I'll follow you into the dark
He wanted to go with her.
No one asks him if he did, though. No—
"Where is my daughter?" Abby, frequently with increasing volume, over and over, nearly clawing at him until Kane finally restrains her.
"Where's Clarke?" Raven asks, once she's sitting up, once she realizes that her friend hasn't come to see her in the med ward. Her voice cracks. "Bellamy?"
"She just left?" Monty, hugging himself, eyes darting to and from Jasper with trepidation. He looks at Bellamy with shadowed eyes. He understands what haunts her, what haunts him. He doesn't need to ask why.
"Did she have enough supplies?" Lincoln, brow furrowed. "To survive?"
"She'll be fine," Octavia mutters, but looks to Bellamy for reassurance, and he keeps his face like stone so she can't see the inner turmoil.
Then Monroe, then Miller, then Harper, then, eventually, Jasper. Even Kane whispers to him, "Do you know where she went?"
He shakes his head mutely, then stomps off, just outside of the camp doors, to where he'd last seen her. He looks to the horizon, even though she'd disappeared into the woods long ago.
He wanted to go with her. He knew that Clarke wouldn't have objected to his presence, per se— she didn't want to be alone, she just had to leave.
But she's counting on him. She trusted him to watch over their friends. And he knew, by the look that she gave him, that he's the only one she trusts implicitly, above all, above her friends, above Raven and Monty and Miller and Jasper, above her mother, it's him.
He could've held her back, could've picked her up in his arms and carried her back, kicking and screaming and biting and scratching, but—
"When you love something," his mother said once, after a story she told him, a tragic romance, "let it go."
"That's stupid," Bellamy had said, thinking about all he held dear to him— his sister, his mother. He thought of Roman emperors and warriors. "You don't let it go; if you love something, you fight for it."
She shook her head sadly. "And then what?" She said, and her eyes flitted to Octavia, still a toddler in Bellamy's lap, briefly. "You trap it. You hold it hostage. Love— real love— is unselfish, Bellamy. If you love something, you set it free, and if it comes back to you on its own, that's when you know that it's yours. Because it chose to be, and because you had enough faith in that love to know that it would come back."
She has faith in him, she trusts him, and he wouldn't be selfish and go with her. Although Bellamy hates the idea of Clarke out there alone, hating herself, emotionally devastated, he knows she would worry even more if she felt that their friends were unprotected.
"May we meet again," she had said, and Bellamy takes it as a promise.
He would protect the people they loved; she would come back one day.
The sun is setting, gold fading into black. He thinks about her hair twisted around his fingers and his hand clenches, once.
He wanted to go with her, but he loves her, so he stayed.
May we meet again.