When you first met John Murphy, he was dead, and you were intrigued how someone who was dead could look so terrified.

You didn't meet many dead people, on account of the eclipse being rare-but-not-nonexistent, enough to bring on a nontraditional not-every-year holiday, like a leap year, maybe, if a leap year wasn't so predictable, and also if you knew fucking anything about Earth, which wasn't the case, aside from the fact that the inhabitants of Sanctum were from there, and honestly, considering the whole mind-drive shit, and the fact that they'd packed up and left their home planet because it was becoming unlivable, that was not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Anyway, that wasn't to say you didn't meet any dead people, because causing people to hurt and kill each other, or kill themselves, or whatever other creative ways humans could come up with to end someone's life, was kind of your whole thing. But usually they looked pretty much the same as the corpses they had left behind, their eyes half-lidded and their stares far-off, devoid of anything at all. Usually when you ate them it was doing them a kindness.

That was not the case with John Murphy.

Of course, you didn't know his name back then. When you sat back and watched the other dark-haired human fighting him, when you ran a finger — or the concept of a finger, what humans would think of as a finger if they could perceive anything of your form besides the fusion of hydrogen atoms and the raging near-eternal hellfire it resulted in — along your bottom lip — again, not a lip, but for all intents and purposes and what have you — and smiled — again, not a— Oh, whatever. The point was that you were watching this spectacle, and it was the same way that it had happened since the beginning of your life, back when you were young and new, though being young was for you just as violent and bloody as your life and the result of you being extant was now. The two humans had been fighting each other, though the one you now knew was called John Murphy was not really as far gone as the one you now knew was called Bellamy. Still pretty bad off, though, if those loud sticks they called "guns" that John Murphy had taken were anything to judge by.

Then the girl, who you now knew — but didn't really care — was called Clarke Griffin, had to go and ruin the whole thing. You watched all of the humans lay on the ground for way longer than someone should be made to watch anything, and then when they woke up the interesting shit started again.

Humans die so damn quickly.

It seemed only an instant before John Murphy succumbed to the seaweed and his consciousness transferred from the only realm the humans could figure out how to live on to the other, vastly more interesting realms. Parts of him went hither and yon, but the core consciousness, the only one he would be able to comprehend, and consequently remember, even a little bit, showed up in front of you.

Because of course it did — it was your fault he was dead, after all.

He coughed, as if there was any water in his lungs anymore, or any lungs in his body, or any body attached to his consciousness, though humans were so attached to the concept of a body (such a limitation — you didn't understand it yourself) that the body showed up anyway, as a manifestation you found yourself oddly drawn to. You had come to like his eyes, really.

He pushed himself up with his hands, blinked his eyes open, then immediately had to close them again and squint through the tiny slits they had become.

No sooner had he done that than his chest began to move in and out suddenly. Breathing. You knew about this one. He was doing it very quickly, in a way that couldn't be good for him. His eyes kept trying to go wide, but you were so bright and so all-consuming that he had to close them again every time, even though the absolute terror in him kept the cycle perpetuating. He was making a sound you associated more with dying animals than with humans, who when they were dying felt that they needed to preserve their dignity, which was baffling, as they weren't likely to have any since most of them voided their bowels shortly after death.

"No," he was murmuring, in a tortured-sounding way. "No, no, no."

But it was the sort of no that meant he had always known that whatever he thought you were was a possibility, and had been really, really hoping that it would not come to pass. Which you tried not to take offense at.

You moved closer. You could see him flinch back from the heat of you.

It must have been painful. Very much so. But, like, he was already dead, so.

You had never tried speaking to one of them before. But you had never really liked one of them before, either. You opened your mouth-that-wasn't-a-mouth and tried to speak to him, but you could tell your words were not intelligible to him as words from the way that tears started spilling out the corners of his eyes when you had said them, despite the fact you had basically said — and you would only know this when you had begun speaking the human language, but you didn't know it now — WELL, WELL, WELL, IF IT ISN'T THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR OWN ACTIONS.

Actually, looking back, you could kind of see how that might have upset him. But he didn't say anything back to you, and his fear, when you tasted it, was entirely dependent on his own perception of what this space he and you were in was. So you were almost positive he hadn't understood you.

You reached yourself out — gently, Christ, you had to do it so gently or they burned to ashes, even when they were already dead — and sorted through his thoughts and memories. A raging fire, unending. That was sort of you. But he wasn't thinking of you. He was thinking of a ghost story that his people told themselves, some permanent, sempiternal torture that came from being a person who made the wrong decisions. But what you had seen from John Murphy did not make him an exceptional candidate for that sort of punishment. If self-preservation was a sin from which there was no redemption, Heaven must have been entirely empty.

Heaven was a new concept to you.

You liked John Murphy. You liked him a lot, actually. As you searched through his mind delicately, trying to preserve what you saw there and not burn it away just by virtue of your proximity to him — although you weren't really that close, it was just that you were so encompassing, so enormous that he could only take one part of you in at a time, and even then, he was having trouble with it, on account of you being too bright even for the eyes he possessed in this plane — you saw just how many times he had fought to stay alive. It had been his single-minded goal, and alliances and enemies be damned. Whatever promised him sanctuary, he took without caring who it affected. At least, that was the way it had been until he had met…

Emori.

Right. Once you saw her face in his mind, you remembered her. Her laughing-mad torment chained up inside that room with the other human girl, the one who preferred to strike from the shadows, which had always struck you as the coward's way of fighting. You liked it when people saw the face of their attacker, or their killer, if you were lucky, and knew who it was that had killed them. Emori, who John Murphy had fallen in love with and absorbed into his desperate self-preservation instinct. Whatever would save the both of them. Though the John Murphy from back on his home planet would probably be horrified by the measure of a heart John Murphy from now had grown over the years — because he was still most interested in saving himself, but now he was pretty interested in keeping everyone he'd come to this planet with alive, too. Sort of.

He and Emori were still the ones he cared most about.

This fascinated you. You had spent so long watching people try their best to appear good, heroic, even if they were doing terrible things in the shadows. It was nice to see someone who did not lie about the sort of person they were, even if people thought less of them for it. And they were hypocrites, really, because you couldn't imagine that if it came down to dying or killing someone else, they would pick the someone else every time. You'd seen what humans did when faced with difficult decisions and precious little time to really consider them.

He was disappearing in front of your eyes-not-eyes. You pulled back, concerned you had burned his very essence away and ruined your new plaything forever, but you slid part of your consciousness into his dismal physical plane and saw that the inhabitants of Sanctum were using that awful snake on him, the one that drained your toxins out of the human body. You hated that. It always felt unpleasantly like someone holding the nozzle of a vacuum to the back of your neck, or at least that's what you would say if you had ever seen a vacuum before in your life, which was not the case, of course. You sighed and began to turn away. He'd been the only human you'd given a shit about, so of course he had to be taken from you before you could really get into his mind and learn him the way you wanted.

—unless he didn't have to.

You turned back towards him, towards that half-formed consciousness draining itself back into the physical plane. It always sucked, having a meal taken from you before you could consume it, but in the end it was kind of a game to you, seeing whether the Sanctumites could revive a human with the snake before you consumed their souls. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost, and it kept things interesting.

What if you could keep things interesting in a different way? What if you played a card you hadn't even remembered was in the deck until it came up at the top of it and you flipped it over, staring at it and realizing you'd never tried to play it before because the uncertainty wasn't worth it until this certain set of circumstances?

You knelt before him. He couldn't feel you anymore, was too far gone for that, was already mostly-living again. You had to act quickly. You intertwined your fingers-not-fingers with the ghosts of his, and you made yourself small, so incredibly infinitesimal, your soul burning like a tiny nuclear reactor inside of your chest-not-chest, and you moved forward to whisper against the shell of his ear,

Take me with you.

And the last thing you heard before you spun into blackness was John Murphy's horrified shout, and then his tortured voice, saying, "I saw something. I f— I felt something. …I'm pretty sure I'm going to Hell."

You smiled. He'd seen you.