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kinetic-elaboration · 4 months

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January 24: Octavia, Bravery/Fear

Octavia-centric, ~830 words, written in about 30 minutes; cw for references to drug use

For the prompt "bravery and its antonyms (cowardice, timidity, fear, hesitation)" from my July Break Bingo 2023 card (though I sort of forgot about the prompt pretty fast lol)

In the same 'verse as Make a lot of Money and Feel Dead Inside, my Time Loop fic. It's not.. spoiler-y per se, but it might make more sense later.

It is not true that Octavia Blake ceased to feel fear at the age of fifteen.

She wanted that story in the last book. The woman, the myth, the legend. Bellamy told her that superheroes weren't relatable, and that all of her adventures would read as boring and slight, if she turned herself into some sort of perfect, fearless goddess. Oh, it would all be too easy then. No stakes, no drama, no reason to care. No one wants to read a book like that, he said.

And even then, maybe that phrasing was just to be polite. Maybe he didn't mean you can't look superhuman but more like you can't look inhuman. And it burned her up that he wasn't wrong. That image they want for the TV screen, girl next door but she climbs mountains for a living, that's not her and never has been. But it's the sort of thing that sells. The relatable thing.

How she'd like to be perceived is like something out of a tall tale, or the over-the-top adventures Bellamy used to tell her as bedtime stories. The characters weren't anything in those; the story was their accomplishments, stacked up against all the dangers they faced.

She can't be a superhero and she can't be too cocky and she can't lie about conquering the very concept of fright when she was just a kid because that self-myth, it sounds so good in her head, but if she spoke it out loud it would prove all too much. She should have been able to vanquish it then: the feeling of her heart pounding in her throat, the nauseous tightening in her stomach, the tickling unease. The dread. Because she'd felt it at its worst and then she'd crushed it in her hands. She'd—

She'd seen everything that she needed to see.

But instead she found the nightmares followed her for years. Maybe she'd come up too close to the monster's face and it had changed her, or maybe she was waiting for the aftermath, the vengeance. Maybe she was taking her cues from her big brother, who sulked around the house all quiet for a while and said that it was mourning. She'd watch his eyes twitch and that tic in his jaw that was always his tell. And it made something sick start to vibrate along her skin. Maybe, like Clarke said, it just takes a while for that stuff to wash over you, her way of saying, there's trauma, and you have to learn the patience to feel it out and through.

What did make it to the book is that she has no patience and never did. To overcome the fear she had to kill it herself. She pushed right up against everything that had ever scared her; she dared, not herself to endure, but the terrifying things to find her, to get her. Horror movie marathons on Friday nights. Sleepovers with Clarke when they took the old Ouija board out and called for spirits. All that other side of the veil shit, she'd always hated it, because it seemed like if it was true, it would be the worst fate of all. She practiced sneaking out of the house even with nowhere to go. She explored the edges of the swamp.

In college, she started hanging out with the two guys down the hall, and on the weekends, after dark, they'd leave campus and go exploring. They tore apart their mid-size university town as if the only things they really had to learn were all its secrets. Jasper was excellent at picking locks. When the security systems were electronic, Monty would fix them. For a while, her favorite sensations were rusting metal fencing cutting into her skin, and the satisfaction of finding purchase in the diamond cutouts with her feet. Sometimes they just sat outside in parking lots they shouldn't be in and smoked Monty's weed. Bellamy would have killed her if she'd gotten high in high school, which is sort of ironic when you really think about it, and at first it scared her, too. She wondered what it would be like, to be not quite herself.

"You'll feel great," Jasper told her, soft and warm, his breath an outtake of cold, misting air and smoke. When he handed her the joint and their fingers touched, it seemed more intimate than the time she'd gotten caught trying to climb one of the fences, and he’d had to shove her upwards with his hands on her ass.

She wanted to cut open her palm, let it bleed like an oath. She wanted to steal just to prove she could. She wanted to jump off a building just to show them all she'd land on her feet.

How had she defeated the worst monster there was, and fear still lingered, tightening up in her throat?

"You okay?" Monty asked her, then, and she swallowed down everything she still didn't know and said yes.

#the year 2024 #2024: free write #mine #my writing #the 100 #octavia blake #make a lot of money #worrying that my writing lacks a sort of semi-ironic detachment and THAT friends is a sign i need to sleep

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