Chapter Title: and the wax is melting
Prompt: flight
Summary: There are very few ways to make falling from the heavens in any way fun. The Ark invested in exactly none of them when sending the delinquents to the ground.
Bellamy likes stories. He likes the dependability of them - they start and end and can be counted on to do so in the same way every time. He likes what few books the Ark has too, the weight of them and the feel of paper against his fingertips, but they aren't let out of the library or schoolrooms. Not for someone like him. He's read them all, told them to Octavia so many times he can recite them with his eyes closed. He likes the really old ones best, Greek and Roman, civilizations gone to dust long before the bombs fell. They are meant to be told as he tells them, to Octavia, with the rise and fall of his voice alone.
In the myth of Icarus that his father first read to him and that he has since read to his sister in hidden whispers, Daedalus tells his son not to fly too close to the sun, lest the heat soften the wax binding feathers to wings and he fall to his death. In the lesser known part of the myth, Daedalus councils him against too flying too low too, or the spray from the waves would soak wings and make the feathers heavy, dragging him - wax and all - to the depths.
Bellamy feels both of those warnings at once now. Too high - no humans are meant to live beyond the reach of air, that they have managed to do so for more than a century is a miracle constantly balanced on the brink of failure - and his descent is growing steeper, dipping into an uncontrollable dive. Can only hope that they don't land in the waves. He has no wings of wax to drag him down, but being strapped to a ton of metal will work just as well.