Combustible

Whenever people talk of the world coming to an end, it generally revolves around a single, cataclysmic event. That one big, red button that signals nuclear war. A total collapse of the grid. History repeats itself with a single blazing comet that comes crashing into the earth, sealing everyone’s fate in the same manner as the dinosaurs. In one fell swoop, life as you know it is over and done with. One massive hit is all it takes. After all, it only makes sense that the world would end in the same way it began: a reverse Big Bang, so to speak.

It’s funny in a way, because really, the end of the world turned out to be anything but brief. Instead of a big bang, there’s merely a fizzle, this slow descent into chaos. The fabric of society unravels like a sweater: everyone just keeps tugging at that loose thread, bit by bit, until they look up to find that there’s nothing left.

Secretly, the two of them are still praying for that big bang, gazing up at each shooting star with the simple wish that this will be the one that ends it all. Because really, who doesn’t love a good explosion?



For Bellamy Blake, the beginning of the end is a sunny day in central Texas, the windows down in his Mustang GT, and the sound of AC/DC blaring through his speakers. It’s one of the first truly beautiful days of spring, when the flowers are in full bloom, the sky’s a clear shade of cornflower blue, and every tree and shrub that lines the streets of this unassuming college town is a lush, vibrant green. For that one brief moment in time, he’s staring out at a scene ripped straight from the pages of a calendar, but he fails to appreciate it.

Instead, Bellamy’s mind is thumbing through a million different checklists: struggling to recall whether or not he grabbed Octavia’s spare charger, if he needs to go ahead and make the stop for gas now before they head onto the interstate or if he can put it off until later, whether or not his car still looks like a complete disaster area. Normally, if it were just his kid sister, he wouldn’t give a damn, but O’s dragging her new dormmate along on their Spring Break adventure, and in all honesty, he doesn’t want to scare the poor girl off. Odds are, she goes through enough just having to share a confined space with his whirlwind of a sister. He’s sure it’s no easy feat, trying to study with Octavia around.

As he nears the red light, Bellamy casually lets an arm hang out the window and rakes a hand through his dark, dishelveled curls. Really, he’s not as dense as his little sister thinks he is, and she’s nowhere near as subtle or as clever as she takes herself to be. It’s not like he’s a stranger to this whole song-and-dance. If there’s one thing he knows for certain, it’s that Octavia Blake loves to play matchmaker, and guess who just happens to be her longest-running project?

It’s gotten to the point where he’s secretly convinced that she’s taken it upon herself to be his own personal Cupid. That, or she just gets some sick form of amusement from trying to pimp him out to all of her girlfriends. No guy’s little sister should ever take this much interest in his love life (or lack thereof). It’s weird and unnatural, but then again, they’ve only ever had each other, so Bellamy’s willing to look past his kid sister’s annoying little quirks.

Octavia’s latest infatuation goes by the name of Raven Reyes. Apparently, she’s a junior physics major two years above his sister, and the two became unlikely cohabitants when Raven was forced out of her single dorm and Octavia had a falling out with her housing lottery-assigned roommate. Evidently something clicked, and his little sister hasn’t stopped talking about the older girl ever since.

Seriously, it’s beginning to border on idol worship.

He rolls his eyes to himself as he eases his foot off the brakes, but it’s utterly useless at masking the hints of a smile that cling to his lips. As irritating as it might be, he knows Octavia has his best interests at heart. They may have two entirely different opinions as to what his best interests are, but really, he could do much worst than have a sister who cares about him.

Walnut-colored eyes scan each street sign in search of the turn, but it’s the movement in his periphery that snatches his attention, and before anything has a chance to register, the two thin-limbed brunettes are careening towards his car.

“Bell!” a familiar voice calls out to him, and his gaze darts to find her in the crowd of college students.

He doesn’t notice the expression etched across her features. If he had, he wouldn’t have been nearly as calm, as nonchalant. Instead, a smirk tugs at his lips as he watches his sister weave through the intersection, the assortment of knapsacks, duffel bags, and totes overwhelming her slight frame as she pulls the other girl along behind her.

Octavia dives into the backseat, eyes as wide and endlessly blue as the Texas sky above them. While Octavia struggles to catch her breath, her friend slides into the passenger’s seat, the girl’s profile oddly still as she sinks into the black leather. It’s a jarring contrast from the frenzied words that stream past her lips. “Drive, drive, drive!”

It isn’t until then that he notices the two security guards trailing their path, wildly searching for the two unlikely fugitives.

“What the hell-“

Before Bellamy gets the chance to finish, the girl’s fingers are curling around his shoulder, nails digging into his flesh, and it’s then that he realizes what he’d mistaken as excitement burning in their eyes was raw, unfocused fear. “Just fucking drive!”

Without even the slightest trace of hesitation, he throws the Mustang into reverse and cuts the wheels, tires squealing as they speed off into the nearest alleyway. No one bothers to breathe a word until they’re surrounded by nothing but asphalt and skyline stretched as far as their eyes can see.

“Bell, this is Raven,” Octavia mutters halfheartedly, her headful of glossy, ash-brown locks ducking into the space between the front seats. “And Raven, this is my loser of a brother Bellamy.”

She offers him an empty “hey” and the slight flick of her wrist before her gaze wanders back to the white lines ahead of them.

Bellamy nods, equally unenthused. “So nobody’s gonna bother to tell me what went on back there?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Big Brother,” she shoots back. Her voice is laced with sarcasm, and he doesn’t have to glance back to know she’s rolling those big blue eyes at him. “It’s just that those two rent-a-cops were trying to friggin’ eat us, no big deal.”

He keeps his grip steady on the steering wheel while his lips slowly curve around the words, “You’re kidding, right?”

“I couldn’t be more serious if I tried.”

“O, let’s be reasonable here,” Raven begins, and Bellamy has to admit he’s a little thrown off by her casual use of the nickname. “Those guys probably just dipped into some Spice they’d nabbed from some poor kid’s dorm and didn’t know how to handle it.”

“Raven!” she protests. “They were foaming at the mouth.”

“Maybe they were bit by a rabid squirrel,” she replies blankly as she continues to pick apart the split ends of her ponytail. “Or, ya know, you’ve just been binging on The Walking Dead a little too much.”

Something in-between a scoff and a chuckle comes sputtering past Bellamy’s lips, and for the first time, he catches the slow spread of Raven’s smile.

Meanwhile, Octavia pushes her hair out of her face in a gesture of frustration before collapsing dramatically into the backseat again. “You two are impossible.”



Though Octavia fails to let up on her notion of an impending zombie apocalypse, it’s really the mind-shattering, ear-clutching blare of the tornado siren that sends the three of them searching for cover at the next Marriott they come across.

Almost immediately, the younger Blake sibling flops onto one of the queen-sized mattresses and flips on the television. Sunlight trickles through the parted curtains, casting her cobalt blue nails in a faint shimmer as her thumb jabs at the remote control. While Octavia’s eyes stay transfixed on the screen, Raven settles in behind her on the bed and starts to braid the younger girl’s hair.

Legs cramped from having spent the past few hours stuck behind the wheel, Bellamy chooses to stand by the window. Almond eyes watch Raven’s hands intently as she carefully gathers up sections of mocha-colored tresses. Her nimble fingers manipulating the strands with a slow and steady ease that seems perfectly effortless, when he knows it’s anything but. He stills remembers having to struggle with his little sister’s hair as they got dressed for school, those mornings when their mother was too depressed to even pull herself up out of bed. He tries to shake the bittersweet memory from his thoughts, but he’s not successful.

There’s a determination to her features, an underlying tenderness laden in her deep brown eyes that reminds him so much of his mother in that moment. Not the tangled, feral-eyed woman she eventually wasted away to, but how she was before: back when Octavia was just this itty-bitty thing, when she would tell him stories of gods and goddesses, tragic heroes and mythical creatures, back before his mother went completely mad and became a ward of the state.

The dull edge of her voice cuts through his memories. “Why don’t you take a picture, Blake? I’m sure it’ll last longer.”

“Shush!” Octavia huffs. “I’m trying to hear this.”

The trio grows silent as one of the local news anchors warns of possibly tainted beef and rumors of a resurgence of mad cow disease.

“See! I told you so!” Octavia exclaims, and Raven falls back onto the pillows dramatically.

“Since when are ‘food poisoning’ and ‘zombie apocalypse’ the same thing?”

Before she can defend her latest conspiracy theory, there’s the sudden flash of blue light, followed by the harsh sound of Raven’s cell phone vibrating on the duvet.

“Hey,” she answers, grinning like a fool as she quietly steps out of the hotel room, and Bellamy can’t keep his gaze from following after her.

It’s only after Raven’s left that he comes crashing down onto the bed beside Octavia. “What was that all about?” he asks, still trying to feign disinterest.

“Probably Finn,” she replies as she smoothes a hand over her new French braid.

“Who’s Finn?”

“Raven’s boyfriend.” Bellamy loves how his kid sister drops the bomb of another guy as if it’s the most obvious and least surprising news ever. She feels his eyes bore into her. “What?” she asks innocently, now toying with the ends of her braid, still refusing to meet his narrowed stare. “I thought you weren’t interested in any of my friends.”

“Trust me, I’m not.”

“What was it you said last time? Oh yeah! That they were all stupid and immature.” Her eyes sweep over him suddenly, like a tidal wave, before her entire face lights up. “You like her, don’t you?”

He keeps his voice coarse, unwavering. “I really don’t.”

But of course, like most annoying little sisters, she refuses to let up. “Uh oh! Bel-luh-mee and Ray-ven, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

He bashes a pillow against her shoulder before he rises up off the bed again. “You’re such a dork.”

“And you couldn’t be any further in denial if you tried.”

Raven tries to slip back in as inconspicuously as she’d left, but it’s useless. Both sets of Blake eyes are staring at her, watching as she eases her backpack over her shoulders and gathers up her tote bag.

“Where are you going?” Octavia chirps, still hugging a knee to her chest.

Though she doesn’t look up to meet their expectant eyes, Raven’s tone remains quiet, calm, collected as she speaks. “Finn’s sick. I have to go back home to Oklahoma.”

“Are you sure?” Octavia continues in that pleading way of hers. “I thought we were all gonna drive up to the lakehouse together? Roast marshmallows by the campfire, tell ghost stores, drink way too many PBRs. What about all of this doesn’t sound totally appealing to you?”

“Yeah, I know,” Raven offers her friend a soft smile in apology. “But Finn says his parents are thinking of taking him to the hospital, so it sounds like it could be pretty serious. He wouldn’t tell me much, but I know he needs me there.”

Aquamarine eyes shoot a quick glance in Bellamy’s direction before she speaks up. “Well, we’d be more than happy to take you there. It’s not like our plans are set in stone or anything. Our uncle’s lakehouse will still be there after we drop you off.”

The older girl is quick to brush off the notion with a swat of her hand. “Nah, it’s fine. I can just take a bus. I don’t wanna wreck your vacation.”

“You’re not leaving,” Bellamy finally speaks up, surprising himself as he bridges the distance between them. The sudden outburst comes out much too firm, too abruptly, but he doesn’t realize this until he has a tight grip around her wrist. “You shouldn’t go out there alone. It’s not safe. There are a ton of crazy people out there, and I’d hate to see your face wind up on the evening news or some shit like that.”

She immediately jerks away, and in an instant, the atmosphere in the hotel room shifts. Raven narrows her mahogany eyes at him as she lashes out. “And just what the hell makes you think you can tell me what to do? I’m not your little sister, and there’s no fucking way you’re gonna boss me around. You don’t even know me. I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself. Hell, I’ve done it for the past twenty-two years!”

He drops her arms, his own hands held up in surrender as he takes a step back. “You’re right,” he begins slowly, his dark eyes focused on the toes of his boots as he chooses his next words carefully. “I don’t know you, but I know you’re not stupid enough to head out there on your own, especially when we’re offering you a ride.”

The storm brewing in her irises begins to settle as her gaze drifts to the carpet beneath their feet, and that’s when he senses that he’s gotten through to her.

“Just…stay. I won’t say another word to you: we’ll drive you out there, drop you off with your boyfriend, and leave. No questions asked.”

As much as he hates to admit it, Bellamy can’t fight the massive wave of relief that comes crashing over him when she eventually nods.



In the miles that follow, Bellamy’s forced to sit there in silence, trying not to eavesdrop as the two girls blather on and on about how totally amazing Raven’s boyfriend is. What he’s able to glean is this: the two of them had grown up together, his parents had helped raise her because her own mother, for whatever reason, was constantly in-and-out of her life, and the two of them started dating when they were in high school. While Raven’s off attending school on a full-ride in hopes of pursuing a career in engineering, Finn’s still in their hometown, stuck tolling the days away at his family’s pizzeria.

The distance has been hard on them, but she knows what they have is strong enough to survive the time apart. What they have is the real thing, the type of love that lasts forever.

Sometimes, he writes her these old-fashioned love letters. He’s so crazy about her that he makes the drive down to campus every other weekend just to see her. For her birthday last year, he bought her a twenty-four karat gold necklace with a raven charm dangling from it, and every now and then, when she talks about Finn, Bellamy can’t help but notice how her fingers flutter to her neck, how she clutches the tiny bird in her grasp like she’s holding onto her lover’s hand.

Really, Finn’s dreamy. It’s the sort of sugary-sweet, Hallmark greeting card garbage that makes Octavia swoon and Bellamy want to throw up. Instead, he settles for constantly rolling his eyes to himself and tightening his grip around the steering wheel.

He doesn’t even know the guy, and already, he can’t fucking stand him. Despite what Octavia thinks, it’s not because he’s secretly head-over-heels in love with Raven (because he’s not) and he’s simply jealous of her boyfriend. While there’s no doubt that the prick probably doesn’t deserve her, Bellamy can’t stand him because he sounds like a pussy. He comes across as the type of guy who uses the sensitivity card to trick girls into trusting him.

If he’s being completely honest, Finn Collins seems like nothing more than a snake in the grass. It’s the kind of façade he could easily see some wide-eyed, idealistic girl, (someone like Octavia) falling for, but not Raven.

But Bellamy holds his tongue and keeps his eyes focused on the road ahead as the sun begins its slow descent into the horizon. After all, he promised her that he wouldn’t say a word, and he intends on keeping that promise.

It’s almost ten o’clock when they finally make it to the hospital, and the streets of Raven’s hometown are eerily vacant. Then again, it’s a small town in rural Oklahoma, so the notion that the place becomes a ghost town at night normally wouldn’t be the most surprising thing ever, but at the same time, it’s a little too quiet for Bellamy’s taste. More than anything, it’s the absence that he finds unnerving: the absence of people, of other cars, of noise. There’s a perceivable stillness in the air that makes his skin crawl and the hairs along the nape of his neck stand on edge. A swollen moon hangs in the sky overhead, its milky white glow sucking away every trace of color, painting the landscape in nothing but shades of gray.

He finally turns to Raven and asks the unavoidable. “Is it usually like this?”

Her features mirror their surroundings: deceptively calm at first glance but haunted with defeat. She utters the last word any of them want to hear, “No.”

With its single glowing red cross, its windows spilling over with white fluorescent lighting, the hospital calls out to them like a beacon. Still, Bellamy can’t shake the suspicion buried deep in his marrow, fear coursing in its most primal form throughout his veins. So he goes with his gut instinct: he grabs his handgun from the dash and tucks it into the waistband of his pants before the three of them head inside.

The dead silence carries over into sterilized hallways, the fluorescent lighting above them blinding against the harsh white walls. For the first time, Bellamy notices the shadows pooled beneath Raven’s eyes, the exhaustion that pulls at her features. Weary eyes squint at the crumpled slip of paper in her hand before she glances back up to the maze of corridors and elevators ahead of them, this helpless expression on her face. It’s such a drastic contrast from the hardened way she’d glared at him back in the hotel room that Bellamy finds her almost unrecognizable.

“Whoa…” Octavia breathes out a whisper, blue eyes struggling to soak in the foreign surroundings. “Where is everybody?”

Bellamy keeps his calloused fingers curled around the grip of his gun. “That’s what worries me.”

Raven continues to ignore all of the red flags. “Finn’s in room 11IC, which should be…” Her finger traces an invisible line from the note in her grasp to one of the signs down the hallway. “That way.”

“Maybe we should just go back?” Octavia starts, looking to her brother for some sort of reassurance.

He begins to turn towards the entrance, but Raven stops him.

“No,” she forces out in protest, but the noticeable break in her voice gives her away. This girl is running on nothing but sheer desperation. “I have to find Finn. You two can go wait in the car.”

This is the moment where everything falls into place for Bellamy, when it all begins to make sense. Finn is as much Raven’s Achilles’ heel as Octavia is his own: the chink in the armor, the one person you’d risk everything for.

“No,” the younger girl repeats with an equal fervor as she rushes to her friend’s side. “We’re in this together.”

Though his lips remain mashed in a tight line, Bellamy steps forward to flank her other side, shoots a glance his little sister’s way, and nods.

As the trio ventures further into the building, the scent of disinfectant becomes overwhelmed by the nauseating combination of bile, vomit, and decay. Still, they don’t turn back, and inevitably, Raven finds what she’s looking for: Room 11IC.

With a single deep breath, she forces every ounce of hope into her features, bracing herself as she reaches for the doorknob.

“Knock, knock!” she calls out as she enters the room., her cheery tone completely out of place in their desolate surroundings. Bellamy’s right behind her, eyes quietly surveying the room before he lets Octavia begin to step in behind them.

“Finn?”

The feral, frenzied look in his bloodshot brown eyes, the saliva bubbling over his lips, the metallic stench of blood so heavy in the air, even the shackles that bind him down to the hospital bed all fail to register for Bellamy at first glance. Surprisingly, it’s Raven who goes on the defensive first, reaching for a tiny Swiss Army knife tucked in the back pocket of her jeans. The tiny blade’s practically useless against the snapping teeth, the nails that claw at his own raw flesh as he fights to break free, and without a second thought, Bellamy grabs his gun. In an instant, he cocks, aims, and fires a bullet into her high school sweetheart’s skull.

It isn’t nearly as satisfying as he’d hoped it would be. If anything, it’s heart wrenching.

The events that follow unravel in slow motion before his eyes. His arm moves to force Octavia back into the hallway, but Raven still holds his stare. He watches as her muscles freeze, her knees lock, then they buckle. Before she has a chance to hit the floor, he sweeps her up in his arms, slinging her arm over his shoulder as he helps her out of the room. The sound of her animalistic wail in his ears is the only thing he can focus on, and it overwhelms his senses as he struggles to get the two of them, step-by-uneasy-step, back to the car.

Octavia was right, this is the apocalypse, and they’re standing at ground zero. Bellamy already has a kill under his belt, and Raven’s completely catatonic, but on the bright side, at least there’s nowhere to go but up from here…right?



For days, Raven doesn’t utter a word. She simply stays curled up in the passenger’s seat, her back turned to him and her head tucked against the door like a girl caving in on herself. Every now and again, Bellamy finds his gaze wandering over to her, lazily following the flow of espresso locks that course down her spine. He catches himself silently checking on her more often than he’d care to admit: counting the slow rise and sink of her back with each shallow breath. There are those times when she sobs uncontrollably until she reaches the edge of exhaustion. Sometimes, there’s only a single, heart-wrenching wail, a sudden stream of achy, pained noises that flood past her lips like she simply doesn’t have the capacity to control it, as if it simply takes to much strength to hold it all in.

She’s broken, and it’s all his fault.

He tries to imagine how he’d feel if someone would’ve shot Octavia in cold blood like that, right before his eyes, and he’s endowed with a newfound respect for this fragile, birdlike girl curled up in the seat beside him. Because if the roles were reversed, he knows he never would’ve been able to forgive the person who killed his sister, yet by the grace of God, Raven’s somehow able to ride in the same car with him, to put herself in his hands, to trust him with her life.

For a moment, he’s enamored with her, and it’s a feeling he can’t quite put into words.



The first time she speaks after Finn’s death, Bellamy’s the only one there to listen. Octavia’s sound asleep, sprawled out across the backseat, and the car’s parked in the lot of an abandoned car wash.

There’s an open packet of sunflower seeds between his legs, and the obnoxious sound of him cracking the hulls between his teeth is the only noise in the cramped space. When Raven sits up in the seat beside him, he immediately offers the packet to her. Even though he knows she doesn’t need him, that when it boils down to it, she can take care of herself, he still feels that urge deep in his marrow to take care of her.

“Here, take these,” he mumbles. “You haven’t eaten in days.”

She cautiously reaches into the bag, plucks out a single seed, and holds it against her lips.

“I never even got a chance to say goodbye.”

Her voice is hoarse, each syllable like a shard of glass tearing through her throat, and he doesn’t have the right words to give her, the ones that will make everything okay. There’s no magical incantation that can erase the pain he’s caused her, the unspeakable thing he’s done. It doesn’t stop him from trying.

“Raven, I’m sorry.”

Her eyes meet his in the darkness. “I don’t blame you for what happened, Bellamy. You saved my life back there.”

There’s a moment of unreadable silence before she leans across the center console, her lips surging into his like something electrical. Her kiss feels like fireworks exploding against his skin: this sudden, brilliant burst of color that quickly dissipates into nothingness.

Maybe she just needs a warm body to call her own.

He doesn’t bring himself to question it.



Time passes. The earth continues to spin on its axis. Those first few hours are slow and unnerving as the three of them anxiously teeter on the brink of the unknown. Hours turn into days as the inescapable tension swells to a head. There’s the inevitable frenzy that’s doomed to accompany the collapse of civilization: the looting, the raping, the violence, but still, the three of them manage to stick together. Days begin to pile one on top of the other, another X that Raven carves into Bellamy’s leather wallet with her pocketknife, until the initial calamity begins to fizzle out. Resources are dwindling now, and those who have made it through the first few weeks are too focused on the struggle to survive to cause them any trouble. The three of them live like nomads, his Mustang becoming their makeshift homebase as they drift aimlessly from town to barren town.

Weeks turn into months as the earth continues to make its journey around the sun. Though she doesn’t dare speak out loud about it anymore, Bellamy knows she still thinks of Finn. There are still those moments when she gets that far-away glimmer in her brown eyes. Even worse are the times she glances up at him, disgust burning through her stare because she still sees her ex-lover’s blood on his hands, still has the scene playing on a constant loop in her reel of nightmares.

Despite their muddled past, Raven still finds her way into the backseat with him more nights than she doesn’t, still lets him lap up the traces of adrenaline beaded across her skin. Afterwards, they cling to one another like they’re lost at sea, both dependent on the same raft to keep them afloat.

Sometimes, on those nights when he can’t sleep, Bellamy wonders if things would be the same between them if the world hadn’t descended into chaos, if they didn’t need each other to survive. When he’s feeling particularly optimistic, he likes to think things between them would be better, that they would’ve found a way into each other’s arms regardless of the circumstance, like what they had was fate or some bullshit like that. Most nights though, he doesn’t play the never-ending game of what-ifs. Most nights, he’s content enough just to have her curled up against his chest. Because if there’s one thing he’s learned from this thoroughly fucked-up situation, it’s that neither of them are guaranteed a tomorrow, so he’s determined to fight for this little piece of happiness.

Some nights, Raven buries her face in his neck and she murmurs, “I can’t lose you, Bellamy.” It’s the closest thing to an “I love you” that she can ever give him. He doesn’t mind: those three words are ridiculously overused anyway.



The explosion he’s been craving comes on a stormy day in June.

They’ve spent a little over a year on the road together, traveling this barren Dust Bowl from town to town with no true destination, pulled forward by nothing more than the basal instinct to survive, to take care of their own. As the world they know comes crumbling down around them, they become each other’s family. Raven falls into the fold effortlessly, almost as if this was the way it was always meant to be: Bellamy, Octavia, and Raven against the world.

And as sure as the blood still flows through his veins and the synapses rapid-fire in his skull, Bellamy knows he loves her: this girl who can hot wire cars and manufacture bombs from tin cans and gasoline. He’s heart wrenchingly loyal to this girl who doesn’t need him, who could leave anytime she damn well pleases, but she doesn’t. She stays.

With each passing second he spends suspended in her gravitational pull, his world expands, steadies. Raven finds the sort of unconditional love she’s never known: the kind that’s fierce and stubborn, the same tenacious devotion that would take a bullet for her. It’s a bond born from blood, sweat, and tears.

What they have is devastating and brutal, but it’s theirs. She may never be able to utter those words to him, and he’ll never give her little golden wings or spill his heart out on a page for her, but he can wipe the grime from her cheekbones and place his bullets in her palm.

No, she doesn’t need him.

She can take care of herself.

But she stays.

The days of warning sirens and weather forecasts feels like another distant memory, an ancient artifact from a lifetime ago. It’s the eerie stillness in the air, the way the sky holds that yellow, jaundiced tinge that signals a tornado looming.

While it isn’t ideal, Bellamy, Octavia, and Raven end up taking shelter in an old parking garage. It makes his skin crawl, being underground like this, in the wreckage of a decent-sized city, nonetheless, but Bellamy tries to keep his mind focused on the task at hand. Silver lining: the higher the former population, the more shit people leave behind, and right now, it’s theirs for the taking. He grunts as he jams the butt of some dead doomsday prepper’s assault rifle through the window of an Audi.

“Check me out!” he can hear Octavia call from a few cars over. She sticks her head out, sporting a pair of dark, oversized Ray-Bans. “Do I look Hollywood or what?”

Raven beats him to the punch, and he can’t help but crack a grin to himself. “You look marvelous, darling.”

Really, it’s all about the little things. Those brief flickers of happiness are all they have left.

“Thank God for soccer moms. We’ve got some blankets, clothes, and bottled water over here,” Raven’s voice echoes from the second row seats of a Dodge Caravan. “What about you, Bell?”

“Not a damn thing,” he mutters as he sinks back into the luxury car’s black leather seats. “Just a half-empty bottle of…Gucci Guilty.”

“Aw, come on, big brother. Don’t you wanna smell good for your girlfriend?” Octavia teases him as she swings from the cab of an enormous pick-up truck, a flurry of mocha brown locks and fair skin.

All he can give her is the dramatic roll of his dark eyes before he slams the useless bottle of cologne onto the pavement. Some things never change.

After all this time, they should’ve known to have someone keeping watch, but they’re too enamored with the thrill of a new haul, with these souvenirs from an easier, better time, to notice that they’re being hunted.

Bellamy catches wind of the sickening scent of decayed flesh, but he doesn’t think twice about it. After all, everything smells like death these days; it’s almost more unsettling when something doesn’t possess the stench. It isn’t until the air grows sticky with putrid breath that he realizes they’re surrounded by the undead.

It’s far too late for the three of them to formulate a gameplan; the monsters are already pouring in from every reachable exit, driven forward by the undeniable need to feed. The heavy grunts, the shuffling drag of feet, and a chorus of wretched, hungry groans overwhelm his senses. It’s something inevitable, really: the infected vastly outnumber the living now, and they’re lucky as hell to have made it this long without having to deal with any attacks on such a massive scale.

As his eyes take inventory of their surroundings, he spots a familiar flash of cherry red paint. It’s the same vibrant color that’s gotten him pulled over by the cops more times that he could bother to count, but in this moment, he’s never been happier to see it in his life. It’s none other than his precious Mustang parked on the far corner of this level, the only car he can be certain is unlocked. He knows it’s their only shot at safety, so he goes on a mad dash towards it, ushering Octavia and Raven along ahead of him. Even in these times of crisis, he still feels that overwhelming need to protect them. Old habits die hard.

Lost in the shuffle, Bellamy doesn’t hear the sickening pop of tendons, fails to see his little sister’s foot fold over beneath her until it’s too late.

He’s too far ahead to catch her now, and Raven’s quick to pick up on that telltale flash of desperation in his eyes. True to her namesake, she claws at the black canvas of his jacket. It’s the only thing that momentarily stops him from running headlong back towards the mob of undead: anything to save his sister.

Your sister, your responsibility, his mother’s words echo in his head with each and every resounding thud of his pulse.

The yell hollows out his throat like shards of broken glass: shattered, tearing, brittle. “I can’t just let her die!”

“Don’t worry,” Raven shouts back, already one step ahead of him as she fishes a beer bottle from her knapsack. “I won’t let her.” And despite her calm exterior, he sees the same urgency pooled in her pupils.

Because it’s not just him and Octavia anymore, and he has to constantly remind himself of that. The two Blake siblings are the closest thing to family that Raven’s ever known.

Before he can fully process what’s going on, she’s already set the makeshift fuse ablaze, and he watches, captivated by the way the flames gnaw away the white scrap of cotton.

She gazes up at him from beneath her lashes, a smirk tugging at her lips. “I’ve been saving this one for a rainy day.”

A hand curves around her mouth as she shouts a warning. “Fire in the hole, O!”

While it doesn’t save them by any means, the Molotov cocktail’s enough to blast away a dent in the horde, and Bellamy rushes towards the blaze, scooping a winching Octavia up onto his back before he takes off again.

When the three of them finally collapse onto the black leather seats, they’re each a miserable, exhausted wreck, hearts racing and lungs begging for air, but for that moment, all they can think of is that they’re safe. They still have each other. This family is makeshift, broken, and needy, but it’s theirs.

Sweat mats wisps of dark tendrils to her face, but Raven’s grinning as she turns her head towards him. “I think it’s safe to say we’re even now, Blake.”