CAN WE GET BACK TO THE WAY IT WAS BEFORE?
CAN WE GO BACK TO THE DAYS BEFORE THE FALL?
WHERE WE HAD NOTHING AND NOTHING WAS ENOUGH
NOW IT FEELS LIKE PARADISE LOST
Three days had passed since the Ice Nation had blown up the bunker.
Three days of mourning, three days of fear of an attack on Arkadia.
And for some... three days of utter, soul-destroying, indescribable agony.
Aerrow winced as he cracked his eyes open, only to force them tightly shut again almost instantly, in an unsuccessful attempt to keep out the harsh and unwelcome invasion of the morning sun.
Wait... Was it even morning?
He didn't even know.
He didn't even know where exactly he was. The only thing he had known since the explosion was the pain permeating his every cell, sinking its talons into his very conscience, feeding off of his guilt at failing to protect anyone. Again. Always.
He moved to pinch the bridge of his nose, a movement which made his every muscle protest with a groan that was echoed in the back of his parched throat.
Everything burned.
His joins were stiff, his vision hazy and his throat drier than Raven's sense of humor, not to mention the raging headache that had ignited the moment he had returned to the conscious world, building with ceaseless intensity until now it felt like someone was trying to split his skull open with an axe.
He rolled onto his side - uncaring of how his hair had fallen into the puddle of rancid vomit beside him; and came face to face with a bottle of moonshine. It was empty – as were the dozens of others that lay strewn around his decrepit shelter that had built up steadily ever since returning from the mountain.
Memories flashed through his head.
Raven's agonised sobs.
Octavia's look of disbelief.
Pike's incredulity at losing more of his people.
And worst of all...
The look of utter, utter grief that slowly took over Bellamy's face upon returning from Polis and discovering that everyone in the bunker was dead – including Gina.
Because of him.
He welcomed the pain they brought him, savoured the continued slices to his mentality.
He stared into his reflection in the empty bottle next to him. The broken mask of an imposter carrying the eyes and hair of the purest person he had ever known was completely unrecogniseable. A stranger. It wasn't even unbearable to look at anymore. He'd embraced the suffering it brought on. He deserved nothing less.
"Who are you?" His parched throat croaked in anguish.
He stared at the reflection long and hard, but it gave no reply.
At the lack of response, he rolled back over and once more closed his eyes whilst running his fingers through his mangled hair as he worked up the courage to pick his pathetic form off the ground.
He eventually managed to sit up, but succeeded only in almost instantly falling forwards as the world around him span viciously. He threw his hands aimlessly in front of him, just barely halting himself from faceplanting into the vomit he had earlier rolled into.
Coughing at the stench – or perhaps simply the torrid state his body was in – he weakly raised his head and began crawling towards the one source of comfort he had been able to find in order to escape the torture he had brought upon himself: another bottle of alcohol.
And to think, Hans Van Dyke once described him as the perfect human being... he thought as he unscrewed the lid and without hesitation downed a significant portion of the bottle, not even wincing at the taste anymore. He flopped back down on the mattress and waited for the now familiar fuzzyness to take over his mind once again - a comforting friend in the middle of the world of pain and suffering he had created for himself.
If only...
The last three days had been rough to say the least. All he recalled was the bumps of the ride back, the silence hanging over the whole group, like a suffocating blanket, as they all tried to come to terms with what had just happened, with his latest failure. Both Raven and Octavia had tried to comfort him, but he had been totally unresponsive, his body on a silenced autopilot as he retreated into the deepest, darkest depths of his mind. When the rover returned, he had exited without a word, stolen every bottle of moonshine from the mess hall under the cover of darkness and retreated to his shelter, where he proceeded to attempt a recreation of the events that occurred two nights previously and drink his pain away. And he hadn't stopped since.
The most psychotic thing about his behaviour was that he knew what he was doing was fucked up. He knew. He just didn't care. He didn't care if he spent the rest of his life in an alcohol induced haze, if his friends abandoned him. He didn't care if he died of alcohol poisoning – something he knew was a very real possibility but had so far eluded him. Damn his Oblivion-enhanced immune system.
He didn't care about anything.
It had finally happened. After everything – Sienna's death, Oblivion, Clarke, and finally the explosion – it had become too much. He had finally hit bottom. No, worse, he was below it.
His friends knew it too, and just as he suspected they had abandoned him. None of them had even spoken to him since he returned and they saw the state of decay he was in – both mentally and physically. Bellamy had stared at him as if he were a disease ever since learning Gina had died, Monty had copped a punch to the face when he tried to take his precious bottles away from him and Octavia...
Octavia was the sole reason he was ashamed about what he was doing, because he knew she cared about him – even if the extent of that compassion was still unclear – and could see that what he was doing to himself was hurting her. Her look of disappointment was akin to the one Sienna had given him when he'd initially refused to train her - another action that had been paralleled with Octavia.
Day by day, as reality slipped further and further from his grasp, he found it harder to distinguish the two, even though one was dead. The feelings he had once had for one, he now shared with the other, and this brought a whole new wave of pain upon him as he constantly reminded himself how it was impossible to be with either.
Even Cleo, his once unconditionally loyal Lace Monitor had abandoned him, and when she had once perched affectionately on his shoulder, she now spent her days atop Octavia's.
Disgusted at his thoughts, he went to have another drink, only to have to bottle snatched from his grasp.
Incensed, he was instantly on his feet, aiming a punch at whoever had the gall to take his escape away from him, but such was his state that he completely missed and fell flat on his face outside his shelter. Before he could do anything else, he felt an iron grip on his shoulder pulling him to his feet and yanking him into a clearing behind the main structure of Arkadia, where he finally got a good look at who it was that interrupted him.
"What the hell are you doing to yourself Aerrow?" Lincoln hissed. The grounder stood over him imposingly, arms crossed and a sternly disbelieving look on his face. He wondered what had brought this on. He had never actually had much to do with the other man, let alone anything that would warrant this.
"What does it look like I'm doing?" He rasped, wincing as he held his arm in front of him to block the sunlight, "I'm coping."
"It looks like you're running." Lincoln accused lowly.
"So what if I am?" Aerrow snarled, clarity briefly returning to his posture as anger masked the glaze in his eyes. "You don't know a damn thing about me!"
He made to shove past Lincoln to return to his shelter and world of pain, only for the grounder to again grab his arm in a vice like grip. Aerrow retaliated, yanking himself free and making another attempt to slug the man, only for Lincoln to easily deflect the strike, grab his shoulders and shove him hard against the back wall of the station.
"I know everything!" Lincoln lowly, yet calmly, fixing his eyes on Aerrow's, "About you, about what happened and about what you're going through."
Aerrow said nothing, he simply narrowed his eyes in confusion.
"Mount Weather, when they turned me into a Reaper," Lincoln explained, relinquishing his grip on Aerrow's shoulders as his voice adopted a more sombre tone.
"They turned me into something else, made me do terrible things, just like they did to you." He continued, looking down to try and mask the sadness in his eyes as he remembered. "I killed my friends, drank their blood, but I didn't care because I was addicted."
Aerrow stared at Lincoln, knowing full well what the man had done while under the influence of the Reaper red drug. He had had to fight him. "Addicted to what?" He asked after a moment.
Lincoln paused, steeling himself. "To what that made me the monster in the first place. Even after I was cured, I couldn't do anything, because it was easier to embrace the agony than fight it. I didn't think I deserved to fight it after what I'd done."
Aerrow said nothing. Truthfully, he was stunned. He recalled vaguely how the drug was supposed to be addicting, ensuring the mountain men had total control over their human weapons, but Lincoln spoke of something else, something more personal and far more deeply seated.
"Aerrow you're no different, only the addiction is. Mine was a drug, yours is guilt and pain itself." Lincoln went on as he placed a friendly hand on the younger man's shoulder, his face morphing from one of disapproval to genuine concern as he did so, "I know what Oblivion did to you, I know it hurts, but you can't change the past. A warrior lives in the moment, or doesn't live at all."
"You're not the first person to have lost someone close to them, and you won't be the last. You have to deal with it but trust me, this is not the way. Don't be like I was. Fix this, before it costs you even more. You're a warrior, Naja, a fighter. And your fight is not over!" He finished.
For a long time, neither said a word. They simply stood there, eyes locked while Lincoln's words sunk in.
Eventually, it was Aerrow who broke the tension, looking down at himself. He seemed to be searching deep inside himself, trying to reconcile with the part of him that Lincoln was trying to reach: the fighter, the person that he was.
What Lincoln didn't understand was that part of him was gone. Not simply buried with guilt or suppressed by some drug, gone. Destroyed.
It was like Lincoln himself had said: you can't change the past.
And you can't go back to it either.
He lifted his head once more to eye Lincoln sideways, sapphire irises peeking through strands of his clumped hair that had fallen in front of them.
His face was a concrete mask but his eyes... Even Lincoln couldn't tell what emotions they contained. Something along the lines of grief mixed with rage, the two contrasting emotions fusing to create a grim, watery expression, one that was echoed in his voice when he spoke.
"What snapped you out of it?"
His voice was quiet and cracking, yet radiated seriousness, a tone that implied he already knew the answer.
Now it was Lincoln's turn to glance down at himself, and there was a distinct pause. "Octavia."
Aerrow was again silent, before he squared his head and gave several small, repeated nods as his brow hardened and his upper lip twitched. "That's what I thought."
His voice was barely above a whisper, but it firmly carried his barely veiled anger.
He gave Lincoln no time to respond as he roughly pushed past and began walking away.
"Aerrow-" Lincoln called after him, only to be cut off
"At least you still have her!" Aerrow snarled, turning around once more. Lincoln was silent as he watched the anger deflate from the younger man as he took multiple deep, uncontrolled breaths, to be quickly replaced by the familiar sadness.
"Enjoy that... while you still can..." He trailed off as he turned his back for good and headed not for his shelter, but the camp gate. It was time to find another escape.
…
That night, Lincoln and Octavia were lying next to each other in their shelter, grateful for the comfort each provided the other and relishing a moment of peace after what had been a long and stressful day.
After Aerrow had run off, a memorial for what had happened at the bunker had descended into chaos when the grieving farm station survivors – led by Pike – had rallied against Kane when news of an approaching grounder army reached the gates. Both Lincoln and Kane knew this was for protection against the Ice Nation but Pike didn't see things that way, and the man's lust for battle and revenge had created a rift within the camp, resulting in Lincoln being assaulted and Bellamy aiding Pike in a coup to attack the grounder army.
Fortunately, thanks to Lincoln, the attempt was foiled, but Bellamy's betrayal and the lingering indiscriminate hatred of the grounders still left a bitter scar on both he and Octavia.
"I can't believe Aerrow took off like that..." Octavia murmured as she settled deeper into Lincoln's embrace, "I can't believe what he's become..."
Lincoln tensed at the mention of the fallen warrior. After everything that had happened, this was the last thing he wanted to be talking about, but he sensed his partner's despair, and understood what the subject meant to her.
"You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved." He told her quietly, tightening his arms around her waist, feeling the almost imperceptible shudder in her body as he spoke.
"You care about him, don't you?" He stated, more than asked.
Octavia rolled over onto her stomach so she could look up at him, deep sadness in her eyes tinged with not a small amount of fear.
She had been dreading this conversation. For some time she had been unable to both identify and corroborate whatever it was she felt for Aerrow, nor did she know how to manage the unwelcome feelings against what she felt so strongly for Lincoln. Still, she knew it was a conversation she needed to have, for perhaps voicing her emotions would give her closure on how to manage them.
"I..." She began, "I don't know what I feel for him... He showed me how to be strong, how to- balance my fear. Before I met you, he showed me who I could be, and I can never repay him for that. I mean, there was a time when..."
She trailed off, unable and unwilling to finish that sentence.
"When you loved him." Lincoln finished for her
She stared wide eyed at him, terrified of admitting such a thing to herself, even more so how Lincoln would react if she did. She wouldn't call it love. Love was what she felt for Lincoln. Nothing else – no one else - could ever come close to that. What she felt for Aerrow was... was...
It was so damn frustrating that she couldn't identify her own emotions. Instead they continued to build within her, overwhelming her to the point where she was shaking in Lincoln's arms with her eyes squeezed shut in order to force herself not to cry for her fallen friend.
She felt herself being rolled over, shortly before Lincoln pressed his lips to her forehead and she was instantly comforted. She opened her eyes to find him staring down at her, his own eyes shining with kindness.
"We all have people in our lives that we admire, that we respect, or that we wish to emulate." He spoke softly, stroking her hair as he did so. "But we can't be those people. All we can do is be ourselves and hope... hope that they see us the same way."
Octavia's eyes widened slightly at his words. He had hit the nail on the head. Her problem wasn't necessarily her feelings for Aerrow, it was simply wishing for him to return them. She still cared about him as a person, as a friend, and the bond they had forged in the very early days of life on the ground was something that she clung tightly to.
Despite their drastically different evolution since those times, part of her still yearned for that relationship to go back to the way it was. It was uncomplicated by feelings of love or anything else, just who people who somehow shared a connection. It was simple, with nothing between them, yet everything at the same time. And for the time it lasted, that was enough. Now all that remained was a burning hole of what she had shared with him, left by the person he had become. She just wished there was a way to bring him back. She had tried everything, even convincing Lincoln to talk to him earlier that day, but nothing had worked, and now she found herself wondering if Lincoln was right, that Aerrow indeed could not be saved.
Grateful for Lincoln's presence by her side and comforted by his words, Octavia raised her head to kiss him softly, and there they remained, gently expressing their love for one another before Octavia rolled back on top of him and pressed her hands on either side of his head to deepen the kiss, only for him to wince in pain as she brushed the stitches on his temple from where he had been struck by a rock during the memorial.
"I'm sorry." She pulled away instantly.
Lincoln shook his head dismissively. "It's fine." He reassured her.
Octavia was silent as she tenderly stroked around the wound, both horrified and disgusted at the abuse he had to put up with on a daily basis. It brought back her yearning to escape this world they lived in, and finally start to forge their own path.
"Why can't we just leave?" She whispered desperately.
He gave a subtle, resigned shake of his head. "You know why, you saw why today."
"I saw you get hit by a rock, another thing you never should have had to go through!" She flared.
"And if we hadn't been here, your brother would have helped massacre an army."
His words again dulled her anger, and replaced it with sadness at her brother's actions. She sighed as she rested her head against his chest.
"Why do we keep doing this to each other?" She wondered aloud.
Lincoln pressed another kiss into her hair. "Because it's better that way. We punish each other, so that we don't have to punish ourselves."
Suddenly, Octavia whipped her head up to stare at him intensely. His words had struck a chord in her.
She had an idea.
The reason it took me so long to finish and upload this chapter – aside from being pretty busy with every day life at the moment – is simply because this story is so freaking dark! And it's actually proving a much bigger drain on me mentally to write this than I originally thought. This might sound strange but, in order to gain the quality of writing that I want this story to have, I have to totally immerse myself in the mindset of Aerrow's character, often drawing from my own experiences to get across exactly what he is experiencing. Having battled depression at various stages of my life, particularly last year, and having finally beaten it at the start of this one, I really don't like having to go back into that world in order to write this story, and it this chapter has come together in small section over the last month or so.
Fortunately, this chapter and the next one are about as emotionally dark as it gets, so hopefully new chapters can be uploaded a bit more regularly (assuming I can beat the writers block that is currently keeping me from continuing to re-write the original 'Closer to the Edge'), so stay tuned for more
As always, hope you enjoyed this chapter, and if you have any feedback, do feel free to drop a review.
