lash out but she can't. Something inside isn't clicking right, isn't going through.

If Bellamy dies, she'll be alone. And she doesn't know how to be alone.

"If you're outside," she says finally, daring a glance at his face and doing her best to sound sure of herself, "I'm outside."

"Hell no."

She can shove him; she can avoid him; she can hate him; she can beat him bloody; she can be angry; she can be miserable; she can do anything he would; and she can do anything he wouldn't. But she can't die.

"If I'm a coward, what'll that make you?" There's only one answer: dead. "Use your head, O. You've already made it clear how you feel about me. I got the picture. But this? Is my choice. You don't get to have a say in this one."

This isn't about Octavia, and this isn't on her. This about the world ending, this is about limited survivors, and this is about deserving. Which he hasn't, not since the culling, or Mount Weather, or since Pike. (Or since Aurora. He probably has Jaha to thank for ALIE knowing about that one.)

"It's my choice, too," she says, and it sounds empty. In her head, another version of herself is calling this weakness, screaming jus drein, jus daun, demanding he stand outside a window so she can watch him die and finally be appeased for Lincoln. It's an impulse that makes her hate herself, added to an ever growing heap she keeps burying over and over again.

Octavia looks at him, eyes a little too wide, mouth turned down at the corners in disgust: with him, with herself, with this planet. With choices she doesn't know how to make anymore and a person she doesn't know how to be.

She knows, though, that she can't be alone. She can't lose the one person left who knows her. The one person left who, like stone in a riverbed, shows her who she is.

"We're already dead, Bell. If you're outside, I'm outside."

Bellamy breathes in and out, sharp, shakier than he'd want. Anything involving Octavia cuts him to the heart, every time. He wants his sister back. He wants the Octavia who was excited to live life, who loved, who didn't have ghosts pulling her eyes so wide, vengeance seeping through her veins. He knows, down to his bones, there's no getting the old Octavia back. But he loves this one just as much, as much as it hurts, and wants her happy. Stable. Okay.

She couldn't be farther from that, and it's painful, and it makes him angry. It makes him angry that she hates him, and it makes him angry that she wants to have that and have this too -- whatever this is. Every awful thing she's said bubbles up, and that makes him angry, too.

"You don't get to do this."

It is easier to turn fear and grief and misery into anger than to understand them. Octavia is too far through this to go back and reassess, not now. Not in this fight. Maybe not ever, if they can't figure out how to live.

"I don't take orders from you," and her volume rises until she's shouting at him, ready to scream. "What are you gonna do? Stick me back in the floor?"

"No, Octavia," he says, and now he's shouting back. "You don't get to have it both ways! You don't get to cut me out and then tell me what to do!"

He's not allowed a lot of things with her anymore; and to an extent, he did that. But she also can't tell him how much she hates him every chance she gets and then force him to do something he doesn't want to.

He shouldn't, but he goes on, "You want to keep me alive so you can keep punishing me? Is that it? Because I'd rather see Monty live than do that. Harper. Miller. Indra. Take your pick."

She shoves him, hard. "This isn't about them," and another shove.

Monty. Harper. Miller. Indra. Octavia wants them to live, but she doesn't want to decide it. She's decided enough about who lives and dies, and it's a bearable weight with strangers, with cause. She doesn't want this with them.

Bellamy's weight she can't avoid.

"You don't get to leave me, Bellamy!" Another shove, and her eyes are wet and she continues on like she doesn't notice the blur in her vision. "If I wanted you dead, you would be," another shove, a punctuation and an emphasis. There is force, but no damage, no blood. This isn't the time in the cave.

"You don't get to leave me alone!"

When she reaches out to shove the last time, he lifts his arms to push hers away, off to the sides. He doesn't say anything about it but the message is clear: Enough.

"Alone?"

There's a level on which he understands that. The terror he always feels for Octavia's safety not just because she's his responsibility, not just because she's sister, but also because if she's gone, he won't have anything left. With their mother gone, he'd be the last of their family. And there are the others here in Skaikru, Clarke, everyone he just named, and more, but they would never ever be able to fill that hole.

"Compared to what you are now? Running away to Polis, avoiding me every chance you get? But that's supposed to be okay because I'm here? Because I'm supposed to wait for you." He takes a step forward, less aggressive now. "People don't wait, O. People aren't going to stay where you left them forever, until you're ready to deal with them."

He's slipped from arguing to teaching, wanting her to learn this lesson: this is what the world is like, Octavia. This is how people act. This is what's going to happen if you do this to everyone.

This is how you live with other people.

"One day you're going to turn around, and they'll be gone. Because that is what happens. And then you really will be alone."

Edited 2017-03-19 19:45 (UTC)

Octavia stills instantly, seething now instead of lashing out, and her cheeks are wet. The tears themselves don't even stop as she carefully schools her face from pained to something smoother, angrier.

This is something she should know. Should have known. Lincoln had changed, too, and she hadn't gone anywhere. They'd shared a bed, a life, and he still put on the guard uniform. He refused to run with her. He had always been steadier than she was, solid and aware, but he was different by the end. Different enough to choose death instead of surviving with her.

She remembers asking him to leave with her, to go to Luna's people. He had said they wouldn't want the attention from his kill order, but maybe that wasn't it.

Fighting is all you know. Death is all you know.

Maybe it was her.

"I was keeping Roan in power, like you wanted," she says through gritted teeth. "Like Kane wanted."

She wants to deny that she was running, but she can't because now she would kill (again and again and again) to be back in Polis listening to Kane moralize at her instead of here, talking like this, knowing she had her name on a list next to Jaha. A list her brother didn't want to be on. A list that meant survival. She doesn't deserve survival.

"You killed him," and she knows he didn't. She knows it was Pike with the gun in his hand, Pike that made the choice. But it was Bellamy, too. And it was her, too. It was Octavia who was there and couldn't get him out. It was her watching from a safe distance when her home, her heart, died in the mud. Maybe neither of them get to survive, maybe neither of them deserve it, but she doesn't want to live with other people.

It's both Blakes or none at all.

"If I'm alone," she says, voice low and dark, "it's because you decided to make me that way."

They say that if you hear something often enough, you start to believe it.

Bellamy knows that Lincoln's execution was not his call. He knows that he reached out to Miller and Harper, to Octavia, to stop it. He knows he wasn't even near Arkadia the day it happened, had no part in Pike threatening the other Grounders in lockup.

He also knows that he's culpable, that he helped Pike get and keep the position of power that allowed him to do these things. That he didn't argue hard enough against the extreme measures, that he was too willing to let Pike give him a target for his rage and grief. That however sorry he is about it now, he wasn't when it would've mattered most. He argued against killing the wounded, against taking the village, against the executions. But when Pike didn't listen, he did those things anyway. He agreed to help them massacre the army in the first place. He stopped Kane from turning Pike over sooner. He made himself blind to the factions of Grounders. That's the truth. That's on him.

You killed him. You made me this way. He is dead because of you. You're the reason they need saving. Everything that's gone wrong is because of you.

He's run out of defenses. And maybe the's the way it should be. But Kane had a point: it's more important to look forward right now than to look back. The most important thing is to figure out a way for humanity to survive the oncoming death wave. Everything else will have to wait beyond that, assuming any of them survive that long. And in the meantime, they save who they can save today.

No amount of wishing he can save his relationship with his sister is going to make it so. But he tried to save her life, and that's going to have to be good enough for today. Tomorrow might be different, or it might not; but since tomorrow isn't promised for any of them, it can be dealt with then. One thing at a time.

He exhales.

"Yeah," he says at last. "Maybe. But if I have my way, at least one of us is gonna have to live with that."

At least one of us is as much of a concession as she's going to get. Then he goes to pick up those binoculars, abandoned not far away on the ground, to put them back on the shelves; and after that, if she doesn't stop him, he'll leave.

Edited 2017-03-20 01:53 (UTC)

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