we watch as they light up the sky
Arrowsbane
I lost my heart (inside a dream)
The first time John Murphy meets Clarke Griffin, he is four years old, and she is five.
His father holds his hand tightly as they walk slowly down the dull corridor that leads to the school rooms. Today is his first day of school, and he's tucked snugly into his father's side like a limpet, but twice as stubborn. He doesn't want to go, doesn't want to leave his parents behind, but his father has asked him to be brave and so he tilts his chin up and sets his expression firmly in place.
"Here we are," his father says as they reach an open doorway leading to a large room already filled with children his age, and John tightens his grip.
"I have to go now John," his father insists, gently detaching him. John stares balefully up at him.
"It's time for me to go to work." His father repeats, patting him on the head. "I'll be back later." The klaxon for shift-change blares, his father offers him one last smile, and then John is alone by the doorway.
He hovers on the threshold, peering inside, trying to bottle up the courage when he's sent head over heels by a golden blur, and lands flat on his back with something heavy on his belly.
That heavy something turns out to be a girl with a halo of blonde hair and eyes as blue as the sky – or at least the sky he's seen in photos and videos. She babbles out an apology, but he's too dazed to really pay attention. What? He's heard that girls are supposed to be mad, but is it normal for them to hurl themselves bodily at people?
"Clarke," a woman voice reprimands and the girl bolts upright, struggling to detangle herself from him. He's lucky he doesn't wind up being kicked in the kerfuffle.
"I'm sorry," she says once more, smiling widely at him, and then she is gone. Hurried off by her mother to a different classroom.
And just like that, he's hooked.
Unity day comes, and he finds himself tucked into his father's side watching the parade. She's there, the girl with the golden hair. She stands proudly in the centre of the pageant, reciting the traditional words with a surety he wishes he could have. She shines so brightly, like a brilliant supernova packed into the tiny body of a seven-year-old girl.
There's a look in her eyes daring anybody to challenge her, to say that she's messed up or gotten it wrong. She hasn't, but she wears that determined expression anyway, and she looks good while doing it. Like she was born to test and defy every last person she ever meets.
He wonders what she'd do if he ever challenged her.
He wonders what he'd do if she ever challenged him.
But she doesn't even see him in the crowd.
And it will be many years before they even come face-to-face.
He sees her again and again over the years; tiny snatches and glimpses at a time, but he never gets to introduce himself. Not really.
[Sometimes he dreams that he has the courage to talk to her.
Dreams that she might smile and laugh with him.
But then he wakes up, and he remembers that he's too craven to get within five meters of her.]
Slowly but surely, he begins to know her. By the time he's eleven, he knows that she's got a kind heart with a spine of steel. Knows that she's determined to become Chief Medical Officer, but that her one true passion is art. He's stumbled across her more than once, nose pressed to the glass on the viewing desk, hands stained with charcoal and her art-pad spread across her lap.
He thinks that he might even begin to love her (even if he's not really sure what love is just yet), but he knows that he can't ever have her. She's the daughter of Abigail Griffin, and best friend of the Chancellor's son. She'll probably wind up marrying Jaha anyway.
She's always just out of his reach.
When he's thirteen, he gets sick. Really, really sick. A nasty contagion of the flu comes around, and more than a few kids his age have already succumbed to it. He's taken to the quarantine ward of the Med bay and given antibiotics, but the rationing isn't enough.
[Somewhere in his delusional haze, he thinks he sees golden hair and hears a soft voice humming to him, thinks he feels a small hand brushing his hair back and mopping his face with a damp cloth.]
With nothing left to give him, he's moved back into his room at home. It's there that he lies, too weak to even eat solid food. His mother frets, and his father paces, until one day, his dad doesn't come back.
Alex Murphy is floated for stealing medicine for his sick son.
(Why did you leave me?)
The tragic thing is that it wasn't even the right medicine.
John gets lucky. He's a survivor. His immune system fights off the virus, and his body heals. His mind gets stronger with every passing day, but it still feels like a part of him is broken inside, a part of him still longs for his father and cringes with every step he takes.
(A part of him curdles into hate; at the world, at the ark, the council… at himself.)
His mother blames him, and to be honest, he blames him too.
One day, when he's fourteen, he comes home to find his mother unconscious in a pool of her own vomit. He hails the Med bay, but by the time anybody gets there, it's too late.
A month later, he tries to drink the pain away (it didn't work for his mother, but it's better than staring at a wall) and winds up assaulting a guard. It lands him in the Skybox.
When he comes to, the only thing he regrets is that he never got to say hello.
The last time he sees Clarke before they both wind up on the dropship, is after he's been locked in the Skybox.
He's angry and stupid, and been practically slamming himself against the walls – a wild animal in a steel box suspended in the empty void of space. Worse, he's only one out of a hundred and fifty wild animals just like him. If it's not a recipe for disaster, nothing is.
In the end, it's an argument during lunch between two seventeen year olds (and gods, he's only fifteen, but he's already sentenced to the everlasting night that waits just outside an airlock) who are close to their final day on the Ark – tensions are high among the condemned, and they are angry, always angry. Angry and hating, spitting venom from between clenched teeth. He doesn't blame them, not really – he gets caught off guard, and slammed against the wall by accident. It leaves him with a nasty concussion and a fractured wrist.
John wakes up in the Clinic, handcuffed to the bed with a firm hand pushing him back down when he instinctively tries to sit up. The sudden movement makes his head spin and he can't stop himself from letting out a grunt of pain. He screws his eyes shut tight before blinking slowly, trying to adapt to the bright overhead lighting.
He's not expecting to see her there, a soft look in her eyes as she checks over his injured wrist, strapping it tightly with an elastic bandage. He scowls when she shines a tiny penlight in his face, peering at his eyes and absently he wonders if she can see into his soul like in the old stories. She clucks unhappily with whatever it is she finds and tells him to rest, but not to fall asleep before bustling off to consult with an olive-skinned man in scrubs.
[Don't go. He wants to say. Don't leave me. But she's already gone.]
Its weeks later, months even before things change. Night after night, the rubber ball he squirrelled away into his cell bounces off the walls with a quiet, repeated smack. But at least it's not his own head.
His roommate is passed out, snoring away on the bed.
Another week, and his roommate is gone.
Gone, gone, gone... and never coming back.
They fall to Earth in a blaze of fire and heat and sound, land in a smoking crater surrounded by a world greener than anything they've ever seen. John noticed when she appears, when she speaks out against a stranger trying to open the dropship, ever-wary of what they might find and he positions himself behind her right shoulder. Just in case she needs him.
But she doesn't. She's never needed him.
She's never needed anybody.
Clarke stands firm in the face of the tall man with the dark eyes, but she accepts his reasoning – there is only so much oxygen in the dropship after all. The door opens with a groan and suddenly he is blinded by daylight.
When his eyes adjust, it is a forest that lies outside the door, wild and unknown. Fear creeps up inside his chest and he has to tamp down the scream that wants to escape. All he has ever known is the hum of the Ark's life support, and leaving the safety of metal walls behind is fucking terrifying. The others forget their fear in a wave of excitement which carries them off of the ship and into the new world outside.
Clarke on the other hand, goes back into the ship and starts digging through the crates strapped in to the lower level. He watches as she surfaces with a rolled up map and then stubbornly stalks to a break in the trees. Curious, he pads after her, watching as she unrolls the cylinder of paper and scans the horizon.
"You're frowning," he tells her softly, watching the lines in between her eyebrows crease and furrow. She doesn't even so much as twitch.
"Do you see that peak over there?" She asks him, nodding at a mountain in the distance.
"Yeah," he replies, feeling more than a little worried. The elation at being on the ground, breathing fresh air, not dying in a blazing inferno or choking on radiation is rapidly dissipating.
"That's Mount Weather. They dropped us on the wrong damn mountain." She says, and he swears under his breath.
For fucks sake.
Originally posted: March 9th 2016.
Rewritten: January 2nd 2018.