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***

"It's day nine-hundred-and-ten, and sunlight has finally penetrated through the clouds."

As she speaks, Clarke watches the rays of light dance over her clothes, capturing motes of ash as flecks of golden dust. She closes her eyes and lifts a hand, letting the sun warm her palm. "I wish you were here to feel this, Bellamy. Fluorescent lights are a crude imitation of the real thing. But it's here again. Finally."

She reopens her eyes and drops her palm back to the rock she sits on. "I'm still trying to loosen the ground enough to actually sow the storage of seeds but it's proving challenging. It's ironic, I guess; planting seeds in ash." She grimaces. "I'd like there to be more for me to tell you. There are questions I'd like to ask you. Things you could really help me with, but I guess that'll have to wait.

"These updates have to be pretty boring by now but I think I need to give them maybe as much as you need to hear them. If you're hearing them." Clarke sighs and tilts her head back, even though she's not really thinking about the sun any more. "I'm not giving up on that hope," she says. "It's why I do this. And it's why I'll keep doing this until I see you again. But until then . . ." She drifts off at the echo that sounds, of small, quiet feet brushing across the floor. They pause only when they reach the door.

Clarke looks over at the little girl who stands there, wide brown eyes gazing back from beneath a crooked black beanie much too big for her.

Clarke smirks, as if sharing some private joke with him. "We'll be here. Surviving."

***

The silence is just as loud in space as it is on Earth, maybe even louder. When Bellamy first arrived on the Ark, the quiet was deafening, but he found connections that soothed his longing for the ground. There was the hum of the circadian lights he could imagine as the chimes of crickets. The undercurrent of electricity vibrating through the walls was like a distant river, the force echoing through the very ground, and for the first few weeks upon arrival, Bellamy slept on the floor.

But over time, that hum of the lights began to sound less like crickets and more like lights. The electrical current stopped sounding like a natural one. He sleeps in his cot now. And as Bellamy stares up at the metal ceiling like he's done for the last two and a half years, he realizes that he is starting to forget. The memories have begun to lose their edge.

He rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands and pulls in a deep breath. He tries not to think of what else has faded from him, like the color of Charlotte's eyes or the quiet fire in Lincoln's. The last words he spoke to Jasper. And thoughts like those inevitably lead back to one person, and his mind is once again on her. On her and her updates, all three-hundred-and-twenty-one of them, before the sudden, taut stretch of radio silence. Nine months since the signal went out and he's still received no word. Not a crackle of feed. Nothing. He knows better than to presume her dead, but he wonders. He worries.

Despite himself, he drudges up pieces of the conversations they once shared, disturbing the silt of memory. Their last conversation seems to hang on the air, and the words of Clarke's final update pierce the silence. Keep them alive, Bellamy.

He tries to recall the inflection of her voice exactly as it was, as if he only spoke with her yesterday, a luxury he didn't fully realize he'd had until he'd lost it. Bring yourself home.

But he can't. Its clarity is gone along with the other memories, another loss among the casualties of survival.

May we meet again.

With a resigned sigh, Bellamy snatches his blanket and spreads it out just beneath the small, circular window of his apartment. He stares out at the stars, imagining himself beneath them instead of immersed in them as he rests on a floor that has long since grown uncomfortable.

***

It is a tradition of theirs; every night, before Clarke tucks Madi in, she reads to her.

When she first found the little girl in the ruins of Polis, Clarke quickly learned that Madi only spoke Triangesleng, with only a couple English words dotting her vocabulary. So Clarke spoke the same, if only to offer the child a sense of familiarity. She didn't want Madi to feel uprooted from her past; new home, new world, new language. But after the first few months, Madi grew curious, and once she began sounding out new English words, Clarke pulled the stories from her past, composed them in pencil, and bound them together in books for her to learn from.

Clarke takes a seat on her makeshift cot and pulls out the box of their bound spines Madi keeps tucked safely beside her. The girl sits with her legs crossed, gazing at the books tentatively.

Clarke smiles. "Which will em be tonight?" She asks.

On cue, Madi jumps and snatches up one in particular. Clarke doesn't even have to look to know which one she's nabbed. It is her favorite.

Clarke waits as Madi scoots over to make room for her before taking her place at her side, snuggled tightly into her.

It took hours before Madi would let her come close in Polis. It took almost the entire day before she would let Clarke close enough to touch her. But once she did, the girl clung there. She was a fighter. She was a survivor. But she had also been alone and craved the human interaction even more than Clarke did.

It was the first and only time since that Clarke has ever seen Madi cry.

Now, seated on their makeshift cot, Clarke adjusts her position and tucks her arm around Madi, who flips open the book's cover to a drawing of a child with long dark hair draping like a curtain down her back.

"Once upon a time there was a little girl, who was born in the stars inside of a steel cage." Clarke's gentle voice fills the room. "This cage held many others too, but they were given the freedom to move around. The freedom to live." She turns the page to another drawing of the child crawling into a small space, with only dim light to see by. "The little girl, though, was a secret. And she was kept safely hidden under the floor."

Madi listens intently, absorbing every word as she gazes fixedly on the images grazing her fingers and the written counterparts.

"But the little girl was not alone. She had a protector. Someone who would always be there for her, no matter what."

Madi turns the page again, to an image of a boy a bit older than the girl, with an unruly head of curls. He gestures with a finger pressed to his lips for her to be quiet as he told her a story.

"He took care of her. He helped her to be brave, and even though the little girl was scared at times, she never lost hope, because she had him."

Madi eagerly flips the page again and draws the book near, as if she can enter the story if only she can just get close enough to its words.

Clarke laughs softly and she tucks a wayward strand of hair behind Madi's ear. "Years passed, but still, he protected her." The next page reveals the girl grown now, on the cusp of womanhood. "Even after she was found out and the secret was revealed did he continue to fight for her. When she was plucked from the stars and sent to the ground, he followed after her."

"En em found her," breathes Madi excitedly, exhilarated by Clarke's words, though she's heard them so much she must know them by heart.

Clarke nods. "That's right; he found her."

"En em saved her."

"Yeah, he did."

She shifts around until her wide brown eyes meet Clarke's. "Protector," she says, pointing to Clarke. "Yu laik ai protector. Like him."

Clarke tugs on her hat playfully and gives her a rueful smile. "I guess I am. Always."

Madi smiles back before her brows furrow in thought. Her gaze drifts back the book. "Den what happened?"

Clarke shrugs and pulls her closer. "What do you hope happened?" She asks, because she wants Madi to believe in hope, and it is a testament to Madi's courage that she does. Even after the end of the world.

"Emo're teina," she says, tapping a finger over the drawing of the boy and the girl. "En happy." They are together and they are happy.

Clarke smiles a sad smile and nods, letting Madi flip through the artwork again. While she paints a mental picture of the boy and the girl now in the same place, happy and strong, Clarke's chest grows heavy.

She doesn't see the point in telling Madi the rest of the story; that the boy has been returned to the steel cage and the girl is back beneath the floor.