This is basically your run-of-the-mill Becho time jump fic, though I hope you enjoy it nonetheless! It will contain some allusions to Echo's childhood, but I am saving much of that for another fic I'm working on that's basically my elaborate headcanons about Echo's upbringing and her relationships with Nia and Roan and Ontari, as well as background on the Azgeda/Trikru conflict and how that affected some events in the series. Once it's published, I'll make a note of it and you all can cross-reference things I mention here with that fic, as they are intended to be in the same universe.

UPDATE: The backstory fic is now online, under the title "Ice." You can find the link on my author page.

(For those who follow me for Joniss, I'm still working on those stories, I'm just working out some of my The 100 feels in the wake of the finale. If you crave new content, I recently updated my babysitter au, which you can find on my Tumblr.)

She still wakes up screaming. Even hundreds of miles from the earth's surface, Echo can't escape the horrors she faced there. Tonight it was the sick feeling of waking in a drugged haze, hanging from her ankles and too weak to move. Though the Mountain is the most common source of her nightmares, it's far from the only one. The death of her parents. Vicious beatings for failing her queen. More recently, asphyxiation. An empty oxygen tank or a pair of angry hands at her throat.

For the longest time, Echo was able to hold everything together. Her esteemed position made all her suffering worth it, and she could funnel any pesky emotions into combat training. But now she has none of that. She's arguably the most useless person on this ship and has no one to fight. Nothing to occupy her time or her mind. Nothing to distract her from the fear and loneliness she feels, from the painful realization that she is a broken person.

It's these facts as much as the nightmare itself that make Echo's eyes burn with tears. Burying her face in her pillow, she let them dribble out along with a few quiet sobs. She's never been much of a crier, but nothing at all about the last few weeks has been normal. When Roan banished her, he not only doomed her to die, he destroyed her sense of self. What was she without Azgeda, without a monarch to serve or a people to defend? So maybe it's not Echo at all who's muffling her sobs in her pillow, but someone completely different inhabiting the sack of skin that once belonged to the fearsome warrior.

A knock at the door makes Echo go stiff, freezing her in the fetal position facing the opposite wall. "Echo?" a voice calls quietly. Fucking Bellamy. A moment passes before the creak of the door on its hinges pierces the silence, followed by his voice. "Echo, I heard you screaming all the way down the hall. I know you're awake."

"Go away, Bellamy," growls Echo, pulling the covers tighter around her body.

He hesitates. "Is that what you really want?" When she fails to reply, he slips in the door and closes it behind him, but comes no closer. "Was it a nightmare?"

Keeping her sniffle as quiet as she can, Echo wipes her eyes. "What do you care?"

"Would I be here if I didn't care?"

Echo values her self-sufficiency over almost everything else, but she doesn't know that she can survive five years isolating herself from everyone on this ship. She wouldn't want to. Still staring at the opposite wall, she mumbles, "It was the Mountain."

Bellamy's voice goes soft. "I understand."

"Do you?" she snarks into the darkness. "After a few hours and one harvesting?"

"Would you have survived that one harvesting?" he shoots back. Echo sets her jaw, not wanting to admit that she has her own doubts about that. For all the times they've saved each other, it was Bellamy who saved her first. After she greeted him with a wad of saliva. Bellamy sighs, and when he speaks again his tone has lost its edge. "If you want to talk to someone who does understand, Monty and Harper were locked in cages for days and drilled into for their bone marrow. Harper was all but dead when Jasper got them out. She still has nightmares too."

Would that even be useful? Wouldn't dredging up those memories just make the nightmares worse? "I'll keep that in mind," Echo responds blankly.

Bellamy's footsteps start to edge closer, and Echo squeezes her eyes shut in frustration. It's not that she wants to be alone. She wants to want to be alone. She wants to be okay with that. Emotional attachments only lead to pain. They are weakness. And she's known since the day she met Bellamy that he would become her weakness if she allowed it. It was proven on that day she lured him away from the Mountain when she should have left him to die. And again on the day she broke her promise to shoot him if he did not get out of her way.

"Do you really want me to leave?"

Echo swallows the ache growing in her throat at the proposition. "Do whatever the hell you want, Bellamy."

After a short pause, Bellamy's surprised voice fills the void. "Who told you about that?"

Echo shifts her weight just enough to squint at him over her shoulder. "Told me about what?"

He blinks, shaking his head sharply. "That's just a thing I used to say, when we first landed. Never mind."

"No wonder you weren't in charge," snorts Echo.

Hard lines form in Bellamy's face as he sets his jaw. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Really, she only said that to get under his skin, but there's a ring of truth to it. "People need confident direction to feel comfortable. I wouldn't want a king who gave no orders."

"I gave orders," he snaps. "I took charge, at least until Clarke took over. We fought a lot." Bellamy appears to go somewhere else for a moment, then sighs as he refocuses on Echo. "My point was, we should do what we wanted, not be accountable to the adults who sent us down to die." Prompted by Echo's confused squint, he explains, "A group of teenaged prisoners came down first, to see if Earth was inhabitable. I snuck on board to protect Octavia."

Turning fully onto her back, Echo props herself up on her elbows and raises an intrigued eyebrow. "How old is Clarke?" Her forehead creases. "Was Clarke."

Bellamy swallows, the pain in his eyes forcing him to look away. "Eighteen."

Admittedly impressed, Echo nods to herself. "She carried herself very well."

"She'd been through a lot."

Echo rolls her eyes. "Haven't we all."

"I wouldn't know," remarks Bellamy, meeting her gaze again. "You haven't told me a thing about yourself."

"You haven't asked," she points out.

"Would you have answered?"

Shrugging noncommittally, she admits, "Probably not. But that was before we got stuck here together for five years."

That's the closest Echo will come to confessing that she craves human connection. That she does not want to be so isolated despite her efforts to the contrary. But it seems Bellamy understands, from the way he eases himself down onto the mattress. Whatever is in their past, the alliances have changed, and so have the rules. Maybe they finally can begin to rebuild some trust in each other.

Bellamy tucks his right heel between his thighs so he can sit beside Echo while keeping one foot on the ground. Half in, half out. The ache in Echo's chest crescendos and is joined by a tingle in her limbs, urging her to grab his shirt and pull him down, pull him closer. It is immutable, this longing to wrap herself around him and find comfort and life in his touch. She hates herself for constantly losing control of her mind around this man. The most she can do is control her hands, wind them tightly in the sheets. They will find other places to reside later. When he inevitably leaves and she is alone again.

"Why were you so loyal to Queen Nia?" asks Bellamy, mercifully pulling her from the quicksand of her own thoughts. It's a strange question though, and a particularly stupid one. "From all accounts, she was a pretty terrible person."

"I don't know," Echo huffs defensively, "why did you follow that Pike man and kill a sleeping army sent to protect you?"

"Because someone destroyed my trust in Grounders," retorts Bellamy. As they hold eye contact, the anger in his expression fades to regret. Echo keeps her face as blank as possible. She never intended to hurt Bellamy, and seeing the fruit of her actions is far from pleasant. Still, she doesn't regret them.

"If I hadn't lied to you, you would have died," Echo reminds him calmly.

"You could have told me the truth and saved us all."

"And betray my clan and my queen? Do you have any idea what they would have done to me?" It was bad enough, what did happen to her for deviating from the plan and getting Roan arrested when news of the attack came over Bellamy's radio.

Blinking away, Bellamy speculates, "Death by 49 cuts?"

"If I was lucky," Echo pronounces emphatically. "The queen was ruthless, Bellamy. I didn't dare disobey."

"So again, why did you protect her if she was so awful?"

"She was a good ruler," protests Echo. "Everything she did, she did for Azgeda."

Bellamy chuckles under his breath, earning himself a glare. "You still didn't answer."

Staring vacantly down the bed, Echo chooses to surrender. It's not something she does with any regularity. Her voice turns as sad as her eyes as she tells him, "Because she took me in after my parents died in battle. That's how I got into the Royal Guard. I'm everything I am because of her." Echo's mouth twitches. "Everything I was."

"And that's a good thing?" counters Bellamy.

Echo's mucles tense, activating into battle mode as a chill sweeps through her. "I guess not," she states, barely reigning in the warble that wants to affect her voice. Turning to Bellamy with a glare, she orders him, "Get out."

"Echo-"

"Leave me alone, Bellamy," she repeats, her tone harsh and cool. Unforgiving.

Bellamy averts his eyes with a small nod and heads for the door. Halfway into the hall, he pauses long enough to mumble, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that."

Except he did. How else could he have meant it? He thinks so little of her and barely even tries to hide it. So what if she's strong, as he said when he coaxed her off the floor and onto the spaceship? It's one of the highest compliments someone could pay her, but if that's all she has to offer, it leaves no room for weakness. And Echo knows she can't be strong every minute of every day for the next five years. Not when she feels so out of place on this ship and with these people.

I don't intend for this to be a long fic, but I will probably add a few more chapters.