Conflate | Bellamy Blake ¹ ✓

※ | chapter fifteen

❝you better call it, coulson, 'cause i'm starting to root for this guy.❞

-clint barton, thor

♛

BELLAMY SHOVES RATIONS INTO a bag like an apocalypse is coming for us. We may as well be leaving for months with how many of the small pouches of nuts he's dumping in the sack, which is much too big for the short distance we have to travel. Then again, maybe he's thinking ahead about all the supplies we'll have to bring back and I'm just being too suspicious of him.

I stand with my own bag slung over one shoulder, my jacket unzipped and hair pulled back in a ponytail. The air is getting crisp with the coming of fall and winter, but I can't help but feel overheated with all that's going on. The bag seems like a weight on my back that's pushing me down.

I stand beside Bellamy as he packs the rations. I would've helped, but he insisted on doing that himself, leaving me with nothing to do as we wait for Clarke.

"That's a lot of rations," she observes after watching him stuff another handful into his bag. "You realize this is a day trip."

I lift my hand and let it fall to my side with a smack. "I tried telling him that. Apparently he doesn't know how many hours are in a single day."

Bellamy shoots the both of us a look as he closes the green bin that the majority of the rations are in. He zips his bag shut and picks it up off the ground. "A lot can happen in a day."

Bellamy slings the bag across his chest and adjusts the strap on his shoulder. He briefly glances at Octavia, who stands at the door of the dropship, watching us go. I sigh and follow after Clarke as she walks through the open door of the wall. After walking a few yards, I turn around upon noticing there are no footsteps behind me. Bellamy still stands at the opening, staring at Octavia with one hand on the strap of his bag.

"Bellamy," I call, coming to a complete stop as Clarke walks on. "Are you coming, or are you just going to stand and stare at your sister?"

Octavia can't possibly hear me from where she is, but she ducks back into the ship as if she can. The curtain falls closed behind her and completely conceals the inside. Bellamy pulls his lips into a thin line. I know he's worried about what Octavia will do while he's gone, but he needs to let her be independent.

He turns and starts trailing after Clarke and I. I wait until he's beside me to start walking beside him, taking careful steps over the incline. "You know," I say as I step over a large rock, "you have to learn to let Octavia be her own person. I know you want to watch out for her all the time, but you can't. You have to let her live."

"It's dangerous out here," Bellamy responds gruffly. "I have to keep her safe."

"And she knows how dangerous it is," I point out, trying not to sigh in exasperation at how hard it is to reason with him. "But that doesn't mean you have to babysit her. She'll never grow up that way."

Bellamy's eyes lock on the ground. "Maybe I don't want her to grow up."

An hour and a half later, Bellamy, Clarke, and I have reached an opening from the woods. The trees here are a lot smaller and thinner with no leaves on their bare, skinny branches. They're barely taller than us but grow closely together, causing us to have to walk around them carefully as to not get poked in the eye.

If anyone has spoken within the last half an hour, I wouldn't know. All of my focus is trained on my small notebook that's clutched in one hand as I jot down notes with my pen in the other. I write which way we've walked, what our surroundings are, and why we decided to take the routes we did. It's more of an in-case-we-get-lost kind of thing. My years of stealing on the Ark have trained me to be able to multitask better than the average person. Though my focus is trained on what I'm writing, I'm also fully aware of what's around me.