✧】xvi. another goddamn war【✧

[ unity day ]

"BE A NINJA," Amery mutters, thinking of Keaton's words as she and Monty creep through the dense woods. It's not quite the same as hiding in a dropship ceiling, but the principle is the same—don't be seen.

The wet leaves allow her to pad along unheard as she darts between tree trunks, a safe distance away from Bellamy and his hunting party. She tries to keep her breathing shallow, putting her feet where Monty steps, keeping her hood pulled low over her brow to hide her blaze of hair. She's less worried about being seen by Bellamy, because she doesn't really give a shit what he thinks. It's more that if Keaton sees her, he'll beg her to go back, and Amery is not good at saying no to Keaton.

She's also not good at listening to pleas for self-preservation, though, so maybe things will cancel out.

They must be halfway there by the time the sky lightens a bit, enough to cast little shadows of leaves across the ground. Amery's allergies apparently decide to wake up with the sun.

No, she thinks, no, no, no—

She sneezes, then goes absolutely still, hands clapped over her mouth as Monty spins to look at her. He looks torn between mild fear and a wild burst of laughter, and heat floods Amery's cheeks beneath her palms. Ahead of them, a group of heavy footsteps grinds to a halt.

"Hello?" Bellamy's deep voice calls out, and Amery presses herself against a tree. But that itch is still there, and she feels it before it happens. She sneezes again.

Keaton swears. "Amery Ekker!" he shouts.

Monty sighs, long-suffering, and holds up his hands as if surrendering to Bellamy's gun, slinking around the tree trunk to reveal himself.

"Okay," Keaton says. "Your turn, Mer." Amery stifles a groan and slides around the tree trunk, offering a frustrated Keaton and a furious Bellamy an overly wide smile. Raven only raises a brow at her, amused.

"Fancy seeing you here."

"Are you idiots?" Bellamy scoffs. Then he narrows his eyes at Keaton, redirecting his wrath. His attention shifts to Jasper next, then Raven, and for a moment Bellamy just looks at each of them, like he's deciding who's more likely to be at fault. "Well, they found out from someone."

Jasper shrugs innocently, Raven glares, and Keaton only sighs and tilts his head to the sky, which is apparently all the confirmation Bellamy needs.

"Sinclair, you are only here because Turner is out of commission," Bellamy barks. Keaton's face contorts at the sound of Cash's last name. "Step out of line and—"

"Keep his name out of your egotistical mouth," Amery drawls half-heartedly, lips curling into a smirk despite herself. Cash is probably on better terms with Bellamy than most of the camp is, but Amery still thinks Mr. Self-Designated Camp Leader is annoying and she hates that he's friends with her friend. So float her. "Listen. You can lecture and you can grovel and you can point guns, but we aren't going back. Keep us with you or let us tail you. Your choice." Her voice sounds steadier than she feels, but it does the trick, apparently.

She can't see Monty's expression from where he stands a few paces in front of her, but his shoulders drop back and some of the tension melts from his stature as he straightens with a newfound confidence. Jasper grins, crooked and excited behind Bellamy's back, and Keaton drags his free palm down his face like a burnt-out father. It's eerily similar to the way Sinclair looked whenever Amery or Keaton would take something apart without asking. They just wanted to see how it worked. Sinclair just wanted a minute of peace.

"We need to spread out," Bellamy says, a gruffness in his voice that feels more irritated than worried. "A group this big will only draw attention." His gaze flickers pointedly to Amery, then Monty, and Amery makes sure not to look away. This is something she refuses to be sorry for.

"We'll split," Keaton offers, taking Monty and Amery by the elbows. "You go ahead."

Bellamy stares at the trio for a long moment, like he's unsure whether they can handle themselves, and then he sighs. "Stay hidden. Stay quiet."

Amery barely stops herself from saying no shit. Raven winks and gives her friends a two-finger salute before following Bellamy and Jasper into the trees.

The three of them linger for a few minutes as the others disappear into the woods ahead of them. "I was gonna say I can't believe you followed," Keaton sighs, "but I can." He glances at Monty. "Thanks for not letting her go alone."

"I'm mostly here to babysit Jasper," he shrugs.

Keaton puts a hand on Amery's shoulder and says, "We're gonna talk about this later." But his tone is already resigned. She's already come out on top of this argument.

By the time they reach the bridge, it's long been daybreak. Moss covers the metal, growing over it like a second skin, the same way a layer of sweat seems to adhere itself to Amery's skin. Three figures crowd near the closer end of the structure, and Amery clocks Clarke's blond hair, Finn beside her, and...

"Octavia?" Amery murmurs. "What the..."

She's unmistakable, dark hair and dark clothes and a posture that screams determination. She wants something, and she's going to get it. After exchanging some terse words with Clarke and Finn, she spins toward the other end of the bridge, abruptly alert.

Someone emerges from the trees, and Amery's blood runs cold.

He's a sight to behold, all sure steps as he runs toward the trio, his muscles wired and expression tight. The Grounder.

Octavia turns and breaks away from the others, and Amery wants to scream, say something, stop her somehow as she runs, unarmed, right toward the Grounder.

She must have a knife hidden somewhere, to pull on him at the last second, to ruin this deal before it even begins. If Octavia wants to take the Grounder out now—Amery understands the feeling, but surely Bellamy wouldn't sit there watching and not acting, letting her be so rash as to jeopardize whatever futile hope for peace Clarke is getting at. But girl and Grounder get closer and closer, and nobody else makes a move.

"Oh, fuck," Amery murmurs. Finn and Clarke stand idly at the nearest end of the bridge, looking on as Octavia sprints to her own demise. Amery grabs Monty's wrist without thinking, needing something to hold onto as both figures on the bridge gain ground, reaching the middle. She waits for Octavia to pull some hidden dagger from her boot and make a diving attack at him, but—

She leaps into his arms.

"What the shit?" Amery hisses as the Grounder sets her down, and Octavia looks up at him, her posture almost soft—as soft as Octavia gets, really, because she never lets her guard down entirely.

"Guess Finn wasn't the one who got that meeting," Keaton mutters.

At the bridge's end, Finn grabs Clarke's hand. Amery rolls her eyes. A sound echoes down the open space on either side of the structure, something animal, but not a roar or a growl, more of a... a whinny.

Amery's jaw might as well hit the ground as three massive, four-legged creatures emerge from the other side of the bridge. Creatures she's only seen pictures of, only heard stories about. Horses.

The confusion surrounding Octavia's amicable reunion with the Grounder dissipates momentarily as Keaton wordlessly passes Amery the gun, eyes wide, and allows her to peer through the scope.

They're magnificent, dark and tall and bigger than Amery every thought they'd be, majestic enough even without the menacing Grounders on their backs. Two of them are a pure, deep black, living shadows interrupted only by the reins and saddles they've been outfitted with. Just behind them, in the center, is a brown horse with white running up its snout, ears twitching as it trots forward, like it can hear its steps and Amery's breathing and everything else stretching for miles in every direction.

She can't help the quiet gasp that slips through her lips. "Wow."

The Grounders are heavily armored, those on each side with unnatural, bony faces and long weapons in their hands. Guess it's a good thing we didn't come unarmed, Amery thinks to herself.

But the one in the center is clearly their leader, a formidable-looking woman with dark, shadowed eyes and various braids tied into her dark-light-dark hair. Amery hands the rifle back to Keaton, then squints as the line of Octavia, the Grounder, Finn, and Clarke seems to tense for a second.

"They're making her go alone," Keaton whispers. Amery's eyes widen.

The Grounder Leader dismounts and walks forward purposefully, Clarke walking to meet her from the other end. Amery's heart thumps all the way up in her throat.

They stop barely a foot away from each other.

Even at this distance, the Grounder leader's voice rings through the space, not anything intelligible but her voice so fierce that Amery feels it. She catches a telltale glimpse of red closer to the ground, below the bridge.

Raven. That's where they're hiding. She squints and makes out shapes that must be Bellamy and Jasper on either side of the red jacket. Amery presses herself closer to the tree. If she can see them, they might be able to see her.

"What's happening?" she whispers to Keaton, and he shakes his head slightly.

"She doesn't look happy." At some point, Amery's grip on Monty's wrist slipped down to his hand. She didn't even notice, but now his fingers tense around hers. Keaton's knuckles are white around the gun, but his aim is steady, unflinching.

If the situation wasn't so high-stakes, this could be almost peaceful. Amery, holding Monty's hand, Keaton at her side, gazing out over a landscape straight out of her dreams. Water slips and weaves among the rocks of the low river, the sun bouncing off them to create rainbows on the leaves. Even the bridge could be beautiful, mossy and strong, a monument to stability in the center of the natural world. She sighs. Aches. Wishes she could hold onto this, keep it pristine in her mind's eye to take out and examine in the dark.

And then everything goes to shit.

An unintelligible shout sounds from below, where Raven, Bellamy, and Jasper are staked out, and then Amery catches the tail end of another holler as Jasper bursts into plain sight. "Run!"

He fires off a round of bullets in a frenzy, and Amery wrenches her hand from Monty's grasp and surges to her feet, pushing forward for a better view. Keaton's already moving, maneuvering down the hillside in a flurry of quick jumps and slides.

"Keaton!" Amery yells, and then he's firing, and Monty is grabbing Amery's hand again and hauling ass. "Keaton!"

"Monty, go!" Keaton shouts, and Monty drags her away.

A Grounder, entirely camouflaged, falls dead from a tree. Amery screams, scrambling for the dagger tucked into her belt.

More gunshots—Bellamy and Raven must be shooting now, too—but they don't stop. "Go, go, go!" Monty shouts, and Amery goes, goes, goes, curses and prayers alike streaming through her dry lips like water.

It's a stark contrast to the way they got here, a frantic rampage through the forest with no regard for sound and speed, for silence, for stealth. It's a rush of morning air polluted by fear and anger and desperation, sweat and swearing and a blade clutched in her fist like a lifeline. She so badly hopes she doesn't have cause to use it.

Nothing good ever happens when I leave this fucking camp, she thinks.

Maybe she should've stayed in space.

✧✧✧

In the rush of fleeing through the woods, gunshots and screams bouncing throughout the echo chamber of her memory, any grasp Amery had on the reality of the camp's standing with the Grounders is lost. She doesn't know what happened, who shot first, whether there was an arrow before the bullet she hadn't seen—but she knows it doesn't matter, not really.

The impending war looms on the horizon like a great, morbid omen, a dark and twisted version of the flares that rended Earth so many ages ago. But that was unavoidable, natural, efficient. This will be slow, bloody, and unbearably human.

The image of Octavia leaping into the Grounder's arms keeps shoving itself to the forefront of Amery's consciousness, and she can't help but wonder. That embrace wasn't new. It was familiar, something Octavia sprinted toward, something she'd been waiting for. And that part—that was mutual. In that moment, he wasn't a Grounder in a helmet made of bones. He was a man hugging a woman he was happy to see.

They can certainly be reasoned with. They aren't nearly as primitive as the camp had made them out to be—as she had made them out to be. They have ranks, organized society. Some understanding of English, considering Clarke and the Grounder woman had been negotiating alone.

But overlaid with the image of Octavia and the man is the image of Cash in a pool of his own blood, of a blade and a skull and the aura of crippling fear. And the two refuse to be reconciled. Amery doesn't know what to think.

She hardly remembers stumbling through the camp gates, only the smell of the ever-present bonfires and the clang of the dropship ramp beneath her boots. She follows Monty, the maroon of his jacket like a beacon through the fog of her confusion and anxiety.

Bellamy and Finn will surely be having it out the moment they're back at the camp, if they haven't already. Amery doesn't intend to be present for it. She collapses against the dropship's interior wall and lets her senses wash over her slowly, regaining her breath and her semblance of sanity in short, gasping bursts.

Monty taps her boot with his.

"Holy shit," Amery gasps. "Holy—fuck. Shit."

She taps back. Her ankle hurts, she realizes. She's probably not doing herself any favors, running around the woods every time it starts to feel better.

"Amery?" She jumps at the sound of her name and looks up to find Fox looking down at her, concerned etched into every line of her face. Amery hurts for her, all youth and innocence and a desire to help—for what this war will do to her, if she even makes it out alive.

"Fox," she breathes. "Uh."

"Hey," Harper says, slinging an arm around Fox. "Think our girl here needs a little room to breathe for a sec—I'm sure she'll catch you up later, alright?" Fox hesitates but then nods, allowing Harper to lead her out of the dropship. With her free arm, though, Harper jabs a finger at Amery as she shoots a glance over her shoulder, mouthing We're talking about this later.

Seems to be a trend today.

Amery just nods gratefully and sighs, head tilting back and hitting the wall with a dull thunk.

"Oh," Monty pants. "Man. That was..."

Octavia storms in first, alone and an absolute force. Jasper follows, hands clenched at his sides. The hesitance radiates off Monty, a living thing, and Amery doesn't know whether to tell him to go or let Jasper be. Lover's quarrel, she thinks, and then frowns and shakes her head. If there was anything between Jasper and Octavia before, it's dissipated in the shadow of the man on the bridge.

"And stay out!" Octavia shouts, guttural, and then Jasper is climbing back down the ladder as the hatch slams in his wake. His movement are mechanical, and when he reaches the floor and turns to exit the dropship, shudders run down Amery's spine. Jasper's face has never been this void of emotion. There is no sadness, anger, confusion, guilt. Only blank eyes and a flat brow, no curve of his lips one way or the other.

Amery reaches into her pocket and pulls out the leaf. Without looking, she presses it into Monty's hand. It's a gesture of comfort as much as it is encouragement for him to go, a promise that she'll be fine catching her breath in the dropship's stifling interior while Monty keeps Jasper from crashing and burning.

He squeezes her hand, then tucks the leaf into his own pocket and stands. With a quick glance back at Amery, he follows Jasper out the door.

Amery doesn't know how much time passes before she starts to hear muted shouts, back and forth and back and forth, the cadence of an argument near the gates. Finn. Raven. Keaton. And then it's Clarke and Bellamy, high and low, shouting and blaming and stars knows what else. A few other voices chime in here and there, and Amery picks them out by their tenors and cracks, lilts and silences. Leaning her head against the wall again with her eyes fluttering closed, Amery thinks their disagreement is almost like white noise, something so common that it may as well be part of the landscape itself.

Eventually, the restrained tone Amery recognizes as Keaton's peters out of the conversation. She shoves herself to her feet and moves to intercept him, but it seems he's had a similar idea—she runs directly into a body as soon as she pushes through the partition of the dropship door.

"Shit, sorry," Keaton grumbles, then pulls back and clocks Amery in front of him. "Mer. I'm—hey."

In this moment, Keaton Sinclair looks so unbearably weathered, like a man who's seen years of shadows and battles and pointless losses. Maybe he has, Amery thinks. She hasn't been there to know.

She surges forward and wraps her arms around him, face pressed into his chest, and tries to channel whatever measly comfort she can into the embrace. Keaton's fingers twist in the back of her shirt like she's the only thing tethering him to the dropship ramp.

For a second, she can imagine they're not here, that they're kids on the Ark again, clinging to each other in the wake of tragedy and circumstance—a dead mother, a floated father, a life sentence to a floating chunk of metal in the endless array of space.

A quick series of gasps and murmurs have her pulling away, back to the present, to the scent of damp dirt and woodsmoke. Amery sees fingers pointing toward the sky and drags Keaton down the ramp, following the trajectory of the frantic gazes and gestures to the sky.

There's a light. A light, purple circles overlayed on bursts of yellow, shooting toward the ground—toward the Ground. Toward Earth. Toward them.

The realization seems to hit everyone in the camp at the same time.

The Exodus ship.

Sinclair. Kyle. Clarke's mom. Engineers, doctors, families—for a minute, she can only grin, looking up at the sky and imagining who could be in there.

But the joy shrivels up as fast the ship careens through the air. It's going too fast. Way too fast. No parachute.

The collision with the earth isn't audible, but it doesn't need to be. The plume of smoke and flames spiraling into the sky, a twisted perversion of the ship's earlier promising jetstream, is enough of a confirmation.

Whoever was in that ship is dead.

✧✧✧

"Are you crazy?" Bellamy shouts. "We just started another goddamn war, and you want to go out there?"

"You want to sit here and let the Grounders get to them first?" Clarke screams back. Firelight seems to bounce right off her blonde hair, making her fury all the more tangible, a halo around narrowed eyes and bared teeth.

"Daybreak," Bellamy demands. It's not the first time he's said it, but it's the first time Clarke's fists shake at her sides, mouth curled into a sneer rather than snapping back. It's the first time Clarke shows any sign of backing down, at least temporarily.

"The fumes could genuinely be toxic this close to crash-landing," Amery inputs. She feels numb. Keaton's disappeared, probably to Cash's tent, and she hasn't seen Monty since he left to go after Jasper. She's only going through the motions, standing here with Raven at her back and Bellamy and Clarke exchanging verbal blows at her front. "And who knows what other explosions the rocket fuel might cause just by shifting debris? We need to give it time."

It's a selfish motive that has her agreeing with Bellamy Blake. Amery can't let them go to the remains of the Exodus ship without her. But she also can't bear to see the damage—the utter lack of life that waits for them at the crash site.

Clarke spins on Amery, everything about her blazing. "My mother—"

"We all have people up there," Amery snaps.

"Well, now their skeletons could be down here!" Clarke shouts. She freezes, hand clapped to her mouth, and takes a staggering step back. "I'm sorry. I—oh, shit, I'm—"

Amery doesn't stay to hear her grovel.

She brushes past Raven as she turns away, not needing to look to know that her friend is following her as she moves toward Cash's tent. She needs to go talk to Harper and Zoe at some point, and Fox, but not now, not when she can't even force her thoughts into any sort of words that make sense.

Behind her, Bellamy announces to the rest of the camp that nobody is to venture out to the crash site before daybreak.

When Amery shoves through the tent flaps with Raven on her heels, Monty and Jasper are flopped on their respective sleeping bags and Keaton is beside Cash on his. He's midsentence, hands raised in an exasperated gesture, but freezes at Amery's entry and gives her a half-hearted smile.

"Ginger Ale," Cash greets, too cheerfully. "Reyes. Wordlessly, Amery flops onto the end of Monty's sleeping bag. "That's the enthusiasm I know and love," Cash says.

"Keep talking," Raven groans, planting herself beside Jasper. "I don't want to function."

"Not all smiles and stardust in here, but if you insist," Jasper responds flatly. Keaton picks up where he left off, explaining to Cash everything that happened at the bridge. Apparently, Keaton is the only one who has been filled in about what went on between Clarke and the Grounder leader.

Her name is Anya. It's such a normal name that it catches Amery entirely off guard. And the man—Lincoln.

"She said we started the violence, not them," Keaton explains. "It was their territory first." Amery supposes that's true enough, but how were they supposed to know?

"We incited violence just by being here? They're the ones who fucking impaled, like, three of us," Amery grumbles. She winces and smiles apologetically at Jasper and Cash, who don't really seem to care.

"Acts of war," Keaton sighs, quoting Anya. His face is pale, and he looks between Amery and Raven like he's hiding something.

"Acts of war?" Amery cries. "Like what?"

"The flares," Keaton chokes out. "They—the flares burned one of their villages. All of it. To the ground."

No.

She sees it like it's happening in real time. Raven, dried blood still flaking off her temple, illuminated in moonlight and grinning wide. It's all you, Ames. The control panel, lit up in a mess of lights and wires, her favorite language.

It might have been my idea, but you powered it. Raven's voice, warm and encouraging. You did this, Ames. It should be you.

She flips the switch, steps back and watches the flares blaze tracks across the sky.

And then the flares come down. A peaceful village, the daily happenings of a civilization they thought was lost. Fire. Screaming. Death, burning, pain.

You did this, Raven's voice whispers in the back of her mind, this time with no trace of the pride she'd had when Amery stood beside her. This time her voice is hard, cold, lethal. You powered it. You did this.

Amery digs her fingers into the dirt, every muscle in her going tense. "Fuck," she whispers, and even the nearly soundless word comes out strangled.

She destroyed that village. A chance at peace, at stopping the impending war with the people of the Ground, and she made it go up in flames before it could even take a breath.

Amery can't hear anything but the ringing in her ears. Her vision blurs, the trees and the camp melting in front of her.

"Amery, that wasn't you." Monty has sat up, one hand on her shoulder while the other turns Amery's head, forcing her to meet his eyes.

"It was." Her breathing is ragged, the way those people must've sounded as they burned. Burned at her hand.

"Listen to me." There's a rare ferocity in Monty's voice, something assertive that she can't help but listen to. "You had no idea what those flares were going to do. You did everything you could to help us, to help our families."

"But I—"

"It's my fault," Raven blurts. She looks like a mess. And Amery realizes no, Raven would never blame her for this. She'd blame herself. Here they both are, attributing the massacre of a village to themselves like it's a competition.

"Hey, no. Raven. Amery. Look at me right now and tell me you'd burn a village to the ground on purpose," Keaton demands.

They say nothing.

"Exactly," Keaton says. "It wasn't your intent. It wasn't anyone's. You can't put this on yourselves."

"The intent doesn't matter," Raven spits. "We're going to war because of it." She lurches to her feet and storms off, and Amery doesn't have it in her to reach out and grab her wrist before she goes.

And suddenly, it's all too much—Keaton and Cash and Monty and Jasper, all those eyes on her with a poisonous combination of pity and worry. Like she's someone who has to be tiptoed around.

She mutters some excuse and stands, Monty's hand falling away as she forces her way out of the tent again and into the coolness of night. Her sore feet carry her past fires and clusters of murmuring campers, roughhousing and arguing and cooking food and sharing rations. She registers none of it, and suddenly she's on her knees in her own tent, Harper's arms around her.

She doesn't know when she started crying. She hadn't realized, honestly, that she was hydrated enough to warrant tears.

Soon, another pair of arms wraps around her from the back, and Amery doesn't need to look to know it's Zoe. Their warmth chases her shudders away, and she sobs into Harper's shirt, ugly, wrenching gasps that have been building up since her first day on the Ground. Maybe even longer than that, really. She's hardly cried since Keaton was arrested. Once a year on his birthday—it's all she allowed herself to have.

But now, she melts. Rivers flow from her eyes, snot from her nose, and she lets herself be an absolute fucking mess with Harper and Zoe here to catch her.

Because Amery has always been fond of fire, of flames. She hadn't seen them on the Ark, nothing aside from welding sparks—flames eat oxygen, her dad always said, and up there, oxygen was the most important commodity. Amery would watch little bursts of red and orange and brown fly from metal as Kyle fused things together, and she would just marvel at how bright they were compared to everything else around her, like little stars that had found their way inside the ship and made a home there, just for a moment.

But down here, there's always a fire blazing, a distinctly Ground phenomenon that makes Amery feel countless miles away from the monochrome life of space, and she's come to savor it.

There is something addicting about the way flames dance, and that is the best word for it—dance. Or it was. Now maybe the best word is destroy.

Amery cries, because she isn't sure she likes fire much anymore.

✧✧✧

a/n:

HI! I'M SO SORRY IT'S BEEN SEVENTY YEARS!

if you're up to date on radio silence you already know this, but i'm sorry for being MIA for so long—postgrad summer is not the free time it was cracked up to be! a lot of crazy job searching and interviewing and interning and freelancing. but thank you for your patience and i hope you enjoyed our foray back into amery's chaotic existence

[ word count | 4.7k ]