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Raven lies back in her chair with a small grunt, the rough metallic edges pressing painfully against her shoulder blades. She cannot wait for the carpenters to replace the furniture in her workshop. She drags a hand along the lines of the engine sitting on her table, lips curving up in a smile. It’s five times the size of her head and a mess of wires and oil tubes. She’s been working on it for most of the last two days but it’s almost fixed.
The first few months after Kane suggested that the parts she has to work on be brought to her workshop instead of her having to move constantly to and from the parking hangar, she balked at the idea every single day. Now she’s willing to admit it feels good to just stay seated from time to time, brace off, thigh free of the metallic bite of the device.
That’s something she’s been learning – how to go easier on herself, to not equate her productivity with her value as a human being.
The Zero G mechanic stretches her arms high above her head, bones cracking in the quiet of the room, diverting Monty’s attention from the engineering book he’s been reading.
“Turning in?” There are dark circles under his eyes. She knows he’ll be here for a few more hours. She doesn’t comment on it.
“Yeah” she says instead, “my awesome brain needs its beauty sleep.”
A tiny smile plays on Monty’s lips, and Raven feels quite proud to be the cause of it, smiling back at him as she ties her brace back on her leg. “’Night, Monty.”
“Good night, Raven. Sleep well.” When Raven crosses the gate to the hallway, she hears him turn another page.
Hadn’t she been so exhausted, she would have tried a little harder with Monty. Maybe she would’ve invited him to go stargazing or tamper with Alpha station’s computers together. She’s always careful with him these days. The shadows over his face didn’t go away – not after Allie was beaten, not after they’d stopped the explosion of the nuclear plants. He probably still sees his mother’s face at night.
He, too, might leave Arkadia soon.
Raven hobbles to her room – bigger than the one she and her mother shared on Mecha station – and closes the door behind her. The thought of Monty, her best friend, being gone, causes her pain, but not the searing kind that leaves her a sobbing mess in the middle of the night, muffling screams she cannot decently let out because everyone is doing such a good job at silencing their own. Instead it’s a dull ache, one she’s been accustomed to since Finn died. It’ll be lonelier with yet another friend gone – Clarke left them just over a month ago – but she knows that sometimes, one needs to do what needs to be done to survive the war. Even if it’s just the one they’re waging against themselves.
Doing what needs to be done to survive … the words echo with those of someone else gone into the world to elude his demons.
“Bellamy.”
The name escapes her lips without her meaning to, so foreign yet so familiar. She hasn’t spoken it in what feels like forever. She refuses to talk about him – to anyone – and constantly tries to chase him out of her thoughts, but the hole inside her chest has been feeling wider for a while now, and anger can only fill so much.
Because when Bellamy left, she was angry. Unfairly so, even.
It happened a few weeks after they got back to Arkadia, having secured their home from the nuclear explosion. It was another rollercoaster that had cost them more lives, but through it all, Raven and Bellamy had stuck with each other. It was the first time they truly worked side by side since the Dropship and, despite the horror befalling them, it felt good.
When he’d first come back from fighting Allie, she’d been so relieved. She’d limped up to him and wrapped her arms tightly around his wider frame. Alive. Bellamy – the only person who’d ever believed in her and defended her as much as Sinclair had – was alive, and home. For good, she had thought. And every touch, every smile, every brush of his fingers against her cheek had been a confirmation that they were in this together. Moving forward together.
Then they settled back in their routine at Arkadia, and slowly, everything changed.
“What are you looking at?”
Raven walks up to Bellamy. He’s standing atop the mound at the back of the camp, staring at the meadow as the sun sets over the horizon.
“Hey, Rae.” He bends over when she comes to stand next to him and kisses her cheek, as natural as breathing. She didn’t want to get used to it. She failed. “Nothing in particular.”
“Right” she scoffs. “You’re skipping meals to stare at nothing.” Her tone is light and teasing but the mechanic is not blind. She’s been watching him, noticing him drifting away, more and more disinterested in camp matters – so unlike him. She knows when he says “nothing”, he means “outside”.
He means “away”.
“Alright, that’s enough staring at dumb grass. Let’s get you some food.” He’s not moving, though he’s looking at her now, brown pupils drowned in fondness and guilt. Raven is suddenly scared. She takes his face in her hands, thumbs brushing softly against his cheekbones, voice pleading. “Let’s go home, ‘kay?”
It happened from time to time, but Bellamy always followed her back to camp. Sometimes they laid together, limbs tangled under the sheets. They never had sex. They didn’t want to. What they wanted was to make love but ... she knew he felt the same way she did about it – they didn’t know how to, not anymore. The faces of dead lovers and resentful victims glowered behind their eyelids and they didn’t want to ruin each other with the taste of ashes. But he always followed her home.
Until the day he hadn’t.
“I can’t be here anymore. I wish I could, trust me. But I can’t. I-” Rain is pouring down on them, flattening his hair against his head. Another day, Raven would have laughed. Today, she’s just angry. Hurt. Desperate.
“Yes, you can. Octavia’s not far. Everyone else’s here. Monty, Miller, Harper, Clarke … me. I’m here, Bellamy! We don’t fight alone. We don’t have to!” Empty words, she knows. They do. Of course they do. They lay against each other at night, talking about anything but how limited she feels, how haunted he is. Tending wounds without seeing them, handing out bandages in the dark.
“I’m sorry, Raven.”
He hugs her. Raven is too greedy to stop him and too hurt to let him hold on, pushing him away a second later, grasping on his sleeves the one after. “This isn’t you” Raven pleads. “You don’t quit. You – you find a way to move forward no matter what!”
He laughs at that, looking at her with sad, sad eyes. “No. No, I just try to find logic. Excuses. When I can’t, I bury it. It works I guess, but Raven, this isn’t – I’m not just hurting.”
He looks at her then, really looks at her.
“I’m tired.”
Bellamy takes a look back at the camp, the metallic shadow of Alpha station glistening in the dark, the wooden sheds, as if trying to carve the sight of Arkadia in his mind.
“I used to think I would never get to that point – no, I used to think I would never give up, like you said” – she winces, although the guilt she feels about her choice of words does not overcome the anger and the pain – “but I feel like if I don’t do this … I’ll break.”
There’s a pause. Raven can see he’s hesitating. Finally, he extends a hand to caress her wrist, and murmurs: “Come with me?”
He knows she’ll say no. There’s nothing for her out there, not even herself. She needs the machinery and the computers, her coworkers, her friends, to feel herself exist.
So he leaves.
She doesn’t hold onto him. She doesn’t beg. Doesn’t show him her tears.
Small victories.
Of course, he’s still Bellamy. He did leave. Went quite far, even, but made sure Monty knew where he was. It’s his curse, in a way. The ground changed them all, shaped them, and since their days at the Dropship camp, Bellamy has been someone who cannot truly turn his back on his people. Raven knows that. She knows she can get to him.
She also knows she doesn’t have the right to. It’s his choice, and not one of them is going to challenge it.
For so long, it hurt. Yet another new beginning turning to dust. She was tired of hoping and grieving, grieving and hoping, so she blamed him. She regrets it. She wishes she could turn things around, tell him what she should have.
Sometimes she thinks of writing.
So far, she never has.
Two knocks on her door startle Raven, and she realizes she’s still leaning against it. There’s a dull ache in her good leg.
“Raven, you in there?”
“Yeah. Wait.”
It’s Miller. Raven lets him in, watches him settle next to her against the door once it’s closed again. “Sector 12, tomorrow.” He doesn’t say anything else. She knows what he means. She’s shut everyone down so many times, he’s the only one who still asks.
Bringing her hands to her neck, Raven lets the thick, black string around it glide between her fingertips until they catch on the pendant. It’s nothing special – a simple bolt with spots of red paint on it, big enough to slide her finger inside. Bellamy had picked it up in the Dropship. Looking around their former home, he’d asked her, “how come this metallic piece of junk is still here?”
“Did you expect it to start rotting away? It’s a big metallic ship, and it hasn’t been a year.”
“I don’t know. I just wonder … how is it still standing?" He'd looked down at his hands. "How does it endure?”
That’s how she’d started figuring it out – that Bellamy was at the end of his rope.
“We’re still here, too” she’d said softly.
“...You’re right.”
He’d picked up the bolt, slid some old string found on the floor inside of it and put it around her neck with a wry smile. “A testament to the living.”
The next day, she’d taken off Finn’s raven and left it in the memorial room of Alpha station, next to Bellamy’s copy of the Iliad.
The truth is that back then, she, too, needed to figure out how to endure – to take a long, hard, real look at herself in the mirror and deal with it. She didn’t realize it when he left, but she needed it.
She hasn’t given Miller an answer yet. He sighs at her familiar silence and makes to move, but she grabs his arm before he can exit the room. “Wait. I – just wait.”
God, she wants to write to him. Say something, although he’s never sent word to her either. Back then she thought it was his move to make – he was the one who left after all. Now she understands he didn’t want it to look like he was making a promise. So many of the ones he made before turned out wrong.
She wants to write to him.
She just doesn’t know what to say.
She tells Miller as much.
He looks at her, understanding. “I think you do.” Then: “We leave at 10. Don’t miss it.”
He leaves.
When the sound of his steps in the hallway fades away, she settles at his desk. There’s a large sheet of blank paper under one of her template, and Raven cuts a piece off it without ceremony. Bellamy doesn’t care about ceremony. She wets her lips.
The truth is that she does know what to say. There’s just so much of it.
‘I understand now that what gets you back up on your feet, what you need, isn’t always what you want.’
‘I don’t feel what you feel but I know what you know. I understand. I know the weight on your shoulders and that it may slow you down, or stop you, as you try to make your way back home, but I will wait.’
‘I’m strong enough not to need promises.’
‘I’ll wait but I do not expect.’
Raven doesn’t know if that makes sense. She doesn’t have the appropriate words but …
… it’s time. She lets the pen slide against the paper.
"I do not know how to write about this.
So I’ll just say:
I carry
You carry.
I will wait a very long time for you still."
It’s raw – five stupid little lines making her choke up – but it’s everything she needs to say. As for the rest … he’ll read between the lines. Hopefully. It’s relieving though, and when she pushes the folded paper inside Miller’s pocket, she’s pleased to note that her heart is not beating wildly, as if Miller would come back with a love letter, a gift or something. She does not expect.
I will wait a very long time for you still.