Disclaimer: I don't own the CW or the 100
This is the turning point for Murphy and Raven.
Murphy was eating lunch by himself when Abby took a seat in front of him. He looked up at her, a question in his eyes.
"I heard from someone that you had a concern." She whispered, leaning in.
He nodded, knowing exactly that that someone had been Bellamy.
"So what?" He crossed his arms on the table.
"Why don't you come by the med bay after you're done eating—I'll have a room set up for you."
There was a wariness in his eyes that Abby quickly caught and she shook her head softly, a small smile on her face.
"No one will know. Patient's confidentiality." She squeezed his hand once and walked away, a gesture that was so motherly that had him wincing without taking notice.
Raven sauntered over to him and sat down in the chair Abby had just vacated.
"What did Abby want?" She asked directly, giving him an odd look.
"Just wanted to check up on my leg later, make sure the gunshot wound is healing okay." he shrugged.
She narrowed her eyes briefly. "But you haven't even been limping."
"Guess I have you to thank for that." he shrugged again. "Actually, I should probably go ahead and see her. I'm on patrol in a little." He stood up and pushed his half empty bowl of rations towards the middle of the table. He left without saying goodbye.
Something was up with him. He seemed off. She was about to get up and follow him to the med bay when Octavia sat down at the table.
"When do you think we'll get some real food? These nutrition packet meals suck. What is this even supposed to be?" She looked in distaste at the mash of yellow and slab of something brown.
"Does Murphy seem weird to you today?" Raven asked.
A flash of surprise crossed Octavia's face, before she raised her eyebrows and started pushing the food around in her bowl.
"Yeah maybe, I mean he's not being a complete dick all the time."
"I'm serious." Raven rolled her eyes.
"I don't know. I don't really pay attention to him. I guess so? I mean, since when do you care about him anyways? He shot you." She waved the fork in the air before stabbing it into the slab of fake meat.
Raven sighed, thinking it was best to leave the conversation as it was right then. She wasn't about to explain her sudden interest in Murphy—not when she could barely explain it herself. She saw Bellamy hand over his gun to Major Byrne and the clockworks in her mind began spinning again.
"Hey, do you know if Abby called Bellamy in for a checkup?"
"A check-up for what?" Octavia asked, sliding the meat around her bowl in a mess of grease.
"The gunshot wounds."
"Pshh, no. Abby said they'll be fine as long as they clean them until they heal. She's had her hands full with trying to help the kids in the med bay recover bone marrow."
Murphy had lied, and for some reason it both surprised her and hurt her. He had lied to her. Sure they weren't friends but, they had never lied to each other.
Deceived—yes.
Attempted to murder—yes.
Shot—yes.
But not lied.
"Thanks O." She said, getting up from the table.
"For what?" Octavia gave her a weird look.
"Nothing." Raven smiled, "And you should stop playing with your food."
"God you sound like my brother." she grumbled as Raven left in the direction of the med bay.
She was determined to know why Murphy felt he had to lie, and curious as to what he was hiding from her. He'd already seen her at her worst and she wanted to know why she couldn't see him at his worst. She walked in quietly into the med bay, trying to make her awkward foot falls on the metal floor as silent as possible.
"Damn leg." she muttered under her breath.
Sneaking around had been easier before she got shot.
Her ears caught the sound of Abby's voice, which was coming from one of the patient rooms on the other side of medical. Most of those rooms were being occupied by the teens recovering from Mount Weather, but there were a couple that Abby kept vacant in case of emergencies. She heard the familiar tone of Murphy's voice, but she was still not near enough to make out what he was saying. As she inched her way slowly across the room, she heard him hiss in pain, and Abby's voice calming him down.
"It's good that you can feel pain." She heard Abby say.
The door was slightly ajar, and Raven opened it a little more to get a look at what was going on.
Murphy lay on his stomach on the bed, his clothes folded neatly on a chair by the wall. He had his arms crossed underneath his chin, his head tilted a little to look at Abby. A sheet covered his lower half. She had a balm on one hand, the other applying it gently to his back.
His back.
Her eyes took in every detail. She knew he had been tortured by the Grounders but this… She brought a hand up to her mouth. There were countless angry red puckered scars crisscrossed over one another, so many that she could barely tell how many there actually were. They enveloped his entire back, as high as his shoulder blades, stopping just above the curve of his backside. There were also circular scars dotted along his left shoulder, and she knew enough to know they were burn marks.
She opened the door all the way and stood in the entrance of the room, not taking her eyes off of him.
"Raven, what are you doing?" Abby scolded.
Murphy whipped his head around to look at her, a look of disbelief on his face, which quickly twisted into fury.
"Get out." He spat. Abby tugged the sheet over his back, shaking her head at Raven.
"John..." she murmured.
"I said get out!" He yelled.
Abby turned her around by the shoulders, spouting off angrily at her about concerning herself with other people's business. She walked her all the way out of medical, until Raven shook her off and faced her.
"Is he going to be okay?"
"You should have waited for him to tell you." Abby blocked the entrance to medical, seeing as Raven was trying to get back inside.
"He was never going to tell me." Raven put her hands on her hips.
"Then maybe he didn't want you to know." Her face softened slightly "You should go back to the radio room."
"I'm sick of that stupid radio room!" She replied angrily.
"Then find something else to do! But stay away from the med bay." Abby warned, turning on her heel to walk back inside.
She did end up going back to the radio room, but only because Wick and the rest of the engineers were working on a project for heating the tents and after about an hour of being sick of them giving her busy work to do, she noticed that they had no idea how to act around her.
She quickly realized she had been demoted from crippled mechanic to crippled mechanic with dead boyfriend baggage in their eyes—most of them anyways. Wick was always good have around. But even he couldn't sway the others into letting her have some real work.
So it was back to the radio room. Mount Weather had been silent since it was attacked, so she was literally listening to static. And that didn't distract her whatsoever from thinking about Murphy.
Frankly, she'd had better days than this one.
She wasn't sorry that she spied on him, but she was hurt that he felt she wasn't worthy of knowing just how much damage the Grounders did to him. At least that's the way she took it—she just wasn't worth telling. Maybe she and Murphy weren't as close as she'd thought they were.
That made her sad.
For past month he was the only one that didn't look at her like she was broken.
She thought about the anger that she had seen in his blue eyes when he was lying there, and she inwardly flinched.
There had to be a way to fix this.
Raven didn't see him at dinner, and after a mostly silent mealtime with Jasper and Monty (silence on her part anyways, Monty and Jasper were as vivid as always) she had gathered enough courage to do what she thought needed to be done.
She grabbed Bellamy by the arm when she saw him make his way to his tent.
"Hey, do you know where Murphy's tent is?"
He nodded "Yeah it's the very last one on the farthest row from the common area."
She thanked him, and made her way through the seemingly endless row of tents. The night air was brisk, and she pulled her jacket closer around her. Winter had practically already arrived, and the temperatures dropped sharply when the sun went down. She spotted a faint orange glow from the last tent and she was relieved that she was awake.
Standing outside his tent, she cleared her throat.
"Go away Raven."
Taking that as her cue, she walked into the tent, taking notice of a large hole in the roof that needed to be patched.
Actually, he just needed a better place to sleep.
There were multiple holes in the roof, some larger than others. He literally had no sort of furniture. There were some blankets on the floor, which he was currently lying on, and a bag on the other side. The light that illuminated the tent was just a small lamp. She shivered against her will. His tent felt colder than the outside.
"Can I help you?" He looked at as if she'd grown a third head "You know usually when someone says to go away they kind of mean it."
"Why haven't you told anyone about the state of your tent?" She put her finger through a hole.
"It's not as if I have visitors over all the time. Hey, stop that you're going to make it bigger." He sat up from the pile of blankets.
Raven knelt on the floor next to him, fingering the thin blankets.
"You're going to freeze when winter hits."
"Let me worry about that, okay?" He sighed. "Hey, can you stop touching everything?" He pulled her hand away.
He muttered something about her being nosy underneath his breath and she shot him a withering glare.
"What? It's true."
"Why didn't you tell me?" She asked.
"About the tent? Because it's not a big deal, I'll patch it soon enough."
"That's not what I meant." She tucked her legs underneath her.
He fixed his stare into the blankets in front of him, zipping his jacket up and down unconsciously.
"Because it's not a big deal." He repeated.
She grabbed his chin with her hands, forcing him to look at her. Her brown eyes searched his blue ones. His eyes showed no emotional.
"It is a big deal. We're friends—"
"When did we decide we were friends?" He asked, jerking away from her touch.
"We are." She insisted.
He fell silent for a bit. He picked at his blankets with his fingers, and she waited for him to face her again.
"You shouldn't have had to see that."
"You don't have to be embarrassed" She touched his shoulder lightly.
"I am. Those scars remind me that I'm a monster. They're just as ugly as I am." He clenched his jaw "My dad would be so ashamed at who I am, who I've become"
She saw a tear roll down his eye, and methodically wiped it away.
"You're not a monster."
He scoffed and turned away his face away from her.
"And your scars aren't ugly. They're a part of you now. Like my brace." She smoothed his hair back.
Her touches were soft and without realizing he started to inch closer to her, turning his body to her. They knelt in front of each other, and without breaking eye contact, Raven slowly unzipped his jacket. She pushed it off his shoulders, fingers trailing over his shoulders, ghosting over his collarbone.
He sucked a breath through his teeth as her fingers crept underneath his shirt. They ran over the planes of his stomach. Her eyes never left his. He felt her tracing patterns over his abdomen, his muscles flexed underneath her hands. She raised them higher to caress his shoulders, and he instinctively raised his arms to make it easier for her to remove the shirt.
She tossed the garment to the side with his jacket. She asked him a silent question with her eyes, and he nodded slowly. She laid him down him a push of her hands. He licked his chapped lips instinctively as he saw her hovering above him.
Raven nudged him and he knew what she wanted him to do. He rolled over, exposing his marred back to her.
There were no gasps of surprise this time.
He felt her seat herself on the curve of his back, legs on either side of him. He laid his head on crossed arms, resting on his cheek.
Tentative fingers ran alongside the entire length of his spine, and he shivered underneath her. She hummed a quiet melody as she traced each and every one of his scars. There wasn't a spot on his back left untouched. Her fingers seemed to want to wipe away all the pain of everything he endured. Her nails scraped lightly against the burn marks, and his shoulders tensed. She felt it, and smoothed the discomfort away with the pads of her fingers. She put pressure on the middle of his back, where the scars where the faintest. In the center, around his spine where the scars were the angriest, he could barely feel her feather touches. Her humming lulled him to a calm place, and he relaxed underneath her.
She rolled off of him after that. The only sound that reverberated in their tent was their unsteady breathing. He shifted to lay on his back.
They rested on their backs, arms to their side almost stiffly. They stayed awake for a long time. Murphy covered them in his blankets when he realized he could see Raven's breath in the air.
There was a gap in the roof of the tent that allowed the night stars to be seen, something that they hadn't truly appreciated since they landed.
Stars were common in space.
They didn't speak, just laid there.
They must have fallen asleep sometime during the night. Next thing Raven knew it was morning, and they hadn't moved positions. The only difference was that their hands had gravitated towards each other, and their pinkies had intertwined.
Like magnets.
Okay now I can breathe. Obviously, things are going to be different from now on. I have had this planned in my head for a really long time and I hope it is received well. Let me know what you thought!
.xoxo