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Raven Reyes has never been a fool.
Her mom, when she is sober enough to make any observations at all, likes to say she is too smart for her own good.
“Brain like that’ll just make you different,” Monica Reyes warns her more than once. “No one likes a smartass.”
Her mom has never seemed to like her much in the first place. Any time there is a choice - Raven or booze, Raven or Tim Hartly from factory station, Raven or sleep - Raven watches as Monica trades their food, their credits, their standing for a few more minutes of whatever peace she can latch onto.
Not that her mother’s drunken snores are particularly peaceful.
So at the precocious age of six years old, she makes the decision not to listen to Monica’s words of wisdom. Raven heads into first grade sharp and hungry - for knowledge, for friendship, for a path out of the mess that is her life.
It’s disconcerting to the little girl who is sure her mother is wrong about everything to discover that in this, she was right.
The other kids don’t want to talk about rewiring alarm clocks. They don’t want to sit next to the girl who wore too-small shoes because her mother never collected her yearly ration.
Raven straightens her shoulders and breaks the curve on every math pop quiz for the rest of the year.
If her stomach rumbles when the council brats take out their special issues tins at lunch, she distracts herself by disassembling the anti-grav ball she’d won in the spelling bee.
She’s no big fan of spelling. But she’d really wanted that anti-grav ball.
When the floppy-haired twerp from Ms. Fyer’s class sits down beside her one day she only spares him a glance before she starts carefully putting the pieces back together.
“That’s cool.” He is talking with his mouth full and she grimaces, squinting harder at her task. Her best time is 45 seconds so far. “Where’d you learn that?”
She slides the plastic cover into place and looks at her watch. 43 seconds. He’s still waiting expectantly. It’s the look the council kids all have - that well-fed look of expecting to be listened to, of being important to someone.
“Taught myself.”
He whistles. He doesn’t actually look much like a council kid, just a luckier version of herself. “Neat trick. I wanna learn.”
He pulls out his lunch bag and settles in. The tin cracks open and her mouth waters. “Gimme half your lunch and maybe I’ll teach you.”
**
From then on they’re a pair. She catches on fast that he’s a bit of a troublemaker. The argumentative sort. Where she sees the teachers as tools, people to help her find her way out of Monica Reyes’ dingy existence, Finn Collins sees them as barriers.
“God, I’d so much rather fuck around with the boards today,” he grumbles, sitting his lanky 12-year-old frame at their table. He’s discovered curse words this year, heard some the last time he was down in her corridor and has been trying them out in moments when he thinks they’ll sound cool. She’s got her head buried in algebra homework. He pulls out the extra tin his mom always packs (for her “growing boy”) and slides it her way. “Stop working and eat, genius.”
Raven picks her head up and grins at him. “But if I finish the homework, we can mess around with the boards tonight. Just like I promised.” She stuffs a spoonful of the mush into her mouth and sighs with relief. Tuna today. “Did you write your book report?”
He laughs and pulls out the disk to wave at her. “As promised, three pages on why Harry Potter did way more work than he had to. He was kind of a moron.”
She laughs with him, because Finn laughing makes her happy. “He was brave and good-hearted, idiot. He didn’t want other people getting hurt.”
He rolls his eyes. “Why did you let them skip you up to algebra anyway? We’re not supposed to touch the stuff till next year.”
She scrapes the sides of her tin, and he passes her his own out of habit. “What was I supposed to do, wait until you catch up to me?”
“I’m just saying, if it was between me or algebra, I bet you’d pick algebra.” He’s sulky again, and she looks up with a quick denial. He’s her only friend. He has to know by now.
“I’d pick you first, every time.”
She puts the algebra away and digs out the hoverboard plans. She can stay up late tonight and finish her work.
**
She’s good enough to balance the two. She makes time to hang out with Finn and flies through math in the higher grades. Her teachers give her special projects, send her home with letters of praise that she doesn’t show Monica.
Raven has long since stopped asking her mother for approval. She’s got a stash of credits, a disk she hides in her mattress and uses when she needs a part, or when she’s tired of asking Finn to raid his family’s pantry on the weekends.
It really kills the mood when your stomach growls in the middle of a makeout session anyway.
She does odd jobs around her station, fixing bum doors for half the fee of the licensed mechanics, stuff like that. She’s a wizard with wires and metal, Finn likes to say, usually when he’s buttering her up so she’ll stop what she’s doing and pay attention to him again.
His parents have finally started to wonder when his rebellious phase will end. They’re cracking down more on his grades and his extracurriculars. It’s made him even less predictable, and more prone to long-winded complaints about the drudgery of Mecha Station life.
Raven just wants a real job, quarters of her own. Sometimes she catches herself imaging what their life will be like - her and Finn - when she’s a mechanic for real, and he’s doing something important and they’re happy and she walks in the door every day to a place and a person that wants her.
Then she reminds herself that she’s a goddamn 17-year-old and there’s at least a year to go.
She gets the apprenticeship in December. Raven’s walking on air until Christmas. What could possibly be better than permission to spend half her school day in the grease and gears of the Zero-G mechanic crew?
She and Finn celebrate with some moonshine he bought off one of their classmates. It makes her feel weightless, and she spins around his room, naked and laughing and almost really free. They’ve been sleeping together for a year now, but tonight she tells him it feels like she’s fucking in space.
He’s not particularly happy when she comes back on Jan. 1 and tells him the real thing - spacewalking, god Finn - is even better. She kisses the pout off of his face, too happy to let him sulk.
**
Three weeks into her apprenticeship, he gets caught on his way back in from an illegal trip out of the airlock.
She goes to bed early - a long shift and a calculus test first thing in the morning - and wakes up to someone pounding on the Reyes’ pod door.
It’s Annette Collins. She’s in tears.
“He never listens to me,” she says, bitterness making her words sharp and cold. “Maybe he’ll listen to you.”
Raven misses her calculus test, instead sitting front and center, her choice stark on her pale face as the Chancellor hears Finn’s crime - three months of oxygen for an unsanctioned, unnecessary walk outside.
People have been floated for less.
Finn smiles when the Chancellor asks why he did it. “We can make more oxygen, right? I needed to know what it felt like.”
Raven can feel the blood drain from her face. This time, when he turns that quick smile in her direction, she can’t answer. It seems to jar him, and his smile slips.
“The regulations are clear,” Jaha says, nodding to the guard who responded. “We are in oxygen preservation mode while the filters are… cleaned.”
In the end, Annette’s tears and Finn’s belated apology send him to juvenile detention with a stern warning and weekly visitation.
Raven throws up her tinned pea soup in the bathroom outside the council chambers. Then she washes her face and goes to reschedule her test.
She falls asleep that night clutching the metal raven he’d made her so hard she wakes up with blood on her sheets.
It’s seven days until she sees him again. Seven days to wonder what the hell he was thinking. The guards look the other way plenty. The hoverboards. The tendency to use storage closet C as a makeout spot. But a spacewalk?
She doesn’t cry until she’s sitting there in front of him, trying to explain why she’s so very angry.
He just shrugs. “Yeah, maybe not my best decision.” Then that little wheedling grin breaks out. “But you were right, you know. It was amazing.”
There’s nothing she can say to that. It’s so very Finn. To choose whatever he was feeling in that moment over the rest of his life. Over the rest of hers.
**
Without Finn skimming rations for her, Raven has to pick up extra odd jobs. She’s down to a few hours of sleep a night when Wick catches her napping on the engineering drafting table at work.
She’d like to say she comes shooting awake when he nudges her with his foot, but she really just digs her head further into her arm and moves her feet away from him.
It’s the sigh that forces her eyes open. Well, the sigh and the smell of his lunch.
He’s gotten his hands on a chicken soup can, and warmed it’s filling the room with all kinds of delicious smells.
“That for me?” she blinks up at him. “You shouldn’t have, Wick.”
He takes a long slurp and then sits down on the bench beside her, back to the table. “You not sleeping, Reyes?”
“Pretty sure I was sleeping just fine a minute ago,” she grumbles. She’d be more worried if one of their bosses had caught her. But Wick’s a pushover. Smart, a little mad, but too nice for his own good.
“Look, we all heard about your boyfriend’s stunt,” he says. “How you holding up?”
“Is this a wake up call or a therapy session?”
“Either.” He grins. “Both. Just, I might have heard from someone somewhere that the big guy is thinking of bringing you on full time.”
She freezes. “What?” No one gets hired in the mecha bay without two, three years of apprenticeship at least. There hasn’t been a direct hire out of school in 52 years. She’s checked the records.
“I think it’s a complete mistake, myself, since the last thing this place needs is another hotshot mechanic to ignore all of my brilliant engineering work.” He slurps another spoonful and Raven’s stomach rumbles. “But if they can’t be talked out of it, I’m sure you napping on the job would do the trick.”
Jones sticks his head in, full of irritation. “Fucking hell, Wick, no one can even read the plans for that new regulator patch. Boss wants you. Now.”
Raven winces dramatically and Wick glares at her. He considers his still steaming bowl of soup, and then deposits it on the table next to her. “Someone ought to enjoy this before it gets cold. Sweet dreams, Reyes.”
**
She turns 18 with little fanfare. They try to give her the day off, but she just asks for a few hours in the morning to register for her adult quarters.
She gets a single four corridors away from her mother. It’s not the cozy double she’d always pictured with Finn - he’ll be fine, he’ll be out in seven months - but there’s something about the whirr of the door and the way the bunk fits snug against the back wall and she’s in love.
It’s tiny, it’s bare, it’s got scuff marks on the walls and the ventilation fan is groaning with old age.
But it’s hers.
Life settles into something of a routine. She sees Finn once a week and tries not to seem too happy without him. At night she works on finishing her final semester of high school. During the day, she plays with all the best toys and the only other people on the ship who understand them.
And she gets paid for it.
It’s almost everything she’s ever wanted. So of course things have to get complicated.
They send the 100 off to die on earth and she doesn’t even get to say goodbye.
Abby Griffin recruits her to repair a pod and ten days later she’s hurtling toward Earth, excited and terrified and knowing that 300 peoples’ lives are on the line.
She wakes up to Clarke Griffin’s worried face and more green than she’s seen in her entire life. It’s wonderful and frightening. She has worked with purpose to master her surroundings since she was six years old and saw a way out, a way to control her own destiny.
But down here it’s all wood and water and everything is alive, not electric.
Fucking Earth skills. The one class where Finn beat her regularly.
He’s alive and here and it’s been a really fucking long ten days. So she doesn’t pick up on what’s wrong right away.
Ten days. It took him ten days to choose someone else. Ten days and he never even mentioned her to the others.
Just like that she’s six years old again.
Her fingers itch for her anti-grav ball, so she dives into anything else. Radios. Bullets. Bellamy Blake, once, just to see how it feels.
She and Clarke get past it. They need each other too much to let Finn make things awkward. It’s not like they have long conversations about him, but she trusts Clarke. She trusts her with everything but Finn. And that's mostly because she doesn't know how to trust Finn anymore.
He and Clarke disappear into the woods and her first thought is bitter. When they come limping back, she can’t fight the relief she feels. After everything, he's her only family.
**
She’s sitting on the dropship floor about two weeks later, a bullet lodged in her spine and a full company of Grounder warriors primed to attack when Clarke Griffin looks right through her walls.
“I’d pick you first.” It’s so matter of fact, so easy. When she was a kid, she’d have looked at Clarke as one more council brat and shrugged it off.
“Of course you would, I’m awesome.” It’s more of a reflex than anything, but Clarke nods decisively and Raven believes her.
Raven tells herself it doesn’t matter. Clarke’s got 50-some kids to protect, and they probably won’t survive the night.
But it does. It rings in her head as she slips into unconsciousness. It’s her mantra when she wakes up to the drop ship door wide open and every single one of them gone.
Clarke wouldn’t leave her. Something’s gone horribly wrong.
Murphy shows up, looking worse than she feels. He’s quieter than before. Sadder. His story sounds a lot like hers, although her mother settled for ignoring her, not blaming her.
She never turned her hurt into a power trip. But not everyone’s as awesome as Raven Reyes.
Abby finds them, Bellamy and Finn hot on her heels. She lets herself lean on him, lets him offer the shoulder that was supposed to be hers to begin with until she’s through the surgery. Then she looks at his wild eyes and tells him to go find them. To go find her.
She sulks for a few days and then Wick gives her a job and a brace and she gets back to work. That’s who Raven Reyes is, after all. Youngest zero-g mechanic in half a century. It didn’t come from sulking.
She walks into the mess hall for lunch on her newly braced leg and looks around at the tables. Wick waves his fork at her and she grimaces, but heads in his direction.
“So is this it? Are we each other’s people now?” He winks as she sits down, taking some of the sting out of the question.
It stings because it’s true. She’s alone in this camp. Sure, there’s Abby, to a point, and she assumes Bellamy and Finn will make it back but - on Earth you never really know.
“No, asshole. You just had a seat free.”
He looks around at the half-filled room and nods seriously. “Clearly an important consideration. I mean if I were you I’d probably have aimed for Johnson over there, he’s had a crush on you for like, a year running.”
She rolls her eyes and eats her stew. But the point lingers. In her hidden heart, it’s always been about who would choose her. Loyalty begets loyalty. Love begets love.
She’s never just sat back and wondered who she wants at her side.
That night she pushes her cot up against the back wall of her tent and hangs the burnished piece of scrap metal she’d snagged to use as a mirror. Her breath catches in her throat when she remembers the single pod she’d spent four months decorating. It’s here - somewhere in the wreckage of Mecha station is the little space she’d created for herself.
She can do that again. Carve something from nothing. Move forward.
Clarke’s voice rings in her head: I’d pick you first.
All of her life, she’s been waiting for someone to say that to her. To mean it.
Maybe it had to be herself, all along.
After all, she’s fucking awesome.