Among Enemies or Friends

[Clarke Griffin]

Yvette

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It was unusual for Clarke to not be alone these days. She could be perfectly alone in a crowd of people. She was good at that, Clarke had known once Finn was dead, she would struggle, not just with others, but with herself. To have Lexa appoint Grounders to follow her, meant she was under constant watch. She could be judged by them. At the same time she had the feeling that their judgment would be different from the judgment of her own people. Her people had a case of short term memory, it would seem. Clarke made her way to one of the more quiet rooms in the crashed Alpha station. She had no tent here yet, no permanent place and somehow with everything happening, the blonde doubted that would ever happen. For the time being she had to stay somewhere and that would be this room.

Clarke turned to the Grounders with her. “I think we should stay in here. Any objections?” It was just a small room, no real decorations, but they were save from wind and weather in here at least. And if Clarke was honest, what difference did it make if they were on the hard floor on the ground outside or on the hard floor inside here. At least they were sheltered. “Do you need anything? Bathroom, food, water?” Maybe to be outside. Clarke would give them what they could offer. Maybe they would want to mingle with the other grounders. In here Clarke should be relatively safe after all.

[Yvette]

Yvette hadn't been thrilled with her assignment to follow around the Arker girl, but she knew better than to question orders. Besides, even though she never would have admitted it, she was a little curious about the Arkers and their culture. The people had literally fallen from the sky, with no warning. So far she hadn't seen much of them, but the way Clarke had killed her friend had intrigued her. Even though the Grounders could have wiped her people out in retaliation, she'd done what she'd decided was best. Although Yvette had been angry that the prisoner hadn't died in the way dictated by her culture, she'd started feeling a grudging respect. The girl was brave, for an Arker.

Clarke led Yvette and her fellow Grounder to one of the quieter parts of the crashed station. Yvette took in as much as she could, for curiosity's sake as much as a warrior's mindset, that everything could be dangerous in an unfamiliar setting. She glanced at the other Grounder, who simply looked back without saying anything. "This will be fine," she told Clarke. There wasn't much in the room, but it would be better than sleeping outside, even though Yvette had no preference either way. She was a Grounder, and Grounders were fierce warriors. "We require nothing at the time," she said in answer to Clarke's question when it became evident the other Grounder planned on saying nothing. Lexa had told them they were free to do what they wished as long as they kept an eye on Clarke and did nothing to jeopardize the Grounder-Arker status.


"What are your plans for the rest of the day?" Yvette asked after giving the room a final look. She was equal parts curious and pragmatic. Even if she didn't want to know, it would be best to find out now rather than just wandering through the Arker camp, seeing what happened along the way, but she felt a tugging in her stomach that urged her to find out more about these strange people.

[Clarke Griffin]

“Good. We don’t have much to offer.” They would with time maybe, but it was not right now. In the future things might get different with that, once her people figured out how to survive without the help of kids, but this was weeks, if not months away. Until then children or barely adults were in charge, despite not officially having the authority to be in charge. She would carry this burden until her friends were safe and the lives of all were in relative quite waters, though Clarke didn’t know how to do that. It would all work out. Eventually they could all live in peace, right?

“I have no plans.” Clarke answered. For right now that was true. “I go to where I am needed the most. Right now I am needed here, to wait for a signal from inside the mountain once the radio is fixed. I don’t know what will happen in a few hours.” Or even mere minutes. All was so very unpredictable to her. The worst case scenario was that they would wait in vain, that there would never be a signal and she failed in her yet so very simple task of protecting the people she loved, of saving them. Clarke didn’t know if she could handle this failure. “For now we can all stay here. They will call us if there is news from within the mountain. I’ll certainly stay and try to rest. We don’t know when we will have another chance at resting.”

Yvette

[Yvette]

The information that the Arkers didn't have much else to offer was carefully filed in Yvette's mind as she kept a blank face. Eventually the Arkers would build better defenses and grow in numbers, but for now it seemed like their unexpected landing had left them disordered. If people as young as Clarke were in charge, the Arkers must be desperate for leadership. She hadn't thought children and young adults would be in any position of power, but evidently the Arkers had a different view on leadership than the Grounders did. Unless, of course, Clarke and those like her had simply taken authority without having the actual rights to it.

When Clarke claimed to have no plans Yvette nodded minutely. "Then we will stay here," she decided, promptly sitting down on the floor. She crossed her legs beneath her, her fingers resting on the fabric over the hilt of the small knife she kept sheathed inside her boot. From the outside it was hard to tell it was there, but she always had it with her. Her sharp gaze remained on Clarke as the young woman spoke, analyzing each word as she spoke it. The talk of the mountain, and resting, she understood, but there was a topic that was not covered in her memory. "This 'radio' you speak of," she said, pronouncing it 'rah-dee-oh'. "It lets you talk with the men inside the mountain? Who are you speaking to?" While the Grounders had their methods of sending information over distances, the radio was an unfamiliar concept to her.

[Clarke Griffin]

It seemed like at least one of her unlikely guards was quite the force to be reckoned with. Clarke actually found a second to smile at her sitting down like that. It was so forward, so refreshing from the complicated politics she had to maneuver, alone right now. There were so many things to consider, so many lives at stake, some more important to her than others. She had lost so much already, most importantly it felt like she lost parts of herself. But right now, thanks to how forward they were, it seemed less hard, just for this second. She found herself able to breathe in and out easily for just this one second, before the worry and dread returned to the pit of her stomach again. If she could, she’d arm herself, go into the mountain, break her friends out and just be done with it, if it claimed her life so be it, but her death was a small price to pay compared to the death of the others. 

“We should be able to, yes. Soon in any case. The Mountain Men try to stop that, our engineers and mechanic have to try to actively trick them.” Clarke explained. She was not the one who would be able to explain the technicalities of it all. She wasn’t a mechanic or an engineer, she was a doctor to be, though right now she couldn’t imagine ever finishing her training, no matter how much she wanted to do it. 

“We’d talk to our inside man. We have a man or will have a man inside, who will try to disable their defenses, keep our people inside safe and ultimately help us get in.”

Yvette

[Yvette]

The information that the Mountain Men would try to stop them was hardly news. For as long as Yvette had been a warrior, or training to be one, the Mountain Men had been one of the most serious threats to her people. Of course, the fact that people had disappeared and never come back was a concrete point, not to mention that Mountain Men had sometimes shot those of her people that ventured too close. But she suspected that part of the fear was due to the fact that nobody knew what happened to the people that disappeared. Fear of the unknown only increased fear of something that could actually hurt you.

Yvette had little idea what Clarke was talking about with engineers or mechanics. Tricking was something she understood very well. As long as the people Clarke spoke of were on their side in the coming fight, Yvette didn't plan on questioning them too closely. If they were going to have any chance to fight against the Mountain Men, they would need all the help that they could get. Hearing they had an inside man was good. Without one their plan would be much more likely to fail. If there even was a plan.

"What do you plan to do once you are inside?" If there was a plan, Yvette would rather know than be kept in the dark. And if there wasn't one... She'd rather know that than go into things blindly.

[Clarke Griffin]

“Do you mean once out inside man is inside?” If he made it alive. That was the biggest problem. They didn’t know if he could make it in there alive. What if he got caught, or turned into a reaper? What if he was discovered early or killed? She knew he would go through a lot, he was willing to go through all of it to save the lives of their friends. So much could go wrong and really, Clarke didn’t know how she would deal with that. How did one deal with someone so important possibly losing their life? How did someone deal with the blood of two people she cared way too much on her hand? How would she survive this? She didn’t know. In her mind there was no way to go anymore. She struggled with the loss of Finn. A little voice in her mind reminded her, that this was not a loss, this was her killing him.

“The plan for him is to disable the acid fog. You surely know about that, right? Mount Weather uses it to keep attackers away.” And they viewed them as attackers. They needed to disable it and get through it in order to take down Mount Weather. “We’re hoping our inside man will be able to disable it so we can march to the Mountain and take it, without harming the innocent people inside it. And hopefully this ends up in getting our people out of there and eliminating the thread to us.”

Yvette