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28. (the 100) our house is crumbling under me;
our house is crumbling under me; part three.
Bellamy can sometimes look at the sun and know what time of day it is. In Tondc, in the dining room where the only sun is filtered through the makeshift windows, he can't tell what hour it is.
Maybe time works differently in Tondc, running on a Grounder clock, one that neither of them really understand. Maybe he's lost his knack for telling the time without a watch around his wrist. He used to be able to tell Octavia when the moon would be at its fullest when Earth hadn't been pulverised by its own inhabitants, but most of that had been guesswork and him creating a fantasy world for the girl who never expected to see the moon in her life.
He used to be able to tell the time on the Ark by which guard was posted where, by where his mother had wandered off to, and when he'd hear loud footsteps stomping outside their very door. He'd never looked at his wrist to tell a freckle past a hair, even if it had been his answer to Octavia whenever she asked what the time happened to be. Instead, he'd relied on sound and instinct, informing her it was time for the girl beneath the floor to resurface and play a game of cards with him as he knew Mom's friends wouldn't bother coming around to their place if she stayed out for more than two hours.
Aurora's been gone for more than two hours, but he's forgotten to count the minutes since he wrapped Raven's arm around his shoulder and helped her limp into the feasting hall of Tondc.
He can't imagine what they'd be doing at this point of time back at camp, the one that they've destroyed and since abandoned, and he can't tell Raven if he thinks maybe the mourning of Gustus is over.
He sits on the edge of the table beside her, sometimes thinking he hasn't moved at all. He isn't even sure if time has moved since Abby left to see Clarke. She may linger in Raven's peripherals and throw her arm over her shoulder to support her when she needs it, but Abby, regardless of how much she wants to be, isn't Raven's mother.
He's not her hero, either, but he thinks, maybe, he's her friend.
Raven's looking up at the ceiling, swinging her good leg back and forth. She's since pulled her shirt back over her head. If he's to look at her from the corner of his eye, he can see the blood stains on her sides and sleeves. She doesn't act like it bothers her. He doubts her shirt is even damp anymore.
She doesn't move. He thinks she's counting the outline of stones or cracks or something on the ceiling. "How long do you think it takes for a Grounder to mourn the loss of their own?" she says, voice echoing in the empty room.
Bellamy shrugs his shoulder. "Don't know."
"Do you think they care?" She doesn't stop looking up at the ceiling, as if the cracks in the stone are stars telling her their stories. He keeps his gaze on the ground, wondering if the stones can tell him of the way the Grounders walk, live, and breathe. This is their place. Their feet should've left prints or charred marks on the floor, but all he can see is dust and dirt and some leaves and wet stains lingering in shallow pools of spilt wine and water.
He doesn't answer her, knowing she possesses the answer she wants in her hands.
She lets the silence linger between them for a moment, swinging her leg back and forth five times before she stills it against the bench.
"They care," she says. Her gaze doesn't move from the ceiling. "They care so much they're willing to make an alliance with their killers. I don't get that."
"Me neither," he says softly, his own voice sounding rough to his ears. He keeps his gaze on the floor as she looks up at the ceiling, in search of a constellation she won't find when she's buried in the pits of hell.
"Does it suck that I want to know who the hell Gustus is?" She shakes her head, as if she's disgusted with herself. "Do you think they even care about who Finn was?"
Bellamy doesn't answer.
"Probably not," she continues. The stories he learned as a kid can't help her now, even though he thinks about them all, from Icarus to Athena to Perseus and Theseus. He wonders if she wants him to be Ariadne in this moment, giving her a ball of yarn to help her navigate the labyrinth she walks in.
Octavia used to look at him like he had all the answers. Sometimes he thinks he misses it, sometimes he thinks she still does.
When he looks down at his hands, all he sees are his lifelines. There's nothing held between his fingers, but sometimes he can see the stain of blood remain in the cracking of his hands. Regardless of whether or not Raven expects him to have the string, he trails behind her, anyway.
His ball of string keeps him mute. He supposes that's what she needs. Her voice sounds faraway, like she's on a planet away from him herself rather than sitting right beside him he can almost feel her shift with restlessness and anger. "He shared his rations with me on the Ark. He gave a shit about me when no one else did."
She shakes her head. "He wasn't the space walker." Bellamy removes his gaze from the floor to look at her. She doesn't look at him, or even acknowledge him with a tilt of her head, but he supposes she is in her own way, what with how she speaks to him when she'd remained silent since she had lost her voice screaming for Finn. "For my eighteenth birthday, he let me walk in space for the first time in my life. I was the one who lost the air. I was the one who made the breach. But because he was younger, he took the fall. I'm Spacewalker."
Raven looks at him and he notices how her eyes glisten. Pressing her lips together, she lets them part, inhaling shakily and audibly. He doesn't drop his gaze despite wanting to. Her brows knit together just as her stern and controlled features crumble, her voice cracking and lowering in tone, "Should I have taken the fall for him?"
Bellamy looks down at her hands, noticing how they grip at the edge of the table. Still, there's no string near his fingers, nor even on the floor, as if he's dropped it. She wants him to give her an answer he doesn't think he has, but he can feel something press heavily against the backs of his hands anyway.
Her knuckles are white where his aren't. He thinks, if she could, she'd break the wood in half, let a splinter lodge itself into her hand, and refuse to tell anyone so she'd never have it removed. Self-inflicted pain is a hell of a lot more torturous than a thousand cuts given by a Grounder.
Looking up at her, his own voice is quiet as he shakes his head, "No."
Her features remain crumbled as she looks down at his hip, or somewhere near it, maybe searching for her constellation there. "I feel like I should have. I should've protected him like he did me."
She looks down at her lap, sniffing. Releasing her hands from the table, she grips her pant legs instead. Looking at her from the corner of his eye, he sees how she picks at the fabric, like it's her skin. Her nails aren't long enough to slice into her flesh — and Bellamy's kind of grateful for it.
"Sometimes you have to let the people you love make mistakes," he says. He looks at the wall, talking to it instead of her. He doesn't have the answers. He's found that since Octavia, he's never had them, even though he's held his hands out for a tiny morsel of it ever since she had been born. Why was having a second child so damn horrible? Why did his mother have to pay for giving life with her own?
He wonders why he hadn't been the one floated, but he knows his answer as he's followed the string and it's lead him to the same destination over and over, regardless of how he tries to unpack the law and destroy it within his hands — he hadn't been the one to break the law first. Following in the footsteps of Aurora Blake, he'd kept her secret, an accomplice in his own right, and he supposes the council had wished to float him by demoting him from guard to janitor. It's as though they believed he needed a reminder he was at the bottom of the food chain, as if maybe that'd break his rebellious streak and render him obedient.
But they'd never really achieved it, he thinks. Bellamy had always known he was stationed a little higher than those who thought to punish people for simply living. Where he doubts Chancellor Jaha even spares a thought about Aurora Blake, Bellamy thinks about those three hundred people — three hundred of his people — who had died because he'd let his fear of being found out possess him and urge him to toss a radio into a river.
He looks to her then, his gaze as soft as his voice, "Sometimes there's nothing you can do."
"Do you really believe that?" Her hands grip her pants tighter before she relaxes her fingers. She tilts her head up to look at him. "What would you have done if it was Octavia?"
Without missing a beat, he says, "Raze this place." He sees her smile, a slight curve to her lips, before he looks down at her hands once more. "If it was Octavia — If they wanted to kill Octavia, I would've done everything I could to stop it. And if I failed … I'd be dead, anyway. There's no point to living if she's not here."
He understands what he's implying, that he cares so much about Octavia that he can't cease living without her. For his entire life, he's been caring for her, ensuring her to be safe, wanting her to have a life that's more than just darkness under the floor. He doesn't know who Finn was to Raven other than the boy who had been kind to her, but he doubts that Raven needs him to survive like Bellamy does Octavia.
Maybe it's a little mean, but Raven doesn't flinch like he would if she was to imply Octavia wasn't a piece of him, a significant limb to his body he'd topple over or cease to exist if she was removed from him.
She doesn't look at him at all. "I used to think you were just a jerk trying to control her." A part of him had thought the same thing, and still does, at times, but Bellamy's since realised it pays off to have a shadow. "No one has a sibling. I don't think anyone gets it — what it's like to have another person be the other half of you." He doubts Raven had looked at Finn as a brother to her. If she looked at Finn as anything, it'd be her moon in the sky, or the stars littering the night, giving her hope and something to wish and rely upon in the darkness. He used to believe the stars would grant him wishes when he was younger, until he realised that it was an empty sentiment. A ball of gas only burns in the sky, but it's his hands that move mountains and create his own destiny.
She'll believe whatever the hell she wants to about Finn, but Bellamy thinks she's trying to trick herself into believing he was her oxygen. He's watched her breathe without him.
He waits for a moment, thinking she'll continue, but he doesn't really know this side of Raven at all. She's all quiet and kind, pensive and reflective, and he thinks this is what she must be like when she's not elbow deep in making bullets or fixing radios so she can hear the stars talk to her. So, he chooses to prompt her, "What do you think now?"
She shrugs her shoulder. Pursing her lips together, her tone returns to who he knows her to be, a pain in his ass as she takes the piss out of him, "You're just a good person, I guess." It comes off flippant, as if this isn't the nicest thing she's said to him since she threatened to knife him over a radio. She exhales as she speaks, "Annoying. A pain in the ass. A seriously lousy shot."
She smiles then, and he finds himself mimicking her. She looks at him, swinging her leg once more as her fingers return to curling around the edge of the table. "You don't have to sit with me. I've been alone in dark places before."
Bellamy shrugs, looking away from her. "I'm comfortable."
She arches her brow, her tone disbelieving, "With hard wood underneath your ass?"
He nods.
Raven shakes her head. He thinks she purposefully wrinkles her nose when she says, "And with that stench?"
He deadpans, "Love it."
He can see her from the corner of his eye looking at his profile, as if trying to figure out what the hell he's thinking. She can pull radios apart and rebuild them, but he's found she falters at doing so with humans. Purposefully, he keeps his attention on the wall before him, trying to not tilt his head to look at her.
She continues to look at him, the crease between her brows smoothing out. He begins to count the stones in the wall, losing after five as he thinks he's counted the same one twice. "Thanks," she says quietly. It draws him to look at her now, perhaps with an expression that's bewildered since she ducks her head to continue, "For sitting with me. For what you did out there." She seems to bite the inside of her mouth, as if she's tasting a lemon, or her words are sharp in their sweetness like a rare fruit they've come across. It comes out quickly, her exhale, "For not hesitating."
He doesn't think much on it. Acting on instinct and impulse is what he seems to excel in. Rebelling against those in charge is what had defined him on the ground when she had plunged to Earth and decided to break open the can he had been trying so hard to contain.
He supposes she prefers him that way now, all rebellious and ready to shoot and ask questions a thousand days later once the dust has properly settled.
"You don't have to thank me," he says as he looks at her. "It was the right thing to do."
She arches her brow, "To stand up for the girl no one believed?"
He thinks to say yes, but it isn't so truthful of an answer. He'd been so determined to stand up for her, to form himself into her shield, because he believed her. Raven Reyes may sometimes be a pain in his ass and someone who picks and pokes and prods him until he's ready to snap, but he thinks if he's to say Because I know you it'd be too confronting.
It is to him, when he thinks about it.
So, he finds himself simply parroting her with a shrug of his shoulder, looking away from her as he responds to her with an answer that's as empty as the stars hands, despite their promises to grant space kids wishes. "To believe in someone."
Maybe it's not so empty to her with the way she looks at him a little too long with a smile. It's barely audible when she turns her head and mumbles, "Cute."
Bellamy can sometimes look at the sun and know what time of day it is. In Tondc, in the dining room where the only sun is filtered through the makeshift windows, he can't tell what hour it is.
Maybe time works differently in Tondc, running on a Grounder clock, one that neither of them really understand. Maybe he's lost his knack for telling the time without a watch around his wrist. He used to be able to tell Octavia when the moon would be at its fullest when Earth hadn't been pulverised by its own inhabitants, but most of that had been guesswork and him creating a fantasy world for the girl who never expected to see the moon in her life.
He used to be able to tell the time on the Ark by which guard was posted where, by where his mother had wandered off to, and when he'd hear loud footsteps stomping outside their very door. He'd never looked at his wrist to tell a freckle past a hair, even if it had been his answer to Octavia whenever she asked what the time happened to be. Instead, he'd relied on sound and instinct, informing her it was time for the girl beneath the floor to resurface and play a game of cards with him as he knew Mom's friends wouldn't bother coming around to their place if she stayed out for more than two hours.
Aurora's been gone for more than two hours, but he's forgotten to count the minutes since he wrapped Raven's arm around his shoulder and helped her limp into the feasting hall of Tondc.
He can't imagine what they'd be doing at this point of time back at camp, the one that they've destroyed and since abandoned, and he can't tell Raven if he thinks maybe the mourning of Gustus is over.
He sits on the edge of the table beside her, sometimes thinking he hasn't moved at all. He isn't even sure if time has moved since Abby left to see Clarke. She may linger in Raven's peripherals and throw her arm over her shoulder to support her when she needs it, but Abby, regardless of how much she wants to be, isn't Raven's mother.
He's not her hero, either, but he thinks, maybe, he's her friend.
Raven's looking up at the ceiling, swinging her good leg back and forth. She's since pulled her shirt back over her head. If he's to look at her from the corner of his eye, he can see the blood stains on her sides and sleeves. She doesn't act like it bothers her. He doubts her shirt is even damp anymore.
She doesn't move. He thinks she's counting the outline of stones or cracks or something on the ceiling. "How long do you think it takes for a Grounder to mourn the loss of their own?" she says, voice echoing in the empty room.
Bellamy shrugs his shoulder. "Don't know."
"Do you think they care?" She doesn't stop looking up at the ceiling, as if the cracks in the stone are stars telling her their stories. He keeps his gaze on the ground, wondering if the stones can tell him of the way the Grounders walk, live, and breathe. This is their place. Their feet should've left prints or charred marks on the floor, but all he can see is dust and dirt and some leaves and wet stains lingering in shallow pools of spilt wine and water.
He doesn't answer her, knowing she possesses the answer she wants in her hands.
She lets the silence linger between them for a moment, swinging her leg back and forth five times before she stills it against the bench.
"They care," she says. Her gaze doesn't move from the ceiling. "They care so much they're willing to make an alliance with their killers. I don't get that."
"Me neither," he says softly, his own voice sounding rough to his ears. He keeps his gaze on the floor as she looks up at the ceiling, in search of a constellation she won't find when she's buried in the pits of hell.
"Does it suck that I want to know who the hell Gustus is?" She shakes her head, as if she's disgusted with herself. "Do you think they even care about who Finn was?"
Bellamy doesn't answer.
"Probably not," she continues. The stories he learned as a kid can't help her now, even though he thinks about them all, from Icarus to Athena to Perseus and Theseus. He wonders if she wants him to be Ariadne in this moment, giving her a ball of yarn to help her navigate the labyrinth she walks in.
Octavia used to look at him like he had all the answers. Sometimes he thinks he misses it, sometimes he thinks she still does.
When he looks down at his hands, all he sees are his lifelines. There's nothing held between his fingers, but sometimes he can see the stain of blood remain in the cracking of his hands. Regardless of whether or not Raven expects him to have the string, he trails behind her, anyway.
His ball of string keeps him mute. He supposes that's what she needs. Her voice sounds faraway, like she's on a planet away from him herself rather than sitting right beside him he can almost feel her shift with restlessness and anger. "He shared his rations with me on the Ark. He gave a shit about me when no one else did."
She shakes her head. "He wasn't the space walker." Bellamy removes his gaze from the floor to look at her. She doesn't look at him, or even acknowledge him with a tilt of her head, but he supposes she is in her own way, what with how she speaks to him when she'd remained silent since she had lost her voice screaming for Finn. "For my eighteenth birthday, he let me walk in space for the first time in my life. I was the one who lost the air. I was the one who made the breach. But because he was younger, he took the fall. I'm Spacewalker."
Raven looks at him and he notices how her eyes glisten. Pressing her lips together, she lets them part, inhaling shakily and audibly. He doesn't drop his gaze despite wanting to. Her brows knit together just as her stern and controlled features crumble, her voice cracking and lowering in tone, "Should I have taken the fall for him?"
Bellamy looks down at her hands, noticing how they grip at the edge of the table. Still, there's no string near his fingers, nor even on the floor, as if he's dropped it. She wants him to give her an answer he doesn't think he has, but he can feel something press heavily against the backs of his hands anyway.
Her knuckles are white where his aren't. He thinks, if she could, she'd break the wood in half, let a splinter lodge itself into her hand, and refuse to tell anyone so she'd never have it removed. Self-inflicted pain is a hell of a lot more torturous than a thousand cuts given by a Grounder.
Looking up at her, his own voice is quiet as he shakes his head, "No."
Her features remain crumbled as she looks down at his hip, or somewhere near it, maybe searching for her constellation there. "I feel like I should have. I should've protected him like he did me."
She looks down at her lap, sniffing. Releasing her hands from the table, she grips her pant legs instead. Looking at her from the corner of his eye, he sees how she picks at the fabric, like it's her skin. Her nails aren't long enough to slice into her flesh — and Bellamy's kind of grateful for it.
"Sometimes you have to let the people you love make mistakes," he says. He looks at the wall, talking to it instead of her. He doesn't have the answers. He's found that since Octavia, he's never had them, even though he's held his hands out for a tiny morsel of it ever since she had been born. Why was having a second child so damn horrible? Why did his mother have to pay for giving life with her own?
He wonders why he hadn't been the one floated, but he knows his answer as he's followed the string and it's lead him to the same destination over and over, regardless of how he tries to unpack the law and destroy it within his hands — he hadn't been the one to break the law first. Following in the footsteps of Aurora Blake, he'd kept her secret, an accomplice in his own right, and he supposes the council had wished to float him by demoting him from guard to janitor. It's as though they believed he needed a reminder he was at the bottom of the food chain, as if maybe that'd break his rebellious streak and render him obedient.
But they'd never really achieved it, he thinks. Bellamy had always known he was stationed a little higher than those who thought to punish people for simply living. Where he doubts Chancellor Jaha even spares a thought about Aurora Blake, Bellamy thinks about those three hundred people — three hundred of his people — who had died because he'd let his fear of being found out possess him and urge him to toss a radio into a river.
He looks to her then, his gaze as soft as his voice, "Sometimes there's nothing you can do."
"Do you really believe that?" Her hands grip her pants tighter before she relaxes her fingers. She tilts her head up to look at him. "What would you have done if it was Octavia?"
Without missing a beat, he says, "Raze this place." He sees her smile, a slight curve to her lips, before he looks down at her hands once more. "If it was Octavia — If they wanted to kill Octavia, I would've done everything I could to stop it. And if I failed … I'd be dead, anyway. There's no point to living if she's not here."
He understands what he's implying, that he cares so much about Octavia that he can't cease living without her. For his entire life, he's been caring for her, ensuring her to be safe, wanting her to have a life that's more than just darkness under the floor. He doesn't know who Finn was to Raven other than the boy who had been kind to her, but he doubts that Raven needs him to survive like Bellamy does Octavia.
Maybe it's a little mean, but Raven doesn't flinch like he would if she was to imply Octavia wasn't a piece of him, a significant limb to his body he'd topple over or cease to exist if she was removed from him.
She doesn't look at him at all. "I used to think you were just a jerk trying to control her." A part of him had thought the same thing, and still does, at times, but Bellamy's since realised it pays off to have a shadow. "No one has a sibling. I don't think anyone gets it — what it's like to have another person be the other half of you." He doubts Raven had looked at Finn as a brother to her. If she looked at Finn as anything, it'd be her moon in the sky, or the stars littering the night, giving her hope and something to wish and rely upon in the darkness. He used to believe the stars would grant him wishes when he was younger, until he realised that it was an empty sentiment. A ball of gas only burns in the sky, but it's his hands that move mountains and create his own destiny.
She'll believe whatever the hell she wants to about Finn, but Bellamy thinks she's trying to trick herself into believing he was her oxygen. He's watched her breathe without him.
He waits for a moment, thinking she'll continue, but he doesn't really know this side of Raven at all. She's all quiet and kind, pensive and reflective, and he thinks this is what she must be like when she's not elbow deep in making bullets or fixing radios so she can hear the stars talk to her. So, he chooses to prompt her, "What do you think now?"
She shrugs her shoulder. Pursing her lips together, her tone returns to who he knows her to be, a pain in his ass as she takes the piss out of him, "You're just a good person, I guess." It comes off flippant, as if this isn't the nicest thing she's said to him since she threatened to knife him over a radio. She exhales as she speaks, "Annoying. A pain in the ass. A seriously lousy shot."
She smiles then, and he finds himself mimicking her. She looks at him, swinging her leg once more as her fingers return to curling around the edge of the table. "You don't have to sit with me. I've been alone in dark places before."
Bellamy shrugs, looking away from her. "I'm comfortable."
She arches her brow, her tone disbelieving, "With hard wood underneath your ass?"
He nods.
Raven shakes her head. He thinks she purposefully wrinkles her nose when she says, "And with that stench?"
He deadpans, "Love it."
He can see her from the corner of his eye looking at his profile, as if trying to figure out what the hell he's thinking. She can pull radios apart and rebuild them, but he's found she falters at doing so with humans. Purposefully, he keeps his attention on the wall before him, trying to not tilt his head to look at her.
She continues to look at him, the crease between her brows smoothing out. He begins to count the stones in the wall, losing after five as he thinks he's counted the same one twice. "Thanks," she says quietly. It draws him to look at her now, perhaps with an expression that's bewildered since she ducks her head to continue, "For sitting with me. For what you did out there." She seems to bite the inside of her mouth, as if she's tasting a lemon, or her words are sharp in their sweetness like a rare fruit they've come across. It comes out quickly, her exhale, "For not hesitating."
He doesn't think much on it. Acting on instinct and impulse is what he seems to excel in. Rebelling against those in charge is what had defined him on the ground when she had plunged to Earth and decided to break open the can he had been trying so hard to contain.
He supposes she prefers him that way now, all rebellious and ready to shoot and ask questions a thousand days later once the dust has properly settled.
"You don't have to thank me," he says as he looks at her. "It was the right thing to do."
She arches her brow, "To stand up for the girl no one believed?"
He thinks to say yes, but it isn't so truthful of an answer. He'd been so determined to stand up for her, to form himself into her shield, because he believed her. Raven Reyes may sometimes be a pain in his ass and someone who picks and pokes and prods him until he's ready to snap, but he thinks if he's to say Because I know you it'd be too confronting.
It is to him, when he thinks about it.
So, he finds himself simply parroting her with a shrug of his shoulder, looking away from her as he responds to her with an answer that's as empty as the stars hands, despite their promises to grant space kids wishes. "To believe in someone."
Maybe it's not so empty to her with the way she looks at him a little too long with a smile. It's barely audible when she turns her head and mumbles, "Cute."