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His girl has never yelled, not at him, in the year and a half Bellamy has been with her. Ten days after Clarke leaves, however, she breaks the furious silence that has been gathering around him ever since, like the way the air collects water before the rainfall, hanging heavy as it waits for the coming storm. And storm it does: her voice is thunder and her eyes flash like lightening, jagged flickers of hurt and betrayal, because in the year and a half he has been with her, he has never been like this, at least not until Clarke had reappeared in his life, their life. Around his girl, he has never been like a fuse waiting to be lit, coiled so tightly with betrayal of his own (she left, she left, she left echoes in his head like the beat of war drums), betrayal by a girl that isn’t his girl.
Because he feels guilt and anger and regret for all sorts of things simmer inside him, he lets his girl yell, lets the stinging downpour of accusations drench him, drown him, because he deserves it, because as much as she is his girl, she is not the girl. Clarke has always been the girl, the one that lights a spectacular type of fire in him, a wild blaze that dances just on the edge of uncontrollable when she is around, and flares out recklessly, harmfully when she isn’t. He hasn’t been burning like this in so long. The tender, then-tamed flame of it was extinguished when she walked away the first time, only to be coaxed back when she walked through the gates again. Now she had left them (him) once more, and he can’t breathe (she left, she left, she left), can’t get enough air, there is no oxygen in his lungs, but the inferno still rages across him, searing his veins and making his blood boil. He fumes with a quiet kind of rage, and his people scatter when he comes their way, none of them wanting to be the one to set off the land mine that he has become, because it seems as if the fire isn’t going to go out on its own this time, and is just waiting for the right (or wrong) spark to set it irrevocably ablaze.
So he lets his girl yell, lets her wounded words rain over him. He waits for her angry tempest to smother the conflagration consuming him, waits for smoke to rise from the sodden ashes of the man he had worked so hard to become without Clarke. He waits to begin again.
There is no phoenix moment for him this time, though, no new start. Weeks later he still burns, even after his girl had stormed herself out, leaving him behind in her wake as she moves on to somewhere calmer, somewhere cooler.
Angrier than ever (she left, she left, everyone leaves), he snaps at coworkers, snipes at friends, an oppressive wave of heat that can’t seem to break because the girl who sparked the kindling had vanished in the dead of night, leaving no instructions of how to combat the blaze she had ignited. Octavia is the only one who dares to get close to his flames now, but he wishes she wouldn’t. He can see the disappointment in her steady eyes, can read in the worried lines of forehead the desperation to know how and when her flesh-and-blood brother had turned into a man made of embers and ash.
The bomb he had been making of his own singed skin and charred bones finally goes off when he stumbles upon Abby and her tear-soaked face. She is a woman who has never liked or trusted him, and she too is a Councilor who probably had a hand in tearing apart his own family years ago. Yet in this moment of grief–grief that Bellamy knows all too well, both past and present—she is just a woman who has lost family, her daughter, twice over now. So her anguish and sorrow becomes the flint that sets his gunpowder heart off, and in a split second, in the heat of that explosive moment, he decides to go after Clarke. Seeing nothing but flames and smoke, he gathers his bag and his gun and blazes out of the camp, reckless and wild and everything she made him into and everything he is scared to be again, especially without her.
So with fire in his heart and soot in his soul, he heads for the forest that hides a golden-haired, shadow-hearted girl who he thinks too carelessly plays with matches, more than ready to scorch and raze every tree to the ground if that what it takes to find her, bitterly gratified to finally put to good use the firestorm she had started and then left burning inside of him.