Road Music
In which Murphy goes on a road trip of self-discovery, following directions shoved in his cup holder in the hopes of undoing what he’s done.
Inspired by an excerpt of Siken’s “Road Music” sent to me by @emorireyes . Hopefully the length of this makes up for the length of time I spent on it.
And, as always, much love to @bombshellsandbluebells who sends me reaction GIFs and wonderful messages and also edits really darn well. <3
Also on Ao3.
1. The eye stretches to the horizon and then must continue up. Anything past the horizon is invisible, it can only be imagined. You want to see the future but you only see the sky. Fluffy clouds. Look—white fluffy clouds. Looking back is easy for a while and then looking back gets murky. There is the road, and there is the story of where the road goes, and then more road, the roar of the freeway, the roar of the city sheening across the city. There should be a place. At the rest stop, in the restaurant, the overpass, the water’s edge…
Murphy won’t tell her where they’re going.
Granted, it was probably her own fault for not asking a couple more questions when he showed up at her apartment at 6 in the morning with a duffel bag and a list of oddly specific, seemingly nonsensical directions. She didn’t ask, though; she got dressed, packed a bag and put on her brace while he stood in her living room, staring at the ancient pictures on her wall.
Now that they’re three hours and nearly 250 miles down an abandoned stretch of highway, she asks, “What are we doing, J?”
“Driving,” he says.
“Obviously. But why?”
He doesn’t answer. He looks down at the napkin spread over his lap. When Raven squints, she sees directions printed in a careful hand. It’s not Murphy’s writing, and it’s not anyone else’s she recognizes.
“Where’s this taking us?”
He doesn’t answer. She can tell by the look in his eyes that he’s gone somewhere else in his head. She leans back in the passenger seat and waits.
She’s beautiful with a split lip and bloody nose. “Damn it, John, you couldn’t have waited another second?”
Murphy passes her a rag for her mouth. “You would’ve gotten killed!”
“I had it handled,” she says with a bloody grin. “You were just scared.”
He shrugs. “Maybe so.”
She smiles again, her soft eyes sharp against the rest of her vicious visage. “Come on.” She grabs his hand. “Let’s go.”
She pulls him along through a maze of alleyways, their pavement shiny from the spring rain, and to the overpass where cars race below at a dizzying speed.
He sits beside her and passes her the bottle of whiskey he’d swiped from the bar during Emori’s first fight. “I knew you loved me,” she crows.
“The alcohol’s what clued you in?” he asks, pressing a kiss to the side of her head. Back there, in the gaps between the skyscrapers, she has to hate him, and he has to avoid her. Here, away from the loud city, he can love her, and she can chose him. It’s nice, consequences be damned.
“That, among other things.” She kisses him. He tastes blood and sweat, salt and tears. When he opens his mouth to her, she lets out a low sound that sends shivers down his spine.
“Love you, John,” she murmurs against his lips. She pulls away and grins, taking a swig straight from the bottle, then passing it to him.
“Um, where the hell are we?” Raven asks, slamming the car door shut and jogging to Murphy’s side. He’s standing in front of an old brick wall with a brown metal security door and a single flickering light that doesn’t do much to ward off the shadows.
“Stay here,” he says, yanking on the handle until the door flails open with a scream of protest and slams against the wall, so hard Raven’s shocked the handle doesn’t dent the brick.
She counts to 20, then follows him. She’s not sure if she’s truly walking silently, or if he’s just too preoccupied to hear her, but he never once notices her presence as she weaves her way around dusty chairs and trash-ridden tables. He’s standing on a low, uneven stage, his feet leaving prints in the dust.
They lock eyes from across the room. He says nothing, only hops down after a long moment and pushes past her, back through the door and the cold back corridor.
They drive another 50 miles or so, weaving through cramped city streets that spit them out onto the highway. He pulls over at a rest stop, which is really nothing more than a collection of cramped, deteriorating brick buildings: two bathrooms, a storage shed and something that might have been a picnic shelter once, before the weeds took over.
He walks to the edge of the woods, and Raven follows, mostly because she knows it might annoy Murphy out of his silence, but also because she doesn’t quite trust that he knows what he’s doing. The memory of him sitting on the floor in front of his mother’s worn green couch with a gun against his chin and tears in his eyes is still too fresh for her taste.
He hadn’t spoken to her then, either.
“Murphy.” Her voice is loud against a backdrop of cicada screams and road noise filtering in through the trees. “J. What are we doing here?”
He doesn’t answer. Raven contemplates putting her foot down and refusing to budge an inch until he gives her some answers, but she knows he won’t hesitate to leave her behind. Plus, the scientist in her is curious about why they’re on this spontaneous adventure when Murphy hates both spontaneity and adventure; he once told Raven he needed at least 48 hours in advance to change his plans, even if his plans were to do nothing.
He tilts his head back and looks up at the sky. There are no stars, but Raven can see the moon.
“There should be more,” Murphy murmurs. “More than this.”
“What?”
He shakes his head. When he looks down, Raven can see tears in his eyes. “Nothing. Let’s go.”
It hasn’t occurred to Raven to be worried about her best friend, but as she watches his slim hands white-knuckle the wheel of his shitty car, she starts to be concerned. The tears never fall, but they’re there, resting on the edge of his lashes.
And then, she realizes. Or rather, she remembers. The memory feels like a faded photograph, blurry around the edges and fuzzy everywhere else, but she can see enough to know what Murphy’s thinking of.
“This is about her, isn’t it?” she asks quietly.
Murphy sniffs, nods. “About time you figured it out.”
She ignores the derisive tone of his voice. “J, it’s been three years.”
“I know,” he snaps. “But I can’t… I can’t let it go.”
“Murphy.”
He shakes his head. A tear spills over. “Don’t. Please. Just don’t.”
Raven shuts up and lets him drive.
2. He was not dead yet, not exactly— parts of him were dead already, certainly other parts were still only waiting for something to happen, something grand, but it isn’t always about me, he keeps saying, though he’s talking about the only heart he knows— He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There’s a niche in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place— well then, game over.
Raven falls asleep somewhere between midnight and dawn. Murphy envies her, but he can’t sleep. He keeps thinking about her, about her voice and the sound of her laugh and the soft way she sighed when he held her after a nightmare.
That’s why he’s doing this. He doesn’t know what to expect - a grave or a living girl - but he knows there’s a high chance she won’t be glad to see him.
He doesn’t blame her.
“Why are we doing this?” she asks, leaning against the doorway, watching him get dressed. “Why are we fighting?”
He doesn’t face her, doesn’t answer. He focuses on straightening his collar instead. Damn this new job that makes him care about his appearance. But it’s the price he pays for going straight, the price he pays for being able to be seen with the woman he loves.
“John.” Her voice is soft. When he turns to look at her, he sees her twisting the ring that hangs from a chain around her neck. His hand subconsciously moves to the matching one on his left hand. “John, what are we doing?”
He sighs. “Emori…”
“No.” She shakes her head. “I love you, but I won’t let you wall yourself off from me like this.” She holds up the ring. “How can we be a team when you won’t tell me what’s going on? How can we work together when you put a wedge between us.”
He doesn’t have an answer. What else is new.
She steps closer and folds down his collar with clumsy hands. He feels the heat radiating off her. He hates it, but it forces him to stand still.
“Are you going to be okay?” he asks when she moves back. He wants to kiss her on the forehead, wants to apologize for all the hateful things he said last night - things he should have known better than to ever let leave his mouth.
She nods. A glimmer of mischief brightens her eyes. Her cheeks, ruddy from days spent working in the hot summer sun, stretch as she smiles. “I’ll see you tonight.”
He kisses her quickly, a peck on the lips, and ignores her sound of protest when he doesn’t deepen it. She doesn’t follow him to the door.
He’s tried to forget her. It hasn’t worked, and he hates himself for it because he could pull his heart from his chest, but he can’t make himself remove the ring from his finger.
The sun breaks over the horizon, and with it comes the city, sprawling out in the distance, bright and lonely in the wide expanse of sky. Murphy pulls over on the side of the road at the top of a hill and watches the sun coming up. When Raven wakes up, muttering unintelligibly and squinting into the sun, he pretends her dark head on his shoulder belongs to someone else.
They stop at another rest stop so he can wash up and Raven can get some shitty vending machine coffee for the two of them. She gives him a ‘where-next?’ look that he doesn’t acknowledge, choosing instead to peel out onto the highway and roar toward the skyscrapers.
He wonders if she still has her warehouse job. He wonders if Anya makes her talk about her feelings or if she’s spent the past few years alone. He even dares to consider that she’s thrown her ring away.
Raven turns on the radio. He figured she would, figured she’d be bored of the silence, but that doesn’t mean he likes it. Twice, he shuts it off. Three times, she switches it back on.
This time, they don’t stop at the city. The directions scrawled on an old napkin don’t tell him to slow down, so he doesn’t.
“Murphy,” Raven starts as they swerve past the freeway exit and head down an old dirt road. “Do you know where you’re going?”
They pass a graveyard. He knows where they are now. His stomach knots in dread. There are tears gathering in his eyes and at the back of his throat. He doesn’t pay them any mind. He can’t afford to.
“Yep,” he says shortly. Raven raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t comment. She does, however, snatch his direction-filled napkin from his lap, peering at it in curiosity and confusion. “Where is this taking you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m gonna be buried here someday,” she tells him nonchalantly, balancing on the fence post while he hikes himself up to sit on the top rail. “This is where people go when no one wants them.”
“Don’t think like that,” he says. She stands on one foot, then the other. Her hair whips around her face and sticks to her chapped lips.
Damn, she’s beautiful, he thinks.
“You’d bury me somewhere nice,” she continues, “but we both know you’ll die first.”
“Oh?” he asks, cocking an eyebrow at her.
“Between your fucked-up liver and your hatred of food, I’m hedging my bets on that.”
Murphy snorts. She grins that beautiful smile he’s come to know as well as his and plops down beside him.
“We’re not going to live much longer, are we?” she asks. She sounds mournful, and Murphy doesn’t blame her. Between her dead brother and his shitty mother, it’s a wonder they’ve made it this far. But it comes at a cost, like all things do; she lost her agency, and he lost his body. But at least they found each other.
He passes a knuckle over the scar under her eye. “I’ll live as long as you tell me to.”
“I want you to live forever,” she retorts, leaning into his touch.
“As long as it’s with you.”
She grimaces. “Sap.”
He smiles, leans forward to kiss her. She tastes like the dirt road and a lost bar fight. “Love you.”
She leans her forehead against his shoulder. “Love you too.”
He barely manages to pull over before he’s flinging the door open and dry heaving onto the dirt, the memory twisting his gut into painful knots.
“J!” Raven reaches for him, then pulls back. “Murphy, what is it?”
He doesn’t realize he’s sobbing until he tries to speak. “I need her,” he chokes out. “Raven, I fucked everything up. I fucked it up so long ago, what if-”
“Hey, shhh,” Raven tries to soothe him, but it’s clear she doesn’t know what to do in the face of his sudden outburst of emotion.
He gasps himself to some state of calm, and then Raven speaks again. “Is that what we’re doing? Finding her?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.” He holds up the near-ruined napkin. “This was shoved in my cup holder last week. I don’t know whose writing it is, but these are all places she and I went.”
Raven frowns. He tries to focus on her clever eyes, but he fails. They’re the wrong shade of brown anyway. “You do realize how insane this is, right? That someone broke into your car to leave you this, and now you’re actually following the directions.”
He nods. “I don’t care.” He wipes his mouth and eyes with the back of his hand and closes the door. “I need to know what’s at the end.”
Raven sighs. Murphy entertains the irrational fear that she’s going to leave him, which is absurd since they’re hundreds of miles away from home. He’s been alive for nearly twenty-five years, and he’s been terrified of being alone for more than half of them. The closest he’s ever felt to safe is this.
“Okay,” Raven says. Murphy shuts the door. “Let’s go.”
3. You wonder what he’s thinking when he shivers like that. What can you tell me, what could you possibly tell me? Sure, it’s good to feel things, and if it hurts, we’re doing it to ourselves, or so the saying goes, but there should be a different music here. There should be just one safe place in the world, I mean this world. People get hurt here. People fall down and stay down and I don’t like the way the song goes. You, the moon. You, the road. You, the little flowers by the side of the road. You keep singing along to that song I hate. Stop singing.
There was a time when Emori thought John’s apartment was the only safe place in the world for her.
She plays with the chain around her neck and thinks about him, about his eyes and deft fingers and the way he smiled at her after a fight. She remembers the relief on his face when it was her coming into the bedroom and not someone else. She remembers the joy on his face in the courthouse, outside the church.
“You up?” Anya yells from outside the door, interrupting her thoughts.
“Yeah!” Emori shouts back. After a moment, she opens the door. Anya stands there, hands on her hips. “What? I’m not late.”
Anya raises an eyebrow at her tone but says nothing. She leaves, and Emori watches her go, standing in the doorway to her room, shivering against the rough wood. There’s a restless energy under her skin that won’t stop buzzing. She wants to rip it all to shreds, starting with her bad hand and working up, up, up until it all just-
Stops.
“What now, John?” she snaps. The nausea makes her angry. The fear makes her lightheaded. “What’s your fucking problem?”
He stands up, hands balled into fists. She doesn’t flinch - she knows he won’t hit her - but he’s ruined nonetheless. His face is twisted into the all-too-familiar look of self-hatred.
“You can’t even tell me why,” she whispers. “You can’t even tell me why,” she says.
He runs a hand through his hair. It sticks up at all angles. She tries not to find it cute. “Damn it, Emori-”
“No!” she shouts. “You can’t throw this away just because you’re scared! You picked me! You chose me! You signed a certificate and made a promise that you wouldn’t leave me! So don’t fucking lie to me and say that you want to be done!”
“I didn’t say that!”
She laughs, wrapping her arms around her torso. Her stomach shivers. “You’re sure acting like it.”
John stares at her. “Is that what you think?”
“This is what you always do,” she points out. “You cut and run when you’re afraid of what you’ll do, of losing this. I’m changing, John. We’re changing. And you need to catch up or be left behind.”
He makes his choice. She tries not to regret it when he moves out. She tries to hold firm when he moves back in, and she moves in with Raven. She nearly forgets when Raven moves out and Anya moves in, but it comes roaring back every so often and nearly chokes her every day.
There’s a knock at the door, a scuffle of feet on the porch that Emori can hear clearly thanks to the open windows throughout the house. Her heart leaps into her throat. She feels ink and a coarse napkin under her hands. She tastes blood and whiskey and kisses.
“Emori?” Anya shouts upstairs. Her voice is full of questions. “There’s someone here for you.”
She’s halfway down the stairs before Anya can finish saying her name.
His name dies on her lips the moment she sees him. He looks like hell, looks like thousands of miles of dirt road, hangovers and nights crying into a shitty mattress on a dirty apartment floor.
“Emori?”
She told herself if he ever came, she’d make him apologize - make him ask for her to come home.
“John.”
She told herself she wouldn’t let him touch her.
“I’m so sorry, Mori.”
She told herself she wouldn’t run to him.
“It’s okay.”
She can’t move. She can’t breathe. Anya’s looking at her as if to say want me to kick him off my porch?
“No, it’s not, I-”
Anya moves aside, out of the doorway, and Emori flies into his arms so quickly she startles herself. He wraps his arms tightly around her shoulders and holds on with trembling hands.
“I’m sorry, Emori, I’m so sorry,” he says into her neck. He’s crying a little, and so is she, but she tries to keep it together enough to remember how it feels to bury her head in his chest.
“It’s okay.” She rubs his back with her good hand. “Shh, John, it’s okay.”
She can’t help it. She sees his car, and she can’t help it.
“What are you doing?” Anya asks. They’re only in town for a few hours, and only because Lexa lives here, just blocks from John’s - their - place.
Emori kneels by the shitty red Oldsmobile and wiggles the handle. It pops open. Before she can second-guess herself, she stuffs the napkin in the cupholder.
She shouldn’t have spent the whole drive working on it. She shouldn’t have taken him to every place that would make him miss her. But she did. She does. She closes the door and prays.
“You could just call him,” Anya says.
Emori shakes her head. “I want him to find me.” She smiles. “We always did like driving.”