Between Us

Only Choice

Please review!

***

The floor should be worn with his pacing, the metal grating sanded by the soles of his shoes. He's surely walked it enough, miles of it, dangling in the stars. He's taken thousands of steps suspended over the earth, but their destination is always the starting point. He always returns to this same place before the same window overlooking the same broken planet.

Again, and again, and again.

The sight sets his teeth on edge, and prompts the inevitable question that he never can seem to make leave him alone.

Will we ever make it back?

And like every time before, he tries to banish it as quickly as it comes, burying it underneath the weight of better things.
We will make it, he tells himself, because we have to.

They haven't survived all this to stop now. And he didn't come this far only to leave Clarke to believe they'd never made it at all.

Bellamy tries not to think how the day-by-day strategy has stretched into weeks, and they are no closer to a plan than they were then. 15 days ago, they chose to reboot everything, with no change. The waiting game, as Murphy put it, no longer seems like a strategy, but their only option. Wait, until something changes. Or wait until Raven's new radar system catches something.

Either way, it leaves him in the same place, and it is almost enough to have him tearing out his hair.

"You look out that window as though earth is going somewhere."

Bellamy looks over his shoulder at Raven, her eyes pinned on the screen before her. She hasn't stopped looking at them. Despite installing her system with alarms that will alert them to any frequency, she still doesn't want to risk missing something.

Bellamy can't blame her. He is here too, after all.

"I'm not worried about the planet going anywhere," he says.

Raven looks up at him. Her eyes don't have to search much to read the unspoken words. I'm afraid that we will.

She smirks half-heartedly. Or maybe it's a frown. Sometimes it is hard to tell; some days their joking has lost its own gravity, becoming as dry as the dust on the earth. It's left Bellamy to wonder if they're all doomed to leave the ring with a humor like Murphy's.

"It just . . . takes time," Raven says, an edge in her words, because she's repeated them at least twice in the last 48-hours.

"But we can't power down again," Bellamy says. "Not if we have to."

Raven has told him of the problem the first time they rebooted the ring and saw the fuel gauge right after. Rebooting costs fuel they don't have, and to continue doing so is to potentially lose the only fuel they have left to get back to the ground.

Raven's silence is answer enough, and Bellamy returns his gaze to the window so he doesn't say exactly what he wants to. He tries to think of more promising things, but his mind turns back to Clarke's most recent call, and the information he could glean from it. He's lost count of the days, the number butchered by the poor connection they've been unable to improve.

"Right, day one-thou- . . . -eighty. Thank you, M . . . -adi."

Madi.

Questions pummel him without answer. The who, the what. The when. The how. They roll into a stream of question marks Bellamy finds himself turning frequently towards, as though it is a puzzle he is capable of solving from here.