Chapter Text
The unraveling of life as Murphy knows it has several possible origins, each as plausible as the last, but he mostly narrows it down to the day everyone comes back to Sanctum following their adventures through the anomaly. There are several others, dating back to the day he fell sick on the Ark, but he could handle the shitstorm that was his life until that day when he was forced to acknowledge that change was coming in ways he had yet to fully comprehend.
If he’s being honest with himself – and he does consider self-awareness one of his best qualities – Murphy should have known that the day was going to go to absolute shit. It started off poorly; why wouldn’t it get worse?
Murphy’s Law is rather aptly named, he’s always thought.
He’d woken to the too-bright shine of Sanctum’s double suns in his eyes with a pounding headache after spending the night drinking away the feeling of responsibility that had settled on his shoulders in the absence of anyone better to do it. He still doesn’t understand that one – how is there no one better to do this? Emori, sure, he can understand. She’s deceivingly fierce and quietly brilliant, the perfect combinations for herding sheep and outwitting foxes, but he’s just... him. A guy too tired and jaded to care.
Usually.
He spent a long time thinking about it the night before and ultimately decided it was Bellamy’s fault. Clarke gets partial credit, of course, but mostly Bellamy.
If Bellamy had fucking stayed like Murphy tried to tell him to, Clarke and the others wouldn’t have left, and Murphy wouldn’t be stuck here trying to hold it all together.
Clarke gets some of the blame because if he didn’t actually like her kid so much – admire the resilience he sees in her each day that Bellamy and Clarke are gone as she continues to get up, go to school, and live life despite the shit that it has thrown at her – he may have let the place go to hell anyway, just to spite them all.
As it is, he does, and they did, and here they are.
That’s been standard for the last week, though, so it wasn’t a great surprise. No, what should have tipped him off was his unflappable, tough as stone, rock of a fiancé nearly collapsing in a fainting spell for no discernable reason. The only bit of luck he had was that he caught her.
She said she was fine, that she just hadn’t had enough to eat the night before, but he knows her, and he knows bullshit when he sees it. Still, she’d smiled at him, told him that he was going to get worry lines if he kept making that face, so he’d grumbled good-naturedly, told her to go eat a fucking apple and left it at that.
It's all been downhill from there.