"It's day one-hundred-and-one," Clarke says into the receiver, "and I'm still here. You have the irradiated deer meat to thank for that. It actually makes me miss the freeze-dried rations you're probably having to put up with, so no complaining." She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, contemplating as she does everyday how much to tell. "In the last week, I've learned that the Nightblood treatment is holding and I don't think I'll be needing any part of the suit for much longer."

Though faintly scarred, everything is where it should be. She is still whole.

On the outside, anyway.

"It feels good to be outside again. It may not be the most attractive nature walk I've been on, but I'm able to get a scope of the area. See exactly what's left." She does not tell him the sight has brought her to tears. She does not share, in detail, the wasteland Earth has become. She does not tell him of her drawings, that after running out of pencils, she's begun to paint with ashes instead.

"If our radio-feed could travel both ways, Raven could instruct me on the statistical aspects of everything. Maybe it would help somehow." Clarke shakes her head. "But we both know that doesn't really matter, does it?"

Of course, there is no reply.

She shuts her eyes against the tears that threaten to fall. "That's what I thought."

***

His dreams yank him from sleep in a sudden jolt.

One moment he is lying in bed, and the next he is sitting bolt upright, sweat dampening his hair and stinging his eyes.

The in-between of those two moments are usually the same, full of flashes of memories that play on repeat. There's only ever two, but they go back and forth. Back and forth. In the first, he is back on the hill, donned in a suit that weighs him down as he looks into blue eyes before he turns in the opposite direction and walks away.

The second is the worst. In it, he is back at the lab, staring after a door he know won't open in time. He gets into the rocket. He stares out the window, waiting and waiting. And here is when it changes; just as the rocket prepares to launch, the door swings open and in stumbles Clarke.

Bellamy tries to tell the others to wait. To let her on. But it's too late. The rocket has already launched and each time he is forced to watch as he leaves her behind.

They don't happen every day, but they happen enough to never let him forget. As if he can.

Today is one of those days and Bellamy shakes it off as best he can before starting on his daily work that has become routine. Still, it clings to him like humidity once did, as he leaves his room and heads for the bridge.

Since arriving at the Ark, no title has been adapted to him. He is not a mechanic or an engineer. There aren't any external threats that would require a guard of him. He is more like the others, in that he does what needs to be done, under the directions of those who understand wires and physics, namely Raven and Monty.

But there are times when it seems the others looks to him as a leader of sorts. But to be the only leader of the Ark would render Bellamy as Chancellor, and that is a thought that leaves him feeling like a little boy again, with precious secrets tucked beneath the floor. No, If Bellamy is a leader on this Ark then so is Raven, which means they are co-leaders in this scenario. But that doesn't make this the dropship anymore than it makes Raven Clarke.

And it wouldn't be fair to wish it that way either. The Ark is not Earth. Here, it is different. Here, he doesn't cool under Raven's calm, because Raven is fire. When her temper flares, it stokes his, until one has to remedy the stubbornness of the other.

But it works, in a way unlike the relationship he shared with Clarke did. On the ground, he and Clarke had always been opposites; reason and emotion shouldering rifles as they stood side by side. Where she had been the quiet mind to his loud heart, Raven has become the amplifier to it. The spitfire mechanic is more like him than he ever realized before, which renders any agreements resolute and any disagreements . . . an absolute pain.

The others have already begun their work. Bellamy passes Monty checking the oxygen supply to ensure they are not overcompensating, as he does every Thursday. In the area that used to be a council room are Harper and Echo, with Emori probably somewhere close by. As he anticipated, the adjustment to space has proven the most challenging for the two grounders, united only in the commonality that they were both born beneath a sky rather than in the stars. It's hardly incited any bonding between the two, but Bellamy thinks time will change that. At least, he hopes it will.

Raven, predictably, is in the control room, fiddling with her screens and tests and doing a multitude of things Bellamy can never hope to understand.

There is never much that has to be done, and what is to be usually consists of the same thing, occasionally in a different order, but always predictable. Always unsurprising. Three months have passed since leaving the ground and he still doesn't know what to do with all the quiet after a year of war and ruin.

Today that quiet seems extra loud, and the time goes slower than usual. He tends to his work, making sure everything is is in working order, because things can change very quickly when you're only seven people running a ship. When he's finished, he goes where he does every afternoon, to the cell or to his room, the two best places to sit and to listen.

Sure enough, Clarke's update rattles over the speaker and he relaxes. The first part she says makes him smile, before her voice becomes more serious-more somber-and he knows it is going to be a short update today.

He's not an idiot; he knows she does that on purpose, never saying everything she really wants to. Probably to spare him, and that lights the fuse to his temper, until he has to put it completely out of mind if he doesn't want the guilt to consume him. She is still trying to protect him, when sometimes Bellamy just wants her to tell him everything. To shout, to cry, to put it all someplace rather than locking it behind a facade of complacency where he cannot go.

How many times had he blamed her when she left him behind? How many mistakes of his had he pinned on her, fastened by the thought: if only she had been here? Now it is the other way around, and she won't even divulge to him how much she's hurting, because she doesn't want to make him feel responsible for it. She's said as much and Bellamy keeps waiting for the break, for the hardness to self-destruct. But it doesn't. And the more he waits for it, the closer he comes to it himself.

On his way back to the control room, Bellamy tries to massage the tension from his neck. Circadian bulbs light his way and he's never hated artificial light more than when they'd first arrived and it took a week for his headache to finally recede. Again, he wishes he were back on Earth and it takes him only a moment before he remembers that the sun does not shine there either.

He hears Murphy before he sees him, a saunter in the echo of his footsteps, appearing at the bend in the corridor. The other man wears similar attire to Bellamy's; a simple white shirt and dark cargo pants. His hands are crammed into the pockets and when Bellamy nods and passes him, Murphy loiters before swinging back around. He calls after him.

Bellamy turns back.

"How's she handling it?" Murphy asks, his voice droll. But there's an emotion in his eyes, one that runs deeper than curiosity but is too guarded to be considered concern.

"The radiation?"

"The isolation."

Bellamy knew what he meant.

He stands straighter to hide the wilt on the inside. "She's strong," is his answer. "She'll make it through this." Because she didn't survive the end of the world just to die after it.

"That's what you say," replies Murphy, resting his side against the wall. He stares at him intently. "But you don't know what it's like to be trapped in a place. Having no one to talk to." He scuffs his shoe against the ground. "Even a prisoner has guards to talk to. And even if they don't say anything, they listen. But Clarke has no one."

"She has us," Bellamy says. "We are listening."

"But it's not like she knows that. For all she knows, her words are just filling up an empty space in the sky."

Bellamy's hands tighten into fists and his eyes narrow. "It's not the same as what happened to you. She has her mom waiting for her. It's not indefinite."

"Maybe not," he agrees. "But there's a big difference between a few months and five years." He has the sensitivity to simper. Barely. "I'm just saying-"

"What are you saying?" Bellamy asks, his words broken to a sharp point. "Do you think that I don't know this is going to be hard for her?" He points towards the wall, gesturing to the world beyond it. "That the fact that she's on her own isn't going to change her?" He's tried to imagine it for himself, what it would be like to be so alone. He's considered how he would occupy the time, going so far as to compose a mental list of all the things he could do, with the days that it would require added up in total. But no matter how much he thinks of it, no matter how many options he produces, he still never manages to exceed three hundred days.

If Murphy is fazed by the warning in Bellamy's voice, he doesn't show it, and his stoic expression remains unshaken. "Oh, I think you do. And I also think that it's gonna get worse. This isn't a war she can strategize against, Bellamy. This isn't a lever she can just pull to irradiate the problem. Like you said, she's the only one on the ground, by herself, and we're not even one year in. She's got four more to go."

Bellamy shakes his head. He takes a step forward, anger and fear tempering his blood. "I'm aware of that, Murphy, so why don't you tell me your real reason for stating the obvious?"

The thing about John Murphy is that he is never incapable of looking someone in the eyes. He doesn't cower, even when he knows the other person is not going to like what he has to say. "I'm just not so sure you want to see what kind of person is left after all this." He gives a small shrug. "If there's any left at all."

The implication is a barrage and Bellamy just stares back at him. He wants to argue. Actually he wants to shove Murphy into the wall, maybe even hit him to knock some sense back into that thick head of his. But Bellamy doesn't, because somewhere deep inside of him, enfolded in a quilt of dreams and buried under his guilt, lies a darker fear.

That maybe he is right.

***

Clarke has known silence before.

Kept within the confines of a cell in the skybox, she knows what it's like to have no one to talk to. She knows what it means to become so familiar with an area that even the smallest details are imprinted into her memory.

But what she doesn't know is how to do it for another four years.

"Day one-hundred-and-sixty," she says, her voice weary to her own ears. "Nearly five months after praimfaya. I'd like to say the time's gone quick but I don't exactly have an abundance of entertainment here, Which gives me a lot of extra time to think. Not exactly sure if that's a good thing or not." She exhales a deep sigh, staring out the window she's seated before. The sky is not gun-grey anymore but an opaque silver, with a plexus of faint, crimson veins threading between tumultuous clouds.

"I'm going for the Ark tomorrow, just to check things out. Maybe see if one of the Rovers survived. From there I'll head to the bunker like I said I would." She tries to make her voice sound more hopeful than she feels as she relays how she's been leaving the lab more. "It felt good at first, after the radiation effects wore off but . . . I think I expected it to help more than it did."

She stares out at the sky until her eyes burn and her heart aches. "As it turns out, the world is a really small place when you're the only one left in it."