Chapter Text
The Ring: Six Years, Seven Days.
The shuttle had seemed bigger when they were going up to the Ring six years ago. Now it was crammed with the same seven people, but was full of all the things they’d pleaded with Raven to allow in.
Monty’s algae farm kit made it on, although when Murphy had complained that if the food was fucked down there after Praimfaya he’d rather die than live the rest of his life on a diet of green. Bellamy couldn’t quite muster up the fight to contradict him.
Echo had negotiated her sword, since it could be plastered against the wall and tied down and had convinced everyone that if they really, truly had to start over in the green spot, something to cut down trees and kill animals might be helpful. Murphy started nodding enthusiastically.
Harper and Emori had simply worn all the layers of clothes they could find, ignoring Raven’s pointed looks as they struggled to snap the seatbelts over their multiplied frames. Of course, Raven’s tools and bits of spare electronics were given purchase. She shot down Murphy’s yells as she tossed out the still for moonshine, with a terse reminder that if he had a problem with her orders he could stay on the Ring.
She didn’t say anything when Bellamy walked in and sat down in his chair, the only personal item in his possession were four working data pads and viewers. They contained the books he’d found comfort in as the hours passed, slower than all the others in his life. If humanity was starting over, they would need to know where they began.
“Knowing our collective history didn’t stop us from leaping into war last time,” Raven said to him as he watched the archive copy over.
“I’m downloading Catcher in the Rye, not the Art of War,” he bit back. He was thoroughly done with her attitude, although his hadn’t been much better. Every day over year five had been pulling a thread in him, a broken promise to the sister he’d left behind whispering in his ears.
“Fine, but strap it down, I don’t need a viewer hitting me in the face when I’m trying to keep us all from dying,” she said, and he nodded, depositing them into the hold, already stuffed full of the remaining medical supplies.
It was quiet when they all strapped in. Raven kept clearing her throat, her fingers shaky on the controls. He knew he needed to reach out, give a little.
“Raven,” Bellamy said quietly, “thank you.”
She looked over at him, her eyes filled with tears, before a small smile graced her face.
“Ladies, gentleman, and Murphy,” she said, an annoyed snort issuing from Murphy’s seat, “it was a pleasure surviving with you. How about we give living another go?” And with that, they broke away from the ring, and hurtled down, one more time, into the unknown.
***
Bright. That was that was something he’d forgotten about Earth. The brightness, the smells, the sounds. The seven of them were stumbling about, giddy at surviving the landing, at the miracle that this place was real and not a mass-hallucination mirage outside the Ring’s windows. He turned to look over at Raven, to congratulate on another awesome job, but she was frowning.
“What is it?” He asked, tromping over, feeling the heaviness in his limbs from the gravity not matching perfectly on the GoSci for too long. Her arms were crossed as she stared into the tree line. They’d landed in a copse of tall grass, surrounded by trees, the leaves swaying gently in the wind. It was a beautiful day on the ground, but he had a lot of experience with beautiful days turning bloody.
“We hit three hours ago, do you see anyone else?” She asked, chewing her lip, dark eyes roaming the tree line. Bellamy felt a prickle go up his back, and kicked himself for not thinking about it. “Bell, where are the people from the bunker?”
“I don’t know,” he said, sighing, “how about we go find them?”
The others stopped their meandering, apparently the celebration was over. Everyone took up their packs, and looked toward Echo for a headway. “Anything look like a path to you?” He asked her, long hair drifting in the breeze. It had been a long time since the wind was a factor in their life.
She eyed the ring of trees critically, turning slowly on her heels. He wondered if she felt strange to be ungainly on the ground now, the Azgeda spy out of practice with taking the measure of the land. Finally she pointed one long, slender arm to the west.
“There, the break in the trees looks unnatural to me. Could be a path, even if it was from before the wave.”
“Good as any direction,” Monty said, taking the lead jauntily, the grin on his face infectious as he grabbed Harper’s hand pulling her forward.
It only took a few miles to remind him that however much the sun was beautiful, it also made it muggy, and hot, and sticky. They were swatting bugs on their skin, only Monty able to keep a positive attitude yelling back at them “if the bugs are back, the things that eat the bugs could be too!”
“So are the things that eat the humans,” Murphy grumbled, using the back of his hand to wipe the sweat away.
“Relax John,” Emori said, catching up to him, “you know I’ll shove you down so I can get away if a bear comes at us.”
“I’m really glad we worked on ‘us’ babe” he cut back. Bellamy shook his head at the exchange, droplets of sweat hanging off his hair. Among the many good things about being back on the ground would be the chance to get away from their constant bickering or fucking.
At least Monty and Harper kept it sweet in public, and Echo preferred the lowest level of PDA possible which was honestly perfectly fine with Bellamy, even though he thought he remembered he enjoyed it a different way. What they had, it wasn’t like the other couples, it was simply a friendship with benefits, one Echo shared with Raven too.
He spun out the miles and hours watching the odd trail beneath his feet, tuning out the comments of his family. He was so lost in his own thoughts, mostly occupied with wishing Clarke could have been part of this, that he nearly ran into Harper.
“Oh my god,” she breathed, and he looked up to see, a village? No, it was just a few structures sitting forgotten in a small field. He squinted into the sun, shading his eyes with his hands as he took in the little buildings, circled around a few old wooden tables and a fire pit. It shouldn’t raise the hair on the back of his neck, but it did anyway.
“This isn’t right,” Echo said next to him, confirming the growing anxiety he felt.
Murphy turned around to face them up ahead, “looks pretty nice to me,” he said, walking backwards, “looks like we’re not sleeping on dirt tonight.”
“This isn’t a place that’s been abandoned for six years Murphy,” Echo said softly, her large brown eyes scanning the area, “this place has been cared for, recently enough for a fire pit to not be overgrown, and pathways to the doors to be cleared. Someone was living here, someone may still be living here.”
The seven of them stilled in a group, each taking more cautious scans of the area, before Murphy walked purposefully up to the door of a squat, square building, pale, colorful flags still floated listlessly around them.
“Murphy, don’t-” Monty started to say, but before he burst through the door, he slowed, cocked at eyebrow at them, and knocked on the door sharply three times, the third cracking the frame as the door groaned inward.
“Look, we’ve been invited,” Murphy said, grinning wryly back at them, Monty looked skyward as though wishing for his algae lab. It had been off-limits to Murphy, one of the few rules their erstwhile companion had followed.
Bellamy started forward with Emori, silence from inside meant it was either empty, or someone had already slit the cockroach’s throat. What he hadn’t expected was Murphy bursting back out of the door, eyes wide, face pale, and hands outstretched.
Bellamy stopped, starting at him, his hands on the gun at his side.
“Murphy?” he whispered, the fear on the man’s face evident.
“She made it,” he responded, his voice strangled, "Clarke's alive."
***
They searched for Clarke for three days.
The second Murphy had walked into the old gas station, he’d been faced with his own portrait. And Bellamy’s. And Raven’s. All of them. Wasn’t much of a leap to realize what had happened.
The little building was filled to the brim with Clarke. It wasn’t just the drawings, it was the keepsakes she’d lined up on shelves, stacks of papers outlining maps and calculations Bellamy couldn't begin to understand, blankets messily draped around a cot shoved into the corner, a few thin shirts peeked out from under it. A table in the back with long scratches where she’d prepared food. The air didn’t smell of her, it was stale, enclosed. His eyes kept landing on the lines of dust they’d made on the table as they searched for some clue among her papers.
He’d left her to burn, to die. He had come to terms with that knowledge. It was tipping his world on the axis to discover that wasn’t quite true. She may very well have burned, but she’d also survived.
They screamed her name, in those hours after Murphy’s discovery, wandering around the encampment, before Echo had discovered the trail south of the little cabins. He’d sprinted through, ignoring the burning in his lungs, the panic that was making his vision tunnel. They ran after him, nearly half a mile before bursting into a clearing and discovering the second impossible thing of the day.
A town. Built in a circular pattern in another clearing, this one stretching miles in front of them. They halted, listened, the sweat dripping down his collar, his eyes darting around trying to spot a slip of blonde hair.
Nothing. They started opening doors to the cabins. All empty, except for bed frames and a two chairs each. The more cabins they stepped into, the more sophisticated the carpentry became.
“She got better,” Harper muttered when they entered the tenth one, or twentieth, running her hand down a bassinet.
It was the third day they’d been back on the ground and Bellamy was hoarse from screaming her name. He felt as though it was the only thing he could say.
“It’s clay,” Monty said from beside her, staring at the wall. “I get what she was making the cabins out of, this has to be made from the sand from the dead zone surrounding the valley, but the roofs…” he trailed off, slipping one of the tight vines between his fingers.
The roofs appeared to be tightly woven greenery, opaque enough for light to filter down, eliminating the need for more than one circular cut window in the clay, but during a sudden down-pour when Bellamy had slipped into the nearest cabin, he discovered they were watertight as well.
There were hundreds of cabins. “Enough for the bunker population, plus some,” Raven said, crossing her arms tightly against her chest. They were all on edge. “She planned for 1200 Wonkru, plus us and whatever births occurred, and could occur in the next decade.”
Bellamy had to put his head between his knees hearing that news. They discovered the food storage the next day, Emori tripping over the handles to a cellar that had started to disappear into the grass.
A week after being back on the ground they circled around the fire pit, back at the small clearing Clarke had, or did, live in and stared at each other.
Echo breathed out softly, closing her eyes, refusing to look at him. That had been routine this week. “We’ve searched the entire town, and a five mile radius around it, what’s next?”
“Polis,” Raven said softly, “we need to get Wonkru out of the bunker.”
Bellamy’s head snapped up from staring at the flames. “You think they’re still in there?”
Raven stared at him, those dark eyes hard as flint in the light. “I don’t think it, I know it,” she pulled a book out of the backpack. “I went through the papers, the drawings of Polis, the rubble. It wasn’t just pictures. She has calculations on the back, details you only see when you lay them all out. She had a plan to burst through the rubble, to the door.”
The fire crackled in the night, but he couldn’t feel the heat from the flames.
“She had?” He said, the words twisting on this tongue. Tears gathered in Raven’s eyes, she pulled on her lower lip with her teeth.
“We need to go back to the shuttle tomorrow. I need to collect the leftover hydrazine. It’s what she was waiting for.”
Bellamy curled his hands around the log he sat on, wondering if her hands had been there before.
“Well, she waited long enough. We’ll go at dawn.”
***
It took another week of walking to get to Polis. He wondered how heartbreaking it would have been to find it alone, hurt and scared. They arrived, thirsty and burnt by the sun, but at least they were together.
The silence that greeted them meant that no one called out her name. Raven staggered around, finding each bowl of detonation material exactly as Clarke had drawn it. They drew the lines of explosives outward according to the calculations Raven had double checked, eyes widening at the accuracy of what Clarke had figured out. She struck the match.
Afterwards, the smoke cleared, and Octavia stepped through the rubble, determined and composed, her people following after her. It didn’t take a genius to understand what a year late and over populated would mean, how it would reshape Octavia. They had theorized what it might mean for the bunker, their late arrival, on nights they couldn't stop themselves, when the moonshine pulled to dark corners of their imaginations. He hadn't particularly liked any of Raven's ideas. Turn out she was more right that he'd ever thought.
Octavia was ‘Bloodriena’ now.
But she still embraced him like the little girl he remembered, tears streaking lines down the red on her face. Abby and Kane stumbled out after her, thin, worn, and fearful. He told Octavia and Abby at the same time about Clarke, what she had built, the answers they didn’t have on where she could be now. He wasn’t sure he’d ever forget Abby’s screams as she learned her child had been left out on the planet alone for six years, and now was suddenly vanished into thin air.
“We need to find her,” he said hands on his hips, looking at the woman his sister had become.
Octavia’s eyes narrowed, her shoulders straightened. “From what you’re saying of this village Clarke survived just fine on her own. I need you now, big brother. It’s time to bring Wonkru home.”
***
It took just two weeks after leading Wonkru back through the desert, for his family on the ring to scatter amongst the population.
Monty directed the farming, ambling up and down the rows of vegetables and starches, Clarke's papers tucked into his back pocket, muttering to himself and touching the long delicate reeds reverently.
Murphy had seemed to walk into the the building Clarke had built to be a cafeteria, and never left. He was suddenly in charge of the prep room, creating recipes that could easily feed nearly a thousand. For now, the food was doled out cafeteria-style, large batches of meals overseen by him.
Emori and Raven were making plans for generators and looking at ways to create motorbikes, the tires built for the sand and mess of moss on the ground.
Echo and Indra had become an unlikely team, leading small groups to the surrounding streams to fish, and set traps for the small animals that roamed. They used the designs Clarke had drawn, prototypes scattered haphazardly in the forest line, enough that the children were kept away for now.
Harper had joined Abby in the medical unit, quietly steadying the older woman’s shaking hands, whispering with Kane as he doled out a meager dose of the medications she’d become addicted to. Kept out of the pits solely for the medical knowledge she could provide and leave behind.
For himself, he seemed unneeded in every role stuck. Octavia hadn’t given him a job, and he hadn’t seemed to fall into one the way the others had. He spent most of his time in Clarke’s home, trying to put the story together. He sifted through the portraits, the diagrams, the maths and odd paragraphs. She wrote about the odd crops that came up, the fish that tasted wrong, the way the storms seem to electrify the sky.
He saw drawings of her face, covered in blisters and sores from the radiation, others that showed one eye cloudy, but then later, healed. It wasn’t until she kept making notes about recordings that he began to search beneath the floorboards, and found it.
Cassette tapes. Old, old, old school. Boxes of them, lined up, organized meticulously. He thought he might just start crying when he chose one at random, placed it into the machine in the first box he’d found, and her voice filled the room.
Bellamy, it’s day 480 and I’m walking back to my house now, covered in clay, again, her laugh broke the sob in him that had been building since the day they had landed.but I’m too tired to clean it off, i’ll just eat some of the cornmeal and pass out. But wanted to let you know those birds came back, they have a pretty song but only sing it at dusk. I’ll try to record it next time. I think you’d like it.
That was it, so ordinary, a little blip in her day. He waited, holding his breath as the tape clicked over. Hey Bellamy, day 481, I found a new stream on the western edge, I’ll have to be careful though- over and over, he let it play out for an hour, getting all the way up to day 525. Octavia slipping into the room without him noticing.
“Hey Bell,” she said, sliding into the chair next to him. The red leathers cracking on her shoulders. He turned to look at her, his neck tensing at the action, he’d been bent over the speaker for longer than he thought. She tilted her chin at the device. “Find any clues to where she is now?”
“No,” he said, feeling itchy at her presence. He and Octavia hadn’t had much time alone. She was busy leading Wonkru, and didn’t have much time for the brother who’d spent the majority of the last six years thinking about her.
It made him angry in a petulant way he wasn’t proud of. Or maybe it was the fact that every time he started ambling towards the tree line the guard unit seemed to follow him, and they only followed one person’s orders.
“It’s so strange. For her to put this work in, then leave,” she said idly, glancing around the space, he didn’t miss how her eyes traced the papers that held her own face, the mask from the conclave on them.
“Then why are you keeping me here, O? I should be looking for her, bringing her home.” He asked, his fingers hovering over the old play button, waiting to press it down and continue listening to a ghost. “Do you still hate her for taking the bunker?”
She didn’t seem to want to look at him, her shoulders still and tilted back, chin held high. But then she let out a slow breath, seeming to deflate, the mask of Bloodriena falling away, and fatigue playing across her features.
“That’s a shitty thing to say Bell.”
“Is it true?” He pressed, the desperation in his voice clear.
She paused, spreading out a few of the drawings until she found the one he knew was under there, Octavia as she had been at the drop ship, looking at butterflies. “She was always so far ahead of us. I hated the choices she made, but even then, she knew that kindness can kill more than it saves in the end.”
“She was kind,” Bellamy whispered, thinking of Atom, of Clarke humming a tune as she slid her knife into his neck.
Octavia looked up at him, those large green eyes dull in the light. “I don’t hate her. If she’s still alive I may be the one person on this planet that truly understands what it took to be her.”
The words settled on him, and he could suddenly see the toll becoming Bloodreina had taken on her, the parts of herself that would never come back after killing her people to save them. “So then why won’t you let me go O? You don’t need me here, that much is very clear.”
“Nothing is clear, Bell” she said angrily, swiveling around and leaping out of the chair, the drawing scattering down to the floor. “You think I don’t want to leave and go look for her too?” She snapped, her fingers grasping for a sword hilt that wasn’t there. Instinctual for her now. He leaned back, confused. The moment they’d broken them out Octavia had been consumed by the needs of Wonkru, he didn’t begrudge her that, only the feeling that he was suddenly part of an army with no enemy.
“I didn’t know you wanted that,” he said softly.
She groaned, her hands on her hips looking down and he was suddenly struck with the pose, knowing it was the same one he made very often, usually when Murphy was being an idiot.
“I’ve spent six years under the ground, pacing the same halls, staring at the same shitty pieces of cult propaganda, trying to keep the last humans from killing each other and cutting out pieces of my own soul to do so, and you assume I wouldn’t like a nice fucking walk in the woods to find the woman that saved my brother’s life?”
“O, I-” he began but she held up a hand.
“I get it, it’s inhuman what I did, what we did to survive but I’m still human, I’m still here Bell. I bore it, so they wouldn’t have to. Just like Clarke. You always found a way to forgive her. Why can’t you do the same for me?” She softened at the end, a small gathering of tears at her eyes.
It took the breath from his lungs to hear her put it so plainly. “You don’t need my forgiveness for that O. It was force them to live or watch them starve. I get it. I don't know if I would have done anything differently”
She sighed, “not for the bunker,” she said softly, “for what I did before it.”
He snapped his head up, looking at her face, his heart thudding dully at the memory of her fists hitting his face after Pike executed Lincoln.
“It’s been a long time since then little sister,” he said slowly, “but thank you.” His lips quirked up. “If you need forgiveness, I’ll give that to you.” Her lower lip trembled slightly, but seemed to regain control of herself. Nodding sharply at the exchange.
He wondered at this woman. The sister he had known on the ground had rolled along the waves of her emotions, loudly, outrageously dancing in the storm of them. Who was he to blame her for the outbursts that rattled others around them, when for so long she had to be still, small, contained. As Bloodreina, she’d had no choice but to measure herself. Keep the raging fire of who she could be confined to the terrible justice on the sharp side of her sword.
“You’ve just seemed, angry, since we got to the valley, I couldn’t help but wonder if you’d enjoyed a life without me on the ring.” Octavia said, raising her eyes tentatively.
“No, god,” he replied, getting up slowly, moving towards her until she let him pull her into a hug. “I’m sorry O, I’m just,” he tightened his grip on her, “it won’t feel like I’m back until I find her, whatever is left to find, I guess.”
“I know,” she said, stepping back hastily. “I came to tell you, you can take whoever you need if they want to go, I’d rather she be found so we know, instead of wondering if the feeling on the back of my neck is her, or a different problem.”
It still irked him that she thought of Clarke as some kind of threat, but he knew the whispered word of Wanheda still flew about the Wonkru people, and a legend can be something people cling to when laws are to their dissatisfaction.
“Thanks,” he said finally, watching her raise an eyebrow, “Clarke would be proud of you, for what you did.”
“I don’t think proud is exactly the right word,” she said tightly. “Now go away, find the Princess, or Wanheda, or whatever.”
“Yeah, I just need to talk to Spacekru,” he said, a smile on his face, as she rolled her eyes at the moniker Wonkru had given the seven of them. “I bet they can’t wait.”
***
Turns out, they could most definitely wait.
He had gone to Monty and Harper first, but instead of helping them pack bags, Monty was ready with carefully wrapped rations for him, enough for nearly a month, more if he caught his own game.
He didn’t even have a chance to work up to anger, before seeing that Harper had moved one of the carved bassinets to their cabin.
He left them with hugs, Monty assuring him that if he didn’t check in at least once a day they would be after him, pregnancy or not.
He wound his way to Murphy and Emori next, but the two of them were with a bunch of Wonrku teenagers, preparing the meal for that evening’s dinner. Joking, laughing, at ease. Murphy regaling the teens with gory stories and tales of bravery that were most certainly performed by Raven and Echo. He suddenly knew, he couldn’t ask this of them either. Murphy was softer that the barbs he wore, few noticed the way his hand reached out to Emori’s every few minutes, shaking slightly.
Echo, the former spy, his sometime lover on the ring, it wasn’t her answer that surprised him, it was why. When he approached her cabin he found her around the back, talking softly with a very old man.
They appeared to know each other, and when she left his side, she explained that it was an elder from her village, from before she became Nia’s child spy. She seemed folded in on herself, trying to explain that she hadn’t realized any of her old kru had survived praimfaya, and the man had memories of her from before.
She looked away when she said it, and his heart broke a little when he realized that even after all the time they’d spent together, she still hadn’t trusted him enough to reveal this part of herself. He didn’t even ask her to join him then.
His family was unraveling like a spool of thread running down a hill, and he was afraid, he realized, afraid of what it might mean to make this journey alone.
***
“Raven, I don’t understand,” Bellamy said criss crossing the small mechanical shop. “What do you mean you’re not coming with?”
Somehow over the span of just a few weeks, she had transformed the space Clarke had created for her, with a simply drawn black bird on the door, into what he could only imagine was the inside of Raven’s brain come to life.
Bit and pieces of tech, from remnants from the Ring, to broken pieces off the bunker, to whatever Clarke had scavenged from her years of falling into old safe houses and bunkers. Now she leaned against one of the tables covered with tools, her eyes brighter than he’s seen in a long time, her hair down around her shoulders instead of tightly pulled back.
“I mean exactly that Bellamy,” she said, “whatever you have to do, I want you to go and do it. But I can’t,” she took a breath, and he saw it tremor through her, “I can’t do this again. I need to be here, for a while. I need to be just a mechanic again.”
Bellamy stepped back from his friend, his found sister, feeling like he’d been slapped. “Raven, I thought we were in this together,” he whispered, “you said you were with me.”
“And we were up there,” she said softly. “You needed a co-pilot, you needed what Clarke had been and I did my best, truly I did but,” she cut off, looked down, the edges of her torn fingernails digging into her arm, unable to continue.
“Clarke is out there,” he said, hating himself for the anger he felt, hating himself for what he would say next. “If it was you, she would go find you.”
He saw her recoil, and the pit in his stomach deepened.
“I know,” Raven said, her arms tightening around her waist. “You think I don’t know that? You think you’re the only one who spent six years trying to do what Clarke would have done?”
Bellamy looked away, out a window to see a few Wonkru children cautiously making their way across a field. The wildflowers looking more at ease than they did in the sun. He swallowed, the lump in his throat didn’t go away.
“Bellamy, you’re not the only person who spent nights staring at the airlock, wondering if it was the better way to go,” she said softly.
He looked up at her, startled by the admission. “I never,” he began the denial rising to his lips, but he stopped when she shook her head sharply, her eyes narrowing, lips tightening. Raven Reyes didn’t suffer liars.
“Shut up,” she snarled. “I watched you dismantle yourself that first year. I watched what leaving her behind did to you, I saw how you looked at me for telling you there was no more time, to close the door, that’s what I bore, you asshole. And to find out, to find out we didn't just kill her, we abandoned her...Bell, I can't face it if she's...”
Tears tracked down her face now, she had stepped closer to him, staring up at him. Guilt clouded his mind, he thought he’d hid the worst of it. How wrong he had been.
“I can’t go searching for Clarke, just to see her dead body. I can’t go searching for her to find her fine and staying away because she chose to. I can’t grieve her again Bellamy,” Raven said, pressing a hand against his chest.
“What if it’s the third option?” He asked, pleading for her to understand, to see what he saw. “What if she’s out there, and she’s hurt, and she can’t make it back?”
Raven sighed, her shoulders slumping down. “That’s why you should go without me. I’m not any good out there, tromping around in vines and uneven ground. Look around you Bellamy. Look at what she gave us. The food that's already stored. There are generators waiting to be fixed. There are a thousand projects Clarke left for me, me!” Raven raised her hands, letting them fall to slap against her slim hips. “If she’s alive, she wanted me to stay here,” she said quietly. “She would want me to help Abby out of the hole she’s dug herself into. She would want me to fix the things she didn’t know how to. I’m doing what Clarke wanted me to do in the world she built. I’m being the mechanic.”
Bellamy could feel the panic begin to rise, for six years he’d look forward to when he wasn’t trapped in space, responsible for lives that were not his own, and now the idea that he might be free of that responsibility made it hard to breathe.
Despite the anger in her eyes, Raven suddenly had her arms wrapped around him, the sharp bird on her chest digging into his. He brought his own arms up around her.
“Okay,” he whispered. “I’m sorry Raven, I shouldn’t have,” he paused unsure. “I didn’t know you felt like this.”
“Oh gods Bellamy, I don’t blame you,” she said shakily breaking her grasp around his waist and stepping away. “Look,” she turned around to the table, handing him a pack, “I’ve digitized her tapes. Every one one of them, put them in order according to the labels she made, but I’ll be honest, her writing was getting pretty sloppy at the end. I’m not sure everything is correct, but it’s solar powered so you don’t have to worry about batteries or anything.” She sniffled, wiping the tears off her face hastily, tucking the hair back behind her ears.
“Thank you,” he whispered, “for everything Raven. For being you, up there, that’s who made it possible.”
She took a big shaky breath, but a smile broke across her face, “Yeah, I know, I’m awesome.”
A knock on her door broke whatever spell there was, and Raven called out for them to come in. A Wonkru man opened the door cautiously, a small child holding onto his hand.
“What can I do for you?” Raven said, walking toward them, and Bellamy saw her eyes light up as she held her palm out for the small device in the child’s hand. “Oh, this is interesting-” she said and Bellamy took that as his cue to leave.
She didn’t call out goodbye as he left, but he heard the easy peal of laughter carry through on the way out, and while it hurt in a strange way to leave her behind, something loosened.
Raven’s happiness wasn’t on him. He wasn’t responsible for Octavia, if anything she now saw him as her responsibility. His family had scattered among her people like they were the missing puzzle pieces in the picture Clarke had created. He wondered if he was supposed to fit too, or if like herself, she had taken both of them off the board on purpose.
He was unmoored and heading into the woods. Into the unknown. He was on his own, well almost, he reminded himself. The clang of the audio reader against his back keeping in time with his steps. He walked a mile until he was at the outskirts of the village, the last of the homes she had built receding. She’d created a paradise. He was leaving it. But he wasn’t going alone.
He took out the device, clipping it onto the front of his shirt, the speaker a little small and removed but Clarke’s voice rang out clearly.
“Bellamy, you’re not going to believe what I found. Or you will because you’ll be giving me grief when I show you that I’ve been recording my radio calls. But this whole talking to you without an answer for the last year is driving me a little nutty, and I need to give myself a reason to keep doing it, so, I figure if I record it, then that’s a rational thought process. It’s kind of cool though, the one year anniversary of you flying off I find this recorder and all these tapes. Something special for day 365.”
Bellamy paused it. Her voice was teasing, but he could hear the shaking to it. He could always see when she was putting on the brave mask. Pretending she knew all the right steps, when really all along she was just dancing through the gaps.
He turned to look behind him one more time, through the gnarled branches he could still see the bright clearing, the sounds of children laughing. Clarke had found it, had made it a heaven. An Eden. Why had she left it? He looked away, into the darkened woods, the vines that made excellent shelters on homes when cut at the root, twisted and thwarted the sun as they strung themselves through the trees, blocking out the light. He’d have to get above them to power the solar battery eventually. He took another step into the growing shade. He pressed play.
Day 366, Hey Bell. So, today I discovered that I’m still a terrible terrible mechanic. And by that I mean I started a very small fire. Trial, ‘blow up rocks round three is a no-go.’ But you could have guessed that right? Don’t worry, I’m not testing the batches on the stuff near the bunker, don’t want to weaken the structure at all. Radiation levels are still off the charts and there’s some crazy weather going on outside the valley. I figure-”
He hadn’t followed her that time outside the gates of Arkadia. She had needed him to watch over their people, breaking his heart in the process. But now their people had Octavia, and they weren’t really his, not anymore. He was free in a way he’d never been. Free to go after what had always eluded him. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. So he let the sound of her voice carry him forward, into the unknown.