All right, so this will be a series of one-shots for scenes that I can't incorporate into my other fanfiction but scenes that I personally find believable. They will only take place after Praimfaya. I apologize in advance, because this one has angst and was emotionally trying for me to write. I'd like to have this one in two or three parts, though. Anyway, please review!

He's waited two-thousand, two-hundred-one days for this moment.

Three-hundred-sixty-five more than necessary, but it's over. The waiting is done. No more falling asleep beneath a metal ceiling. No more breathing recycled air. No more drinking recycled water. He gets the real thing again, only this time it isn't falling to a strange, foreign world.

It's coming home.

"Initiating launch in ten . . . nine," Raven's voice fills the small space and Bellamy's hands tighten over the straps that are secured around him. He leans back and shuts his eyes, heart a raucious thing inside his chest.

The others surround him in a semi-circle but they are as quiet as he is, as if a single noise that isn't Raven has the power to shatter this reality, and they'll once again wake up to find they have a thousand days left to go.

When Raven reaches five, she stops counting. Bellamy opens his eyes to find her looking at him. "You ready for this?" she asks.

Bellamy almost laughs, but he can't celebrate yet. Not until he knows for certain that the others are still waiting for them. His gaze doesn't break from hers. "I've been ready."

She smiles, finger over the ejection pad. "Then let's do this." She presses it.

For a moment, there's nothing.

Then their small ship seems to drop like a rock, shoving Bellamy against his restraints. One strap lacerates his neck but he doesn't feel it. All he can think of is the movement of the ship and the planet waiting below, and how pissed off he'll be if the landing kills him before Earth manages to.

It was better the first time around.

That's his initial thought, but it's bumped out a moment later, when the echo of his heart stops pounding like drums in his ears and he can actually breathe again. He coughs. On what he doesn't know. "Everyone all right?" his voice bounces around the cramped quarters.

"I'm good," Raven responds.

"Same," calls Monty and Harper.

"Emori? Murphy? Echo?"

"Fine."

"Is it . . . always like that?" asks Emori, and though the grounder would never admit it, Bellamy can hear the shaking in her voice.

Murphy helps her out of her restraints. "The last time wasn't as bad," he says, echoing Bellamy's thoughts.

"That's what happens when you have one less thruster to work with," Raven replies as she climbs out of her own.

Bellamy doesn't even feel his hands moving, but somehow he gets out of his restraints before the others. His first step almost makes him fall back into his seat; it's as if someone's replaces his boots with blocks of lead. His jaw tightens and he forces his legs forward, to the doors.

They stand there, a band of seven, and Bellamy looks them each in the eye. An odd sense of deja-vu floods him. Though it feels as if the old dropship fell from another life, he suddenly remembers it as if it were yesterday. He's seen Earth, but he hasn't seen this Earth. He hopes it won't be too bad. He hopes, this time, they'll make it better.

Murphy raises a hand to the switch that will open the doors. Bellamy braces himself.

But Murphy doesn't press it. Instead, he gestures to Bellamy. "Care to do the honors?"

This time he can't help it; Bellamy smirks. The others sidle over as he takes Murphy's spot, lifting his own hand to the switch.

"The air could be toxic."

"If the air's toxic, then we're all dead anyway."

And he presses it, too aware of the missing piece that makes a usually dull ache suddenly flare back to life.

The sun burns so intensely that for a moment, Bellamy is sure that the world is still saturated in radiation. But the burning doesn't grow worse. Instead it recedes, long enough for Bellamy to blink through it and catch a glimpse of green.

The air is pulled from him as he takes in the sight of trees. Trees. And the smell. His head spins, intoxicated by the world, his senses tripping over one another, battling to the front.

He's returned to the ground, to a place that isn't as broken as his nightmares had originally led him to believe.

Murphy sighs, drawing Bellamy's fragmented attention to him. "We're back."

And for the first time in what feels like two-thousand, two-hundred-one days, Bellamy smiles.

"All right, as much as I know we all want to go straight to the bunker," Raven looks pointedly at him, golden sunlight dancing over her lackluster clothes, "let's check in with Becca's lab. Maybe some of the equipment there still works and we can reestablish contact with the others. Get an idea of what's gone down the last six years."

"Becca's lab," Bellamy repeats. He swallows. No, he doesn't want to go there, but he will. He'll face the darkest corners of his mind if it means getting his sister back. If it simply means confirming that she's alive at all.

Raven's eyes soften a fraction. "It should be just a little over a mile south." She doesn't ask him if he's ready. She doesn't ask if he wants to stay. Because she knows he's not, and that he won't.

She just nods and turns away as they start. Though they are a family and Raven has been a constant beside him in space, it's different on the ground. Down here, he was accustomed to someone else walking beside him, and he can't help but crave a phantom's company now.

He sees the satellite first. After walking the better quarter of the day, the hill they've begun to crest reveals it. A part of it has broken off. The dish is gone, its metal warped. But he remembers it, and the sight stirs that ache again, until Bellamy has to look away.

It isn't until they've crossed over when the lab swims into view, grimier, but still intact. Bellamy pauses a moment and takes a deep breath. Though it's green here, too, the air seems to taste of ash.

Him and Raven are the first to reach the doors, with the others just a few meters behind. On closer inspection, Bellamy sees that there's a crack in one of the windows, but no damage beyond that. It's odd, how quickly old instincts have come soldiering back. His alertness doubles when Raven prepares to open the door; a part deep inside of him doesn't want to know what lies behind it.

Yet, when Raven goes to open the door, she finds she doesn't have to; it's already open.

Bellamy and her share a glance. "Maybe radiation levels deactivated the magnetic locks," she says, and eyes him a moment longer before stepping inside.

With clenched fists, Bellamy follows after.

The lab appears the same, save for a few screens missing. It still feels sterile and empty, a little like the Ark. Against his efforts, Bellamy's eyes drift to the far left of the lab, where the rocket once rested. Where they waited. Where he should've waited longer.

"Hey." Raven's voice pulls him back. She touches his arm. "You okay?" She asks even though she knows, to give him the opportunity to either confide in her, or the chance to recollect himself once more.

He clears his throat and nods. "Yeah. I'll go check the rest of the place." Because it's harder to be there than he thought it would be.

"Good idea."

Bellamy leaves up the stairs, quickly but not too quickly. He passes by a smaller room with a steel table, office-like.

"You inspire people, because of this." A small hand over his heart. "But the only way to make sure we survive is to use this too." A finger at his temple.

"I've got you for that."

He hastens his pace just a little, until he's reached the far door that he remembers led into the kitchen.

Once there, he stands for a moment, releasing a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. Then he raises his chin and takes in this place, too. Also undamaged, also more sterile-looking. The sink still has dishes in it. The cupboards still have random miscellany in them, and he supposes they just didn't have the space or storage to bring it with them. But the place feels different, somehow. Unnerved, Bellamy shakes his head and walks down the hall, the sound of his boots echoing around him.

Something on the kitchen table catches his eye and he strides over to it. His eyes narrow at sheets of paper he finds stacked there. He pinches the corner of one. Flips it over.

At first, the only thing that strikes him is that it is a drawing of a little girl. That's it. A little girl he does not know. Then he stills as he remembers, and he realizes the only person who could've drawn such a thing.

It's like he's grabbed a bomb, and Bellamy can do nothing but stand and stare. The six years seem to both expand and dissolve, growing and disappearing at once. It feels so long ago and yet not long enough to have prepared him for being so close to her once more. The closest he will ever be to her again.

In a shaky breath, Bellamy sets down the page and flips over the next. Again, that breath catches. It's of the little girl again, but instead of a portrait, she stands in a field of small flowers, gathering them in a dark hoodie.

Bellamy brings the drawing closer, trying to remember. When did she draw these? When did she have the time? Was it while she stayed here after they'd dropped off the fuel? Bellamy puts it down. That must be it. He flips over the next drawing, another of the girl. This time she sits on a bed, a book of sorts open in her lap.

That ache inside him grows and he tries to breathe through it as he flips the drawing over with the others, expecting the last to be of her, too.

But it's not. And nothing can prepare him for it, either, because it's of her. Of her and the girl, both of them, looking up to the stars as something falls out of the sky. A rocket.

A sound wells up from inside Bellamy and the gravity he's been fighting against all day suddenly seems to win. He has to grab the table to keep himself upright as he stares, unblinking, at the woman in the drawing. She looks different, too. Her hair is shorter. She is not in a hazmat suit.

No. She couldn't have drawn this weeks ahead, because she didn't know she'd stay behind then. She couldn't have drawn this after either, because she died in Praimfaya.

Unless . . . the nightblood worked, and she somehow managed to survive the deathwave.

Unless she survived.

That ache is a furnace now, burning him on the inside, turning him to ash. "Raven," he manages, feeling an invisible hand around his throat, choking out her name. And then louder. "Raven!"

But it isn't Raven who comes. It's Monty, bursting through the door a moment later. "Bellamy, you're gonna want to hear this," he says, unaware of Bellamy's struggle just to stay upright.

"Get Raven," he manages, eyes still pinned to the drawing.

"Bellamy." It's the tone Monty uses that gets his attention. "Trust me. Come now." Then he's gone, leaving the door ajar after him.

Slowly, Bellamy gets his balance back. He forces himself to look away from the drawing but brings it with him as he shuffles back to the kitchen. Distantly he wonders if Raven got word to the bunker, but it's a flimsy train of thought that disintegrates. He can't think beyond the drawing and the impossible hope that tears an old wound freshly open.

He's just opened the door back to the lab when he hears it, distant and broken and riddled with static. "-don't know why I still do this everyday . . . "

His eyes drift upward and in that moment, it is too much to process. It both slams and seeps into him as he approaches the rail.

It's a voice he hasn't heard in over six years. A voice he never thought he'd hear again.

Below him stand the others, all eyes on the screen displaying an audiograph in blue waves.

"Maybe it's my way of staying sane."

The blue waves blur but Bellamy can do nothing but listen as the threads of himself threaten to unravel. He can't believe this. Can't believe what he's hearing.

"Not forgetting who I am . . . Who I was . . . "

He starts shaking, deep on the inside, from where the others cannot see. But he feels it, a cataclysmic shift between his ribs, under his feet, like the very world is different all of a sudden.

"That's Clarke," Monty says quietly, a quiver in his voice. "Right?"

"It's been safe for you to come down for over a year now . . ."

"When was this?" Bellamy asks, a part of him surprised that he's able to speak at all. But he is. Harshly. He looks at Raven whose own eyes are glassy. "How old is this feed?" Six years, a part of him hopes, even with the drawing he still clutches in his left hand telling him otherwise. He wants her alive. He's wanted it since he lost it. He just doesn't want her alive and alone.

Raven pauses the feed and it's a moment before she speaks. "April 24th." Her eyes cut him. "Forty-eight hours ago."

And those threads come undone.

Bellamy clasps the rail with both hands, feeling as if the very ground were pulled from under his feet and he's falling again, like the dropship did from the sky. Like the rocket does in the drawing.

"Clarke's alive," he says quietly, out loud, giving voice to a hope he never dared to keep lit. His gaze bores into Raven, her figure painted in blue, blurring beyond his veil of unshed tears. "And you're telling me that she has been alive, this entire time, here? Alone?"

A terribly sad look crosses Raven's face and for a moment, no one speaks. They don't even breathe. She takes a step towards him. "Bellamy-"

"We left her!" he shouts, the chaos folded inside him suddenly erupting. This pain isn't the same as the kind he's carried around for six years. That pain was a scar from a wound that just never healed properly. This pain is a worse pain, because he mourned her when she was still alive. Buried her while she was still breathing. "She saved us," he says, brokenly. "And we left her here to die."

Raven shakes her head. "But she didn't. She-"

"No, instead she got to live on an isolated planet for six years without even knowing that we were alive." Bellamy slams a hand against the rail, a storm caged inside him. This means that she came back. Clarke came back to an empty lab, knowing they'd gone. After he'd waited, she had come back. Maybe a few minutes later. Maybe a few seconds. But she had. And that beautiful, terrible truth slams into Bellamy, until it feels as if something inside him is breaking. "We should've waited longer," he says, as tears finally leak out. "I should've waited longer." But instead I left her. Not only to die, but to live alone, in silence.

Raven reaches him but doesn't touch him. Right now, she knows better than to. "You know Clarke. That's not what she would've wanted."

Bellamy looks at her. "And this was?"

"If it meant our survival, then yes."

"But if she's alive," cuts in Monty, "where is she?"

Bellamy scrubs his face and looks back at the screen, suddenly afraid. He can break. He is breaking. But he will do so fully later, in the privacy of a room, after he finds out everything he needs to know.

"Keep the feed going," says Bellamy around the pain in his chest.

A click from Raven, and her voice resumes, filling the lab. Drowning him.

" . . . The bunker's gone silent too. We tried to dig them out for awhile but . . . there was too much rubble. I haven't made contact either."

Bellamy shuts his eyes. His anger recedes and in its place falls an old desperation.

"Anyway . . . I still have hope. Tell Raven to aim for the one spot of green and you'll find me. The rest of the planet from what I've seen basically sucks, so . . . "

A long pause. Bellamy opens his eyes again.

"Never mind . . ." her voice chimes back. "I see you."

Static. Bellamy looks sharply at Raven. Questions bombard him, but they quiet in place of the new, loudest one that makes his chest go tight. He pulls out the drawing and unfurls it, until he is again looking into her hopeful face. She isn't speaking of them, he knows.

But if it's not them, who else can it be?