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Raven's taxi drops her off at the end of the dirt road, where the forest opens up onto a grassy, lakefront campground, strewn with tents. She takes her bag out of the backseat, closes the door behind her with a single, sullen thump. As the car drives away, leaving her to whatever comes next, she tilts her head back to take in the nearly cloudless blue sky, the sway of the wind through the top branches of the trees, the glint of the sun on the water.
WELCOME, reads a large banner, hung up between two poles in front of her, TO FLOUKRU RETREAT.
The font on the banner matches the font on the invitation Raven received two months ago. Why she decided to attend this particular event, she cannot entirely explain, even to herself. Officially, she came because Miller, the only one of the old crew with whom she still, occasionally, speaks, asked her to attend. Unofficially—
Already, the campsite is busy with people: women in peasant shirts and chunky jewelry, men in linen—someone sitting in the grass, playing acoustic guitar, the slow chords picked out like individual notes floating far but faint on the summer breeze— None of them are familiar, except for a man with a graying beard and a woman with long, wavy red-brown hair, whom Raven recognizes, from the invitation, as her hosts.
And Miller, carrying a heavy box out toward the fire pit.
And Jasper and Monty, ducking out from under the flaps of one of the tents.
And Bellamy, the silhouette of him familiar even from the back, standing out by the edge of the lake and skipping stones.
Raven takes a deep breath, readjusts the weight of her bag on her shoulders. Her taxi's already gone, no chance for escape now, even though she'd be lying to herself if she pretended she hadn’t seen this coming. If she told herself she was surprised to see them here, again.
The old gang. Her best friends, her housemates, her family. The Super Seven, minus two.
Behind her, she hears the slow, reluctant thump of another car, bumping along the slight decline to the lake. She looks over her shoulder just in time to see the taxi park, and its passenger step out.
No surprise here, either: only a drop in Raven’s stomach, and a slight uptick in the beating of her heart.
Only Clarke Griffin, standing for a moment just like Raven did, observing scene with a narrow-eyed and uncertain look. She takes a deep breath, as if she were steeling herself, an aura of uncertainty around her that is not familiar, or barely so. It brings up no memories of battles, or missions, or victories. Only of those few private moments when she allowed Raven, and only her, to see the streaks of worry in her unflagging, granite confidence.
When she turns and looks at Raven, Raven immediately looks away.
*
The Super Seven weren't her biological family, or her first chosen family, but they were the ones she thought would stick.
She left her mother's house at seventeen, in the aftermath of a gruesome fight. All she remembers anymore: the burning red heat in her hands, the confusion in her chest—what she recognizes now as raw power without control, without release. Her palms were sweating when she knocked on her boyfriend's door. He opened it to her and took her in.
For three years, they lived as if the world revolved around their second-floor walk-up and the flower boxes in their window and their disastrous attempts at cooking, in their little kitchen with the noisy fan. He was her everything. Sometimes he felt less like her boyfriend, more like her brother, or her partner: boyfriend both too narrow and too broad for the way she needed him, how she relied on the way he needed her.
She would have died in his place, if she'd gotten the chance. She could have. The crime had no human target; Finn was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The sort of casualty Arkadia saw a lot in those days.
After the funeral, she came home again, threw the flowers out the window, thought she might set herself on fire—she was so cold and numb and so hot all at once—then felt two rapid bursts of flames blast from her palms.
Set her fucking rug on fire, and singed the sofa and the lamp.
Two weeks, and one more Arkadian thief behind bars, later, Bellamy Blake showed up on her fire escape. Raven peered at him, thin-lipped and narrow-eyed, through the narrow break between the door and its frame, the chain lock still in place. She'd never seen him before but in some sense, even then, she thought she knew him, in the way that like recognizes itself in like. She was still half-drunk with newfound power then, and light-headed with grief. So she undid the lock and let him in.
Only after he stepped over the threshold did she notice the other boy with him: Jasper, tall and skinny, walking across her wooden floors with an impossibly light step.
She asked what they wanted with her. And Bellamy answered, "We want to help you. And we think you can help us."
And the sense that they were familiar, that perhaps she did know them, or had seen them, grew and grew like a half-remembered tune, floating through head. She jumped back when he waved his hand, and her mug of cold coffee slid across the tabletop.
When Jasper disappeared, flashed out of sight like a ghost, she threw up her hands and spit fire at the spot where he'd once stood. Bellamy threw back his head and laughed. Her face turned just as red as her hands.
He brought her to the window, showed her where Jasper was sitting in the passenger seat of Bellamy's car. "Good thing it was an astral projection," he said. "Or he would have been toast." He bumped his shoulder up against Raven's. "That's an impressive power that you have. I know you've caught bad guys before."
"A bad guy," she corrected.
Bellamy shrugged. The deep, steady timbre of his voice, the casual acceptance he radiated, the sense of home—she'd trusted him on instinct. Hadn't hesitated when he asked, "Do you want to catch some more?"
She broke the lease on her apartment and moved in with him, Jasper, Monty, Miller, Octavia, and Clarke at the end of the month.
The building was a refitted boarding house, with a rooftop garden and a massive kitchen, and a tiny fenced in backyard, where they'd eat outside throughout the warmer months. She helped Miller with the home repairs, played chess with Monty in the evenings, marathoned reality TV with Jasper and visited local bookstores and cafes with Bellamy. Once, she even took a weekend camping trip with Octavia, into the mountains outside the city, where Octavia tried to pick out constellations, even though all Raven could see was a beautiful chaos of stars. They trained regularly in their basement gym, and when one of Arkadia's bad guys started causing too much trouble, they assembled in the dining room and made their plans.
No one knew who they were. On the front page of the paper, they were famous. In the quiet of their home, they were just a family like any other: Clarke's chore wheel pinned to the fridge with a magnet, Bellamy's calendar, heavily annotated with appointments and reminders, spotted with water where it hung above the sink.
Sometimes, in the mornings, when she woke early plagued by poor dreams, or simply animated by the brightly energetic desire to be awake, to plan a pre-work run, she'd find herself sitting across the table from Clarke. They didn't talk much, at first. Clarke was not a morning person. She liked her coffee with extra sugar and milk, and she forced herself to eat breakfast, even though she hated it. But being tired, being not fully awake, she became also more honest, and over time the person who Raven had seen as the most mysterious, the most opaque, the most difficult, became in a sense her closest friend.
Then something else.
Became the woman sitting on her windowsill, silhouetted by the streetlamp glow, watching the first snowfall with her forehead against the glass, her arms around her bent knee, her other leg hanging down, lazily, toward the floor. A woman she admired, trusted, adored.
Raven watched her, soft and quiet, from the tangle of her bedsheets.
She thought that maybe, without meaning to, she had fallen in love.
*
Raven is sitting in a folding metal chair inside one of the tents, a sheen of sun visible through the cloth. Marcus, and his salt-and-pepper beard, is leading them through the first group talk session, which still start with—“Well, I suppose introductions aren’t necessary,” he says, with a paternal smile that makes Raven slide down lower in her seat. “I understand that everyone here knows each other already?”
She glances around the circle, sees five heads nodding, like hers is.
“So, re-introductions, then,” Marcus suggests. “Let’s go around and share what you’ve been doing these past—how long has it been since you last saw each other?”
“Two years,” Bellamy says, low.
“Two years. And what you hope to get out of this long weekend. Who’d like to start?”
No one immediately volunteers. Raven looks around the group again, notes that the circle is wider than it needs to be, the spaces between them larger than they need to be. Everyone's gaze is jumpy, and they refuse to meet each other's eyes. Jasper is fidgeting. Clarke is holding her hands clasped tight together in her lap.
"I guess I will," Miller says, after a long pause, as he pulls himself up straighter in his chair. "Um, I've been... working construction. Still living in Arkadia. And I guess I'm here because..."
What sounds at first like it might only be a slight comma in his speech lingers on and on. Like they're caught in a time loop. Raven wonders for a moment if they are: she's seen stranger, after all.
"It's all right—" Marcus starts, and she cuts him off without thinking.
"It's not really fair to ask us these questions, is it?"
Suddenly everyone is looking right at her. She feels their gazes like six fires, and her palms are warm, and getting warmer. She presses them against each other between her knees.
"I mean--" she tries again. "You talked, before, about how important it is to be honest. And that this is a safe space for all of us. But it can't just be safe. You can't just declare that we're safe here." She learned to be safe, in the boarding house. Working side by side with friends who did not push her, who were quiet when she needed to be quiet, who only poked and prodded her when she was ready to speak, to draw out feelings she didn't know she had, secrets she didn't know it hurt to keep. Bellamy's soothing voice as they stared out at the skyline from their garden, the advice he always tempered with, "But that's just what I think." Clarke, helping her to hone her power, holding her hands above Raven's hands to heal them, every time the fire burned too hot, that soothing blue glow like a balm from skin to skin.
"We have to feel safe," Raven adds. "And it's been a long time. We stopped speaking to each other for a reason."
"Doesn't feel like a great reason, though," Miller says, so quietly that Raven almost doesn't hear.
Marcus, perhaps, doesn't at all. "You're right," he says. "Trust isn't an off-on switch. I'll start. Will that help? I'll tell you something about me." He takes a deep breath, as if he were not preparing a speech he must have given many times already. "As you all know, my name is Marcus. I grew up in a religious household, with a very strong, but completely inherited, sense of right and wrong, a morality I never interrogated. Then I became a lawyer, and a terrible cliché of a lawyer, too—I cared about winning, more than anything. I crossed lines; I made compromises with myself. I got involved in situations I shouldn't have. And when I gave that all up and tried to rediscover myself, I found it was a much harder process than I was expecting. Even after I met Luna, it took me a long time to feel that I had found, or created, a version of myself that I was comfortable with. So what I want to get out of this weekend, out of any of these weekends, is a... checking in with myself. A rediscovery of my values and beliefs. And I feel like I do that best in an environment like this one, apart from my normal life and routine, surrounded by nature, and in the company of other people who want what I do."
And what do I want? Raven wonders. And how do you know what I want?
"I suppose that's what I mean by a safe space," Marcus adds, turning now directly toward her. "We've all come here willing to be vulnerable and to forgive vulnerability in others. Or even to welcome it."
The first year she lived in the boarding house, they undertook a spring-cleaning project, wiped down the basement to the rooftop and every nook and crevice in between. She remembers, all of a sudden, Miller lifting up the fridge, the disgusted look on Bellamy's face as he swept out a small storm of dust and debris from underneath.
The memory almost makes her smile. She hides the expression in her hand as Miller starts to speak again.
"So I guess what I want is... to see my old friends again. That's all."
No one answers—no one, Raven thinks, wants to be seen—and after an awkward pause, he looks to his left, to Jasper, as if there were a special, clockwise order to things.
"Oh—um." He sits up straighter. How embarrassing it would have been if he had been projecting himself somewhere else at that moment. That's what she'd be doing, if she could. "Well. I guess you all already know that I've had some... substance problems since we—stopped hanging out. So I'm here to see if I can find some more sober living tips!" He tries to grin, but the expression only looks macabre, like a Halloween mask. "Oh, and what I've been doing. Working odd jobs when I can and living with Monty upstate. That's it."
Monty, sitting to his other side, is next. "I'm doing freelance IT work mostly. Um, living with Jasper, like he said. I'm here because the location seemed nice."
Lie, Raven thinks. Or partial lie. She lets him have it.
Then Bellamy: "I moved out of Arkadia about a year ago, now I'm living in Polis and... I got a job at an animal shelter. It's all right. I'm here because... I was asked." He doesn't sound like himself, but the way he keeps his eyes downturned, looking at the open palms of his hands, so that it's impossible to tell who might have asked him, who might have been vulnerable with him—that reminds Raven of home. "And I didn't see any reason to say no."
Clarke is the next in line, but she does not speak, or give any indication that she knows the rest of the circle is watching her. She rubs her hands up and down her legs, slowly. "I have a job as a paramedic," she says, at last. "And I'm here because I am sorry and I'm hoping for forgiveness."
"Forgiveness isn't something we can turn on and off either," Raven snaps. The words feel like the fire from her hands did, the first time: uncontrolled and uncontrollable, random and violent and frightening and cathartic all at once. She gets to her feet. Clarke is looking up at her, unafraid and open—this willingness of hers to be the martyr just makes Raven angrier, like there is nothing she can say now, nothing she can do, that Clarke wouldn't simply take, and take, and take, and then at last simply shrug aside.
She doesn't speak. And Raven cannot either. She curls her hands into fists and strides out of the tent.
*
This is a place to be open, Marcus and Luna tell her. To be open to her thoughts and her feelings, to the best and worst parts of herself, a place without judgment or fear.
So she tries to be open.
She takes a boat ride out on the lake with Miller, reclines within the steady movements of her arms, rowing, and the soothing summer breeze. He does most of the physical work, leaving just enough for her to feel a slow-building burn in her muscles. They don't talk but it's all right; with her back to the camp, looking out at the water and the forest beyond, she imagines that could be anywhere.
She joins Luna's yoga class, where she feels awkward and slow, ill at ease with the regimented breathing. Almost falls over once or twice. Bellamy is even worse at it than she is, and he puts his arm around her briefly as they leave the tent, and says, "I guess that was a lesson in humility."
She tries art therapy, and writing. But all she sketches are plans for unrealistic flying machines—soothing, she supposes, in a certain, distracting way. Miller jokes that she's trying to be like Octavia, and she's not sure why she finds the image funny, but still it makes her smile.
Writing is more difficult. All of her attempts start Dear Clarke, Dear Clarke, Dear Clarke.
I'm still angry with you.
I still think about you all the fucking time.
I wish you weren't here.
Clarke isn't just at the retreat, she is everywhere at the retreat. Sharing a boat with Bellamy, smiling fondly with him, while Raven crosses the lake with Miller. Expertly imitating every single yoga pose that Luna leads them in, eyes closed and serene in her balance. Sitting side by side with Monty, sketching out beautiful garden vistas with green and purple colored pencils—Raven recognizes certain plants, from their old home. Sitting at dinner with Miller and Bellamy, while Raven eats with Jasper and Monty.
The first evening, still tense from dinner, Raven joins a lantern walk, just on the edge of the forest. This part of the campsite would be almost pitch black, but for the pattern of lanterns on the grass. She feels a soft buzz through her brain, and a shivery anticipation up and down her arms. Luna tells her not to think, not to force herself to think, but just to walk at her own pace.
She follows the lights, intent on their beautiful glow.
Bellamy is waiting for her at the end of the path. She steps beyond the spiral, and she lets herself fall into his arms. His close bear-hug is almost suffocating, and she welcomes it, buries her face against his broad chest and closes her eyes, and holds him, and is held by him, for a long time.
The second night, she stands for a while at the end of the dock, and remembers, and remembers, and remembers. She hasn't thought about the Mountain Men in almost two years. She's focused instead, with a minute and delicate intent, on the cracks and breaks in her family and the way they fell apart, on how bitter being abandoned has left her, on the shameful way she asked, even begged, for Clarke to stay. How when it came right down to it, she begged.
She finds Jasper sitting in an Adirondack chair, out just beyond the warmest glow of the fire pit, staring out at the lake. "This seat taken?" she asks, gesturing to the chair next to him.
"Be my guest."
She slides all the way back in the chair, settles in to listen to the crack of the flames, the soft and indistinct voices and the cricket-chirp and insect-buzz.
"Are you enjoying the retreat?" she asks.
Jasper shrugs. "It's a little strange. But," he adds, turning lazily to her, "it's not my first rodeo. You doing okay? I feel like this isn't really your scene."
"Why? You don't think I'm introspective?"
She's trying to tease him, but the slight smile on his face drops away. He considers. "I guess I never thought you needed to be. You've just always handled everything—" He snaps his fingers. "Automatic."
Not a bad reputation to have. Though she isn't sure that it feels real.
After a while, she reaches across to him and takes his hand, her fingers wrapped around his fingers, squeezing tight.
"Have you heard from Octavia at all?"
"Oh, yeah, actually." He fishes his phone out of his pocket with his free hand, scrolls through it quickly, then passes it over to her. On the screen is a picture of Octavia, smiling wanly, with a sheep. "She's living out on this farm in Scotland. Absolutely fucking hates it." Jasper grins, then adds, "She'll be back soon, I bet. Monty was bummed she couldn't come this weekend."
"Monty—?"
"Yeah." He glances at her briefly, uncertain, as if he weren't sure she knew a secret that he knew. "He's the mastermind behind this whole meet-up."
Raven hands Jasper his phone back, hums, quizzically, in answer. She can feel that he's still watching her.
"You thought it was Clarke, didn't you?"
She doesn't reply, and he continues, "No, but she was the first to say yes. I've talked to her a little. We took a nature walk." He pauses, laces his fingers up with hers and when he speaks again, he sounds serious, and maybe a little sorry, too. "I think she's starting to understand that...she didn't understand. That she wasn't the only one responsible and she's not the only one who got hurt."
Raven's whole body is stiff, is numb.
"She needs to tell me this herself," she says, and Jasper asks:
"Are you going to let her?"
*
The Mountain Men were their most challenging adversaries. Not small fry local criminals, but a vast, intricate organization, an ever-growing cult, which had already entwined itself with the government in Washington. Taking them down felt like saving the world. Raven thrived on the risk, the stakes.
Clarke's initial plan would have cut off the monster at its head, with minimal casualties, and left the more naive, brainwashed, innocent members of the organization alive and ready to be rescued. But then a double cross from an ally and a string of bad luck—
and everything fell apart—
Despite their name, the Mountain Men took their last stand in a bunker at the bottom of a steep valley, surrounded by rocky, dangerous crags. Raven remembers standing at the top of a steep incline, the uncertain stones threatening her balance, under her feet. The other six standing next to her, all too aware of the only avenue left to them. Clarke's face as impassive and unreadable as the stones.
"We have to take them out now," she'd said.
And Bellamy had tried to argue. Then Jasper collapsed, without warning, and Monty had to drag his prone body to lie against one of the rocks. Octavia stood yelling off to Raven's left: "Bring him back!" Floating, agitated—was no one, Raven wondered, her own emotions jagged as the landscape, roiling like a storm at sea—was no one in control?
Only Clarke, telling them without flinching what it was they had to do.
The only other memory she has: standing right on the edge of the rock, trying to keep herself balanced, holding out her palms and sending out two powerful bursts of flames, down into the valley, and watching the Mountain Men's final, pathetic little hideaway explode.
*
On the third night, she finds herself standing at the edge of the water, listening to Clarke apologize. "I understand if you don't want to forgive me," she says. "But I just need to tell you that I'm sorry."
Raven considers the words for a long time, looking out at the gleam of sunset as it colors the lake. Tells herself to focus on the silence, to cultivate patience. The quiet within. Within it: everything she's long wanted to say, but never been able to express.
"Do you know why you're sorry?" she asks, turns just in time to see the startled expression on Clarke's face. As if that question were the last one she expected. As if the answer were both obvious and utterly beside the point.
"I'm sorry because it was my plan that didn't work," she answers. "And because I came up with the second plan, too. I was impatient. I'm the reason all of those people are dead."
"Clarke, come on—" Raven turns on her heel to face her, feels the way that Clarke shrinks from her but doesn't step away. "You're the one who said it but we were all thinking it. And you might have...you might have been the most resolved. But it was my hands—" She steps forward again, grabs up Clarke's hands and traps them between her palms as if between the two steel claws of a trap. "These hands heal. Mine burn."
Miller strength and Octavia's levitation and fighting abilities had gotten them past the outer line of guards, to the cliff above the Mountain Men's last retreat. Monty's x-ray vision had shown her the target; he’d pointed her to the gas main underneath the floor. And Bellamy's telekinesis had provided force for her flames. But it was her power, in the end, that caused a whole bunker of people to burn.
Clarke's hands grow warm between her hands. She looks Raven straight in the eye and does not blink.
"When it happened, you acted like only you were to blame. Like you were the only one who was even really there. We were barely holding ourselves together and then you just left—"
The damned break in her voice. She has to breathe in, deep, and the inhale turns watery, and she drops Clarke's hands so she can swipe angrily at the beginnings of tears welling up in her eyes.
"And then everyone left," she adds. "I would have stayed with you through anything. But you were so...upset with yourself, so guilty about what you had done, you didn't even see me anymore. I've never felt so useless or so alone in my life. Are you apologizing for all of that?"
Clarke nods, and her eyes shine brightly in the pink-gold light as she takes Raven's face in her hands. With the tips of her fingers, she brushes aside a stray piece of hair from Raven's forehead. They're standing so close that Raven feels herself off balance; she steadies herself again with her hands at Clarke's hips.
"I shouldn't have left," Clarke whispers. "I'm sorry. I am sorry for that, and for thinking that…all of you were better off without me. I needed to be alone, but I never stopped thinking about you or caring about you."
And Raven can't be sure if what she feels is forgiveness or only how terribly, how completely she misses her, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t think. She only pulls Clarke close, crushes her close, and holds her as tightly as she can.
*
Later, they walk hand in hand back to Raven's tent, and find that Bellamy, Miller, Jasper, and Monty have squashed two beds together and taken over them both. Raven's face still feels salty and dry from tears she only half-remembers crying. She pretends she is not wiping them away with the back of her hand as she takes in the scene and smiles.
"Do I have the wrong tent?" she asks.
"Does this look like the wrong tent?" Monty counters, and waves her and Clarke over to the last remaining space down at the bottom of the beds.
They squash in, Clarke with her head on Raven's stomach, Raven leaning back against Bellamy's leg, and when she closes her eyes, she feels that she has found her place with her family again.
Bellamy's phone breaks the moment when it starts to ring loudly from his pocket, and Miller rolls his eyes and asks, "Can't you read the room?"
"It's O," he says, half-twisting onto his back, as Monty tries to shove one of the pillows helpfully beneath him. "She's Facetiming me. Here." He holds the phone out so everyone can see her, and she can see the group. Raven has to contort herself awkwardly to view the screen, but it's worth it, for the shocked expression on Octavia's face and how it edges, immediately afterward, into a satisfied smile.
"I see I'm missing a lot," she says. "Are you having an orgy without me?"
"O, that's disgusting," Bellamy answers.
"No, it would be disgusting if I were there too. So, have I told you that Scotland is boring?"
"A few times," Jasper says. He's absently playing with Monty's hair, leaning back against Miller's chest. "Considering coming home?"
"Depends." She tilts her chin up, stares down her nose at the group of them as if with haughty appraisal. "Do I have a home to come back to?"
Raven glances around at the group, at each of the boys in turn and then, finally, at Clarke. First steps, she thinks, and at least you are in a safe place. She gives a tiny little nod.
"I think so," Clarke answers, loud enough for Octavia to hear. "I think all of us are ready to come home."