CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
you were more than just a short time
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𝐓he prominent and distinctive scar on her face had never been so exposed. A long, ragged slash runs from her forehead down to her cheek, crossing her nose and partially covering one eye. Despite the scar's prominence and the emotional burden it carries━it symbolizes her resilience, inner strength, and the challenges she has faced throughout her life.
Elliot did not intend to cover it this time. It made Octavia feel something, like a pride of some sort. Elliot decided to like Octavia. She did not flinch or turn away from her. She didn't care about the scar on her face. She wasn't scared of her. Octavia looked at her the same way Bellamy did.
Like she was more than the scar on her face.
Octavia gave up on opening the door after a couple of minutes. It didn't seem like it would budge anytime now. She sat on the ground, her back against a green trashcan while constantly flipping a knife in her hand. As if hoping for some stupid miracle to suddenly happen to them. They didn't want to leave.
Elliot abruptly straightened up when the sound of an alarm started to blare out from the door. She looked at Octavia and found her staring at the trash can with a miserable look on her face. The younger girl muttered something she didn't quite hear but when Elliot saw what was inside the trashcan━her throat tightened.
The sound of footsteps made Elliot look away as she raised a hand as a warning. She crept towards the entrance of the tunnel with her hands around the hilt of her swords. But she once again was surprised at who she found staring back at her in the dim light of the tunnels.
"Clarke," Elliot muttered. She almost sounded disappointed as she turned her back on her, walking back toward the door, leaving Octavia to deal with the blond.
"We have to get in there." Clarke rushed forward to the door but Octavia held her back, making her look at their friend's corpse inside the trash can.
"If that was possible, do you think we'd still be out here?" Octavia retorted as a look of horror washed over the girl's face who had to grow up too quickly, weighted by the burden of her choices and the will to save her people.
Elliot looked at Clarke. "Why did Lexa sound the retreat?"
"She made a deal with Mount Weather, freed the Grounders, and now we're on our own," Clarke spat before angrily marching towards the door and started to slam her fists on the metal.
Immediately, she thought of Lincoln.
"Stop! They'll know we're here." The younger Blake approached her and forcefully grabbed her away from the door. "What about Lincoln? There's no way he would have gone along with a plan like this."
"He didn't. They took him." With her words, Elliot clenched her fists from anger, but she tried to maintain calm at the moment. Her eye narrowed when Clarke pointed her gun at the electronic pad on the door.
Octavia smacked the gun out of her hand. "What's wrong with you?"
"I am getting through that door," Clarke said stubbornly.
"And that's your plan?" Octavia said incredulously. "Bellamy's counting on you. Everyone's always counting on you."
"Well, what do you want from me?" Clarke cried out, the reality of the situation crashing down on her. She had made all the wrong decisions when she thought it was right.
"You trusted Lexa. You let a bomb drop on Tondc. You let all those people━"
"I am doing the best I can!"
"Yeah? Well, it's not good enough."
"Both of you shut up!" Elliot yelled at them.
They only stopped when the door suddenly clicked and opened behind them. The three women immediately pulled out their respective weapons━Elliot gripping her swords tightly in both hands. Then a familiar someone stepped out from the door and Elliot's arms lowered in an instant.
He looked better than her, which says a lot since a building just dropped on her. He was wearing a Mount Weather guard's uniform. She studied his face, noticing the fading bruise on his eye but other than that, Bellamy Blake was fine.
"Bellamy." Octavia sighed in relief and threw her arms around her big brother.
Bellamy hugged his little sister like they hadn't seen each other in years. His eyes fell on the two women behind Octavia, his stare lingering on the Grounder's face more than he planned to. He expected her to glare at him even curse at him, but she didn't. She merely sent him a short nod, hiding the fact that she was glad he was alive.
As soon as Octavia and Clarke rushed to the door, Elliot went to stand in front of the older Blake. Then she deadpanned: "You're not dead."
He raised his brows at her. "You sound surprised."
Elliot scoffed, shaking her head before she walked past him. After days of being stuck inside the mountain, Bellamy finally let a smile grace his face even for a second. The Grounder trudged inside the doors and found familiar faces staring right back at her. Bellamy appeared next to her.
"Hey." Jasper looked confused at the sight of the ivory-haired Grounder. Her scar made him double-take. He seemed mildly surprised. "You're that Grounder from under the bridge."
Elliot looked utterly uninterested as she walked past him without saying anything. Suddenly, another person appeared before them━a teenage girl wearing a blue hazmat suit. Elliot was about to raise her sword when Jasper stopped them and told them she was fine. The girl, whose name was Maya, was on their side.
She waited impatiently for them to finish their hugging and catching-up session. It got cut off short when Maya's suit started to beep loudly, and Jasper rushed towards her, checking the time of how long until the hazmat suit ran out of oxygen.
"Thirty minutes. And we just changed it," Jasper sputtered, sounding completely worried and nervous as they panicked. "That can't be right. Uh, shh━um... It's her last tank."
"Hey." Clarke tried to reassure them. "Uh, we'll find you another one."
"All the supplemental oxygen is on level five."
"Then we have to get you to level five."
"Five isn't safe for any of us."
"We'll take the trash chute again. It will work."
"To get in, maybe," Bellamy cuts in. "Maya's right. Every soldier in this Mountain is there. We'll never make it out."
"Leave that to me." His eyes fell on the Grounder. He thought he was hearing things but Elliot stepped forward. Something had changed about her. Bellamy found that he liked her better when she showed her face. "I can take them. You just get the girl what she needs."
"We can do this." Jasper nodded, trying to be positive for the girl. Maya was running out of oxygen in her suit and the air around them wasn't exactly safe for her to breathe in. "We'll split up."
"Okay. You guys go for Dante." Octavia breathed, looking at Clarke, Monty, and her brother. Then she nodded at Jasper before pulling her sword to lead them. "We'll help Maya."
"Aren't we supposed to be getting out?" Elliot muttered beside Bellamy as she watched Octavia slip inside the door with determination and purpose. "Not getting further inside."
"Are you with us?" Bellamy looked at her. There was a hopeful look in his mahogany eyes.
"Let's go," Elliot grunted, hefting both of her blades in each hand. She gave him a once-over and scoffed. "Don't die."
Bellamy chuckled wryly. "I'll try."
Elliot used to wonder what it was like to be born before the world went down. Being able to live like a normal person in a normal place without anyone killing each other. Even so, no one could stop other people from murdering each other for stupid reasons. It was inevitable. Natural order. People just find ways to make it look so easy and ordinary.
She barged inside a room with unnervingly clean white walls, the bright light inside the room almost blinding her. She wasn't used to this kind of scenery because of the fact she lived most of her life in the wild among the trees and the dirt underneath her feet.
"Hello, Clarke."
Stood before them was an old man. Something about him tells her that he was in charge of the place before someone else━his only son━took it from him. Her hands gripped the hilt of her swords, watching his every movement with wary eyes even though she doubted he was capable of making a move against them.
"Sir, we need your help again," Bellamy said urgently.
"It's okay," Monty assured him even though that wasn't the least of the old man's worries. "I took out the camera from the junction box in the hall. We can talk freely."
"No one's watching, anyway," Dante said half-heartedly. "Thanks to you, they're all on level five."
"You're not," Clarke retorted.
Dante looked calm. "No. I'm not."
He didn't seem like the bad guy. He looked harmless. Like his words were the most dangerous thing about him. Elliot narrowed her eye at him when Dante glanced at her. He didn't look bothered by her scar, but a flash of recognition appeared on his face. The girl looked a lot like someone he'd met before. A Grounder with hard eyes but the musings of a smart man. (This girl must've been the daughter he used to talk about).
"Please. We don't have much time," Bellamy said desperately. "We need a way to get our people out of this mountain without killing everyone."
But the look on Dante's face said it all. Elliot scowled. "He's not gonna help us."
"You're a smart one," Dante mused. "I knew your father once. He was a visionary. He influenced the peace between us all."
"Yet I'm here and he's not," Elliot spat, glaring at him. Her father was a coward. Aster died running away from his mess. Just like her mother who couldn't admit her wrongs. And her brother who was too stubborn to prove himself. Now they were all dead.
"You cut the power, risking the lives of everyone in this mountain━my people, even the ones who helped you," Dante said hardly.
Clarke walked toward him. "We knew they'd be safe on level five. We made sure not to destroy the turbines so you could repair them. We're the good guys here, not you."
"Tell me, if we released your people and theirs, what would've happened to mine?"
The old man had a point. There was only one way this war would end. Someone was going to die either way.
"Can you get us into the command center?" Clarke ignored his words and turned to Monty. "We need to see what's happening on level five."
"No problem." Monty quickly went to work.
"Let's go," Bellamy grunted as he rushed forward and grabbed the old man by the arm. The five of them walked out of the room and to the command center with Elliot leading them. "You're gonna help us, whether you like it or not."
"I told you, there's no one here," Dante muttered after they turned into another hallway, not finding a single soul anywhere.
"Sorry if we don't take your word for it," Bellamy said sarcastically.
"Why aren't you with your people on level 5?"
"After what I've done, they can be free. I can't. Deliverance comes at a cost. I bear it so they don't have to."
"It wasn't Cage." Bellamy realized. "It was your idea to make the deal with the Grounders."
The former President of Mount Weather nodded in response. Elliot glanced at him with an unrecognizable expression on her face. I suppose that's why he and her father got along. Dante reminded her a lot of Aster. But his choices got him killed. Just how this old man would be if he kept his act.
"We're in. Got it."
Bellamy went inside the command room first because he insisted he had a gun. Elliot ignored him and bumped into his shoulder as she barged inside with her swords in her hands. The man clenched his jaw but he followed close behind her to watch over her back. There was no one inside the command center.
"It's clear," Bellamy told them, dragging Dante inside. "He's telling the truth."
"Let's get the monitors up," Clarke said, shutting the door behind them. As soon as the multiple screens lit up, the blond let out a small gasp at what she saw. "Oh my God."
"Is that Raven?" Bellamy demanded, disbelief in his tone as they watched someone familiar strapped on a bed and getting their bone marrow drilled into.
The camera panned to the other side of the room, showing a bunch of familiar faces━people she didn't expect to be there. Clarke looked like she might start crying. Her mother was one of them. Along with Kane and a few of the Hundred. They were shackled to the wall, waiting for their turn to get drilled into.
Bellamy hastily grabbed one of the radios from a table and shoved it towards Dante. "Tell them to stop now."
"I won't do that."
Elliot turned to Bellamy. "I can go there and take a few of the guards out."
"Elliot, no━"
"Do it." Clarke sprung from where she stood. She looked desperate. She'd agree to everything if it saved her people in there. Bellamy looked at her in disbelief, his jaw clenching. "Make it quick."
"I wasn't asking for your opinion," Elliot spat, the blond girl a little taken back from the harshness of her tone and her narrowed gaze. "I'm not going to watch Raven die after everything."
"Just... come back. Okay?" Bellamy gulped ever so slightly. His eyes wavered staring at her. "Lincoln would kill me if you didn't."
Elliot pursed her lips. "Good to know."
Bellamy could only watch as she marched out of the command center before looking at the screens to see her running through the hall to where the others were. Elliot ran with caution, turning left and right, finding the dorm where the Mountain men were holding the sky people. She turned to another corner and found a couple of guards coming her way with guns on them.
Her back pushed against a wall━Elliot took a deep breath before she decided to make herself known. She was outpowered by their weapons but that didn't mean she couldn't fight them. She slid on her knees, her swords flipped the other way around, holding them like she held a dagger.
The sharp blades sliced through their stomach with ease. She got two of them and as soon as their legs dropped, she stood up and slit their throats. Her only certainty that they were dead. Blood sprayed all over her face, tainting her skin with splatters of red. Some of the substance got on her lips, making her spit out some of it on the concrete floor.
She briefly glanced at the camera in the corner of the hall, knowing that Dante, Clarke, Monty, and Bellamy were all watching her. The only recognizable color on the screen was the blood on her face, her hands, and the dead bodies of the guards soaking the floor with their blood.
The last three scrambled to their feet, their shaking hands holding guns. Panicked, they started firing in her direction while backing away. Elliot quickly dropped to the floor and grabbed one of the dead bodies, covering herself and using the corpse as a shield. She waited until they ran out of bullets before she shoved the body away and began marching towards them.
There was terror in their eyes. She could see the fear on their pale faces. Her feet dragged her towards them. Red covered her face down to her neck, and her arms hung to her side with blood-stained hands gripping her swords. A monster. They thought she was a monster in the shape of this woman who was going to kill them.
Not a single sign of remorse could be seen on her. That's what scared them. She'd been trying to avoid this, but sometimes, your true self will always come out no matter how much you try to hide it. This was Elliot of Azgeda. The ruthless warrior born from the ashes of her loved ones and the people who had molded her into this.
They didn't even get to call for help on their radios when a blade flew through the air and embedded itself in the guard's heart. He dropped the radio from his hand, stumbling a little as he slowly looked at her with wide frightened eyes. He didn't want to die. But death was already in front of him.
She stared back at him with hallowed eye. There was no emotion on her face as she watched him drop dead like the rest of his comrades. The last thing they ever saw was the she-devil's disfigured face glowering down at them.
Then Elliot continued to run along the hall to get to her destination. Then somebody almost bumped into her. Her fingers twitched around the hilt of her sword. Her eye narrowed at the familiar by. "Jasper?"
"Elliot?" He gaped at her.
Just as fast as they found each other, a group of guards appeared out of nowhere. This time, Elliot was too outnumbered, and she couldn't act fast because of their grenades and rifles. Elliot dropped her sword as they zeroed in on them. Now, they weren't too afraid of her because they caught her.
They did not miss the horrid lesion across her face and neither did the blood all over her skin and clothes. It was enough to remind them that she wasn't someone to mess with. They tightened the ropes around her wrists and dragged her to where they kept the others. Elliot only had one thing in her mind━the Mountain men's success was flawed.
There is only one way this story ends, and Elliot refuses to die at the hands of cowardly men who kill innocent people.