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one - alex murphy
i.
In all of his years, Murphy has never loved anyone more than his father.
This was partially because Alexander Thaddeus Murphy was an especially easy person to love. He loved him wife to the moon and back, and he loved Murphy even farther.
Murphy looked at his father like he hung the stars, and Alex told him that the moon, shining bright and beautiful in the sky, was something he had built for Murphy and God, he believed it.
He believed in Alex without question. He followed him around closely. He told everyone who would listen (mostly Mbege) how he wanted to be just like his dad hen he was older.
It was Alex who told Murphy what love meant. Murphy had caught it as it rolled lazily off of his mother and father's tongues, and so he crawled into his fathers lap and asked "What is lav?" (his pronunciation was a bit off, but the sentiment was there).
Alex only smiled. "Love," he responded carefully, and Murphy tried the word out on his lips correctly. Love. "is when you like someone a lot, Johnny. Like, they're the most important thing in your life."
Murphy's small brain couldn't quite comprehend. "More than cheese?" he asked, pulling the nearest comparison he could. Alex laughed, rich and deep, and Murphy wrinkled his nose at the thought that he had been wrong.
"Yea, more than cheese, Johnny," Alex replied, and Murphy nodded thoughtfully. Liking someone more than cheese? Seemed a bit extreme. But then he looked up at his dad's smiling face, the slight snaggle in the man's front two teeth, and he understood.
"I love you, Dad," he informed him, as if it was obvious, and Alex's smile was far better than cheese.
ii.
The last time Murphy heard his father say "I love you", he was fifteen. He was healthy, sort of, the illness that had crippled him for nearly a month clearing a little. His father was behind the thick plastic of the floating chamber, and his hand was pressed up against it.
Murphy knew what his father was being floated for. He remembers, through his sickly, delusional state, Alex brushing his hair back, whispering how much he loves him, more than cheese, more than anything, as he fed him medicine that he wasn't supposed to have, though Murphy hardly knew that at the time.
Murphy's mother clutched her son tightly, snot running down her chin and into Murphy's hair, but Alex was dry-eyed behind the plastic wall. His eyes were sad, but there was pride there too. He didn't regret what he had done for his son, his Johnny. Love, Murphy realized, was stronger than fear, stronger than death.
"I love you, baby," Alex told Murphy's mother, and she removed one arm from her son to pound it on the glass, her sobs heartbreaking and deafening in the observation area.
"I love you, John," Alex promised Murphy, and Murphy could feel the tears welling up. Murphy knew that boys weren't supposed to cry, but he didn't think Alex would mind too much, and his mother would hardly notice.
Before Murphy could respond, the guard pulled the lever, shooting Alex Murphy into space, flying away until he was a lonely speck, somewhere far in the galaxy, a speck who couldn't possibly have a widow and a son who would never recover.
"I love you too, Dad," he told the empty chamber.
(Later, Murphy would look back on this moment as the moment it all started going wrong. But in the moment, all he noticed was the gaping hole carved into his chest.)
two - his mother
i.
Sometimes, Murphy forgets that he had a mother, before the alcohol drained it out of her.
Her hair was always pinned up, and her eyes sparkled when she danced with his father in the dim lighting of their living space like they did in the movies. Her laugh sounded like pots banging together, in a way that was both deafening and beautiful. She smelled like disinfectant and, faintly, of thyme.
When he came home on the second week of kindergarten with a note pinned to his shirt, telling his parents that his teachers suspected him to be dyslexic and that maybe school wasn't the best course of action, he saw a righteous fire light itself in her eyes. She read with him every night, encouraging him to try out every word, kissing his head when he read entire sentences by himself.
"I love you, mama," he told her every day. every night. He whispered it when she hugged him as he went off to the school that they, together, had earned his place in.
"I love you too, Johnny," she responded, like a promise, every day until he was too old to be read to at night.
ii.
After his father died, his mother was never the same. Her promises of "I love you" became few and far between. More often, she sent her love in flurries of drunken, heartbroken punches and kicks, leaving him searching for it in the bottoms of her whiskey bottles and in the bruising of his own delicate, pale skin. And Murphy, he just took it. When he looked at his mother, in her drunken rage, beneath the desperation and hatred, he saw the woman with the pot-banging laugh, the sparkling eyes, the mother who read to him every night and he knows. He knows this is his fault. He knows he did this to her. So he just takes it.
"I love you," he promises as her feet connect with his stomach one, two, three times.
"I love you," he pleads as she breaks his nose, and it tastes like fear on his tongue.
"I love you," he repeats through every hit, punch, scratch and every scathing insult. He says it as everything she used to be disappears, as it stops being true.
"I love you," he promises, sobbing, holding her thoughtless head in his lap as she chokes and drowns in her own vomit. She smells like moonshine and stomach acid, and he runs his hands through her hair that she used to pin up so delicately. Her harsh snarl of"I loved your father, you bastard. I loved him, and you, and you fucking killed him!" reverberates through his skull, but all that comes out of his mouth is "I love you, I love you, I love you."
(As he watched the guard's chamber go up in flame, he could almost smell disinfectant and thyme. It smelled like redemption.)
three - mbege
i.
Back when they were young, Mbege spoke Murphy's name as if it were a single word, "Johnmurphy".
Whenever Murphy hauled the older boy around by his slim wrists, it was "Slow down, Johnmurphy" and "You're hurting me, Johnmurphy".
When they played together, foolish little hands fumbling on chess pieces and bouncy balls under harsh fluorescent lights, it was "What do you wanna do, Johnmurphy?" and "Stop cheating, Johnmurphy".
When Murphy showed up with his cheeks and arms bruised from the older kids who picked on him, Mbege would square up to his full height, and ask "Who did this, Johnmurphy?" in a voice like a thunderclap, and return later in the day with bloodied knuckles and fire in his eyes. Mbege was only a year older than Murphy, but he protected him like a baby, and Murphy loved him for it.
When he was 15, Murphy got sick, and Mbege visited him daily. He visited him when he was admitted into the Ark's medical station, when he got worse, when (unbeknownst to either of the teenagers) Murphy's father was out stealing illegal extra quantities of medicine to heal him. Murphy could barely see, vision blurred and doubled, his throat raspy and painful, but he curled into his best friend's embrace.
"I'm so scared," he managed to whisper, his voice a gravel path. Mbege hushed him, running lithe fingers through Murphy's hair where it wasn't plastered to his forehead with sweat. It was revolting, but the sweat seemed to be the only thing keeping him from drying up.
"I love you, Mbege," he rasped out, throat screaming from the agonizing effort of each syllable.
Murphy could barely see, but even he noticed the tears rolling down the darker boy's face.
"I love you too, Johnmurphy," he promised, his voice so sorrowful and sincere that it destroyed Murphy entirely.
ii.
When Mbege left Murphy, alone in the woods, as he followed Bellamy back to camp, Murphy thought it was the worst he'd ever felt. He didn't blame him; after all, he could never blame Mbege for anything. Murphy and Mbege loved each other more than nearly anything, but they were survivors above that. They'd held eye contact for a second before he left and Murphy knew that one word from him and Mbege would stay.
He knew he couldn't do that. He wanted Mbege with him always. He would never be in love with Mbege, but he would always love him. But more than he wanted Mbege to stay, he wanted him to be safe. To be alive. He knew that if he let Mbege go with Bellamy, he would be safe. So he let him go.
It was one of the first truly selfless things John Murphy had ever done. And letting him go, he thought it would be the most painful thing he could imagine. Mbege wasn't truly gone, but Murphy had lost him. And that hurt like hell. He didn't think it could get worse.
When Murphy got back to camp, bloodied, tortured, and barely holding on, one of he first real things he asked was where he could find Mbege. It was Bellamy who told him, something that (on anyone else) could have been genuine sorrow in his eyes, that Mbege had gone where none of them could ever reach him. He had been snatched by a grounder in a tree, his throat slashed, body discarded like a rag doll.
Murphy cried himself to sleep that night, his tortured body the least painful thing about him.
A day later, after killing Connor but before trying to hang Bellamy, he stumbled out to the grave where they buried the last living person who cared about him. He almost hoped that when he got there, he would see Mbege, that it would all be a lie, but it wasn't. It was a fresh grave, six feet of dirt covering all six-foot two of a boy with eyes that had filled with fire and joy in their own just intervals.
Murphy collapse onto the ground, sobs shaking him, his tears making a track through the blood on his face.
"I love you," he whispered to the grave, like an apology, like a desperate plea.
The tearstained soil did not respond.
(Murphy will never stop wondering if Mbege would still be alive if he hadn't let him go.)
four - emori
i.
Murphy loved Emori for everything he was not.
They weren't that different, not really. They were both pariahs. Both survivors (no, not like Mbege, he tries to convince himself). Both were bitter.
But Murphy was broken. He was destroyed. He was a boy broken by cage after cage after cage.
Emori was free in a way Murphy could never be. Her pariah status had saved her, somehow. She could be whoever she wanted to be, do whatever she wanted to do. She had been anywhere and everywhere. She brought out a part of Murphy that he thought no longer existed. When he smiled with her, it wasn't bitter smirks. When he laughed with her, it wasn't angry, or sarcastic. She made him happy, made him genuine.
If he could pinpoint the moment he knew he loved her, it was after they started thieving in the woods, but before he was captured and sent to Polis. It was caught between dirty kisses and endless profits. Their love lived up in the trees, with the birds and the bees and see? Emori made him love like poetry. She made him live like one of the bioluminscent butterflies they'd seen in a clearing on time. Glowing. Happy. Free.
Once, Murphy found a cerulean cloth strung up in a tree. It was a little torn, a little dirty, but it was beautiful. He jumped like a rabbit until he snagged it between his third and fourth finger.
When he presented it to Emori later, he was hesitant. He fumbled over his words, trying to explain that he didn't mind one way or the other if she covered her hand, but he thought she liked to, so he thought she might like it and he's sorry this is stupid he-
She cut him off with a kiss, and when they pulled back her eyes were like supernovas.
"I love you, John," she choked out, gripping the cloth tight in one hand, her deformed one wrapping around his.
The simple statement somehow floored him. "I-I love you too," he responded, and the freedom in those words felt like the most natural thing in the world.
ii.
Emori had always been a wild soul; Murphy had loved her for it. She was a girl made of wilderness, made from endless sand expanses and boat trips going anywhere. Murphy has spent so much time in a cage that her sort of endlessness and freedom touched the deepest parts of him.
When they launched into space, Murphy should have known that it was the beginning of the end. The ring wasn't exactly small, but it wasn't endless. It wasn't limitless. Emori was a wild soul, a girl made of wilderness. She was not used to being confined like this. The Arc was hardly a cage, but for a girl who had never been limited, it was maddening.
"I can't do this, John," she told him one night. They're living together in Murphy's old apartment. It had barely been three months. She should really try being up here for sixteen years, he thinks, but holds his tongue.
"I love you," he reminds her. His voice is hollow, tired. He wants to get on his knees, plead her to stay, but to him, this is an old song.
She leans down, kissing him gently. He tries to convince himself that it doesn't feel like goodbye.
"I love you too, John," she swears, running her hands through hair that is much too long, "but that isn't enough."
When he wakes the next morning, she is not lying next to him. In the distance, someone is calling his name.
He runs toward the cries, pushes past Monty, Raven, Bellamy, through every person on the arc except one, and finds himself in front of the floating chamber, the doors on the other side wide open. By his feet is a blue cloth. It's shabby, almost ugly. A dumb piece of fabric that some naïve boy must have found in the woods, and saved for a girl he didn't think he could live without, to wrap up a poor, mutated limb. Somewhere, in the back of his brain, he wondered if she felt freer without it.
Someone is screaming. It's him. He didn't even think he could scream anymore, his voice to broken and raw from screaming his way through torture, but a rough, horrible sound spills past his lips. Someone is holding him, but both of their hands are the same, and it's not right. It's not.
He was supposed to be a heartless psychopath, he wasn't supposed to be broken like this.
If you love her, let her go, someone had told Murphy a long time ago. He doesn't think this is what they meant.
(It seemed fitting, somehow, that the place Emori could go that Murphy could never follow would be the greatest expanse of all time. He tried not to think of his father, his mother's drunken corpse, out there somewhere with her. Free at last.)
+ one - bellamy
i.
Murphy doesn't know when he first knew he loved Bellamy.
He thought he loved Bellamy when the dropship landed. He'd followed him like a puppy, obeying his every command, taking his every statement to heart. He thought it was heartbreak that he felt with every girl who came stumbling out of his tent.
He thought he loved Bellamy when he watched the older boy wrap a seatbelt noose around his own neck. Revenge felt more like adoration to a boy who was made of bitterness.
He thought he loved Bellamy when he fought him outside the dropship, Raven screaming in the background as Kane comes hurtling to break up the fistfight. He thinks the blood dripping down his lips tastes like affection.
He thought he loved Bellamy on the elevator ride, when Bellamy killed the grounder attacking him. Emori had adapted him, slowly, to kindness, and so he assumed that was all there was to love.
All those times, he had been wrong. He knew he loved Bellamy up on the Ark. He loved him when he held him as he cried for his girlfriend who would never come home, when he told him about Polis. He loved Bellamy's broken pieces, the flaws in design that Murphy had never believed he'd had before.
Bellamy, Murphy found, was unpredictable. His father had been flawless. His mother had been passionate. Mbege had been his protector. Emori had been his freedom.
He loved Bellamy like a rainstorm. Bellamy was his past, his anger and pain. Bellamy was his present, bitter but surviving. Bellamy was his future. Bellamy was scarred, and broken. He would never be happy. He was like Murphy in a way that Emori and Mbege had never been. He was always flitting into Murphy's life story somehow, in a way his parents never would.
Murphy loved Bellamy. More than cheese. More than freedom. More than redemption. More than surviving. But every time his lips moved to say it, his tongue tied. All he could thin abut was the people he'd told before that he'd loved them. He thought of his father's floating, his mother's vomit, Mbege's grave, Emori's... suicide.
Correlation is not causation. He knows that. But somehow, "I love you" still clings to the back of his throat, never coming out of his mouth.
ii.
Even if he can't say it, he tries to prove his love endlessly.
He hopes Bellamy can hear "I love you" every time Murphy tells him that he looks, like, really good in that shirt.
He hopes Bellamy can feel "I love you" when Murphy presses his lips to every inch of exposed skin, when he intertwines their fingers in front of all their friends.
He hopes Bellamy knows that Murphy isn't stumbling and stuttering his way through mythology textbooks for the love of reading.
He hopes Bellamy knows that the crushed look on Murphy's face whenever he says he loves Clarke means he loves him. He knows Clarke may always come first, but he hopes Bellamy knows Murphy loves him enough to ignore that.
He does everything he can, breaks all of his unspoken rules, depletes all his energy, trying to prove how much he loves Bellamy.
"I love you, Murphy," the older boy sighs against his hair. Murphy tenses, kisses him with the intensity of a forest fire. He hopes Bellamy understands.
iii.
After the first year on the ring, Murphy brings Bellamy to room 243. Where he had lived as a kid. Where he lived with Emori.
Bellamy had already told him about his mom, about not knowing his dad, about Octavia. He'd never asked for much (read: anything) in return, but Murphy felt like he owed him anymore.
Murphy tells Bellamy, through his tears, about his mother's laugh. About his father's smile. About Mbege's split knuckles. He told him about the time, when he was little, when he and Mbege had lost his dad's wedding ring, and when they had found it. He told him about school. About getting sick. He told him about the alcohol. He told him about the grounder torture. About Emori. About the bunker. He told him everything.
Bellamy just wrapped his in strong, muscular arms, in the middle of the floor where his parents used to dance, pretending not to notice as Murphy's tears and snot ruined the shirt that, dammit, looked so good on him.
"I-I-I lov-" Murphy stumbled over the simple sentence. He was trying. For Bellamy. Bellamy was a dumb sop.
Bellamy kissed the top of his head. "Ssssh, it's okay. You don't have to. I understand."
Fuck, Murphy had never felt this before. His heart was glowing. It was warm. It was racing.
"I l-love you," He choked out, burying himself into Bellamy's chest, and the older boy crushed him impossibly closer.
"I love you too, Murphy," he replied, quietly, like a secret, caught between the two of them.
And... nothing happened. The world didn't end. Bellamy didn't fall dead at his feet. His heart didn't break. And he loved him, he loved him, he loved him.
(Murphy loved him. He did.)