Ground Down

Chapter 87

"I put my faith in Clarke. I'm a fucking idiot." 

Octavia slumped her shoulders against the wall and the giant window that made no fucking sense because why would you equip your café with giant fucking windows if the building lay on the very ass of a city constantly being hit by airborne ammunition gave a crack loud enough to startle some lost bird out of the gutter, but, then again, she didn't exactly appreciate her new head of unit for his brains. She didn't appreciate him at all, really. 

"If you say that one more time, I will lock you in that fucked-up outhouse round back." 

Bellamy sighed into his shoulders. With eyes-closing defeat that made his mouth hard and pulled its corners down until he resembled a sad little doggy, probably because he'd seen it coming that she'd tell him where he could stick that, but, well, Octavia inhaled. Deeply. And then she let the air back out, crossed her arms, and slumped her back against the wall. Again. Hard. Again. The window cracked. Again. Bellamy scuffed his right heel against the ground with angry little clouds of dust decorating every thwacking impact. 

Skaikru had failed to show. Trikru had failed to show. She stood next to her brother on the best end of a crappy alley leaning against the one building that had been constantly reassembled after having been shot to shit, and that was putting it nicely. People who hardly passed for people anymore probably lurked in the surrounding buildings. And it stank. Kinda. Blame that on the outhouse her brother had mentioned. Octavia sucked on her cheeks and sulked at the ground. Dust-ruined and unfortified. Somebody had build a ramp, relatively recently, too, the wood hadn't yet worn. 

"I could kick the door in?" she offered. 

"Then we'd be standing around inside an empty café," Bellamy said. 

As opposed to outside an empty café. Yeah, his point. A café without a bunker. She'd put her faith in Clarke, she was a fucking idiot. Octavia picked on a tear in her sleeve, picked all the little pesky bits off it and new pesky bits took their place like snap, so she kept picking, wondering just how badly her sister's head-over-heels ass had suffered when Clarke had arrived in Polis and had ripped her a new one. Clarke had to be the least willing ambassador Lexa had dealt with so far. Least cooperative, most bothersome, least listening, most demanding, blah, blah. Then again, the nagging feeling that if Clarke had remained at Arkadia, Skaikru would've arrived at the café on time and in some sensibly selected fashion kept nagging on her neck. Fuck Clarke though. 

"Why does Roan not have his people in order?" Bellamy smacked her hand away from her sleeve and Octavia moved her hands behind her back to keep picking on the sleeve there with an eyeroll towards the sky. Grey clouds. Yellow sun. Bleak-ass blue. "This is his café," Bellamy went on, "how hard can it be to get his warriors whose boss he's supposed to be here?" 

"How hard can it be for your Chancellor to get her people here?" Octavia asked towards the sky. "Just put them in a rover and drive, right?" 

Bellamy blew up his cheeks, but granted her that point. His heel had worn a dent into the ground. Both of them straightened out like those little groundhog things that poked out of holes and craned their necks around all triggered only to nope back out when they thought they sensed the presence of a hawk at a motor rumbling, a car passed by the alley, both of them slumped back. 

"How long do we wait?" Bellamy asked into scraping loose dry dirt into the dent his heel had made with the toes of his boots. Almost threw him off balance. 

"Until we have other orders." Octavia moved to help. 

Didn't seem to satisfy him, he made quite a face for somebody who took such pride in being in Skaikru's proxy army which, as far as she understood armies, should function like any army and have higher ranking warriors giving orders to lower ranking members who responded with a crisp yes, chief or with their insides getting a sneak-peek of their outsides. She kinda preferred her brother's insides on his inside. Skaikru made for a shitty proxy army. The Guard. Like naming it in the sense of protection meant they did anything different from what warriors did. Maintaining order by force and respect. Minus the respect, maybe, Skaikru weren't great at that, first example being their ambassador.