#trickstermurphy

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The 100 (TV) Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Emori/John Murphy (The 100) Characters: John Murphy (The 100), Emori (The 100), Trey, Zev (The 100) Additional Tags: Season/Series 07, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Missing Scene, Murphy-centric Series: Part 83 of The 100 Fics Summary:

Bellamy’s curled up on his narrow cot; he’s too drained to do anything else but other than lay there. Screams and gunfire echo against the walls, but he isn’t sure if it’s his memories or something happening beyond the barred door.

Shadows dancing on the floor of the corridor catch his attention.

Are they coming for him again? It feels like only minutes have passed since the disciples brought him from the White Room, but time has been behaving strangely since he was captured: dragging its feet and skipping around at random, so who knows.

He isn’t sure what the disciples are doing with him, only that every day he gets strapped to that chair and plunged into a world of fire. He has a vague memory of threatening them, of rebelling against their prodding and shuffling through his brain. But days blur together, and his thoughts are scattered, plagued by monsters, twisted in a way he can’t be sure whether they are real or just imagined.

A woman, dressed in the standard-issue blue suit of the disciple guard, stops on the other side of the door. She is grim-faced, her plump mouth pulled into a tight, displeased line, and Bellamy tries not to tense. The long nose and caramel-colored eyes are familiar, but faces, much like everything else, are difficult to distinguish in this place.  

The fact that she is alone sparks a tiny, rebellious spark inside him. He could fight one guard. He is strong enough and knows how to fight; he could try to escape.

Bellamy drops his gaze to the floor, squashing those thoughts. The guards are not cruel, as long as he complies.

He wishes he could tell Murphy that he understands now. He isn’t better than him; torture has broken him, too. But he can’t because he is at the mercy of the disciples, and nobody is coming to save him, too busy trying to survive Praimfaya to notice that he is gone.

The guard’s boots catch his attention. Worn and patched up with mismatched laces caked in mud, they are unlike anything else in this pristine facility, with its smooth white walls and symmetric designs. The boots look out of place; they don’t belong here. When he closes his eyes, he can nearly see them, carelessly abandoned beside a heavy metal door, traipsing through leave-covered forests and…

The door bangs open, startling him out of half-remembered memories. Bellamy tenses, the part of his brain that isn’t completely worn out tensing for a fight that will never come.

The guard doesn’t manhandle him out of the bench. Instead, she kneels in front of him, her hand strong and calloused as it lands on his shoulder. When she talks, her voice sends shivers down his spine.

“Bellamy, can you hear me?”

He looks up into her sacred caramel eyes, feeling a sense of déjà-vu. Shouldn’t it be her inside the cage and him the one doing the rescuing?

“Echo.”

Plump lips curve into a small, shaky smile, and she runs her fingers through his sweat-matted hair. “We need to stop meeting like this,” she says like it’s an inside joke. Before he has time to question her, she is leaning forward and pressing her lips to his.

For a split second, Bellamy is too startled to do anything but lay there. Then he remembers who she is, not that scared woman curled inside a cage, but a duplicitous spy who abused his trust, and shoves her away with what’s left of his strength.

There are canonically speaking 6 people John Murphy gives a damn about: Emori, Bellamy, Raven (Echo, Monty, and Harper) 

For the first three, he will risk his life. (It remains to be seen if he would do it for anyone else.)

A new chapter on my Tumblr Prompts fic. Thank you @echokomazgeda , I hope you like it ^^

Murphy looks down at the list Raven handed him if it can be called a list. It looks more like a spider wandered in some ink and then decided to do a crazy dance all over the strip of paper. Is this some sort of prank? Is Raven pranking him? Maybe it’s code. Or scienc-y stuff, but he has never seen anything like this before.

“John, what’s on the list?” asks Emori. She’s crouching amidst the large crates of supplies they found in the storage unit. Too crowded for him to properly enter the room, but with enough space for Ems to slither between the containers and peak inside them.

“I have no clue.”

The woman’s stare is unimpressed at best. “I thought you said you could read.”

“I can read. But not whatever language this is.” Emori sighs and squeezes her way out of the storage room. She can’t read, so she doesn’t even try looking at the list. “OK, let’s see if Raven can translate it for you.”

Murphy feels a surge of shame as he follows Emori down the hall. He has already proven he can’t help Raven or Monty with techy stuff, not like Harper, Bellamy and Emori can. Echo has the excuse of being traumatized by the mountain, but he is just useless. One would think he’d be smart enough to read a fucking list of materials.

One would be wrong, apparently.

“Raven! Murphy can’t read your list.”

The mechanic groans, pushing herself out from inside a panel in the wall. “Really? Come on; I didn’t use any technical names.”

“I don’t know what this is, but it’s not English. And I told you I don’t get your fancy coding and scienc-y languages,” growls Murphy, feeling his ears burning.

“I told Echo to write the list;” the mechanic is climbing to her feet with Emori’s help. “So it’s in English.”

“It’s not”

Raven rolls her eyes and snatches the paper from his hands with a tired: "She said her penmanship was a little rusty, but I don't think-" The mechanic stares at the collection of small dots. Blinks. And stares some more, finally rolling her eyes. "Ha-ha, very funny, Murphy."

“I swear to god; this is the paper Echo gave me.”

Emori looks between the two of them. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“This isn’t English,” declares Raven. It’s not like Murphy has been saying this all along, but he bites his tongue and follows the two women when they set up to find Echo. She's with Bellamy, Harper, and Monty, setting up the algae farm and doing most of the heavy lifting while Monty orders Bellamy and Harper around to install scrubbers and water filtration systems. The young man’s hands haven’t healed properly yet, so he can’t do any of the manual labor himself.

“Yo, Echo! I thought you said you could write”, is probably not what Murphy should have said upon entering their future hydro farm. The scary Az-woman rises to her full height, squaring her shoulders. “I do.”

“The hell is this, then?”

She checks the paper. “Well, Raven said you write ‘Ionic disruptor’ as it sounds.”

Bellamy wanders over, peeking over Murphy’s shoulder to take a look at the paper. “What language is this?”

“Since only gonaleng can be written down…”

“You mean to tell us; this is English?”

The warrior frowns at them, her hackles rising. “I am not an analphabet; I was trained as a high commander of Haiplana’s Royal High Guard. I deciphered the dispatches during the Three Year War against the Plain Riders. My penmanship might not be as sophisticated as a Lady's, but I can write."

And with that, she turns on her heel and marches out of the room.

Also on AO3

Clarke watches Bellamy and Echo wake up the rest of their friends: Echo helping Raven jump down from her pod, stabilizing her when her bad leg gives under her; Murphy winking and asking for “five more minutes”; Emori’s amazed “it cannot have been ten years already” as she sits up, mindful not to knock her head on the glass cover of her pod.

They notice the lack of Harper and Monty almost immediately, their easiness automatically replaced with vigilance as they turn to Bellamy for answers. He looks distressed: eyes shiny with tears and a distinct tension around his shoulders. Echo intertwines her fingers with his. Nobody notices Clarke standing by Madi’s still closed pod, watching.

Bellamy sighs: “Come with me. There’s something we need to talk about.”

It comes to absolutely no surprise to her when it’s Murphy the one who digs his heels in, refusing to comply, even though, the Murphy she knew didn’t much care about Monty. “What the hell? Why aren’t we waking them up?”

Bellamy opens his mouth, but Raven beats him to it, her hand falling on his un-injured shoulder: “Come on.”

None of them notice her as they walk out of the cryo-pod chamber. She wants to join them, but can’t this isn’t her place, and the longer she watches, the more evident that becomes: they’re a closely-knit group, a family. And she isn’t part of it. Still, she follows them at a distance as they enter the bridge.

Clarke longs to embrace Madi, still blissfully asleep, to find some sort of respite and human contact. Her skin still burns where Bellamy touched her a few hours ago in this same bridge where he now stands next to Echo, her hand firmly clasped in his. Clarke can’t help the bitter jealousy gnawing at her heels at the ease with which he has replaced her, the nasty feeling entwining with her longing and sadness.

Bellamy’s voice carries a particular authority, even with his shoulders curled in tiredness and sadness, even with his eyes bloodshot and still wet with tears. He explains the situation matter-of-factly: Harper and Monty didn’t go to sleep, deciding to stay awake for ten years to get a respite from all the fighting, to sort themselves out after the horrible things they had to endure. Their plan went awry when the Earth didn’t come back.

Clarke watches Bellamy softly easing the rest of the group into the news that they’ve been asleep for over a hundred years and that their friends are dead.

Murphy leans forward, eyes burning and a nasty expression on his face: “You are lying,” he growls showing his teeth like a rabid animal.

Echo’s hand is white-knuckled around Bellamy’s, that being the only sign of distress on her, Bellamy turns his head upwards, blinking rapidly. Raven swallows, turns to the controls and keys in the sequence to open the big window. The new planet hangs in front of them like a beautiful gem.

“You are lying.” Murphy’s voice is shriller now as he pulls away from the group, shaking his head.

Bellamy swallows twice, taking a tentative step as he says: “I wish I were.”

Emori sits down on a stool, her breath coming in short gasps. Murphy keeps backing away from the group, his eyes wide and terrified and hurt like Clarke has never seen him. “No. We were safe. We were ok. They can’t be dead.”

Raven turns slowly away from the bay window like it’s taking every ounce of her willpower to do so. “Did they suffer?” her voice is soft, almost kind.

“NO!” shouts Murphy and is about to stomp out, but Echo is suddenly there, an unmovable wall of slender warrior. When her arms come around the younger man, he collapses into the hug, clawing at her back. She bows her head to his shoulder, one hand rubbing soothing circles on his back, the other cradling the back of his head. Murphy’s sobs are loud and ugly, a harsh contrast to the spy’s silent tears. Emori moves to join the hug a second later, burying her face between Murphy’s shoulder blades, her mismatched hands resting on his on Echo’s back. Bellamy throws an arm around his girlfriend’s shoulder, his head resting on the younger man. From where Clarke stands she can barely hear him whisper. “It’s ok, John.”

Raven is the last to join the group in their grief; she buries her face into Bellamy’s chest, pressing herself into Emori’s side.

Clarke doesn’t know how long spacekru stands there, pressing themselves as close to each other as they can possibly get, but she cannot stop looking at the pile of bodies, at the way they share their grief and find comfort in each other.

She longs to belong so much, it physically hurts.

For a moment she thinks she could join.

For a time after cryo Murphy has trouble sleeping. When he’s lucky he manages a few hours shuteye before waking in a panic, reaching for Emori. When he isn’t he just wanders around the room until he’s exhausted. 

It isn’t even nightmares anymore. Murphy has dealt with nightmares, they’re a companion he’s used to. 

No.

His fear comes from the tapes - something he doesn’t want to think about. Ever. His fear comes from going to bed knowing his family was all save and waking to the knowledge that he missed all of their lives. That a third of his family has died while he slept. That they let him sleep, preferred to live alone, having him locked up in a box. 

Murphy watches Jordan marveling at this new world his father had found them. 

It’s not like he’d rather be dead like he’d prefer to live a long and boring life eating algae mush and seeing the same faces all the time. But he remembers Harper’s and Monty’s fights on the Ring. Remembers one or the other storming into his and Emori’s room. They all needed a break from each other every now and then, and Harper and Monty didn’t have that. They were trapped together, with nobody else to vent to. 

They rather live like that than wake him up. They remembered Bellamy and Clarke, leaving videos recounting their boring, mundane life but forgot about him. They lived over forty years on the Eligius ship and they didn’t think once of leaving him a recording. 

And if Monty and Harper could discard him so easily, who is to say that Emori, Bellamy, Raven and Echo won’t do the same when he acts up? When they tire of him, or when he’s sliding back down one of his more self-destructive moods? 

Chapter 11 of KOHD is up, folks!!! And once again, it’s Bellamy’s turn to suffer at my hands. Here’s a tiny sneak peek you can read the rest over at AO3

Some days are just a wasted effort.

Bellamy goes through this one like he's in a fog, unable to concentrate on anything for more than two seconds before his mind wanders back to the failed attempt at escaping, the new knowledge that some aliens are playing around in Echo's worst memories. He gets struck continuously with the uncertainty. Does he even know which one is the worst? Has she ever told him? Is he better off not knowing? He tries to imagine what it is from the thousand little details she has revealed from her childhood.

Is it some grave wound or when they took her from her aunt’s cottage as a kid? Maybe some trial, some job where she had grown attached to her mark? Is it her banishment? Seeing the world destroyed by a wave of fire? When he tried to kill her?

Bellamy feels bile rising to the back of his throat.

Gods, is she seeing him looming over her, choking her over and over and over?

Could it be the first few months on the Ring when she kept forgetting where she was, kept having flashbacks of the mountain because the tech looked so similar?

Is it the time she tried to kill herself only altered so that no one comes because nobody cares? Can the graa’s tech do that? Can they change memories? And if they can, what will stop them from twisting every sweet moment she has ever had and turning it into a nightmare?

No.

Alice said they take your worst memories and play it over and over.

Bellamy knows precisely what his worst memory is – his mom's terrified eyes, mouth agape as she is ejected from the Ark, sucked out into the cold vacuum of space; Octavia's screams as two peacekeepers tear her from his arms, wrenching her frail body back, dragging her away.

Has he told Echo of that day? Has she shared her worst day with him?

Can we talk about the fact that Murphy thinks he’s worthless? And during his first scene in S5 he’s the one who sees Eligius? 

Like: Bellamy’s all “say you’re not worhtless, my beautiful troll!” and Murphy’s “NEVEEERRRR-Wait. waitwaitwait. I see the plot. The plot  is here to rescue us and torture me.”