Very early S1 Murphy/Clarke, ~1,000 words, for the prompt "secret" for July Break Bingo @julybreakbingo.
This ficlet was also written in response to a request by Robrae in a comment on AO3 for Clurphy in canonverse.
Written in about 40 minutes.
*
Back in the Skybox, most of the guys put on a front: fearless, arrogant, and rude. This exaggerated bravado was partly to ward off the usual existential dread—the prison atmosphere, the looming threat of death. But also to attract girls.
Skybox courtship followed a certain pattern: first annoyance and rejection, then curiosity, sometimes amusement, then boredom. Eventually even the assholes with their unsubtle pickup lines started to look pretty good. Horniness, and more dread. Pretty soon you're hooking up to feel alive or starting relationship drama to pass the time.
Clarke was in solitary so she doesn't know any of this, and unlike the girls in gen pop, she has neither time nor patience for sly winks and swagger. All the guys showing off their new Earth muscles by chopping wood or curing meat, they're trying to gain points with Bellamy and his crew first and foremost, sometimes, depending on who’s watching trying to flirt. But they're not trying to lure Clarke. They know better.
Murphy knows better too, which is why he's just as shocked as the rest of camp would be, if they only knew, that every other night he and Clarke trade off sneaking into each other's tents. Without discussion, they agreed that their arrangement should remain a secret. Something unspoken perhaps because it's shameful, perhaps because it's too ill-defined and ill-formed. What's he supposed to say anyway? That Clarke's his girlfriend? Not likely. Attaching labels to it, squashing it down into words and sentences, confessions, rumors, announcements or news, all that would tip over the delicate balance they've created. Just like they're baking a soufflé, they have to be quiet. Too much noise would send the whole thing falling down.
Clarke would probably find the soufflé metaphor funny, because, like most people, she doesn't know that the cook books in the Ark library database were his favorites. She'd laugh if he tried to call himself a chef. He's a lackey. A thug. He's in with the in-crowd because Bellamy saw something useful in him, something dead about the eyes that screamed out enforcer—or maybe he just knows from his little brat of a sister that Murphy was a lifer, unaccustomed to normal society, ready to follow strength and show it loyalty.
Most of that is true.
So if Clarke sees those traits in him and no others, he can't blame her, and if he keeps the quiet, soft, vulnerable parts of him hidden, whatever they are, it's for the same reason he put up his tough guy persona every day for four and a half long years up in the box: to ward off the dread, to get the girl.
A part of him says that Clarke wouldn't laugh, that she'd get real quiet and thoughtful and maybe brush his hair out of his eyes. He's been watching her during the day. She bends and softens at vulnerabilities; she knows she'll never get anything out of people who are kicked when they're already down. But then maybe he just likes the fantasy of it: a beautiful woman with power who tells him his dreams aren't dumb, who speaks with authority in the dark and silence just as she does out there in the chaos of daylight in the camp.
How he got such a girl he still doesn't entirely know. He'd cut himself badly working on one of the new structures, the wooden hutch where they hope to cure their meat. She was alone in the corner of the Dropship they've curtained off as Medical, and as she wiped the blood away and he hissed low curses and winced at the pain, she started talking to distract him, and he found out she was calm and clear-headed and brave in a crisis. That she looked beautiful as she pressed antiseptic to his skin, and that she could make him laugh when he didn't think he could. What she saw in him in those moments, he has no idea. That's just another secret, too deeply buried to disturb. But she held his hands a long time, even after he was all bandaged up and ready to go. She was kneeling on the floor in front of him, strands of hair pasted to her forehead with sweat.
He thought she'd probably banish him for kissing her but it seemed a fair risk, for that one reckless moment of time before he leaned in. Instead, she grabbed fistfuls of his hair and bit his lip.
In the perfect silence of the hour before the changing of the guard, that night, she crept across the dirt and deadened, yellow grass and scraped her nails like ghost-sounds down the nylon side of his tent. He let her in.
Maybe he's just around, a body, an opportunity—something she missed in her months of isolation, an outlet to her frustrations and her fatigue and her fears. Except she could have any damn person in camp if she wanted them. Maybe she's with him because she knows he won't brag. Ms. Griffin the Council Member's daughter in his bed.
Sometimes afterward they lie together in the quiet, listening to the wind in the trees, the footsteps of the night watch on patrol. Low, skittering forest sounds that he can't name. Tree leaves swept off their branches and thrown against the tent. Clarke climbs half on top of him and presses her ear to his heart and he gets his fingers all tangled up in her hair. They talk about the Skybox and he tells her about the arrogant and frightened young men. Then other stories. The long years, the distortion of time, the rituals—visiting day, birthdays, holidays—the new people coming in and the old going out. Less often, they talk about the camp and its progress. Sometimes she tells him about her parents and her friends back on the Ark.
She holds back a lot more than he does. He hears the hesitation in her voice, the care she puts into her words.
But it's all right.
He feels her chest rising and falling as she breathes, pressed against his chest. She's warm and heavy on top of him. Some nights it feels like she might stay there forever, like the time before the last gray hour before dawn, when she'll gather up her stuff and sneak away, is really all the time left in the world.
December 9: Murphy & Miller, Worst Secret Santa Gift
For the prompt "“I’m going to buy/make the worst secret Santa gift humanly possible," requested by @fontainebleau22. Thank you!
Murphy & Miller, ~660 words, modern AU
I reblogged some winter/holiday prompts here, and I'm accepting requests if anyone is interested.
*
"I am going to make the worst secret Santa gift humanly possible," Murphy announces, as he surveys the coffee table, and the mess of crafting supplies he has arrayed upon it.
Miller looks up. He's sitting sideways in the armchair, his legs over the arm. For over an hour now has been so engrossed in his book that he's barely paid any attention to the sounds of Murphy moving, gathering, arranging, dropping, and piling up his hoard of Christmas stuff. When he catches sight of the coffee table now, his eyebrows rise up.
"Is that a threat?"
"It's a declaration of intent," Murphy answers. He's got that glint in his eyes that says he's scheming and proud of it.
Miller just shrugs. "That table looks like an elf threw up on it," he says, and turns back to his book.
"That's the idea." He picks up some scraps of yarn in one hand, and a small canister of round red and green beads in the other. "I want to create something that looks like it came from Christmas Town by way of hell."
"What did your secret Santa giftee ever do to you?" He flips a page. Then glances up one more time. "It's not me, is it?"
"Nathan. Have you forgotten what the word secret means?" He's starting to fold a piece of white paper now, as if to make a snowflake, creasing it hard enough to give himself paper cuts. "This isn't about the giftee, this is about Clarke."
"And her insistence that everyone make their Christmas gift this year?"
"Yeah. She has artistic talent. She is probably going to give her giftee some amazing piece of art that looks like it could hang in a museum and what am I supposed to do? Hmmm? What am I supposed to make?"
"Elf vomit from hell?"
"Exactly." Underneath all the glitter, beads, yarn, paper, felt, tape, and glue is a rectangular cardboard box, not much bigger than a shoe box. Miller can see, out of the corner of his eye, Murphy extract it from beneath the wreckage of every elementary school craft project ever, and eye it warily. His half-finished snowflake has fallen to the floor.
"So your gift's for Clarke?"
"I didn't say that."
"Right."
He returns to his book. From the couch, he can smell the scent of Elmer's glue and hear the rattling of beads, the soft sound of Murphy cursing, and the sharp cutting sound of scissors slicing through paper.
"So what's going in the box?"
"Nothing. The box is the gift."
Miller looks up, tilts his chin down and stares at Murphy as if over the top of invisible glasses. Murphy stops, one garish felt snowman in his hand and the bottle of glue in the other.
"What? It's a beautiful keepsake."
"Don't be a troll."
Not to Clarke.
Murphy just snorts, and for a while afterword, works in a suspiciously uninterrupted silence.
But when Clarke opens the box on Christmas Eve, at the annual friend group holiday exchange—the box that looks like the monstrous reject from an kindergarten art class, so doused in glitter that it's shedding sparkles all over Clarke's hands and festive knitted sweater—she smiles a genuine, sweet smile, and says, "Thank you, Murphy," in a voice softer than Miller's ever heard her use before.
And the next time he sees her, she's wearing the cracked watch case from her father’s wristwatch on a chain around her neck.
"How'd you even get your hands on it, anyway?" he asks Murphy later. "I haven't even seen it since it broke and she stopped wearing it."
Murphy just stares at him, stone-faced, the smallest tic at the corner of his mouth the only indication of a smile. But Miller knows it would be a self-satisfied grin if he would let it. "You're not the only thief around here, Nate," he says.
