A/N: I've always felt sorry for WV (and all the other exiles by extension). Spending all those years alone out in the desert would get really terrible and lonely!

He walks for days and days and days, and never sees another person. He finds water sometimes, in the ruins of old homes, or grocery stores, or very rarely right after a rain. There is a moment once, not so long after he arrives, when he realizes that he is glad the Reckoning killed all the denizens of this planet. With them gone, there is no competition for supplies (but he'd be damned if he wouldn't give everything just for a little competition, just to hear a voice again).

Sometimes, he finds the worn-out remains of dead trees, or the skeleton of someone's dog, and knows that life must once have grown in the desert. He never looks too closely at the bones.

Once – just once – he finds the dried-up bodies of a group of Prospitians. He realizes that they must have died of something out here, maybe sickness, or hunger, or thirst, because he can't see their ship anywhere. He read the Reckoning Survival Manuals back on Derse; he knew in theory what to do.

It was just that before he landed here, he'd never realized just how big a world could be.

Well, he thinks, At least there's no war here. With that, he turns over and laughs until he cries, the sound stretching out and dying in the empty desert.