sixthiterationlogs | racing through canyons of angels ♙ closed

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racing through canyons of angels ♙ closed

WHO: Jess Brightwell.
WHERE: The inn, then into the wild unknown.
WHEN: Aug. 9th.
OPEN TO: Raven Reyes.
WARNINGS: Children at play?
STATUS: Closed.

The morning was lightening into butter-yellow sunrise when Jess started getting ready to head out into the canyon.

Water, a makeshift knife, and an extra pair of socks went into his pack along with his other gear. Every couple of days now he'd taken his bag with a day's worth of supplies and picked a direction, hiking as deep into the canyon as time and circumstances allowed.

Towering rock walls in every direction made an excellent place to disappear a town, Jess scathingly had to admit, and the rough terrain and thick foliage in the forested areas didn't make it easy to scout. More than once these two weeks past, he'd been willing to trade an arm if it'd get him a proper knife to clear the way. But setbacks or no setbacks, someone had brought them here, and someone was providing them supply boxes. Jess had every intention of finding them, or barring that, a road out of this bloody primeval village.

And he knew he wasn't the only one who felt that way.

Before stopping by the storeroom to grab the rations he'd need, Jess' first stop was Raven's room. "You ready to go?" he asked, rapping on her door.

She wasn't a friend he'd trust at his back like Glain, but she was just as hungry for answers. Shared interests made them allies in this, at least.

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Jess didn't need his hand, did he? It wasn't like he was a contributing member to this creepy town.

Three months she spent coming to terms with the fact she was crippled. It'd been a hard and tumultuous journey, one that she hadn't quite finished exploring when she'd come to at the bottom of the fountain. Despite being given back the functionality of her leg, the people in charge of the town hadn't so much as thought to rectify the way she thought.

On a bridge as slippery and weak as the one they'd been walking along, Raven didn't feel invincible. She felt as frightened as she had in the pod she'd built, in front of Lexa's blade, lying on the makeshift cot inside the skeleton of the Ark with Abby Griffin looking at her as though she didn't quite know how to inform her the whole world had dropped around her.

When she flexed her fingers, she realised she was still holding Jess' hand. Rather than smoothly dropping it, she let go abruptly, and rolled her eyes at nothing at all. "We should find another way back just in case that bridge doesn't survive."

As Raven often did, she made to move without so much as asking him if he was all in one piece. Something told me he was, minus a hand.

If nothing else, Raven would have no problems strangling their captors to death should she ever get her hands around their necks.

"That's another bridge we can cross when we get to it. You said it yourself--greys are the badasses. Finding a way across a river is no sweat if it should float away by the time we get back," he said, doing her the courtesy of not commenting on the crack the last leg of the bridge had revealed in her self-assured demeanor.

No matter how good of a mask she put on, Jess couldn't forget that she was new. New to this town, new to a lot of things. Concerns over crossing the river made sense in her case. If he couldn't swim, he'd be afraid of falling in and drowning, too.

As they turned to follow the shoreline, finally on their way, he said, "I've been meaning to ask: where were you living before this? I don't mean Arkadia, but where in the world? Have you seen these kinds of forests before?"

She glanced around, as if expecting for the forest to simply become familiar to her. But the one she was used to wasn't as sparse as this one. She found it funny how she thought it to be colder.

"Earth," she said, looking at him with a slight arch to her brow. His question was an odd one, and definitely one she wasn't knowledgeable enough to answer. Everyone else could mention where they were from — the Seven Kingdoms, Alexandria in Egypt — but Raven couldn't.

The maps the Ark had provided had been full, once. But they hadn't been given coordinates to land on, and a map Clarke Griffin had been provided before she landed on the ground had only a few details. She knew of Tondc and Mount Weather, and they were the only landmarks she knew of.

"I was near Mount Weather."

Well, that sure narrowed it down. He resisted the urge to sigh. The day people stopped using listing "Earth" as their home address couldn't come too soon.

"Earth's a big place." A planet and the name of a mountain left a dizzying array of possibilities across seven continents and almost two hundred countries. "Where's Mount Weather?"

Arching her brow, when Raven answered next, her tone wasn't as bright and bubbly and teasing as it had been before. She sounded unsure. "On Earth."

What she was coming to loathe quickly in this town was her apparent lack of ability to give someone a proper and specific answer. It made her feel as though she had pieces in her hands, but could only feel the weight of them and not see what they were. It was akin to having a leg that was still attached to her, but was useless in every other way. She couldn't balance her weight on it, and she sure as hell couldn't move it effortlessly.

"Somewhere," she opted to add. Raven didn't know, and she grew frustrated by it.

Oh, boy.

"Yeah, I kind of got that," he answered mildly.

He couldn't let himself get worked up into knots over their differences in understanding, even if it was a challenge to his patience, a new way of thinking he wasn't used to. Like with any problem, he had to think of a different way to come at it.

"What was it like? Describe it to me. Was it warm? Cold? Were you on a beach? In the jungle? The desert?"

Lincoln had told her of the beach. There was a clan there, one of neutrality that would help them in any war waged amongst the Grounders and beyond. Raven wondered where the beach was, and despite his teachings, she grew impatient at the thought of them being so far away from the heart of the fights.

The desert and jungle were odd terms to her, despite knowing of the terrains. The Ark had taught her everything that it could, but it still didn't teach her of how the desert would feel, if the jungle would still remain standing after the onslaught of bombs.

She almost told him to forget it, but she had a feeling Jess wasn't intending to be cruel in the differences between what his world had to offer and what hers lacked in. "It was like this," she began, "but with more trees. There's hills and lakes …" Her brows furrowed as she tried to think of how to describe it. "There's lots of grass. There's no buildings, and if there is, they're gone. There's Tondc with a sign," she waved her hand in front of her, as though expecting it to be right there before them. "Some bunkers exist under the ground that are made of cement. It's just woods. That's all it is."

Shade replaced open skies and sunlight as they moved into the trees. Swallowing them like the mouth of some green giant, the forest encased them in the cool and quiet, trees that had grown too closely together jutting out at all angles just like bones. There were no trails here to make the underbrush less treacherous to navigate, and what sunlight filtered down from the canopy was diluted by the density of the trees, leaving the forest in dappled, dimly-lit repose.

It would be a beautiful old forest to hike, if not for the circumstances in which they were here. As it was, being the chosen body-dumping ground for a bunch of unknown assailants added a threatening undertone to every blind angle and distant rustling in the bushes. Jess had walked the outskirts of the town dozens of times, but he didn't think that ever-present discomfort in the back of his mind would fade. He didn't want it to.

"Trees like this?" Jess snagged the branch of an alder tree in passing and thumbed the broad, green leaves.

A little deduction work could narrow down a climate zone, or even an area of the country beyond just a hilly place near a mountain--assuming Mount Weather was actually a mountain and not just a place with a misleading name.

Raven looked at the tree and its branches hanging above them, and shrugged her shoulders. It looked like a tree — that's all it was to her. If she was Monty with his knowledge of trees and all their different leaves and the meanings of them, she'd be more help.

It looked the same as it had back home. Raven felt a bubble of frustration begin to well within her; this wasn't her area of expertise, and she knew she needed it now more than ever if she was to discern whether she was within walking distance to Arkadia.

"I guess …" Pulling a leaf from its thin branch, she held something that was a little ruined in her hands. Her tug hadn't quite pulled it clean off, the wooden stem a little tougher than Raven Reyes. "It's a tree," she shrugged. "I lived near trees. Near Tondc and some other hole."

Raven had a healthy vocabulary at her disposal; Jess knew she could be more descriptive if she really wanted to.

"Come on, you can do better than that. There are as many kinds of trees, forests, and mountainous regions as there are stars in the sky, I need more to go off of." He gave the branch a wave. "Be more specific. Think shapes and colors. Did they have leaves like this? Pine needles? Or were they big, long palm fronds?"

Before Raven could dismiss the question by claiming ignorance of what frond leaves were, Jess spread his hands wide in a rough approximation of the size and shape so she could see the considerable difference between a regular old alder and a tropical palm tree.

But he wouldn't be insulted if there was something else holding her back from descripting her home in detail. Maybe this was a painful conversation to have for her. Shrugging back, he said, "We don't have to talk about it if you don't want to get into it. I was curious, is all."

Though she wanted to play ignorant, Raven truly didn't know what half those leaves were. They were leaves. They became insignificant in the grand scheme of things, especially when survival twisted from simply scavenging for food and speaking to the Ark to fighting battles she'd only been told about by Mrs Collins in her bloodied stories.

It made her uncomfortable to know she hadn't paid attention. Monty knew his shit. So did a few of the other kids. She remembered vaguely a boy who she'd never see again had gone on and on about the shapes of leaves and how incredible it was to see them and feel them beyond a book and his imagination, but she'd tuned him out.

Her woods was space and the stars that made her feel like she had a billion friends watching her back.

"I don't know," she said, sounding a little frustrated. It wasn't at Jess, but more to herself. He was giving her an out, but Raven would never quite let herself take it. "There was nothing left on the ground. There weren't any trees in space, but stars."

All right, so maybe it wasn't so much a matter of her wanting to avoid the conversation as that physical geography wasn't the way to go about jump starting her imagination.

Jess focused on details about the natural world because he was from the natural world. He'd been born on Earth. He'd grown up a toddler learning the names of states, provinces, and capital cities, filling them in on blank maps so his teachers could give him gold stars for knowing the world in which he lived. He'd visited zoos, saw the different environments exotic animals came from. He'd read travel books, met people from other parts of the globe.

All these things had helped develop a perspective firmly entrenched in what he could see, hear, and touch on the ground. But Raven kept saying so herself--she wasn't from the ground. She wasn't used to looking outward at the world, she looked down at it.

"Let's go with that, then," Jess finally ventured after a moment to think. Time for a new tactic. "The stars. Do you know the same constellations, like the Big Dipper?"

Raven rolled her eyes. As though the life within her had begun to seep from her, she grew much more vibrant like a star rekindling its own sparkle in the night sky at the mere mention of constellations. Shaking her head with her lips slightly pursed, it was clear to only her that that was a stupid question to ask Raven Reyes.

The youngest Zero G mechanic in fifty-two years. She embraced any and every opportunity to remind anyone in the general vicinity of such an accomplishment.

"Big Dipper. Milky Way. Sirius, Rigel, Vega, Arcturus are old friends of mine," she said, perking up a little. Her step was lighter; less weighed down with the obvious notion she wasn't quite delivering what Jess wanted, she forgot all about her frustration at his questions. The stars were hers. As much as she missed the weightlessness of space, she liked to talk about it more than she did ignoring it.

She looked up at the sky, as if expecting to see the stars twinkling down at her. Looking at Jess with an arch to her brow, a slight upward curve to her lips, she continued, "I know a thing or two about stars, Brightwell. I walked among them."

Finally we're getting somewhere. Despite himself, Jess felt a sliver of hope that he'd walk away with more than what he'd started with when he'd or asked what her home was like. At this point, a part of him almost wanted to figure it out on principle alone.

"Then you know where the North Star was in the sky, do you?" The challenge was there, in the flippant manner he flicked the question at her like a giveaway question on an exam.

If she couldn't describe vegetation or terrain, this should be easy for their resident space case.

She looked at him like he'd grown several heads out of his neck. "I know Polaris."

If the test was whether it was the North Pole's star, she wouldn't ace it. Raven only knew what the books contained, and the stories passed done from the very few generations that had lived on the Ark before oxygen levels had decreased to severely low amounts.

She knew of stories Jess never would've heard. She knew the North Star was in the sky, and that she had always been set on walking out and touching it. Raven had a different idea of how the stars worked to most. They were her friends, and they were the only things that hadn't abandoned her when she felt as lost and alone on the ground.

"Are you going to ask me anymore stupid questions?" Instead of it sounding sharp, it was said in a tone that was almost humorous. Almost like Raven was egging him on.

And there it was--her favorite look of indignant bewilderment like he'd started speaking Greek and posing the Sphinx's riddles at her. In the brief time he'd known her, Jess was getting the impression Raven never left home without it, like a woman with her favorite purse.

"Good, then that's somewhere concrete to start."

He used his arm to brush aside the snagging branches of a bush. Beyond it was a tree, and as they passed it he took out a knife and blazed a small arrow on one side, marking their trail.

"It should be possible to work backward based on where it was in the sky and what constellations you could see," he explained while he carved out the second arrow on the other side. "If we know the arrangement of constellations, we can figure out what part of the world you were in. Following me?"

It's the kind of tactic Raven would think Clarke to use. Mark a tree subtly and hope to god they find their way back to the dropship camp.

With three months spent locked inside of the confines of Arkadia's walls, she'd forgotten all there was to know about surviving in the wilderness. All Raven knew was how to deal with a bum leg, and all the pity thrown her way. (It involved a simple step: Ignore it.)

Looking to Jess with a slightly arched brow, Raven didn't comment. It was a decent idea, even though she wasn't too sure if Jess would be of any use. Her expertise was the stars. Space was her kingdom and she was its king, and she refused to believe in anything else.

She didn't speak immediately. Taking in the trees and how they looked identical, she thought she'd be able to find her way back to the town simply by taking in the different ways the trees bent in comparison to the others they were clustered with, and the shape and length of the grass blades along with any wildflowers.

With her head slightly raised, as if she can see the night sky right now, she said, "Gemini." Pausing for a moment, she tilted her head in his direction. "You know Gemini, right?"

Wilderness survival was a science as much as mechanics was. Surviving an enemy that was watching them from afar? More of an art.

He knew better than to put their navigation at the mercy of memory when they had miles and miles of forest to survey--trailblazing was the science part, and the High Garda had taught him well in that regard. When he was finished, he put the knife away again and resumed walking.

The art would mean getting creative when the time called for it. At his most optimistic, Jess envisioned finding a patch of cliffside with enough handholds to take him up the canyon wall and not even needing to use the blazes on the way back. (At his most realistic? That was another story.)

"Yeah. Sandwiched between Taurus and Cancer. Brightest star is Castor, second brightest is Pollux."

Doubting Raven would know what he was talking about if he brought it up, he left out saying Ptolemy's Almagest had been what had introduced him to the zodiac constellations. He supposed only someone looking up at the sky from the ground could appreciate the writings of someone else doing the same in another long-ago century.

"Good to know you're following me," she said. Each constellation he named was an old friend of hers. She knew of their own stories, the ones she used to make up as she learned the stars and the way space was threaded together. She felt no inclination to let Jess in on that.

It was something that belonged to her and only her. She didn't need to carve anything into the trees if she had the stars to guide her. Despite them turning a blind eye toward her when she needed them most, they were more reliable than her own two feet. A part of her wished they were scouting during the dead of night, but she had an inkling Jess wouldn't trust her instinct and ability to read the dots in the dark blanket above them as well as he could see his own two feet without a torch.

But the stars didn't quite build the same map Jess was referring to. What Clarke had drawn of Mount Weather's bunker, the map she had unfolded and refolded over and over to guide them toward that hellish chamber, was nothing compared to the type of intricate map Raven could draw with her finger tracing the sky. She wouldn't know Gemini overlooked Virginia.

"So," she said, turning to him with an arch to her brow, "where's Gemini?"

Every time he posed what he thought was a banal enough question, Raven found a way to answer without really answering or turn the question around. Dare he point out the only place she was leading them was in circles?

Tempting. But considering they were about to spend the majority of the day in each other's company, he decided it was better to drop it.

Jess returned the look with another questioning one of his own. "As much as I like a round of trivia, what I know won't help figure out where you were living--I wasn't there. You'd have to tell me that. When we get back, we can put together a star map of what you remember. That'll give us something to go on."

It was something to think about, anyway, if she was interested.

He was as frustrating as Finn and Wick combined, except where the latter pushed and pushed, Jess seemed to do so then let go. Either he read something in her body language she didn't know was there, or he was the type of person to leap forward then take several paces back and decide to go another way.

She still hadn't figured out what type of person he was, other than someone who was just as overly unhappy to be here as she was.

Rather than bite back at him, she thought better of it. She didn't know where she came from, other than space and the Ark and a spit of earth where Tondc could be found. But Jess knew where he hailed from, and Raven wanted to know everything about the home she should've had if some asshole with a trigger happy finger hadn't pressed a button.

"Where are you from again?"

"Originally London, England. Part of Great Britain. In Europe," he said while scanning the path ahead for anything worth making a mental note of. 'Path' was a bit of a misnomer as it was all thick brush and no discernible way through it, but this trip made a good opportunity to map any potential food or water sources, or more importantly, any sign of their shy hosts.

A bird twittered overhead, disappearing into the canopy in a flutter of wings.

"That's where the accent comes from. If you've heard it before, they might have been British. Yours-- I'd guess you were American, judging by yours."

Raven nodded, although her expression showed she was completely lost. His accent wasn't completely new to her, as there'd been people on the Ark who spoke with that kind of lilt. She'd always liked listening to one man in her sector, speaking of his wife, of the stars, of anything she could trick him into saying.

Jess' accent wasn't as much of a comfort as his had been, but she still liked it all the same. It made him sound different, and Raven sought for the differences in this town and Arkadia.

She looked at him with a furrow to her brow. "American? As in the United States? I remember the stories of Unity Day, where all of us were united on the Ark as one. I don't know all that much about Great Britain or Europe, probably because there was nothing to really know anymore."

He nodded to the first part--yes, that was what he meant. America. The United States. Raven wasn't as hopeless at geography as she talked herself up to be.

But then it was his turn to run up against another gap between his knowledge and hers, of which there were many, littering their conversations to date like landmines waiting to be discovered. Ignoring the part about their not being anything to know about Europe (that hurt like the historically-minded part of him in a deeply painful way), he said, "Unity Day?"

"The day all the space stations came together as one," she recalled in a dull tone. She sighed then, as though the mere mention of it aggravated her.

To a point it did. Raven never quite understood the original division between the stations, of why they were split and not quite working together in tandem as they did now.

"When the bombs went off, I guess each country had their own station sent to space." She looked at him with a small shrug. "To save some of their people, I guess. There were twelve of them. Twelve nations had managed to save some of their people, and they were up in space, not quite living together. One of the stations floated toward another, and I guess a light bulb popped into their heads," she said, her fingers curling into the palm of her right hand then bursting like a flower opening, "that working together was better than working apart.

"Boom, Unity Day."

racing through canyons of angels ♙ closed

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i can't believe you found a picture of a snail.