all of the nutrients you'll need with none of the taste
Moss and Prosper return to Luna’s cave late that afternoon, bringing back enough fresh food for all of them: berries, a whole dead panther, herbs and plants for Luna. Wanheda follows them in, and Luna lets her through. She has a gift: a wrapped carving of a cat. He can’t imagine that she actually brought it for him; in awkward Trigedasleng, she apologizes several times.
Murphy is kept prisoner in one of the far caverns of the cave. Ryfe tries to explain to him that Murphy isn’t really Murphy now or whatever, but Moss gets it. Murphy is a wily and escapable criminal, and he is a useful tool to the Coalition. But he has decided to stay! They should stop.
Nobody listens to him, though. His voice is small and gets drowned easily, in the noise of other people.
Also, Murphy probably never explained to them that he has decided to stay. He was very grumpy about the whole affair when Moss had last asked.
Anyhow, Murphy requires a guard with him at all times. They are almost finished putting away the panther when the watch changes and Prosper asks him if he would like the next shift. He would!
The last time he had seen Murphy was in Polis, a week ago. Maybe two weeks. It seems far away now, but it must have been recently: he had been showing Murphy how to fletch arrows, using hawk feathers to ensure a true aim. Murphy’s hands had been unsteady, but persistent until Ryfe had called him back to the barracks to train. And then Murphy had left, on another mission, with another debt, and Moss had heard no more of it until Prosper had bundled him along to the dropship, in the loud self-moving cart, and then there was a cave and a quest and now here they are.
Murphy is sitting against the wall, his knees pulled to his chest, when Moss comes in. He relieves Miller from his post, and Miller looks him up and down with raised eyebrows but leaves. Doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t need to. Moss knows that others often take the full measure of him in, and find him lacking. Lexa says that that is his strength: to look weak when he is strong. He doesn’t feel very strong.
“Heyo, lukotwar,” Moss greets Murphy, and then regrets his use of a title over his name. He searches for some kind of comfort in his pockets. He has not brought anything but the wrapped cat Wanheda had given to him. He pulls it out, unwraps it, and then scooches the cat towards Murphy. “Mraow,” he says as the cat, imitating the yowly plea of his own cat at home, before the Ice King came.
Murphy glances down at the cat dismissively. “Sha,” he says. “Chit, Moss.” Yeah, whatever, Moss.
“Yu hon in beda!” he half-yelps without thinking, too excited to restrain himself. You’re getting better! Maybe Ryfe had finally found an effective method, or there had been nothing better for him to do, down here in the darkness.
“Sha,” says Murphy, and then he does look at Moss, and his eyes glitter with something unpleasant, something not-Murphy. Moss tries to brush it off as superstition, but: sometimes a man will be on a long fishing trip, alone, and he and his boat will wash up to the shore separately, and the man will speak like the ocean; hissing syllables and all soft shhhhh’s, and he will talk about things he was not there for, about things he should not know. “Sha,” Murphy says again, in that cadence that Moss doesn’t like. “Fakte mi get in Trigedasleng tutaj tempo, ba ai ne gaf in al chit al la absolutaj plej malbona natblida.” What. “Yu estas oni mokskwoma, Moss, kqj yu estas plej malbona ĉe ĉe batalado.” He wouldn’t —
When a man washes up on the shore, talking about things he shouldn’t know, things he shouldn’t say, they will set him on a raft made out of sticks and float him out to sea. If he comes back again, they cut him open from throat to gut and leave him for the gulls.
“Yu estas fisako en la okuloj de via frato,” Murphy finishes, and there’s this sick grin on his face, and Moss remembers cutting the man open, his guts slimy and coagulating, still speaking, impossibly, through ruined mouth, teeth stained, remembers Prosper’s hand on his shoulder, his face wet. “Yu noun em okuloj,” he snarls. You know I’m right. But he’s not, and it doesn’t matter, because this isn’t Murphy, but it isn’t not Murphy either — his voice, speaking something Moss can understand, has said only to himself: you’re soft and useless. You’re a failure to your brother.
He wraps the cat up again, seeking anything to do with his hands. He hurts, and Murphy hasn’t even touched him.
I have always spoken Trigedasleng, I just never wanted to talk to someone as awful as you before.
Raven is speaking into a box, the next room over. “Look,” she says, her voice tinny and far away. “Can you send someone else over? Murphy made Moss cry, and it’s fucking pathetic.”
—
Bellamy comes to pick up Moss, and then there’s nobody but him and Raven for a while, and he feels tired and kind of bitter, and he lays down, unwrapping himself from his knees. He wanders the City of Light again, but it’s like Emori doesn’t seem real to him anymore, and Mbege, who has been around on the edges, in crowds, like he can’t stay for long, keeps appearing with his throat cut and he won’t respond when Murphy calls out. He tastes blood in the back of his mouth. It’s not satisfying.
You’ve been living here, in the silence of the night sky
He doesn’t want that. It isn’t helping anymore.
He stands up and paces the room for awhile. The door to Raven’s office is closed now, and no matter how much he rattles the doorknob, it doesn’t open.
Bellamy comes in after that. Murphy says: “You were going to torture me.”
Bellamy shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
Murphy can’t decide if he sounds insincere. He doesn’t want anything from Bellamy.
Not that the image is false, but that the relation is false
He wants everything from Bellamy. He wants the warmth of Bellamy against his skin, his voice, his —
“You need me to cuff you again, Murphy?” Bellamy is asking.
“Nah,” says Murphy. “I’m good.” Bellamy’s fingers over his wrist, brief warmth, circled thumb to forefinger, cold metal — It’s not a bad memory, but it’s not a good one either, and A.L.I.E’s not sure what to do with it. He holds on.
“Okay,” says Bellamy. “Stay on that side though, yeah?” He points, to the far wall, away from Raven’s door. He obeys, meandering his way back, sits down cross-legged. Bellamy ducks out again, leaves the door open. Murphy stays where he is.
Bellamy brings in a chair. Wooden, with a back, no arms. A well-made red cushion on top of it. And then: Clarke follows him, and —
She is holding the Flamekeeper’s journal. The heavy, leatherbound notebook: what Titus had promised to him, before, if he ever stopped fucking up. He wants it. He doesn’t move. He wants it. “You gonna be okay?” Bellamy asks Clarke, as she sets her bag across the chair and sits down.
“I can handle myself, yes,” Clarke says, stiff.
Bellamy lets his eyes drift to Murphy. Murphy nods back at him. Bellamy ignores that. “You have the shocklash if you need it,” he tells her.
“Yes,” she confirms. She opens the book.
Their whole. Thing. That’s kind of interesting.
Bellamy leaves again, shuts the door behind him. The book is on her lap. He can’t stop thinking about the book. The journal. Whatever.
The door opens one last time. Prosper comes in, sets down a plate of food in front of him. Won’t look him in the eye. Leaves. Clarke isn't paying any attention to him either.
Murphy looks down at the food on the plate. Gathered berries, panther meat, something packaged that’s probably from Ark rations or rations from — the bunker? The cave system? Something that was made a long time ago but is probably still good for eating. He starts in on the berries. They taste like nothing. All he registers as he swallows them is that they’re not poisonous.
<Talk to her.>
Can do. “So you got locked up because of a crime you might have committed, right? That’s kind of hardcore, Clarke.”
Clarke won’t really acknowledge him. “Not really,” she allows.
“You think you’re not a real criminal?” he tries.
She doesn’t respond.
“You’re just like us, Clarke, even though you keep trying to escape it all the time. You’re just as low as the rest of us.”
“Eat your food and shut up, Murphy,” she says with no real heat. He goes back to the berries. He doesn’t feel hungry and they’re no more appealing than they were before.
<Try something different.>
He starts pulling apart the meat with his fingers so it looks like he’s doing something. “Anyhow,” he says. “You got kept in solitary all the time, right? No yard time or anything. We never saw you. Did you even get work to do?”
“Yeah,” she says, sounding affronted, maybe? “I sorted through fabric.”
“Easy,” he scoffs, and then reigns his scorn in. It’s not useful right now. “You ever act out or anything? You drew stuff on the walls, right? We all got shuffled through different cells that one time, and I saw them. Fucking beautiful.” He’s not even lying.
“Where is this going, Murphy,” Clarke is saying, but she’s paying more attention to him now.
“Anyhow. You were already in solitary, right, so what did they do to punish you?”
There’s a long pause, and it looks like she’s not going to answer, until — “They fed me Nutraloaf.”
Yeah. Nutraloaf. That’s the memory. Pasty brown bread, made up of the previous day’s meals all in the same bowl, shoved through a blender, and then sliced for optimal convenience. “Exactly,” he’s still saying. “You remember what Nutraloaf is?”
In a half sing-song, Clarke obliges him: “All the nutrients you’ll need with none of the taste!”
He lets her have half of a quiet laugh. “Right,” he says finally. “That’s what everything tastes like to me.”
<She’s listening to you now. Make her remember what she did to you.>
Yeah. Yeah. “You want to know what actually happened between me and Ontari?” It won’t hurt to tell it, he’s so numb to it now. He can’t feel anything: the sensation of pain isn’t even a memory, it’s just this deadening nothing in the back of his brain.
And. After he had gotten back, as Clarke pressed an icepack to her rapidly swelling eye, she had said, you can tell me. You can tell me what happened.
And he had handed her the broken necklace and said, you can’t fix this, because symbolism or whatever, Mbege would have known. And then: fuck off, Clarke, it’s over, don’t talk to me. And then there was Ryfe, and she hadn’t approached him again about it.
But she doesn’t have his best interests at heart here. She just wanted to know, for the sake of knowing. So she could use it against him in the future. So she could have it.
And he doesn’t care anymore, and he wants to hurt her, and she’s hungry for it, so yeah. He’ll give her what she fucking wants.
He shoves away the plate of food. “We were going to take over the world together,” he says. “Me and her. Make everyone who had ever hurt us, make them pay.” Pauses, considers. “And like, it’s not the same as it was before,” ages ago, now, “it’s not the same, imagining them dead. But with her, it was almost good again. It was really nice.” And then, calculated: a slow roll of his shoulders. “And then she went into the tower — into Polis — and she killed six children, the Nightbloods, and she tied me to the bed and she —“ <Cut yourself off. Breathe, let it out, stay shaky.> “I don’t know why I expected anything different. I don’t know why I thought she would —“ <Stop. Slow your breathing down.Calm.>
His throat kind of hurts. <There is no pain in the City of Light.> His throat doesn’t hurt. <Calm. Even. Cool.> He’s got a lot of practice at that. “She used her knife.” <Steady.> His throat feels kind of. Heavy. “She used her knife and she used me. My body was her tool and I liked it. I got off on it.” Whatever whatever whatever. “Her hands on my shoulders, in the Commander’s bed —“ Clarke makes a noise. He stops. He waits.
She won’t say anything.
<Keep talking.>
“And I went back to her. I went back to her and I took off my shirt, like this time would be better, like —“ <Come on, John.> “I thought if I was —“ <Steady. Keep talking. She’s paying attention to you.> “I thought that if I was pliant, it wouldn’t hurt. I thought that if I submitted, she would go easy on me.”
<Laugh.>
It’s dragged out of him, like a scream. “And I was wrong. Obviously.” Another slow roll of the shoulders. It’s almost easy. “I just.” <Murphy. Murphy.> “I never had to participate in my own torture before. I never had to pretend to like it.” The book in Clarke’s lap is slipping now. She’s visibly reacting: her breathing is harsher, her face flushed. He leans forward a fraction —
<The Flamekeeper’s journal. Let me see it.>
Easier said than done, A.L.I.E.
He lunges for it. Clarke reacts — his hand on the spine, leather to fingertips, but she has the shocklash and she gets him in the shoulder, pain arcs across his chest, his collarbone <THERE IS NO PAIN IN THE CITY OF LIGHT> he sprawls backwards, without the book. Hurts. Doesn’t hurt. Just winded.
He lies back and stares at the ceiling. “I would have let her keep doing it,” he tells the ceiling. “But she fastened this heavy iron collar around my neck, and she took me out to the throne room, and I shot Roan for her, and she tugged on the chain.” Hurts. Hurts. Hurts. “And it was never going to be okay. So I turned and I shot her too. That’s all.”
Clarke tucks the journal away.
It wasn’t even worth it.
He thinks about it, the leatherbound volume of secrets left to him by Titus. Tastes the blood in his mouth again, as he says: “You should give that book to Raven. And keep it away from me.”