Chapter Text
Raven discovers she has rad fire powers and kills her mother on the same night.
She doesn’t mean for either to happen. It’s a regular night and she’s fixing their broken toaster, she’s always been gifted with things like that, something you got from you dad, darling, her mom would always say, except she never told Raven anything else about her dad or anything else at all, really. Instead Raven had a stepfather that’s as flighty and neglectful as her mom, and how is that supposed to work, you’d think at least one of them would be on the lookout for her. But birds of a feather flock together and she’s saddled with three shitty parental figures, two of whom leave broken bottles scattered around the dark apartment and one of whom couldn’t even be bothered to stick around.
She hadn’t done that great in school, either – she’s jumpy and twitchy, which only adds to her temper and gets her sent to the principal’s office more than once, and she has difficulty reading words; the letters seem to switch themselves around in her head, and she did so badly one year that she’s held back. Her mother and stepfather seem to remember she exists then, if only because it’s another year of paying for school, and they yell at her for three hours.
It wasn’t so bad in the long run, though. She got to know Finn, who’s in her year now, and he’s beautiful and nice and sensitive. Like her, he’s missing a parent, like her, the letters twist themselves in his head, and like her, he can’t seem to focus on any one thing. The other kids sneer at them and the teachers turn up their nose, but at least Raven has someone to eat lunch with. Finn holds her hand, and Raven feels warmth in her chest.
The summer Raven turns twelve, her stepfather leaves her mother, and her mother leaves her even more for alcohol.
So it happens like this: she’s at home fixing a toaster that’s probably older than she is. It’s easy, second nature, check the transistors, replace wonky parts of the circuitry. Easy. It would’ve been like any job, and she would’ve had cold chicken to pop into the microwave for dinner, and she would’ve gone to sleep.
Except her mother coming home is burned into her memory – hair mussed, eyes blown wide, mouth turned in a downwards sneer, bottle clutched in hand. Raven blinks; her mother shares her skin and eyes and mouth, and she’s horrified at what she sees. “It’s your fault,” her mother hisses, “Your fault he left me.”
“Travis?” Raven is stupid enough to ask. “Or my dad?”
She remembers her mother’s mouth twisting cruelly, and not much else, before –
(before)
before suddenly her mother’s hands are around Raven’s throat, and she’s yelling and screaming and Raven is clawing at her hands not even to fight her mother off but just to breathe, and it’s terrible she’s desperate and feels like she’s about to die, and she’d cry if she could, how could her mother, who was neglectful but loved her, she knew – her mother drops her, gasping on the floor, reaches for the toaster and raises it above her head –
Raven screams.
Then the toaster explodes.
There’s fire everywhere, suddenly, and the only thing Raven can hear is her mother screaming as the fire gets bigger, and she’s running towards the front door and then there’s smoke in her lungs but she’s not being burnt and she feels like collapsing, wonders briefly if she’s going to die here –
Until suddenly there are strong hands pulling her up and there’s a man with goat legs staring down at her – “Good thing we got you out in time,” he’s saying, “C’mon, girlie. We gotta run.”
It’s not a story she likes telling. There are a few who know about it, of course, Finn, Chiron, her favorite siblings, but people ask about how she discovered her fire powers, and she just says, “I was fixing the toaster and it kind of exploded,” and that shuts them up fine.
The immediately after is not something she likes, either – they cross the pine tree into a camp and she’s brought to the Big House, where Chiron’s looking at her kindly. “Raven Reyes,” he says, “Welcome to Camp Half-Blood.”
“Where is this?” she remembers spitting out, because she’s small and twelve and tired and may have just killed her own mother. “What are you?”
Chiron had drawn himself up to his full height. “I hope you’re familiar with the word centaur, Raven. The better question is – do you know what you are?”
Demigod. The revelation surprises her, but only on a superficial level; she’s always known, deep down, that there’s something about her – she’d confided in her mother, at first, at how some of the adults’ faces flickered sometimes, showing things more terrifying than she could describe, but her mother had folded up on herself and refused to talk about it.
Chiron sets her up in the Hermes cabin – for transit, he says, “Only until you’re claimed. I have a feeling none of us will be surprised when you are.” Before he leaves, he tells her, “Two things – get some rest, you’ll need it, and–” his smile’s gentle. “You’re safe here.”
It’s the best night’s sleep she’s had in years.
(She’s claimed not even two days later.)
The after after is much better.
That summer is one of the best of Raven’s life – days spent with her new siblings in the bunker tinkering away at machinery, in the fields racing with pegasi, in the training rooms practicing with weaponry. It’s practically a dream, and the days begin to blur together.
One of the best, of course, if you discount the nightmares. They come, of course – of explosions and her mother’s face dripping vicious accusations, and she wakes in the middle of the night sweating and on the verge of screaming. But her siblings are kind, the head counselor Wick learns how to make hot chocolate the way she likes it and the sister who bunks below her, Monroe, tells her about her school, her half-brother, her dog, all in a steady, calm voice, and Raven breathes in and thinks, yes, she can live here.
(She never uses the fire powers.)
Raven asks Chiron, of course, what’s happening to her family, who’s dealing with the legal fallout of her mother. He assures her they’re dealing with it. (She learns later that Chiron had been making legal trips back and forth on her behalf, and her father – her father, the god – had turned up a few times, and her heart warms.)
And that’s before Finn comes, on the heels of a chimaera attack that Thalia Grace’s tree zaps back. She’d been practicing swordsmanship with Bellamy from Ares, the older boy critiquing her stance and hold, when she’d seen him and his protector stumble past the boundaries, his clothes torn and dirty and his hair messy and accidentally make eye contact with her, his jaw dropping. Raven has never been happier in her life.
She sneaks him out of Hermes the night after he arrives and they lie on the roof of Cabin Nine, which Wick had repurposed as sort of a dumping ground-slash-workshop after Monroe got too annoyed with all the clutter in the cabin and the bunker.
“So,” he says.
“So.”
“We’re demigods.” Finn’s voice falters, like he’s not used to saying it.
“We are.” She eyes him out of the corner of her eye. “That’s not a problem, is it?”
“You’re Hephaestus’s kid,” he says. “And I’m someone’s, I don’t know–” his face breaks out into the smile Raven loves. “It’s amazing, Rae. It’s weird that I’m saying it, but it makes so much sense. It’s nice,” he adds, almost like an afterthought. “Feeling like I belong somewhere.”
“Like we belong somewhere,” Raven reminds him. “Hey, we’re really family now. Sort of.”
He grins at her again. “Yeah.”
Raven’s there when Aphrodite claims Finn, when the bright pink doves appear above his head and his jaw drops open in surprise. She’s there when he moves his stuff into Cabin Five, wrinkling his nose at all the pink but appreciating the warm hugs from his affectionate siblings. His sisters look between them and smile knowingly, and Raven tries not to frown.
“You guys love each other,” Roma whispers conspiratorially, her hands twisting in her dark hair.
“It’s not like that,” Raven says, annoyed, because Finn’s never been anything more than family to her.
Roma looks undeterred. “He looks at you, too,” she says flippantly, before patting Raven on the shoulder and heading out of the cabin.
(She’s right.)
Raven and Finn grow up that year, come into their own as members of their cabins. Finn’s always been charming and diplomatic and Raven’s always been fiery and good with machines. It just works. Finn kisses her for the first time at the summer’s end ceremony, before they leave to go back to normal life. He returns to his family and Raven is palmed off to a disinterested aunt across the country. It sucks, but there’s Iris-messaging and letters and Finn never feels far away, not really.
There’s always next summer.
Raven’s aunt never mentions her mother, and they both prefer it that way. She doesn’t need her mother. Not now, when she has Finn and everyone.
Two summers later, Clarke Griffin and Wells Jaha come into camp. She doesn’t think much of them, only that they’re scrawny rich kids, not until Jaha shoots lightning from his fingers. Then everybody’s tiptoeing on eggshells around him, but it’s hard not to like him – he’s amiable and kind, dotes on Clarke, the kind type of leader his dad never was.
Griffin, well.
She catches Finn making out with her two weeks in, and Raven retreats into her cabin, throws herself into gadgeteering, leaves only to eat and attend important camp events. She doesn’t speak to Finn, because she’s not sure if she can stick back the fragments of her soul if she does.
She’s so caught up in avoiding Finn that she’s stunned stupid by Clarke Griffin standing on the Cabin Nine doorstep. “What are you doing here?”
Clarke inhales. She’s pretty, Raven notices, with her mother’s blonde hair and steely gaze. “Wells and I are leaving on a quest tomorrow,” she says quietly. “Bellamy’s going with us, but – well, it’s our first, so in case something happens – I want you to know that I’m sorry, Raven. If I had known, I would never–”
Raven envelops her in a hug before she can say anything else. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. She’s not sure if she means it, but it seems the right thing to say. “You’ll survive.”
Clarke Griffin smiles at her, innocent and sunny, and Raven’s jealousy dies down just a little. She leaves her cabin to see them off the next morning. Finn is there, too, skulking at the side; she sees him approaching and shuts him down with “There’s nothing to talk about, Finn.”
(Clarke, Wells, and Bellamy do more than survive. They bring the fucking Golden Fleece back with them, too.)
It takes time, but Raven forgives Finn.
She lets him kiss her again, too, but it’s different now, knowing he’d cheated. Raven’s voice screams not good enough, disposable, boring enough to be cheated on, and sometimes he makes her hole up in her cabin and cry for family. For his part, Finn’s eyes are gentler, he holds her softer, kisses her temple more affectionately, tells her he loves her more and more – but deep down, Raven knows things won’t ever be the same between them.
It’s also hard with Clarke around – the next year, Clarke stays the school year along with Raven and Bellamy and a few other kids. At first, nobody asks why she’s not at her fancy prep school, why Wells isn’t with her. But Raven sits on the lakeside with Clarke, Monty, and Jasper; the latter two are doing something inane with some lakeside plants a couple hundred meters down, leaving her with Clarke on the pier.
“If you don’t mind me asking, Princess,” Raven says softly, breaking through the awkward silence. “Why’re you here?”
“My father’s dead,” says Clarke. “He was an engineer, knew some stupid state secret. Someone ratted him out.” She’s blunt about it but Raven can tell she loved her father from the quiver in her voice and the gloss in her eyes, and thinks of her own mother and her rough fingers.
“Does Wells know?”
It’s clearly the wrong thing to say, because Clarke’s eyes flash, her shoulders stiffen. “It was Wells’s fault,” she says, very lowly and tightly that Raven has to strain to hear it.
Awkwardly, she puts her arm around Clarke. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “Boys suck.”
That, at least, makes her laugh.
The summer Raven turns seventeen, they stop the world from ending. It’s bloody and it’s brutal and they lose so much and nobody quite knows where Bellamy and Clarke and Wells are, but on the ground, while throwing bomb after bomb after bomb, Raven thinks they’re doing pretty okay.
And then there’s a drakon.
And then suddenly Finn’s falling –
Raven blinks. And then suddenly, she doesn’t hesitate. Suddenly her hands warm and all she can see is fire, and she’s yelling and running and leading the Drakon down 57th Avenue and hurling fire, and suddenly – the Drakon collapses, half its face burnt off, its leg crushed by a falling building, and all Raven can feel is empty.
“Fire powers,” says Jasper, when she wakes up in the makeshift medbay. It’s equal parts accusing and admiring. He’s one of those Apollo kids who’s good with a bow and arrow but not with medicine, but they’re low on manpower and for now, he’s all she’s got. “Didn’t know you had it in you, Reyes.” Jasper looks uncertain for a moment. “They thought you had the blessing of Ares in you,” he adds quietly.
“Finn was dying,” is all Raven says, looking down at her hands. She can still feel it, the anger, the need for revenge, the fury, the way her blood had sung. The fact that she would do it again in a second, kill and burn and destroy cities for him still, terrifies her. “I’m not going to apologize for doing what I had to do.” She looks over at Finn, unconscious in the bed next to her. Half of his face is scarred from the acid and the bandage around his stomach is beginning to bleed through. Her breath catches and she nearly sobs at the sight of him. “Is he going to be okay?”
Jasper touches her hand comfortingly. “He’ll be fine,” he says, like he’s trying to make himself believe it too.
By the time Finn wakes up, she’s gone.
She doesn’t talk to him at the end of everything. There’s partying, lots of it rancorous and uninhibited, and then, quieter, rebuilding. Raven and Wick build a dragon, and little Charlotte from Cabin Seven shrieks with glee when she rides on it. She drinks Sterling’s wine and lets Roma do her hair, teaches Mel how to swing a sword and laughs at Bellamy’s bad jokes. It’s nice, rebuilding the camp. It gives them something to do, to forget the losses, and allow the relative peace. It keeps her busy.
But that’s before Wells Jaha goes missing.
Later, when he is returned to them, Raven will remember how Clarke had cried when she’d heard the news, and how she’d launched herself at Wells when they find him in Rome, Lexa’s billowing robes and stoic mien behind him.
“I wanted to make up with him,” Clarke had murmured. “Saving the world – it really puts things into perspective.” Bellamy’s arm is around her and Clarke’s slumped into his shoulder like it’s the most wonderful thing in the world, and Raven’s not blind. It’s obvious to anyone who’ll look twice that Bellamy is utterly devoted to Clarke. Personal loyalty, the gods had whispered, his fatal flaw. He’d burn cities for her, fight alongside her, die for her.
In Rome, he falls into Tartarus for her.
Now, Raven would never be inclined to trust John Murphy – he reeks of death – but she loves Bellamy, and she loves Clarke, and when the Parthenos is loaded up on the ship and everyone’s in hysterics she’s the one who takes him by the collar and asks him how to get to the Doors of Death.
Epirus, he chokes out. Greece.
Everyone’s sullen. The plant in Monty’s hand wilts and Wells’s hand stills. That’s another sea to cross, more monsters to fight, more death and destruction. Can we even, she thinks mirthlessly. Who are we to think we can save them? Save the world?
Do you know what you are? Chiron’s voice rings again.
Raven Reyes. Daughter of Hephaestus. Mechanic. Teenage orphan. Freak pyrokinetic. Finn’s ex (?). One of seven dumb kids prophesied to save the world. These have become her identifiers.
She inhales, and stands.
“You think Bellamy and Clarke would want us to sit around and mope for them?” she says, her voice hard. The others turn to look at her. “Don’t you guys think for one second that those two won’t be looking for the Doors of Death and we have to fucking be there and wait for them when they get out, is that clear?”
Wells stands next, sending her an appreciative look. “Raven is right,” he says. “We have to keep moving.”
The others listen to him, because he’s a child of Zeus, duh, and they scurry off to their quarters. But he slides into the copilot seat next to her when she sits down. “Thanks for that.”
“We all needed it. For Clarke and Bellamy, too.” She turns to him. “I know you guys are tight and you’re freaked, and trust me? This is the most freaked I’ve been since I was twelve years old. But Bellamy and Clarke – they’re counting on us.” It’s hard to think of Bellamy and Clarke, both so proud and strong and stubborn and deserving of life.
Wells’s expression is distant. “We count on each other,” he says finally. “That’s the whole point of team.”
Raven Reyes. Engineering genius. Gifted with fire powers. Drakon-slayer. One of seven badass demigod warriors destined to save the world.
(She’s fine with that.)
She closes her eyes, breathes in, smirks back at him.
“Damn fucking right. Buckle up, Jaha.” Her fingers warm, tightening on the steering wheel with renewed determination. “Gaea won’t know what hit her.”