Chapter Text
i.
Bellamy is sitting quietly at his desk in his Earth Skills class when it happens, his hands wrapped gingerly around the small object he is examining. The shell had been handed to him only moments before, his teacher reminding him gently to be careful with it. The exterior is an odd combination of hard and frail, soft and smooth. Shells, he’s been told, were found on coastlines across the Earth. People would collect them, and take them home as decorations. Shells, he’s been told, hold the power of an ocean raging in the distance if you just hold it to your ear.
At nine years old, Bellamy Blake can imagine how the rough ocean water might have felt pushing against his body, can conjure feeling the uncomfortable scratch of sand against his skin. He is also skeptical of fairy tales, and has felt enough disappointment in his short life to never hope. He was born to an endless night, where the only ground his feet will ever touch is the cold metal floors forged by their ancestors. Earth is only a dream they orbit, kept alive in their minds by treasured artifacts snatched from homes before they crumbled, and long forgotten memories that live on as bedtime stories.
But in this moment, with the soft but hard, smooth but rough shell in his hands, Bellamy is tempted to raise it to his ear, to listen and to hope and to believe. Except as he looks down, his hands no longer his own. They are smaller and softer, and though he can feel the cool of the shell resting in his palms, and the firm wood of the chair under his arms, it all but disappears. His eyes are unfocused, shifting hazily between his reality and somewhere else. He can hear a voice raging, louder and louder, and can taste blood on his lips. His hands clench, crushing the shell into pieces. Another voice starts, this time much closer, and he looks up, bewildered before being pushed back sharply by an invisible force, and lost to the darkness.
--
The second time it happens Bellamy has all but forgotten the day in Earth Skills when he was nine and destroyed a treasure. He is older now, with the weight of a long kept secret hung heavy on his shoulders. Already a cadet-in-training, he is on his way to becoming a member of the Guard, the safest place for someone who dreams the word brother, whispers the word sister, knows the definition of responsibility is written in blood.
Training takes place primarily in Arrow Station, a station re-purposed to house what are deemed Peacekeepers in times of strife, and Guardsmen in times of calm. It’s his least favorite station, with the sparse, empty corridors a constant reminder of how destructive a spark can be. Ark History taught him of the epidemic some fifty years earlier that threatened the future with a single cough. To save the many they slaughtered the few; cutting power and resources from the station until the only legacy left were the immune. The tale became a cautionary for those who came after, the ghost of choices made written into history as necessary sacrifices; the leaders praised for preserving the future.
He senses the happiness above all else. Joy spreading through his veins, a smile creeping onto his lips. The dim hallway blurs into nothing and then brightness, something beaming onto a workbench, hands too small to be his own flicking at a switch, on off, on off, the repetitive motion causing something in his heart, in their heart to erupt with happiness. Bellamy reaches his hands forward, finding the familiarity of the hard cold metal a comfort beneath his blurred vision, and then words fill his head. Distant at first, so quiet he can barely make out the words, until suddenly they are deafening, oh shit, shit shit shit , and then he is drowning in the noise. “Enough.” He shuts his eyes and finds silence, back in the safety of darkness, alone.
Then, a voice.
“Am I losing my mind?” Barely audible, the soft words ring in his ear. “I mean it was bound to happen given my family history, I’m surprised it took me this-”
“No.” Bellamy interrupts, the word reverberating like an echo into nothing. “I think, I mean, I don’t think you are crazy-” but then, it could be me losing it instead .
“Yeah, okay, sure. You are real and I’m not hearing voices.” Sarcasm seeps from the words, and Bellamy shuts his eyes in an attempt to gain clarity.
Bellamy isn’t used to words spewing from someone’s mouth like this. In his world there is only hushed tones spoken softly, gently. This voice is brash and audacious and loud, like it wants to fill the silence with as much noise as possible. It fills his mind to the brim and he can feel each syllable punctuated clearly in his mind, like the beat of a drum pounding in his ears.
“And imagining creepy walkways that I have never seen before, and I’ve seen everywhere, been everywhere in this-”
And it’s belongs to a girl. Perhaps. Someone who definitely, he thinks, is of the female persuasion.
“Apparently not.” His voice is frustrated as he cuts her off, wanting desperately to shut her up. “I am real, sorry to break it to you, you are just garden variety normal--”
“Except nothing that’s happening is garden variety here buddy. I am talking to a voice in my head who has a habit of walking empty corridors and, and-” Her voice raises a little as if something in the past clicks into place. “Get’s panic attacks when people knock on doors.”
Here she takes a breath, and Bellamy leans back against the wall to stop himself from shaking. “You-” He breathes out, running hands through his hair nervously. “You know about that?” The words form cautiously as his fingers interlock in his hair, an impending sense of fear lingering in the pit of his stomach, what if floating in the air.
Instead, “Yeah I know about those. Heart murmur my ass.” She bites out bitterly, and for a brief moment Bellamy has the good grace to feel apologetic before relief washes over him.
“Heart murmur, huh?” He responds as another sharp, short laugh fills his ears.
“No one would listen when I told them it was crippling fear.” She replies, her voice softening a little, and Bellamy can feel the tension easing, and isn’t sure if it belong to him or her or them. She laughs again and Bellamy thinks it could be the best sound he’s heard in awhile. “What’s a boy's voice in my head,” She sighs, “In the overall cosmic joke that is my life?”
Silence falls and for a moment Bellamy forgets he has a mother who he can barely look at and a secret hiding in the floorboards because my sister, my responsibility . He forgets he’s training for a job to keep them safe and sound and just is, with slow breaths echoing in his mind, calming his heart.
“I know you don’t believe me, but I am real.” He says finally, and she just continues to laugh. “Name’s Bellamy.”
For a second he feels breathless and wonders if this is the moment where hearing someone speak and listening to their world and seeing through their eyes becomes too much for the girl at the other end. Then, it eases, and he can see once more her hand flicking the switch, on off, on off, and that same smile is clawing it's way back to his lips. “Okay, boy in my head whose name is Bellamy.” On off, on off. “I’m Raven.” She breathes into the darkness. “Nice to meet you.”
--
“So,” Raven murmurs gently, nudging him awake. He wonders quietly if he will ever get used to sharing a life through someone else's eyes. Probably not, especially her eyes comes the silent reply. “I’ve figured it out.” She continues, and he notices that she too is laying down, her fingers playing absentmindedly with the fraying thread of the blanket beneath her. “You’re in the Guard. You were in Arrow Station the other day. It’s why I didn’t recognize it, only the Guard has access.”
She sounds smug, and Bellamy smiles sleepily before nodding, then realizing she can’t actually see him, only feel the motion. “Yep. The secrets of the Ark are told to only the chosen few. Guess we have a real Sherlock Holmes on our hands.” He retorts, and smiles a little when he feels her shake her head. “Who the fuck is Sherlock Holmes?” She demands with a twinge of annoyance. Bellamy cracks a smile, “Someone who lived a very long time ago,” is the only response he supplies.
Inching upwards slowly, he peers around the room to make sure the other inhabitants are sleeping soundly before pushing himself up off his bunk and sneaking silently from the room. Outside the corridor is lifeless, lit only by the soft glow of the moon. He walks towards the window, sliding down the wall to watch the endless space and glimpse the uninhabitable earth orbiting beneath them.
“I’m going to see them, one day.” Her voice sighs wistfully, and he knows instinctively she must be talking about stars because it’s all he can see though his eyes and her own. The only difference is her stars are stenciled in patient patterns across the ceiling of her room, the constellations mapped out like a path to her heart.
“Why?” He asks before he can help himself, his innate curiosity catching up with him. Bellamy has, after all, always been afraid of that which he cannot control, so the idea of going out there into the emptiness of space is something he can’t fathom.
“To be free.” Comes the whispered reply and Bellamy thinks he might be hearing the real Raven, the true Raven push through, stripped of sarcasm and bravado. Just a girl who wants to escape the monotony of the metal hull they call home. And that, that he can understand.
“Yeah,” He breathes softly, “that would be nice.”
Quiet contemplation takes over the conversation, their eyes looking up and out into the stars they share their universe with, until Raven’s sleepy voice breaks the silence. “I don’t know how or why this happened,” Her words are faint, but Bellamy still feels them in his core. “but, I’m glad it did. And I wanted you to know, I’m glad I met you.” He smiles then, small and gentle. “Juuuuuust,” She draws out the word with a yawn. “Don’t creep on me when I’m naked, or anything. That’s just weird.”
--
Threads from his life begin to unravel the more they talk, strands of moments become inextricably linked and it becomes clear that they have been bound since birth.
“When I was, maybe, fourteen, there were two months where I felt this inherent sadness.” He says gently, trepidation causing his voice to waver slightly. Still in the process of getting to know each other, Bellamy treads lightly around moments of sadness with Raven, aware that while she is clever and bold, there is fragility floating just below the surface.
He wonders if he found the line not to cross, but bulldozed over it anyway when her silence greets him, but finally she looks up from her math homework ( Gibberish , Bellamy had called it once, and she’d mercilessly mocked him for his lack of smarts) and sighs. He sees her move cautiously across her room, grabbing a portrait and staring at it intently. He can see a small girl with a wide smile standing between two people, barely adults, barely older than he is now. Unlike her smile, which is natural and pure, theirs are forced and tight, as if forced to put it on for the camera - and Bellamy can only guess as to why. Having a photograph on the Ark is a rare thing indeed, but he can sense that Raven feels less than thrilled to have this at her disposal, not ashamed exactly, but like it’s presence causes her heart to weigh a little more in her chest.
“Those are, uh, my parents,” A pause, and gulped breath. “WhenIwastwelvemypapágotfloated.” The words come out garbled as one big word and she takes a short breath before continuing. “He wasn’t the best,” Bellamy feels her shoulders shrug, “but he was all I had. And mamá,” A bitter laugh echoes in her empty room. “She was never right, but at least when papá was around she was here.”
Bellamy considers her weighted heart, her savage scorn for the Ark’s hierarchy. Having a parent floated on the ark causes instant shame in some circles, and Bellamy imagines when you’re twelve and the only thing holding you together gets shoved into a box and sucked into space, that sort of thing can irrevocably change who you are. That day, he imagines, the girl with the bright smile burned and the girl with the heavy heart and sharp wit rose from her ashes.
“Raven, I--” He stutters, stopping. When someone tells you about their parents death, knowing what to say, to ease the pain, it’s never easy, or right. “I am --”
“Sorry?” She cuts in, her voice bitter. “Yeah, that’s what they said, after they handed me his jacket. As if the word could replace a life.”
Silence overwhelms him as he searches for words but comes out wanting. He thinks, of his own father who gave him nothing except a face and a name. He thinks, knows, somewhere deep in his gut, that Octavia exists to ease the pain Aurora feels when she looks at him and sees the man who gave her a son and nothing else. You can’t lose what you’ve never really had and yet it still burdens his mind at times like this, when fathers exist only as reminders of happier times.
Raven saves him from his thoughts (as she has a knack of doing) when she declares, “Screw sorry,” with ferocity. “If you are going to float someone at least be man enough to be a dick about it.” A barked laugh makes his way from his mouth, and he opens his mouth to apologize but thinks again, when he realizes how cheap it would sound. Instead he trusts that Raven knows he get its, that he understands where the cynicism and sarcasm come from, and that he wouldn’t change a thing about her.
--
From that point on Raven’s voice is a constant in Bellamy’s mind. It juts in and out across the day, and as days turn to weeks turn to months he can barely remember a time before she was there. She connects with him across the day, with sarcastic quips and angry interjections and, occasionally, words of encouragement just when he needs them most. He, in turn, sees her small hands work steadily on problem sets and intricate machines Bellamy knows he couldn’t dream up, let alone create. They come to find that while she doesn’t always have words, he sometimes only has them, but together they manage to make it work, this new hyper awareness of someone's entire reality.
She teaches him about basic equations and simple repair in her own gruff manner, laughing when his larger hands fumble with tools that her own smaller ones move delicately around, and he tells her about ancient civilizations that lived and died long ago, whose ruins society built their own destruction on. He calls her Hephaestus once while he’s watching her work with fire, and she asks what it means. So he tells her the stories Aurora told him during his childhood, the ones about gods and goddesses who wreak havoc on humanity. She likes those ones, he can tell; her hands stop fiddling as the words slip from his lips. Eventually, she starts asking him to tell her the stories when she finds herself alone in her room, as if the sound of his voice and the stories of an ancient time can keep her loneliness at bay.
He turns twenty-one, and she is there for his induction into the Cadets. She smirks wildly when Kane hands him the worn blazer, and mocks the oath Bellamy takes along with nineteen other young men. He barely makes it through without cracking a smile, Raven has heard him practicing for weeks, and she recites the words perfectly, sarcasm dripping from her voice. But at night when he peers at the jacket through sleepy eyes, he hears congratulations in its most sincerest form.
She turns eighteen, and he feels his heart ripped in half as she is told she doesn’t qualify for the Zero G program. Once again his words are not enough. She shuts him out for a week (and how can she not when it’s all because of him?) but then loneliness is washed away with elation because Sinclair, a god among men, declared her too good to let go. “Damn straight,” he yells into an empty corridor, and smiles widely when he feels her mouth stretch into a grin, his heart constricting with love.
And when she finally steps out under the stars he sees fragments of constellations and is struck suddenly by the fragility of everything. Humanity has lived and died a thousand times under the enduring night sky, and here they sit, those lucky few, the last hope circling a wasteland world.
He sees her then, for the very first time, while he is adrift in his darkness. Light catches on her helmet, causing a reflection against the cool outer metal, an illumination of a girl with a radiant smile as wide as he could imagine, with jet black hair and dark skin. She is radiant and perfect and so very dazzling that he never wants her to fade. He whispers “You’re beautiful,” as the reflection fades, and even though the moment passes, the memory is tattooed onto his soul.
A light guiding him from the darkness.
--
“What’s it like?” She whispers gently, burrowing herself under the covers. By now he is used to her presence in the darkness, late night hushed conversations while the lower ark quarters sleep soundly through the night. He shivers, goosebumps prickling on his skin and wonders if he is siphoning the heat from her. He curls tightly into himself before replying. “What’s what like?”
A beat, then he feels her breath hitch, his own stuck in his throat. Her hesitation betrays her nerves, and Bellamy knows that Raven doesn’t get nervous. He braces himself for the words that could come tumbling from her mouth, words that would destroy his world. She can, after all, see the world through his eyes, and oh what a world he can see.
Yet as the sounds stumble out he feels them both sigh in relief. He, because his world is safe for a moment longer, and she because her question cannot be taken back. “Seeing me,” She mumbles through her covers, “through your eyes?”
For most people the question would be simple enough, seeking absolution for their basic human flaws. But Bellamy knows Raven as she knows herself; knows the ways she hides her insecurities behind her rough exterior. He feels her move through their world, feels the way she aches for the expanse of the universe, desperate with longing to explore the stars and escape from the tiny box she exists within. He knows that her heart is frayed like the blanket she holds on to for dear life, that she desperately seeks the love of a mother who will never love her back, not in the way she deserves; knows she is tenacious and rough and angry, afraid and soft and full of light.
“I remember the first time it happened, you know? Seeing through your eyes.” He begins softly. “I was in Earth Skills and it was fucking Beach Day.” He hears her scoff and a small smile crosses his lips, because Beach Day is a rite of passage all children on the Ark Undertake, seen as a joke the older you get, because what chance do they have of ever touching the ocean water, or feeling the sand beneath their feet. “I had this shell in my hand and it twinkled so strangely in the light, and was soft and hard and smooth and rough all at once. And then these hands, little hands that were too small, too dark to be my own, they were clenching the shell, and all I could do was sit there while this, this fire coursed through me.”
He pauses for a moment, and can feel Raven holding her breath. “Those hands, that fire; it was all you. At the very end I felt so small and alone, but right before I blacked out there was also this strength, this willpower to stand up and be counted and be loved, and that’s what I see, that’s what I feel every time I am with you.” Another pause, when her hands gently lift themselves to wipe silent tears from her eyes. “You are like that shell, Raven, soft and hard and rough and smooth all at once, with this fire that burns bright and stronger than I could ever dream.”
“Bell,” Her reply is more of a sigh, and he is so lost in thought the realization of a nickname used by one person and one person alone doesn’t cross his mind until the secret is stumbling from her lips. “I know.” So soft, he can hardly hear, and then hurriedly she adds. “But I won’t tell.” He sees her hands criss cross across her heart, the long forgotten symbol of promises forever kept.
But his heart in is his chest, thudding desperately and drowning out her words because his secret is no longer his alone. And it's never a secret for long when two people know.