Murphy woke up chained to the wall.
Every time he had been chained up in the past, it had been indicative of something very bad about to happen, so without wasting any time thinking he pulled at the cuff clamped around his wrist, hissing in pain when the unsympathetic metal bit into his skin. A trickle of blood slipped into his sleeve, a maddening sensation. He couldn't rectify it. Both of his hands were in cuffs, and the cuffs were attached to the wall of the currently-unused building they were occupying, which was moderately run-down in the way that it probably hadn't been lived in for quite some time, but wasn't so far gone that he could pull down a wall all by his human self.
He pushed against the cuffs until he thought his bones would break, and even then he might have continued until they actually did, and maybe he could slip out of the cuffs that way, if he broke all the bones in his hands, which wasn't optimal, but he couldn't see Emori or the eclipse, and the last thing he remembered was her bashing a rock into the eclipse's head, so, like, probably a fair bet that the eclipse was Fucking Pissed. Which didn't bode well for Emori.
But just before he made the decision to do so, a pair of long-fingered claw-like hands slipped up his forearms, curling around his wrists. The person situated just behind him lifted the bleeding wrist to its mouth and lapped at the wound, humming contentedly as it did so. Dark hair tickled Murphy's nose; he froze completely.
"You bleed for me," the eclipse purred.
"I bleed to get away from you," Murphy said hatefully. "What the fuck did you do with Emori?!"
The eclipse moved around to face him, its legs crossed on the hardwood. It kept hold of his wrists the whole time, leashing him. Emori had at least done some damage; there was a gash across its left temple, though Murphy couldn't tell how long it had been since they'd been out in the Joberry fields, because while the blood that had oozed down its face and along the upward curve of its jaw had coagulated, the blood was so gold it hurt to look at, which meant it definitely wasn't human, despite being in a human body — so the fact that the blood had dried itself like lava into a tiny mountain range down its face was not representative of the passage of time since it had been injured. It could have been minutes, hours, days.
"John?!" came Emori's voice from another room not far away. "John, are you okay?!"
"I swear to God, if you hurt her—"
But the eclipse grinned madly, as if Murphy had unlocked some secret thrill within it. It tugged on his hands, causing him to involuntarily lean close to it, and pressed their foreheads together. He could feel the jagged terrain of its scabbed wound underneath his own right temple, pressing uncomfortably into his skin.
"She's not hurt. I told you, John Murphy — it's not her I want to hurt."
It pressed its thumbs hard enough into the backs of his hands to cause him to cry out.
"It's you."
From the other room, Emori hollered, "Hey! Don't you fucking dare hurt John or I'll make you wish you'd never been born!"
The eclipse called back, "Promise?~"
Murphy said, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"
"It's been so long since I had someone to play with," the eclipse told him. "Ever since the Sanctumites started going to Ryker's Keep, I've been so lonely. It was nice to have you."
"You weren't playing with us," Murphy hissed. "You were making us kill each other."
At the eclipse's blank look, he said, "Unbelievable. To you, they're the same thing, aren't they? You said you didn't want me dead — so then what was all that shit with 'mori stabbing me and Bellamy trying to kill me, huh?"
It removed its forehead from his and gave him that blank fox-tilt look again. "I told you you were safe."
Murphy was lost. Obviously he had never seen the eclipse before it had attacked him in his room. What on Earth— but then the image leapt into his mind. Him, sitting on the roof, rifle cradled in his arms, rocking back and forth. Him saying to himself, They're all crazy. You're okay. You're okay. All this time, he'd thought that he'd been immune to the toxin, somehow. But he'd been so full to the brim already with paranoia that when the toxin had affected him he hadn't even noticed it.
"That… was you?" he asked them again. It was already one hell of a thing to be talking to an eclipse that had fashioned itself a human body, but somehow each new revelation managed to surprise him nearly as much as the first one.
"You can come back from the seaweed," it said simply. "Even if I hate feeling Kepa-she leech me out."
Well, this threw a whole fucking wrench in the situation. Several wrenches, actually. Maybe the whole damn toolbox. Murphy wanted to be angry, to be furious that the eclipse thought of the humans as playthings, that their lives apparently had no real meaning or worth to it when he himself was so concerned about the continuation of his own. But it was hard to truly be angry with something that had little concept of mortality and probably even less of morality.
And it was very hard to truly be angry with it when it held the key to what was possibly the best survivors' move yet.
"You said you didn't want to kill me," said Murphy carefully. He was walking on thin fucking ice. One misstep and he'd blow everything. He was speaking to a god, after all, and who had more right to entitlement than a god? "I need to know what that means. What would you do if someone else hurt me?"
"Not acceptable," crooned the eclipse. It grasped his hands so tightly that he swore he could feel the bones rubbing up against each other. He had to bite back a swear so Emori, who was definitely viscerally angry in the other room but unable to do much when a binary solar eclipse held Murphy's life in its hands, didn't hurt herself trying to get to it and give it a matching scar on the other side of its face. Its eyes flared dangerously, which made its juxtaposing smile terrifying. Not that it hadn't already been terrifying anyway. "No one is allowed to make you look so pretty, now that I'm here. Just me alone."
So far, so good. His heart was beating rabbit-fast. If he could just… "What about Emori? If I let you do this to me, will she be safe?"
The eclipse burst into laughter in that same spontaneous, explosive way as before. It seemed to expect him to do so as well, and when he didn't, it repeated, incredulously, "If you let me."
"Yeah, okay, I get it," he said, before he could stop himself. Fuck. Roll it back, idiot. But the eclipse didn't look offended. Did it like this side of him? His abrasive personality, his razor-bladed tongue that hurt people whether he tried to or not? If it did, there really was something fucking wrong with it.
"I'll protect Emori. If I don't, you might get mad at me." It lifted his hands to its lips and smiled wickedly behind them. "Besides… I like what she did to my face."
From the other room, Emori shouted, "The hell's going on in there?! You better not be hurting John again."
"It likes what you did to its face," Murphy called back.
"It what?!"
"Yeah, that was my reaction, too." Murphy said, hushed, conspiratorially: "So you hang around with us, I don't complain when you shove me around here and there, and you keep me and Emori safe. Is that it? That's the deal?"
The eclipse shrugged, then nodded.
He could be angry at the nonchalance it treated this whole situation with later. It seemed that somehow he had secured the affection of a being more powerful than any in Sanctum — one so mighty that the entirety of what was left of the human race fled to the underground every time it so much as became extant. It was going to be one bitch of a relationship, but he had already done this before. Ontari's face slipped into his mind, that Azgeda sneer, her dead and curious eyes as she forced him to fuck her. If he'd thought he had escaped the same old cycle he and the rest of the 100 found themselves in time and time again, he found himself now sorely mistaken.
"The things I do to survive," he muttered.
They were quite a ways out from Sanctum, distant enough that if Murphy or Emori had screamed for help, no one would have heard them. The eclipse and Emori sat at the lone weathered, dismal table in the middle of the room, and the shadows outside grew long, which meant that they had been there for at least a day, since it had been well on its way into the evening when they had been in the Joberry fields.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
The eclipse had both elbows on the table, and had interlaced its fingers — its chin rested atop them, and a saccharine smile played on its face. Its eyelids were fluttering half-closed dreamily.
"Don't get too attached," Murphy said, standing over the counter just two feet away. "She'll end up breaking your heart."
"John." Emori glowered. She was glaring at him, eyes wide and full of sparks. Keep going and see what happens, those eyes said. Unfortunately, Murphy was the kind of person who took words like that not as a warning but as a personal challenge.
"Depression's a bitch," he muttered, mostly to the pot he was standing over, stirring occasionally. The pot was full of strange-looking vegetables that the eclipse had gathered from what must have used to be a garden surrounding the house they were in. He and Emori had been left alone inside the house for a few moments, but it hadn't occurred to either of them to escape. Somehow, a quiet understanding passed between them — that this was their life now, that they were not going to be able to get the eclipse to leave them alone. If it left it would be of its own volition, and it didn't seem as if that was going to be in its itinerary any time soon.
At least they'd been able to convince Emori that the eclipse's treatment of Murphy had just been a momentary lapse in judgment, a surge of instinct that had overcome it, with the phenomenon of the eclipse proper being in such close proximity, time-wise. Emori was not the sort of person who would hear that her boyfriend had agreed to being someone's punching bag and be even marginally okay with it. She'll find out eventually, the eclipse had whispered against his jaw, sending shivers up his spine, and when she does, she'll be furious. I can't wait. But, John Murphy, when she finds out, our fun will be over. And I don't want our fun to be over. It's barely even started.
"So," said Emori, in the here-and-now. She could so easily have taken the incendiary path — but not doing so was what made it so clear that she had grown up on the Ring, more than Murphy, at least, or in a way better suited to diplomacy, if nothing else. She turned halfway to the eclipse, met its double-eyes as if the only way she could think of to get it to stop staring at her like that was to face it head-on, and said, "Do you have a name? Because if we're going back to Sanctum any time soon, we can't call you 'the eclipse'. And just calling you Eclipse seems a little on the nose."
"You can call me whatever you want, beautiful," the eclipse said.
Emori was stunned into silence. She pressed her lips together into a thin line and averted her eyes, but the patchy red that spread across her cheeks betrayed her feelings. She said, "W-Well."
Murphy winced into the smoke rising from the pot. He was still madly in love with her, of course, and always would be. It had seemed like they were going to rekindle what they had, now that he was working on not feeling so sorry for himself, now that he had something to make him want to stick around, and — if the eclipse really was fond of him — someone who would care, at least, if not actually be upset, if he disappeared. But Emori loved being the object of someone's affections, and the eclipse was breathtaking. So if it wanted her, there wasn't much he could do to compete.
But they didn't jump into each other's arms and run off into the sunset, making out the whole way. Which he guessed was a blessing. Instead, Emori said, "…Daimeikakova."
"Hm?" the eclipse asked.
"Daimeikakova. It's Trigedasleng. My language. It's as close as I can get to 'eclipse'. It means 'sun cover'." She raised an eyebrow. "I guess it doesn't really matter if the thing doing the eclipsing is a planet, a moon, or another sun. It's still an eclipse."
"Daimeikakova," the eclipse repeated, testing the words, sounding them out in its mouth. It had already been smiling, but now it seemed more out of genuine satisfaction than whatever worship-adjacent thing it had been projecting at Emori before.
"Now we just gotta get the little tyke off to school and tell it to play nice with all the other kids," Murphy said dryly — did he ever say anything any other way? — as he spooned the mixture from the pot into a series of wooden bowls that had been left in the kitchen by the previous owner, surprisingly smooth and unblemished for people who appeared mostly to be living off the land. He set the bowls in front of Emori and Daimeika. "I imagine this has gotta be everyone's first foray into food even remotely approaching some semblance of culture. Rats aren't Sangedakru culture," he said, cutting Emori off at the pass, "they're just rats. Which are disgusting. Even yours. Sorry, sweetheart."
The eclipse was pushing the meal around in its bowl with a just-as-surprisingly-quality wooden fork. It didn't seem to know what to do with it.
"It's cianfotta," Murphy said, as if that would have meant fucking anything. Then he realized— "Oh, right. You probably haven't ever eaten anything before. Just, uh, do what I do."
He scooped up some of the stew and slowly maneuvered it into his mouth as Daimeika did the same, its eyes on him like it was going to be tested afterwards. Once it closed its lips around the fork and pulled the stew off, its eyes went wide, like it had been shot— and then it was screaming with its mouth closed, kicking its legs with such wild abandon under the table it nearly upended the entire thing, clearly euphoric.
Emori took a bite as well. Her own smile was muted, not anything like Daimeika's, but not so muted that one couldn't tell she was very impressed, though not surprised. "John would be welcomed in Sangedakru with open arms for his skills in the kitchen."
"I thought you said any clan would value me," Murphy argued playfully, sliding into the unoccupied seat across from the two of them.
"Yes," said Emori, "but Sangedakru would value you the most."
It was not lost on the two of them that they were carrying on a conversation around the dinner table as if they weren't sitting there with the personification of an eclipse that was at least incredibly violent if not outright murderous and did not have plans to stop being such any time soon. There was a certain undertone of paranoia to every action they performed and every word they spoke in front of it — at any point, it could deem them unworthy of being treated like people and pick up where it had left off a few days ago. But the only way to deal with that constant paranoia at the moment was to ignore it and bury any defensive instincts deep down and hope they were within reach if they ended up being needed.
Murphy ventured, "…how long are we staying here?"
He was trying to act nonchalant about it, as if he couldn't care less if they returned or if they stayed here forever.
"Right," said Emori, pushing the cianfotta around her bowl, her appetite suddenly absent with the reality she was forced to accept that they couldn't just walk out the front door any time they chose. "Clarke told us to stay put. Can't wait to hear her read us the riot act because she thinks we can't be trusted again."
A growl purred low in Daimeika's throat. Its fingers dug into the wood of the table.
"Probably better for Clarke if we stay here as long as possible," Murphy reasoned, watching Daimeika warily. His shoulders were tight. "We're… safe… here, anyway. No matter what happens. Right, Daimeika?"
He and Emori held their breath.
Daimeikakova looked at Murphy for a very long time.
Then its eyes quit their flaring, and it said, "…yes."
The hesitation was of course not because it had been difficult for it to decide whether or not it was going to protect Murphy, but rather because it had been so singularly focused on ripping Clarke apart that it found it a monumental effort to dispel the vision of doing so and concentrate instead on what was happening around it in this present moment. Not so surprising for a god, Murphy supposed. If he had been a god, you wouldn't have been able to make him give a shit about the human world for love or money. As it was, he kept expecting Daimeika to burst into flames and ascend back to godhood, to decide the humans weren't even worth the little energy it took to pay attention to them and to move on to whatever it was that it had been doing for the millions of years before humans had arrived on Sanctum.
"'k. Then it's settled," said Murphy, not sounding entirely thrilled about the prospect, but not sounding too opposed to it, either. "We hole up here for a while. And we hope that when we get back, Wanheda's taking a break from being a harbinger of death."