Red - Bellamy Blake - I

One -Before the Ground

|One -Before the Ground|

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My earliest, most vivid memory had been a heavy, tear-filled shout, "She isn't mine."

I remember crying and being comforted by my mother. It wasn't my father's words that stung- those I did not truly understand. Rather the heavy stare that had landed on me right after, his mouth still twisted into a snarl, and whether his eyes were red with anger or tears was lost on me. I remember finally discovering what power those words held, but by that time- it didn't matter to me anymore.

'She isn't mine.' Those weren't just words to him. It was a fact- an important one, just as how we were floating in space, above the Earth. He held no care for me, in fact he couldn't even stifle his hatred for me to please his wife. When my mother had gotten a promotion, her hours shifted. My father would be there for dinner- my mother wouldn't. Whatever not-so-repressed hatred crawled back when she was gone, and he began to eat my dinner rations.

I was nine. This was the Ark. There was no extra food I could snack on. I had breakfast and lunch, but after a while, that wasn't enough. I wasn't nearing death- although my baggy clothing may have suggested otherwise, so when my mother had taken me to be checked out I had to explain why I was losing weight. 

My father was gone for a week after that, the best week of my life. My mother had the entire week off to spend with me, and I was bedridden, so no schooling either. But it flew past, too quickly.

After that, my plate was never touched again.

But he wasn't a timid man. I, however, was a timid child. Eleven. That's when he's stopped touching my plate and opted to drink illegal moonshine and hit me, instead. He refused to hit my face- then everyone would know. He knew I wouldn't tell. He watched like a hawk in the early mornings on the Ark when I sat down for breakfast, and would wince from moving too quickly. His ears would perk when my mother asked me what was wrong. Then, he would settle, like a contorted set of wires being untangled as I answered, "I think I just slept wrong." 

That was his drug. He couldn't stop, and it seemed as if he never would. It resulted in hidden appendages for weeks on end, extra laundry loads I would do in secret, and in so many despicable scars. His eyes grew more and more tired, darker in their intent and in their weary. I stayed the same. More beaten and bruised, perhaps, but I was always pathetically timid. I had friends and had my mother, and I never said a word.

Around thirteen- it had become much worse because then he had grown lonely. So lonely, perhaps, he had forgotten what he was supposed to be to me. I could taste the moonshine he drank. That's all I could remember, the moonshine, because after I could taste it, I couldn't sense myself. I hardly remember what would occur past 9 p.m. on the Ark, nearly every night. It was like I was watching myself through a deeply tinted lense, like I wasn't there. But I was.

I didn't tell. I didn't want him to be floated, only because my mother loved him, and I loved her.

One month before my fourteenth birthday, I murdered three people.

I don't remember it clearly. It was a hazy and busy memory. I knew I had stabbed him in his neck when he began to pull those bright red, plaid pajama pants back up. I remember stabbing him in the chest as he screamed, with a stolen knife from the lost and found. 

I don't, however, remember killing the other two guards. I knew I'd done it, but everything was so red. I remember the blood and the screaming and the gunshots and the searing pain- but I can't picture what happened. 

There are three things that can happen with that. You freeze, you run, or you fight. I'd chosen to fight once out of at least a hundred times.

I didn't want to kill those guards. I did want to kill Jacob- until he was already dead.

I murdered people.

Murder.

Do you know what it's like? Having held a human's life in the palm of your hand? It's awful. It breaks you. It broke me. It hovered over me, slowly killed me like an unchecked tumor, and I couldn't just stop feeling guilty. So I chose to feel numb, numb to glares and gossip and everything and everyone around me for a while.

Later, I'd woken up to my doctor hovering over me, re-dressing my wounds. "Why?" She had whispered, tears in her eyes. Abby Griffin was desperate to know why I would do such a thing. 

So, I had spilled everything to her. She had cried more than I had.

The next three years I was in the sky-box. I had one recreation day per week. I was too dangerous, they had said. After the council had discovered the abuse- they opted to kill me at eighteen, like every other criminal kid on the Ark, than to kill me at fourteen. The reason as to why was lost on me- why would they give me an extra four years of life when I didn't deserve it? Why, an extra four years, just to stare at the wall of the grey box until my eighteenth birthday?

I had made one friend, two years later.

Her name was Octavia. She was beautiful, that kind of beautiful in which her olive skin and dark hair drew everyone's eyes to her. She was caring and sweet, and so very innocent. She said she had been living under the floorboards, in secret. And when the Ark discovered her, they floated her mother, and degraded her brother's job position, and sent her here.

She asked what I had done. I had told her to ask anyone else, they would tell her. Octavia was persistent, though, and I gave in a week before now. I told her the truth, yet she was unfazed.

"We do what we do to survive, I guess."

Then she told me how she went to a masquerade party. It was her first time out of her living quarters. I drew her in the 'sketchbook' I had been given. You can't truly hurt someone with charcoal, and a guard had felt pity for me. Drew, an empathetic guard who would talk to me every day. About his wife, and about the family he wanted. This was the minimal social interaction I received in the Sky-Box. And although I relished in it, it always reminded me of what I took away from those two guards- their spouses, and children, and parents, and friends mourning- because of me.

I was in my cell when Abby Griffin had come to meet with me. We walked around the empty Sky-Box for hours. She explained everything to me, what was going to happen. I kept seeing a janitor in the distance with his head was down, every time I turned back.

Abby told me how the Ark, the giant floating machine that has kept the human race alive for 97 years, was dying.

She told me how we had only three or so months left of life support, and how Jaha, the leader of the Ark, was sending the 100 delinquents down to the ground to see if it was survivable.

She told me she was my mother, my birth mother.

She told me of my sister, Clarke, and my real father, of how she wished I was there with them. She told me about how Clarke and I were twins. How I should be dead because Clarke was firstborn.

She also told me how much she regretted sending me to Emery and Jacob. 

Most importantly, she told me my mother had forgiven me.

"I've already told Clarke everything. She knows to find you and to keep you safe. Do the same for her, please." Abby had pleaded.

"I'll try." We were back at my cell. Her eyes were filled with water once more.

"They'll be here at noon tomorrow. I love you Grey, May we meet again." She'd cried.

"May we meet again." She turned around, and my cell door was shut after that, and I'd fallen asleep after hours of just sitting there.

-

A soft throbbing pain soared through my wrist, and I jolted.

I sighed as I heard the clicking of the metal cuffs around my wrists. They were sending me to my possible death, and they still don't trust me.

The blonde guard slid the key into my boot.

I didn't even bother fighting.

Goodbye, Ark.