Clarke cried enough for two people, but she didn't cry long. She didn't see the way the parachute fluttered. Jasper poked his head in. Kid took one look at us and seemed to understand; he made himself scarce with a sad look on his face. So he had some sense. Good.

When Clarke finally tired herself into a limp heap, she rubbed her cheek against my chest. "I soaked your shirt."

"Cleanest it's been in a while."

"It kind of smells."

My chuckle turned into a sharp groan. "Ow." I touched my cheek gingerly. Damn, that Grounder packed a punch. I flexed my jaw, testing the swelling. Oh yeah, I was going to look pretty tomorrow. "I'll work on that,"I told her.

I dropped my hand back to her skin and returned to tracing invisible patterns. I listened to her heartbeat. She came too close to dying. She wasn't out of the woods yet. That fever was still warming up her skin even as she shivered with reaction. Being with her like this, even as sad and gritty as our lives had become, was good. Felt good. Felt right.

"Be honest, Clarke. Is it my fault?"

She stilled. "Would it matter?"

I tightened my jaw. What the hell kind of question was that? Didn't she know by now? "Yes," I bit out quietly. "Yes it would."

She slowly raised her head to look at me in the eye. "I meant...would it matter what I thought if you still blamed yourself?"

Right in the gut.

My hands flexed. My lungs were starting to fail me, and my heartbeat picked up. If Clarke decided Finn was my fault, if she said it, it was true. It was one thing to tell myself that. It was another to hear it from her. I dragged in breath through my teeth. It was painful. "You have a way of making me believe."

If I sounded a little choked up when I told her that, I didn't give a damn. I could be real with Clarke. She'd seen me at my worst. More than once. If I couldn't talk straight and be as raw as I needed to be with this girl, there was literally no one on Earth that could handle me.

I settled both hands on her hips. "I've got three hundred and twenty four on my head, Clarke. More counting today. I need..." I hesitated. "I need to know exactly how damned I've become."

I couldn't put a right name to her expression. Worried? Concerned? Trying to find the right words to tell me that yes, that made me a mass murderer?

She scooted up until we were face to face, chest to chest. In the back of my mind I recognized how different our bodies were. She was soft where I wasn't, curved where I was just an angle. That didn't even touch the tip of the iceberg with us. We were almost total opposites.

She has pretty eyes. Funny. I knew that already. They were bright and they were serious. I don't what it was about them that held me right then, but they did. I think I could close my eyes and picture them clearly, the way I could picture Earth from the Ark without even trying.

I hated every narrow corner of the Ark. But hell, what a view.

"Bellamy Blake, I told Finn point blank that if he took it too far, he'd die. When he left camp he assumed full responsibility for anything that might have and did happen. It wasn't your fault. It was his."

I searched her face. Her mouth thinned and she stared me down as seriously as she did that first day.

All the tension flowed out of my body in a gusty exhale. "Okay." I nodded. "Okay."

One less death on my soul.

I should have been happy. I was relieved, but even that was tempered by a thickeness in the pit of my stomach. One less didn't mean that the others weren't on me. Honestly, I'd forgotten what happy really felt like.

"I killed someone today. Beat his head in." Her shoulders slumped just a little bit. "I guess we're all damned in some way here." She laid her cheek back on my chest. "Do you really think that we'll survive Earth?"

"It's home now," I said as I wrapped my arms around her. "If the Vikings and the Romans could do it, we can."

"Sometimes I wonder how. We don't even know how to survive the winter."

Our breathing had synced. I wondered why bodies did that, why being around one person made them try to work together without the brain noticing it. "We take it by basics. Food. Warmth. Shelter."

"It's too late for Monty's garden, even if we could find enough vegetables with seeds to plant. Raven and I thought we heard a chicken today. That's why we were...where we were."

Naked. I pushed that thought out of my mind, not ready to tackle all of those complications. But hell, I was a man. I was gauranteed to think about it later.

In brilliant technicolor.

"What are you suggesting, Princess? Trying our hand at farming?"

"A sustainable source of food would be nice." And then she shivered.

I rubbed my hand over her flesh. "I think clothes would be our first order of business."

"Real houses would keep us warm."

"We may not have time for that. We have to go basic."

"No problems there," she muttered.

I smiled a little. "Yeah."

I was aware of time moving on, and I knew I couldn't hang out in here much longer. The table was cold, and Clarke needed to get warm. I had to get outside and deal with things.

Without her.

Well, that just felt fucking unpleasent. "I've gotta go. Stay here. I'm going to have Octavia come sit with you for awhile. Then we're getting you back to your tent. Okay?"

She nodded. "Bellamy..."

"Hmm?"

"If you see Raven...She may need somebody."

"The last person on Earth she'll want to see is me, Princess."

"Send Jasper or Monty. They're good with people."

Better than me, and I was all for that. I carefully shifted out from under her, careful not to jostle anything. And then the worst thing that could happen right then, did.

My jacket got caught on her bra.

Which tore, leaving me frozen with nothing but plump flesh and beaded nipple practically in my palm.

Neither of us moved.

Fuck. What was I supposed to do? "Uhhhh..."

Oh, that was brilliant. Pure genius.

Clarke stared at my arm, then at me, mouth open in a little O of surprise. And then, "You can let go now, Bellamy."

My fingers flexed. "What?" I shook my head. Idiot. "Yeah. Yeah, I knew that." That's when I let her go, not before, and all I could do was stand there like a doofus, not sure what to do with my hand. Wipe it on my leg? Close my fingers over my palm? What?

A reluctant chuckle pierced the silence. Clarke looked up at me, her puffy face alight with amusement and a flush that had nothing to do with crying or the fever I knew she was still going through. "You're replacing that."

What? My hand?

Get your shit together, Blake. The bra. "Don't know how much lingerie I've got laying around camp, Princess, but I'll see what I can do."

"Ask one of your girls."

I quirked a brow and smiled. "Jealous?"

She snuggled deeper into the pillow and sighed, eyes closing. "You'd like that."

Yeah. I would. I planted my hand on the table next to her head and leaned in. "Clarke."

One eye opened again. She was fading and fast.

I smoothed her hair back. "They're not mine and I'm not theirs. It's not how it is." I found myself fondling her earlobe. "You get it, right?"

"Hmm," she murmured. It sounded like an affirmative.

I let myself look at her. She was splotchy, exhausted, dirty and haggard. She looked like hell. That's what a real girl looked like after she got down and dirty and she pulled through even when shit went south.

She was my kind of animal.

On impulse I bent down the rest of the way and kissed her cheek softly. "See you later, Princess."

She didn't answer.

But she did smile. Just a little.

Small things like that made me feel like a damn superman. Like I could do anything and be anybody. Or like I'd done something good and should definitely do it again, just to get that same reaction.

I walked out of the drop ship with a renewed sense of purpose. I knew what role I took on Day 1. Nothing about it was easy, even though in the back of my head I didn't expect it to be so hard. I had this vision in my head that didn't hold up against reality. Now I knew exactly how tough just walking through camp was going to be, but at least I had a little more energy to face it than I did a few minutes ago.

I was almost instantly surrounded by people who wanted to know what happened and what to do. I guess Miller did what he could but they wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth. A lot of them were in a friggin' panic because some dumbass spread the rumor that Clarke was dead.

I listened to the rising hysteria for a full minute before my patience snapped. "Everybody, just calm the hell down!" I finally roared, then winced. Damn, that hurt my face. It fueled my irritation. "Clarke's alive and she'll be fine, so get your heads together. There was an attack, and a girl did die. So did Finn Collins, the best tracker we had."

I looked them all over. "The Grounders are pushing us. They want to cut us off from something even as simple as taking a bath. They're probably hoping if they can't kill us, then disease will."

They were glancing at each other. Some were clearly afraid.

"We need to get serious. Fast. We're making good progress, but it isn't enough. I'm going to reassign a few people. We need a better wall, and some of you are going to get that med bay together. Then we're going to move on to permanent housing, people. Winter's going to be here before we know it. I don't have to tell you what that would mean for us."

I crossed my arms. "This is more than just eeking out an existence. This is surviving. This is about showing those bastards we're not going anywhere. We're here, and we're staying." I gave them all a hard look. "Now all of you get back to your jobs. We've got a lot of work to do."

I turned and walked toward Miller. When people began to disperse, I leaned in so no one could hear us. "Thanks for handling things for me for a while."

He nodded, watching the others. "Wasn't easy. Raven's losing her shit and that whipped people into a frenzy."

"Send in Jasper or Monty. Somebody needs to stay with her." Something I wouldn't have thought about if Clarke hadn't pointed it out. "The last thing we need is for our best mechanic to off herself."

He frowned. "You think she'd go that far?"

"Girl threw herself through space for the guy, Miller."

He didn't say anything to that, but I could tell he couldn't fathom that kind of devotion. I could. I spent fifteen years hiding a secret. I put myself on a drop ship that I was 85% sure would blow up on reentry. For Octavia.

For myself.

Because life without her was not an option while I had strength. "Make sure she's with someone," I repeated.

"Alright."

"And get the engineering kids to me. We need to figure out this med center." I spotted Octavia in the crowd. "O!"

She stopped.

I jogged over to her. "I need you to go sit with Clarke, make sure she drinks and her fever doesn't get higher."

"Yeah. I can do that."

I hesitated. "Before you do...see if you can find a shirt for her." I flexed my hand at my side. "And a bra."

Both of her eyebrows slowly climbed to her hairline. "Do I want to know?"

I rolled my eyes, but I couldn't stop the heat sneaking up my neck. "Don't worry about it, okay? Just find it for her. And maybe another blanket too," I added as an after thought. "She's probably cold."

"Oh man. You've got it so bad."

"Shut up, O."

"It's cute."

"Just go. Now."

"Yeah, yeah. I'm going."

Not a single soul in this camp knew what it was like to deal with a little sister. None. I was alone in my suffering.

But at least she was talking to me again.

I stood next to the fire, absorbing some of its warmth while I waited for Miller and the others to show up. My gaze fell on the pile of bones sitting next to it, and I was reminded of how long it was since I'd eaten. Some of the them still had meat on it. I scowled. Who the hell wasted that? Did they think we were fucking swimming in edible around here?

There had to be a way of using that. Like...I didn't know, soup or something.

Wait. Soup. Clarke could eat soup.

How would we make that?

Soup was hot water with flavor. We weren't supposed to use water for that in space usually, but with an illegal human in our tiny apartment, sometimes we had to stretch rations a little farther in creative ways.

What if we boiled the bones?

Ideas were forming in my head. Vikings and Romans didn't have the technology the Ark did. Neither did we. They had wood and bone. So did we.

I crouched down and picked up a rib with two fingers, looking it over.

"Uh...Bellamy?" a tentative voice piped up behind me. I turned to look at a skinny redhead nervously toeing the ground. She couldn't have been older than fifteen. She was twisting her fingers together. "Miller said you needed to see us?"

I glanced around. "Where are the others?"

"Coming."

I stood up and walked over with the bone. "You design things." I had something on my mind, something I wasn't sure I could keep to myeslf. It had nothing to do with the med center. Was it important enough to go for?

"You could say that."She twisted her fingers harder. I don't know what a nervous kid like this did to be Confined, honestly, but looks were decieving, so I kept my face impassive.

"You either do or you don't, kid."

She swallowed. "I do."

I nodded once. Fuck it—I was going to follow through. "Okay." I thrust the rib at her. "Then tell me how to make this into a comb."