From Ashes & Ember

A few days after Finn’s death, Clarke comes to visit her, marble blue eyes fixated on the floor of Raven’s room as she hands her this tattered box of charcoals.

“Here, I thought you might be able to use these,” she says slowly, being careful to avoid Raven’s gaze. There’s a hollow vacancy to her voice that seems to perfectly mirror the other girl’s numbness. “Sometimes, it helps me to draw things out. Soothing, I guess. I thought it’s something that could help you too.”

Raven nods as she runs a thumb along the box’s corner. It’s not nearly enough to make up for losing the love of her life, the only family she’d ever known, but she doesn’t have the heart to tell Clarke. After all, his blood is on her hands, not Raven’s.

And she still can’t bring herself to look Raven in the eyes.

“Thanks.” The word leaves her lips as this broken, wretched sound, but at the very least, it’s authentic.

Raven keeps her gaze trained on Clarke’s golden locks as she shifts the box in her palm, hears the soothing roll of charcoals tumbling on the inside. No, it’s not nearly enough, but it’s something.

The first time she tries her hand at the craft, it’s during the middle of another sleepless night, when her mind’s running rampant with an endless stream of radio parts and schemes for communication towers, all of these things that she uses as distractions to keep her thoughts from straying back to the obvious. The loneliness. The helplessness. The sheer and utter worthlessness she’s felt since she the paralysis.

More than anything though, it’s Finn. While she’s able to push everything else off to the wayside, keep those emotions from rearing their ugly heads, Finn always has a way of seeping through the seams of her subconscious.

So she grabs the sketchpad and charcoals and gets to work.

Of course, she’s not able to recreate those round compassionate eyes or that same playful smirk that careens across her childhood memories, but at the same time, she’s almost grateful she lacks the skill. Clarke’s sleeping corners are papered from wall-to-wall in these portraits of Finn that are so realistic that it’s haunting. There’s Finn hovering in midair, his dark locks askew and a mischievous glimmer in his eyes. In another, Finn is surrounded by the cosmos and the transparent fluttering wings of butterflies. The resemblance is so striking that Raven almost feels as if she could reach out and touch him, but it’s nothing more than just a thin sheet of paper.

It’s too much. It’s too much.

So instead, her first attempt at art isn’t really art in the traditional sense at all. It’s merely a reflection of the chaos she feels swirling inside of her: a cloud of gray dust like smoke smeared across the page, this swirling tornado raging inside of her. No, it isn’t pretty, and it doesn’t look like much of anything, but she has to admit that she feels a sense of calmness wash over her.

And so she continues to sketch things, nothing that would mean anything, just bits and pieces here and there. She finds herself drawn to the broken things, the features that seem rough or harsh at first glance, but when viewed through the right lens are something beautiful.

Like Abby’s hands: the thin, nimble fingers of a surgeon.

Or Lincoln’s tribal tattoos, the scars that mark his shoulders: one for every enemy slain in battle.

And the series of braids that wind down Octavia’s scalp. Lincoln even shows her how to get the shading of her dark strands just right so that they possess that certain depth, the mingling of lights and darks, of shades of gray that make them appear somewhat realistic.

Raven sketches the scar that runs along Bellamy’s cheekbone, this ragged, nearly crescent-shaped mark. Even though it’s healed, there’s still that trace of raised tissue like a streak of white lightning cutting across his features, a silent reminder that they aren’t these fresh-faced kids anymore.

She finds herself studying him more often than she cares to admit.

But when he stops by her room one night to bring her dinner and begins casually flipping through the stack of drawings strewn across her work desk, she doesn’t think much of it. She certainly doesn’t expect him to put two-and-two together because, let’s face it, Bellamy Blake had never been the most perceptive person ever.

Also true to his nature is his innate knack of finding ways to skirt around her expectations.

A sheepish smile spreads across his lips as he holds the sketch up to his face. “Can I have this?”

She blinks twice, her expression unfaltering, tone the definition of disinterest. “And just what could you possibly want with that?”

His eyebrows lift as he sets the sheet back on the table. “I dunno. I thought it looked pretty badass.”
Stirring her soup, she’s forced to bite back a grin, her earthy eyes absorbed in the bits of vegetables and shredded meat floating around the bowl. “Fine. Take it.”

That foolish grin is still stamped across his face as he straddles the chair at her desk. “Only if you’ll sign it for me.”

The confusion etched across her face must be hysterical because he’s fighting back chuckles as she asks, “And why on Earth would I do that, huh?”

“That’s what artists used to do, back before the blast. They’d sign their work. Did you guys not have to take that unit in Earth History?”

There’s the slow shake of her head. “Nope. They must’ve cut it before my year.”

His dark eyes meet hers in the small space as he holds out the drawing. “So will you do it?”

In an instant, Raven’s reaching over, snatching the paper from his grip and scrawling her name across the bottom of the page in shattered, nearly illegible letters. She was a mechanic; she never claimed to be a calligrapher. It’s not like anyone had actually handwritten anything in decades.

“Here.” She thrusts the sheet back in his direction. “Satisfied?”

Ashen eyes glance at the page, the noise something between a grunt and a purr as it slips past his lips. “Mhm.”

They sit and eat their meal together in silence. She knows he still isn’t quite sure of what to say to her, doesn’t have any words to offer that could ease the pain of losing Finn, but he remains by her side: this silent, brooding shadow she can never seem to shake.

He makes sure she eats.

He constantly hangs around her workstation, despite the fact that he’s not much help in the engineering department.

He stops by her room every night to check up on her.

All of these things Bellamy does under the guise of something else: he just wants to see the progress they’ve made on the new communication devices or he noticed that she was in on the way to his own sleeping quarters. It’s all bullshit, and she knows it.

Beneath all of the scars and the calluses, his stonewalled expression and detached tone, this boy loves her. Of this, Raven is certain. She’s also aware of the fact that she cares about him more than she probably should, and it’s an emotion she isn’t quite sure how to process. It’s something basal, something buried deep with the marrow of her bones: she cares for him on this cellular level that she can’t explain, but she can’t love him in the way that he wants.

Not now.

Not so soon after Finn.

Truthfully, there are times when Raven isn’t sure if she has the capacity to feel anything anymore. There’s only numbness, just the action of putting one foot in front of the other, living from one day to the next. It’s exhausting enough, trying to rise from the ashes, that she can’t afford to let herself backslide.

But the next night, as she’s heading down to mess hall, she catches a glimpse of her sketch hanging beside Bellamy’s bed.

And in spite of herself, Raven looks down at her charcoal-smudged fingers and smiles.