A/N: I'm sorry this one is a bit shorter than usual. I am so so sorry. I hope the quality-over-quantity rule applies... fingers crossed.

A/N2: During this holiday season, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge what FFN has meant to me. Finding people who care about/want to read my writing has been the most amazing gift ever. Making incredible friends like MarinaBlack99, Persepholily, and Lucawindmover has been beyond the realm of realistic expectation. I cannot begin to express my gratitude.

A/N3: A special thanks to each of you, as well, for all your kind comments/reviews (on this story and others). Your feedback is ABSOLUTELY the best gift I could ever receive. I will never stop loving those notes from each of you (even if it takes me months to respond)... I read all of them, I cherish all of them, and I am inspired to write more by all of them!

Monty and Nathan arrived in the kitchen just as A.L.I.E turned back to Wick and Raven at the table near the window. The boys joined Bellamy along the sleek marble counter, helping themselves to food and listening in silence to the conversation. Raven wanted to get eyes on the warhead; A.L.I.E. was eager to oblige. Wick interrupted to request access to a workroom, so he could repair Raven's brace. Raven scoffed but he fought back, pointing out how much it had been through in so short a time.

"Hey, you and Sinclair were the ones who insisted it was travel-ready!" Raven grumbled – and only then did Bellamy realize she was not wearing the article in question. Instead, the sandy-haired engineer had the slender mechanic's leg slung across his lap. His fingers worked steady circles over the weak muscles around her knee.

"Kyle Wick," A.L.I.E. intervened, "I will make sure you have the supplies you need to assist Raven. Her comfort is important to my mission."

"I can take care of myself, thank you both!"

"Nobody's saying you can't," Wick cut in. "But maybe sometimes it's okay to let someone else do things for you because it makes them happy." He stretched across the space between them for a kiss. Raven smiled.

And Bellamy smiled.

Monty caught his expression, raising a curious eyebrow in question at the out-of-character response to Wick and Raven's flirting; Bellamy shrugged but said nothing. This was going to be the hardest part of Clarke's plan. How to explain it to the others, without –

Nathan interrupted his thoughts. "Dude, you have, like… makeup or something all over your face."

Bellamy reached up, rubbed his hand over his cheek, and stared at the smudges of color on his fingertips. He blushed as he wiped his hand on his pants.

"Shut up."

"No man, listen, what you two do when nobody's around… that's none of our business," Nathan continued, allowing a small grin at his own joke.

"It's not like that," Bellamy growled. Not exactly like that, anyway. "Clarke was drawing."

"On you?"

"On the sheets," and as soon as he said it he groaned and mentally kicked himself. "Look, we need to talk to you about that, but… not right now."

Monty and Nathan glanced at each other in disturbed confusion.

Harper's arrival saved all of them from the awkward turn of their conversation; her quick hugs for each of the three men caught A.L.I.E.'s attention.

"Harper. You slept well last night."

"I did." The girl's face pinched in anger. "How about you? You got an eyeful I assume? Did you like what you saw?"

"I found it fascinating. The degree of physical affection between the three of you is more reminiscent of a traditional human couple. I am curious to know if you have struggled with issues of jealousy."

"Not. Even. Once." Harper's entire body canted forward, ready to attack. "But I'm not really sure that's any of your damn business."

Shit. Bellamy recognized that fighter's stance. This was Harper the way he had not seen her since just after the return from Mount Weather: too protective of Monty and everything they had survived. Too damaged on the inside to differentiate curiosity from threat. Too eager for the fight.

He could not let her derail Clarke's plan before they had even begun.

"Harper…" He rested a heavy hand on her shoulder to calm her. Nodded, barely, at Nathan and Monty.

"Sorry. I'm sorry Bellamy." Harper settled back on her heels – and into Monty's outstretched arm. "But it's hard to just… put up with her spying on everything."

"I am capable of discretion," A.L.I.E. supplied. Bellamy laughed out loud at the holograph's claim.

"I find that hard to believe."

"Well," and now the ethereal woman flickered slightly, a waver Bellamy was starting to suspect was the strain of a century-old machine working to process human emotions and react in real time, "I admit you are a fascinating species. I have had little recent opportunity for such close examination of these more intimate interactions between people. Surely you cannot blame me for a little curiosity."

"You've been watching Grounders this whole time, though, haven't you?"

"I have watched the few that inhabit the Dead Zone. Their interactions are quite predictable. As we discussed earlier, humans are an inherently destructive species. That group is no different, and their behavior lacks intricacy, especially in comparison to the rich complexity your group has revealed after only a few hours of observation. Those in the Dead Zone are reduced to thinking only of day-to-day survival."

"Well, there's a damn good reason for that, and you're it," Clarke announced as she stepped directly through the image, startling the rest of the room. Monty and Harper flinched, Raven let out a small low curse, and Nathan swallowed hard, as if the sight of the blonde woman exploding through the stomach of the brunette made him queasy.

Clarke stepped toward Bellamy and kissed him.

Deeply.

The room froze, then exploded in reaction.

"I knew it!" Raven and Harper each shouted as Wick and Nathan applauded; Monty claimed it had "taken long enough" – but he was grinning.

None of them had any idea Clarke's real purpose. Yet. Bellamy lifted a conspiratorial eyebrow at his partner.

"Your people did not know you are in a romantic relationship?" A.L.I.E. asked. Her face was drawn into a half-question. Bellamy was learning to actively dislike that expression.

"We all knew Bellamy had it bad," Wick volunteered, earning an evil glare from the leader, "But Clarke was off in the woods for… so… long… okay, why are you all staring at me?" He held his hands up in surrender. "Am I wrong?"

"We suspected," Raven clarified. She reached out and patted Wick's shoulder as if to let him know he had put in a good effort, but it was time to stop. "But they're not the… publicly affectionate type."

"That seems to be untrue," A.L.I.E. pointed out. She swiveled her face toward Clarke – the first time her movements seemed more engineered than organic – and studied the blonde teenager clinging to Bellamy. A very specific kind of stillness deadened her eyes. Reading vital signs.

A lie-detector test.

No. Bellamy inserted himself between the two figures. Slid his hands up Clarke's shoulders to cup her chin and steal another kiss. His hips guided Clarke back against the smooth cool countertop as he let the rest of their people disappear, let A.L.I.E. and the bomb disappear, let this hellish planet and its mutant animals and the growing threat of war disappear in the heady softness of Clarke's lips. She was warm, her tongue still sweet from the berries she had grabbed while Wick and Raven were talking; she was a tremble of anticipation under his fingers, a sigh of need along his upper lip, and – most importantly – a minor earthquake of spiked heart-rate and useless vitals. Bellamy grinned against her mouth. Mission accomplished.

"Ho… Ly… Shit."

Raven's stunned comment tore Bellamy free of the moment. He avoided the eyes of the room, watching Clarke carefully.

"I-It's... new for us." She sounded defensive. As if worried A.L.I.E. would not give up.

"You don't need to justify your actions to a computer, Clarke," he whispered into her cheek. After all, A.L.I.E. would hear it at any volume. "She doesn't know anything about what we've been through." It was half-show, for the holographic woman watching them. It was also completely true, for the very real woman gripping his shirt collar protectively.

Her kiss this time was genuine in all the ways her first one had been pretense. Bellamy pushed her back toward the door without breaking that kiss, abandoning the room with a rough eager growl.

Just before they left, he whistled at Harper.

He did not bother waiting for her answer, letting the door erase that cluster of surprised faces and stealing a moment to savor Clarke's flushed cheeks, dilated pupils, before threading his fingers into hers and leading her toward the sleeping quarters to further defile that absurdly comfortable bed.

At the first corner she stopped him.

"Why wait?"

"I… what?"

"What's wrong with right here?" She pointed toward a nearby settee, its grey velvet and gilt-wood frame breaking up the white monotony of the long hallway.

"I… like it," Bellamy admitted. Part of his brain questioned Clarke's sudden exhibitionist streak but the rest of him quickly drowned out that voice. He let Clarke shove him down onto the antique furniture. Let her rake impatient fingers up his torso, pushing his aged cotton shirt toward his throat. He gripped the bunched material and pulled it over his head, reaching for her again, dragging her over his chest for another kiss.

"Please tell me this is a joke," John Murphy drawled from somewhere nearby, his tone of disgust a bucket of cold water over Bellamy's thoughts. "Did you know there are fifty-three rooms in this place? You could have picked any one of them. But not you two. You picked the goddamn hall." As he sauntered past, Murphy caught Clarke's eye. "Enjoy being the Top for now, Clarke. He won't let that last, trust me."

Bellamy sat up, unsettling Clarke in his frustration. "What the hell, Murphy!"

"No, hey, not my place to offer relationship advice, obviously. You two lovebirds carry on." He turned the corner.

Clarke touched Bellamy's cheek softly.

"What was that all about?"

"That was about… a mistake." Bellamy scrubbed at his face with one hand. "A bad decision, a lifetime ago." He turned to watch her as she pieced together her scattered knowledge of Murphy and Bellamy's relationship since they had landed on Earth.

"But… it's over." She did not ask it as a question, and she did not probe further. She knew better than to poke around in other people's shadows.

"It was never much to begin with."

She nodded and looked down and something in her face was wrong. Clarke battling an inner demon felt like a slap in the face; Bellamy rose, shirt a ball of fabric in his hand, and dragged her with him down the hall to their room. He did not stop. He pushed past the bed to the windows on the far wall. Yanked the curtains aside, found the latch, and stepped through the window-turned-exit with Clarke in tow.

"We can't run," she reminded him as he propelled them across the lawn. "She'll kill us. She doesn't need us."

"I'm not running!" he announced, for her and for the drones buzzing to life over the mansion's grey roof. He spotted a cluster of evergreens and jogged toward them, and only when the familiar snap of pine sap flooded his nostrils and drove out the house's horrific lack of any real smell, only when the needles pricked his arms and chest and back and reminded him of the row of scars now trailing over his shoulders, only when the sun was obscured by dense branches of black-green and the brightest thing in sight was Clarke's halo of gold hair…

Only then did he round on her.

"You knew about John."

Her silence sliced through his chest.

"You wanted him to see us. That's why you stopped me in the hall."

"…I did."

"Jesus, Clarke." He pulled back from her. Turned to stare through the branches at the approaching drones, heart beating too quickly and too loudly and too painfully. He needed an explanation. Needed to find some way to justify how she could be that cold… But Octavia's voice whispered to him from somewhere deep in his subconscious. You have to stop doing this to yourself. He shook his head, trying to make her shut up. Just stop apologizing for her.

"I had to," Clarke whispered, voice low and rough and addictive. "It's part of the plan." He felt her fingers brush over the still-healing wounds on his back. He felt the muffled sob more than he heard it: a hard tug inside his chest where his heart was too tangled up in hers.

"I fucking get it, Clarke. Don't you dare ask me to like it."

"I hate it," she confessed, and the drones were close enough now to be heard as well as seen, "I hate every second of it." She sighed, and blinked, and drew her sleeve across her face to dry her tears. "Time's up, Bellamy. The show's back on."

The show. He hated the way she said those words, as if confirming his worst suspicions about just how much of the past day had been an act.

But then how could she kiss him, here under the evergreen branches, as if her world began and ended with him? How could she pull him out of himself so perfectly, catch his naked soul in her arms and breathe new life into his fractured heart? How could she make him feel so whole, when he had spent so much of his life up until they met certain he would die alone?

…He loved her. Even if she had somehow lost her ability to love him back.

And he trusted her.

Even if she would eventually destroy that trust.

Two drones usually assigned to the solar array system, each now showing minor system malfunctions, returned to the mansion and settled into the first available docking ports for repairs. Once they were linked to A.L.I.E.'s central hub, the mainframe initiated routine maintenance. Data passed between the small mobile computers and the core almost as quickly as human thought. A tiny glitch was discovered in their programming. An error so small it seemed to have affected only one very specific element of the drone's processing units: the malfunction sensor itself. A.L.I.E.'s system installed a patch for each drone and sent the machines on their way.

A.L.I.E. filed the results of their data dump without immediately reviewing the material because every time there was a multiple-drone upload it demanded so much memory to process, the entire system slowed considerably. And she could not have that. Not right now.

There was a couple making love on a bed of pine needles in the woods nearby. The woman clung to the man, eyes closed and lips clenched tight and trembling, a perplexing response since she seemed to be in no pain and had clearly initiated the intimacy. The man held her close, fingers soft on her cheeks and in her hair.

At the same time a suddenly-angry boy was picking fights in the kitchen, yelling at his friends about the state of the food available and throwing silverware even though he had plenty of options.

Down the hall crept three others, whispering about a whistle as if worried A.L.I.E. could hear. She could. She would have to review her footage of the whistle in question later; right now the girl shushed her male companions adamantly as she turned the handle of their shared bedroom.

On the other side of that door, a lonely young man with shadows under his eyes and an unsteady heart rate paced and wrung his hands. He muttered to himself but the sounds were not decipherable as words.

In the other wing of the house an old man was dying and a nuclear warhead was waiting for Raven Reyes to help it fly again.

The drones and their data and their odd glitch could wait a few hours.