Between Us

Static

I'm just uploading all that I've written of this in one go. 

***

"Day three-hundred-and-sixty-eight. I went to Polis and found the tower. As for the bunker . . ." Clarke hesitates, uncertain. Should she tell him? Would she want him to, if it were the other way around?

"It's fine," she lies. "So you don't have to worry about Octavia. I on the other hand could really use some company." She hates the hitch in her voice. Today she is unable to bury it. "I miss you," she whispers, tears thick in her voice and she bites her lip until it almost bleeds. "I miss everyone. I miss people. I don't know how I'm going to do this. I don't even know if you're hearing anything that I'm saying and a part of me hopes that you're not. I don't want your guilt, Bellamy. I don't want to cause you pain. Some days are just hard. Really hard. So . . . if you are hearing this, I need you to stay alive, all right? Don't give up, and neither will I."

***

Sitting in the cell with his back to the wall, Bellamy's hand tightens over the speaker. "I don't know how I'm going to do this," her voice fills the room, its echo suspended in the air.

He releases a shaky breath and purses his lips. His fingers tremble the more his frustration grows. If only he could do something. Anything. Anything at all, but sit and listen to the break finally hit. He shuts his eyes, gritting his teeth against the torrent of memory. Ten minutes on the clock. A closing door. This is what Clarke would want.

"I don't want your guilt, Bellamy."

He scoffs quietly to himself. Of course he knows that. Just like he knows he couldn't have changed what happened if he could. Yet the guilt lingers. There must have been something I could've done different, is a song to him that just plays and plays, no matter the fact that he can't do anything about it now. Not ever.

"I don't want to cause you pain."

Is she? Not directly, no. It's the knowledge of her being down there, alone, that makes the guilt thrum, just as it would if he didn't receive the calls at all.

When he'd first heard her radio call, it had lifted a burden from his shoulders. It had given a piece of solace back to him. But then he picked up on the hurt in her voice. The weariness, as he got a taste through her words what saving them had cost her. And still does his conscience suffer the weight of her hurt, as if he had been the one to inflict it himself.

At the start, he'd been sorry. That faded, though, when he knew that if he could reply, she'd immediately disapprove of his regret. Keep yourself alive. Keep them alive, is what she'd say. So he kept his guilt to himself, as he does now, silent but indelibly there, pressing against his sternum like a second heartbeat.

"Don't give up, and neither will I."

"Sounds like a promise," he mumbles, leaning his head back and staring at the ceiling above. "I won't break it if you don't."

***

The vehicle trudges through the ash and debris well enough. Winds have increased over the last few months, making travel a little more manageable. Above, the sky remains in a perpetual bad mood, maintaining an impenetrable sheet of 's decided to use the day for more distant scavenging and she takes her time, stopping every once in awhile to step out and look. Scavenging for what, though, is harder to pinpoint. She doesn't know what she expects to find each time she opens the door and climbs from the Rover, exchanging one barren plate of ground for another. She supposed she's just looking for something nameless. A something in a nothing world.