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John Murphy meets Bellamy Blake when he is fourteen and they take his mother’s dead body out of their room. Bellamy is a young guardsman, shadowing an older one while he asks Murphy all kind of questions – Had he been there when she died? No he had been at school. How long had his mother been drinking? Since like forever? Was there any family he could stay with? No, everyone was dead.
He thinks that he’s seen him around before, they’re from the same station after all but he doesn’t give him a lot of his attention. Murphy likes to ignore guardsmen after all.
They leave him in the room and have someone look after him once or twice a day and Murphy forgets about Cadet Blake within an hour.
He is fifteen when Mbege and him nearly get caught stealing and he’s making his way through the crowd of people who’re coming back from work, hoping that he lost the guardsmen that were after them. He runs into Cadet Blake just as he thinks that no one is following him anymore. Blake doesn’t seem to know that everyone is looking for the thieves which is ironic since Murphy has about twenty-five rations in his pockets that they’re going to trade with Nygel. Blake remembers him and he is nice and Murphy doesn’t care about him – doesn’t care about Alpha’s at all, Mbege is a Beta he is nice and he doesn’t care about the fact that Murphy is an Omega. But Blake seems friendly and asks him how he’s doing and Murphy feels his answers getting longer and less clipped and then Blake smiles at him and Murphy temporarily forgets what exactly he is doing out here.
Now that he’s aware of Blake it’s like he’s seeing him everywhere – which is stupid because he knows that cadets get the worst shifts and Blake isn’t following him – and the thought that Blake apparently likes him makes his head hurt. And that he likes Blake. Murphy is fifteen and he’s never been interested in anyone but Blake - who wants him to call him Bellamy – smiles at him and makes him laugh and gives his attention to Murphy.
It takes Murphy about two weeks to fall in love with Bellamy Blake. Mbege tells him that it’s a really bad idea but he doesn’t care at all.
Murphy is someone who likes to ditch his medical evaluations, mostly because he doesn’t feel like he wants people to ask him stupid questions, so when he’s pulling Bellamy inside his room by his collar and jumps him they’re both confused as hell. It takes them about five seconds to figure that Murphy is in heat because he was supposed to get his shot at the evaluation. It takes Murphy another five seconds to be totally down with the idea and about ten minutes of heavy making out, grinding against each other and Murphy telling Bellamy everything he wants from him to get Bellamy on board because he has this stupid hang-up about the fact that Murphy is only fifteen and they really shouldn’t do this.
Bellamy spends the day and the night and when he leaves Murphy’s heat has mostly stopped – which is weird since they’re supposed to last longer than that – and Bellamy really needs to get back because his Mother is going to kill him. Murphy doesn’t ask questions because Bellamy is going to tell him what’s going on at some point.
Murphy is fifteen three-fourths when they finally track him down for his medical evaluation and don’t let him go again.
It’s been six months since Bellamy and he started sleeping with each other. He’s put on some weight and he’s been puking his guts out. Technically he knows what’s happening. But he’s so good at repressing it that he completely ignores everything.
The doctors tell him that he is six months pregnant, that it’s too late for an abortion and that he broke several laws by hiding his pregnancy and by becoming pregnant in the first place. They ask him who the father is but he doesn’t say Bellamy’s name, he doesn’t him to get into trouble. He’s not a snitch after all.
When they see how uncooperative he is they call in the guard – and thankfully Bellamy isn’t one of them. They put him in isolation, tell him that they will probably let him out when he’s eighteen. Murphy doesn’t care about their words. He doesn’t care about some stupid baby he tried to ignore for so long.
Shortly after his sixteenth birthday his daughter is born. She is tiny with black hair and blue eyes and if Murphy wouldn’t have been so tired and in pain he would have asked them to let him hold her. Instead he just stares at her and the doctor’s take her away. Tears are running down his cheeks and he screams when they make him push again to get the placenta out and thankfully they all think it’s because of the pain.
They fix him up, put him on suppressions again and two weeks after she is born they put him in the sky box in a cell with Mbege who doesn’t say anything when he starts crying and just hugs him.
They don't let him see her, they don’t give him updates on her life. He doesn’t know if she is still alive or if she has found a family. Someone told him that there might be a way to get her back when he gets out but Murphy doesn’t even know if he wants that.
Bellamy doesn’t visit him, never mentions what they had again and pretends like they don’t know each other – not that Murphy would have wanted him in any kind of way, not after Bellamy left him alone in the skybox. He sides with the mob and nearly kills Murphy twice that day, as if Murphy is nothing else than some stupid kid he doesn’t know.
Murphy is seventeen and he learns to hate Bellamy Blake.
“Do you know what really pisses me off?” Murphy says and pulls the seatbelt tighter. Bellamy’s body shakes on the crate he’s standing on and an angry smiles plays on Murphy’s face.
“Getting caught killing people?” Bellamy asks like he is funny, like he can still make Murphy laugh. Murphy hates him so much.
“You didn’t visit me in the skybox, you ignored everything we had on the Ark when we came to the Ground and still expected me to do everything you wanted.”
Bellamy looks away. He is angry and he probably hates Murphy as much as Murphy hates him – for different reasons though – but some part of him knows that what he did was wrong.
“What do you want me to say?” Bellamy asks. “You got yourself locked up, we all knew it would happen. I wasn’t aware that it was hurting your feelings, I’m sorry for that. I didn’t think you cared.” And of course Bellamy would think that. Of course Bellamy expects him to swallow it down, watch him fuck one Beta girl after the other without feeling anything. Maybe it makes Bellamy feel better about himself.
Murphy smiles bitter. “’I got myself locked up’? Do you even know why?”
“I guess you punched someone in the face or something like that.”
It seems like there’s someone outside trying to get in.
Murphy puts more pressure on the belt and Bellamy struggles to breathe. He wants him to die, he wants him to feel everything Murphy felt during those months when he was sitting in his cell, his belly getting bigger and bigger, feeling his daughter move under his fingers and then just emptiness because she had been taken from him. But he knows that Bellamy won’t because Bellamy never loved him. Maybe he cared about him, liked him and found him attractive but with the way things played out Murphy can’t believe that it was more than that.
“I got locked up,” Murphy starts and stops putting pressure on the belt. “Because I got myself knocked up.”
Bellamy stops trying to untie the noose around his neck and stares at Murphy.
“You-what?” he asks and Murphy smiles. “During my heat.”
The Dropship door opens.
He steps in front of Bellamy and watches the different emotions on his face. “She had your hair and my eyes. She’s probably dead by now.”
He kicks the crate out under Bellamy’s feet and gets the hell out of the camp.
They don’t talk about it. Not when Bellamy nearly beats him to death after he shot Raven, not when they’re locked up together in the Ark – even though for a moment it seems like Bellamy wants to – not even when they’re watching Clarke and Raven talk about whatever they need to talk or when Bellamy protects him from Raven’s murderous plan.
They don’t talk about it and Murphy hates it. He is still angry, so angry and hurt and he knows that Bellamy wasn’t as invested in their relationship as Murphy was and that he wasn’t even aware he had a daughter until she died in a fiery explosion but it still hurts.
He considers leaving with Jaha but goes back to the camp in the end, aware that he’ll survive neither the journey nor being alone in the wilderness. He gives his gun back and lets them put him to work. He just wants to forget ever feeling anything.
“Put that part there,” Raven orders when he’s helping her clean up her workspace. He’s not sure why Raven even requested him and he really doesn’t care if her feelings are still hurt but he’s trying to be a good citizen so he just does whatever she says and hopes that it will be over soon.
“Why do you even need me to do this?”
“Because I’ve been crippled for life,” she replies and Murphy rolls his eyes.
“I apologized for that, okay?”
Before she can answer the radio comes to life and Bellamy’s voice comes through.
“Raven? You there?”
“Yep,” she answers. Murphy sets whatever he is carrying at the moment down and Raven gives him a nasty look. She doesn’t tell him to leave though, so he just leans against a pillar and waits for some news. Not that he cares about Bellamy at all.
“We managed to sneak our friends out of the dorm and divided them up, but I’m not sure how long it’ll take Cage to find them,” Bellamy sounds distressed and Murphy leans forward. He doesn’t care but he can be curious.
“We’ll come up with a plan.”
“Do it fast.”
Murphy narrows his eyes and shakes his head. This sounds just really stupid. Raven looks over to him and he moves one hand to his head and makes a gun motion.
“We can’t just kill them all, Murphy.”
“Why not?” It’s not like the Mountain Men aren’t killing all of them.
“Murphy is with you?” Bellamy’s voice comes out of the radio and Raven confirms before she can see that he is violently shaking his head.
“We can’t kill them because they’re kids in here…”
“As if you care about kids,” Murphy says loud enough for the radio to pick it up.
“Why don’t you come back when I’m done?” Raven snarls at him and Murphy throws his hands up before marching out.
“Raven?” Bellamy voice comes out of the radio again and Murphy looks around. He’s the only person in the room at the moment. Raven and that other guy are out getting some mechanic stuff they might need – not that Murphy listened – and they left Murphy to clean their boards so that they can use them later.
“She’s getting some stuff at the moment,” he simply says and there’s silence at the other end of the radio.
“I’ll tell her you wanted to talk to her.” He puts the radio back where it belonged and turns around to try and forget everything about this when Bellamy speaks up again.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” Bellamy asks and Murphy hand clenches around the rag in his hand. He turns around and takes the speaker in his hand.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“Not until Raven can give me some help here.”
Murphy sighs and thinks about walking out while letting Bellamy say whatever he wants but honestly? He is kind of curious what Bellamy has to say to him.
“What is it?” he asks and sits down on the table. Hopefully no one will come on while he’s busy talking to Bellamy, he really doesn’t need anyone telling him that he should be working right now.
Bellamy lets out a deep breathe. “I just wanted to apologize for everything. I mean… I left you alone on the Ark because I didn’t want to get into trouble and then I treated you like we didn’t know each other because I … I felt like I had to prove something.”
Murphy grips his leg with one hand. He already knew all of this or suspected it. He doesn’t need Bellamy to tell it to him.
“And after you told me… I was just so angry at you. Completely for the wrong reasons and… I’m just sorry.”
“Okay…” Murphy says because he has absolutely no idea what else to say.
“Can we talk when I’m back?” Bellamy sounds so sincere that Murphy doesn’t really know what’s happening. This sounds like the Bellamy he knew on the Ark. The one he really liked, the one he maybe even loved. But that Bellamy is gone. At least for him.
“Why do you want to talk?”
“Because I feel horrible and you didn’t deserve how I treated you and being in this Mountain just put things in perspective. I just wanna make things right.”
Murphy looks at the speaker. “Are you hitting on me?”
“Murphy, I was being completely sincere, can you take this seriously please?”
“How the fuck am I supposed to react when you start saying stuff like that?”
“’Yes, Bellamy, we can totally talk. I might punch you in the face for being an asshole, but I will definitely hear you out and maybe even forgive you because I know that you care about me.’”
“That’s not how I talk,” he protests – ignoring the tingly feeling in his chest at the mention of Bellamy caring about him - but Bellamy just snorts
“It totally is.”
“Fuck you.”
“So can we talk?”
“Are you gonna accept no for an answer?” This is Bellamy after all.
“Absolutely.”
“I knew-what?”
“I told you, I want to make this right.”
Murphy stares at the speaker again. “Okay…”
Raven comes in at this exact moment so Murphy just gives her the speaker and goes back to cleaning the boards. She’s a Beta, so she isn’t able to smell the distress that’s probably coming out of him in waves. He’s not sure what exactly happened with Bellamy and he is still angry and hurt but somehow… somehow this feels different.
There’s another Ark station.
The message comes in right as the chancellor and Kane are about to leave for the Mountain and nobody really knows what to do.
In the end they send out a few guards and one doctor Murphy remembers from giving birth – who definitely knows what happened to the baby - and Murphy. Because he has apparently nothing else to do, but knows the terrain and can handle a gun. He’s not sure if this is something positive or not but he’s gonna take the chance to actually do something productive.
It’s an eight hour march into a direction Murphy has never gone before and when they find the Ark station they realise why no one has been able to find their camp.
The station landed in the middle of a lake, only about ten metres of it reaching out of the water with lots of people in an about it.
“Holy shit,” the assistant – whose name is Jackson – says next to him and Murphy can only agree with this assessment.
“What are we gonna do?” he asks and then looks around to the guard.
“Everyone, we need your seatbelts and wires,” the guard in that’s in command yells and Murphy pulls his own out of his back.
“What are you gonna do?” he asks and the guard looks at him like he can’t believe Murphy dared to ask him a question. He shifts closer towards Jackson. As the only two Omega’s in a Group full of Alpha’s it’s best to stick together.
“I think someone is gonna swim over to them and then they’ll strain the rope so that everyone can just slide over to us.”
He looks over to Jackson. That’s actually kind of smart. And there he thought that all of the good guards are at the mountain at the moment.
“Someone will probably get eaten by a sea monster.”
No one gets eaten by a sea monster. Which… Murphy isn’t really disappointed but it would have been kind of funny.
Instead he watches as person after person slides down towards them, sometimes with someone who isn’t strong enough to do it themselves. He’s standing at the end of the rope with another Guard, motioning everyone towards Jackson who checks them for injuries. It takes them not even an hour to get everyone over there; apparently a lot of people drowned during the crash – everything that’s under water is apparently also filled with water – and there’s not even thirty people left. A few of them are hurt and he gets to meet Fox’s mother who’s happy to hear that her daughter is alive. There are also two children and Murphy really doesn’t know how they’re gonna make the journey back. It had been hard even for them.
“Murphy, can you come over here?” Jackson asks him and the guard nods at Murphy so he stops untying the rope from the tree.
“What’s going on?” he asks and crouches down where Jackson is kneeling on the ground in front of a young girl with brown hair and a black eye patch.
“Murphy, this is Reese, Reese this is Murphy.” The girl looks at him with her own eye narrowed. She looks down to her arms and up to him again, apparently assessing something. Murphy doesn’t understand what’s going on.
“So you’re the one responsible for the nose,” she simply says and rolls her one eye. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
And Murphy is really rethinking his decision to not hit children – unless they nearly got him killed – when the bundle in her arms makes a noise.
Murphy falls backwards on his ass.
Tiny arms, a few shades darker than Murphy’s own skin, reach out of the blanket and tangle themselves in Reese’s hair.
“Don’t to that, Lyla, Miss Lucy told you a thousand times that you’re not allowed to pull other people’s hair,” she scolds the baby like it’s a grown up and the only thing Murphy can croak is.
“Who’s Miss Lucy?”
“She took care of me and of Lyla because her parents were apparently too stupid to do it. She died during the crash.”
A noise close to a whimper comes out of Murphy’s throat.
Jackson pats him on the back and gets up. “Have fun you two, I need to check on other people.”
Murphy follows him with his eyes. That traitor.
“So… what happened?” Reese asks, still with that narrowed eye.
Murphy needs a few seconds to get a grip on his voice. “I was fifteen and stupid. Got knocked up by my then-boyfriend and um… tried to hide it.” This can’t be happening. He knows this must be a hallucination. How could it be possible that out of all the people on the Ark, she could survive? And how could it be possible that she might find her way back to him?
“So you didn’t want your baby?” she asks and pulls the bundle closer to her. Murphy doesn’t even know if he wants to hold her or not.
“I didn’t really think about it at first but I regretted it the minute they took her away from me. Didn’t even get to hold her or anything. I thought she died and may or may not have tried to hang her father because I was so pissed.”
“You tried to kill her father?” Reese asks and Murphy realises that that might not have been the best idea.
“I was heartbroken okay?” he tries to defend herself but there’s actually big smile on her face.
“That’s cool. Wanna hold her?” And a second later he holds his daughter in his arms. She’s tiny, even though she’s already a year old and Murphy will have to get used to calling her Lyla in his head – and who the fuck came up with that name? He takes a look at her face and looks back at Reese.
Then he leans down to her tiny face. “I’m really sorry about the nose.”
It takes them ages to go back. Murphy still has the gun in his belt but there are enough guards to keep them safe and Reese teaches him how to hold Lyla right while walking, that she doesn’t need him to keep her head up because she’s already big enough to do that herself, that she’ll feel safest if he lets her rest under his jacket, with her nose on his skin, getting used to his scent. It’s extremely tiring to hold her the whole time and Reese keeps going on and on that they should stop and make some kind of holding mechanism out of the seatbelts, but they don’t have the time. He learns that they had enough rations for a few days but that they ran out a three days ago, which made them desperate enough to climb down into one of the flooded parts and find the radio behind a pressured cabinet, where there wasn’t any water. Their group had a little bit of food with them so everyone ate food they gave them but babies can’t eat normal food so Reese shows him how to chew it for so long that it’s eatable for babies. Murphy thinks it’s really unsanitary and probably a really bad idea but Lyla suckles on his finger afterwards. He gets an approving look from Reese who only knows what Miss Lucy told her and apparently lives by ‘fake it till you make it’ which Murphy appreciates.
He has his daughter in his arms, he’s not dead and he’s supposed to talk to Bellamy soon and he’s probably going to start crying and laughing hysterically as soon as they’re behind the gates.
He just learned how to clean a baby and change a diaper – something that even Reese hadn’t known how to do correctly and something Murphy really could have done without knowing – and he’s sitting down outside because everyone inside is busy and he doesn’t want to be in the way. Someone gave Lyla new baby clothes and he’s had about five people tell him that they’re going to make him hats and gloves for her – for now he wrapped the upper half of her blanket around her head to shield her from any kind of cold weather.
And then the Guards yell.
Murphy keeps back while everyone else comes through the gate. Blood on their clothes, broken bodies and dead eyes. He’s not sure if anyone even notices him and only steps forward when Monty has come through the gate and nods at him.
It takes Bellamy only a minute to follow and an actual smile spreads on his face when he sees Murphy. Bellamy makes a few steps towards him and reaches out with one hand right until he realises that Murphy isn’t alone. Bellamy looks down towards Lyla, his nostrils flaring while he takes in the fact that yes, Murphy does have a baby in his arm.
“Please tell me you didn’t steal that one,” he simply says and Murphy raises his eyes at him.
“Seriously?” Why would he steal a baby? He hadn’t even wanted a baby until he had seen his own.
Bellamy shrugs and Murphy gets Lyla to sit up against his chest. She looks at Bellamy with her big blue eyes and Bellamy reaches out with one hand, mouth open.
“They found another Ark station,” he says. “And she was on it.”
“Holy shit.” Bellamy’s mouth snaps close. “I’m not supposed to swear in front of a baby am I?”
“The fuck do I know?”
Bellamy laughs and Lyla grabs one of his fingers with her tiny hand. “She’s got my hair, and your eyes.”
“And my nose.”
Bellamy grins. “It got character.” And Murphy would have kicked Bellamy in the shin if it weren’t for his own living tiny thing of a daughter on his arms and yeah okay, he might be having that panic attack now.
Or he would have if Lyla hadn’t been staring at him and started giggling. Holy shit, his daughter is cute as fuck.
“What’s her name?” Bellamy asks and Murphy rolls his eyes.
“Someone had the amazing idea to name her Lyla.”
“Why?” Bellamy frowns and wiggles his finger. She grabs it tighter as to not let go of it. “I mean it has a nice meaning but why?”
“What does it mean?”
“Night.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Yeah… do you think we can change it?”
Murphy looks at Bellamy without blinking. “I don’t think that’s a thing.”
“Damn it.” Bellamy slowly untangles Lyla’s fingers from his own and looks at Murphy directly.
“I think I should get cleaned up,” he says and makes a motion towards the provisional bathroom. Murphy gets it he wants to be alone now. Of course he needs to process the whole thing. Murphy needed his time too. “Do you two want to come?” Or maybe not.
“Can’t you wash yourself, Blake?” he asks, grinning and makes a first step. Bellamy falls in besides him.
“That coming from you, seriously?”
Murphy snorts and Bellamy shakes his head. Lyla giggles again and starts tugging on Bellamy’s clothes.
All in all it could be worse.