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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With camp set up away from any grand lakes or rivers, Raven hadn't grown used to the differing sounds of running water. The two camps she's lived in have been set aside from any water, a good walk away from being able to hear the rush of them.

Raven slowed to a stop. She looked in the distance, her expression studious as she tried to see if she could glean an answer to Jess' question. For the girl who understood how almost anything worked in camp, she couldn't quite find a reason for this.

"Did it rain earlier?" She glanced down at the ground and found her boots didn't squish against any mud.

Jess picked up his pace, winding his way down toward the riverbank. What was left of the riverbank. A large portion of it was underwater, saturating the grassy bank.

Crossing the bridge was no longer the easy task he'd been imagining; the top of the rapids licked at the edge of the walkway, the boards probably slick with water. "Not here. It could've rained further upriver, I suppose." Having been so far unsuccessful in seeing what lay beyond the canyon, it was strange to think that heavy rains were one of the few pieces of evidence that a world existed outside of their enclosed bubble.

"I guess we should count our blessings the plumbing wasn't backing up this morning." He sounded doubtful.

Raven shoved Jess lightly. "Jinx," she said, rolling her eyes. It would be a problem she'd have to fix, unless there was someone who understood breaking and fixing plumbing already positioned at the inn.

Looking out toward where the river was, the sound was loud and unfamiliar to her. She had been bed bound, kept within a perimetre where people could observe her and rush to her rescue if she so happened to fall. Despite being out in the open for a few months, there was still so much of the world Raven had yet to see.

"Maybe we should follow it," she said. "The river has to start somewhere. Maybe we'll find something." Or maybe they wouldn't. But the river was safe to follow, wasn't it? Embedded deeply into the ground, it'd lead them to wherever it was she wanted to go, and it'd bring them back home. It was better than trying to memorise the shape of a tree that had a thousand twins in the woods.

He blinked at the shove, picking up on her meaning a second after. Guess he shouldn't tempt fate, should he? "Slip of the tongue. Maybe our first order of business should be for you to eye on me for the next little while in case I step into some poison ivy. I hope you know what it looks like so you can warn me."

Jess preferred to hope that the inn's plumbing not backing up was a sign of good luck, and it wouldn't end up being one of those days they'd come to regret. He already distrusted the wilderness and any manner of trouble they could find there--too many places for someone to hide. Too many opportunities for something to happen.

Already nodding, he gestured to the south, in the direction of the raging current. "The river empties out to the southeast. I've been up north a few times, didn't turn up much. I'm thinking let's flip the switch and try the opposite." Though now Jess was starting to wonder about his plan to use the bridge to cross to the other embankment.

On approach, it didn't look in danger of breaking up and floating away just yet, which was a positive sign. Slick but still solid. He gave Raven a questioning look that asked what his mouth didn't. Was she up for a river crossing?

Birds flew south for the winter.

Supposedly.

Winter was coming back home, and she wondered if this was a sign that something much cooler was to come their way. Or perhaps she was thinking a little too hard on a metaphor she didn't so much as make a sound about. She guessed he'd take it and run with it, and thus introduce the poison ivy she knew the look of. She'd made sure Monty taught her what berries to eat and what plants to never push Finn into.

She noticed his look, and glanced toward the bridge that didn't make her feel very confident. It didn't surprise her the one way to get to their chosen destination was to walk on something so flimsy it didn't inspire much trust.

She looked at him, arching her brow. "Do you want me to hold your hand?"

For the girl who couldn't swim, she didn't care about walking along a bridge that could see her falling into the water that had almost pulled her to the fountain's floor. A part of her wanted to find another way, but Raven Reyes had never let anything stop her.

She'd destroyed a bridge not even the bombs could touch. She could handle a stupid wooden one.

Trust Raven to shrug off an easy out. He'd meant the offer as a friendly gesture, knowing better than to judge someone's abilities on appearance, but he was starting to get the impression she wasn't one to accept the easy way out or the comfortable path.

That was fine by him; he had no doubt about taking the bridge. (All right, not a lot of doubt. Not enough to stop him.)

Plainly intending it as a joke, Jess held his hand out as answer, not for one second believing she'd actually take it. "Was it that obvious? I'm trembling in my boots."

"The poor nerd," she answered dry before slapping her hand into his and wrapping her fingers around it. She tugged him along, and not too gently, either.

It was a bluff if she ever saw one. Raven never was one to turn down a challenge, even if it was in the shape of someone joking with her. She always had to prove herself, and sometimes Raven found she had to show herself to not be a stuck-up mechanic who was as stiff as the metal she worked with.

She might have reservations about the bridge, but she knew she'd survive it. She'd gotten through much worse than a wooden, flimsy walkway.

"You can hold onto me if you're so scared. I'll only judge you just a little."

"Your philanthropy is noted."

It wasn't easy to surprise him, but here he was, continually being surprised by the situations he found himself in in this town. Raven, instead of pushing ahead as he'd expected of her, took his hand. More like grabbed his hand and then began dragging him along like a child too scared to cross the road by himself. He kept his fingers loose, not quite holding on and not quite pulling away. You made your bed, Brightwell, lie in it.

If anyone was watching them right now, they were going to lay eyes on an odd and completely misleading sight: the two of them clutching hands as intimate friends or couples do. Except the one person whose hand Jess wanted to hold was as far out of his reach, just like Raven's Ark, sitting high in space.

"You've done this before." Tease travelling companions? Hold the hands of men she didn't know? She could take her pick which he was implying. Even with one hand now at Raven's mercy, Jess closed the distance to the bridge and stepped up onto it like it were a stable concrete slab and not an arrangement of groaning, wet wood that was who knew how old.

"I've held a boy's hand before."

She's held plenty of hands since landing on the ground. From the guys who found themselves a little too weak or a little too injured from a Grounder attack, Raven had taken it upon herself to play the bedside nurse. It meant she could learn how to protect herself, even heal herself when Clarke Griffin wasn't around.

Good thing she paid attention when she had the chance. There'd come a time where Clarke griffin wasn't around.

She pulled him along, but her strength on his grip took mercy on the possibility his delicate fingers might end up bruised. She didn't let go, though. She didn't think on it, but she hadn't exactly been forthcoming over the last three months in letting anyone touch her, or touching anyone in return.

Looking over her shoulder at him, eyebrow arched, she continued, "And I've walked across a scary bridge before. Can't say I held a boy's hand while doing that, though. This a first."

"Family members and arm wrestling don't count, in case you were wondering." It was hard to picture Raven giving someone the time of day in a softer, romantic way. She was like Glain. Independent, unattached, her hands made for fists, not for hand-holding.

Jess focused on keeping traction on the wet surface. The water was a seething cauldron underneath them, and he had to raise his voice somewhat to be heard over the roar of the spray. He wondered how many more floods like this the bridge could take before it finally gave way, and then decided he didn't want to think about that. Not while walking across the middle of it.

He curled his fingers around Raven's wrist. If she went down, he damn sure wasn't getting pulled off guard because they'd taken a game of chicken too far.

"You'd make my first bridge buddy, too. Lucky us." First time for everything.

The type of arm wrestling Raven did with her mother wouldn't be the type Jess was thinking of. What she'd challenged Finn to on numerous occasions might have fallen more into line with his joke. But Raven brushed it off, not allowing the acid that often accompanied her mother's memory to overwhelm her.

She'd look over her shoulder at him as they walked across the bridge, but she kept her eyes on her feet. Her leg might have felt steady and full, but she didn't trust it. When it came to crossing a bridge held slightly out of reach of the rushing water below, she didn't trust anyone but her eyes and ears and her focus to keep her safe and sound as she lead them across it.

"So you've held a boy's hand before?" She smiled to herself, knowing she was being purposefully annoying. Jess seemed to make it easy for her to do so. She projected her voice, "Cute."

And her footsteps did slow down, strides becoming smaller, as Raven wasn't too sure of herself along his bridge.

"I can't help it if people seem to want to." Like Raven, case in point.

But Jess was getting antsy to push on and the banter fell a little flat. Just as he got it into his head to speed up, giving into eagerness to be off the bridge and properly on their way, he felt more than saw Raven slow. With her positioned slightly ahead and to the right of him, he couldn't go any faster unless he wanted to shove her aside and potentially cause her to fall.

In response, he slowed, too, letting her have his hand and arm for support. "Almost there."

"Should've bombed this damn bridge," she muttered. How was it a shitty bridge like this one could survive the rough current of water, but other bridges that were built of sturdier stuff fell victim to a couple of bombs?

Raven didn't speed up, despite telling herself to. She wasn't afraid of heights, but she was of water, whether she wanted to admit it to herself or not. Moving faster might get her to the other side and onto solid ground all the more quickly, or it might see her tumble into the water before Jess could even get his swimmer's trunks on.

Steeling her shoulders, she kept moving, and her strides became uneven. Some short, some long; she wanted to get off the bridge, and by the time she reached the end, she wasn't so sure if the solid ground was wobbling beneath her.

What she did wonder was whether or not Jess had a hand left after how tightly she had been gripping it.

Her reply, if she gave one, was too quiet; the river drowned it out, cocooning them in white noise. But Raven's body language was more than enough to go by and said more than her words did--she was inching along stiffly, obviously unsure of her footing. It made him suddenly glad she'd called his bluff, because now he was able to steady her.

Maybe she actually had wanted to hold onto him for this reason. Even if that were true he didn't think she'd admit it.

Her grip was vice-like, and only grew tighter as they creeped onward past the halfway point. He didn't complain. She was a survivor, she'd said so herself, but he knew she couldn't swim and might not have any physical training under her belt. It would be stranger if she wasn't cautious about keeping a balancing act on this bloody deathtrap.

Planks finally gave way to the squelching mud of the shore, and they stepped off onto the opposite bank no worse for wear. "Made it one piece. That wasn't so bad," he announced blithely. It was a chance for Raven to agree--

And to realize she was still clutching his hand.

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."

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