@lingeringscars sent: if octavia had died, it would’ve been my fault.
she thinks one should be denser than the other – empathy, guilt. one should sink more quickly, she’s sure, have a larger impact when it hits bottom, but the two drop to the pit of her stomach pretty similarly, and weigh near the same.
on the ring, it was guilt, more and more severe as the years went on. it reared its ugly head every time he spoke of his sister, so clearly longing for her and so desperate to return to her, but it might have been worse when he was quiet, when he looked off into the distance and she could feel it radiating off of him, how deeply he worried for her and missed her. bellamy would never admit to it, but she’d swear there was anger there too, fits and flickers of frustration he never meant to have. nothing compared to her own anger, hot and boiling until she exhausted it to a blackened and charred depression, but significant enough that she’s sure it must have left room for regret, if only in his darkest moments. he was on the ring because of her, after all. were it not for her, he would be in the bunker with octavia.
it wasn’t until this moment that raven realized how much that option terrified her.
bellamy, she’s sure, at least a bellamy before their time on the ring, would have preferred it – would have done anything to be there with her and shoulder the weight of her burdens, even if it meant bearing the brunt of her violence. she worries bellamy might very well still think he deserved it, that octavia may have failed to stamp out the part of him convinced he could have stood between her and whatever horror took place in the bunker, and selfish as it might be, given how those in the bunker suffered, raven is so glad that he wasn’t. perhaps it even heals the little part of her that wondered if bellamy would have been better off had she kicked the bucket in becca’s lab, loosens that awful tangle of resentment she’d harbored for both of them for thinking she alone possessed the skill to bring them back.
but the hurt she feels watching him hurt now isn’t much better.
in a way, it runs deeper – cuts a path all the way to the years before finn, too empty and cold and hungry to call a childhood, the years she spent waiting for herself to stop waiting for her mother, stop expecting her to stop leaving her and stop using her and stop – well, she wasn’t around enough for much more than that. raven refused to do that for abby, told herself she was never going to do that again – and then when abby showed up with warm clothes and the promise of a full stomach and a tattered heart stitched back together with care, it was too late. maybe she should caution bellamy to forgive this new octavia before he runs out of time to, maybe that’s the takeaway, but she’s too angry at being left again to manage it, and too afraid of seeing bellamy hurt again – or worse – to try. any progress he’s made toward independence from octavia was hard won, and she won’t risk it, certainly won’t condemn it.
“ she was dangerous, ” she says instead, sitting beside him. she can still remember his face when he made that call, the tight line of his shoulders in her peripheral as she’d manned the controls like he’d asked. she’d wanted to touch him somehow, but something told her it was better to steer them away before he had the chance to open the doors back up or follow octavia into the dark and live or die with her, like she’s sure he thought he should have done in the bunker.
it took everything he had to do it. every single thing.
raven knows that from experience.
so she can’t let him agonize over it now. god knows she’s done her fair share of agonizing, what-if’d herself half to death – if she’d stayed, could she have stopped her mother, pried the bottle out of her hands? if she’d gotten them to the ground in five years instead of six, would abby have been so far gone? (there’s a stinging sensation in her cheek that says torturing her wasn’t the first time abby ever hurt her, just the worst.) “ just because she’s ready to mend fences now doesn’t mean everything she did goes away. she hurt you, over and over again. she was a threat to all of us. ”
raven reaches out to him now, touching his arm. it’s not her decision, whether or not he lets octavia back in again, and he certainly didn’t care for her input when she cautioned him against forgiving clarke, but it doesn’t stop her from watching them when they’re together, looking for anything amiss or threatening. “ it was the only call you could make. ”
it was your only choice. what bitter fucking irony.
