A/N: This chapter tied up some loose ends to get ready for another small time jump in the next, which causes more problems amongst the group :P and gets us closer and closer to the Bellarke reunion!

Chapter Fourteen: Counting On It

-Before-

'All I think about every day is how we're going to keep everyone alive, but we don't have a choice.'

The sky released a gentle smattering of rain that latches onto the tree tops. Bellamy and Clarke sit, bloodied, exhausted and covered in mud against a trunk of a tree. The reprieve is small but it's enough that Bellamy can begin to make sense of the storm raging in his head. He moves his hand in the mud beside him and brushes against Clarke's fingers. She doesn't flinch or move away. He pretends he's too exhausted to notice how her fingers twitch comfortably from the slight overlap of their hands.

He can see her looking at him in his periphery and his chests constricts from the scrutiny. What was this? These times in the silence when too much passes, unsaid in feigned ignorance. This feeling creates a nest in his throat and it should frustrate him, considering they assimilated only out of necessity. She was the privileged after all, she had just been a wrist band.

Bellamy turns his head to meet her eyes and she blanches from the sudden change in tension. It's a challenge. He's challenging her but he doesn't know exactly why. She accepts it and studies his face with an open, albeit, unreadable expression. There's a dangerous awareness to her eyes as if she recognizes more than he does. He wants her to spill her thoughts out into the mud to him, he wants to take every single one and plant them in his skull. He didn't understand why then, not yet. It's too early to tell when one heart begins to wrap vines around another.

"We'll figure this out." She says as if to fill the chasm of silence.

"I hope so." Bellamy replies and she nods at him, resolute.

"We've been fighting our whole lives, Bellamy. This is what we're used to."

Bellamy breaks eye contact when the heaviness starts to fill him to the brim. There's too much he can't make sense of.

His voice wavers, "…don't you get tired of it?"

They didn't have childhoods to ponder or look back fondly on. The happiness they found in between the dark has always been temporary and incorporeal. The likeness and perserverance in each other is all they had. Octavia had been all Bellamy had for so long and to find solace in another scares the hell out of him.

She reaches out and touches his arm to ground him, to get him to look at her again but he can't. He keeps his eyes forward towards those dark trees fanning out in front of them. They are blurred images, fleeting and meaningless.

"But that's what it's all about." Clarke moves closer and scraps her clothing against the bark. "Look at me, Bellamy."

Now, he didn't have a choice. He had to turn to meet her eyes and when he does he releases a quiet breath at the empathy he finds there.

"It's all about the struggle, it's where we find meaning." Clarke whispers.

Years from then, those words and that voice would haunt Bellamy Blake in the deep void of space.

-Present-

"Bellamy…."

Bellamy can feel a gentle push on his shoulder and the incessant voice that isn't Raven's. He blinks his eyes open to Harper's blurry face above him. She steps back to give him room to wake and he scrunches up his face in the unavoidable assault the bright lights provide. Hadn't anyone heard of knocking?

"What…what is it?" Bellamy stumbles and forces himself to sit up. He rests his head in his hands, feeling pressure on his arm where Clarke had rested her fingers those years ago, as if the memory had just occurred.

"I need to talk to you." Harper's words are heavy hearted and Bellamy isn't awake enough to deal with whatever it is.

"I'm listening." He says anyway.

"It was me." She says in a rush. He moves his hands away from his face and blinks at her, processing her statement.

"You?" Bellamy tries but he knows. He knows what she means and somehow it didn't surprise him.

"I was the one that poisoned the food…oh god…I'm so sorry…I never…I didn't mean for it to poison you. I think there was a mix up with the food dishes and before I could do anything about it….I…I am so sorry. Echo…she saw me do it." Harper words fall out onto him like a weight in a jumble. There are tears now springing in her eyes and cascading down her cheeks.

"Whoa…whoa…" Bellamy says and holds up his hands as her breathing becomes erratic. "Who exactly were you trying to poison?"

"Murphy and Emori. I didn't know what I was doing. I just thought…I thought about the O2 and about how they don't contribute much to workload, they're always complaining and I didn't want to suffocate because of them. I didn't."

"Jesus…Harper." Bellamy breathes and Harper wipes away her wet face with the palms of her hands.

"What do you want me to do? I'll do anything." Harper desperately replies.

"None of us is going to suffocate. We are all going to make it back home and no one deserves to be floated or poisoned because of it." Bellamy states harshly.

He spots Raven appear in the open doorway and she watches them perplexed. Bellamy stands from the bed and Harper keeps her eyes on the empty floor beneath her shoes. "I need to talk to Raven, stay here." He tells her and Bellamy lightly taps Raven's shoulder to get her to follow him into the hallway.

"What's that about?" Raven asks, quirking a brow.

"Harper is the one that poisoned the food and blamed it on Echo because Echo saw her do it. She meant it for Murphy and Emori." Bellamy bluntly confesses and Raven steps back from the onslaught of the implication.

"Harper? You've gotta be kidding me…" Raven replies and pinches the bridge of her nose. "What do you want to do?"

Bellamy eyes her and then whispers, "lock her up until the situation calms down. The others should know so they don't attack Echo when she's released but…"

Raven sighs and continues for him, "But Murphy and Emori."

Bellamy nods, "They're unpredictable and Monty…"

Raven releases an exasperated grunt, "I hate this."

To say that informing the group of this predicament didn't go well, would be an understatement. Murphy and Emori lash out and Monty lashes back. Bellamy has to pull Monty off of Murphy twice before the meeting is up but Monty being the more reasonable of the two, didn't blame Bellamy or Raven for what they had to do, as long as they allowed him to speak with Harper.

"She should float!" Murphy yells for the third time.

It's Bellamy's turn to snap under the pressure. He pushes Murphy up against the solid wall behind the nav system and grits in his face, "No one is floating anyone."

Murphy smirks at him darkly and says, "Well she wasn't trying to murder you, was she?"

Bellamy pushes off of him and steps back, running his hand through his sweaty hair. Raven peers at the two of them with an old exhaustion. "Luckily, no one was killed. What Harper did was wrong but we aren't going to exact the same punishment our families had to live in fear of. We aren't going to be those people."

That seems to calm Murphy a little even if the smirk remained on his face like a permanent fixture.

But Murphy isn't done. "I bet if Clarke were here she'd float little miss Harper and you'd fall in line, you'd give a speech about how it's a necessary evil."

Bellamy closes his eyes against it, shaking his head without a response.

"Clarke is dead. We all know it. Even Raven and we pretend because we don't want to hurt Bellamy's feelings. You've lost it and I'm so fucking tired of pretending your insanity doesn't exist. We all see it. How many times have we repeated the same conversations?"

Raven's quiet voice comes next as a plea, "Bellamy.."

Emori adds, drowning her out, "What does a dog do without his owner?"

Bellamy's anger rises above the threshold in which he can tolerate, it boils over and spills out into the room in a wild flurry. As if everything Bellamy has pent up inside him reveals itself. His fist connects with Murphy's jaw and they topple together to the cold floor. Murphy tries in vain to retaliate but Bellamy overpowers him and connects his fist again with his face. He can hear faint yelling; protests from Raven and Emori. "You lef..t her to die…" Murphy splutters. He lifts his fist and brings it down again and again and again. He can feel the tug on his shoulders and the stinging punch from Emori's knuckles against his cheek. He lifts his bloodied fist again. There's a feral fury beneath his dark eyes that slowly dissipates when he sees the mess that is Murphy's face. Murphy coughs up blood beside him, one of his eyes completely swollen shut. The sound comes rushing back in like the floodgates have been opened.

Raven successfully drags Bellamy by his shoulders off of Murphy and he goes willingly. She's screaming his name and he just keeps his eyes locked on Murphy. Emori blocks his view now, assessing the damage. He waits for her to tear towards him, which she does and Raven steps in the way. It's Emori that punches Raven this time and Monty just sits there watching it all with a defeated exhaustion. Raven retaliates, collapsing with Emori beside Murphy and tries to calm her by holding Emori's fists above her head. Bellamy blinks, his hands shaking, his senses regaining as he hobbles to stand.

The rage is slow to evaporate from Emori but Raven keeps her held there; the room filled with harsh gasping breathes.

"We're never going to make it another three years up here." Monty coldly states as he steps over tired limbs and leaves the command center.

Bellamy stumbles out of the door not long after him and flexes his injured fist on the short walk to the comms room. Once inside he leans against the wall and then slides down to the floor. His legs are stretched in front of him and he sets his bloody hand against his thigh. He stares ahead absently at his messy bed. His eyes burn and the tears slide down his cheeks, uninvited. He closes his eyes and wets his eyelashes against them. He still feels Clarke's grip on his arm like a burn and he sets his hand there against the pressure. She's branded in his skin.

Perhaps he has lost it, the moment he left Earth would have been the origin point of his loss.

"Bellamy.." Raven's soft voice speaks from the doorway and he looks over at her, not bothering to cover his tears. What's the point?

"Is Murphy..?" Bellamy asks and Raven answers, "He's going to be okay."

Bellamy nods once and bites his lip.

"What about you? Need to bandage that hand." Raven continues and Bellamy holds her eyes.

"You think I've lost my mind." Bellamy states quietly and she shakes her head immediately.

"I don't think you've lost your mind, Bellamy."

Bellamy tilts his chin and swallows, "You and Monty think I'm hearing things."

Raven sighs and sits on the floor in front of him, resting her hands in her lap. She has bruise on her cheek where Emori hit her. "The only time Clarke seems to contact you as of late is when you're alone and I had my suspicions that the stress and lack of sleep was getting to you. Hell, you'd have those same suspicions about me too but I don't think you're insane…you want to know what I think?"

Bellamy nods and looks away as a tear escapes from his chin.

"You love her. You love Clarke, Bellamy and you are so terrified for her. The not knowing would eat away anyone's resolve. You blame yourself for leaving but she wanted you to. She needs you to keep breathing as much as you need her to keep breathing. I've never seen anything like it…" Raven huffs a small laugh, wistful and melancholy as she continues, "the two of you together can shape the world and being split apart from that kind of force of nature is in itself unnatural. This separation isn't permanent. Soon the two of you will see each other again and the both of you will be what brings us together again. I know it. I believe in it and I hope you do too."

Bellamy releases a heavy breath and his eyes blur. Raven is just a smudge as she reaches out and wraps her arms around him in a tight embrace. He rests his chin on her shoulder, the words refusing to arrive on his tongue. "You'll find each other again. The world is counting on it." Raven whispers.