The 99

Chapter Twenty Eight: Bellamy

SO sorry it has taken so long to post. Luckily, I've only got two chapters left of this. I was going to end it right after this one, but I kind of want to add more background to the Hundred's circumstance without Bellamy and Clarke's influence. I'm ending it on Clarke's POV, so make that three chapters left. Three, that's it, I SWEAR. Please review!

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The world was too big.

Never had Bellamy stood in a place greater than the twelve Stations composing the Ark. Never had he seen a place capable of housing more than two thousand people. And, once upon a time, Earth had housed billions.

Those billions were gone now, lost in the explosions and swallowed by the fire. The few who had managed to evade the bombs by burying themselves in the ground would've been found by radiation, sooner or later.

Years ago, Octavia had once asked him about Earth. What had happened down there, she'd wondered. Where were all those winged creatures now?

And Bellamy had looked down at his sister, her beating heart a broken law, his responsibility, and had told her the truth. "A long time ago, there was a nuclear apocalypse, that covered the ground in massive explosions and ripped the world apart. But some very smart people found a way to build a flying machine that would take us to the stars, where we would wait until Earth became safe again."

"Like Noah's Ark," Octavia replied, and Bellamy had just smiled, because what else could he do after confessing to a six-year-old how broken that world really was?

But now, standing on the ground for himself, before columns of trees stationed side by side like soldiers preparing for war, Bellamy found it wasn't as ruined as he'd once thought, which left him a lot of options for where his sister could be and no one around to ask where she might have gone.

He resisted the urge to hit something.

"Hey."

The sound of Clarke's voice broke through Bellamy's reverie and a small hand settled on his forearm. She peered up at him with eyes too blue to make much sense of. Eclipsed between shadow and sunlight, she looked like something ethereal, the princess from Octavia's stories given flesh and bone. He didn't even notice the grime caked on her clothing, or the torn fabric of her shirt. They were alive, which made her one of the best things to look at.

Bellamy clenched his jaw and forced his gaze back to the treeline they stood in front of, a couple hundred meters from the crash site. He stared into the forest, as if expecting Octavia to come running through it any second now.

"What if she's not here?" he asked. "How are we even sure the coordinates were right? We could be on South America for all Sinclair knows."

"If he thinks we're close to the dropship, we should trust him until proven otherwise."

Bellamy clenched his hands, wishing he could silent that pestering fear probing his mind, thoughts of a hurt Octavia or a lost Octavia. The thought of no Octavia at all. "The One Hundred came down a month ago," he said in a strained tone. "They could be anywhere by this point."

Clarke moved in front of him, too short to block his view of the trees, but not too short he missed the halo of golden hair from his periphery. He lowered his eyes to hers. "Do you honestly think they would've separated so quickly?" she asked, expression pleading. "They knew their best chance of survival was staying together. If they did leave, they probably didn't go very far. Jaha spoke of an underground military base. Mount Weather."

Bellamy inwardly grimaced at the mention of the Chancellor. They weren't on the Ark anymore, so what did that make the Council on the ground? He wasn't exactly warming to the idea of a new Chancellor. "How do you know about that?"