you could do damage
“Lukotwar,” Emori hisses, and she lets go of him.
He is incoherent. He is not alive. He is still in the City of Light. He is asleep. He kissed her. Where’s his gun? He still has his knives, right — no, those were taken from him a long time ago. Bellamy has stepped toward him now, concerned, confused. Good. He touches Bellamy’s waist, searching for his gun, but — he’s not wearing it. “Your gun,” he says aloud. “Where is it?”
“I’m not carrying it,” says Bellamy, and he takes hold of Murphy’s wrists, keeping them in place. “What are you doing?”
Murphy yanks at his wrists. Bellamy keeps them there. “This isn’t real,” he says. “Emori’s dead, she was in the City of Light, something went wrong —“
“John,” says Emori, and her voice is exactly the same, “You’re not in the City of Light anymore. But this isn’t over. You have to finish this.”
“What,” he says aloud, but she’s gone, and it’s like he dreamed her —
“What was that?” asks Bellamy, a distant rumble. “How do you know Luna?”
“What the fuck,” says Murphy out loud. “Just — don’t.”
“Murphy, I’m trying to —“
“Yeah,” says Murphy, distracted. “Let me go, I have to talk to Raven.” Bellamy stares at him, and Murphy tugs his hands out of Bellamy’s grip. Stalks the few paces over to Raven, and she turns, and he raises his hands to ward her off. “Don’t touch me,” he says, rough.
“What?” says Raven.
“The chips,” he says. “They’re still in us. If we touch, they’re going to be reactivated. Static, or whatever.”
“Right,” Raven says, and she nods. “Guess kissing is out of the question, then.”
He frowns. “They can be cut out of us,” he says. “I can show Clarke how to do it on me, and then I can do it to you.”
Raven nods, business. “Okay,” she says. “Then I want you to go back into the City,” holding out a chip, and he feels the blood drain out of his face and takes a step back. “Look,” she says. “I built this chip from the ground up so that there’s no connection to A.L.I.E, just the server.”
“What,” he says, because, what. “I can’t kill her if she’s not there,” he says, like he still has any interest in this at all.
“Look,” she says, and her voice softens. “A.L.I.E’s just a distractions. You have to get into the Citadel. I think that’s where she keeps all her stuff. She doesn’t want you to get in there — I think it contains, like, a kill code. Or, I don’t know. Secrets.”
“Okay,” he says, hesitant. “I need to get this to the Commander,” he says.
“What?” goes Raven, instantly suspicious. “Why?”
“She’s the Flame,” he says, not really understanding himself, but A.L.I.E thought it was important. “She’s like, the next version of A.L.I.E, and A.L.I.E wants to destroy her, and I think we have to go in together. To end this.” Things had seemed — clearer, before, after he had woken up. They’re getting fuzzy again, but the real world is getting sharper. Everything still feels dreamlike. “It’s important,” he says, and knows he sounds dumb.
“Okay,” says Raven, and she’s kind of looking at him with concern.
“Is Bellamy really that bad at sex,” he adds, dropping his voice.
Raven laughs loud enough that several other people look over in concern. As soon as she can take a breath, she says: “Don’t judge him too harshly. It was probably his first time. Didn’t get a lot of practice, I imagine.”
“Christ,” says Murphy, and Raven laughs again.
—
Bryan looks him over before he lets Clarke cut into him. Bryan makes him a sling for his wrist, tells him to quit moving it. It makes him feel anxious, on edge; even here, among friends. In a way, it makes him more helpless than handcuffs — handcuffs mean, you are dangerous, you could do damage. The sling means he has been damaged, and is healing; vulnerable.
Jasper is nowhere to be found: Ryfe is gone. Bellamy lurks in the corner of the room, probably trying to look protective. “You have burns,” says Bryan aloud, and the unspoken question: how.
“Jasper,” he says, and there’s a sharp intake of breath from Bryan. “Shocklash.”
“Why —“ Bryan goes, and Murphy is sort of dully surprised that anyone would ever come to his defense. Then again, it’s Bryan — he’s a sweetheart. He doesn’t finish his sentence, so Murphy pretends it wasn’t a question, that he doesn’t have to clarify.
“I need to take a horse to the Commander,” Murphy says around him, instead. “When can I leave?”
“Not good weather for horseback, Murphy,” says Bellamy from the corner, low. “Why don’t you take the Rover?”
Because he can’t drive the Rover, obviously. “Whatever,” he says.
“You can’t drive the Rover,” says Bryan to him, which, thanks. “You can’t use your arm.” Right, the sling. “Take Bellamy with you.”
—
Ryfe isn’t there to ask him: why did you choose Clarke for this, you don’t like her and you don’t trust her? So he does it for himself. The answer is that he has seen the inner workings of the Flame, he has been A.L.I.E and he knows how to remove her from his blood. And Clarke is the most intimately familiar with the Commander, so she knows where her infinity symbol lives, where she keeps her Flame. So he sips at a mug of hot cocoa at a table and Bellamy sits in silence across from him and Clarke prepares her surgical tools.
Clarke approaches him from behind, and he tenses all over. “Lean forward,” she says, and he pushes aside the hot cocoa and leans forward, and he reaches his hand out, empty — Bellamy takes hold of it. Murphy glances to him, sideways. Bellamy gives a twitch of a smile. Murphy just stares back, but he’s grateful for the hand-holding.
She starts cutting into him. “Christ,” he says, because ow, but fortunately she doesn’t stop. Something wet drips down the back of his shirt.
“That’s gross,” he hears Clarke say, and she wipes something away from his skin.
“What is it, lemme see,” he says, and Clarke hands him the rag, filled with his blood and silver liquid. “Gross,” he agrees, and then pulls over his mug of hot cocoa and vomits into it.
Bellamy lets go of his hand and takes the mug away. He sets his face down on the surface of the table. “Ugh,” he says. He thinks of the unpleasant things he still has to do, and how much he would like to take a nap instead.