A/N: Okay. I had homework. So I wrote this. Muchas gracias as always to my incomparable beta, MarinaBlack1 (are you reading Walking Through Fire yet, because it is chock full of Murphy epicness) and to the world's best reader, Persepholily. I love you both in unhealthy ways. I Bellarke amounts of love you.

Night 17

He kept forgetting: there was always a new lesson for Earth to teach them. He could lull himself into an odd sense of comfort about the perpetual violence, the unrelenting danger – and completely forget he had experienced only a few months' worth of what this planet had to offer. The grounders used the trees. He knew that… he just hadn't understood it. They could move through the thickest parts of the forest without setting foot on the ground, and apparently they could even live up here if it came to it.

Now, clutching the silvery tree trunk beside him, Bellamy surveyed this tiny aerial city Lexa and her warriors had constructed over the course of the past two hours.

The hardest part should have been getting the injured into the air, but the Grounders knew what they were doing. With an ease that came from years of practice, they had rigged pulleys and hauled up first the weakest of the Sky People, then their own wounded. Now a network of makeshift hammocks criss-crossed the branches and Nyko passed among them, administering what first aid he could.

"I should go help," Clarke announced quietly, easing onto the limb nearest Bellamy. He glanced at her in disbelief.

"Have you watched how they travel up here? That's a thirty-foot drop, Clarke. It's too damn dangerous." Bellamy shook his head and turned back to watch Nyko. Of course she would go, though. She was Clarke. She never fucking listened to him. He was busy keeping her alive, and sometimes he couldn't help but wonder if she had the opposite goal, the way she contradicted his every demand. He wasn't trying to prove he was in charge – not anymore. He was just…

He was just trying not to lose her.

Ah, shit.

"Clarke! Hey wait!" he half-whispered as he crawled after her along the thick branch. This was suicide. Humans were meant to walk and run, not jump around in trees like squirrels. As Clarke neared the end of the branch it bent and swayed, and Bellamy cursed, trying to visualize how he would grab her, how to hold her so he landed first and protected her from that deadly impact with the forest floor –

She reached out to grab an overhanging branch from the next tree and swung forward, and only when he saw she was safe did Bellamy let himself give in to the wave of panic, like a cold fire burning across his skin. Just for a moment. Then he swallowed and followed, landing more heavily than she but not worried about form so much as catching up to her.

"What the hell was that?" he asked in hushed tones once they were both safely hugging this new tree. She was so close he could hear her breathing. Her brow wrinkled in confusion at his obvious anger.

"I watched Octavia, she does it all the time. And Lincoln took that same route earlier tonight. I knew the branch would support me."

"Dammit Clarke, I don't care about Lincoln, I care about you!" Even Nyko looked at him then. Bellamy felt heat rushing up his neck and face, and was thankful the weak moonlight washed out color. He sought to recover. "We're all relying on you now. You can't just do whatever the hell you want." He knew he had phrased it wrong the minute he said it. Her quick grin infuriated him, but at least she had the decency to grow serious immediately after, instead of needling him further.

"I need to check on my patients. We've been traveling all day, with barely any time to rest." Clarke turned toward Nyko and let him lead her to Harper, who still looked like she could go at any moment.

Bellamy counted to ten. Then twenty. Once he felt calmer he sought out the Commander and found her in a nearby tree, balancing lightly on a branch in front of their prisoner. The Grounders had strung a rope bridge across the expanse here, which Bellamy gripped tightly as he inched his way over the yawning darkness below. Dante Wallace was bound and gagged, and part of Bellamy envied his security, tied so tightly to the trunk that way.

"I should kill him," Lexa announced. She did not even glance back to see who had arrived.

"You could have, a dozen times over by now," Bellamy pointed out. "So why haven't you? Why didn't you, back at the dam?"

"He is not my prisoner. He belongs to Clarke, and she is now responsible for seeing that justice is served."

Bellamy was silent. He had seen Lexa's face when Clarke and Bellamy appeared at the top of the dam with Dante in tow. She had not been angry; she had been surprised and disappointed. Lexa immediately accused Clarke of treachery, of betraying the Forest people and the memory of all those who had been lost. For a long tense minute Bellamy had watched as Clarke waged an internal war over how best to respond; at one point, he was sure one or both of the women would end up like Sterling and Charlotte, a body at the bottom of the ravine. But then Clarke had asked about the eighteen lives lost in the Grounder village. And Bellamy saw and heard it, a tiny shudder-stutter of pain and anger and guilt at the memory of such a terrible crime committed in her name. It was the fulcrum around which Clarke's moral compass now swung. The Commander had noticed too, Bellamy was sure, because she tilted her head and, instead of responding to the question, asked for more information about those inside the mountain.

"Children. Old people. Healers. Innocent people, like yours. Do they really deserve to die for their leaders' crimes? Because that's what will happen if we shut down the mountain. They can't survive out here, and they'll suffocate in there." Clarke had a funny little way of shifting her jaw forward just a bit whenever she was settling in for a long bout of stubbornness. Bellamy knew it well, and when he had seen it, he'd felt compelled to step in.

"Listen, we've got people dying, and we're an easy target out in the open like this. Let's argue later. For now we need to take cover." Getting nearly one hundred people to cross the dam unseen was always going to be impossible, something he and Clarke had discussed for hours without finding a better solution. They had made it almost halfway before the Mountain Men managed to rally a half-hearted pursuit, but even so there were still far too many casualties – including a tall blond boy named Tim, and a tiny dark-haired girl who'd seemed to have a crush on Miller. It wasn't until they were safely hidden in the woods that anyone realized Wick had been shot, too. He was big, too big for most people to carry, but Lincoln and Nyko had volunteered to take turns. Bellamy watched Clarke hastily rip a section of fabric from the bottom of her own shirt and stuff it into the bullet wound – to keep him from leaving a blood trail, she had whispered quietly to Bellamy when the others weren't paying attention, a confession that chilled them both. She seemed nervous about Wick's prognosis, and Bellamy tried not to picture how Raven had fallen apart the last time she lost someone close to her.

"Bellamy!" Clarke's voice brought him back to the moment and without a second glance at the Commander, Bellamy returned to her. She was with Wick now, speaking to Nyko in hushed tones, describing a procedure Bellamy understood just enough of to hate. She turned to him next. "We have to get the bullet out. And it's going to hurt. You… you have to hold him down. You have to keep him quiet."

It was disgusting. It was always disgusting, every time he watched Clarke reach inside another human like that, moving through blood and tissue and bone. But she made it beautiful, too, in the way she refused to look away, in the way she cared so much for the humanity of her patient. Clarke was life, fighting the battle against death single-handedly, and when she managed to pull that bullet from Wick's side, Bellamy released a breath he had not realized he was holding. For tonight, life had won. Clarke had won. Nyko moved forward to finish dressing the wound, and Bellamy silently offered Clarke his canteen so she could wash up.

"You should rest, Clarke of the Sky People," Nyko rumbled as he worked. "I will care for your friends." She thanked him and stared up at Bellamy. She looked like she was waiting for him. He wanted it to be true, and admitting that to himself should have been a hell of a lot harder than it was, but tonight everything felt uprooted and unsteady, including his own self-restraint.

When they found an empty limb, in a tree close to the injured so Clarke could help if needed, Bellamy began pulling his belt through its loops. He caught Clarke's raised eyebrow.

"I don't know about you, but I don't want to fall thirty feet in my sleep." He looped the belt around both his leg and the limb of the tree. "What's your plan?"

"I guess I could use my jacket to tie myself in…" Clarke looked suddenly exhausted and scared and cold and small, straddling the tree branch and watching him as he leaned against the trunk in relative comfort.

"You'd freeze." He sighed. "Come here." Bellamy traded places with her, tightening his belt around her leg and absolutely refusing to look up when his fingers brushed along her thigh. "Is it too tight?"

"It's fine. - What are you going to do?"

"You need sleep more than I do."

"Shut up, Bellamy. You'll kill yourself if you keep going like this. You promised me you'd sleep when we got our friends back. Well they're back, so now you sleep. Okay?" He couldn't have refused her under the best circumstances. Tonight… He slid into the open space behind her, bracing himself against the trunk of the tree for added support. Clarke leaned back, pinning him to the spot. She was warm and soft and without really meaning to he wrapped his arms around her to steady himself, and wondered how easy it might be for her to feel his heart pounding in his chest. He could barely hear anything over the drumming of it.

Together they watched the dark shadowy figures of friends and allies settling into their own little treetop nests, a strangely beautiful scene.

"Don't fall," Clarke eventually murmured with a yawn as she let her head sink into his chest and her breathing became more regular.

...Too fucking late, Bellamy Blake finally admitted to himself, in silent surrender.