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The thing is, he loves her. And he can’t say when it happened, or why, but the fact of it remains. She isn’t the head to his heart or any big romantic notion like that but it doesn’t make the weight of it any less real.
He watches her walk around in a body neither is sure truly belongs to her anymore, watches the frequency of her hand being held to her temples increase day by day, and he aches in new and unfamiliar ways. The smear of black against the back of her hand tells him she had another nosebleed; reminds him of why her blood is black, why she was a target for the Primes. At the end of the day, it has once again stemmed back to him, to the things she did to save him.
He fell apart last time they lost her, in epic and embarrassing ways that he vowed to not do again. Given all that they had lost before the Ring, it was easy enough to conceal his pain, the specificity of it. They didn’t need to know that he woke up with her name on his lips and tears in his eyes. And really, compared to Bellamy, how dare he struggle to breathe. Compared to Bellamy’s loss, how dare Murphy fall apart over her. Emori stood by for the nightmares, the anger, the screaming and crying and holes in walls; but when he lost the motivation for living she stepped away. Murphy barely found it in him to care. In some ways it was easier; no one left to disappoint.
But now he has them both back. At least partially. Clarke’s only half there most days. She’s locked herself away, retreated back to be a pair of helpful hands and little else. They’re no longer at war and everyone has made it perfectly clear they have no place for the Commander of Death; they forget she was always more than that. Every time he looks at Emori he’s reminded of the choices Clarke made for them, not for their people, but for them.
He stops indulging Raven her righteous anger. Walks out, yells back, levels some hard truths. None of them are innocent, and hand-balling the hard decisions doesn’t make Raven any more redeemable. He’s starting to think if anything it has made her less. And yeah Raven’s his friend and there’s a section of his heart she firmly occupies, but for all the talk of “family” Skaikru espouses, he sees no family in how they turn away. Family is injecting yourself with untested night-blood, it’s taking off your radiation helmet to replace a broken one, it’s staying behind on a satellite dish. Family is forcing water down a throat and wiping blood from a face despite the contagion. It’s finally apologising, and its forgiveness, and its a love that can’t be erased… even by the end of the world (twice) and death (twice).
Sometimes he looks at Clarke and his blood runs cold in the moment before he’s sure she’s her, that those fingers he’s seen end and save lives aren’t going to reach up and twist her lock of hair. He thinks maybe she has the same moments of fear sometimes, when he sees her walking around in the early hours after his nightmares draw him from bed, when she returns from the scouting mission with hair lobbed off at her ears (Josephine would hate that), when she goes to call him “John” and her face morphs with horror and panic around his name.
He tries to be there. He joins her at tables and campfires, makes snarky comments to draw her out, brings her food when she forgets to eat. And he watches over Madi, tries to make the younger girl laugh, lift some of the weight of the world off her shoulders. When they start assigning land plots, Emori snags them the one next door.
Slowly Clarke stops trying to fade into the background; she smiles with Roan and lets Miller dance her around the fire when they crack open the rice-wines. She allows Octavia to tattoo her arm, and draws the stories of Jordan’s childhood at his request. Some nights she lets Murphy lead her to bed and clings to him like a sinking man to the shore. She doesn’t talk about the bad times, the traumas, the frequent dizzy spells she’s still trying to conceal. And despite the returned softness to her eyes, the new uptick of her lips as she goes about her day, he worries what the next Red Sun will bring. He worries that maybe it wasn’t just the toxin that made her raise that scalpel. That’s one of the nightmares on rotation these days. He’s not sure he’s enough, not sure they are enough after all this time, after all they’ve missed and all they’ve done. But he’s trying to be, for her.
Echo and Raven glare at him across the mess hall and he thinks he should feel something more than the over-riding sensation of annoyance. He’s Team Cockroach all the way and if there’s battle lines to be drawn count him firmly in Wanheda’s square. He loves Clarke Griffin, whether she’s bearing it so they don’t have to or tracing soft charcoal lines through her sketchbook, the mountain slayer or the princess or the commander of death or (his favourite) just Clarke. Family is choosing, time and again, to stick around. And he chose her a long time ago, without meaning to, without noticing it. He loves Clarke Griffin and come hell or high water, Team Cockroach will find a way to finally live.