She was never one to panic loudly. Fear made anchors of her feet and wrapped chains of silence around her throat, but it rarely ever spurred her to action, even to save herself. The mountain brought out the screams that had been trapped inside her lungs for too long. The low flickering lights, the cement floors, it was like being locked up all over again, just waiting to die-but this time, there weren't any windows to look out of.
At least when you got floated, it didn't hurt. Not for long, anyway.
Nobody took death seriously in the Skybox, even though being there basically meant you were slated for execution. It was almost funny to her now, thinking back on those days was just a languid haze of pacing up and down her cell or staring out into the void until she began to ponder when it'd ever begin to talk back to her. Boredom. That was what she had felt.
Being killed didn't feel like a possibility, though she was tangibly closer to it than anyone else, alongside the ninety-nine others locked up alongside her. Maybe she wouldn't be convicted. Maybe petty vandalism wasn't that bad. Maybe she'd be pardoned. Fox held onto all of those thoughts until the day she walked through the doors and saw with her own two eyes that the rumours about some girl they found under the floor weren't just rumors. What did they arrest her for? Existing?
Just maybe her chances of survival weren't as great as she thought they were.
Once, in jest, she had looked to the boy behind her in the makeshift classroom, "What are you in for?" Fox asked, unable to keep the grin off her face. What she'd just said sounded like a stock phrase from one of those old movies she sometimes had the chance to watch.
He answered "murder" with a stone cold expression. What could someone hope for with that kind of accusation hanging around their neck, like a noose that began to tighten with every passing day, just waiting for the ground to give out from under their feet the day they turned eighteen? Fox wanted to ask, but she instead turned around quickly, and never spoke to him again. Even if she had the courage, she wouldn't have had the words.
Why hadn't someone put the pieces together beforehand? Why would a bunch of kids who in all likelihood would probably be going to their deaths in a few years or even months have to learn any of these skills? Making a fire, building a shelter, finding food. Like they had some kind of future ahead of them, maybe not on the Ark, but a future somewhere. That had to be a joke, right? She looked up at Pike, and then down at the little fire he had conjured just below. You said we were never going to amount to anything, remember? What are you trying to do? It didn't really hit her until she stepped out of the dropship and the sunlight did.
Perhaps to her dismay, at least on some subconscious level-she was no different on the ground than she was in the sky. Fox laughed when Finn did something funny, she crossed her arms and rolled her eyes whenever the Chancellor's son dared to speak, she chanted whatever the crowd chanted whenever they did it, be it, "Whatever the hell we want!" or "Float him!" Just like she did when the kids she was trying desperately to keep up with convinced her that, "Hey, it'd be fun to break some shit."
But she liked Wells. Not Chancellor. Wells Jaha. He took the time to bury the dead when everyone else was off doing whatever the hell they wanted. She didn't want to see Murphy hanging, she had let it happen, regretfully-but she didn't want to see it. So why did you say that you did, in the crowd? Why were you waving your fist and shouting?
No one is coming to help any of you.
But Pike was wrong. Bellamy came. He didn't come down with the specific goal of helping them, even she had picked up on that, but he was here all the same. He helped. And that was all that mattered. Her voice was small, even when she was screaming her lungs out. But for the first time in her life she felt like that voice mattered, even if nothing else did. Those kids she had followed on the Ark had escaped with their crimes unnoticed and their lives unscathed, she had not. Fox had taken all the burden of their shared wrongdoing on her back and now she was down here, and they were up there.
"We can take care of ourselves, can't we?"
She looked around and wondered for the first time, who was really free.
Jasper promised her she'd be okay, and she nodded her head and believed him, not because she really did, but because she needed a leader in Bellamy's absence. Fox felt it like the chill of a dark night with no blanket. She needed someone to stand straight with an unwavering voice, and look her in the eyes and say that she'd be okay. That she was ready to fight for her life and the lives of her friends in the face of death.
I promise.
Fox liked Jasper, but she didn't truly trust him-not because he was untrustworthy, but because the task in his trembling hands was too immense for him to hold, and she knew that someone was going to be dropped, and she was terrified, because she was someone. But when he told her that they-no she, specifically, would be okay, Fox only nodded her head and prepared to fight when the Mountain Men came for them, even though she had never been a fighter before.
When they had grabbed her and began to drag her out of safety and through the hallway, away from her friends and the precarious reassurance that as long as she was in that room by their sides that she would stay alive, it felt like she was back on the Ark again. It was as if her whole life was passing through her eyes, but this was not a flash flood like the cliches always described, it was a lethargic river etching out a path through the forest of her mind, rushing gently, unhurried in the summer heat. Fox didn't struggle when they took her out of the Skybox. She watched as everyone was shouting and swinging, until her ears grew used to that raucous cacophony, and somehow, that became her new silence.
The guards had to tranquilize one girl to get her to calm down and go quietly. Fox could only look on in amazement. Where were you going to run to, anyway?
The ground brought a loud and newfound fear out of her and to the surface, and desperately clinging to its shoulder was her will to live. She couldn't do that. Fox couldn't just step out of that dropship and taste the air in her lungs and feel the rain on her skin to let them take her alive like this, and kill her slowly, piece by piece. She wanted to feel the way she did when she stepped off that ship and onto the grass. So she fought them, with every inch of her being she made sure to kick and scream and struggle for her life, drag her feet across the ground, if only to stall, to give Jasper more time to fulfill his promise to her.
You promised.
Fox saw the others, the ones they didn't fight for quite as hard. Her heart froze. Their bodies were horrifically mangled on those tables, so much so that had she not already known the names of the taken she wouldn't have recognized them. The last time she had seen them, they were alive. Nobody had fought for them then, but they had fought for her now, and yet she still ended up here. Was someone else going to get dragged in here, hours from now, and see her corpse? Was it going to be Jasper?
As soon as she felt that immense pressure leave one of her arms, Fox took her chance and threw her whole weight into the other man. That grip on her was gone and her hands slammed onto the concrete below. She wasn't going to spend a single second in this awful room of the dead, she deserved to be with the living, because he promised, because she couldn't die here, because no matter what anyone said about her life being insignificant, she still wanted to live it.
And it was Bellamy who had made sure of that. He had outside and somehow, he had here, too. He was right in front of her, her would-be executioners dead and bleeding on the ground. Like she would have been had he not been there. The only person who had ever made her feel like she was something was standing there. Fox clung to him and wept, because it felt good to stare death in the face and not succumb to it. And she cried for those that didn't make it, not just because she had almost become one of them. Even though it made no logical sense that Bellamy would be here, he was. To save her.
Fox was so close to freedom again, whatever that was going to mean on the outside. She imagined the sun on her face again, and the feeling of not being explicitly hunted. At least she could run out in the open, and not down narrow corridors where no matter how much ground she seemed to cover it felt like she was going nowhere.
Who will save you?
When it finally felt like the beginning of the end, she found herself trapped in a room again. It was almost as if this wasn't happening. Like her mind was just replaying a memory and she already knew how it would conclude. All those bodies from before, of people she once knew, now bloody and mutilated, didn't frighten her anymore. When out of everyone already holed up in that room, a finger pointed towards her like she was some inanimate object on a store shelf, she wasn't afraid this time. She had been here before.
He'll be here soon. She didn't have to hear him promise her like Jasper did, she just knew. This horrific pain would be temporary. Everyone was screaming at the men to stop what they were doing before they even started, all of them at once and then even more as the number of captives began to grow. Fox couldn't hear them. Why bother screaming when the whirring of metal would block out their pleas? All you have to do is hold on, hold on a little longer. They're almost here. He's almost on his way.
When they had said, "this one first" she had been surrounded by everyone who had either put her in harm's way or falsely claimed that they would keep her safe from it. Those who made promises they couldn't keep, the only one who had ever proved it to her, not just in that moment but every minute on the ground wasn't here. Not yet.
The drill began to pierce through first her skin and then her flesh and she could feel the deep agony straight to her bone. There were periods where the screeching ceased and the needle finally pulled itself from her flesh, and that was when she could hear her own sobs. Then it was the same pain in a new place all over again, and she was screaming when there was no one who could hear her. She still had a small voice, after all.
The time was passing faster than she was expecting, and nothing was changing. Above her was a concrete ceiling, not the blue open sky she was expecting to see. Just more and more misery. She always hid behind someone else, clung to another person, looked for reassurance wherever she could get it, but this time she didn't have anyone to cling to, they were all out of reach.
When they had first landed, she figured if she died that she'd be buried just outside the dropship, with everyone else who had died. She even morbidly expected that Wells would dig her grave, and just like that she had outlived him. Fox thought that she wouldn't like being laid to rest out there much. But she'd like a dumpster for a coffin even less. It wasn't difficult to believe that she was worthless, after hearing it so many times and actually feeling it when they sent her down to earth to die. But goddamn it, she wanted to live. She didn't want to believe he wasn't coming. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. Where was Bellamy? He was supposed to burst in with a gun and end everything that was causing her all this torment, and spare everyone else from having to feel the same.
"Bellamy?" Fox cried out, weakly. There was dried blood on her bottom lip, from when she had bit it so hard it had split open. Everything hurt now.
"Bellamy! Where are you?" She screamed, louder than she ever had before, louder than the drill that was killing her. "Please! Help me!" Everything she saw was blurred by her tears, or her waning consciousness. She was in too much pain to tell what was what. He had saved her once, twice before. She had to believe that he'd do it again, she was screaming now. What was the point of always hearing that she was going to be okay if she was just going to die here anyway, like this? What was the point...
Fox would open her eyes again, and she knew she'd see him standing there like before, and all this sticky blood would be washed from her skin and she'd be carried out into the sun and the breeze, through the trees. But first, she needed to rest her eyes. He was coming for her. She would be okay.
Bellamy...please save me while I'm gone.
I hate that they killed Fox at all, but the way her death was just an unceremonious afterthought and she was thus never mentioned again was somehow worse to me. So this story is the result of two years of pent up bitterness at how a minor character was treated.