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When she wakes, she’s alone.
It’s her first thought, even as disoriented and in pain as she is, curled in a fetal position on the cold floor of ALIE’s lab. This silence is like nothing she’s ever experienced before. It feels physical, like there’s a solid pressure to the air pressing her down, like she could reach up and grab a fistful of the stuff and it would squeeze in her hand like cotton balls.
Silence had been a foreign concept to Clarke before Earth. Even in solitary, the hum of the spaceship had been a constant drone in the background of every minute of her life, one she never noticed until suddenly it was gone. Her ears rang in the silence for what seemed like the first entire week on Earth, and even now she dreams in the drone, even when her nightmares are a hundred percent pure Earth. She’s dreamed a thousand times of Finn’s death with the comforting machine hum as a soundtrack.
But even then, Earth silence wasn’t really silence. It had taken her a while to make the adjustment and to realize that, but there were always small sounds: the wind through the trees, the rustling of small animals in the bushes, the calls of birds and the buzz of insects in the summer. The whining and bickering of the hundred and, later, the rest of the arkers as they busied themselves with the work of survival. It wasn’t a spaceship drone, but she’d adapted.
Now, though, this is true silence. She lies on the floor and hears absolutely nothing in the spaces between her own breaths. She can feel herself, her pain and her shuddering heartbeat, and she can feel the hard floor of the lab, but it’s if she hangs suspended in a great void. She survived, she’s alive, but she is the only one. There is nothing else out there. Absolutely nothing.
Clarke is equal parts terrified and relieved.
*
She waits about a week before leaving the lab.
At first, she’s weak and still quite ill, but even as she recovers she’s scared to venture outside. It’s silly, considering she’d already exposed herself to whatever is out there and has newly pockmarked skin to prove it, but she can’t shake the nightmare idea of packs of irradiated grounders roaming the scorched surface, maybe gathering right outside her door and waiting for her to emerge. It’s ridiculous, she knows; no one but another nightblood could have survived Primefaya, and probably even then only if they had decent shelter. But she’s alone now, and there’s no one pushing her to get a move on, and it turns out almost dying, even voluntarily, doesn’t actually make you super eager to roll the dice a second time.
But she can’t stay in the lab forever. The food stores had been ransacked to bring up to the ark, and even though Clarke is small and used to not eating much, what’s left won’t last her very long. And she can’t just turn the practical part of her mind off, and that part nags at her that she’s going to need these stores for her journey, too. They have to last.
Her journey. Hah. As if she has somewhere to go. As if she actually has any hope of surviving in this barren wasteland. It’s a joke of a plan.
And yet.
The night of the fifth day (she thinks; there’s no real light in the lab to judge the time of day) finds her curled up against the glass in the observation lab, her back to the room that had once held a rocket. The room is dark; she’s been using a wind-up flashlight she’d found to get around, since all the power systems in the lab itself had been fried in the fire. It’s yet another depressing reality of her situation, that all the tech that had allowed her to come this far is now hopelessly useless to her.
She has a blanket wrapped around her knees, simple scratchy wool from storage, but warm. And she holds a walkie-talkie in her lap, cradled in both of her hands like a priceless treasure.
It doesn’t work, of course. There’s no one to talk to, and the signal would be far too weak even if the device was still functional, which she’s not at all sure of. But when she pushes the button she hears the reassuringly familiar static buzz, and she really needs to talk to someone.
“Hey,” she says, or tries to. It comes out as a croak. She frowns and rubs her throat. She hadn’t realized, but it occurs to her now that she hasn’t said a word since she woke up. She’d been afraid to break the silence, and there’d been no reason to.
“Hey,” she tries again, and this time it comes out scratchy but at least vaguely human sounding. “Um, surprise? Guess who’s not dead yet. I know, I can hardly believe it myself. Mom smashed that radiation tank for nothing. We could’ve all been nightbloods right now.”
She has to stop, shocked herself at the tears pricking at her eyes. Because it’s true. If they’d just stuck to the plan, if her mother hadn’t decided Clarke’s life was so fucking precious and they’d just tested her, they would’ve known this would work and they could’ve all been here together—
No. That's wrong. Yes they could’ve survived Primfaya, but then what? Had she forgotten what she was doing with this walkie-talkie already? No, it's better that she die here, alone, than watch her friends waste away around her. They're safe, they're on the Ark. They'll survive. That's all she’s ever wanted.
“Right, so, scratch that,” she mutters into the speaker. “Not my best idea. I’m glad you didn’t stay, really. I was scared you might, you know. You must know that. That head and heart speech wasn’t exactly subtle, huh? But I was probably worried for nothing. I mean, why in the world would you stay? For all you knew I was already dead, and…there’s absolutely no reason why you would’ve wanted to stay, even so.”
She swallows, trying to hold back the tears. She hadn’t expected this to be so hard. She wasn’t even talking to a person. But then, maybe that was exactly what made it hard.
“I’m scared, Bellamy,” she confesses in a whisper, lips almost touching the speaker now and the tears are coming and she can’t stop them. “I thought—I was going to die up on that tower and that was okay, that seemed right and I deserved to be left and I was helping you so it was okay but now—” A sob bursts out and she’s crying, loud and ugly, and she’s getting the radio wet and oh GOD what if she ruins it, what if it’s working and she ruins it—
She wraps her blanket around the radio to shield it and holds the bundle close to her chest and she cries. She can’t remember the last time she cried like this – she’s not sure she’s ever cried like this. And it’s awful, like something’s tearing itself out of her and she feels raw and messy and wrung out but she’s beginning to feel lighter too, though that could just be because she’s losing quite a bit of water.
“I could really use a pep talk right now,” she confides to the radio later, when her tears have slowed and her sobbing is under control again. Her voice still sounds weak and unsteady to her ears. She's so tired. “Or some advice. If you could put Raven on for a minute that would really help. I know how useless you are at plans.” She uncurls and leans back against the glass wall, looking out at where the rocket used to be. It’s too dark to see, but she imagines she can feel the gaping void of it. “I hope you’re doing all right up there. I hope you’re safe. It’s probably too much to hope that you’re happy, but what the hell. It’s the end of the world. I hope you’re having the time of your life. I wish…I wish I could be there.
“Hah. Stupid, right? You’d think I would’ve learned to stop wishing for things. Maybe that’s my problem. I want things. I want…I want to see you again. I want to make it that far, even if I don’t deserve it. I thought I was dead for sure, but here I am, and no one’s even trying to kill me for once but…
“I know what you’d say. You’d want me to live, you’d tell me to go for it. But Bellamy, what’s the point? Everything is dead. There’s nothing to eat. It’s either die in here, in safety, or out there with…whatever’s out there. Starve to death alone on some ashen hilltop in the middle of nowhere and you won’t ever know what happened to me.
“But I guess that’s better, isn’t it? Better you think I died on the tower than here in the lab because you didn’t leave me enough food. I know you’d find some way to torture yourself over it. Don’t deny it. It’s basically your superpower.
“…Yeah, okay. It’s my superpower too.”
*
There are no mutant grounder hordes waiting for her outside the lab.
There are, however, fish in the water.
There aren’t many, and they are small and sickly, but they are alive and they’re enough to set Clarke’s dying ember of hope ablaze. Before she even manages to catch one she’s fumbling for her radio to report the good news in an incoherent babble of glee. Fish! She’s found fish!
You know what that means, Bellamy!
She spends all of that day and the next fishing. Even so, her catch would have been an embarrassment in the days before the Earth was a completely irradiated catastrophe, but it’s at least more than she can eat on the spot. She dries and salts the extra and wraps them carefully in medical sheeting, and then sets them aside as the first of the supplies she means to take with her.
The boat is in rough shape. It’s retained its form in broad strokes, but it’s blackened and charred with fire and doesn’t fill Clarke with confidence in its sea-worthiness. Luckily, she figures it’s unlikely that Murphy’s sea monster has survived the fires in any better shape, so that’s one worry down. She decides she’ll have to risk it and just make sure everything she packs can afford to get wet or will float. She’ll stick to the coast when she reaches the mainland, so she’ll have the fish as a reliable source of food; she suspects freshwater fish won’t have fared quite so well as those in the sea, but if she’s wrong she’ll look for a river to follow inland. With any luck she’ll come across another boat, or…well she isn’t really sure what else.
The world is a wasteland, but it’s her wasteland. Hers to explore. And if the fish could survive…if she could survive…well, maybe there’s somewhere that Primfaya couldn’t reach. Maybe some animals were resistant enough and managed to hide. Maybe there’s another bunker out there, one with a greenhouse…who knows.
She’s scared. Nervous, about what’s out there but mostly about the great gaping chasm of time that stretches out in front of her. There’s no bargaining with that, no shortcut to be found, and no one to help her with it. She has no choice but to just take it day by day, and it won’t be easy. But she also feels…free. Weightless. Five years with no one looking to her to be the leader and make hard decisions. No one around to judge her and call her a monster, apart from herself. No one she has to fear losing, because the ones she loves are out of reach but they are safe. Nothing to do in all that time but survive, explore, and live.
Five years to find something worth sharing when her family gets back. The thought makes her smile, faint but real.
Just you wait, Bellamy. If there’s anything to be found here, I’ll find it. And I’ll tell you all about it every day and once more when you come home.
I know we’ll meet again.