From The Ashes | The 100 S5 [Bellarke]

|2| Ring of Life

3 days after Praimfaya

"Ark Station to the ground, this is Raven Reyes. If you are receiving, please respond."

Raven knew it was probably too early to hope for contact through the thick orange cloud of radiation that blanketed the earth, turning the familiar green-and-blue planet into something alien. But that didn't lessen the frustration that turned over in her chest, cold and heavy, when there was no response to her looped message she had set to run on every possible channel.

"Hey," Wick said from his position at the internal systems panel, "there's nothing more we can do but wait for a clear signal."

"I know," Raven muttered, closing her eyes and rubbing at her temples. "The earliest we can expect reception through the radiation is six months. Plus, the systems on this thing are either crap or dead crap, and we don't know if we'll have the parts to fix them, and–"

"Stop," Wick interrupted. Raven opened her eyes as he came over and cupped her face in his hands, the scent of electrical circuits and wiring drifting to her from his fingers as he held her gaze with his steady brown eyes. "So what if this place is a fixer-upper? We're here. We'll get this old thing running like a dream in a few months, no problem."

"It was failing when we left, and that was before the stress of a power drain and forced separation," Raven pointed out, even though she felt her tension easing a little under Wick's steady hope.

"Semantics," he replied airily, leaning down to catch her mouth with his in a soft, reassuring kiss. "C'mon, Raven. The Ark's best mechanic and best engineer left with nothing else to do but have sex and fix things? It's like heaven."

Raven shook her head at his terrible humor, but it had worked. Wick was inexplicably good at bringing her out of her funks and stirring her mind into action and, once again, she was grateful that he was here.

"What would I do without you?" she murmured, leaning her head against his shoulder.

"Oh, you'd be just fine," Wick replied lightly, but his hold on her tightened fractionally. "I mean, you'd be deprived of my charm and awesome sense of humor, but you'd still be Raven Reyes – the badass mechanic who keeps her friends alive."

~ ~ ~

Bellamy was glad that the Ring was in such disrepair.

He didn't want the circular space station to fail on them, but the constant work kept him busy enough so he could ignore the pain of losing Clarke. He needed to keep moving, keep focusing on the survival of their little group. If he didn't, Clarke's sacrifice would have been for nothing, and he wasn't going to let that happen.

After he left the makeshift farm section where Monty had taken up shop, tending to the starting growth of algae that would be their main food source in the coming years, Bellamy checked in with Raven and Wick in Earth Monitoring.

The room of screens and control panels was Raven's domain. Here, the sharp-witted, loyal mechanic was queen, seconded only by Wick when it came to matters of tech. It was their combined skills that kept the Ring's systems running. If the two of them couldn't fix something, no one could.

"We've got the beacon set to loop for as long we've got power," Raven told him. "If someone's listening, they'll hear us."

"How's the green coming?" Wick asked, twirling a screwdriver in one hand. "I've diverted our carbon dioxide to vent into there, which means we'll be getting extra oxygen on the reverse intake. If we've get algae growth, we'll have a source of natural oxygen; how's that for nature, huh?"