Miss Me Princess?

Chapter Four

[1x10 – 'I Am Become Death']

"What do we do?" Finn asked frantically, looking at Clarke with a wide eyed desperation that had Murphy fisting handfuls of his blanket in anger. Finn wasn't the one with blood dripping out of his eyes. Clarke and he were the ones exhibiting the exact same symptoms as the guy who just dropped dead in front of them. So why was Finn the one getting hysterical? Couldn't he see the fear in her eyes?

It took Clarke a few minutes to gather herself, but then she swallowed, took a deep breath and a shutter came down, sealing her emotions back inside behind hard blue eyes.

"Quarantine." Clarke instructed Finn and Bellamy as she stood to face them. "Round up anyone who had contact with Murphy. Bring them here." They nodded.

"And everyone they had contact with?" Bellamy asked. Clarke's eyes flickered.

"Well we have to start somewhere." She snapped with the slightest flash of irritation. She turned to the barely conscious figure curled up on the cot next to Derek's, "Conor who was with you when you found Murphy?" Clarke asked, "Who carried him in? Think!" His unfocused eyes rolled from the slumped body of his friend up to the faces of Clarke, Bellamy and Finn standing over him.

"The first one there was Octavia." He rasped, his eye lids heavy and his breathing shallow. Bellamy jerked, his body stiffening. He didn't wait for any further conversation. At the mention if his sisters name his eyes went wide, snapping up to look at Clarke before he spun and rushed out of the dropship. With a searching look at Clarke, Finn silently followed him out a minute later. Clarke watched them leave, remaining in place for several long seconds, waiting. She slowly - steadily - counted down from ten in her head before allowing herself to loosen her grip on the leash she held on her emotions. Freeing her sadness and releasing her fear Clarke allowed the weighed of her responsibility to overwhelm her, and fell to her knees beside Derek's lifeless body with an anguished sob.


Murphy and Clarke sat together on his cot, cocooned in a still silence. It was a jaded miserable silence, but companionable unlike the loneliness Clarke often dreaded. Together they each wallowed in their fears, whilst savouring the brief calm stillness that had settled over the dropship, knowing that the illusion of peace was about to be shattered at any moment when others would start to arrive. Finn had thought to cover Derek's body with a blanket before he left, but they both sat staring at it now, unable to ignore it. Blanket or not, Clarke and Murphy were both transfixed by the dead body with some kind of petrified revulsion. Derek had gotten sick and now he was dead. They were both sick…

"I'm scared." Her whispered confession felt too loud in the hush that had descended around them.

"Me too." He murmured back. Clarke exhaled a long slow breath.

"I don't have time to be scared. They'll be back soon with others. I don't have time to be sick either. There's too much to do." She didn't sound bitter, Murphy noted, just exhausted. Clarke was the first to move, tearing her gaze away from Derek's body and turning instead to look at the man beside her. While Murphy's skin was naturally pale as marble, Clarke noticed that the sickness gave it a sickly grey hue, while faint smudges of blood cast purple-brown shadows under his nose and around his eyes. Most of the swelling from his beating by the grounders had gone down but a rich pallet of bright purple and deep blue bruises blanketed the majority of his arms and torso, and bordered his grey eyes. Clarkes looked at the sharp blood-red lines that cut across his face in angry slashes and darker coloured scrapes and grazes. She knew they continued down his torso and along his arms, her stomach rolled with yet another wave of – guilt, sympathy, disgust, anger...? So many emotions connected to this face, the face of a man who she realised she didn't even truly know. A thin sheen of sweat bordered his hair line and dipped down his neck, and his hair was still all slicked back from his face from the strokes of her wet cloths. He looked ill – she noted - he looked tired, beaten and underfed, but she didn't think he looked like he was about to convulse on the floor and die. Did he? Clarke frowned.

"You should be resting." She said. He slid his gaze over to her, she saw the last traces of his fear as he turned away from Derek's body before his eyes focused on her. Murphy mirrored her frown.

"So should you." he shot back, taking her by surprise. Clarke raised an eyebrow, her mouth quirking at the corner. "What?" he continued, his tone losing the heavy weight of their serious conversation and turning petulant, verging on grumpy, "You can tell me what to do but I can't tell you what to do?" he asked, "That's hardly democratic." He was teasing her, she realised, deflecting both of their attentions from their worries and distracting them from their symptoms. She wasn't sure if he was doing it on purpose or not - if he was deliberately trying to shake off the sombre atmosphere that had been shrouding them or if it was an unconscious act, like the trademark of many snarky skybox kids who defensively deflect any kind of emotional weakness with insults or humour, or violence - but either way his deflection worked, pulling a genuine, if slightly weak smile from her.

Murphy marginally relaxed at the slight curving of her lips which he recognised as a much diluted version of a smile. He had been shocked and more than a little disturbed as he watched a sobbing princess fall to her knees beside her dead patient the instant the others had left the dropship. Clarke had soothed and comforted him when he had been burning with fever and vomiting blood. It had been her composure, and her promises that he wasn't going to die, that had consoled Murphy through painful days and feverish nights. So to see her so distressed had been almost as frightening for him as vomiting up blood had been.

"Rest." She urged, her features now less strained. "Doctor's orders." She added in a deliberately condescending tone. He snorted, the puff of breath carrying equal parts derision as it did relief at the return of the version of the princess he was used to – the return of his bossy healer princess.

"You're not even a real doctor." He muttered. But even as he said it he had already started moving, lifting his legs back up onto the cot to stretch across the space she had just left. Turning to face the wall he lay on his side and adjusted his blanket, scooting down the cot and curling into her leftover warmth. As his eyes closed Murphy heard her puff out an exhale of amusement and smiled to himself. It would be ok, Murphy thought as he let sleep begin to slowly seep through his mind, his last thought before sliding into slumber was the sound of Clarke's promise to him from earlier in the day "…we are going to fight it, together."


Clarke drew a sleeve across her sweat dampened forehead, trying to ignore the slight shaking in her arm as she raised it, and thought with irony that the quarantine idea had been meant to be a precaution: it had been about having a plan of action to make them feel like they were still in control of a bad situation. It was no longer just a plan, and she was definitely no longer in control. The idea of enacting a quarantine for those first in contact with Murphy had quickly escalated to a full blown quarantine zone with procedures and segregation. Those who had had contact but weren't exhibiting symptoms were on the upper levels of the dropship, in their own isolation from the occupants of the ground level, those who were sick. There were a lot of sick people now.

Murphy lay on his cot and watched the steady flow of patients entering the dropship with every hour that passed: vomiting, leaking blood, shivering with fever. He thought his own fever might have finally lifted: his head felt clearer, he was no longer drowsy or confused and there was no cold sweat trickling over his skin or shakes tremoring through his muscles and bones. His entire body still throbbed and ached with spasm of pain, but how much of that was from illness and how much was from his injuries he couldn't tell. He adjusted his blanket more securely around his shoulders and looked down at the blood stained rag he held in his hand. It had been almost two hours now since his last nose bleed. Was he getting better, or was he still in danger of ending up like Derek? He pulled at his blanket again and reached for a flask of water: he would stay warm, stay hydrated and rest. That was his plan. That was what he would do, because that was all he could do, that was all Clarke managed to do for any of the other patients. Murphy's eyes sought her out now, watching as she tended to a young girl whose chalk-white face made a startling contrast to her bleeding eyes. Clarke was also looking pale, and the reddish smudges under her eyes had gotten steadily darker with each time her eyes leaked bloody tears and she distractedly smeared them away. Murphy had watched her intently over the last several hours as her condition rapidly deteriorated. With each new patient that arrived in the dropship she handed out blankets, and herb-and-seaweed water, and kept telling them all to rest. But Clarke wasn't resting. Murphy watched as she ran around after them all, fussing: tucking in blankets, wiping sweaty foreheads with damp clothes, and listening to every single moan and groan they made. Finally she approached him, her movements sluggish. A heavy weight sat in his stomach - Clarke had treated his injuries, cared for him, stood up for him against Bellamy and the others; and now she was getting ill from a sickness he had brought back into the camp and given her. Something in his chest tightened.

"You look like crap Princess." he said with a frown.

"Thanks Murphy." She murmured dryly.

"You need to rest." Said Murphy.

"I will." She nodded distractedly, "But first I need to have a word with Bellamy, we're going to need more boiled water and we're running low on seaweed." Murphy watched her shuffle slowly towards the door; her movements too sluggish. He hesitated then groaned in annoyance as he tugged off his blanket and clambered off of his cot. He hurried after her, stopping just short of the door and peeking out through the canvas to listen in to the two leaders.

"Octavia you ok in there?" Murphy tensed as he heard Bellamy call out to his sister and Clarkes responding sigh in defeat.

"I sent her to see Lincoln." She wearily admitted, "If there's a cure he has it." The obvious drowsiness in her voice was what made Murphy finally push the thick curtain aside and edge outside onto the ramp. Murphy squinted against the harsh light - the first he had seen in days - as he observed the group's leaders.

"If anything happens to her you and I are going to have a problem." Bellamy growled. Murphy inched closer, stopping just behind Clarke.

"Bellamy." She called after him groggily. Murphy stepped up to her side but before he had a chance to coax her back into the dropship a scream ripped through the air and everyone froze.

People scattered, frantically scrambling away from a pair of bleeding eyes in the middle of the crowd… Then again, more jostling to create a wide berth for the bleeding eyes on someone else… And a bleeding nose somewhere else. Then another scream – someone fell in a fevered faint. Hysteria erupted, people pushing and shoving. Another person dropped to their knees and vomited. A shout. Panic flared. Voices yelled. Panic swept over the camp like a swollen yellow cloud of acid fog; swift and deadly. It polluted the air with an overwhelming pungency, hitting the camp with a sharp and sudden sting that had everyone recoiling. People begin to push at each other frantically. The crowd churned with barely supressed chaos. People stumbled, people ran, people brandished knives and guns, shoving and shouting in panic.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Staccato cracks of gunfire rang out across the camp as Clarke fired a gun into the air. Everyone froze.

"This is exactly what the grounders want." Clarke spoke quietly - woozily - but her voice carried clearly across the silent camp. "Don't you see that? They don't have to kill us if we kill each other first." An angry youth stalked towards her with his own gun trained towards her.

"They won't have to kill us if we all catch the virus. Get back in the damn dropship!" But Bellamy reacted first: swiftly moving in and disarming him with an efficient manoeuvre. Silence held as the camp watched on, holding their breaths, and waiting for their leaders to take control and fix things.

"I hate to state the obvious," said Bellamy "but your quarantine isn't working."

But Clarke didn't have a solution this time. And for once she couldn't even bring herself to try to suggest any possible options. She was too tired. She was too weak. She was too hot - the sweat trickling along her brow and down her spine even as she felt herself shiver. The world spun, tilted and then she was falling. Clarke knew she had lost her fight against the virus a split second before the last dregs of energy oozed out of her muscles and her knees buckled underneath her. There was a rush of air and then-

But the pain didn't come. Instead of the hard impact she expected her fall was broken by something warm and solid. She looked up blearily, and blinked at the face frowning down at her, taking several seconds to focus before she realised she was looking up at Murphy. He had caught her?

"Murphy. I'm ok."

"Sure you are Princess." He huffed as he gingerly adjusted his arms around her, manoeuvring her where she rested against him to hold her more securely against his chest.

"You caught me" Clarke said weakly as her sluggish brain slowly realised what has happened. She watched as his frown turned into a scowl. But she didn't really notice this, instead her attention was focused on what she could feel: after trembling all afternoon under the pressure of the virus her arms and legs felt boneless where they hung from Murphy's arms. It was nice there, she thought, leaning against something that was warm and soft but strong. A stray thought flitted across her mind – that she never would have realised he was strong enough to hold her. Then Clarke realised how nice it felt to be looked after for once instead of doing the looking after. She had needed to take a break, needed to rest. Hadn't Murphy told her exactly that less than five minutes ago? Murphy had caught her. This all fired quickly through her head in the space of a few seconds whilst she stared up into eyes that were a pale blue. Had she known that before? But she was interrupted from her wandering thoughts as a small commotion broke out near the gate and a burst of motion rippled through the camp. Heads turned, the crowd curved, making space as Octavia pushed to the centre of the camp.

The look of fierce determination on her face faltered slightly as she stopped beside Bellamy, her eyes fixed on a sick Clarke slumped in the arms of Murphy.

"Octavia." Bellamy prompted.

"There's no cure." She breathed, her eyes flicking anxiously from Clarke and Murphy to look at Bellamy as she added, "But the grounders don't use the sickness to kill. They are attacking at first light."

It would have been very easy in the moments following Octavia's announcement for the camp to descend back into the panic that had engulfed it minutes before. But Bellamy reacted before that could happen, the gravity of their situation spurring him into action as he took control of the camp once more. He issued several commands in quick succession - ordering all the sick into the dropship and everyone else back to work - his authority and determination pushing everyone to act with a renewed urgency.

As the buzz of activity picked up around them Clarke felt the cloudy threads of her consciousness slipping away from her. She groaned, her head lolling forward to rest on Murphy's shoulder. He gave a grunt. He was still weak, the muscles up his arms and across his back burned under Clarkes weight. He could feel one of the bigger slashes on his side stinging as the healing skin was pulled and stretched, but he ignored it.

"I need you to hold on Princess." He gritted out.

"Mmm..." was her only answer

"Clarke you have to hold on to me." he barked more harshly. Finally seeming to understand her arms came up and wrapped around his neck.

"That's it." He said gripping her tighter and turning back towards the dropship. Octavia rushed forward, scooping up the gun Clarke had dropped before he tripped over it.

"Come on I'll help you get Clarke back inside." She said as she rushed passed him up the ramp to pull aside the parachute curtain.


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