Rupture | Bellamy Blake ² [Discontinued]

❉| chapter ten [caleb's pov]

❝it's not who i am underneath, but what i do that defines me.❞

-bruce wayne, batman begins

♛

CALEB'S EARS HAVE BEEN ringing nonstop ever since the explosion, and honestly, he's gotten pretty sick of it. He keeps trying to make it stop by subconsciously shrugging his shoulder to his ear. There is something particularly annoying about it that makes his journey back to Arkadia even worse than it already is. That, and the fact that he can still smell the scent of fire on his clothes as well as his own burning flesh.

He knew there was something...off about the mountain. He couldn't quite place it, but he constantly felt like someone was following him wherever he went there. Like ghosts were trailing his every move. He had been jittery there. So, when his senses blared at him to go find Raven and Sinclair, he immediately obeyed them.

And just in time, too. Because as soon as Caleb's foot touched the grass, an explosion had blown him at least thirty feet back into the surrounding forest. Dirt had dusted his bare skin. He laid there for a minute, breathing shallowly without knowing why. But then the instant had passed and suddenly the agony was swallowing him whole. A terrible cry of pain escaped him. The right side of his neck was burning, sizzling, in a manner that he could hardly bear. It traveled down to the middle of his chest and promptly stopped. It was worse than any pain he'd ever felt, drowning him in the anguish that set his nerves aflame.

He passed out from it.

Now, on the second day, Caleb supposes it's a little more bearable. Don't get him wrong - the burns still hurt like a mother - but he's now almost used to it and can continue on with minimal grunts of pain.

If he didn't have a photographic memory, he would never have known where to go. Caleb cannot understand how he managed to hide his intelligence from people for seventeen years. Nobody had believed him when he was confident in becoming a Zero-G Mechanic. But he had passed his test with flying colors. And he changed. All because of Fallon Rivers, who had woken him up from his assholish ways.

He wonders if he'll ever get a chance to really thank her for that.

Caleb trudges on. The air is still yet cool, even more so on the places where the blast had singed holes into his shirt. The jacket had saved him- if he hadn't been wearing it, more of him would have suffered. His stomach growls and he wonders if he'll even be able to find another rabbit to kill. He doesn't have any weapons with him except scrap metal that he somehow constructed into a poorly-made spear. All it took was a little twine to tie it to a stick, and boom. A rabbit-killing device. May the bunnies fear Caleb Jones.

It seems like a miracle that he hasn't run into any Grounders yet. Maybe God decided, "Hey, you've had enough suffering for now, I'll let you figure out your problems for a bit." He honestly doesn't know what he would do if he did run into some Grounders. He doesn't have anything to defend himself except the dumb spear that can barely kill rabbits.