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AND AS THE EARTH
BURNS TO THE GROUND
OH GIRL IT'S YOU
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[ fun fact!
if u listen to As the World Caves in, you will cry when u read this 😀]
NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN. Lyra's pulse thunders in her throat, incendiary and vengeful as gunfire. It is a merciless mantra that is seared deep into her mind, a sadistic fact weighing down upon her tongue and forcing her to be silent as a corpse, it is remorseless and unloving and it is cracking her glass heart and threatening to seep into her soul. If Octavia were to take a sword and cut through her, Lyra is afraid that she would not bleed ruby red but instead this desolate oblivion that leaves her every bit as void as a black hole: nothing will ever be the same again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Praimfaya will burn her world to the ground and she is afraid that nothing will rise from the ashes; they will suffocate everyone she loves. Nothing will ever be the same again. A remorseless Grounder could tear through her with their most noble blade. These words would ooze from her wound forever; she could bleed these words for an eternity and still they would churn and writhe. Nothing will ever be the same again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Everything is changing.
"Just in case I don't get it, run me through the plan one more time."
Drifting through the chamber like a cold, senseless phantom, Lyra halts dead in her tracks. Noah faces her in the scarce shadows; worry sinks his face and it makes him look older.
Her blood freezes over. She swallows, wishing the agony would dissolve from her eyes. Reality is atom-defined, ruthless, like cut glass. They stand there together in that little stone chamber where the water cycler sits and, perhaps most importantly, the water tank. It is crafted from glaring glass and frigid water is utterly still within it, seeming like diamonds in the dim. Glaringly colorless ice drifts through the dead waters that seem inky and black; perhaps if Lyra squinted hard enough, they would look like stars in the night sky. But they are not stars. And the phantom thought floats through her mind too quickly for her to shut it out ━━ she isn't sure if she will ever see the stars again.
"I need to purge the residual code," she begins clumsily. "If it were a computer, I'd reboot it. So. . . I'm trying to do that. To myself."
"Right." Noah wraps his arms around himself as if anchoring himself, imprisoning himself. "Except that makes it sound like you're trying to turn yourself off. Or kill yourself."
Lyra grimaces.
"Not. . . kill myself, not really — "
"Not really?" Noah echoes sharply, his eyebrows narrowing against his otherwise chalky skin. He snaps the words out as if he is on the verge of snarling. "What do you mean not really?"
"I have to stop my heart long enough for for all electrical activity in my brain to stop, too." Lyra feels like an effigy of herself; one breath and she would be blown away into ash. "That means I need fifteen minutes."
There is a heartbeat of suffocating soundlessness.
Noah gives an almost maniacal laugh, though his face is so crude that it doesn't seem as if he finds anything funny. "Fifteen minutes."
She gives a nod.
He stares at her, a mixture of shock and disbelief sweeping his face. "Fifteen minutes. You need to stop your heart for fifteen minutes — you'll be brain dead, Lyra! And that's assuming we can even get your heart to start again — this is going to kill you — !"
"Not if I'm frozen." Lyra's existence feels collateral. She jerks her head in the direction of the tank. "Or just really, really fucking cold."
There is a resounding silence.
"This is the only way you'll live?"
"It's the only way."
An eternal despair falls across Noah's face like a shadow. Lyra can only imagine the civil war raging within him ━━ this is something no father should ever have to watch, no father should have to see his last child bleed together with the darkness until she has become death.
"It'll be really cold," Noah says at last. He eyes the tank of ice water. "You could get frostbite. What if you come out with no fingers?"
Lyra gives a startled laugh. Oh, god, she loves her dad. She loves him more than anything.
"OK." Noah blows a puff of air from his chapped lips. His limbs are trembling and his eyes glisten with shattered slivers of silver, but he puts a brave face on for her. "OK. I can't believe I'm saying this, but uh. . . kill yourself, kid."
There are no words left. She swallows, wondering vaguely if her mouth had ever been this dry. The crushing pain in her head is colossal, but soon she will feel none of it. She will feel nothing at all.
Only for a little bit, she thinks. You'll come back.
Everything smells of frost and bitter earth. It is then that Lyra feels the dread digging deep into her bones and it is now that the air in the room is suddenly cold as she strips her clothing from her body until she is left in nothing but thin, moth-eaten spandex and a sports bra with dozens of loose threads hanging like loose strands of a spiders web. She faces the tank and wonders if this is how fast winter falls ━━ with deathly speed, lethal and swift, flashing steel like a Grounder's blade. Her heart ricochets so much that she thinks it might burst from her ribs, and soon it will stop completely. Soon it will all be over. Her heart will stop and it will hang there in the black tar of her sinful lungs. Dead. Dead but not decaying.
Noah helps her into the tank. Into her grave.
The water is glacier. Lyra wonders what would happen if she screamed. Her lips are shivering.
"A live wire on a timer is set to go off fifteen minutes after i flatline." Her teeth chatter violently and Noah pretends not to notice. "I rigged it to deliver the exact same charge as the defibrillator med kit I took from Abby. It's analog. But shocking my heart could put me into cardiac arrest. If that happens, you'll need to shock it again with the defibrillator."
"What — me?" Noah's jaw is agape, his eyes storm-stricken. "Shouldn't it be Abby or Jackson or — "
"They're not. . . " Lyra's entire body shudders. It is so cold she can hardly breathe. "They're not awake yet."
Because it is not even an hour past midnight. The apocalypse will be here with the red of dawn and already the air is faintly orange, foggy, stinking of salt. Dozens of her people are still lost in a dreamless sleep, very nearly lifeless, all thanks to Lyra gassing them like the Mountain Men. They will wake up, but not until after the world has ended. And then there will be those who never wake up at all. . .
Three hundred and sixty four people. Her people. They will never see the sun again.
Lyra trembles violently, her shoulders jerking. Is this what it feels like to truly become a monster? The misery is colossal, the anguish unendurable. She feels little more than a flayed-bone shadow. It's an anomaly within itself ━━ she killed her own people so that humanity would survive.
Perhaps she doesn't deserve to ever see the sun again, either.
Her heart desperately stampedes against her ribcage. A dead thing being beaten by a dying thing. A cold dagger has been thrust straight through her soul. Chewing her up. Spitting her out. She wants to be swallowed up by the glacial waters that engulf her. She wants to drown. Just like all things. She drowns everything. Broken silver rain slithers down her ice-colored cheeks and she feels blind. Everything is cataclysmic. Everything is changing. She will come back from this, but nothing will ever be the same. It will never be the same. Never. Never. Never. She does not know whether this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning. All she knows is that this is the end. There is no coming back from this. She will never be the same.
"I killed them." Her voice is barely a whisper. "All of them."
Noah whips around, eyebrows contorted, stricken. "Lyra — "
"Everything I've ever done — everything — has always been to protect my people." Her eyes are as dark as the starless night, black with torment. She chokes on the words like they're corrupt, like they're poison bleeding through her veins. "Always, always, always. But now I've killed them."
Her glass heart is on the verge of shattering. A web of cracks spiraling like a spiders web unraveling. Tears shake from her starless eyes like molten silver.
"I don't deserve to survive this."
"Lyra, breathe," Noah's voice is raw with desperation. His knuckles are white as ghosts as he grabs desperately at the tank. "I need you to breathe, OK?"
"I don't deserve. . . " Lyra's heart stalls with a mixture of horror and grief. "I'm a monster. . . "
Everything is weirdly luminous. So bright that she can hardly see past the light to make out the shapes around her. And her voice ━━ everything is coming out all slurred and all wrong.
"You are not a monster."
Sound is wobbly and distorted. She can barely understand Noah.
"Listen. . . some people do bad things to survive. But that doesn't make you a bad person. That makes you a fighter — a survivor.
Noah's voice is like molten gold. Glittering and gleaming. Everything is agonizingly cold to the point where it feels like burning, the waters brain-fogging, mind-numbing, and it almost feels as if Lyra is drifting in a whirlpool of white-hot stars. But her dad's voice is like the sun, yellow solace, shimmering salvation that isn't burning red but wonderfully and fantastically golden.
"You were born with stars in your eyes, Lyra. I have seen you do amazing things. And whatever great thing you're destined to do next. . . I can't wait to see it. Because you're made out of stars, kid."
Lyra feels as though he's gutted her. She wonders if he knows how similar that is to her mom's last words.
We're made out of stardust, kid.
Darkness bleeds into the edges of her vision. Everything bright and blinding and luminous is drifting away until all she can see is Noah's soft face swimming before her.
"Dad?" Lyra's voice is small and fear-filled and childlike. "It's. . . it's time."
It's impossible to make out his expression; everything is too blurry. Vaguely she feels him pressing something that should have felt freezing, but now everything burns to touch. It is the oxygen mask.
She clutches it in her shivering hands. "May we meet again."
She thinks she might hear her dad murmuring We always do.
She forces herself under.
And then she is drowning.
Ice water becomes a chokehold around Lyra Jupiter's throat. It is dribbling into her lungs. Everything is glacial to the point where it is an inferno; phantom flames licking at her bones, seething in her blood, slathering at her heart. It burns. It is as if she has thrown herself into hell, ice-thick and molten hot. It is incendiary. Her heart is threatening to beat straight out of her chest, her lungs are screaming themselves raw, her limbs thrashing involuntarily.
THIS IS HOW YOU SURVIVE.
Lyra is drowning. Every breath is incandescent. She tries to scream, but there is no sound here.
YOU'RE DYING.
Wildfire is burning her alive. She is drowning and she is burning. Feral and afraid, war ravages her mind as she fights against herself. This is pure animal instinct. Her self-preservation is kicking in. There is no way to convince her body that she is not orchestrating their own destruction.
YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO DIE TO REALLY LIVE.
She is drowning and she is burning alive. How much of her will be left after this? She feels like a dying flame on the verge of being snuffed out by the swollen shadows. Violet blooms before her eyes. Everything is stained black. Charred. Burnt. Nothing can save her from the endless cruelties of this black water. She is drowning. She is drowning. She is drowning.
There is nothing at all. Nothing but ice and agony and hate and despair. Crimson leaks into her eyes. Memories of every terrible thing she has ever done ━━ killing Wells, pulling the lever at Mount Weather, leaving Camp Jaha and Bellamy and Noah, slaughtering Baylis, leaving hundreds of her own people out to die ━━ and those are just the big things, the most painful exhibits. But there are heinous interludes littered between the acts. Her stage is built from gilded bones.
You're made out of stars.
But the stars are deadly. Seething. Cackling. Scattered across the inky night sky like shattered diamonds ━━ pretty from far away.
Up close, they are lethal. They will burn you to ash.
Lyra is standing at the end of the world. Shadows are searing through her skin. There is no clarity in the cold. She is untethered and drifting away. Fading into the nothingness.
Her hand scrabbles at the glass desperately. This cannot be the end. She is not ready. The burn is infernal. She is freezing. She is drowning in this cold, star-sucking void. She thinks of the sky and how it looks like sapphire glass stretched taut; made of glass like her heart. She wonders what it would take for it to shatter. What it would take for the sky to shatter.
What it would take for her heart to shatter.
Are we the architects of our own downfall?
You make your own choices. Good or bad. Light or dark. To live or die. Your destiny is not laid out for you in the stars; you can go to the heavens and crush each one with your bare hands if that is what you want. The stars have no power over you. You carve your story out of the night sky with constellations of your own.
ARE WE THE ARCHITECTS OF OUR OWN DOWNFALL?
Lyra met death when she was only fifteen. She was only a child. She had searched for her mother among the hollow stars, blood behind your teeth. When she'd been forced into the cell and handed a death sentence, she could never tell where the darkness ended and she began. She was molded by the shadows and still somehow blazed brighter than the sun. That was her. That was her. She made herself that way. But then she was seventeen and chaos has become her only god; when she is given nothing but impossible choices, did she become the artist of her own destruction? She did not want to do those things. But there was no other choice. There was no other choice.
The thought is mind-numbing.
Something is on the other side of the glass. Everything is dark and fuzzy.
A hand, she decides. The last thing she remembers is that it might be her dad's hand. . .
And then her heart stops.
"Bellamy's on the radio with Octavia."
"The radio? What, he isn't here? The Death Wave's going to hit us at any moment, where the fuck is he — ?"
"He's not going to make it."
"You're joking. . . Oh, god, no. . . He can't die. He can't, Marcus."
"He's not. They have an idea. In the labs, Lyra was getting the rocket ready to go to space. They're going — "
"They're going to the ring? But life support failed — "
" — Bellamy says they have it all figured out. They'll be in space for 5 years. Radios won't reach them. He. . . he wants to talk to Lyra."
"He can't. Her heart stopped."
"What the hell do you mean?"
"I mean her heart fucking stopped, Marcus! What the hell do you think I mean? I — oh, jesus fucking christ, what in fuck's name was that?"
". . . Praimfaya."
"Fucking hell — where's the damn radio? I need to talk to Bellamy — now!"
HEART RAGING AGAINST her ribs, Lyra bursts back to life.
She is drowning.
Where am I? Thoughts sear Lyra's tongue and she is biting it until she can taste blood. It feels as if barbed wire is strung around her neck, incendiary ash hot on her lips. Fire licks at her eyes and flames ensnare her heart. Where am I? Nothing makes sense. Shadows warp everything. All she can see is black and feel this terrible, terrible cold. Once upon a time, stars seeped luminary into her bones. Now it is this treacherous black that is filling up her lungs, poisoning her, drowning her ━━
Her limbs are numb. With great effort, Lyra hauls herself towards the surface and drags the mask from her face. Ice water churns wildly, splashing at her skin. She gives a strangled gasp and chokes down a gulp of air.
She inhaled sharply, once, and then let's out a panicked exhale that sounds more like a shriek. Nothing makes sense quite yet.
A heart monitor is shrieking in the background. It is not slow and steady like it should be. It is getting faster and faster and faster ━━
This time, Lyra really does scream.
It feels as if a python has wound itself around her chest and is now constricting, crushing, the life out from her. She is not drowning, but it feels like it. There is such a violent and agonizing pulsating in her skull that she half-expects to see blood in the water.
"Cardiac arrest — " she gasps out, half-blind from pain. "I'm going into — cardiac arrest — !"
Her body flounders wildly in the glacial water. Everything around her is a nauseating blur. Where is her dad? He is supposed to be here, helping her restart her heart. He would not leave her here to die. Where is he? Where is he?
Lyra holds onto the edge of the tank and then she is hurling herself out of it and slamming onto the tile. Her fall is about a half a dozen feet. With her shoulders taking the brunt of it, they scream in agony, the rest of her body seething. She'd thought she'd felt like she was on fire because of how cold the water was, but that feeling does not go away. She is burning alive. Some small part of her manages to wonder if this is what it feels like to be left at praimfaya's mercy.
The world is roaring in her ears. All she can hear is dizzying white noise.
She tries to breathe and it makes a gasping noise in the back of her throat. Her chest is jerking faster and faster. Her lungs feel like they might explode. Her jaw contorts so wildly that her teeth make a terrible clacking sound.
"Don't — die — "
By some great miracle, Lyra manages to turn over onto her stomach. Stars swim above her. Her body keeps jerking of its own volition.
She grits her teeth. "Come on!"
Everything is fuzzy. She can't make herself move properly. She can hardly feel the linoleum tile as she drags her body across it. Every inch feels like a mile and every breath is napalm-hot. She is dissolving into the shadows. There is nothing to tether her to life. Everything is cold and cataclysmic. Life is flooding from her. And it hurts to die. It fucking hurts. . .
Blood trickles into her mouth. Lyra bares her scarlet teeth. The shadows are concreting.
Her salvation is on the shelf. Lyra does not trust herself to stand. Despair crawls through her veins, stinking of mud and weighing her down, viscous darkness eating her alive. She lifts her shivering arm and strikes the shelf once.
Nothing.
Her lungs are an inferno. Her glass heart is stretched taut.
She lifts her arm and takes another single, brutal strike.
The defibrillator crashes noisily to the ground.
Crimson-drenched fingers scrabble frantically over the wires. Desperation is eating Lyra alive. She does not want to die. She does not want to die. She does not want to die.
Her fingertips are frozen and white, like sheets of ice. There is hardly any strength left inside of her. There are patches, she realizes vaguely. Patches need to be put over her heart. And so her frozen fingers scrabble for those, too, fighting against the way the life is leeched from her bones. Her eyelids are fluttering shut and her hands are plummeting. Falling freely.
One of them hits the button. Lyra does not remember if she wished that it would work or not.
And everything is dark.
There is no light.
Only darkness.
This is a world without a sun.
It is so terribly dark ━━
Lyra wakes with a strangled gasp.
Her entire body jerks violently and then her head hits the back of the steel shelf. A shockwave shakes her body and she collapses completely against the floor, trembling, sweating, her heart pounding in her chest.
But she is alive.
"LYRA — LYRA!"
Noah bursts through the doorway like a starved animal, chaotic and savage. His entire body is trembling violently. Wild, storm-stricken eyes sweep the room until they find Lyra slumped there in the corner, shivering horribly, brutally. For a fleeting, precious moment, the two simply stare at each other.
Noah looks as though he feels like vomiting.
"You did it," he croaks. A tremor ripples beneath his voice. "You're alive."
She manages a jerky nod. "I did it."
And then he is running towards her and falling beside her and hugging her and laughing and sobbing all at once. His eyes had been panicked and unsure, but now he clutches her as if his life depends on it. Lyra feels a little less war-torn, there in her dad's arms. Because isn't that everything all children needs? For their father to hug them and wash the war from their skin and tell them that everything is going to be OK?
And then the storm becomes cataclysmic.
"Dad," Lyra mumbles. "Dad. . . where's Bellamy?"
There is a beat. Noah has gone very still. Another beat. The silence is visceral. It is apocalyptic.
Something crumbles in his eyes. "He's not coming back."
Lyra blinks once. Then twice.
Her voice is blank. "What are you talking about?"
She starts to sit up, ignoring the crushing pain that explodes inside of her. Her lungs are hollow, void, and now they are crumbling and decaying. But that doesn't matter anymore, nothing matters except that her dad is acting as if Bellamy isn't there in the bunker, maybe helping Octavia hold her head beneath the weight of her new crown, he's just somewhere else in the bunker and she wishes that her dad would tell her where ━━
"He's not coming back." Defeat leaks through the crevices in Noah's tone. He wrestles her back down as Lyra starts to stand. "He's not here, Lyra!"
"Then where is he?" Lyra's voice is rough-edges and rising with anger; it houses a hurricane. "Where is he?"
She is still fighting to somehow get to the doorway ━━ though surely her legs cannot carry her that far now ━━ and she is becoming angry with Noah, angry with Bellamy, for both of them to keep her waiting like this. Bellamy had abandoned her in that corridor not even a day ago, demanding that she'd save herself. It can only be another moment before he is emerging with his radiant smile and sun-warm voice, shaking back his dark hair and telling her that they have 5 years stretching out in front of them.
"He's going to space."
Lyra's mouth trembles with shock. She doesn't think she'd heard him right.
"What?"
"He's going to space," Noah repeats. His voice is soft, as if he means to soothe her, but he clearly hasn't wrapped his own mind around this. He is unfathomably sad. "They're going to dock the rocket with the ring. They'll be up there for 5 years."
Her heart skips a beat. An icy sense of despair washes over her. She feels as if she is drowning all over again.
"No. . . " her voice is quavering. "No. He told me he was coming back. He promised — !"
Despair slinks across Noah's face like the shadows. "I'm sorry. I can't fix this. I'm sorry, Lyra. I'm so, so sorry."
Desolation gouges her glass heart from her chest. She freezes there, anesthetized to Noah's touch, ice creeping through her veins until she is stiff and fragile like porcelain. It's as if she is a corpse with no tomb, a spirit with no graveyard, a dark coffin without bones. Her mind feels like a wasteland. If her voice had been the edges of a hurricane before, now she storm is swallowing her whole. Something swells beneath her skins and her breath catches and then it erupts. He's not coming back. The words are razor sharp and twice as lethal as they echo. He's not coming back. It is as if all the air has been sucked from the world. She is hung somewhere in the balance, drifting in limbo, not quite dead and yet not quite alive, either. He's not coming back. The words are bleeding, cold and unsheathed, sharpened iron, cutting into her. He's not coming back. Shredding her to ribbons. Tearing her asunder.
The brief, fleeting sunshine that surviving had brought her is now being snuffed out. Perhaps forever. Lyra isn't quite sure. All she knows is that Bellamy promised her he'd come back and now he is gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.
The entire universe seems to come to a screeching halt. Galaxies fall away. Corrupted stars burn out. Reality bites through her bones.
She feels like a tendril of a dying flame. How much longer until she burns out? She feels as if she is running out of time. Everything is falling apart. She is standing at the edge of the world and the sky is shattering.
She feels as if she is drowning in the universe. Maybe she will be lost in it forever. Her lips wobble violently. Her eyes are shimmering with tears and they are silver as they cascade down her porcelain cheeks. The universe is swallowing her whole. Just like it swallows all things.
Nothing will ever be the same again.
͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙ ✩ *̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ .·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙ ✩ *̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙
NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN.
Space is cold and dark and empty.
The tragic irony of the universe is this: Bellamy Blake is lost in the darkness between the stars while Lyra Jupiter is hundreds of miles away, dead beneath the dirt.
He has always worn loss like a second skin. Some sort of lifeless cloak, invisible to everyone except him, blacker than a world without sun, clinging to his flesh like decay, stinking of rot. Ghosts have always surrounded him. He'd never met his father. His mother had died next, her eyes brown as the fresh earth that she'd never stepped foot on. The days that followed felt like an eternity; each morning he woke in a new, incendiary hell that seemed to burn him from the inside out. A walking catastrophe. Flames had slowly slathered at his insides as he waited for his little sister to be next. Pain had festered inside of him: His mother was dead and his sister was dying and it was all his fault. His chest was filled with the tight hollowness that came from existing alone in the world and desolation became his only friend. He'd drifted through the corridors of the Ark like a phantom. No one knew him, no one ever tried to understand him, no one ever cared to even ask his name. All he'd wanted to do was burn.
And then came Lyra Jupiter.
There were stars in her eyes even the day he met her; when she was alone in that cramped little cell with nothing but the shadows as company. Skies had seemed to melt honey on her skin and she looked as if she held the power of the galaxies in her hands. She burned incandescent, molten silver, a supernova personified, radiant with life. Always so alive. Never hesitating to give up a piece of herself if only to see someone else smile.
You never wanted anything more than the stars, he thinks as he gazes into the obsidian vortex of space. Silver leaks through the porthole. He reaches his fingers out tentatively, remembering what it had been like to hold hers as the world fell apart. It feels like holding a ghost in his hand. But you always outshone them.
She wore moonbeams like a second skin, her lilting voice like liquid magic, silvery as the cosmos. Haloed in starlight. Ethereal.
And through everything, she had always stood beside him. Always.
It had been her who'd held his broken pieces together when he'd killed Dax. It had been Lyra who'd carefully put him back together, piece by piece. Bellamy had worn a bloodstained crown that he'd stolen for himself as he took charge at the dropship camp, and Lyra had worn the halo and they'd kept the hundred alive together. Torture. Bombs. Biological warfare. Alliances. They'd fought battle after battle and blood was seeping from Bellamy's bruised knuckles and Lyra smelled of sweet decay, but they were together. There were always those nights when his mind went to war with her heart and they'd sit and make the hardest decisions together beneath the starlight. They'd been nothing more than a boy and a girl and they'd fought a war.
They had always been plagued by traumas, but they had each other. The fall of Mount Weather had been their burden to share, even when Lyra had wanted to take the weight of the sky and hold it alone. And when Bellamy had committed atrocities for Pike in the name of his people ━━ when even his own sister could not look at him ━━ Lyra had held him as he shattered into a thousand pieces yet again. When the City of Light stole her away, Bellamy had been the one to bring her back from the brink of turning into nothingness. It had been them who'd destroyed the City of Light, Lyra in Alie's hallow and Bellamy in Polis, protecting her body with all his might. And then she'd crawled into his arms and she'd cried and she'd told him that it wasn't over, that the end of the world was coming. But she promised that they'd face it together, just like they always did.
But he's here, alone, at the end of the world. He reaches out and he touches nothing.
He has gone where Lyra cannot follow.
She was so young and so doomed. Just a girl. Only seventeen. A walking tragedy. She was a star and she'd bled luminary.
Now she is dead.
He'd held the radio in his shaking hands and he'd asked, voice trembling, "Noah, where's Lyra? I need to tell her. . . I told her I was coming back. I promised her."
Interference marred Noah's words.
"Bellamy, kid, I need you to promise me — promise me, all right? — don't know how to explain this. . . Lyra's heart stopped — fifteen minutes — don't know — brain-dead — "
And then the radio died.
Something in Bellamy's chest broke so violently that he had been convinced it was impossible for no one else to have heard it.
Everything had seemed to end right then and there on the island as the Death Wave closed in on them. It all just stopped. Nothing mattered anymore.
Some part of him, some part buried deep within him as this numb and glassy grief stretched tight over his skin, wondered if he should scream for the only girl he'd ever loved. But she wouldn't answer him. She'd never answer him again. Never. Never. Never. This is the end of everything. Destructions horrific birth, crawling out of his unfathomable grief.
Nothing will ever be the same again.
Lyra is dead. He'd saved their friends. Taken them to the stars that Lyra had loved so much because that is what she would have wanted. Lyra is dead. He'd watched Raven take her spacewalk and had been ripped to shreds from the inside out as he thought of how much Lyra would have wanted to walk among the stars, too. Lyra is dead.
Lyra is dead and it is your fault.
And that old loneliness that had stalked him during his childhood crept into his veins as he stood there on the Ark. The chill was back, the dread of existing alone in the world ate away at him like a terminal illness that he could not fight against. There is something so terribly cruel about existing alone in the world when you had been promised someone to bear it with.
His eyes are wastelands; they reflect the earth as he gazes down upon it. Great fiery explosions rock across it all. Entire continents have been wiped out, razed by hellfire.
I love you so, so much, he'd said to her.
He wishes she'd said it back.
"I don't know if I can do this without her."
Bellamy is too distressed to really register Raven's tears, the way her cheeks shimmer, the trembling of her limbs as she joins him in the empty corridor. Bellamy cannot hear the thundering of her heart against her ribcage as a thunderstorm swallows her whole, too. He is utterly blind to her pain. This is wreaking demolition upon her heart, too.
"She wouldn't want you to die." Bellamy's voice is a hollow web of catacombs. He sounds as if he is dead, too.
"She wouldn't want any of us to die," Raven corrects him, a bit of steel in her broken voice.
She stares at him as if daring him to contradict her, but Bellamy doesn't care for whatever sympathies she might offer. He faces the dying earth. Stars hang in the universe, but they are corrupted. Poison leaks through the galaxies.
"We won't," says Bellamy hollowly.
He will get them to the ground. One last promise to Lyra. He will take their friends back to their home. And then. . .
And what he will do then, he does not know.
"We'll survive this." He swallows thickly and then finally faces Raven, fighting to keep from crumpling, fighting to keep his voice steady. "Together."
Raven gives a satisfied nod. "We always do."
And just like that, she is leaving him there, alone again as he watches the earth die.
His heart burns. He does not know what he had expected ━━ certainly nothing like the apocalyptic oath that had been sworn so long ago. And there is no way Raven could ever think to grasp the gravity of her answer, how it is burning him alive from the inside out. His heart burns and it burns and it burns and he does not think it will ever stop. His incendiary heart will be burning him for an eternity.
Until the very end.
It is a remorseless mantra. Once upon a time, it had meant everything to Bellamy. Now it means nothing. His mouth is full of ash.
What a lie that had turned out to be.
͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙ ✩ *̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ .·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙ ✩ *̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙
that chapter legit took everything out of me. hope y'all enjoyed ‼️‼️🤪🤪🤪
Bellamy on the radio when Noah tries to explain that Lyra isn't dead, that she restarted her heart
Bellamy crying because he thinks he killed Lyra
Lyra, alive, killing 364 people
5.9k words