Chapter 31: Ch. 31 – Return to Arkadia

It was Kane and Clarke that came to fetch me when Nia was done with her questions. I had done my best to plant the bait that I might be turned to her side, but it was still a question of whether she would truly take it. Things might seem hopeful now, but Queen Nia was not someone that could be easily played.

Thankfully, they had brought the small rover with them, so I climbed in with no problems and then collapsed on the side bench. Clarke was worried at first, but constantly reassuring her that I was just exhausted from straining my power too much allowed me to sleep for the rest of the night in the rover. In the morning, I had to convince Bellamy that I was fine, but it ended up lightening the mood after I buried him halfway into the dirt, although that might have just been for me and possibly Anya.

The Ice Nation escorted us to the edge of their border then broke off, heading towards Polis. It was not a force large enough to threaten the capital, so I could let out a sigh of relief that Queen Nia still wanted to keep up appearances. The rest of our trip back to Camp Jaha, or Arkadia since it had been renamed while we were gone following the story, was quiet and uneventful. Trikru trusted us enough to not send us with an escort, so even Pike had to admit that there was something to what I had done to make peace.

As we neared Arkadia, my head could not help but snap up as I looked in the direction of the Ark. I could still sense the charm that I had made for Raven, which was something that I did not remember from Diego's story, where my powers originated from. My sudden reaction caught the attention of those who were walking around me.

"It's fine... I just wasn't expecting to still sense something that I had given to Raven," I explained.

"What did you give her?" Finn asked.

I chuckled, "She looks good with a necklace, so I made her a new one and gave it to her when we left."

He smirked and asked, "How much does she hate me?"

"A lot less since I've stepped up and replaced you," I taunted. "Honestly, I like you. You were dumb enough to let go of Raven, and while Clarke is a wonderful woman, I will still call you an idiot for wasting your chance with her."

"Thanks," he retorted with a frown, rubbing the back of his neck.

While Bellamy and I got to laugh at his discomfort, I did not push him to feel any guiltier. It was his mistake to let go of Raven, and I would make sure that she was happy through this timeline with a smile on my face. He was just lucky that Clarke was in the rover today instead of walking with us, or she would have been pulled in.

Our group slowly walked up to the walls and headed inside. There was a hint of growth to the garden between the two sets of walls which made me smile, seeing the vibrant green carpet, as we walked past. The gates to the inner layer of walls opened up and those that had ties to the people in Farm Station rushed out. It was nice to see friends and family reunited, but nothing could compare to when Raven rushed forward and found me. I could only happily return her kiss since she practically jumped on me.

"I missed you too," I chuckled softly as I supported most of her body weight.

"You better have," she growled playfully in my ear.

"Where's your necklace? I can sense it, but..."

"Sinclair took it from me. I got bored after you left so I started doing tests on it like you said to, but he saw the reports and commandeered it," she replied.

"I'll get it back for you," I chuckled then kissed her again.

"So, everything turned out, okay?" she asked.

"More or less... Azgeda isn't going straight to war with us which is something," I answered honestly while hiding other things.

Bellamy, Clarke, and Finn were smart enough to keep quiet about everything else that happened, so I was able to keep things happy between me and Raven throughout the night. The survivors of Farm Station were placed throughout Arkadia, but even with people being moved to Mount Weather and the Second Dawn bunker, there were still a number of people that had to double up with bunks. Raven and I sacrificed one of our two separate rooms, purely out of the goodness of hearts, so that someone else could have it.

The sound of someone pounding on metal woke me up disgruntled, and I curled into Raven, trying to ignore whatever was waking me up this morning. Unfortunately, the person on the other side of the door was insistent and both Raven and I were fully awakened. I was still trying to resist the truth, but she ran her fingers through my hair, and I could not help but perk up at her touch.

"Go; save the world... I'll still be here," she teased.

"Can't we just hide in here and pretend like we aren't home?" I asked, burying my face in her neck.

"With Ryder outside the door?" she chuckled. "No. Now, get up and handle whoever it is."

I sat up with a sigh, replying, "Fine... use logic against me."

She chuckled again as she watched me get dressed without moving from the bed until she saw the clock. "Shit! How did we sleep so late? Sinclair is going to kill me," she complained as she hurried to get dressed as well.

"Well... we did stay up pretty late," I teased, about to hug her before she pushed me away.

"Which was your fault," she grumbled. "Not all of us can get out of working."

"I work... sometimes," I defended with a laugh.

She rolled her eyes and gave me a quick kiss before she slipped past me. When she opened the door, Kane was waiting on the other side. I could only give a wry smile as she squeezed by him and headed on her way, with Ryder following behind her, while he gave me a hard look.

"We just got back yesterday, and I had a long night. Sorry," I said with a shrug.

He let out a huff and motioned towards the hallway for me to walk with him. "It's fine for today, but we are limited on time, especially when it comes to being able to utilize your powers," Kane replied as we headed down the corridor. "Sinclair is begging for as much of the metal you made for Raven as you can make. If I didn't know as much as I did, I wouldn't believe everything that he claims it can do."

"You know... that was a gift originally and he stole it," I reminded.

"I apologize, but I agree with his decision. It's some kind of superalloy that frankly should be impossible, yet he has already demonstrated a number of things to me, and I can't refute anything that I've seen so far."

We stepped into a large workroom where Raven, Sinclair, and a few other people were working on various things. We headed over to Sinclair who looked almost excited to see me as we gathered around a large table. Using my sixth sense, I found where the remains of the charm was, making me frown when I saw the state it was in.

"Really?" I complained, stretching out a hand and manipulating the metal to come back to my hand, but the raven was gone since it had been flattened into the thickness of a coin.

"Amazing... you really can control it with, what? Your mind?" Sinclair asked with wonder in his eyes.

"Something like that. There is a kind of energy in my body that allows me to manipulate Earth, Fire, Air, and Water with focus and lots of practice," I replied, examining the metal closer since I noticed that half of the mana that had been originally left over was gone.

"Have you always had them?"

"I'm not sure... the first time that I used them, it was unconsciously after I saw Jasper get hit with a spear on our second day down here. Stressful situations can bring out my powers... So, what makes this so amazing that you ruined my gift?" I asked as I placed the coin-sized piece of metal on the table.

"Everything... It's a perfect conductor of electricity, the heat resistance is off the charts, completely resistant to corrosion even against the strongest acids that we have, but what's really incredible..." he said, picking up the metal and banged it hard on the table. I did not understand why he had done it since nothing happened to the metal, but then he proceeded to bend it in half with what looked like little effort. "... it can be completely rigid one moment and flexible in the next. I don't understand how that's possible."

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"It's the mana that still inside of it... my energy. I sensed it react when you folded it which explains why it only has half of the amount of energy that I remembered," I explained.

"Can you take all of the energy out of it so we can retest it?"

"I should be able to," I replied, holding out my hand.

Sinclair gave me the piece of metal back and started draining the energy out of it. It lost a bit of its luster, but that was the only noticeable difference. I handed it back to him and the first thing he tried to do was bend it again but could not this time.

"Raven," Sinclair called out and passed the piece to her. "Start rerunning all of the test on this. What do you need to make more of the metal?"

Raven and I shared a smile while he talked and then I replied with a chuckle, "Time, energy, and a lot of dirt. To make that piece of metal, I compressed a stone brick that I had made with my power. It started off roughly this size," gesturing with my hands, "but it was the size of my finger when I was done."

"Incredible... everything that I have ever learned about physics has been proven wrong with a tiny piece of metal," he said with a wry smile, shaking his head.

"Because it's normal for someone to be able to conjure flames with a thought," I chuckled, forming a small ball of white fire above my hand. "Let just agree that anything involving these powers is an anomaly until someone else like me appears."

"Agreed," he replied, watching the fire disappear.

"We don't know how long that Octavia will be able to stay here before she is called back to Polis. Do you want her to start making the metal now, or wait on your tests to finish?" Kane asked.

"Most of the test will take the rest of the day, so if there really isn't anything special needed and there are no side effects for you, I'd like you to make as much as you can. Even if it's lost all of its uniqueness without your energy in it, I can still do a lot with the extra metal," Sinclair answered.

"Alrighty, then I just need a place to camp out and get started. I wasn't joking when I said I would need a lot of dirt, so I'm not sure if you really want me doing this inside the walls," I said.

"I'll assign a couple of people to bring you dirt from outside, but I'd rather not risk you being outside the walls for too long. You got lucky before when that bullet hit your shoulder," Kane replied.

I could only silently curse Kane in my mind when Raven looked over questioningly and growled at him, "You realize that I had been hiding that from someone, right?"

That only served to make Raven's expression darker, but Kane quickly understood what I meant.

"Let's get you started," Kane said in an attempt to break the tension in the air.

"Yes, someone was just reminding me that I don't pull my weight around here enough," I retorted, giving Raven one last apologetic look before I turned away.

Kane and I walked out of the room and made out way outside. He called over Major Byrne and explained to her what I would be doing. She nodded then walked off to find a couple of people to handle the job.

"I'm sorry about Raven; I didn't know that no one told her," Kane said quietly.

"It's fine," I sighed as I sat down in a nice, shady spot out of the way. "She'll get over me being shot; it's the fact that I hid it, that's going to get me the lecture."

"You said that intentionally for her to overhear?"

"I'd rather her be mad at me than worried about me. My biggest hope by doing all of this is that we can have real peace... and that none of us will have to relive what I've seen. The mistakes that I've made since I received my powers have already led to so many bad things happening again. Pitying me is worse than hating me, although I doubt Raven will do so over this stunt."

"It's strange hearing you talk like that when you look so young. How old were you, if you don't mind me asking?"

"I think roughly a hundred and sixty, but we were in cryo-stasis for a hundred and twenty-five years traveling between planets," I chuckled, enjoying the look of disbelief on his face. "Roughly six after Priamfaya forces us underground, Diyoza's ship will land, and you can believe me then."

"Are we going to have to do that again?" he asked, slowly regaining his senses.

"If we can keep Eden from being destroyed in the crossfire while we try to handle Diyoza and her people, I doubt it. Lexa and I are planning to make sure that Wonkru will have a lot more peaceful time in the bunker, so if I keep training from now until then, especially with her powers added to the mix, we should be able to disarm them before it can happen. Diyoza is... was... will be a friend, but her people are less cohesive than the Coalition yet understand technology like ours. We plan on granting them fair treatment like Lexa did for us, but we are not going to risk them with control of their ship."

"I think I'm going to retire after we make it through this," Kane sighed.

I chuckled, "Don't say that. We'll need Ambassador Kane for a long time. There will be little that we can predict by that point and our usefulness will lessen."

"You're planning on saving thousands of people, and you think your 'usefulness' will lessen?"

I gave him a smile but said nothing as I looked behind him to watch Major Byrne walk up with nearly perfect timing. He gave me a hard look, knowing that I was hiding something important, but what, was certainly not what he was imagining. Tori had told both Katye and I the same thing: when the journey of the original story was done, we would move on to our next life.

Kane did not push me further and left to handle other matters while I put in my headphones. I started working by making dozens of stone bricks that I placed to the side until I had made a sizable hole in the ground. After that, I slowly worked my way through the bricks, compressing them into small bars of metal. I stopped every now and then to meditate when I felt a headache forming, but throughout the whole time, I kept my eyes closed and ignored the world around me.

"Octavia," Raven's voice rang in my ears as she pulled out my headphones.

Opening my eyes, I took in a lot of things at once. There were only two stone bricks left while there was a large pile of metal bars next to me. It was also night, and a lot of people were walking away from us, meaning that I had likely drawn a crowd while I had been working.

I sighed, "I'm sorry... I just zoned out while I was focusing on what I was doing."

"You're fine. People just said that you haven't moved in hours," she replied with a relieved expression.

As soon as I tried to move my body, I knew that it was true because of how everything ached, and groaned, "I think that's about right."

"That's what you get," she said with a half-hearted smile while she tucked a few strands of hair behind my ear.

"I'm sorry that I didn't tell you about it," I sighed, "I just didn't want you to worry about me."

"I already do," Raven replied before she kissed me.

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