Archive of Our Own

i

Octavia Blake has never beaten her brother at Christmas.

Every year, Bellamy reminds her that Christmas is a holiday, not a competition, and they promise not to waste any money in the exchanging of gifts. And every year, they each break their promise, and Bellamy's gift to Octavia is the most perfect, epic, amazing gift she could ever imagine. One year, he got them tickets to the amusement park on Christmas Eve, where they watched the holiday light show, and Octavia rode on her very first roller coaster. Another year, he took her to the fanciest restaurant in Arkadia, late at night after it had already closed, and they had the kind of lavish dinner only rich people can afford, catered to them in a room of twinkling white and green lights. And last year, after he picked her up from her first semester at college, he woke her up at the crack of dawn, roused her out of her too-small childhood bed, and drove her out to the farmland beyond the city limits, where they took an early morning sleigh ride across the crisp, new fallen snow.

All of these gifts were possible because Bellamy knows everyone, and everyone owes him a favor at nearly all times. Octavia knows almost no one, has no favors to call in or strings to pull, and always ends up saving her money and wracking her brain only to end up buying her brother... a book. An art print. A plant in a cracked brown plastic container.

Every year he tells her, "O, you shouldn't have, we said no gifts," and then pretends the concert tickets they have to sneak in through the side entrance to use are "not a gift" at all. Just a nice thing for them both. Just a way to spend quality time.

So this year, she's decided, they're going to spend quality time. The cabin shows up right at the top of her Airbnb search list, on her very first tentative planning attempt. It's dirt cheap, and it's available for a whole week right at Christmas time. Like some kinda miracle. She books it before she can overthink, and then when she's home for Thanksgiving, she packs a bag of Bellamy's stuff, and smuggles it in with her things when she returns to school. He spends the next month asking her if she happens to know where his favorite blue sweater is, but it's worth it. After the semester ends, she stays late on campus to get in a few more shifts at her job. And when Bellamy finally rolls up to the deserted heart of her university town, early in the morning exactly four days before Christmas, she tells him he looks tired, and volunteers to drive.

He looks at her skeptically, a single curl falling across his forehead, poking down into his bloodshot eyes.

"Seriously," she says, and sticks out her hand for the keys. Bellamy's still behind the wheel, bare hands turning slightly blue where they grip at ten and two. "You look like hell. And take these." She pulls a pair of gloves from her pocket, well-worn and beaten up on the outside, lined with soft fake fur on the inside, and shoves them in his face. "Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas to you, too, O," he grumbles, as he throws her the keys and drags himself out of the car. He's slightly hunched over, with a creaky limp-like uncertainty to his walk.

She narrows her eyes at him, as suspicious of him as he was of her. "You're walking like an old man."

"Thanks. Just stiff from driving."

"And working too hard." She bangs on the top of the car, the jittery excitement in her surfacing as nerves and impatience. "Get in Grandpa. We gotta hit the road."

Bellamy groans as he sinks into the passenger's seat. But he still puts on the gloves, stretches his fingers in them appreciatively, and he still lets Octavia force a thermos of hot coffee into his hands. "I've been hitting it," he mutters. A pleasant color rises in his cheeks as he opens up the thermos, breathing deep of the rich scent and letting the steam rise up in thin plumes toward his face.

"That's what she said. Ready to go?"

"Gross. Also—that doesn't make sense." He screws the thermos cap back on. "And yeah."

"Shut up, yeah it does. The gloves are your gift, by the way. And the coffee. Bonus gift." The thrill of lying makes her hands want to shake, rushes of nervous adrenaline pumping through her, and a hard twist in her stomach. This is how she feels before a big test, or the first drop on the roller coaster, how she felt opening the financial aid envelope the spring of her senior year. It all makes her feel almost ill, in the most exciting way. Her plan, her very own plan, is falling into place.

She maneuvers the car out of the parking spot, then turns it in a wide arc until it's facing the exit of the lot. Bellamy always gets nervous when she drives, even though she's awesome at it. She figures he must be really exhausted, if he's barely even tensing in his seat this time.

"I thought we said no gifts," he says, belatedly, and without any force.

"Yeah. And what's your not-a-gift to me?" Octavia counters. "Plane tickets to Europe from Miller's friend's cousin's wife's orthodontist whose house you painted once?"

Bellamy doesn't answer for a long time, so long that she figures he's fallen asleep. She glances over at him once she hits the perpetual red light by Kane's Grocery. He's still awake, just embarrassed, staring out the window, hunched up in his jacket and refusing to look at her.

"M'Benga knows a guy who works at the ice-skating rink. His girlfriend does. She knows someone who knows someone. I know you always wanted to learn how—"

"Ugh." She groans. She's disgusted. She wants to take back the fur gloves. And she tells him all of this, because what she really means is that he knows she never got to learn how to skate when she was a kid, when it was all the rage among her friends, because they couldn't afford it, and because their mom was always paranoid about Octavia's health. That he still remembers how much her little heart was set on it is the most annoying and the nicest, sweetest, most thoughtful thing. She tells him that she hates him, because she really means that she loves him, like, a stupid amount.

"I know," he answers, tired but smiling. Then he props his knees up on the dashboard, crosses his arms against his chest, and curls down into himself, half-hiding himself in his coat.

He's mostly asleep by the time they race past the city limits, totally gone before Octavia takes the wrong exit and starts leaving civilization behind. The cabin is farther away than she thought it would be. Once she gets into the woods, all the trees start looking the same, the road becomes narrow and winding, the pavement unmarked, and her GPS quickly becomes useless.

Sweat pricks under her arms and across her forehead, and she feels like she's suffocating in her winter coat, in the stuffy, warm inside of Bellamy's car. Her palms stick with sweat against the wheel. This is it now, the part of the woods that wants to swallow them whole. On a hunch, she takes a turn and bumps onto a dirt road, which is probably right, but not certainly right, and winces at the way the car sways and rocks over the uneven path. That'll wake Bellamy up for sure. Afternoon is reaching its peak, which means—damn late December—that the light will start waning on them soon. Then they could really be screwed. If her Christmas gift to her brother is getting them lost in the woods—

He stirs briefly, muttering inscrutable low noises as if in a dream, but doesn't wake. Not long after, the road empties out into a clearing, and she finds herself rolling right up to the cabin, the winter retreat of her dreams.

The place seems bigger in person than it did in the photos, but otherwise, just the same. She traces her eyes up the wide front steps, along the wraparound porch, with the swing on one side, and the two rocking chairs on the other, takes in the wide picture windows and the little peaked roof and the stone chimney, counts the logs in the pile of neatly chopped wood just outside. It's perfect. It's just what she imagined. She knows what the inside looks like, too, from hours scrolling through photos and working out her plans. The living room is long and wide, with a real brick fireplace and overstuffed furniture upholstered in faded green and red plaid. There's a thick shag rag between the fireplace and the couch, a coffee table, a couple of bookcases stuffed with books, and a big table off to the side, the kind of table you'd slap a bright tablecloth on and use to serve Christmas dinner to all of your family—if you were the sort of person who had a lot of family, the kind of person who needed a big table, which Octavia isn't and never has been. The table's just next to the swinging door that leads to the kitchen. She swiped through pictures of that room, too: a cheery place with wooden countertops, a green tiled floor, and yellow curtains on the window above the sink. A sweeping staircase in the living room, and another, smaller staircase in the kitchen, both lead upstairs to the bedrooms. The house supposedly has two, although there were only pictures of one: a cozy little space, taken up mostly by a huge queen bed topped with a red quilt, fresh white curtains on the windows and hand-painted flowers on the chest of drawers, clean wooden floors and a soft, red throw rug.

It looked like the kind of place Bellamy would dream up and then describe to her in a bedtime story, a fairy tale house or a house for animals that talk, a far-far away house where happily ever afters take place. Except it's real, and she's staring up at it through the streaks on Bellamy's windshield, feeling sweaty and dehydrated, and her legs all cramped up from too much sitting.

Bellamy himself is still asleep. Now that the cabin is real and the adventure is real and the car is really parked right in front of the real cabin, a disgusting wave of second thoughts takes over, bad enough to make Octavia want to hurl. So she rips the band aid off fast, because there's nothing she can do about it now anyway—shoves at him roughly until he startles, waking with a gasp of air and a violent shake, cracks his elbow against the side of the door and his knee against the dashboard, and swears, "Fuck, Octavia—"—all in one chaotic handful of seconds.

Then he whips around and gets a look at where they are.

"Fuck, Octavia," he says again, this time lower, more subdued. He stares up at the cabin. For once, she can't read her big brother's face.

"Um, surprise?"

He turns back toward her. His eyes are still bugging halfway out of their sockets, and his mussed-up hair makes him look deranged, like he's been kidnapped, and the bag has just been yanked off his head.

She tries again. "Merry Christmas? I lied about the gloves."

"The gloves," he echoes faintly, as if this new information just made the situation several times more confusing, looks down at his hands and then back up at the cabin again. "What are we doing here? Are we lost?"

"No." The confused act has gotten old. She decides abruptly to stop indulging it. "I rented us this cabin. We're staying through Christmas. It's gonna be fun and festive. Come on." She shoves at him again, indicating he should get out of the car, then steps out from behind the wheel herself.

The first blast of fresh air clears her head, and as she swings her legs out of the car, her feet crack through a layer of frozen crust and then sink several inches deep into a soft, fluffy snow. She grins. That’s the stuff. The mountains must get a lot more of it than they do down in Polis. She's barely seen a few flakes on campus this year: a light dusting on the first day of exams, which melted by noon, and several chill weeks of hard, cutting winds and bleak, gray skies. But up here, a high sun shines in through the trees and sparkles along low drifts of pristine, unblemished snow. It crunches beneath her boots as she walks around to the trunk to get their bags. She can hear Bellamy's boots crunching too, the dull thudding of his car door as he closes it, and something like an unwarranted, exasperated sigh.

"You don't like it?" she asks, pulling out her suitcase and then his bag.

"No, I—" He takes a deep breath, and she knows that the sharp, cold mountain air does him good, too. "How did you afford this place, O?"

"I didn't buy it. Just rented it. It was super cheap. And I got a discount on those gloves so... had some extra cash."

This is a better explanation than literally any he's ever given her about his gifts, and after a moment, he seems to accept the gesture in the spirit in which it was offered. She can practically feel his muscles unclench, just watching him. A certain uncoiling of relief flows through her, too.

"This place really is beautiful, O," he admits, as they stomp up the porch steps, leaving outlines of white boot prints in their wake.

Octavia fishes out the key from the corner of the little mailbox next to the door. "Isn't it? It'll be great. No studying. No work—called your boss, by the way, so don't even worry about it—no annoying people. We can build a fire!"

The noise they make unlocking the door, crossing the threshold, stomping the snow from their boots onto the welcome mat, and dragging in their bags causes such a racket in the perfect stillness of the cabin that, for a moment, Octavia doesn't pick up on the other sounds. The sound of wood pushed against wood. The sound of footsteps. The sound of wheels rolling, even though her own suitcase is still.

The sound of a door swinging open on the other side of the room.

She looks up, and Bellamy looks up, and the woman on the other side of the room looks up.

"What are you doing here?" she says, which is funny, because that was going to be Octavia's second question. Right after:

"Who are you?"

The woman has long blonde hair that falls in waves over her shoulders, and pale skin turned pink at the cheeks from the cold. She's wearing a heavy blue winter coat with fur lining along the hood, buttoned up to her chin but with the hood itself pushed back, and fingerless blue gloves, and men's style brown and black snow boots. Her suitcase is the same style as Octavia's, but newer, and a startling shade of purple. She seems to be about Bellamy's age.

"I'm Clarke," she says, after a long moment, as if either have them would have any idea what that means. "I rented the cabin for the week."

"I’m Bellamy and this is Octavia. You don't own it?" Bellamy asks, at the same moment that Octavia steps forward and insists:

"No, we rented it."

Did she fuck up the dates? No, no she definitely didn't. This other woman must have fucked up. So much for no annoying people.

Clarke looks between the two, unsure who to address, then quickly settles on Bellamy. "No, I'm not the owner. I'm just renting the place, starting today through the twenty-sixth. What dates do you have?"

"Today through the twenty-sixth," Octavia answers, stepping forward again and slightly in front of Bellamy, hoping to force this Clarke lady to look at her. The nerve, asking her what dates they have, as if it weren't obvious. "Are you sure you didn't book for January?"

"Are you sure you didn't book for January?"

"Yes."

"Well so am I. Look, these are my only Christmas plans—" She cuts herself, closes her eyes for a moment and exhales hard enough to make her nostrils flare, like she's annoyed at the amount of emotion she let slip into her voice.

She doesn't look like she's about to cry, but she does look mightily pissed off, and this time Octavia has no idea what to say.

"I'm sure it's just a mistake," Bellamy offers into the awkward silence. He's staring at the girl with those sad puppy dog eyes of his, feeling sorry for her maybe, or thinking she looks cute (which she sort of does), or just trying to defuse a situation that has already been defused, that has already fallen in on itself like a slowly deflating balloon. "We'll figure something out. Maybe we can split the cabin or something."

That's a punch in the gut she didn't ask for. Octavia starts to protest, half to Bellamy and half to the interloper—"You know these are our only Christmas plans, too" —when she's distracted by a long, low whining sound from somewhere right above.

She looks up. Bellamy and Clarke look up, too. After a moment of tense, breath-held silence, Clarke says, "That must be the house settling."

"Maybe," Bellamy answers, but he doesn't sound sure.

The whining repeats, and then is followed by two sets of footsteps, walking across the floor above them and slightly to the left. Under slightly different circumstances, the noise would be terrifying. As it is—even if there are intruders on the second floor, at least her side has them outnumbered.

But she doesn’t think they’re really intruders.

"Oh great," Clarke mumbles, passing her hand across her face.

"Oh no," Bellamy mutters just under his breath.

Octavia sits down on her suitcase, shoulders weighted down with defeat. Barely audibly, she sighs, "Oh shit."

ii

The cabin has six bedrooms, which is wild, because the listing claimed there were only two. At first, they second-guess themselves, wondering if they drove up to the wrong empty wooden house in the middle of the woods, if this is serial killer territory, telling each other increasingly fearsome tales about their imminent fate as some crazed ax murderer's stuffed trophy. Or maybe it's a fairy situation, and they should be watching out for forest cryptids, goblins and ghouls and the like—possibly werewolves, or other magical beings lying in wait in thick drifts of snow. The stories are just for the fun of one-upping each other, but then a tree limb outside cracks and falls with a gunshot-sound, and Jasper drops to the floor on instinct and tries to hide under the bed. At that point, they decide to take a more reasonable view.

The key to the cabin was right under the welcome mat by the back door, as promised, and both the inside and outside looked like all the pictures: the yellow curtains in the kitchen, the plaid upholstery on the couch and armchairs, the real fireplace with a basket of neatly chopped wood right next to it (the use of which is definitely on their Christmas agenda). The largest bedroom is also as advertised on Airbnb: a huge king bed with a blue plaid comforter; a view of the back of the house, where they've parked Monty's VW Bus; and a closet where they should probably hang up their clothes, since they're adults now, and they are staying a full five days.

So the other bedrooms are, given the weight of the evidence, probably a fluke. A typo. Monty claims the one with the blue plaid comforter, and Jasper plans to take the next one over, slightly smaller but with cheery orange wallpaper and a wreath on the door, but he doesn't even get as far as storing his suitcase over there. Instead, he and Monty spend some time testing the bounciness of the king, until, exhausted, they find themselves lying side by side on their backs, staring up at the pristine white of the ceiling.

"Long trip," Jasper says.

"Long trip," Monty agrees.

Suddenly, it's like neither of them have any energy at all. The world feels heavy over them, and light and inconsequential at the same time. Their dorm, which they left eighteen hours ago with two suitcases, a cooler's worth of drinks and snacks, and a semester's worth of work study money for gas and food, seems like another planet, or perhaps another universe.

"This was a good idea," Monty says.

"A really good idea," Jasper agrees.

"Way cooler than spending the holidays with our families."

"Oh, infinitely. Who needs them?"

Monty's the only family he needs, and he doesn't even feel bad about it. But even in quiet moments like these, the soft warmth of the heater and the awareness of the deep cold outside, the cold that wants to seep through the glass, the unadulterated cold of the dark and quiet days that threaten the end of the year—even in moments like these when he's running his hand up and down the worn fabric of the blanket on some stranger's bed, he doesn't think he can say it. They've only known each other four months, but it's like, why not call it what it is and say four life times? That's how it feels.

He turns on his side and stares at Monty, who has turned in the same moment to look at him, too.

"I'm really fucking tired," they say at the same time, then cannot help but laugh.

"Jinx," they add, and hook their pinkies together.

Monty thinks that it's nice to watch Jasper's eyelashes up close.

Thoughts like that let him know he's really sleepy, just as much as the heavy ache in his limbs.

So Jasper doesn't get up and neither does Monty, and the bright yellow sun of early morning has dipped into the mellow shade of a short winter afternoon by the time either of them opens his eyes again.

Jasper widens his slightly. From downstairs, they can hear the scrape of the door opening, the stomp of footsteps. The distant sound of objects being moved.

"What's that?" Jasper whispers. He's lying as still as he can possibly be, and even moving his mouth to form the words makes him wince. Even breathing feels like a risk. In his heartbeat he can hear, over and over, someone is here, someone is here, someone is here.

"Serial killer?" Monty answers.

Jasper shoots out one leg to kick him in the shin. "Not funny."

Monty gives an apologetic shrug. He's lifted his head very slightly, staring into the far distance, as if he could see the intruders with some sixth sense. "More than one person," he murmurs. "They're talking."

"Well, are you going to see who it is?"

"Me? Why me?"

"You're the one who said serial killer—!"

Monty hushes him sharply, and Jasper swallows down the panic forming heavy in his throat. "Together, then?" he says after a moment, and Monty agrees with a serious nod.

They stand up very slowly, careful not to make a sound, creep out of the bedroom in their sock feet, and start down the hall. Halfway to the stairs, a floorboard creaks with a long, plaintive whine under Monty's heel. They freeze. Jasper closes his eyes tight, heart thudding in his ears, and doesn't move again until Monty grabs his hand and tugs him forward.

The voices stopped abruptly after the creak, which means their presence definitely isn't a secret anymore. Still, they tread carefully down the rest of the hall and down the stairs, pausing at the bend so they can carefully peak around the corner and look down.

In the living room, three people are arranged in a confused tableau, surrounded by bags, still dressed in their winter boots and coats. And they’re staring up at Jasper and Monty as if they were the serial killers in this scenario.

Jasper meets the eye of the younger girl, who looks to be about their age and is unfairly beautiful, even with that scowl on her face, and gives her a tentative wave.

Reluctantly, she waves back, and his knees just about buckle beneath him.

"Let me guess," the other woman says, crossing her arms against her chest. "You booked this place for the week, too?"

"Yeah... Is that what all of you are doing here?" Monty answers, slowly standing up straight and walking down a few more of the steps. Jasper follows a beat after. The brown-haired girl is still watching him, a certain grudging curiosity beneath her scowl. "Is the place double-booked?"

"Triple-booked," the guy answers. He sounds just about as gruff as the girl next to him looks, so Jasper figures they must be related. "I'm Bellamy, this is my sister, Octavia—"

"And I'm Clarke," the blonde woman finishes. "We were talking about maybe splitting the cabin, but if it's only two bedrooms..."

"It's not, though," Jasper interrupts. "We got here this morning—we're Jasper and Monty, by the way—and took a look around. There are six bedrooms. Which still leaves one for each other of us plus an extra in case we get any more guests."

"Don't even joke about that," Octavia groans. She stands up again, from where she was sitting on top of her suitcase, pulls off her gloves and shoves them dramatically in her pockets. "Are all of you really suggesting we split this cabin for a week? I don't care how many beds there are, it isn't that big."

"Well maybe not a week," Clarke concedes. "But at least the night. It'll be dark soon, and this place was hard enough to find during the day. Plus, I don't think anyone's really in the mood to hash out who has the best claim right now."

Octavia looks ready to argue that point, but her brother cuts in before she can. "Agreed. We should all pick a bedroom, settle in, and just… try not to bother each other."

"I think we know who the mom and dad of the group are," Monty whispers, leaning in close so only Jasper can hear.

"Agreed. You think we're a group now?"

Monty follows Jasper's gaze, watching with him as Octavia throws off her jacket and hangs it up on one of the pegs by the door. He can already guess who Jasper's most interested in befriending. "For now at least, yeah," he answers. "And if we actually want to spend the week here, and not get kicked out by these people, I think we need to embrace being a group."

iii

Thirty minutes past civilization, on an unmarked, deserted road without another car in sight, Raven's GPS malfunctions and abruptly shuts itself off. So now she has only her wits. Her wits, her trusty Jeep, and a couple flares in her emergency kit in the back. She doesn't have a great idea about how to get to this cabin, other than she's looking for a dirt road somewhere around here and to the right, but she masks the growing, prickling unease in her belly with muttering and a low simmer of annoyance. Sure, she'll be fine, and getting away for a bit was a good idea, she's sticking by it, but if she ends up camping in the woods in the middle of winter, four days before Christmas—

She's not going to end up camping in the woods in the middle of winter. No matter what, that is not going to happen.

The morning's crystalline ice-blue sky has deepened in color now, to a hazy, deep blue smudged over by clouds. Late afternoon feels more like mid-evening, so she flicks her headlights on. They illuminate a scrum of snow along the blacktop, cut through with tire tracks, and an endlessness of winding road, and cast the snow-decked evergreens flashing by on either side of her into shadow.

She reaches out to fiddle with the radio, hoping for some music to break the silence. One part of her plan—the idea that she needs some time alone, some Raven-time, as she’d put it, to figure herself out—does seem foolhardy now, as the forest creeps in closer, much too vast and much too dense. The path snaking through it is too narrow, the illumination of even her high beams too weak. At first, she can find only static to keep her company. Then a few hints of talk and scratchy guitar riffs. But eventually, she eases into a station that is mostly clear, some classic rock song hitting its final notes before the announcer comes on. She settles back into her seat again.

"...And folks, if you're home, you're going to want to stay home tonight, and make sure you've got some extra food and batteries stored up because a storm IS on the horizon. That's right, the first big winter storm of the season. We're looking at up to three feet of snow expected and seriously chilly temperatures, as low as—"

Raven flicks the radio off. The uneasiness feels like it's uncurling, stretching itself all through her. She flexes her hands against the wheel.

As she turns a corner, the tire tracks ahead of her swerve abruptly off to the right, and she realizes for the first time that she's been following another car, one specific car, ever since she first eased her way into the woods. And now that car is stopped, half-tipped into the ditch between the tiny scrap of shoulder and the trees, with its emergency lights flashing a bright and haunting red. Raven slows down. Some part of her, the ancient part that still believes in superstitions and ghosts, and not the scientific part that knows better, wonders if the sight is no more than an apparition. She hasn't seen another soul for almost an hour. And now these blinking lights are flashing through the haze and quiet, blinking over and over, calling to her through the dark.

She stops even with the car, in the middle of the road. If this is a trap, well, she’s fallen for it. As she jumps out, the car's driver's side door opens, and a figure in a long, black winter coat steps out. He stumbles a little on the uneven dirt that he's driven his car into, regains his balance with a huff, and pushes his knit hat back on his head as if to see her better from underneath the brim.

"Thank God," he says, as he steps fully into view in the glare of Raven's headlights. He's younger than she was expecting, probably in his mid-20s just like her, red-faced from the cold and sniffling. Even with his shoulders hunched up to his ears and his hands deep in his pockets, he’s still shivering. The hat and the coat look decently warm, but he's not dressed nearly well enough for a night in the woods—even without a snowstorm coming. "I thought I'd die before I saw another human being. I've been trying to get some kind of cell reception but this whole area is an utter dead zone."

"How long have you been out here?" she asks, stepping closer, eyeing the sorry little car behind him. It's a banged up two-door the approximate color of dirt—a few visible dents and a navy-blue back door from a junk yard salvage—all visible tires intact, but no chains on them—all in all the kind of clunker she doubts could get from one end of Arkadia to the other, let alone up a mountain in winter. So he's an idiot, reckless, desperate, or he’s got a death wish. Maybe some combination of all four.

"Long enough to freeze my ass of," he mutters, then adds, quickly, "Sorry."

Raven scoffs. "I'm a mechanic," she says, pushing past him roughly on her way to the car. "I've heard worse. What happened here?"

"Well, I had this idea I'd rent this cheap cabin in the woods because I’m—"

"I mean with the car." It's not smoking, which is good, nothing's actually on fire, but that's about all she can say as she pops open the hood. "Do you have a toolkit? If not, there's one in my car, under the passenger seat."

He brings her the little red toolkit from the Jeep, and she pulls out a flashlight so she can get a better look. "I don't know," he says. "I was doing fine and then it just sputtered out and died. I could barely get it off the road. Can you fix it?"

"Can you afford my hourly rate?"

"Funny." He steps closer, looking over her shoulder to watch the play of the flashlight beam. She can smell the wool of his coat and, underneath it, a faint scent of cologne mixed with sweat. Not actually unpleasant, but terribly distracting—makes her wonder in a vague way if he’s going to try to bash her head into the engine and kidnap her or something, which would be a very bad mistake on his part.

"Can you give me some room?” She glances up, and he holds his hands out in apology, still in his pockets, and takes a step back. “I’m trying to work here.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

She can hear him pacing nervously, his shoes crunching and squeaking across the snow, and almost wishes she hadn't shooed him away. He made her less tense when he was crowded up behind her and watching her work. Plus, it was nice, in a way, another person so close in the eerie quiet of the woods.

"So can you fix it?" he asks, after several minutes during which Raven can feel his patience fraying, just as easily as she can feel the frigid winter air through her thin gloves.

"Yeah," she answers, straightening up. "But I'll need to replace a couple parts."

"And I don't suppose you have them on you?"

"No, I don't carry an entire replacement engine, cut up into pieces, with me wherever go." She rolls her eyes, but she can hardly be annoyed with him when he's got that sorry hangdog expression on his face. "Where are you going? I can give you a lift."

"You're serious?"

He stares at her for a long moment, his eyes slowly narrowing, like he's struggling to read her face properly in the gloom.

"Dead serious. You think I'm going to leave you out here to freeze to death?"

"What if I'm a serial killer?"

She gives him the once over, letting her gaze linger disparagingly on his shoes. "I guess that's a risk I'll have to take. Now grab your stuff," she adds, patting him on the shoulder as she passes him by again.

She waits in the car while he pulls a duffel bag out of his trunk and stows it away with her suitcase in the back of the Jeep. Then he hauls himself up into the passenger seat. For a moment, in the overhead light before the door slams shut, she catches a proper glimpse of his face: the brown hair sticking out from under his hat, the stubble beginning to grow on his cheeks, his brown eyes flecked with gold.

Then they're alone, in the silence and the shadow. The deep blue of an overcast afternoon has itself mellowed into purple twilight, the trees on either side of the road rising up like ghostly shadows. Raven's headlights reveal the pure white of the snow and, now, a few sparse, drifting flakes starting to sift down, floating lazily through the beams. She wonders if he's watching her. She can't hear a thing but her own engine thrumming, and the sound of the stranger blowing air into his cupped hands.

She reaches over and adjusts the heating vent so it blasts warm air directly on him. "Thanks," he mumbles. Out of the corner of her eye, as she puts her foot on the gas and starts to drive, she can see him pulling off his gloves and turning his palms toward the vent. "I'm Murphy, by the way."

"Raven," she answers. "Where did you say you were going?"

"This little cabin—I'm not exactly sure where it is..." His voice trails off awkwardly, but Raven doesn't bother to fill the silence in its wake. That uneasiness is rising up again, a new tremor to it this time. Something she's not yet ready to name, a realization she knows without wanting to know.

"Let me guess," she says, in a clipped, measured tone. "It's one-bedroom, suspiciously cheap, out in the middle of nowhere..."

He glances at her, then abruptly away again when she meets his eye. "Green tile in the kitchen?"

"Porch swing?"

"Fireplace?"

"Fuck." She slams her palm down abruptly on the steering wheel and, though the car doesn't swerve at all, Murphy instinctively reaches out as if to pull them back on the road.

"We're sharing a cabin, aren't we?" he asks, which is a stupid question, because of course that's what would happen to Raven Reyes's well-deserved and needed Raven-time vacation.

She grunts under her breath.

"So, your Christmas must be pretty pathetic, too, isn't it?" Murphy asks, sitting back in his seat and pulling his gloves back on. "If you're spending it alone in the wilderness."

"It's a personal choice."

"Oh really?"

He's turned to look at her. She can tell without looking at him. She can feel his gaze on her, surprisingly open and curious—like he's seeing her, somehow, in a way she hasn't been seen in a long while.

"Yeah. I had this invite to go skiing with this person I've been seeing..." She trails off, then finishes very quickly: "But it wasn't working out so I cancelled and told him I needed some time alone."

"Oh, right, I get it. It's not him, it's you."

"No, it's definitely him," Raven answers without thinking. She abruptly snaps her mouth shut again, dares to glance over at Murphy—and as soon as their eyes meet, they bark out identical, short laughs.

"I saw this cabin and thought it would be a nice... a gift to myself,” she adds. “Just to get some perspective."

"Yeah, sometimes that's just what you have to do." He shrugs, humming a little as they take another turn. The pink glare of sunset is already faint on the horizon, bleeding out around the edges, the purple sky directly above growing darker and deeper.

"So how about you?"

"Me? Oh. I've been... between situations for a while." He turns lazily toward the window, watching the dark outline of trees flash past. "Couch surfing and so on. Anyway, I got a real job that starts next year, and a new roommate situation lined up, but I can't move in until after Christmas so I thought..."

"Dirt cheap cabin in the woods," Raven finishes.

"Dirt cheap cabin in the woods, yeah."

"And that's going well for you so far?"

"Well, I didn't freeze to death in my car, so—yeah." He manages a smile, and she can hear the tension easing out of him on a long, deep sigh. "Working out pretty well, at least tonight. You going to kick me out of your cabin tomorrow?"

"No. Probably not." She smiles. "But you are taking the couch."

Murphy scoffs and crosses his arms against his chest. "We'll see about that, Raven."

She rolls her eyes and bites back a grin, while ahead of them, in the new-settled darkness, manic swirls of snowflakes pass through the glow of the high beams and settle on the road.

iv

When the cabin starts to feel too claustrophobic, Bellamy grabs his jacket and steps out onto the porch. His sister is pacing around like a caged animal, and those two college boys, Jasper and Monty, have taken over the living room floor with a loud game of cards. He can hear them even up in his bedroom. If he doesn't get some fresh air soon, he might just break.

And Clarke—he's not entirely sure where Clarke is. Probably rehearsing her argument for tomorrow, as to why she should have the cabin for herself. She is definitely going to make more of a fuss about it than those easygoing stoners, which means if he and Octavia are going to have the Christmas O wants, Clarke is the primary obstacle in their way. He should be spending his time planning out his own counter-attack, but in truth, he's not sure he has it in him this year. He can't blame Clarke for someone else's mistake; he can't see her as an enemy. She'd looked just as exhausted as he felt, standing there in the middle of the living room with her single suitcase and her jacket buttoned up to her chin.

Beautiful, too. Beautiful, authoritative, direct—if O weren't so distracted, she'd be reminding him that Clarke is just his type.

He sighs, sticks his hands in his jeans pockets and steps up to the porch railing to look out over the scene. Winter twilight has settled early upon the forest. Above, the sky is not yet black, not the pink-purple hue of sunset, but a dark and muted, hazy blue. Everything touched by this light softens under its eerie cast. The snowdrifts that sparkled in the sun when they first pulled up are now colored a dim lavender, sloping down into deep pockets of shadow, and the evergreens that tower above the clearing are shaded in deep blue, nearly black, with subdued white edgings of snow. He's started to get used to the sharpness of the cold, even as it seems to slice through his lungs with each inhale. He feels the bitter clarity of it all through him, sees it in the silvery clouds of his own breath.

He hears the front door opening, and the creak of quiet footsteps, but he's paying so little attention that he startles at the sound of a voice:

"Looks like it's going to snow."

He jerks around sharply on his heel, and only then catches sight of her, staring at him from the shadows just beyond the porch light's glow. Clarke. She's not wearing her winter jacket, but she still has on her brown snow boots, and she's pulled on an oversized white cable-knit cardigan whose sleeves fall down loosely over her hands. Swimming in it, she looks smaller than she is. He doesn't say anything for a long moment, and she offers him a tentative smile.

He smiles back. She steps forward into the light, then takes another step, so she's side by side with him. Her knees bump up against the railing when she shifts her weight between her feet.

"How can you tell it's supposed to snow?" Bellamy asks. He tilts his head back, but there's nothing about the thick brown clouds, crowding together to hide the stars, that make him think a snowfall is coming.

"The light. It always looks like this right before it starts to snow... gloomy and blue, but the air's so cold it's almost... crystalline. Expectant." She shrugs. When she rests her hands on the railing, her bare fingertips peak out from the edges of her sleeves. "That's the best way I can describe it."

"Does it snow a lot where you're from?" He's lived in Arkadia since he was a kid. They get some snow but real storms are rare, and he's only seen a handful of white Christmases his whole life.

"Oh, no." She pulls her sleeves down lower, starts to fidget with her sweater. He'd guess she was nervous, but she's probably just cold. "I used to go skiing with my family every year for Christmas. Sometimes we'd have some heavy snows up in the mountains."

"No ski trip this year, though," he says, tentatively, after a moment of searching for anything else to say. Whatever is melancholy about her, he wishes he could erase; whatever burden is weighing her down, he'd like to ease. But he's curious too. People with better things to do, with big families, with big plans, don't end up trying to escape the world in an isolated, picaresque spot in the woods.

"Nope," Clarke agrees. "Decided not to go. My parents—" She hesitates, staring out at the hills and slopes of snow, a sob story she never meant to tell just there on her tongue. "They divorced a while ago. I was supposed to go to the ski cabin with my mom and my stepdad but there's always some sort of drama going on with them, a lot of people... I have a lot of thinking I need to do and I just felt like I needed to get away, and not.... Really away," she clarifies.

"Not get caught up in other people's bullshit," Bellamy supplies.

She grins—the first real, true smile he's seen on her, which makes him smile too.

"Exactly. Yeah."

"Except now you have to deal with me," he adds, and she bumps her arm against his arm companionably, and mutters:

"Ugh, I know. What made you think you could mess up my plans, huh?"

"Hey, that was my sister, not me." He'd hold up his hands in surrender, except he doesn't dare to take them out of the warmth of his pockets. After a moment, his smile softens and his voice becomes more serious again, and he adds, "She rented this place for us as a Christmas gift. I think she's trying to one-up me. We, uh—I mean not to outdo your parental drama story, but our mom died when O was thirteen, so—it's been just us for a while. I try to find something nice for us to do on the holidays to make it seem less lonely. Especially since she's in college now."

He expects Clarke to apologize, to try to say something nice but generic about his mom, the way people always do. But instead she just reaches out and squeezes his arm, and gazes up at him with a gentle, sorry but compassionate look. He thinks about tracing the slight crease between her eyebrows. He thinks about taking her hand and squeezing it back.

"Sounds like she's learning from you," Clarke says.

"Yeah? Learning what?"

"The art of the Christmas surprise. This was a good one."

He grunts, pretending to shrug off the compliment, as well as the kindness. "Sure. Until all you interlopers showed up."

"Unacceptable," Clarke agrees. Then she glances over her shoulder, and adds, "I was looking through the kitchen... there's a pantry back there. Stocked up from the ceiling to the floor. There's more than enough food for all of us."

For a night? Bellamy wonders, his eyebrows slightly raised. Or—

Clarke shivers and tries to wrap her sweater closer around her, and every possible iteration of the question immediately flies from Bellamy's thoughts. "Hey—you should have brought your coat," he chides, but instead of walking the five steps to the door to grab it for her from inside, he shrugs his own jacket off and wraps it around Clarke's shoulders.

"You don't need—" she starts to argue, but he only urges her to put her arms in the sleeves. "We should just go inside. We'll need to start getting dinner soon."

"Soon," Bellamy agrees. He doesn't head toward the door, though. Instead, he wraps his arm around her, and she sinks against his side, like there was nowhere else in the world she could possibly be. She feels warm and soft, and her hair smells like citrus shampoo.

Outside, in the shadows beyond the reach of the golden porch light, a light fluttering of snowflakes starts to fall, glints of pale white through the dark of settled evening.

"See?" Clarke says, pointing vaguely toward the snow. "Told you."

"Not exactly a storm," Bellamy answers. He flicks his gaze up, takes in a dizzying whirl of snowflakes and the barest hints of stars. Almost enough to make him lose his balance. But he could keep on staring at the oncoming snow all night.

v

Octavia confirms the existence of all six bedrooms, twice, before she heads downstairs to explore the rest of the cabin. The boys seem to have claimed the blue room for their own, which is the only one with a king. She gives Bellamy the red room, and takes the room next door for herself, which has a cheery yellow quilt on the bed and a strange little music box on top of the vanity, because it seems like the second best one. Clarke has left her suitcase open and all her stuff strewn over the bed with the purple comforter, all the way at the end of the hall. That leaves a citrus-y themed bedroom with an orange bedspread and a strangely welcoming, though somber, gray-colored room, both without occupants. She supposes one of the boys could take one of those, if he wanted.

Downstairs, she gives herself a tour of the kitchen, taking in the gas stove, just like Bellamy's at home, and the red plastic dish rack next to the spotless, stainless-steel sink. There's a little pantry hidden behind a door next to the fridge. She starts to take inventory, but gets bored halfway through, since it's stuffed to the rafters with food.

The cabin has two bathrooms, and she gives each one a proper examination: tests out the sturdiness of the checked-tile floors, kicks the legs of the claw foot tub in one, and admires the cleanliness of the marbled glass shower door in the other. Nothing in the medicine cabinets of either except spare toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap, which is not a surprise, but somewhat of a disappointment. The water runs clear and warm out of all of the taps.

When she's finished with her rounds, she returns to the living room, where she stops up short just at the bottom of the stairs. She'd forgotten for a moment that those kids, Jasper and Monty, were here. They're sitting across from each other on the rug next to the fireplace, playing cards with a nerdy, weirdly endearing enthusiasm. She watches them for a long moment. Jasper sets down a card, then slaps his hand over it quickly, crying out in victory as Monty covers his face with his hands in defeat.

Curious.

Without hesitation, she strides across the room and leaps over the end of the couch, launching herself right onto the middle cushion, where she settles in to watch them from above. She doesn't say anything, and after a moment, as he deals out another round, Monty asks, "Can we help you with something?"

Octavia shrugs. "What are you playing?"

"Speed," Jasper answers. "We found the cards in the bedside table in Monty's room. Do you want to play? We can deal you in this round."

"Nah." She has no idea how to play, but would rather not admit it. They shrug, and Monty continues dealing, and neither one asks her why she's still hovering above them and watching.

"Are you in college, too?" Jasper asks, after a few moments of easy silence. "Monty and I are freshmen at Trishana U.”

"Sophomore at Polis. You go to Trishana? That's pretty far away." She tucks her hair behind her ear thoughtfully. "Are you from around here?"

"Nope." Monty pulls a card from the stack in the center of the rug. "We're both from the west coast."

"So, even farther away," Jasper adds.

"Too far to bother flying home for just a few weeks," Monty continues. "According to mom."

A few weeks is plenty of time, if it's your only chance all year to see your family, as far as Octavia is concerned. But the distant, cold steadiness to Monty's voice tells her that he thinks so, too. So she figures there's no point in telling him.

"And my dads are taking a romantic trip to Europe this year," Jasper says. "Renewing their vows or something. I don't know. They assumed I wasn't coming home so… yeah, now there's not much point in coming home."

"Your parents sound like they don't give a shit," Octavia observes. At least they stuck around, though, unlike her dad. She doesn't intend any insult, but then she never does, and people still always take her honesty the wrong way.

But Monty only says, "They sure don't," and then asks, "Why aren't you with your parents for Christmas?"

"It's just me and Bellamy."

She braces herself for some kind of annoying sympathy or apologies, like they caused her dad to run off when she was two, or took her mom from her, but the most she gets is a kind look from Jasper. He fiddles a little with one of his cards and says, "It's cool that you two are so close. What's he like?"

"Total nerd," she answers, without hesitation, and smiles her first genuine smile since she arrived. "Super smart, loves books. Grossly overprotective. Really quiet most of the time but he still knows just about everyone. And he can actually be pretty fun when he lets himself relax for more than two minutes at a time."

Monty hums, lays another card down with a slow, precise movement, and says, "We're nerds too—”

“And great at relaxing.”

“—So he should fit right in."

Fit right in. As if there anything to fit in to. As if they weren’t all just random people, forced to spend the night in the same place.

Still. These nerds aren't so bad. Maybe kinda cool, in a probably-have-weed-in-that-weird-van-of-theirs sorta way.

Octavia crosses her legs beneath her, tapping absently against her ankles as she tries to figure out the game. When Monty wins with another excited shout, and starts gathering the scattered cards again, she asks, all of a sudden, "Do either of you play poker?"

They both look up at the same time. "No," Jasper answers, in a tentative, uncertain voice.

"Oh, it's fun. This girl on my floor taught me last semester." She slides down off the couch and onto the rug between them and holds out her palm for the cards. "I can teach you."

"You're going to make us bet the cabin, aren't you?" Monty asks warily, as he reluctantly places the cards into Octavia’s hand.

"I was thinking more the shirts off your backs," she teases lightly, and only catches out of the corner of her eye the decided blush that spreads across Jasper's cheeks.

vi

When Bellamy and Clarke return from the porch, she's wearing his coat, and Octavia has to bite back a groan. Figures: blonde and bossy is exactly his type. She doesn't have anything against Clarke, but if control of the apartment comes down to her versus the Blakes, Octavia knows which side she's on.

She catches Bellamy's eye as Clarke hurriedly hangs the coat back up on its peg, starts to wiggle here eyebrows a little, but he cuts off even that bit of teasing with a glare.

"Who's hungry?" Clarke asks, turning around to face them again and clapping her hands together. She was probably an RA at some point in her life, Octavia thinks. Or a camp counselor. Or a really enthusiastic babysitter. "We should probably have dinner altogether, or we'll be up till midnight taking turns in the kitchen."

"I can cook," Jasper volunteers.

"He's actually pretty good at it," Monty adds, as he collects the cards from their most recent round and slides them back into their box.

"Fine by me," Bellamy answers. He rolls his shoulders back, rubs his bare hands together briefly. He still looks exhausted, and a little blue from the outdoors. Octavia gets to her feet and tries to herd him toward the couch, but he can't be swayed. Instead, he ends up in the kitchen with everyone else.

Octavia doesn't quite understand exactly why all of them crowds into the kitchen, but somehow, she finds herself shoved up against the counter, while everyone tries not to step, quite literally, on anyone else's toes. Clarke seems to want to give her input on the evening's menu, and Monty is hanging around ready to play sous-chef. Bellamy is standing guard at the door, as if he didn't trust the rest of them to make a simple dinner without adult supervision. And Octavia refuses to hang out in the living room by herself, if the rest of the cabin is gathered in the kitchen.

After half an hour, they’ve managed nothing more than to deposit the content of two pantry shelves onto the kitchen table, put a pot of water on the stove to boil, and get into a debate on the relative merits of rigatoni versus penne as a pasta shape. Octavia has sat herself on the most out of the way counter top, absently kicking her heels against the drawer beneath her. Directly across from her, through the window above the sink, she can see a heavy downfall of snow slashing through the darkness.

The kitchen, despite the occasionally raised voices, feels cozy by comparison.

"Does all the needless drama make you nostalgic for home?" Bellamy murmurs to Clarke, during a break in the great pasta debate, and she lets go of her held breath and finally cracks a smile.

Jasper has stuck his head into the far back of the refrigerator, where he is either sifting through ingredients or attempting to find an alternate entrance to Narnia, when a sudden stomping, banging sound just outside the door makes everyone jump. Jasper lets out a loud yowl as his head hits the top of the fridge and Monty leans out from around the doorway to the pantry, a wide-eyed, uncertain look on his face. Octavia freezes, one foot caught mid-swing in the air—all she can think is bear or human, bear or human, without even knowing which one would be worse.

The banging sound repeats, and Bellamy and Clarke, who are closest to the door, pull their shoulders back as if assuming battle poses.

"What the fuck—?" Jasper starts, still rubbing his head, as the door shoves open with rough scrape, and two people, more snowman than human, try to push their way in at the same time.

"What the fuck?" the man says, as he pulls off his hat and dumps a pile of melting snow onto the welcome mat.

"What did I just say?" Jasper whispers to Monty, but except for this small murmur, everyone is still. Clouds of snow swirl around the newcomers' feet, and a hard, freezing wind blows inside in great gusts. Octavia shivers, and lets her heels fall back against the cabinet one more time.

Abruptly, the strange woman huffs a breath through her nose, shoves the strange man forward, yanks her suitcase over the threshold, and forcibly closes the door. She stomps her feet on the mat and shakes the snow off her coat and out of her hair. "In case you haven't heard," she announces, "there's a blizzard out there. So whoever you are, I guess you're sharing our cabin tonight."

"Your cabin?" Bellamy asks, and Octavia, at nearly the same moment:

"Do you own the place?"

"No, we rented it," the woman answers. "Whoever does own it double-booked."

"Triple-booked, technically," the man corrects. He gestures with his thumb between them. "We're not together."

"Penta-booked," Jasper says, resigned, as he finally closes the refrigerator door and leans against it heavily. "We're not all together either."

"Pretty sure that's not a word," Octavia grumbles.

"Hey, uh—who cares?" The woman shoves at her suitcase, giving herself enough room to limp forward and properly into the light. Octavia wonders for a moment if she'd gotten into an accident out in the storm, then belatedly notices the brace on her leg. "How are we supposed to split a one-bedroom among seven people? I already told Murphy he has to sleep on the couch."

"That was not decided," Murphy cuts in quickly, but Monty interrupts him, stepping fully out of the pantry and waving away that objection with his hand.

"It's a six bedroom," he explains. "There's enough beds. Jasper and I can share my room and no one has to sleep on the couch. Who are you, again?"

"Perfect because I'm tired of other people's sofas," Murphy says, with a satisfied nod of his head. He points his thumb at the woman, then himself. "Raven, Murphy. So, is there a bellhop in this place—?"

"I can help with your stuff," Bellamy volunteers. He gives a resigned sigh, but Octavia would bet he's eager enough to get out of the crowded kitchen. "There are too many people in here anyway." He reaches for the duffel bag on the floor, then for the handle of the suitcase, but Raven has already grabbed it.

"Yeah, what is everyone doing in the kitche?" Raven asks. She glances around for the first time, her eyes narrowing when she notices the pot of boiling water bubbling uselessly on the stove. Octavia has never seen a more judgmental stare—already she thinks she might be in love.

Five different voices answer at once, "Making dinner," and Murphy throws up his hands.

"All five of you? Haven't you ever heard the expression about too many chefs?"

"I think that's generally considered bad," Octavia answers lightly.

Murphy glances over at her, slightly surprised for a moment, as if he'd only just then noticed she was there. Then he nods. "Yeah. Lucky for all of you, I was a chef in a former life. A real chef." He throws off his jacket, drapes it over the back of the nearest chair, and rolls up his sleeves. "Who was in charge before?"

He must be using the term 'in charge' loosely enough, given the chaos he walked in on, but still Jasper tentatively raises his hand.

"Perfect!" Murphy claps his hands together. "You, stay. Everyone else... shoo!"

"Yeah, get out, let them work, I'm starving," Raven agrees. "You can all introduce yourselves. And I can tell you about how I saved Murphy from freezing to death in a car he picked up in the junk yard."

The crowd that was so eager to get into the kitchen is now even more eager to leave, pushing and shoving at each other to get to the door and escape into the open air of the living room. Bellamy almost gets squashed as he tries to slip through with Murphy's bag, and Raven follows last, her suitcase rolling after her, the door swinging back and forth on its hinges in her wake.

vii

The kitchen table is not big enough for seven, so they eat dinner at the long table in the living room. Clarke finds a cheery red tablecloth, patterned with snowflakes, in the linen closet, and Monty and Octavia take down the nice plates and glasses from the top shelves in the kitchen. By the time they've all sat down, passed around the sides and the drinks and distributed the silverware, the little cabin has begun to feel like home.

"How did you manage to make all this?" Monty asks, as he peers down at a large plate of perfectly cooked roast chicken. Next to it on the table is a bowl of pasta, several sides of vegetables, and a salad.

"Hello, right here, former chef," Murphy reminds him, and shoves the salad bowl into his hands.

"So, you used to be a chef," Clarke says. "What are you up to now?"

Murphy shrugs. "This and that."

"Just like Bellamy," Octavia says, then mouths 'what?' at him with an exaggerated widening of her eyes when he glares at her across the table.

"I have a day job, too," he corrects her, and Murphy nods and gestures vaguely.

"Yeah, yeah, me too. Or I mean, I will. That's why I'm passing through here—"

"You're passing through the forest on your way to a job?" Monty asks skeptically.

Murphy ignores him and simply continues: "Just taking a vacation before I move into my place in Arkadia and start my new life."

All at once, Clarke, Raven, Bellamy, and Octavia look up. Clarke's eyes narrow. "Arkadia?" she repeats.

"Yeah. It's a few hours—"

"I know where it is." She has her fork halfway to her mouth, lets it drop again against her plate with a slight clink. "That's where I live."

"Me too," Raven adds, and Bellamy, at the same moment:

"So do I. And O, when she's not in school."

Octavia's so hungry that she keeps eating through the wary silence that follows, each of the four glancing among the rest, while Jasper and Monty observe with equal, though more distant, interest.

"I guess that's not so weird," Raven says. "It's the nearest city to here. Makes sense all of us would find the same listing."

"That's true," Clarke agrees slowly. The oddness of it seems to have hit her with particular force. Even as she returns to her food, her movements are slow and uncertain, as if her mind were far away.

"I don't know how long I'll be there anyway," Murphy admits. "I want to get another restaurant gig but for now I'm just doing grunt work at the hospital. Can't complain if it brings in a paycheck—""Arkadia General?" Clarke asks, glancing up from her peas.

"Yeah."

"My mom works there. She's head of cardiology."

Jasper starts humming It's a Small World After All, which makes Octavia stifle a giggle despite herself—he's such a dork.

"My friend Miller works there too," Bellamy adds, and this time, Murphy lets his fork fall to his plate with a loud clatter, and leans forward so he can look all the way down the table, past Jasper and Monty, and try to catch Bellamy's eye.

"Nathan Miller?"

Bellamy's eyes narrow. "Nathan Miller. Yeah. You know him?"

"Yeah. From around."

"Miller knows everyone from around," Octavia says, without any surprise at all. Jasper and Monty have started to sing It's a Small World now, which seems like a good excuse to change the subject. "Murphy, this is really good." She almost adds, what are you going to make us for Christmas?, before she remembers that they'll probably have scattered by then. That this is all a mistake. That they aren't supposed to be here together at all.

A wild gust of wind shakes the windows then, howls so menacingly that for a long moment, the conversation drops, and Octavia shivers in her seat. The shriek of it sounds like a human voice. Through the picture window, she and Raven and Clarke have a perfect view of the ferocity of the storm: sheets of snow falling in streaks through the bleak, cold night. An endless, hypnotic deluge of snow.

She pictures it forming massive snow piles in the clearing, building up on the hood and the roof of Bellamy's car, accumulating on the porch steps in soft, round drifts.

"That's a serious storm," Raven murmurs.

"Understatement of the year," Monty answers, twisting around in his chair to watch, too.

In the same moment, without any warning at all, the wind shrieks again so wild that the whole cabin seems to shake, and all of the lights abruptly flick themselves off.

Only Jasper reacts, at first, yelling, "What!" into the darkness, in a tone of deep offense. Raven swears under her breath, perfectly audible in the quiet. Octavia's fingers wrap a little tighter around her fork.

She couldn't see her fork, or her fingers, if she tried. When she closes her eyes, she sees exactly the same pitch black as she does when she opens them again.

She's about to ask what they're supposed to do now, when a bright flash of light rises from the other end of the table. In its beam, she can see Clarke, holding up her cell phone flashlight above their half-eaten meal. "We don't want to rely on our phones," she says. "But I bet there are flashlights here somewhere."

"Candles at least," Bellamy adds, already scrambling for his phone and starting to stand.

"You might want to look for extra blankets, too," Raven calls after them as they hurry from the table. She flicks her gaze up to the ceiling. Her face looks unduly sorrowful, cast as it is halfway into shadow, illuminated by the scattered beams of several cell phone lights. "It's going to get damn cold damn fast in here."

Bellamy and Clarke return, faster than Octavia thought they would, with giant flashlights for everyone and several long, tapered candles for the table. Murphy digs a lighter out of his pocket and lights each of them in turn. Then everyone turns off their cell phones and stores their flashlights next to their chairs. The candles provide just enough light to see their plates and glasses—just enough light for them to glance around the table at each other, identical relieved, still nervous expressions on every face.

A bunch of strangers eating dinner, Octavia reminds herself. Yet as she looks around at them, takes her inventory of them, reminds herself that each one is safe in the gentle candle glow, she feels safe in turn. They're together, and the vicious storm outside, the encroaching dark within, can never harm them.

She looks across the table at Bellamy last. He gives her a little nod. It's all right.

"We found a whole stash of candles in the back of the closet," he says aloud. "Extra batteries for the flashlights if we need them, and plenty of blankets. Worst case scenario and the power's out all night—I think we'll be okay."

"Yeah," Clarke agrees. Her glance lingers on Bellamy, her smile barely discernible in the weak light. Maybe the softness about her face, the gentleness to her expression, are only creations of the flicker of candle flame. Still she sounds like she believes it herself when she says, "We'll be fine."

"I've never actually eaten by candle light before," Raven admits, after a moment, as she picks up her fork again.

"I think it's beautiful," Octavia says, with the air of a serious announcement, unnecessary defiance in her voice.

"What, no special someone ever made you a romantic, candlelit dinner before?" Murphy asks, catching Raven's eye across the table. His words sound almost like a dare. Something odd about them that Octavia can't name, something weird in the way he stares at her like it's a contest and he wants to make her blink.

"Nope." She spears a few pieces of penne onto her fork. "Guess I've never been with anyone who was into that sort of thing."

"That sort of thing like romance?" Jasper asks, incredulous. He looks over at Octavia, and she meets his eye and, uncertain about the expression on his face, offers him a smile. "Because I think these candles are very romantic."

"Yeah, all we need is a string quartet," Monty says, and mimes playing the violin.

viii

Clarke sets her flashlight down on the bedside table, crawls in under the heavy purple comforter on her bed, and lies down on her back to stare up at the darkness of the ceiling. The flashlight points a ring of light, concentric circles of ever-weakening light, directly up. Around her, water runs through the pipes in the walls. Luckily, the power outage didn't affect the hot water, and she only recently stepped out of a surreal shower experience herself, grappling for the soap in the near-pitch black, listening to the hollow sounds of the water beating against the tub, seeing her own body as barely more than shadow as she breathed in lovely, deep breaths of steam.

After a while, the sounds of water stop, and she reaches out to turn her flashlight off. She can't hear anything but the intermittent, high shriek of the wind. Perhaps everyone else, except the person just exiting the shower, has already gone to sleep.

On her drive up to the mountains, so purely exhausted and so terrified that she was lost that she had to pull over to the side of the road and bang her head against the steering wheel and scream, she'd told herself that as soon as she found the stupid cabin, she'd fall onto the couch and go to sleep. Now all she has to do is drift off toward her dreams, and her mind won't let her rest. This way; that way. The bed is soft enough to sink right into, the mountain of blankets on top of her traps her body heat perfectly despite the frigidity of the room, and the silence, even the sounds of the wind in between, feels peaceful and right. Finally silence, and peace, and time. Time to get her thoughts straight, to stop feeling like she is being pulled in twenty directions all at once.

And if she decides—then it will be fifty directions.

Maybe the serenity of the woods is, itself, too much. Maybe she's no frickin' good at taking a break. She flops onto her back and blinks up at the ceiling again.

Her eyes have no intention of closing, her brain no intention of settling into sleep. She sits up again, grabs her cardigan and her flashlight, and slides out of bed.

Finding her sketchpad and pencil with just the help of a flashlight beam is not easy, but she manages, and then she slips as quietly as she can out the door, and down the wide staircase to the living room. The downstairs is ice-box cold, cold enough for her to see her own breath when she exhales. At least her dad had the forethought to teach her wilderness skills. She gets the fire going in the fireplace, switches out her flashlight for a trio of squat, pine-scented candles, and curls up under a blanket on the chair by the fire with her sketchpad balanced in her lap.

She can hear the wind just as well down here, though it sounds more menacing in the great emptiness of the room. But the crack and spit of the fire allays the worst of her nerves. The longer she stares at it, occasionally reaching out one hand or the other to take in a bit more of its warmth, the more at ease she feels. Small, but strong, hardy in the face of an unrelenting storm, surviving despite the elements in the middle of the woods.

This feeling, glowing in her like a fire of its own, was what she wanted when she first drove up here—yet she doesn't know if she would feel it, if she didn't know there were people sleeping soundly just above. If she were really on her own. She’s not sure what would be left to her then, other than loneliness and fear.

She's not sure what to sketch, so she tries a portrait: a man's face, with sharp features and curly hair—the first face that comes to her in the gentle middle of the night.

Then, through the silence, a long, whining creak just above.

She jumps so high she almost knocks over one of her candles, and even as she comes back to her senses again, the hard rush of adrenaline nearly makes her sick. She holds her breath. Six other people in this cabin, it must be one of them, and yet she leans forward as tentatively as possible to try to catch a glimpse of the stairs.

At first, she sees only the vague outline of a figure, hidden in the shadow behind a flashlight beam. Then the light drops, and the most expected person, the person she was secretly hoping to see, comes into view. Clarke releases her breath, her hand still pressed against her beating heart.

"Bellamy," she says. "What are you doing down here?"

"What are you?" he counters, smiling, as he shuts off the flashlight and navigates by candlelight to the corner of the couch nearest her chair. He holds up his hand, waves the paperback he's carrying back and forth like a prize. "Couldn't sleep."

"Same." She sinks back against the overstuffed cushions of the chair. "Storm getting to you?"

He shrugs. "Maybe. What about you?"

He looks more relaxed now, she thinks, like before he was always tense and at the ready, the sort of person who always expects something to go wrong, and now he can simply be. The firelight plays off the golden tones in his skin, lights up the deep brown of his eyes, softens his tentative offer of a smile. His blue sweater is so old and so well worn that there are holes at the ends of the sleeves for his thumbs, and his feet look too big even for his height, in fluffy, mismatched brown socks.

She pulls her cardigan more carefully around her, tucks her feet neatly beneath her. When she ducks her head, a bit of hair falls loose from her braid and tickles against her cheek. "Just can't turn off my thoughts."

"Want to talk about it?"

Clarke laughs, dull and humorless. She points with her chin toward his book. "I know you didn't come down here to play therapist. You don't need to take on my problems. They're not even problems—"

"Try me."

She only hums. Still she knows she wouldn't win in a staring contest between them, and the truth is, she can't talk to her parents or any of her friends about this, and she's tired of the weight of it on her shoulders alone. "I—so, I've been involved in city politics in Arkadia for a while," she says finally. "It's not my day job, just... something I care about. I got this offer, around Thanksgiving, to run the campaign of a candidate for the state legislature. It would be an insane amount of work, I'd have to quit my job, I'm hugely under-qualified—"

"And you want to do it," Bellamy finishes.

She looks up, releases a shaky breath. "It would be irresponsible."

"Taking on a huge amount of responsibility is irresponsible?" He laughs, but the sound is warm, and it eases the tight cords that have been pulling at her chest for weeks. "Clarke, I don't know you well and I know that. But that's exactly what a tenacious, insistent, ambitious, secretly qualified person would say."

She rolls her eyes, more at herself than him, and turns away toward the fire. The flames flicker and waver, shooting off low sparks that disappear into the black. One of the logs falls down, half-consumed, and the fire shifts and spreads to feed from it.

"Those are a lot of ten-dollar words," she says.

"I'm a rich man," Bellamy answers. "In words. How long do you have to think about it?"

"They want to know by the middle of January."

"Well, if you want to exchange numbers or something..." He trails off, shrugs and rubs his thumb across the edge of his book. "You can call me and list off pros and cons any time you want."

"I do love a good pro and con list," Clarke agrees. "What are you reading?"

"What are you sketching?" he asks, even as he hands over the book. It's a well-worn trade paperback, with yellowed pages and small, thick type, its spine so cracked that the title can no longer be read. "Don't judge it by its cover. It's way better than that... overly muscled man and his weirdly tiny horse."

Clarke laughs. "Oh, good, because based on the cover, it looks awful. You know what I used to do all the time?" The memory comes back to her so suddenly that she doesn't even think to consider it before she speaks. "I used to redesign the covers of all the books I read. Huh. I don't think I've done that since high school."

She tilts the book back and forth, watching the candlelight shine off the raised silver letters of the title. When she looks up again, she catches Bellamy staring at her, the softest, fondest smile on his face, and she realizes only then that she's been smiling just the same.

"What?" she asks, but the word has no bite. She still feels warm inside, nearly giddy in a way she hasn't felt in years.

"Nothing. Want to redesign this one?"

"I don't even know what it's about. And I'm not redrawing this silly horse."

"I can summarize it for you. Read you the best bits, even—" He pulls back slightly, as if suddenly aware and faintly embarrassed by how far he'd draped himself over the arm of the couch and into her space. "I've read it about a dozen times."

"One of your favorites?"

He shrugs up one shoulder. "You could say that. So, what do you think?"

"Hmmm." She taps her pencil a few times against the edge of her sketchpad, then abruptly flips the paper over to a new, blank page. "All right,” she agrees. “It's not like I'm tired anyway."

ix

Raven's flashlight beam plays across the floorboards, lighting a narrow path ahead of her as she creeps along the hall. Her footsteps make no sound, muffled by her thick, woolen socks. Being awake in the middle of the night, when everyone else is asleep, feels illicit and exciting, like she's eight years old again and sneaking downstairs to spy on Santa putting presents under the tree. Even then, she didn't really believe in him. But she knew the presents got there somehow, and she just needed to see—

"Bah!"

"Fuck!"

"Shit—Raven?"

A flare of bright light blinds her from her right side, and she holds up her hand to shade her eyes. The light flicks down. Her own flashlight is still gripped tightly in her other hand, and she angles it up subtly, illuminating no one more threatening than…Murphy, standing in the doorway of his room.

"You're not a psycho killer," she snaps, her voice a hushed, sharp-edged whisper.

The corner of his mouth quirks up. "No, but I am trained in the art of self-defense." He makes a chopping motion with his free hand, and Raven bats it easily away.

"No one's attacking you, Murphy. What are you doing out here?"

"Freezing my ass off." He gestures with his light toward the end of the hall. "I'm on a search for extra blankets."

"Me too. The extra sweater just isn't cutting it." She glances at him again, takes in his long-sleeved t-shirt and the sweatpants tucked into regular cotton socks. "You look like you could use a few more layers."

"Yeah, I know." He steps out of his room fully and closes the door behind him. "Hence, the blanket mission. What say you we join forces?"

"I say you lead the way to the linen closet," Raven answers, with a light roll of her eyes, and gestures with her shoulder to the last door at the far end of the hall.

Unfortunately, the closet has several stacks of spare sheets, pillowcases, and towels, but not a single extra blanket. Murphy grabs one of the fluffier towels from the top of the stack. "I guess we could do something with these... Or do you want to try the downstairs closet? Didn't Bellamy and Clarke say something about blankets before?"

"Yeah, probably," Raven answers vaguely. "Or..." She trains her flashlight beam directly above them, illuminating a cord with a round plastic ring at the end, attached to a square door in the ceiling. "We could go up."

She meets Murphy's eye. It's a silly idea. There's probably nothing in the attic but frostbite conditions and rats—maybe the owners' old yearbooks if they're really lucky. But they're existing now in no particular time and no particular place, and the pull cord seems like an adventure, another layer to the surreal blackness of this frigid, wintry night, and the temptation is just too great to ignore.

From the way Murphy grins, she figures he feels the same way. "Up it is," he answers, as he yanks the attic staircase down.

He climbs up first, with Raven a step behind, and stomps up so much dust as he clambers to his feet that at first, as she pulls herself up into the space, all she sees is wafting clouds of brown. All she can do is sneeze and cough, and wave her hand in front of her to try to clear the air. "Ugh, this place is dusty. And freezing. Must be twenty below up here."

"Excellent idea of ours," Murphy agrees, coughing a few times himself. With one hand, he rubs at his arm, and with the other, he swings his flashlight beam wide across the room.

"Nothing special," Raven murmurs. Cardboard boxes stacked on cardboard boxes. A large wardrobe against the wall and an ancient chest of drawers, a few chairs. Stacks of books and newspapers.

And a five-foot-tall fake plastic Christmas tree.

Raven's eyebrows rise, and she walks over to poke at the branches with her light. "Festive."

"But it won't keep us warm at night," Murphy answers, and stomps past her to start peering into boxes.

Cold as the place is, and she can feel it on her cheeks and nose, rising goosebumps along her skin and cutting at her lungs, she's too curious about the attic, so unlike Murphy, she takes her time. "To be honest, Murphy," she says, as she opens each of the drawers in a tiny jewelry box, "this is the last place I ever thought I'd end up spending Christmas."

"Weird, because it was at the top of my list," he answers. Then, after a moment, he adds, "Actually, some random guy's attic in the middle of a blizzard—pretty much the best of all my available options this year."

"Don't go feeling sorry for yourself or anything."

He snorts. "Says the woman who could have gone skiing with a guy she isn't that into..."

In another life, maybe that's where she is: in a different cabin in a less deserted spot, with Finn's nose digging at the back of her shoulder while she sleeps. Or while she lies awake maybe, looking at the moon through the open window blinds. The vision floats up, dully romantic but ice cold. No real feeling in it. Raven Reyes, playing a part—the last thing she ever wants to do.

"I'd rather be here," she says decisively. "Do you ever feel like... I don't know." She wants to bite her tongue. Somewhere behind her, in a separate spot of light in the utter blackness of the attic, Murphy has paused in his search to listen to her, maybe even looking over his shoulder at her, waiting. She can feel his stare again, that certain stare like no one else’s she’s ever known. "I don't do this sharing my feelings thing very much," she adds, and pops open the top of a cardboard box, just to have something to do with her hands. Inside is a collection of photo albums.

"Raven, I'm the king of not-sharing-my-feelings. But if you're going to tell anyone anything, shouldn't it be a stranger, while you're invading another stranger's privacy?"

"Funny." She runs her hands across the top of the albums, then pulls one out of the box on impulse. As soon as she turns it right side up, a single photo slides out. She catches it, and props herself on the edge of a nearby stool, her flashlight tucked awkwardly under her arm.

"So, do I ever feel like what? Don't leave me hanging here."

"What? Oh." As she stares down at the picture, she sees the people in it, and she doesn't see them, and she starts talking again as if her own voice were a distant relic of the past. "Do you ever feel like your life is just totally unmoored? Like you're just floating along, and nothing—not that nothing matters, but that everything's arbitrary?"

She waits a long moment for Murphy to speak. In the photo, a girl with dark hair, wearing a sun dress and sandals, poses in front of the cabin with a man who looks like her father. It's springtime, and the clearing is alive with wildflowers and grass. The back reads Maya and Vincent, 1946.

"What I've decided," Murphy says, finally, slowly, and so quietly that she instinctively turns around, searching out his voice, "is that it is arbitrary, so all you can do is... survive, and try to enjoy it as much as you can."

"You mean life?" Raven asks.

"Yeah."

She sighs, and slips the photo back in the album, and the album back in the box. "I'm not sure if that's optimistic or pessimistic."

"Realistic." From across the attic, the sounds of shifting boxes and Murphy's footsteps slip through beneath the rattling of the windows and the violence of the storm. "Hey, the strategy brought me here, didn't it? And honestly, this is pretty much the best Christmas I've had in years and it isn't even Christmas yet."

"It is pretty nice, isn't it?" Raven agrees, surprised at how easily the realization comes. She doesn't even know Murphy, really, or any of the others, but she's felt more at ease with them this weekend than she ever did around Finn's family—or even her own, most of the time. She pushes her way past two precarious towers of books, to the wardrobe standing against the wall. "All it's missing is some Christmas decorations to make it really festive."

"What about a fake pine?” Murphy asks. "Is that good en—" He cuts himself off with a yell and a stifled curse, accompanied by the sound of something heavy bumping against some other heavy thing, and a light, muffled crash.

Raven hears all of it, but in the same moment, she'd thrown open the wardrobe doors, and now her flashlight is trained on a floor-to-ceiling collection of blankets, quilts, and sweaters.

Pay dirt.

"You okay over there?" she asks belatedly, as she starts pulling blankets out.

"Uh, yeah," Murphy's voice answers. She can't tell by his tone if he's serious or not, but at least he doesn't still seem to be in pain.

"I'm fine," he adds, fainter still, as he shines his flashlight into the giant plastic bin that so recently ruthlessly attacked his poor, shoeless foot. The thing is packed to the brim with tangled Christmas lights, tinsel, pristine boxes of multi-colored glass ornaments, wooden ornaments, weird little handmade ornaments—every sort of ornament that Raven could ever want.

On top, nestled in a crinkled scrap of red tissue paper, is a silver dove of peace on a green velvet ribbon.

"So, you're into the whole decorating-for-the-holidays thing?" he asks, as loudly and as nonchalantly as he can.

"Oh yeah," Raven's voice, slightly muffled, answers from somewhere near the wall. "I used to be an expert tree trimmer. I still get a wreath every year and some lights... work's so busy I don't have the time to set up a big tree, though. Are you going to help me with this? I found three blanket forts' worth of stuff over here. Oh, and a sweater."

As she speaks, her voice comes closer and closer, and Murphy barely has enough time to snatch up the dove and shove it in his pocket before he whirls around and sees her: a figure more blanket than woman, casting monstrous shadows on the attic wall, holding out an oversized sweater in one outstretched hand.

He takes the sweater. "Does this have...reindeer on it?"

"It suits you. So, me, you, blankets, helping...?"

Murphy pulls on the sweater, somewhat against his better judgment, and grabs half the blankets off the top of the stack. "All right, all right. But you need to help me get all these ornaments downstairs. And I guess we'll need to haul down the tree..."

x

They manage two runs downstairs with the blanket, and one extremely precarious additional trip, balancing the box of ornaments between them, before disaster strikes. Murphy hears an unexpected noise behind him, and the surprise causes him to lose his balance, trip down the final stair, and drop his flashlight somewhere on the floor. Raven then loses her grip on her end of the box, and it slips down the stairs and lands with a great thunk, accompanied by a string of curses, and a loud, "What the hell is that?" from a voice that sounds suspiciously like Octavia Blake's.

Murphy grabs his flashlight, and pans it across the hallway. Everyone seems to be in one piece. But there are many more people in the hall than he'd anticipated: not only him and Raven, now limping her way into view down the last of the stairs, but Jasper, Monty, and Octavia, bleary eyed and shivering in a small group outside Octavia's door. Monty has a blanket wrapped around him and Octavia is holding a pair of fuzzy slippers in her hand.

They look at each other, slightly wary, no one quite sure who should be accusing who, and of what. Everyone appears guilty and suspicious all at once.

"Anyone else looking for a midnight snack?" Jasper asks, with an awkward little shrug.

"How can you be hungry now?" Murphy snaps, and Monty holds his hands up, his blanket almost slipping from his shoulders, and says:

"Hey, it's not an insult. He's always hungry."

"What about you?" Raven asks, pointing her chin at Octavia.

"Hot chocolate run." She arches an eyebrow. "You?"

Murphy and Raven exchange glances. She tilts her head. He nods subtly.

"We were looking for extra blankets," she says, with a heavy sigh, and shines her flashlight across their great, fluffy haul. "And then we found all these decorations and thought we'd make the downstairs festive for everyone. As a surprise."

"So—surprise!" Murphy adds, with a lackluster attempt at jazz hands.

"You can still surprise Bell and Clarke," Octavia reminds them, as she leans against the wall to pull on her slippers. "They're still asleep."

"Or... not," Raven mutters, gesturing with her chin toward the other end of the hall. There's nothing to see yet, even within in the reach of their flashlight beams, but all five of them can hear the creak of footsteps climbing up.

Bellamy appears first, Clarke a moment behind, nearly washed out in the glare of all the artificial lights that are jumping and crisscrossing around the narrow hall. Octavia can make out the expression on her brother's face, though: that menacing combination of worried and annoyed.

"Is everyone okay up here?" he asks.

"We heard a noise," Clarke adds. "Why are you all awake?"

"Why are you?" Raven asks, with the slightest teasing, accusatory hint around the you. Octavia's eyes snap again to her brother's face, then to Clarke's. He just grumbles something unintelligible and hunches his shoulders up toward his ears.

"We couldn't sleep," Clarke answers. "I guess no one else could either." She gestures with her light. "What's all this?"

Murphy gets them up to speed on the attic adventures, and the need for some help in getting down the tree.

"Now?" Clarke asks. Her back slumps, and she has to push the sleeves of her cardigan up before they slip down from her shoulders again. "It's the middle of the night."

"Yeah, but... we are all awake," Monty points out.

"And I am still hungry," Jasper adds.

"And—hot chocolate," Octavia argues, at which Murphy gestures grandly.

"Hot chocolate," he repeats. "There you go. The kid has a point."

Clarke glances at Bellamy for backup, but he's already started to crack, eyeing the sparkling tinsel poking out at the top of the giant Christmas box. He looks back at Clarke, then at the box, then back to Clarke again. "You don't have to help," he points out tentatively.

She sighs. "No. I mean. It could be fun." She sounds like she hasn't said the word fun, and meant it, in quite some time. But when she steps closer and picks up one of the boxes of round glass ornaments, a distant look that could only be nostalgia settles itself upon her face. "If we're going to do this," she adds, "we should at least be organized about it."

So, they organize. Bellamy and Murphy head back to the attic to haul down the tree, while Jasper, Monty, and Octavia descend to the kitchen. Raven and Clarke bring down the blankets and stoke the fire. When everything is at last in the living room, Clarke lights some more candles, and Raven takes the lead on trimming the tree. Octavia brings out a tray of hot chocolate and gingerbread cookies, and Monty and Jasper untangle the lights, then string them around the tree, across the mantle of the fireplace, and over the windows.

"You'd almost forget the power was out," Jasper says, as he snaps the batteries into the last set of lights and flicks them on: a long string of red and green and blue baubles, fading in and out in a frame around the windowsill. He starts to close the curtains on the snowstorm still raging outside, but Octavia holds him back.

"Leave them open," she says. "It's pretty."

"Yeah, it's beautiful," Murphy mutters. "We'll be spending the rest of our vacations digging our cars out of the snow."

"If you can even find yours," Raven adds, as she adds another ornament to the far side of the tree.

Finally, the tree decorated, the living room bright with candles and strings of lights, a necklace of tinsel draped around Murphy's neck, they settle in a half-circle around the fire and bury themselves beneath the blankets. Raven, Murphy, and Clarke take the couch, while Bellamy and Octavia huddle in the armchairs, and Jasper and Monty form a small blanket fort on the shag rug, directly in front of the crackling flames. They pass around the plate of gingerbread cookies. Octavia holds her mug of hot chocolate directly beneath her nose and inhales deeply, then pokes tentatively at the one of the marshmallows as it bobs up to the surface. The drink tastes better, somehow, than it ever has before.

"If only we had some Christmas music or something," Clarke hums.

"We could try singing... but I'm not sure I trust any of your voices," Raven answers, with an exaggerated suspicious glance around the room.

"Best not," Bellamy says. After a few moments, he adds, "Or some Christmas movies."

"Yeah, my dad and I used to watch all the classics every year," Clarke agrees, with a wide, faraway grin.

"I always liked the stop motion ones," Jasper adds.

"Christmas comedies only," Murphy argues, and Raven nods her enthusiastic agreement. "Nothing too sappy."

"Not that it matters anyway," Octavia reminds them. "Since we can't actually watch any movies."

Vague hums of agreement follow and then another gentle, quiet pause. Candle wax pools around the flickering lights, and another log shifts in the fire, causing another warm burst of flame. The wind outside has not lessened, but blows with a steady, plaintive howl just beyond the windows. But the blankets and the Christmas lights, the candles and the fire and the warm mugs in their hands keep it at bay.

"You know," Jasper says tentatively, "Monty can recite the entire Muppet Christmas Carol from memory."

Octavia raises her eyebrows skeptically. "Oh, really?"

"Really," Jasper answers.

At the insistence of the group, Monty sits up straighter, clears his throat, and begins.

xi

Pale rays of winter sun, patterned with dust motes, wake Murphy with a start. His neck is bent at a painful angle, and he's squashed under a tremendous, unaccountable weight.

He has no idea where he is.

When he opens his eyes, with not a small amount of effort, he sees that he is on a couch, and most of the previous night comes back to him. The view out the window is nothing but gleaming white. But he can just make out a few trees, and a scrap of pale blue sky—whatever damage the storm has wrought, at least it's over now.

He can barely move with Raven asleep on top of him, and Clarke on top of her, but eventually, he manages to disengage himself awkwardly and get to his feet. Then he almost trips over Jasper and Monty, asleep on the floor. He jumps back and bangs his hip against the chair, where Octavia is still asleep. Her brother seems completely out of it, too.

Murphy has a vague memory of Clarke snuffing out the candles before she settled down to sleep, and the fire has burned itself out by now, too. Yet he's not turned into an icicle. So he's fairly sure the power is back and the heat has clicked itself on once more.

An almost normal morning, then, nearly enough to make all of yesterday feel like a strange and unsubstantial dream. At the time, he thought their midnight decorating party was more cheesy than anything, just the sort of weird idea that somehow always takes over a crowd. But now that he looks around at the expertly decorated tree, the haphazardly tacked up lights, the scraps of tinsel on the floor, he can't help but feel a certain reluctant holiday spirit coming over him. Like maybe it is nearly Christmas, and a proper one too, unlike Christmas when he crashes at Dax's place or Christmas when Emori lets him stay over for old time's sake, or Christmas when his mother forgets it’s Christmas—he's not had a lot of good ones.

But this is good.

He tugs at one of the candy canes on the fake pine tree. And it's not good because of kitschy little ornaments like these. (Though they don't hurt.)

He glances around at the others again, fast asleep and peaceful beneath their mountains of blankets: strangers who took each other in, who let themselves be taken in. Who shared a meal and told stories and weathered a crisis, who'd rather fall asleep on the floor or curled up in a chair or stacked up one on top of another on the couch than disperse to their separate rooms for even a few hours, while a storm howled outside and the snow came falling down around their little cabin for hours and hours on end.

The corner of his mouth quirks up. "I guess even my heart has grown three sizes this year," he murmurs.

He sticks his hand in his pocket and feels along the crinkled tissue paper edges of the silver dove.

In the kitchen, the morning light shines across the countertops and the tile, soft and clear, in flat yellow rays he almost feels that he could touch. A pair of crystals tacked up just above the window flash rainbows across the walls. His feet slide easily on the clean floors.

On the table, someone has left a stack of plates and a raspberry Danish. "Could have sworn that wasn't here last night," he mutters, then hears himself, as if on a delay, and rolls his eyes. "And now I'm talking to myself. Smells good though."

He should probably wait for the others before he helps himself to breakfast, but at least he can make himself some coffee. The smell of it slowly suffuses the kitchen with a hearty, deep scent, and he stands by the window, next to the sink still half-full of last night's dishes, and listens to the bubbling of the coffee pot and the creaking of the trees outside, their branches wafting now in a much gentler breeze.

He's just taken down a mug for himself when he hears the kitchen door swing open and footsteps shuffle in, and he immediately takes down a second mug. "Morning," he says, with a short glance over his shoulder.

"Morning," Raven's sleepy voice answers. She doesn't look entirely awake yet, her hair loose and falling in tangles around her face, a plaid knit blanket wrapped around her with its tassels dragging along the floor. She rubs at her face with the back of one closed fist. "Where'd you find this?" she adds, with a suspicious look at the Danish.

Murphy shrugs. "Around."

He pours two mugs of coffee, and hands one to Raven before returning to his spot next to the sink. She limps over to stand next to him. Out of the corner of the eye, he can see her wrap her hands securely around her mug, lift it up to her nose so that the steam wafts up over her cheeks.

"Beautiful morning," she whispers. A blanket of sparkling, pure, undisturbed snow has fallen across the clearing, hills of snow rising up and then sloping down into perfect valleys in the spaces between the trees. The evergreens are weighed down with snow, heavy masses of it falling intermittently with dull and distant thuds, especially when the wind picks up. It disturbs the otherwise perfect stillness of the trees and blows stray flakes of snow across the drifts.

Murphy nods, watching Raven as she takes a tentative first sip. "Really beautiful," he agrees.

Something unusually gentle and soft in his voice makes her glance back at him, and he immediately stumbles, ducks his head and clears his throat. "Hey—uh—I got you something"

Raven's brow furrows, and she stares at him suspiciously over the rim of her mug. "What do you mean?"

"I mean I got you a present, for Christmas. Early Christmas," he answers, setting his own mug down and fumbling in his pocket, trying to make sure the tissue paper is securely wrapped around the thing before he takes it out.

"I didn't get you anything," Raven answers. She's staring more at him than at the object he’s holding out to her. Her genius brain—and everything she told them about herself at dinner makes him think she really might be one—must not be firing on all cylinders yet, this early in the morning. Of course she didn’t get him anything. They were strangers less than twenty-four hours ago.

All he says is, "You gave me my life," and lifts his palm a little closer to her face.

Belatedly, Raven puts her coffee down on the counter and reaches for the small package in Murphy's hand. She opens up the tissue paper, and reveals, in the middle, the silver dove of peace, gleaming brilliantly in the sun.

"Murphy..." she breathes. He can't stand to watch her face, can't stand to look anywhere else but her face. Gently, she hooks her finger through the green ribbon, and holds up the ornament so it can fully catch the light. "It's... I love it, it's beautiful. It's—wait."

Suspicion clouds suddenly across her face again, and she flashes him a wary look. "Where did you get this? Did you find this in the attic last night?"

"Raven, I'm insulted." He holds his hand against his heart in a profession of perfect innocence. "I would never. I just happen to always carry ornaments around in my pockets."

She doesn't believe him, of course, only shakes her head in feigned disapproval. But he catches the hint of a reluctant smile on her lips. "What am I going to do with you?" she murmurs, and before he can give a smartass answer, she tugs him down by the front of his sweater so that they are nose to nose. Then she leans up, and presses a lingering, sweet kiss right to the center of his forehead.

The smartass answer dies away on his tongue.

He can't grab the coffee mug fast enough to hide the reddening of his cheeks with the excuse of warm steam. Next to him, he can see Raven, pleased and grinning, the silver dove still resting safely in the palm of her hand.

xii – two days later – christmas eve

Octavia is the first to notice the cabin again, appearing in the distance just as they round the corner on their makeshift path through the woods. She is exhausted. Even Jasper and Monty, who seem to have boundless energy, are flagging some, but they all rally when they see home just within reach.

Taking a hike along a trail covered in several feet of snow was perhaps not the smartest idea any of them have ever had, but except for Monty's near-fall on a patch of unexpected ice, and an embarrassing moment when a foot's worth of snow fell from the branches of a tree right onto Octavia's head, the expedition has been free from disaster. Even the snowfall thing was a little funny, if she's being totally honest with herself. The day is freezing cold but the sun has been shining brightly all morning, with not a bit of wind, and the clarity of the mountain air feels refreshing in her lungs and against the exposed skin of her face, the exercise invigorating after a solid night's sleep.

So even though, by now, she can barely feel her thighs or her hands, and Jasper and Monty are starting to look a little too red in the nose, overall Octavia would still call the adventure a success. The boys are funny, too. They can do impressions of people she's never even met that still make her laugh, and they know a bunch of creepy forest-creature legends that will keep her up all night, waiting not just for Christmas but for the safety of the sun, and they've promised her a continuation of their ongoing poker game tonight. Jasper's even started to learn how to bluff.

The mountain hasn't seen any more snow since the storm on their first night, but with the temperatures so consistently frigid, none of the snow has melted, either. They spent most of their first morning at the cabin digging out Bellamy and Clarke's cars, Raven's Jeep, and Jasper and Monty's van, and if the experience of a night without power didn't bond them all for life, then the back-breaking work of salvaging four vehicles from about a whole winter's worth of snow sure did. They feel, in some ways, sort of like a family now. Like she'll never get these people out of her head, or her heart, for the rest of her life. Jasper and Monty are like the little brothers she never knew she wanted, and Clarke's like a new big sister—a female version of Bellamy, but even more tightly wound. Raven is definitely the cool aunt. And Murphy's the weird cousin, the one who'd be a black sheep, if the rest of them weren't misfits, too.

She'll miss them when she and Bellamy go back home after Christmas. The best she can do is visit Clarke, Raven, and Murphy when she's in Arkadia again on spring break, and text Monty and Jasper all the time when they all start school again next year. Until then, she does have a master plan brewing, to get Bellamy to let them crash at the Blakes...

But she's not sure yet if that will work out.

"I've decided," Jasper says, around staggered breaths. "When we get back... I'm... living in front of the fire."

"Home base," Monty agrees, as he pulls his mittens down more securely over his hands.

Octavia is about to express her wholehearted agreement, when she glances up, and catches sight of something odd just past the cabin steps. Someone odd. She stops, and reaches out her hands to either side to stop the boys short too.

"Who's that?" Her voice comes out low and uneasy, but neither Monty nor Jasper seems particularly scared.

"Looks like a girl," Jasper says. A girl with long, dark hair, a winter coat that falls down to her knees, and what appears to be a long dress underneath it. Her hands are shoved deep into her pockets, but she’s got no hat or scarf to keep her warm. She's half-turned toward the cabin, staring up at it in a curious way.

Octavia creeps closer, her boots squeaking on the hard-packed, frozen snow.

"Can I help you?" she calls, when she's even with Bellamy's car, and the girl turns abruptly to look at her, and smiles. Her skin is much too pale, nearly translucent in the full morning sun. The expression on her face is warm and welcoming, and distant and faint, all at once.

"If you're here about the cabin," Monty adds, as he and Jasper approach, too, "we're more than over-booked."

"Oh, no." The girl laughs, and the sound rings out like wind chimes, cool like a whistling wind past a chain of icicles. "I'm Maya. My dad and I own the cabin. I wanted to come out and greet you earlier, but with the storm..." She trails off, then extends her hand for Octavia to shake.

Even through her gloves, Octavia can feel the smooth cold of the girl's skin. She's not sure what to say, and she's reluctant to let go.

"I just wanted to know how everything is. Do you like the cabin?"

"Actually, there was a mix-up—" Monty starts, but Jasper shoves his elbow hard into his ribs and interrupts:

"Yeah. Yes. It's great. We're having a great time. Really great."

He sounds like he's malfunctioning, and the manic, nervous pattern of his speech snaps Octavia partly out of her trance. She glances back at him. "I swear," she says, turning back to Maya, "my friend's not usually this weird. It's a beautiful place. I'm glad we could rent it."

"I'm glad," Maya echoes. "We love to see it put to good use." She reaches out once more and squeezes Octavia's arm, just below the shoulder, smiles at her again as if they were old friends, then starts to tramp past them in the direction of the woods.

"Wait!" Octavia calls, whirling around on her heel. "Where are you—?"

But she's already gone. Somehow she's already gone, not even a trail of footsteps left in her wake.

"What was that...?" she asks faintly, words as weak as a half-remembered memory on her tongue.

"Yeah, what was that?" Monty echoes, and bumps his arm up against Jasper's arm. "You sounded like a robot on low batteries. You've gotta be a little more cool around girls you think are cute."

"I'm very cool!" Jasper counters. "And I did not think she was cute. Octavia, back me up on this—"

"Yeah, yeah. Cool." She waves her hand vaguely at them, barely aware of what they're saying. Along the path through the woods, a light breeze seems to sweep along the low branches of the trees, while all around her the sun shines bright across a calm and breathless winter scene.

Before she can complete her thought, even to herself, the sound of running footsteps stomping against snow, and vague arguing, coming from behind her, grab her attention and distract her entirely from what was. "I really think we'll see better from this side," Bellamy's voice grumbles as he strides quickly around the side of the cabin and toward the porch.

"I think you can't tell the difference between bird song and icicles breaking, and you should give me back my binoculars," Clarke answers. She has to jog to catch up with him, but Bellamy gives no sign of slowing down, or of handing her back the binoculars he has hung around his neck.

"I'm telling you, I almost saw something," he insists. "Oh—hi. Back from your walk?" He stops abruptly when he notices Octavia, Jasper, and Monty hanging back next to his car, and Clarke is finally able to overtake him, though the most she can do about the binoculars is grab them from his hands, pulling the strap against his neck. "Hey—ow! If you want them back, you can just ask."

"I've been asking!"

"It was more of a hike," Monty corrects, as Jasper asks:

"Are you bird watching?"

"Trying to," Bellamy answers, as he finally untangles himself from the strap and hands off the binoculars to Clarke. "Someone here can't tell the difference between a cardinal and a blue jay."

"Please." She rolls her eyes, but doesn't bother looking up from inspecting the lenses for imaginary smudges. "They're not even the same color."

"That's my point. Like I said, we'll see more from the front porch."

"It's not the birds or the porch, it's the bird watcher."

Octavia huffs, rubbing her hands together in their gloves to generate some warmth, as she strides past Jasper and Monty and prepares to push her way past Clarke and Bellamy on her way to the stairs. "You two have got to get a room," she declares. She's so cold, she doesn't even bother looking back to see how that one lands.

She does hear vague sputtering behind her, though.

Before she's bounded halfway up the steps, the cabin door opens, and Raven sticks her head out and then immediately goes still. "Oh. This is where everyone is." She steps into the doorway and crosses her arms against her chest. "Having a party without me. Anyway, I'm here to announce that Murphy is finally happy with the results of his hot apple cider toddy experiments, if anybody wants some."

"Oh, hell, yes," Octavia answers, and skips the last step in her rush to the door.

"Wait just a minute, I don't think so," Bellamy counters, just as fast, his own boots shaking the stairs as he bounds after her. Raven has to slide out of the way, clinging to the chain of the porch swing and barely keeping her balance as the Blake siblings race past.

Clarke sighs, but follows at a more dignified pace. "What's this one?" she asks Raven, offering a hand to help her steady herself again. "His sixth attempt?

"Seventh," Raven answers. "Secret perfectionist, I guess."

As the others disappear, one by one, into the cabin, Jasper and Monty walk sedately up toward the porch. "What was all that about?" Jasper asks.

Monty shrugs. He curls his arm around Jasper's arm. "I don't know. I just want to get inside. I don't think I can feel my toes."

"Maybe we can get some of that fancy drink."

"Maybe..."

As they pass across the threshold, another faint breeze picks up, closing the door securely behind them and scattering fine wisps of snow across the porch.