𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐈𝐂𝐊𝐄𝐃 | the 100

15 | Damned

"I'm still human."

‧ ✩ ｡ ✭ ° ☆ ･ _______ ･ ☆ ° ✭ ｡ ✩ ‧

Amber bites her lip as she trudges on through the shallow riverbed, ignoring how her dampened socks are slowly turning her toes stiffly cold. No matter how important she knows this search is, she can't make herself care, and when she glances up at everyone else's hunched over figures, she can tell they feel as miserable as she does. Only Bellamy, who sits by the shore, wears an unreadable face. When she spots him, her fingers prickle, and she realizes she's more than just miserable. She's angry.

"Hey, I found it!" Jones calls out. He lifts something out of the water and gives it a few shakes, droplets splattering.

The new girl perks up.

Not even the arrival of the pod could lift Amber's spirits, not when she found out that it wasn't filled with resources, guards, or doctors, but a single girl, a barely-adult mechanic named Raven Reyes. Maybe Amber could have been grateful anyway when she learned how the girl had built the pod herself only to establish contact with the 100, but Bellamy had to rip out and drench the girl's radio, ruining everything.

Raven takes the radio in her hands and shakes her head as she looks it over with a troubled brow, ripping out leaves and twigs from it. A small group huddles around her expectantly and Amber resentfully walks over to them.

"Can you fix it?" Clarke asks, her words tinged with fragile hope.

"Maybe," Raven mutters. "But it will take half a day just to dry out the components to see what's broken."

"Well done, Bellamy," Amber quips sarcastically as she joins them, sick of his insistent need to make everything worse. Not only do they need to contact the Ark for their own survival, hundreds of lives will be sacrificed for air if the Ark doesn't find out that the Ground is survivable soon.

"I told you, it's too late," Bellamy says weakly with his arms crossed.

"Do you have any idea what you've done?" Clarke snarls as she steps up to him with eyes narrowed in rage. "Do you even care?"

"You asked me to help. I helped," he points out.

"You need to learn how to show some freaking remorse," Amber scoffs. There's no point in trying to follow the rules she'd set for herself, she shattered every single one when she reached out to Murphy, and she hasn't been able to piece her composure back together just because she was met with the truth. The walls she once relied on to contain her ugliest emotions still lie in ruins and she hasn't found the strength, or perhaps the will, to rebuild them yet.

"Three hundred people are gonna die today because of you," Clarke yells in his face, but he doesn't show any sign of admitting his fault.

"Hold up," Raven interjects, then thinks aloud, "We don't have to talk to the Ark, we just have to let them know we're down here. Right?"

"Yeah, but how do we do that with no radio?" Finn eyes her.

Raven smiles mischievously at his question. "I love that I can still impress you after all these years."

***

Assembling flares from scavenged parts of Raven's pod takes hours, but they're working against the clock and have no time to complain if they want to signal the Ark in time. Amber helps as much as she can but in the end it takes knowledge she doesn't have, so she backs away for the qualified ones to finish the job.