a/n Thank you to those of you who reviewed the last chapter! I'm so pleased I picked this story up again, I'm having a great time writing it. One little spoiler for season six ahead. Happy reading!

Echo had never expected to be the type of woman who went to a Skaikru girls' night. Apart from anything else, she'd always rather disdained opportunities to socialise with other young women, on the ground, and she'd rather hated Skaikru until she'd ended up in a tube in the sky with them. Or maybe until a couple of months after that, if she was being truly honest with herself.

And yet, somehow, this was the third time in as many weeks that she had found herself appearing at Raven's room for an evening of having fun doing nothing in particular.

She didn't quite understand how it was that these gatherings constituted a girls' night. They happened in the evenings, of course, and consisted entirely of young women, but she didn't understand what was so special about this particular type of organised fun. They didn't even tend to drink, out of consideration for the fact that Emori wouldn't have been able to join them in doing so. They just sort of sat around, with a film on in the background that they largely ignored while they were chatting.

The idea that chatting was something that Echo enjoyed was a new development, too. She'd not exactly had friends, when she was younger, not since she'd killed the real Echo who had been just about her only childhood companion. But since she'd ended up in this damn tin can she seemed to be getting on better with other people. She'd hit it off easily with Emori, of course, because they both understood what it felt like to be cast out. And Emori and Raven had quickly become a package deal, so that sorted that one out. And she'd always respected Bellamy, and she enjoyed training with him and Murphy and Harper.

She had to admit, though, that Monty continued to be something of a mystery to her.

She expressed this opinion to Harper, now. She reckoned that was how gossip was supposed to work.

"He's still a mystery to me." Harper agreed with a laugh. "And I've been dating him for the last couple of years."

"No." Raven, naturally, felt the need to insert herself into the conversation. "Monty Green is not a man of mystery. He's an engineer who likes peaceful resolutions and growing algae. He's the least mysterious person on this damn space station."

"Then how do you explain his Pike phase?" Harper asked with a frown.

"His mother." Raven answered shortly.

"So he's peace-loving apart from when someone he loves doesn't love peace?" Harper shot back, brow quirked.

"You see what I mean?" Echo found herself entering into the spirit of things. "He's a mystery."

"That doesn't make him mysterious." Raven insisted. "It makes him mildly complicated at best."

"I did not come here to listen to Harper swoon over Monty." Emori informed them. "I am pregnant, and you have to be kind to me. No more Monty chat."

"Well we're not talking about Murphy." Raven decided.

"And it seems wrong to gossip about Bellamy without Clarke here." Harper put in. "Maybe we should invite her via the radio next time."

"We could try not gossiping about men at all." Echo suggested mildly. "We could try not needing men in our lives all the damn time."

"Well of course we don't need them." Raven was looking at her as if she'd lost her mind. "You managed to lead an army without one, I seem to remember, and me and Clarke brought down ALIE -"

"Modest." Emori coughed loudly into her hand.

"- but what else is there to gossip about around here?"

"We could talk about the baby." Harper said, eyes wide with excitement. "Have you chosen a name, yet?"

"Or we could talk about the wrestling tournament we're having next week." Echo suggested, somewhat nervous, not quite sure whether that was the kind of topic that was permissible at a girls' night.

"What's the point in talking about that?" Raven was determined to be her usual abrasive self, it seemed, and Echo felt her heart sink.

"You're right." She shook her head, pasted on a careful smile. "Sorry, that's probably not the point of girls' night."

"No, that's not what I meant." Raven rushed to assure her. "I just – what is there to talk about? Obviously you're going to win."

"You – you think so?" She supposed this was what people meant when they said they felt moved.

"Yeah."

"Thanks."

Raven was looking at her as if she had lost her mind. "There's no need to thank me. It's only the truth. If we were having an engineering tournament, I'd win."

"Why would we have an engineering tournament?" Harper asked, visibly puzzled.

"How would we have an engineering tournament?" Emori followed up.

"That's not the point." Raven shook her head. "I'm just saying, there's no need to be shy in admitting you're good at things, Echo. We won't respect you any less for having a bit more confidence in yourself."

"Thanks." Echo stared at her hands for a while, and contemplated Raven's words. She was confident in the art of leading armies, sure, but substantially less confident in the art of living with other actual people. "I think I might be better at wrestling than at girls' nights."

"Not true." Emori jumped in. "You're great at girls' night. You got us away from that senseless conversation about Monty, didn't you?"

"That's true." Harper acknowledged. "But she did also start it."

…...

Raven awoke early the following morning, and went to the Earth Monitoring Station. There was nothing unusual in that, in those two steady features of her morning routine. There was nothing unusual, either, in the fact that she sat down and started tinkering with the computer, checking up on a few simulations she had set to run overnight on the radiation readings.

The content of her thoughts, however, was a little less usual. She couldn't help but feel that she'd been a bit unnecessarily sharp the night before. Sure, a small dose of sharpness was a fairly standard feature of her personality. But she'd found her temper growing increasingly short, in recent weeks, and the faces of those in her company growing increasingly long, and she couldn't shake the idea that, perhaps, she was being somewhat more abrasive than strictly necessary.

She knew why that was, of course. She was worried sick about Emori. She'd never really had a best friend before, only Finn, who had been so many things to her that it was hard to keep track of them. But now that she had Emori in her life, she was getting increasingly anxious about this whole pregnancy thing. She was worried about her on a lot of levels, everything from whether mother and baby would come out of the birth alive and well, to whether the presence of a newborn might have a substantial impact on the dynamics of their friendship, and might mean rather fewer mornings spent achieving nothing in particular with a soldering iron.

After all, she was already lonelier in the mornings, since Emori had become more tired and started sleeping in. In months gone by, she would not have been tinkering with this computer alone. They'd have been laughing at each other's silly ideas for fixing that damn heating system on Deck A, perhaps, or having something of a race to see who could do some basic bit of circuitry the quickest.

She sighed, and gave a little shake. There was no sense in sitting here and worrying about all this. She did what she always did in moments like this, and called Clarke.

"This is The Ring, calling Eden, does anyone read me?"

"Raven? Is that you?" The voice which bounced straight back at her was Madi's.

"Hello, Madi. Is Clarke there?"

"I'll fetch Clarke now if you'll tell Bellamy he has to call me after breakfast so I can tell him about the bug I found?"

"It's a deal." Raven agreed with a laugh.

"Hello, Raven?" That was Clarke.

"Hey. How's the ground?"

"Damp." Clarke laughed. "It's raining pretty hard, today."

"I miss the rain. I think it's when it's pouring with rain that you know you're really on the ground."

"I'll try to remember that when I'm soaked to the skin, today."

"Yeah."

"What did you really want to talk about, Raven?" She inhaled sharply at the evidence of Clarke's perceptiveness.

"I'm worried about Emori."

"I can understand that, but there's nothing to be worried about. As far as we can tell, the pregnancy is progressing perfectly. She's due any day, and then, all being well, you'll have a healthy happy baby to make a fuss of."

"Yeah. I hope so. And I'm looking forward to having a kind of niece or nephew, of course, but – I guess it'll take over Emori's life a bit."

"A baby is a lot of work, there's no denying that. But I know everyone will help out, and Murphy's there, too. There's no reason why Emori shouldn't still be herself, and sit around by the radio fixing things with you."

"How did you know that was what I meant?"

"I know what it's like to worry about being left out in all this happiness."

"As if we could ever leave you out of this. You're Auntie Clarke."

"Thanks, Raven. It was good to talk to you."

"Right back at you."

…...

Bellamy had had enough. He decided that, rather abruptly, as he put down his spoon with a clang. It just wasn't fair, watching Murphy and Emori steal kisses whenever they thought no one was looking – or quite often when they knew full well someone was - and seeing Monty and Harper gaze at each other with what he could only describe as bedroom eyes. He missed Clarke, damn it, and he missed her in that kind of way, and he very much intended to do something about it.

He couldn't do anything about her actual physical absence, of course. He wasn't quite capable of that. But he was feeling sufficiently desperate to try to do something about – well, about the whole bedroom eyes genre of activity the two of them were missing out on. He never thought he'd see the day when he felt compelled to act on Murphy's radio sex idea, but it seemed that there was no other choice.

Before he could waver in his resolve, he marched directly to Earth Monitoring.

"Clarke?" He picked up the radio and realised that he should, perhaps, have planned what he was going to say before doing so.

"Bellamy!" She sounded almost as happy to speak to him as he was to hear from her. "Hey. How are you?"

"I'm missing you." He announced, and before he knew it his words were running away with him. "And – and I'm missing you in that way, if you know what I mean. And I was thinking – and this might sound stupid but stay with me – I was thinking we should try having radio sex."

"Bellamy -"

"No, I think it could work. We would just – you know – and kind of talk to each other at the same time, I guess. I think maybe I should take the radio somewhere more private than here, though, because I don't really want Raven to walk in while I'm -"

"Bellamy, stop -"

"I don't mean right now, necessarily." He rushed to assure her, wondering why she didn't sound convinced. Was she not missing him quite in the way that he was missing her? "You could go away and think about it. We should – we should maybe plan what we want to do, because I guess it could be a bit awkward as we've not tried it before -"

"Bellamy -"

"Do you – do you not want to?" He hadn't considered that possibility, and found himself feeling a little hurt. "Sorry. Erm, maybe I've got the wrong idea. I just thought that – well, as relationships go, this probably counts as long distance. And I've heard it's a thing long distance couples used to do."

"Bellamy, let me speak." He couldn't tell whether she sounded more annoyed or amused. "It sounds like a great idea. But Madi's still up and she managed to walk past to get a cup of water at the exact moment you said the words radio sex."

"Oh."

"Oh." She echoed, laughing hard now. "No harm done, she didn't understand what you meant. But shall we continue that conversation a bit later?"

"That might be best." He conceded, pleased that she couldn't see the rather pained expression on his face. That was, he suspected, one of the more embarrassing moments of his week.

"But you'd better not think I'm letting you forget about it." She said, tone stern. "Because I'm definitely missing you in that kind of way, too."

a/n Thanks for reading!