Kings // c. griffin

Twenty Six/Epilogue

Isaac and Monty had been locked up in their respective spaces in Mount Weather for over two days now, and both of them were starting to get jumpy. No sign of their friends had come yet. Nobody had come by to speak with them, or even passed the windows of the doors since they'd woken up 57 hours ago. Isaac had been carefully keeping track by using the needle from his IV to carve little lines on the wall, one for each hour. He'd figured out that the camera in the front of his room would beep, every hour on the hour, and he'd used it to keep track of time, or at least, as much as he was able to. When he'd asked Monty, the Asian boy had said the same, and started keeping track as well, should one of them accidentally miscount.

They were both incredibly light sleepers thanks to the constant danger they had been in while in the camp with the rest of the 100. Every beep would wake them up, and they would roll over, put another tick on the wall, and then go back to a restless sleep until they were woken again.

Their food would come while they were sleeping; when the beep woke Isaac up, there would sometimes be a plastic white tray on the floor of his room -he wasn't sure weather to call it a room or a cell, but he chose the latter because it helped calm his nerves a bit- heaped with different foods, though most were vegetables and some odd meat substitute that Isaac realized resembled what they had eaten on the Ark. With every meal would come a little cookie, and Isaac liked those. They'd never had many sweets on the Ark, and even though Isaac was suspicious of whether or not the food was spiked with something, neither he nor his friend across the hall could deny the fact that the cookies were something of a tasty treat.

The camera beeped, a loud, shrill noise that lasted for two full seconds before it stopped. The noise left a slight ringing in Isaac's ear for a moment after it had ended, which was something that happened every time it went off. Once the whine had died out, Isaac sat up on his bed and pressed his left shoulder against the wall. Gingerly, he took the IV needle off of the table using only his thumb and two fingers, and delicately drew a line a straight as he could, placing it right next to the last one he had made.

He had now been here for 58 hours, or so the tallies said.

Isaac lay back down on his bed then, his back pressed somewhat comfortably into the mattress, his eyes closed, though only to the point where he couldn't see; he had no intentions of falling asleep. His hands played with the sheets on the bed, his toes curling anxiously. Nothing had happened for almost three days, yet for some reason he couldn't help anticipating something terrible.

Of course, just after he began thinking, he heard a noise outside his door. His first thought was that the people holding him and Monty thought he was asleep and that they were delivering food, which immediately made him go to get up so he could meet or at the very least, see them. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, the bare balls of his feet twitching as they made contact with the freezing cold floor- something he would never get used to. He wondered if maybe the people keeping him could lend him some socks.

When Isaac made his way to the door, though, and looked through the window, what he saw was not what he had expected. The men in the hazmat suits were back, marching down the hall in a haphazard line as they pushed long, lumpy carts in front of them. It took Isaac a few moments to process what he saw in front of him before he realized that the lumps were people. And it wasn't until he recognized one of the people did he realized it was his friends.

His fist raised and he hit it against the window, making the nearest guy in a suit turn to him. Their gaze then went down to the person on their cart, and they paused for a split second, allowing Isaac to study their face. Blondish brown hair, a button nose, thin lips and rosy cheeks- that was Harper. He'd seen her around camp enough to recognize her when he saw her, even while asleep. He sucked his lower lip back, pressing his teeth on either side of it and nibbling on it nervously.

Next he saw Miller. He was pretty beat up- he had a black eye and a cut that ran from just below his ear, along his neck and ended on his shoulder, his shirt ripped from the contact of the weapon that had done it to him. Isaac remembered how Miller had, even though he was one of Bellamy's cronies, been kinder than most had been to him, and he found himself viciously hoping that he would turn out to be okay, if the Mountain Men were going to try and heal him like they had with Isaac.

He saw some more people wheeled past, people that he vaguely recognized- Monroe, Jax, a fifteen year old named Kevin that's he'd spoken to only once or twice. After another few people he didn't recognize, he saw a familiar head of shaggy hair with sunken, pale cheeks, shallow circles under the boy's eyes. At the sight of Jasper, Isaac subconsciously looked up towards Monty's window, almost surprised to find that while he'd been staring down at the bodies being carted past, Monty had arrived at his own window and joined him. Monty's cheek was pressed against the glass, a desperate, anxious look painted across his face -which was paler than it had been previously- and his eyes followed Jasper until he was no longer in sight. Once  he was gone, Monty glanced at Isaac, who tried giving him a reassuring look. He failed. Everyone was injured or beaten up or covered in dirt or mud or blood that neither boys was sure if it belonged to them or someone else. Isaac wondered for a moment where their injuries had come from- the Mountain Men? The grounders? Maybe themselves? Something else? He wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer.

One thing Isaac took notice of was that, as he noticed the last suit approaching his door, was that there were far less than a hundred people. Maybe not even fifty had been carted past, and that was what really made his stomach clench with fear. He hadn't seen Finn or Bellamy, or Murphy, or Octavia or Raven. He also hadn't seen Clarke. He had no idea what that was supposed to mean, though. He still didn't know if being inside of the Mountain was something he should be relieved or afraid of. He wanted to feel safe, but he knew that wasn't an option. He didn't know if being here meant they were dead, or if being here meant that they were alive, and the ones who weren't were gone.

So Isaac couldn't help himself when he looked down at the last cart. He didn't know who he wanted it to be, but when his eyes landed on the cart his stomach swirled with panic and he immediately wished that it wasn't who he saw. Clarke Griffin lay on the cart. Her hair was matted with dirt and blood, and her face wasn't much cleaner- cuts riddled her cheeks and her nose and her forehead. Blood had trickled down her face and dropped into the curves of her neck, soaking through the top half of her shirt. She was swollen and still and the paleness of the skin that Isaac could see through the blood made her look almost dead. He wondered if she was dead, but then quickly shoved that thought out of his mind.

His fist pounded against that glass again and a crack sounded; he blinked as a large crack appeared on the window, starting at the bottom before running upwards towards the ceiling, splitting off into tinier, littler crack on the way up. The man in the suit that had been pushing Clarke stopped and looked to face him with wide eyes. His mouth moved underneath his suit, but he was speaking quietly and Isaac couldn't hear what he was saying. He stepped back from the door, balancing on shaky legs. He watched as the man took some sort of paste from his pocket and spread it across the window. Isaac noticed with great dismay that it was black and thick, preventing him from seeing into the hallway.

"HEY!" he shouted. He coughed just afterwards, an effect of not having spoken out loud for almost three days. He swallowed thickly, blinking his eyes furiously so that they would stay dry.

He couldn't see Monty. He couldn't see Clarke. He couldn't see anything.

And all of his friend might be dead, including the girl he was hopelessly, irrecoverably in love with.

A/N: what even

p.s. sorry it's short