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“I need a man the way a fish needs a bicycle.”
Raven was eight the first time she’d heard that turn of phrase, and she was young enough to smile when she’d heard it but not young enough to giggle. Not young enough to approach her boozed out mother and ask her what it meant, but young enough to ask her mother what she thought of the girl who’d said it.
Dancing around a subject tended to give her more answers than trying to get her mother to help her head on.
“Mama said that she’s got a face like the moon. That’s what makes her angry at guys.” She murmured to Finn that night. They were curled close with flashlights under a bunch of sheets they’d attached to the bookshelves on either side of his bed with duct tape and a bunch of heavy objects from all over Finn’s home.
“Because she’s pale?” Finn asked, wide eyed. In these moments, Raven felt the whole year, two months, and twenty six days she was his senior.
“Because it’s got craters, dummy.”
Despite the girl’s poor looks, there was something in that independence, in the way she covered up all the times she was rejected, in the way she picked herself up and asked yet another boy who’d say no to the Unity Day Masquerade on the off chance he might say yes, that made Raven smile a bit more privately to herself.
She never learned the girl’s name. Eighteen years old and caught swiping an extra ration of food for her father for his birthday. She was floated. Turns out, fishes might not need bicycles, but a suit before they’re sucked out into zero-g wouldn’t hurt.
*
When Raven started falling in love with Finn, there was never a moment where she wondered if she needed him. She had already accepted the fact that she needed him long before she fell in love with him. But she didn’t need him in the way that certain authorities needed her mother, and she definitely didn’t need him in the way that her mother needed alcohol and attention. It wasn’t an addiction, it was a home. It was comfort and family, and yes , eventually love. But the physical was just a side effect.
Finn was always enthusiastic and attentive, but he’d been fed too many novels about knight errants and benevolent gentlemen growing up. He had this idea of what he was supposed to be to her, and that guy was quiet and constantly checking “ are you okay ” and kissing her mouth tenderly. Sometimes, it worked for Raven, other times it didn’t. She didn’t think too much of it. There was something deeper there past sex. They had their whole lives to get good at it. She could wait a couple years before he got comfortable enough with her to start driving her into the bed… And anyway, he came every time, so that mean she, at least, was doing a decent job. Just because it’d been four years and he showed no signs of improving didn’t mean anything. What was four years on their eventual eighty, right?
But Raven didn’t get eighty years. She didn’t even get to five. She got ten days of him being out of her sight, before Finn had needed someone else, someone that wasn’t her.
Crash landing on Earth was something no amount of training could have prepared her for. A radio cut, a hand against her throat, a familiar face, and then a heart breaking. But no time for that… Raven had to up and save the world. Flares sent moments too late. A village destroyed in her negligence, and all she could think about was the need splayed across Finn’s face.
He looked at Clarke and needed her to understand, needed her to let him back in, needed her to acknowledge that he loved her and that she loved him too - maybe not in equal measure, but it was there. He looked at Raven and all he “needed” was the guilt to end.
She hadn’t needed a man. But she had needed a family. It wasn’t the loss of her love that she mourned, it was the loss of the certainty of a forever. It was the way she lost him caring about her in a way that would never have allowed him to hurt her like this. She hadn’t needed Finn’s body, but she had needed his capacity to care. She lost both in one fell swoop.
*
Bellamy was the other way around. The night she prowled her way into his room, confidence leaking off her in desperate waves, false in the sheer pressure she’d put on herself to convince him of her aloofness, she hadn’t needed his heart. There were pitying looks from everyone already. Someone well-meaning had offered her one of the biggest tents and shrugged it off as everyone having agreed that since she saved their asses, she could have it. The sheer space of the damn thing just reminded her of how alone she was in it. She didn’t need the damn tent. She would’ve taken a sleeping bag and a soft bit of dirt. Hell, she could’ve even done without the sleeping bag.
No, she went to Bellamy, because he knew a facade. People might look in on the exchange and think that Raven had bought into his whole physicality, the anarchical leader persona, the devilish charisma. They might believe that she saw him and really thought him the kind of person to fuck a broken hearted girl and forget it later.
“I’m not that guy.” He’d insist, panic in his eyes because he didn’t want to hurt her but the man he was pretending to be shouldn’t have cared. Panic, because he so desperately wanted to buy into his own act, and he couldn’t.
Well, dumbass, saying so kinda says otherwise.
Raven had chosen him, because she wanted to buy her own act too. Because it would probably take him five seconds into her stripping down for him to read her like she’d read him. There would always be that flicker with them, the hesitation that came with waiting for someone to call you out on lying . She flickered every time something too loud or too brash or too sure burst from her mouth. Being sure meant she couldn’t afford herself room for error, her reputation didn’t leave room for doubt. He flickered every time the hard call had to be made, every time everyone’s faces turned to him in expectation. He didn’t want this mantle, he’d chosen it to survive, but he hadn’t wanted it. Bellamy was happier following orders instead of giving them. He was more comfortable firing shots instead of calling them.
Who we are and who we need to be to survive are two very different things .
Raven wasn’t even there for that conversation, but she’d lived it enough for the lesson to be soaked into her bones. She needed to be the smartass, cocky mechanic. He needed to be the chaotic, rebel king. No one needed to know that underneath lay the girl whose heart pumped so hard it felt like bursting, because sometimes even she didn’t believe her inventions would work. Next to her was a scared boy who didn’t even know what he’d want to be if the choice was all up to him. He had filled roles all his life to help a sister and a mother ( guard, teacher, playmate ) but had no clue what he’d choose to be if the Ark hadn’t forced a mop into his hands when his mother floated away.
They wandered the camp with a constant chafe that no one else would understand. Clarke really was a princess, a leader. That was who she was born into. Finn would always be the humanist, the pacifist. It was Bellamy and Raven who walked in skins slightly too large for them and ached their way through shoes too big to fill.
That’s why she went to him. Not because she needed his heart to pity her or his mind to sympathize, but because she needed his body to remind her that she could keep this whole pretense up without Finn, that this pretending had started long before the asshole and could keep going long after he’d gone.
Fake it until you make it.
“Did it help?”
I know it didn’t. I wish it could.
“No.”
Doesn’t change anything, Blake.
Because it hadn’t helped the cocky mechanic… but the little girl breathed a little easier knowing she lay under her mask, safe another day.
*
In a way, she should’ve seen the whole A.L.I.E. thing coming. She needed the chip the same way she’d once needed Bellamy. It was a distraction, and it was relief, and she’d only expected it to take away her pain for a little while… What she got in return was, like most things were in her life, more trouble that it was worth.
Nice fucking job, Reyes. Wipe away your pain. Wipe away your personality. Hell, you’re the poster girl for wiping humanity off the face of the Earth.
Living under A.L.I.E.’s influence was unlike any experience, any story, any history she could know. It wasn’t really A.L.I.E.’s thoughts forcing hers into submission. It was complete and total unity. She truly felt her thoughts to be her own. Maybe that was why A.L.I.E. worked in such a widespread fashion, because she adapted to her host. Yes, there was a base goal. Chip as many people as possible. Get away from your captors. Convince her to put this in her mouth. But it was Raven that figured out how to get there. Use your life as an advertisement. Sprint away while they’re distracted. Slit your wrists. It had been Raven contributing to the hive mind, and she’d felt everyone else’s individual contributions in a wave of pure knowledge. Zeroes and ones that turned into a world that she had been a part of, a world she had helped populate… a world that had become the last thing many people had ever known.
It was after the big battle in Polis. Raven had come up in the rover to help the group figure out a way down the skyscraper that didn’t involve them scaling down the outside of the hundred foot drop… That was when she saw the bodies. The ones on the cross that never gave in, the ones in the street that had dropped from pure exhaustion… But it was only when she got to the tower that she had to find an alleyway to throw up into.
Indra was there, staring at the pancaked carnage littering the perimeter of the building. A sea of gore and blood and bone and brain that littered cobbled streets and covered the tattered and ripped covers of market stalls.
“They were climbing when it ended.” She said, limping weakly from how the blast had knocked a bruise into her hip. Raven had felt something similar only a few weeks ago when they lost Mount Weather ( had it only been weeks? it felt like lifetimes ). The girl rubbed her aching hip absently, reminded yet again of the eternal pain. “In the confusion, they all fell… The healers are tending to the people who weren’t too far off the ground.”
You did this . Her mind screamed out to her, and she could no longer blame A.L.I.E. for these poisonous thoughts. You did this. You guided too many people to her. You brought them to this. You started this whole damn thing, Raven. Murphy said no, why couldn’t you?
She threw up until bile was all that would come, and even then, she sat, dry heaving as the picture of the broken bodies played again in her mind. Monty grabbed her soon after that, and Harper gripped her so strongly, Raven wondered why she needed a brace at all if the other girl was so determined to be her human crutch.
“We can do this without you, Raven, you’ve done enough. Wait in the rover.”
He was trying to help. As Harper deposited her in the driver’s seat of the vehicle, the rational part of her tried to remind her of that. He was only trying to help . But his brand of help sat in her mouth like slime: heavy, disgusting, and hard to swallow. She didn’t want to be told that she couldn’t help, or that her help was so insignificant that it could be done without.
That’s not what he meant, drama queen.
I don’t fucking care.
She raged against the rover she had worked so hard on. She punched and kicked and screamed and pulled hard at the steering wheel as if her will alone could yank the mechanism from the axle. She fought the car… because the thing she wanted to do most was fight herself, punish herself.
Tear down the work. Tear down the good you did. You don’t deserve it.
“Didn’t see you figuring out a way to get me down, Reyes.” A rough voice interrupted her tirade. “What? You save everyone’s asses, and suddenly you get to throw hissy fits? Sounds like a princess’ job to me.”
Bellamy’s familiar smirk caught the corner of her eye, but she didn’t let herself sink into it. Raven was in no mood to feel better. She wanted to suffer. How many would never be able to feel pain again because she doomed their bodies and erased their minds? How many had families ?
“Only saving the asses I put on the line. Sounds like an even trade to me. Besides, you got out eventually. Can’t kill you, Blake.”
Her tone was flippant, empty, pretending. He saw through it. He always did.
Bellamy shifted into the passenger seat, and for one horror-filled moment, Raven thought that he was going to pull out one of his inspirational speeches about fighting the good fight, and continuing on, and “people need you so this has to be about them, not about us”. With knuckles white against the steering wheel, she braced herself for the influx of well meant platitudes that bounced off her like hail.
“Is it ok with you if we just sit for a bit?”
Raven blinked, scrambling to cover up just how much she’d expected something else from him. Maybe… she didn’t know him half as well as she thought she did.
“It’s a free rover.”
I wish I knew how to get you to leave.
“Great.”
Until you do, I’ll be here.
And he caught her eyes then, because hers were fixed owlishly on him ( do you even remember whipping your head around, Reyes? ). There was a look in them that whispered of self-loathing and the wish to do more, be better, and hating so much that he’d still managed to make this about him and his feelings while so many lay dead around them.
She saw herself.
A war had begun with 300 dead grounders he’d helped slay. Another started with her taking a chip and helping feed it to hundreds more. There were stains under their skin so dark they’d never scrub them out.
“...Great.” She echoed.
She didn’t need him… but she sure liked the way he filled her silence with his own.
*
There was no repeat between them of the time her heart had been crushed by Finn. Her heart was mangled, yes, but it wasn’t mangled by love. It was thrashed by guilt, wracked with remorse. There wouldn’t be any fucking that away. After the last time, Raven didn’t want to try.
What she did want was to follow his lead.
Bellamy started training more men to shoot. He stepped down firmly from the seat at the table he was offered. He’d fooled around with power once for all the wrong reasons, and once he’d found it for the right ones, adults had torn the taste away. He’d followed one corrupt leader too many, and now, Bellamy was wary of the way people could follow him into the wrong fight because it was him at the forefront. That power didn’t suit a janitor.
When she caught glimpses of people she’d chipped personally, remembering how they’d tumbled into her own propaganda, she felt that itch again of her second skin. Maybe the power didn’t suit a mechanic either.
Sometimes, they’d be seated together by the fire, him cleaning a stack of guns and inspecting them, her fiddling with a new gadget or oiling her brace. She didn’t push to go out on patrol anymore. Raven had tried denying her pain, hoping that would make it go away. Maybe now it was time to figure out how to live with it.
“Pass me the oil. These idiots don’t know how to take care of a gun.”
My day was rough.
“Well, I don’t have oil to spare. Go get your own, Blake.”
So was mine. Suck it up.
A million conversations between the lines.
This lasted about two weeks before Clarke broke the news to her.
“Raven, A.L.I.E. told me something… you might want to sit down.”
“I’m always sitting, Clarke. Might as well mix it up a little.”
That’s how Raven found out she only had six months to live. That’s how she found out they all only had six months to live. That’s how she found out that her big brain was the only hope they had at living.
Yeah, it was a chance at redemption. Literally save the world? Maybe she could forget about the hundreds lost because she was weak… Maybe .
She sure as hell couldn’t let them die. Not without a fight.
*
“Thought you might need a drink. You’ve been at that for hours.”
Raven’s nose wrinkled at the smell of moonshine wafting through her workspace.
“Yeah, I’m not going to figure out how to repel the black rain with alcohol messing with my head.”
The chuckle rasped against her like sandpaper, something about it grated but it smoothed away the tension in her shoulders. Raven’s blood curdled, ungrateful for the ease a smile and a proffered tin cup could bring.
“The moonshine’s for me. I may not be on your level, but I’m not stupid.” Bellamy sat down on the high stool Raven used to force herself onto to prove a point. Currently, she was seated at the low work bench. She supposed it built character, to start humbling herself, that is… That, and Abby had someone put cushions all over it and stretching her leg along it helped her hip too much to be stubborn.
“Could’ve fooled me, Blake.” She glanced down at the clear fluid suspiciously. “So what’s this?”
“Water…”
“So… so the filtration system…”
“It’s holding up. You did good work there.”
They hadn’t expected the source of the river to be hit by the black rain before them. Their drinking water had been severely cut down for weeks with them rationing out what they could collect from the rainwater and trying to figure out how to make juices out of the few fruits they’d tried to grow. She’d only just installed the new filtering system she’d invented, but it was good to know they were getting use out of it already.
“Of course, I did. I built it. No shit it’s gonna work.” She scoffed, keeping her head down so he wouldn’t have to see the genuine pleased surprise in her eyes. The fidgety nature of the screws she was working with helped sell the bit.
“If you say something’s going to work, Raven, it’s going to work. I never doubt that.”
Her hands stilled against the metal, his tone halting her movements. In a world where the two of them whispered of friendship and loyalty between lines of sarcasm and insults… where they snarked out each other’s last names when things were ok, and growled out first names when things weren’t … where they lied and lied and lied to each other because it’s what they knew and it’s so relieving that they can lie and someone can still recognize it for what it is… the truth was rare. The truth was impossible. And the truth said in that soft, reverent voice? That was something that threatened to break it all apart.
She continued her work more determinedly than before, refusing to look at him and acknowledge the shift he was trying to instigate, “The people who doubt me usually end up dead, Blake. It’s smart not to join them.”
“Probably, huh?” The words were chuckled, rueful, and still casual as anything, as if he didn’t just try to rock them to their core.
“If there’s nothing else…?”
Your cue to leave, dumbass .
“Oh, I’m going to stay. Figure maybe you’ll rub off on me.”
I know .
Bellamy wasn’t budging. He settled back into his seat, plucked up the worn copy of The Iliad that Raven hadn’t noticed tucked under his arm, and just began to read silently.
That first day, Raven fumed. She was useless for the next hour until she shoved what she was working on away and stormed off without so much as a goodbye. She’d like to say that was the end of it. She wished she could say that they both matured out of their pigheadedness, and routine continued as it always had.
The next day, Bellamy found her in the workshop at the end of his shift again.
The next day, Raven lasted two hours without storming out.
So it continued.
After a week, Raven threw her still non-functioning device at a wall, not caring about the piece that snapped right off.
“What are you doing here?! I don’t want you here!”
“Yes, you do. That’s why you’re angry, isn’t it?”
“I’m not angry!”
“Could’ve fooled me!”
“WHY ARE YOU HERE?”
His voice got quiet, “Raven… there’s no point in you making sure we all survive if you forget how to live…”
She sat there in stunned silence for a bit, choking down her defense mechanisms screaming at her deny, deny, deny . Because Bellamy could see through her lies. He breathed the same ones.
“There’s no point in me living, if none of you survive.” She growled out, her fists clenching on the countertop. “Don’t you get it? It’s on me! You guys could get the ideas, but not before my brain should be able to figure it out! And even if, by some miracle, you beat me to a solution, it’s still my hands that have to build it, my science that has to make it. It’s all on me .”
Bellamy didn’t shake his head or refute her. He did exactly what he was good at, and let her take out all her emotions on him. Only this time he didn’t pretend not to notice.
“It is all on you, Reyes… But, you doing ok? That’s on me. That’s on all of us. You take care of us, we take care of you. That’s how this works.”
“... I don’t see Clarke here shoving water down my throat or forcing me to put up with her.”
“No. Just me.”
They looked at each other for a few long moments. Those seconds were long enough to finally slip out of their skins. For a few ticks of the clock, a scared teenage girl looked back at a broken man-boy, and they both wished they could be what they really were.
As it was with most things with them, Raven broke the spell, nodding to herself and blinking away glassy eyes. Turning her back to him, she collected her broken invention and went to work repairing it.
Just before she picked up her tools again, she replied so quietly, if Bellamy hadn’t been waiting on edge to hear it, he never would’ve known she’d spoken.
“Alright then.”
It was the first time they had held a conversation on the lines instead of between them.
*
And that’s how it went for months. Raven would work well into the night. Bellamy would keep her company. When her eyelids were getting heavy, he’d tell her stories about what he was reading to make her laugh. Achilles’ gay sex. What it must’ve been like for the Greeks to win the war by crawling up a horse’s ass. He never talked to her about the tragedy of the Trojan War. The war they had been fighting was tragic enough.
At the end of the night, Raven never went to his tent, and Bellamy never went into hers. In another world, another life, maybe they might have taken that step. But the cocky mechanic and the rebel king, the little girl and the young boy, all versions of them knew that nothing could start while the world was ending.
Maybe Raven would figure it out before the radiation consumed them all.
Maybe their deaths would find them the same way life had, sitting quietly together trying to pretend like just staying wasn’t everything.
Raven doesn’t need Bellamy… but she chooses him. She chooses him every day. And he chooses her. Grease and irritation and biting insults and all. Some might call that love or devotion or even friendship.
For now, they call it enough.
Maybe fish don’t need bicycles. Raven sure never needed a man. All she really needed was someone to stay.
Besides, if you think about it… Raven was never really a fish to begin with.
But hey, birds don’t need bicycles either.