i can't believe you had sex with raven
Bellamy kicks Murphy’s legs out from underneath him: Murphy drops the gun, goes down hard onto his hands and knees, stays there. Bellamy is dimly aware of Harper gasping, Raven asking for clarification, Monty speaking very quickly. Miller kicks the gun away from both of them, presses a hand to Murphy until he collapses, a knee into the small of his back.
“We need to get her to Medical,” Monty is saying, and Bryan is nodding — together, they somehow produce a stretcher, load Harper onto it. There’s — there’s a lot of blood. “If that’s her femoral artery —"
Murphy is muttering something into the floor. Bellamy threads a hand into his hair, wrenches his head upwards. “What the fuck are you saying.”
“It’s not her femoral artery,” he says, through a mouthful of blood. Bellamy doesn’t remember hitting him. “I’m not a fucking amateur, let me up, I can fix this, I can fix her —“
“What are you talking about,” says Bellamy, confused and exhausted and useless. “You shot her —“
“Dr. Griffin is in the City of Light with me — Raven can —“
Miller has scrabbled away to get the discarded radio: he summarizes events as quickly as possible.
“I mean, yeah, theoretically, that should work — I wouldn’t trust him, though,” Raven is saying over the radio. “How’d Abby get into the City, Murph?”
Murphy says something into the floor. Bellamy yanks him up to his knees, and he repeats himself: “Jackson,” he says. “But only because you weren’t available.”
Bellamy cuffs Murphy’s good hand to his own.
“I can’t believe you had sex with Raven,” Murphy tells him, and then Bellamy does hit him, and Murphy spits blood, and he laughs.
—
Harper is still conscious. That’s a good sign. She has lost a lot of blood, though, which is bad. On the plus side, they all share the same blood type, and there’s plenty of them here.
He remembers another time, digging bullets out of Arkadians and Grounders alike after the bomb dropped on Tondc, Jackson beside him, always by his side, his shadow since Jackson was just a kid — These aren’t his memories.
Monty has elevated Harper’s feet, her head. Murphy starts directing him, to do what he can’t do with one hand, except Monty starts yelling at him. Murphy stops talking, does his best to employ Active Listening, but he just zones out. He’s trying to help, and if Monty can’t see that, that’s okay. There’s a moment where everyone is yelling over each other, and then Bryan says underneath the noise: “Murphy. What do you want me to do?” and Murphy instructs him. It’s not like he’s talking to Dr. Griffin so much as he just knows what she would say, how she would react.
He gets hold of a blood transfusion thing, but he can’t seem to grip onto it right: there’s something wrong with the way his free hand works, like his movements are too slow or like his wrist doesn’t work correctly.
“Stop,” says Bellamy. “You can’t use that hand,” he says, taking the thing from him. “You’re injured,” he explains, when Murphy keeps staring at him.
“It doesn’t hurt,” says Murphy, reaching out for it.
“Shut up,” says Bellamy roughly, and presses the needle of it into his shoulder. The machine beeps, and Bellamy says: “You’re anemic, can I override that?”
“Yeah,” he says, and then reconsiders. “But you shouldn’t. It won’t help Harper, and your blood is fine. Give it back,” he says, reaching for it.
“You can’t hold anything,” argues Bellamy.
“I’ll do it,” says Monty beside them, his voice even. “Give her my blood.”
And then it goes smoothly again: Bryan makes the transfer, digs out the bullets with a pair of tweezers. Easy, easy, easy. And then: “Okay,” says Bryan. “What do you want to do now?”
“We still need to smash the mainframe,” Miller is saying. He’s cuffed to Bellamy, but all he needs to do is break his thumb and he can slip out, and he can take Miller’s gun —
“Stop,” says Bellamy in his ear, and he stills. “Bryan, Monty, get Harper into the Rover. Miller, if you want to smash it, go ahead.” Murphy makes an involuntary noise, yanks at the cuff until Bellamy wraps a hand around his shoulders.
Miller shrugs, but he also takes the sledgehammer and leaves.
Over the radio, Bellamy says to Raven: “So Murphy’s in the City of Light, what do you want to do?”
“Bring him back here,” she says. “But you can’t — you can’t let him know where we are, or where we’re going, or we’ll have A.L.I.E on our doorstep.”
And he wants to ask, he wants to know: but then the pain blossoms up in his chest, and it’s all he can do to stay standing.
—
Murphy’s head drops to his chest at the same time there’s a cut-off yell from Raven over the radio, and he starts speaking again. Bellamy has to bend his knees a little and tilt his head to hear, for the words to make sense: “…when you forget where you are, because you’ve been living, it seems, somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky…”
Weird.
Bellamy takes him out to the Rover. Jasper is there, listening to the music player he has. He takes one earbud out, looks up at them curiously.
Murphy stops behind the Rover, won’t get into the back, even as Bellamy tugs on the cuff still connecting them together. He’s stopped talking by now, looks up at Bellamy with wide eyes. Bellamy scowls, lifts him by the armpits into the Rover and then sets him on one of the seats, then reaches over, unlocks the cuff from his own wrist, threads it through the back of the Rover’s seat and locks it around Murphy’s injured wrist. Murphy gasps, makes a low, distressed noise.
Bellamy looks him over. “You can’t feel pain,” he says, rough.
Murphy’s expression shutters closed, and when he looks up at Bellamy again, he smirks. “There is no pain in the City of Light.”
Bellamy takes a strip of cloth from his bag and ties it around Murphy’s eyes, trying his best to ignore the guilt that has pooled in his chest.
—
Jasper slides in to sit next to Murphy, examines him for several tense seconds, and then shoves both earbuds into Murphy’s ears. Murphy startles and turns his head suddenly, trying to twist out the earbuds: Jasper raises both hands and holds Murphy’s head steady, until he settles. Against Murphy’s ear: “I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere, you get me?”
Murphy takes a deep breath. “Don’t,” he says, with some unknown urgency behind it.
Jasper wraps an arm around Murphy’s shoulders. Bellamy goes to meet Miller, to help carry Harper. He tries to match his breathing to Murphy’s.
A measure of time passes. “The drone,” Murphy says, barely audible, into the silence. “You have to shoot down the drone. It’s following us.”
They’re not moving. Jasper shifts his eyes to the Rover’s window. There’s a flying machine hovering outside: a drone, collecting information, whirring.
They haven’t seen fit to leave him a gun. He can’t afford to wait for anyone to come back.
He takes his arm away from Murphy, moving slowly.
There’s a thick rubber band wrapped around the gearshift of the Rover. There’s a rock that fits perfectly in his palm. He opens the Rover’s skylight, sticks his head out. The drone flies above him, clicking, processing.
He knocks it out of the sky on the first try, and then hops out the back ofthe vehicle, walks over, and smashes the rest of it beneath his boots. When he gets back to the Rover, Murphy is leaning over, spitting blood.
Jasper rubs his back and pretends he doesn’t notice when Murphy’s shoulders shake into crying, or laughter.
When the others return, they blame Jasper for the blood on the floor. It’s not his problem.