Review Response:
Guest- Hi! Thanks for reading and reviewing! I'm really happy to hear that you found Angelos interesting. Especially since I'm not used to writing dark characters. But I love a challenge, and I appreciate the time you took to write a review! And I'm also really excited to see how Angelos interacts with the rest of The 100! :)
Angelos' right wrist hurt like a bitch when she awoke. Her brown eyes fluttered open and, as she looked down at her hand, she tried pulling off the goddamn metal wristband.
"What the hell?" She grunted, attempting to open the bracelet after finding out that moving it only made the needles inside hurt her flesh even more.
"Don't, that transmits your vital signs to the Ark," a voice said next to Angelos, and she turned to face the young blonde girl.
"That's great," she muttered with sarcasm as she gave up on the wristband and looked at her surroundings.
A large number of kids varying from 12 to 17 years old were strapped to the dropship's seats. A few were even up against the wall. She noticed the two smiling idiots beneath a monitor screen that looked as if they were going on a school field trip and rolled her eyes.
"What's going on?" she thought aloud, gripping her red harness that strapped her down to her seat as the dropship shifted.
Several of the other delinquents, mainly girls, screamed, terrified when the dropship gave another violent shook.
"What was that?" asked the teenager next to her worryingly as the turmoil caused the dropship's lights to blink on and off.
"That was the atmosphere." A dark-skinned young man replied to the blonde, who stared back at him in shock.
"Why the hell are you here?" she demanded, but Angelos was too deep in her thoughts to hear the guy's explanation.
Atmosphere?, she thought, looking at the other delinquents. What the hell were they doing to them?
"Prisoners of The Ark, hear me now." The screen in the dropship automatically turned on. The African American man on screen got the attention of all the prisoners as he proceeded with his speech, "You've been given a second chance, and as your Chancellor, it is my hope that you see this as not just a chance for you, but a chance for all of us, indeed for mankind itself. We have no idea what is waiting for you down there. If the odds of survival were better, we would've sent others. Frankly, we're sending you because your crimes have made you expendable."
The mere sound of Jaha's voice made Angelos see red. To let the sight of someone fuel her with so much anger- there had to be something extraordinary about that.
"Your dad's a dick, Wells!" one of the boy's shouted at Wells, who was seating one blonde chick away from Angelos.
She looked his way, holding on to the red belt around her chest to keep her from strangling the Chancellor's son.
Angelos did not spend five years of teaching herself self-control in a cell just to throw it out the window that quickly. Not after what she did back at the Sky Box. Even if the green-eyed guard's blood was now wiped off her face, she still felt it heavy on her cheeks, and she swore to herself that she wasn't going to lose it again.
The first few months after they floated her family, Angelos' only thought was revenge. And what better way than to kill Wells Jaha? An eye for an eye, it was that simple. For a long while, she fantasized about it- made it easier to cope with having her family taken, even- but when Abby Griffin, her dad's co-worker in Medical Station, walked into her cell to help with her first menstruation pains, Angelos was reminded of her mother.
Her sweet and caring mother that had not raised her to be a killer.
But the visits of Dr. Griffin became less frequent, and within a week, Angelos was lonesome in her cell once more. The books Dr. Griffin sneaked in for her did not take long to bore her, and she was found back to looking for a way to make the Chancellor pay.
This time, she told herself, it would be different. She would not stoop down to their level. If only she said the right words and took the right actions, maybe she could stop Chancellor Jaha from enforcing the laws that killed her parents and sister. Maybe if she saw that the Ark's leader was not a murderer, the god awful feeling in her heart known as hatred would go away.
But maybe was not enough, and after failing at her little mission, she was locked up in an even colder, isolated cell. There, she learned to embrace that feeling of hatred and accept it for what it was: the part that now occupied the love she had lost.
Her mother did not raise her a killer, but the Ark had turned her into one.
Angelos closed her eyes while the dropship flew down to the ground, drowning out the Chancellor's voice as he said, "Those crimes will be forgiven, your records wiped clean. The drop site has been chosen carefully. Before the last war, Mount Weather was a military base built within a mountain. It was to be stocked with enough non-perishables to sustain three hundred people for up to two years."
"Spacewalk Bandit strikes again!" One of the teenagers exclaimed. "Go, Finn!"
Angelos opened her eyes to see who was causing all this commotion that made it impossible to hear the Chancellor talking on the screen- which didn't bother her at all.
A guy of about seventeen years of age with long, dark hair and matching colored eyes floated on his back with a smug smile plastered on his face, telling Wells, "Check it out. Your dad floated me after all."
Wells chose to ignore the comment and warned him, "You should strap in before the parachutes deploy."
"Hey, you two, stay put if you want to live," the girl next to Angelos shouted at the other two boys who thought following the Spacewalk Bandit was a good idea and unbuckled their harnesses.
"Don't waste your breath," Angelos said to her. Looking at the guy in the green beanie that was now floating in front of them, she muttered, "They're just a bunch of morons."
He arched an eyebrow at her and feigned hurt but she kept her gaze steady when she realized he heard her, meaning what she said.
"Name's Finn," he said with a cocky smirk, looking at Angelos and expecting a reply.
The girl with raven-black hair nodded slightly at the information but didn't give Finn her name. Getting that she didn't want to talk, the boy shifted his eyes to the blonde next to her, "Hey, you're the traitor who's been in solitary for a year."
"You're the idiot who wasted a month of oxygen on an illegal spacewalk," she retorted, earning a small smile from Angelos.
"But it was fun," Finn said with a foolish smile on his face, glancing at the quiet girl.
"I bet it was," Angelos said in a barely audible voice with a smile that didn't reach her eyes.
Even if she said it to Finn, the words were intended for her as she thought about the reason she got locked up. Compared to his, Angelos' crime made her look like a murderous monster. Of all people, she tried to kill the Chancellor for God's sake.
His crime was an act of foolish defiance, her's was and act of cold revenge.
Maybe she was a little bit of a monster.
There was a sudden jerk as the parachutes deployed and the three boys who were floating in the dropship violently crashed onto the walls.
Angelos' eyes widened as she saw them fly like rag dolls across the ship and she gripped her harness for dear life, screams of fearful teenagers filling the air. She tried not to hurl as the spiraling dropship made her dizzy and nauseous.
"Your one responsibility is to stay alive," were Chancellor Jaha's last words before the screen short-circuit along with all the lights of the dropship.
"Stay in your seats!" The blonde strained her neck towards Finn, her voice laced with worry, "Finn, are you okay?"
The boy didn't answer and Clarke turned to look at the brunette and found her unconscious.
"Hey, wake up," she moved Angelos' arm but her head just lolled to one side. "Hey!"
"Is she alive?" Clarke heard Wells ask.
Putting two fingers on the side of her neck and feeling the girl's pulse, she nodded but didn't meet his eyes, "Passed out. She'll be fine."
Wells' next words could hardly be heard against the shrieking teens, "Retrorockets ought to have fired by now."
"Okay. Everything on this ship is a hundred years old, right? Just give it a second," Clarke raised her voice before she was lunged forward, the harness across her torso sucking the breath out of her.
"Clarke, there's something I have to tell you." Wells caught Clarke's attention and met her eyes, "I'm sorry I got your father arrested."
The girl's blue eyes turned cold before she shouted at him, "Don't you talk about my father!"
"Please, I can't die knowing that you hate me!" he told her while she turned to make sure the dark-haired girl didn't fly off her seat.
"They didn't arrest my father, Wells. They executed him!" When she was sure that the unconscious teenager was safe, Clarke looked at Wells with tear-rimmed eyes that flickered with loathing, "I do hate you!"
Wells stared back at Clarke, his dark eyes wide with hurt, but she didn't care. After what he did, Wells was no longer her friend. No longer will be.
The dropship stopped moving and the lights turned on as the teenagers silenced. They breathed hard and their hearts beat wildly after surviving the flight down to Earth.
Unbuckling her belt, Clarke took in a deep breath. Now the only thing that could kill them was the Earth's radiation.
She needed to stop waking up to pain, Angelos thought to herself as she rubbed her stinging cheeks and saw the blonde looking at her in relief.
"Are you okay?" Clarke asked.
"Yeah, feel like dancing on rainbows." The blonde ignored the sarcasm and gave her a nod.
"Sorry," she said, helping her unbuckle her harness, "you weren't waking up so I had to slap you a few times."
Brushing off her apology, Angelos looked at the empty dropship with confusion and asked the girl, "Where's the rest? Did... did we make it?"
Angelos felt something in her stomach when the teenager met her eyes and smiled, "It's beautiful, you have to come out and see it."
She didn't have to be told twice as she stood up from the seat and followed the girl whose name she didn't know down to first level. The door was opened and, even from where they stood, Angelos could see the sunlight coming in from outside.
That feeling in her stomach grew stronger as she neared the door, already the scent of earth heavy in her nose, and Angelos realized it was happiness when her eyes stared at the green-filled forest in front of her.
Her eyes closed, wanting to feel the sun on her skin penetrate her whole body. Slowly, she raised her arms to feel the light air go through her fingers and the odd sensation that had been building up in the pit of her belly burst out as she started laughing.
After spending so many years without even cracking a smile, Angelos was surprised she could laugh so much. But the pain in her chest didn't bother her, it didn't even hurt, as she fell to her knees and felt the warm soil under her.
When her laughter finally stopped, she rose to her feet and smiled at the girl who woke her up. "I think it's time you know my name. I'm Angelos."
"Clarke," she held out her hand and Angelos shook it.
"Thanks for slapping me awake. This is a sight I wouldn't want to miss," Angelos smiled at the forest, looking at the other criminals as they laughed and ran happily through the trees.
When her eyes landed on the man in the guard's uniform, the smile faded off her lips. Her eyes suddenly stung with unshed tears, the dream of being on the ground quickly turning into a nightmare when he turned around and she found herself looking at the eyes that had haunted her dreams for five long years.
She balled her fists, wanting to scream, but the sight of him hit her hard in her chest and she couldn't breathe. For a moment, she was taken back to the memory of her thirteen birthday, but it wasn't just some foggy nightmare she would wake up from and forget in minutes. This time the memory of her family being ripped away from her came back to her so sharply, with such vivid detail, that she was reliving it.
"Angelos," Clarke reached out to touch her arm. The action wiped away Angelos' thoughts and she was back on the ground, staring at Clarke's worried blue eyes again.
"Are you sure you're-," the acrid smell of vomit filled the air and Clarke stopped talking to hold up Angelos, who turned sickly pale as she hurled out her insides.
After she was done, Clarke sat her down against a rock and touched her cheeks and forehead. Taking her hand away from Angelos, she shook her head, "You're not feverish. It must be the shock, just sit down a few seconds and take deep breaths. You'll be fine."
Wiping her mouth clean with the back of her hand, Angelos tried not to look at the guard. She didn't know if she could resist the urge to take the ax hanging from his hip and slice his head off clean with it if she saw his face again.
The thought both terrified and thrilled her as she surprised herself with how much she hungered for revenge. She realized the time wasted in a cell trying to teach herself self-control was a lie. It was just another excuse for her to build enough strength so she could escape and attack the Chancellor and anyone that got in her way.
But she had to believe that the days spent tearing her muscles apart had also been to keep herself sane, so she tried her best to ignore the guard and looked up at Clarke, saying, "Whatever you say. Just take me away from here."
"There it is. We know they've landed, but communications are down, which means we're still blind to conditions on the ground. Thanks to Abby's wristbands, at least we know how those conditions affect the human body, which is more than we've had for a hundred years. So nice work. Now, what are they telling us?"
Lea heard Councilor Kane's voice from the Ark's hallway she moped clean. As a low-level janitor, the woman was ignored by many, especially the Privileged, so none of the Council Members of the Ark acknowledged her as she put her mop back in the bucket and slid inside the Mess Hall.
"Two dead kids, dark tiles. Dr. Jackson, please share our theory with Councilor Kane." The sandy-haired doctor crossed her arms, turning to look at the giant screen that spread across the back wall of the room.
Lea lowered her head at the passing people as pretended to clean an empty trash can, her ears listening to the dark-skinned man.
"Of course. Granted, they've only been on the ground for seven minutes, but as of now, we believe the fatalities are due to the landing, not radiation levels."
"Both boys died at the same time that we lost contact with the drop ship," added Dr. Griffin as she referred to the two dark tiles on the screen filled with the faces of one hundred criminals.
"Rough landing? That's your theory?" Marcus Kane took his eyes off the board and turned to Abby.
She nodded, "The dots connect."
"Would you agree that if it was radiation, we'd see fatalities climb fairly quickly now? Because I'm noticing a lot of red on that board."
Lea looked up to see the pictures on the screen, making a mistake when she met with Abby Griffin's eyes.
The doctor blinked at her, but she did not alert the others and chose to ignore the young woman, saying to Kane, "Spiking vital signs, two possibilities: one, injuries sustained during landing..."
"And the other?"
"They're excited to be there."
Abby glanced back at the doors, where she'd seen Lea, but the girl was already gone. It had been the first time Abby saw her after her parents got floated and her little sister taken to the Sky Box.
Abby almost didn't recognize her. Five years of scraping the Ark's floors and doing who-knows-what else to survive had worn the daughter of her once good friend out. But at least she was alive, Abby told herself as she looked at her own daughter's picture on the board.
Looking at the next tile that held a picture of Angelos Hicks, Abby remembered her promise to Caleb to keep her daughter's alive. Alive, not safe. Because they both knew no one born on the Ark would ever be safe.
Abigail hoped returning to the ground would change that.
A/N: I wanted to make this chapter longer but for that to happen, I would've delayed it a few more days. I kind of want to stick to updating this story every Sunday, so yes, the chapters won't be that long, but they will be constant (fingers crossed).
After figuring out where this is headed (kind of), I'm so excited to keep on writing and I hope you enjoy reading it. If there are some questions, suggestions, or feedback you want to give please feel free to leave them in a review or PM at anytime.
And whose excited for the season 2 finale?!
Anyways, thank you so much for favorite-ing/following/reading/reviewing! I hope you all have a great day/night! :)