It's a beautiful day today, Bellamy. I wish you'd been here with me to watch the sun rise. Can't wait until you're all back on the ground. 1298 days and counting.

That had been today's transmission from Clarke, sent in the early morning. For a long time now, messages like this had been enough to keep him going. Hearing her voice, knowing she was alive after all - Bellamy had been feasting on those crumbs for more than a year.

But today, for some reason, it just hadn't been enough.

It had been building in him, he realized, this need to respond, to ask questions. To let Clarke know that at least for the moment, they, too, were okay up there on the Ark. But at the moment, he could do none of those things. Bellamy's frustration was suddenly in full bloom and he was unable to contain it.

"Raven," he said at dinner that night, "uh…I'm almost afraid to bring this up, considering what happened the last time, but..."

His voice trailed off and Raven eyed him suspiciously.

"Just spit it out," she snapped, impatient.

Bellamy's mouth quirked and he shrugged. If they all got pissed off again, so be it, but he'd avoided the subject for a long time and he wasn't waiting another day.

"Isn't it time to start trying to build our own comms? So we can talk to Clarke? Maybe ask questions about the bunker? After all, wouldn't some information be helpful while we're making a plan to get back to Earth?"

Bellamy had steeled himself for Raven's expected protests, for her arguments. Perhaps even her derision. What he hadn't been prepared for was her agreement.

She nodded sharply. "You're right on both counts. We need to start figuring out how we're gonna get back to the ground, and for that we need information."

Echo had been listening to the exchange closely and now she frowned in confusion.

"Aren't we going back the same way we got here? In the rocket? I mean, I know you were worried about the fuel…"

Raven smiled. Echo had been a pretty good physics student, but apparently not quite good enough.

"We can't actually use the rocket to get back. Rockets are good for going up into space, but not so good for getting back. We need a different sort of transport. Something that will be able to land safely on the ground."

Raven looked around the table as five heads nodded.

"And what would that look like?" Echo persisted.

Raven sighed. "Well, a shuttle would be nice. Something that could descend through the atmosphere and then glide into a safe landing on the ground. Like an airplane."

Echo's brows drew together, and Bellamy watched her trying to recall his lessons on air transport.

Raven saw the look and smiled. "Don't bother trying to come up with a mental image, Echo. We have no shuttles here."

"So…what was the original plan for the return trip with the rocket, then? If it couldn't land, I mean. There must have been one, right?"

Raven smiled. "Yes, there was one. There's a pod inside the rocket that's meant to be the landing ship. But there are a couple of problems. First, I've looked it over and it was damaged during the flight here. Maybe because of the retrofit. And then, even if I could fix it, it's…well, it's still not big enough for seven passengers."

Bellamy saw the shock he felt at her statement mirrored in the others.

Raven frowned. "Yeah, it's a pisser, all right. But don't get too depressed about that part, because there's still the question of fuel, anyway."

Monty opened his mouth and Bellamy was sure he'd been about to say something, but Harper rushed in first.

"Can we at least a look at the descent pod? Maybe there's a way we can retrofit it, just like we did the rocket," she insisted optimistically.

"I've already calculated it a dozen times. And besides, we still have no fuel." Raven sighed. "But I suppose we can take a look after dinner."

Twenty minutes later, they were traipsing around the ring towards the hangar, an area they rarely visited.

"Raven," Bellamy said quietly, tugging her back, letting the others pass. "Why didn't you tell me about this before? That there was a space issue in the landing pod?"

Raven shrugged. "I just…I figured I'd cross that bridge when…you know…"

He sighed quietly. "I'm pretty sure that bridge is on the horizon and getting closer every day."

Bellamy understood that Raven knew a hell of a lot more about this stuff than he ever would, but he'd also thought they were a team. And secrets didn't exactly inspire trust. He tried his best to let it go.

"We'll figure it out. Dammit, Raven" he hissed, "if Clarke can survive praimfaya, and make it all this time more or less on her own, I'm not letting a little thing like…like…leg room stop me from getting back to her."

He knew his determination must have sounded a little crazed when she smirked, saluted him smartly and said, "Aye, aye, cap'n."

"Shut up," he grinned, poking her in the ribs.

By the time they reached the hangar, his resolve had become steely, but when they went inside the rocket and found the descent pod, it weakened considerably. The pod had clearly been built for two, and he could see that it might be retrofitted to accommodate perhaps four passengers, but certainly no more. Definitely not seven.

Would they be forced into another lottery? Another culling? Just the thought made him shudder.

Echo studied the pod curiously, walking all around it, and then her head began to nod.

"Seven people would never fit inside this small space," she declared, as though that weren't the exact premise that they'd started with.

Raven snorted in exasperation. "No duh! What do you think I've been trying to tell you?"

Echo shrugged. "Then I don't see why you wouldn't use one of the others. One of the bigger ones."

"Others? What others? Monty," Raven turned to him, the expression on her face one enormous confused frown, "do you know what the hell she's talking about?"

When he shook his head, Raven swung back toward Echo impatiently. "I don't see any other pods."

"Not here," Echo sounded equally exasperated. "I mean the ones in…in there." Her arm waved in the general direction of the ring.

"Exactly where…in there?"

"You don't know about them?" Echo was clearly perplexed. "They were in one of the rooms I went through looking for debris. Somewhere…" Her voice trailed off vaguely.

"Echo," Bellamy deemed it a good time to get involved. "Can you show us where these pods are?"

Her expression became uncertain.

"I'm not sure…"

That wasn't cutting it with Murphy.

"What the fuck, Echo? You must have some idea where you saw this stuff. Unless you're just making it the hell up!"

In all their time together, they'd mostly managed to avoid coming to blows, but the few times it had happened it hadn't been pretty. So Bellamy laid a calming hand on Echo's shoulder as she began to tense, and answered Murphy himself. "If Echo says she saw pods while she was clearing out all the junk, then she did. It makes sense she wouldn't have known what they were. Why don't we divide the ring into a rough grid? We can split up and start a search tomorrow."

"Fuck tomorrow!" Murphy was as determined and impatient as ever. "I'm starting right now."

Bellamy could see in their faces that it would be useless to argue, and in truth, he was just as anxious to find out if these phantom pods really did exist. "Okay," he nodded. "Let's give it a few hours tonight, and if we don't find anything we can pick up again tomorrow."

It was the work of a very few minutes to decide who should search where. Bellamy divided the ring into only six roughly equal segments, because for as much a Raven wanted to be one of the searchers, Bellamy convinced her to let them find the damn things first. Then she could make her way to wherever they happened to be. She wasn't happy about it, but she knew it made the most sense.

They didn't find the pods that night, or the next day. Or even the next. But on the third day, Echo found them, just where she'd seen them last, nearly 180 degrees around the ring from the section they occupied, and tucked into an interior room whose door was nearly invisible.

"I remember being surprised there was another room back there," Echo told them, after she'd alerted the group and they'd assembled to check out her find. "I had a hard time opening the door."

It was Raven who finally figured it out.

"This must have been the training room," she told them, wide-eyed. "I'd just been cleared by Sinclair to work in zero-g when Jaha sent down the drop ship and then everything went all to hell. Otherwise, I'd have known all about this room. Probably would have been training in here myself, I suppose, but I never got the chance."

She moved closer, peering at one of the pods, her frustration evident as her game leg kept her from climbing up the side and through the door.

"We'll have to set up some kind of scaffolding, but for now, Bellamy, can you give me a boost so I can check it out?"

Bellamy picked her up and set her on a lower platform, and from there she was able to scramble up and slip inside. He was on pins and needles until her head popped back around the door. The shit-eating grin told him everything he needed to know.

"Yeah?" he asked, brows raised, his voice and his smile tentative until he'd heard it with his own ears.

"Yep," Raven said with a blast of her old confidence. "I can work with this."

Bellamy helped her down amid the whoops and cheers of their friends, and she stood there for a moment before finally whistling them all to silence.

"Will you guys shut the fuck up for a minute! I said I can do it, but I didn't say it would be easy and I didn't say it would be fast. The basic components are there - navigation, propulsion, life support - but it was still only a training module. So first I have to figure out how to modify it and then find the shit we need to make that happen."

"Hey, when it comes to finding tech, I've had a whole lot of experience," Emori reminded her. "If what you need is anywhere in this pile of crap, I'll find it."

Raven nodded. "I'll hold you to that. And," she added, turning to Monty, "there's still the problem of the fuel."

"Yeah, well, I've been working on that," he said. "I've had some ideas about using the waste from our food supply to make fuel." Monty paused, shrugged. "I wasn't sure we'd ever really need it so working out the formula hasn't been a priority."

"Well, make it a priority."

Raven leaned against the bottom of the pod, and Bellamy could see on her face how tiring the expedition around the ring had been. But he could also read the elation. They were going to get the fuck off the Ark, and she was personally going to make it happen.

"Tomorrow," she said now, as she stood before them, filled with determination, "we start to make the plans. For everything. What we need to do to make the pod viable. The fuel. How we'll get it out of this room and down to the hangar."

Bellamy could feel the electricity in the air. They had purpose now. A goal. The end was in sight. They'd get off that damn ring or die trying.

He hoped it would never have to come to that.

"But tonight," Raven continued, pushing away from the pod, "we celebrate. I hope you got some prime moonshine, Monty, because I'm feeling a real thirst here."

"Yeah, right, Reyes," Murphy interjected. "You're such a lightweight. One drink and you'll be out cold."

"Well, then give me that one drink!" she insisted amid their laughter and Monty's assurances that his moonshine was always prime.

"Here, hop on my back," Bellamy said, squatting slightly. "Tomorrow I'll try to rig something up so you won't have to walk all this way, but for tonight, you'll have to make do with my personal transport."

The others had already turned to leave, and for a moment Bellamy thought Raven was going to take his offer of help and throw it back in his face. But then she gave a quiet sigh, and climbed onto his back.

"Well, then, move it along, Blake. I'm getting thirstier by the second."

As he made his way around the ring to their quarters, Bellamy recalled, not for the first time, that while their search for the pods had consumed them, they'd never gotten back to his original question. The subject in which he was most interested.

He carefully lowered his passenger to her feet outside their common room and then asked quickly, "So, what about the comms, Raven? We never got back to that discussion, but I seem to remember you agreed we needed to work on them."

Raven was quiet as she eyed him sympathetically. After a moment, she gave her head a small shake.

"I can't do both, Bellamy. It's going to take a ton of planning, and effort, and materials, and just plain time to make the escape pod happen. I can't get that done and figure out a way to build some comms, too."

"Well, then, maybe Monty…"

"Is working on the fuel. And even if he figures out a successful process, it's going to take all the time we have left to build up enough of a supply. Besides…with his hands…" Raven shook her head. "My gimpy leg is a pain in the ass, but at least I can still use my hands. Building comms would be painstaking, delicate work, and I don't think that Monty is …up to it."

Bellamy was silent, trying to accept it, trying to absorb his disappointment. He clenched his fists, looked away, worked very hard at not punching any walls. Christ! He was a grown man, not a kid. He should be able to deal with this. But it still felt like a heavy blow.

Raven grabbed his hands, forcing his attention back to her.

"Bellamy," she said, squeezing tightly, "I know how much you want to talk to her." Perhaps she saw something of what he was feeling in his face then, because she amended that statement immediately. "Okay. Maybe I don't really understand how much being able to communicate with Clarke would mean to you, but it still doesn't make any difference."

She reached up, tipped his chin down, forced him to look her in the eye.

"We'll get to the comms eventually, but right now I can't do both," she reiterated. "And anyway, isn't finding a way to get back to Clarke a lot more important than just being able to talk to her?"

Raven's logic was unassailable. Bellamy understood that. And even if she'd been willing to take valuable time away from getting the pod ready just to build some comms, it would be incredibly selfish of him to ask her to do that.

Not that all of them wouldn't have been happy to have a working comm link, but he was the desperate one. The one who was fed up after a year of being on the receiving end of a one-way conversation. The one who needed to let Clarke know that he heard her, that he understood her, and that he was coming home.

Bellamy sighed. No doubt Raven was right. Better to just come home.

XXXXXXXXXX

It was going to be damn hard work. All of it. And it wasn't going to happen overnight.

The basic bones of the pods were good, Raven had assured them, because the Ark engineers had been just as brilliant as everyone else who worked in GoSci.

Raven had wondered at first why the training pods hadn't actually been in GoSci, which had been a part of Alpha Station where a lot of the big-shot scientists lived. But then she figured that the pods just took up too damn much space. It had probably been easier to build them way out on the ring in a spot that wasn't needed for more mundane activities. A spot where zero-g mechanics could train in relative obscurity and quiet. And could then pass that training on to the next generation, until finally the time would come for the brave few to start exploring the planet below. Seeing if, at last, it was habitable.

"Hah!" Raven said, as she expounded this theory to Bellamy the first day they began to draft their descent plan. "The failure of the Ark's air system turned all that careful planning for the future into a big pile of crap. So instead of a bunch of highly-trained engineers, it was 100 delinquents who had to save the day. Plus," she added with a smirk, "you. The stowaway."

Bellamy huffed a laugh. "And you, the hot-shot mechanic, come down to see if we were still alive."

"Yeah, well you kind of put a crimp in that plan, if I recall."

"I did," he agreed ruefully. "I was a real asshole."

Raven patted his arm. "You know you weren't to blame for all the shit that went down on the Ark, Bellamy. And besides, you might have redeemed yourself once or twice since then."

She looked down at the paper in front of her, tapping her pencil on the list they'd been working on for hours. "In any case, we don't really have time for this cheery trip down memory lane. Not if we want to finish making the plan so we can start working on some of this shit."

"So, then," he nodded, picking up where they'd left off. "Good bones."

"Yep. The basic pods are sound. But they were for training, and never meant to actually hurtle through space."

"And this means?"

"That while the operational components are probably still intact - or at least I can fix them up to work right - we may have some structural problems. I can test the metal on the outer shell, but I'm almost positive it wouldn't stand up to the heat of Earth's upper atmosphere."

"So we'd be toast."

"Quite literally. Yep."

"But you have a plan."

"Of course. I'm pretty sure we can cannibalize sections of the outermost part of the ring without compromising its integrity. But…I'll need your help."

"With…?"

When Raven sighed, Bellamy wondered what the hell it was she wanted him to do.

"You're maybe not gonna like it."

"Raven!"

"Okay, okay. We need to go out and cut away enough heat-resistant panels to cover the pod."

It took a moment for her meaning to sink in. But when it did…

"Go out…as in…go out into fucking space?" He could hear the horror in his voice as he felt the blood drain from his face.

Raven sighed. "I was afraid you might have that reaction. But the thing is, Bellamy, lasering enormous metal sheets away from the superstructure and then carting them back inside is not something I can handle by myself. It's a two-person job." She shrugged. "And who the hell else should I ask?"

"Shit." The last thing Bellamy ever thought he'd be doing was walking in space.

"Jesus, Blake! You make it sound like I'm sending you to your doom. Spacewalking is awesome! Besides, you've had to do a lot scarier things. It's a fucking miracle you ever made it out of Mount Weather alive."

Bellamy shook his head. Logically, he knew that she was probably right. That spacewalking had been common on the Ark for needed repairs. That they'd be tethered. That Raven would be with him. That it was actually a lot safer than almost every damn thing he'd had to do on the ground. But still. Something about it just gave him the creeps.

Raven frowned and played her last card. "Uh…you do still want to get back to Clarke, right?"

Bellamy sighed, resigned to his fate.

They'd found a half-dozen canisters of oxygen among the useless debris on the ring. So far Raven had used up most of one of them making necessary repairs to the Ark and repositioning their communication satellite, the very thing that had allowed them to receive Clarke's transmissions and to learn that she'd somehow miraculously survived. But now there'd be two of them spacewalking, two of them using up their dwindling supply of canned oxygen. Bellamy understood they couldn't afford to waste any of it.

"I suppose you know the best place to get what we need."

Raven nodded. "I've been studying the plans for this tin can, and there are some redundancies in the superstructure, probably the result of the overlapping of the space stations when the Ark was first combined. I think we can just about reach it with the tethers."

"Just about?" Bellamy could hear the uncertainty in his own voice. He knew without ever before having given it a thought that spacewalking was never going to be his thing.

Raven grinned. "You'll survive," she promised.

XXXXXXXXXX

Madi was sad today, Bellamy, and I didn't know how to comfort her. I kept thinking about you and Octavia, how much you must have done to make her feel happy and safe for all those years on the Ark. Will I ever get the hang of parenting? I wish you were around to give me some pointers. 1400 days down, 425 to go.

When that one had come in, all Bellamy could think about was how much he wished he were there, too. Now that the end was in sight, their years of separation nearly over, Bellamy knew his anxiety should be lessening. But the truth was that it was exactly the opposite. With only a year left to go of their five-year exile from the ground, and the reconstruction of the escape pod well in hand, he was somehow more apprehensive than ever.

Building their getaway vehicle was proving to be a long and tedious process. It had taken Raven and him several weeks of carefully planned spacewalking to cut away and then haul into the ring enough high-density heat shield to cover the exterior of the pod. Plus a little extra, because as Raven kept reminding him, you just never fucking knew.

For a while, Bellamy had been so awkward out in space that Raven complained they'd run out of oxygen long before the mission was completed. But as he eventually became more adept, their efficiency increased, and they finished the job with two tanks left, each half full of oxygen.

Transporting the bulky and incredibly heavy metal proved more problematic once they left the vacuum of space for the gravity-laden ring. The sheets were so heavy, in fact, that they off-loaded them only as far as the hangar. After Raven modified the pod's operating systems for actual space travel, they'd have to somehow maneuver the pod around the ring to the hangar, and attach the outer plating there. Then it would be moved through the airlock to the launch deck.

Weight and bulk also entered into Raven's decision-making process about which of the two available training pods they'd retrofit.

"The one nearest the door," she'd told Bellamy with a shrug when he asked. "It's going to be hard enough to shift the thing. Why move it even one foot further than we have to?"

While Raven was in her element poring over schematics and fixing up mechanical systems, to Bellamy, it was the most mind-numbingly boring task he'd ever undertaken, save perhaps for his stint as a janitor on the Ark. Nevertheless, getting the pod ready had become everyone's top priority, and they all lent Raven whatever assistance she required without a murmur.

Raven's work on the modifications went on for months and had begun to seem never-ending, until with almost startling abruptness she suddenly declared that she was finished. Done with the innards was how she put it, announcing it casually over dinner one evening. After an initial moment of shock, the others whooped for joy, deciding the occasion called for a party.

Over cups of moonshine, Raven and Monty began brainstorming methods of moving the pod around the ring to the hangar where it's outer hull lay in enormous sheets, waiting to be attached. The more of Monty's prime moonshine they consumed, the more fantastical became their preferred methods of transport.

"Pretty sure fucking ALIE left me with some telekinetic powers," Raven proclaimed. "I'm just gonna think that sucker around to the hangar."

Monty banged his cup against hers as though in agreement, while at the same time insisting that what they really ought to do was slingshot the thing through space, sending it out the training room hatch and somehow, using the exact right calculations, it would come sailing back into the hangar.

When the two of them began to argue over how to make the calculations for Monty's plan, Bellamy chuckled and took himself off to bed. As he lay on his cot a few minutes later, he finally let himself feel the excitement he'd managed to keep at bay ever since Raven had made her announcement.

They were on the last step of retrofitting the pod for space travel and it had been going well. There were still ten months left before they could safely return to the ground, and he couldn't imagine that plating the outer hull would take that long. So as far as he could tell, they were ahead of schedule. They'd be done with the escape pod and Raven would have some free time.

Bellamy was almost afraid to hope that she could then afford the time to work on the comms he so desperately wanted.

He recalled the message that Clarke had sent that very morning. Bellamy had known almost from the beginning that she was an extraordinary person, but he continued to be astonished at how upbeat Clarke's messages were on most days.

But not that morning. And he'd perfectly understood her concerns.

Yesterday was a tough one, Bellamy. Madi's getting older and I have to let her do some things on her own, but it's so damn hard. She was gone for hours. When she finally got back, she was so proud that she'd found a new growth of berries and even filled a huge sack with them. And all I wanted to do was crush her to me and tell her she was never going away for that long again. But I didn't. Maybe when you come down in…less than a year now…you can tell me how you were able to let Octavia train as a warrior without losing your mind.

Dammit! She needed him. Not in ten months, but right fucking now! He knew in his bones that he could help her, if only they had a way to communicate.

And he damn well needed her. That had never gone away. He doubted now that it ever would.

Still, as Bellamy drifted off, he was buoyed by the certainty that the pod would be finished in a matter of weeks. That Raven would finally have the time to build the comms. That within a few months, he'd be talking to Clarke instead of just listening to her. And that soon after that he'd be seeing her, touching her. Bellamy's lips turned up and his eyes closed as he pictured the blue of her eyes and the radiance of her smile.

He slept.