✿ FOUR ✿
"What a wicked game you played
To make me feel this way"
___
Katherine dropped some lightweight and dried logs on the pile she and Wells had managed to make, while the rest of the hundred seemed to either get high by exploring nature or just do nothing. Slowly, the feeling of being unuseful crept inside Katherine's body. Just as Monty had said, she should be out there looking for edible and medicinal plants, not collecting wood.
"Don't get me wrong, Wells," Katherine started, crossing her arms. She noticed the lump in her pocket and made a mental note that she had do find Nathan Miller soon. "It's not that I don't like dragging wood to this place while the other kids are being completely unuseful, but I should be looking out for plants that could perhaps also help you."
"It's okay," Wells replied. He looked down at the pile of wood. It was obvious that his foot still hurt, yet he had not once complained. "This should be enough to last two days at least. I will join you on your search for plants."
"Find any water yet?"
Murphy and his sidekick seemed to have appeared out of thin smoke, both looking down onto Katherine and Wells. Directly Katherine started to cringe. While they were doing whatever unprioritized thing they were doing, she and Wells had been working their asses off to make sure that they would make it through the night without perhaps freezing or being attacked by animals.
"Our merciful Lord has given you a pair of legs, hasn't he?" Katherine asked sarcastically, uncrossing her arms and pointing to Murphy in a demeaning way. "Go use them and find water yourself."
Soothingly, Wells placed a hand on Katherine's shoulder, pushing her away from Murphy and his sidekick. He gave her a reassuring smile, as if to say that the would handle this one, and turned towards Murphy. "No, not yet, but we're going back out if you'd like to join us."
Wells's voice trailed off, causing Katherine to follow his look curiously. On the side of the Dropship something had been written with such a messy handwriting that it took Katherine a moment to figure out what it actually said.
FIRST SON, FIRST TO DYE
Katherine couldn't help but chuckle softly. She didn't know when Murphy got locked up, but surely he couldn't have been arrested before he was six. Probably a six-year-old even knows how to spell die correctly.
Chuckling, Murphy scratched his nose, showing the knife he held in his hand off clearly and providing a truly charming sight to Katherine and Wells. "You know, my father, he begged for mercy in the airlock chamber when your father floated him."
Before Wells could even think of a reply, Katherine had already taken a step forward. "Oh boohoo, Murphy. Go cry in a corner somewhere," she said, brushing away imaginary tears. She hardly cared about Murphy's floated dad, but she couldn't stand the fact that they were blaming Wells for it. "Almost no kid on the Ark has the luxury of having two parents. You're no exception, so quit acting like you are.
A split second later, Murphy held out his knife, the edge pointing towards Katherine's jugular, though that couldn't have been on purpose, for the boy seemed too stupid. Katherine took a sharp intake of breath, but as soon as her eyes strayed to the text written on the side of the Dropship, she couldn't help but chuckle.
"See something funny, witch-eye?" Murphy barked out, clearly disappointed that he didn't look as threatening to Katherine as he felt.
"You spelt die wrong, geniuses," Wells entered, causing Katherine to chuckle only more loudly.
"Oh you think you're so funny, don't you?" Murphy asked Katherine, shoving the knife half an inch closer to her neck. His sidekick looked at him hesitatingly, as if he wasn't sure what they were doing was correct. Not that he had enough of a backbone to actually stand up to Murphy, Katherine thought.
"No, Murphy, I actually think you're hilarious," Katherine replied. Even though the stress tingles were spreading through her body once again and her throat felt like sandpaper, she still managed to look at Murphy as if he was the biggest joke in the universe. She did know for sure he was the biggest waste of breath and space in the universe, but it didn't seem wise to say that to him. "You made my day with that message."
"Katherine, just don't provoke him any further," Wells muttered, not amused with the situation they were currently in. He turned towards Murphy, his face grave. "Just leave her alone, Murphy, so we can go looking for water."
"Katherine," Murphy repeated, seemingly testing the way her name sounded. "A fitting name for a witch like you."
"Well, Murphy, you don't only look like a frog, but you actually sound like one as well," Katherine bit back. Without a moment of hesitation, she smacked with her left hand Murphy's right hand holding the sharp knife away. Instantly she stepped next to Wells, out of Murphy's reach. "Waste of breath is what you are."
Before the fight could escalate any further, Bellamy decided to join in. He looked from the knife in Murphy's hand to Katherine, who managed to muster one last venomous glance. "Everything going alright here?"
"Perfectly fine," Katherine replied shortly. She gave Wells a quick nod and stuck her hands in her pockets. "We were actually just leaving, so if you don't fancy joining us, please do excuse us."
Not waiting for an answer, Katherine roughly walked past Bellamy, not appreciating his leader-like behaviour in any shape or form. After a moment of hesitation, Wells followed her, looking suspiciously at Bellamy, whose eyes followed Katherine's bird-like figure intensively. Even though his ankle hurt badly, Wells didn't have any troubles keeping up.
"I just can't wrap my head around the fact that people can be that stupid," Katherine muttered softly to herself, shaking her head. She felt like talking to one of the trees might deliver more result than trying to let Murphy grasp anything, and she hated that feeling. On the Ark, most people believed the substantiated things she said, but here, down on Earth, she seemed just another kid trying and failing to get her way.
"Not all of us can be as genius as you are," Wells replied, a friendly smile covering his face.
"I'm not a genius," Katherine denied. Looking intensively at the plants around her, she ran a hand down her long and dark hair. On the way she found some terrible tangles, causing her to let out an irritable sigh. "I just try to do as much as I can with the brain capacity I have."
"And the fact that you're very good at that makes you a genius," Wells retorted teasingly. He gave Katherine a small shove, just hard enough to make her look up. "Doesn't it?"
"Theoretically yes, practically not necessarily," Katherine replied. She didn't like compliments, especially the receiving end of it. She didn't know what to do with it, other than awkwardly smile and nod. It had been like that ever since she was young enough to understand that people praised her for her intelligence. "Now please just try to look for plants with a green sphere on the stem. On the green sphere, there will be a yellow, sun- or flowerlike shape."
"Whatever you say," Wells replied, giving an unofficial salute.
Katherine rolled her eyes, not bothering to give a reply. She noticed that Wells was quite a bit more fun and less serious now than he was around Clarke. Katherine didn't know the history between the two of them, but it didn't sound like a fun one. All she could remember from her lessons with them is that they always sat next to each other. Now, not anymore it seemed.
She must have been on Earth for a couple of hours now, but she still couldn't get enough of the flora around her. She drank in the rich colours of the plants and trees, all the while thinking about how unfortunate it was that Monty couldn't be with her here right now. At the same time, she tried to find remember some landmarks, so that she could navigate the way back.
Softly biting her lip, Katherine couldn't help but let her thoughts wander off. She wondered how her mom was doing up there, and if she had been notified at all that her daughter had been shipped off to an early grave. Probably not.
She hadn't seen her mother in over four years, and their last encounter had been a grave one. Katherine had told her mother what had happened and what she was going to do about it like she might have told her how her day on school went. Her mother, who was a nurse and had always raised Katherine to be independent, yet failed to live up to those standards herself, had cried but made no move to hold her daughter back, even though she knew the consequences.
"Katherine," Wells said softly, yet harshly interrupting Katherine's train of thoughts. "Do you hear that?"
Katherine stopped walking, focusing on the sounds around her instead of the things in her mind. It took her a moment, but then she heard it. It was the soft sound of a trickle of water moving its way and it sounded like heaven to her ear.
Her eyes widened and she looked triumphantly at Wells, whose eyes radiated the same excitement as hers. It only took her a minute, before she started running towards the source of the sound. She knew rivers sometimes could be heard clearly, only for them to be miles away, so she didn't want to get her hopes up too high.
Fortunately, however, it only took her a minute full of enthusiastic almost tripping over every branch covering the ground to locate the source. That being a small stream that flowed downwards in constant, miniature waterfalls. It was barely a foot deep and the water was so clear that you could see the light brown coloured pebbles underneath.
"Wow," Wells breathed out in amazement as soon as he had caught up with Katherine, expressing in words the way she felt.
What Katherine saw across the river made her even more thrilled. As soon as she saw the red flowers, she ran across the stream, splashing water around as if her life depended on it. Not caring for the fact that her boots and pants were completely drained, she knelt down next to the poppy plants in the muddy ground.
In amazement, she touched the stem of the plant and the delicate flower. Before she went to gather as many unflowered plants as she could possibly carry back, she tanked whatever Lord or God might be out there for finding these precious flowers. She looked across the field, and everywhere she looked there were either poppy or lavender plants, living in harmony with some other plants she couldn't identify immediately.
"This is impossible," she muttered in awe to herself. She turned around, observing Wells. The Chancellor's son was bending over the water in astonishment, reminding Katherine of an old poem she once read about a boy called Narcissus, only instead of falling in love with his reflection, he was drinking the water as if his life depended on it. "Say, Wells, you don't happen to have the sheet of the parachute with you we used to carry the wood, do you?"
Guiltily the boy looked up, shaking his head. "You can use my jacket, though."
"Nah, that won't be necessary," Katherine shook her head. Out of the pocket of her jacket, she found Miller's beanie and shrugging to herself, she began to stuff it with lavender. The boy probably wouldn't mind, right?
After taking only around twenty poppy plants, she didn't dare to bring more, for she was afraid that someone might recognize them for what they held, she noticed something was wrong. With the stuffed beanie in her left hand and the poppy plants in her right, she walked across the stream to Wells.
"It's all wrong," she said, as she observed all the different plants living together in one place. "Poppy's can only grow on dry, sandy grounds. Lavender is a shrub, they don't need particularly much sun. Yet they all live in the same muddy, drenched in sun area."
Katherine carefully observed Wells's reaction, but he didn't even seem slightly bothered as he shrugged like that's how things went. "The radiation must have altered their genes and needs, natural selection and all."
"Right," Katherine answered, not caring at the moment to correct Wells. Looking up at the sky, and seeing the way the sun was moving, she decided it was time for them to head back. Much to her surprise, she found she actually looked forward to getting back to the Dropship, because it was there she could work her magic with her newfound plants. "It's time for us to go, Wells."
"You haven't drunk one sip of water yet," Wells protested. "Surely you must be thirsty."
It was only after hearing Wells's words, she realised he was right. Now that the effects of finding plants had started to lose their strength, she noticed her throat was aching and feeling like rough sandpaper. She nodded quickly, handing Wells the plants and kneeling down next to the water to take some big gulps. The water tasted like sweet nectar, and slowly but surely she could feel the strength she hadn't even noticed to be lost come back.
It was only after that they could finally start to head back to the camp.
"Would you remember the way back to the stream?" Katherine asked curiously after what she guessed to be twenty minutes. She wasn't even sure they were going the right way at the moment.
"Wouldn't you?" Wells retorted, looking at the girl next to him.
Katherine shrugged, looking up at the sky. "My talents lie elsewhere."
After that short exchange of words, they walked quietly further. It wasn't an awkward silence, Katherine was thinking about a way to secretly manipulate the plants so that they would uncover their medicinal workings. She also realised that if she could, in fact, make morphine out of the milk of the poppies, she had to never lose it out of her sight.
It wasn't long after that that Katherine started to hear the rumble of life near the Dropship. The sun had started to set rather fast and by the time Katherine and Wells entered the camp, several fires had been lit. Loud cheers could be heard throughout the clearing and frowning curiously, Katherine brushed past people so that she could see what was going on, not even bothering to mumble courtesies.
Sure enough, Murphy and his sidekick were just in the middle of prying open a metal wrist band that was supposed to send your vital signs to the Ark. The girl whose wristband was being pried off grunted in pain, but when the wristband came off and was thrown into the fire, she whooped along with the other criminals like nobody's business.
"Frog-face," Katherine said annoyed, gaining pretty much everybody's attention. Even though her plan had been to keep a low profile, she wanted to survive and that just wasn't going to happen if she allowed this to continue. "What are you doing?"
"We're liberating ourselves," Bellamy answered, shoving Murphy's sidekick back. "What does it look like?"
"It looks like you're trying to get us all killed," Wells acclaimed. He took a step forward, his face scrunched up in annoyance, much like Katherine's. "The communication system is dead. These wristbands are all we got. Take them off, and the Ark will think we're dying, that it's not safe for them to follow."
It bothered Katherine that Bellamy didn't even try to look interested, but instead just looked around as if Wells was the most boring thing he had ever witnessed. If communication was a problem already, how could they possibly survive? The longer Katherine observed Bellamy and his newfound posse, the more agitated she became. Slowly she counted from ten to one.
"That's the point, Chancellor," Bellamy replied calmly, causing a few chuckles to erupt. "We can take care of ourselves, can't we?"
Katherine was done. She had counted down like her mother had taught her when she was a little girl, and it had only made her anger turn into an uncontrollable ball of rage. "The fact that you rely solely on two people to search for water and five for food shows you can't," Katherine deadpanned. She stared long enough at Bellamy for him to look away uncomfortably, ignoring the sense of familiarity that once again engulfed her, before she looked around at the rest of the group. "It's not just your friends up there, or your mummy and daddy. It's our doctors and engineers, and if you think you can survive without them, you're delusional."
"Besides, if it is really safe down here, how could you not want the rest of our people to come down?" Wells added, looking genuinely confused.
"My people are already down. Those people," Bellamy replied, pointing with his finger towards the sky. "They locked my people up. Those people killed my mother for the crime of having a second child. Your father did that."
"Bellamy," Katherine hissed. She clenched her hands in fists, causing the lavender and poppies to crumble in her hands, though she could not care for the moment. "Have you ever, really just a single time in your life, bothered to pick up a book about politics and read it? Even if you have not, you look like the guy with enough brain cells to understand that Chancellor Jaha didn't write the laws."
Bellamy looked at the girl in front him confused. She didn't seem moved by the fact that the rest of the group had accepted him as their leader, nor that he could easily take her on if he wanted to. Even though he wanted to find her annoying, he couldn't help but feel a little respect towards her as well. He recovered quickly, looking down at Katherine, straight in those oddly blue eyes. "No, but he enforced them. Not here though, not anymore. Here, there are no laws."
Katherine had hoped for some support from the group, but as soon as they started to agree with Bellamy, she knew it was hopeless. She took a sideways glance at Wells, seeing he realised the same thing.
"Here, we do whatever the hell we want whenever the hell we want," Bellamy stated, once again earning some approving shouts. He grinned, making Katherine's look of annoyance even greater. "Now, you don't have to like it, Wells, Katherine. You can even try to stop it or change it, kill me. You know why? Whatever the hell we want."
"Whatever the hell we want!" Murphy repeated screaming, causing a whole bunch of the group to join in.
Smugly, Bellamy held his hands out towards the rest of the group, as if the show his rightness. Katherine rolled her eyes, and while the whole group started to chant along with the stupid praise, she took a step forward, until she was almost breathing the same air as Bellamy. As she looked up to his brown eyes, she didn't feel a shred of fear, just frustration.
"It's not impressive to get a group of ignorant people to support you," Katherine claimed frustrated. Even though she started to feel the awkward tension between her and Bellamy, she didn't dare to break eye-contact. "You should try to convince the people who have knowledge of the subject, perhaps then you have the right to feel smug and satisfied."
"Socrates, am I right?" Bellamy replied. After seeing the quick wave of shock show through her facial expression, he chuckled, crossing his arms lazily. "I have, in fact, read my fair share of politics."
Katherine was utterly confused. If he really knew the principles of the old philosopher, he must speak the truth. That meant Bellamy was educated, much to her surprise, but why he chose to act as if he wasn't, had her bewildered. She tried to hide her shock quickly, straightening her back and looking at Bellamy determinedly. "If we're all dead in a couple of weeks, it is not because of Chancellor Jaha," Katherine said. She grinned and shook her head. "It is because you wanted to be a leader of chaos. I'll tell you what, chaos isn't something you will be able to strive in, it will break you and your people down. Just keep that in mind."
"Thanks, sweetheart," Bellamy smiled, not even seemingly bothered by her words. He looked across the group of hundred, smiling as they were still chanting. "Any other words of advice?"
"Get that stick out of your ass, before I will kick it up so high you will choke on it," Katherine muttered, displeased with the fact that she couldn't get to him. Just as she was about to turn away to find a place to sleep for the night, heaven announced itself by a loud thunder and decided on opening it's clouds, sending down streams of water on the hundred.
Amazed, Katherine looked up, she had heard enough about rain, but she couldn't just quite imagine it. Now, feeling the cold drops moving across her sin, she felt better than ever. And she was not going to let Bellamy, who looked at her in an odd way, ruin it. Instead, she grabbed Wells by his jacket and montioned him to follow her. "Even though they might be ungrateful, we do need to catch this."
"Right," Wells answered, taking one last glance at the group before the two of them started to work.