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As Bellamy stared out the window, down to the desolate earth, he wondered how he was supposed to keep everyone alive. The Prince of the Ark probably should have paid better attention in his Earth Skills class.
He ran his hands through his curls making them stand up in all directions. If Clarke was there, she would have told him to stop fidgeting, while she stood with her back straight and blonde hair in a perfect plait over her shoulder, but Clarke wasn't there. She was in solitary confinement.
And that’s what had drawn Bellamy out of his bed at the late hour, to meet a mechanic.
Raven Reyes was the youngest zero-g mechanic in fifty-two years. She was also an engineering apprentice under Jacapo Sinclair and Jake Griffin, Clarke’s late father.
So she knew things. Like Bellamy.
She knew the Ark was failing and he knew that the Council was preparing to send one hundred delinquents down to earth to see if it was survivable. And they both knew they had people they cared about locked up behind bars that were being sent down to the ground.
“It needs to happen tomorrow night,” Bellamy looked up when he heard Raven’s voice coming down the corridor. He could see her ponytail swinging back and forth as she came into view. He leaned back against the window letting the blue of the earth light up behind his head like a crown.
Raven scoffed at his silence as she strode up beside him and looked out.
“Are you still with me on this, Bellamy?” He could practically hear the word asshole in the way she said his name. He wasn’t on the friendliest terms with a lot of people on the Ark. His father was the Chancellor and so, had sentenced Raven’s boyfriend, Finn, to lockup, after a spacewalk had cost the Ark two months of oxygen. It wasn’t something most people could forgive that easily.
“There’s a council meeting tomorrow evening,” he answered her crossing his arms. He needed more information before he got himself locked up.
That was the plan. Bellamy would go down in the dropship with the delinquents and Raven would follow them down in an escape pod. But first Bellamy had to find a way to get himself into trouble.
“Just do it now,” Raven said in annoyance. Her leg was bouncing beside his and she couldn’t stop twirling her necklace around between her fingers.
“I can’t just go for a spacewalk, Reyes. Some of us can get floated for crimes now,” his words landed exactly how he thought they would and Raven flinched. Raven and Bellamy were both over the age of eighteen. After Finn was arrested, she had poked around in the Ark’s databases and discovered the flaw Jake had found. She had approached Bellamy soon after Clarke was locked up.
“Your father wouldn’t float you,” Raven said in disbelief.
“He floated my mother.”
The venom in Bellamy’s voice was hot. He had never had a good relationship with Jaha. Once the man had finally claimed him as his son after Bellamy was born, he spent his time going back and forth between Ark stations. His parents never married, but Bellamy was given all the privileges of the upper class. As he grew older, he distanced himself from his mother and her secrets more and more, under Jaha’s influence.
Until Octavia was found.
He turned back to look out the window, wondering how quickly his mother’s bones had incinerated into stardust out there in space and if he would suffer the same fate.
“So did you drag me out of bed to look at the stars or what?” Bellamy asked huffishly. Raven pushed up off of the window and began walking away from him so he followed her down the silent halls of Mecha Station to a maintenance bay.
She looked at Bellamy hesitantly for a moment, distrust still filling her eyes, and then decided he was the only one who could help her. She pulled off a white sheet that was hiding an old rusty pod.
“It’s got to be at least 130 years old. It was salvaged from Mir-3. But it should hold up through the re-entry and hopefully, the landing. If I can just score a pressure regulator…” Raven rambled on. Bellamy couldn’t follow all the mechanical lingo, but it looked promising.
“How did you find this?”
“I have my sources,” Raven said. She had said that to him a lot since they had started planning their escape to earth. He had his suspicions of a certain doctor helping her, but he didn’t say anything.
“It can fit two if you chicken out,” she teased him and poked his ribs with a screwdriver she had picked up from the floor. Bellamy shooed her hand away and ran his fingers along the metal frame of the pod.
“I’ll go to the council meeting tomorrow and make sure their plan is still a go. Then I’ll damage the last living tree or something. They’ll have me floated in the morning, but I can bribe a guard to get me on the Dropship. It’ll work.”
“I’ll meet you again on the ground?” Bellamy asked and got ready to leave, but a noise in the hallway startled them and he quickly followed Raven into the escape pod.
The hiss of their door closing was closely followed by the noisy boots of a guard and then a flash of light was searching the mechanical bay. In their haste to hide, Raven had ended up on top of Bellamy’s lap, smashed between him and the pod’s motherboard.
Bellamy tried to calm his breathing as his heart hammered in his chest wildly. It wasn’t breaking any law to be out late at night, but it would be hard to explain why Bellamy Blake, Chancellor's son, and Raven Reyes, Mecha Mechanic, were hanging out around an ancient escape pod.
They watched the guard move slowly around the bay and then sit down in a chair by the door.
“I guess it’s his break time,” Raven whispered right into Bellamy’s ear. Her breath ghosted down to his neck and he felt goosebumps rise up on his skin. She shifted in his lap and his hands came up to her bare arms to steady her.
“Are you comfortable?” Bellamy asked quietly. He could feel the rise and fall of Raven’s body as she leaned back against his chest. Her body was warm.
“You don’t have to be so nice to me, you know. You act like such a dick to everyone else all the time.”
“It’s just an act,” he replied. Bellamy had spent years perfecting his image. He wanted to be seen as the Prince of the Ark, not just the bastard child of the Chancellor. It had turned him cold, following the Ark’s rules while turning a blind eye to his little sister’s existence. But he was willing to throw it all away now to save her.
“Our best chance is on the ground now,” Raven told him reading his thoughts. They had spent the last week gaining as much intel as they could, Raven spied on Sinclair in the Earth Monitoring Station, and Bellamy listened in on all the council meetings.
The dropship was being dropped near a place called Mount Weather. It was stocked with supplies for three hundred people and could last them two years. The main problem was determining if the ground was even survivable. That’s why they were sending the disposables. It made Bellamy sick to think of them that way, but it was true.
”At least we have a shot of making amends for our sins,” Bellamy agreed. He hasn’t been there to protect his sister from being discovered by the unannounced room inspection, he couldn't stop his mother from being floated, or prevent Clarke from being silenced, just like Raven couldn't stop her boyfriend from taking the fall for her mistake. But they could make sure the ones they cared about made it safely to the ground.
”What do you think it’s like?” Raven whispered again. The escape pod was getting warmer the longer they sat inside and it reminded Bellamy of the space Octavia hid under the floor in. He loosened his grip on her arms and flexed his foot to keep his body awake.
“Large. Larger than anything we could imagine. Like the universe, but brighter and green. So much green space,” Bellamy sighed imagining the unimaginable. He thought of what would happen once the Ark failed. If it would be stuck in orbit around the earth forever or be sucked into oblivion. Would space reclaim it like earth reclaimed the ground?
“I hope there are birds down there,” Raven murmured. They traded wishes in hushed tones throughout the night. The guard had fallen asleep, but they knew they couldn’t exit the pod safely without waking him up. They were trapped until he left.
At some point, Bellamy felt his eyes drooping and his hands settled heavily over Raven’s, their fingers eventually entwined. He dreamed of blackbirds flying across a vivid blue sky all night. Raven’s head was resting on his chest when he woke in the morning. Bellamy shook Raven awake and they untangled themselves awkwardly. She poked her head out of the pod and pushed the door all the way open when she had decided they were alone.
Bellamy climbed out after her and stretched his arms over his head.
“I’ll see you on the ground, Blake,” Raven said and went to shake his hand. His hand engulfed hers and he gave her a small smile.
“May we meet again.”
—
“So are we all in agreement to send the Hundred down to the ground tomorrow morning at zero six hundred hours?” his father’s voice rang out and Bellamy looked up from where he was staring down at the table. Hands shot up in the air around him in agreement. Bellamy slowly raised his and met each council members’ gaze. Abby Griffin, Diana Sydney, his father, and Marcus Kane. He had joined the Council when had come of age, but he was still the youngest member there.
Staring back at Jaha and then Kane, with a fire in his eyes that reminded him of his baby sister, he wondered how his mother had become the ship’s common whore to men like them. How they could be so callous of her fate when they were a part of the reason she was floated. He didn’t even want to look at Abby. How could a wife float her husband and a mother abandon her daughter?
The leaders of the Ark were hard and pious rulers. Bellamy was not sorry to say in the slightest that he hoped they suffocated in their palace of welded ships one day.
Bellamy memorized the coordinates on the wall to Mount Weather in case the Dropship’s landing was miscalculated. He listened when Jackson and Abby went over the mechanisms of the monitoring bracelets each delinquent would wear. And then he went to destroy the Last Tree.
—
When Raven crashed through the earth’s atmosphere and landed in the treetops, she thought of the tree Bellamy had damaged on the Ark. The limbs and branches were broken at odd angles to help them with their descent to earth. What destruction would the two of them cause on the ground?
Her question was quickly answered when Finn and Clarke stumbled upon her escape pod in surprise. They took her back to the Dropship camp which was in total chaos as Bellamy sat on his throne of guns and discarded wristbands.
She wanted to wipe the smirk off his face when she was told of the Grounders hiding out in the woods and they realized the slim chance they had to survive winter without the help of the Ark. Her radio was fried and her boyfriend was in love with the princess now.
When she showed up in Bellamy’s tent after Clarke and Finn disappeared, she figured she would just nab herself a prince. His heart was bleeding for someone who didn’t even notice him and his sister had run away with a Grounder. They took out their failures on each other. Stripping down to bare their tired bones and exchanging angry affection, learned from the ones who were supposed to love, but only hurt them.
When they went to war with the Grounders, Raven made bombs and lost the full ability of her leg. She tried not to let it make her bitter.
When the Ark finally made it down to the ground, Jaha embraced his son like a prodigal child. He never left camp, so Bellamy never had to take part in a genocide, and they soon were too busy finding shelters for their people when the world decided it wanted to end again.
Raven and Bellamy tumbled in and out of each other’s arms through their heartbreaks. When Clarke murdered Finn, it took a piece of both of them. Going to a place where they couldn’t follow.
When Clarke left him after they took down the mountain and Wick disappeared, they held each other and promised to start over. Bellamy had Gina, who was real, and Raven thought a lot about the nightblood and her sea.
When she struggled through all her pain, Bellamy traded his crown for a knight’s armor to follow his queen.
And when Bellamy and the others showed up on an island, he was looking to her to get them back up to space. The hope that blossomed out of his face filled up her heart and she got him there.
As she stood behind Bellamy now, as he looked out the window at the scorching earth, he looked less like a prince with a crown upon his head and more like Atlas with the world on his shoulders.
Raven couldn’t fill the hole that Clarke left behind or the cracks that his family had made in Bellamy’s heart, but she could hold his heart in her hands and keep his broken pieces together. They could grow to love one another deeply. She hoped. If he wanted.
“Are you with me?” he asked her.
“Always.”
She reached out for his hand cautiously, and let their fingers interlace like they had in her escape pod. Instead of asking him what he thought it would be like, she asked him what he would miss.
“The birds,” he whispered. Raven smiled and laid her head on his shoulder. She imagined the sound of chirping and the feeling of the sun on her face. Bellamy took her chin gently in his hands and tilted her face up to his. His eyes were shining with tears, holding the pain of loss and regret that Raven knew well.
“I’m going to kiss you now, okay?” he asked with caution like Raven was a bird he didn’t want to scare and have fly away. Raven nodded and Bellamy met her lips with such a reverence that she wanted to weep. It was different from all the other times they had kissed. Pouring out their anger from the ones that had hurt them or letting off steam after being in a battle they never should have been a part of. Leaving his father and sister in the Bunker...leaving Clarke behind in Praimfaya...it had changed him.
He kissed her now like he wanted her, and only her. Like he needed her. Like he loved her.
She didn’t know if Bellamy was supposed to be the love of Raven’s life, but he was hers up in space. Like a ship in a bottle, she could hold that place until they were back on the ground. And if he asked, she would follow him to the ends of the earth and beyond.