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His mama’s red red hair falls like a curtain around him, hides him. His mama’s hair was always long, but now it reaches down to the floor, and he, full grown, can hide himself within.
“Baby,” she says, in the sweetest tones he’s ever heard her use, “will you braid my hair? Like you used to?”
It’s been years since John braided her hair but he slips through the fire-red veil and falls to his knees behind her. It is eerily similar to worship, but that doesn’t stop him. He’s been flagellating himself in her memory for years. His fingers ache, bleeding and sore where his nails used to be, but he can hardly tell where the blood stains her hair, so red. Braiding comes back to him like the proverbial bike, and before long her hair is contained in a single column of twisted rope, but no, not rope, he mustn’t think about ropes or chains or what being flagellated actually feels like.
He comes to the end and looks for a scrap of cloth to secure it with, but they are not in their rooms or even the sky box, or the Ark at all. All around them, clinical fuzzy white, like how he imagined hospitals to look, or heaven. There is nothing but the two of them (again). He looks down at his arms, where the skin is lacerated and hanging loosely, barely a part of himself. It is easy to pull off a strip, to bind her hair with the tattered remains of himself.
He had been doing that for years.
Far, far above him he hears a voice like an echo, calling-screaming-yelling, “Murphy, stop! Murphy, stop!” but there is no one who calls him Murphy here, just him and mama and mama doesn’t even call him John, now. He’s been nameless ever since his daddy died.
It’s hard to tie the scrap of skin, still slippery with his blood, but he manages. It’s long enough for him to tie a bow. “Anything for you.”
“Baby, let me paint your nails.”
When John was very little, mama would steal or trade for paint or ink and paint their nails, cementing it with floor sealant or wax, while daddy shook his head in disapproval. His nails have not been painted in years.
He curls up on her thigh, lets her take his hands one by one. He is already so hurt, he barely notices the cuts she makes, up and down his arms, collecting the blood in her little polish bottle, capped with a little brush and a piece of tape. The blood pours form his body like a fount, and he’s not sure if he’s surprised that there’s that much still in him, or that it took her this long to hurt him tangibly.
She paints the blood onto the places where his nails once were, a new kind of loss. “Mama,” he asks her, woozy and afraid, “did you ever love me?”
She pauses in her painting, considering. She is beautiful, space-pale skin and shiny red hair and eyes so bright and green. There is nothing of her in him. His nails, she said, when he was still so young he fit on her lap and her hair, barely past her shoulders, was like a curtain. His nails would be just like hers.
“I tried, baby. I tried.”
Before him, she is bones, gripping his wrists so tightly he thinks he might scream. He does, maybe, echoing through the void, hurtling past them into the stars. She disintegrates, turning to dust, to ash, amen amen amen, and is swept out of the airlock, gone.
Then, his mother’s voice, fragile like a single thread, whispering, surrounding him, and he can’t breathe. “There’s a darkness in you, baby, that no one can love.”
He is coughing, sputtering, heaving for breaths but there is no air.
The other voice, the voice from before. “No no no, Murphy, don’t do this, c’mon c’mon c’mon.”
He is turned on his side, forcibly, and he can breathe again, coughing out the blood that fills his mouth and drips from his nose.
Bellamy sits back on his heels, heaves deep sighs. “Fucking shit, Murphy.”
He is in the drop ship and he is on fire. His arm is bandaged in a way he doesn’t recall it being before and all his fingertips are bleeding. He’s not sure how much of what he saw was fever dream and how much he enacted on himself. He is covered in sweat or blood, and it is no different than he was at the hands of grounders, except Bellamy is still kneeling next to him and cautiously reaching out to touch him.
“Murphy?” It’s at this point he realizes he is crying, huge sobs breaking from his chest, maybe puffing out the holes in his skin, the gaps between his ribs, instead of where they are supposed to go. “Murphy, what the hell?”
I have a darkness in me that no one can love, he thinks, and then laughs. He wants to hurt the people that hurt them, set them ablaze; he wants to hate his mother; he wants to love himself. Bellamy’s face has gone from confusion to concern, but John is choking on laughter and tears and the taste of his own blood. “You should have let me die,” he says.
“Clarke says people deserve second chances. I think maybe she’s right.”
No, he thinks. She’s wrong. I deserve dark and dust and blood. I deserve as much as my mother gave, or less. I don’t deserve second chances and I don’t deserve this.
“I’m,” Bellamy says, and then pauses, an ellipses, like it’s scripted. “I’m sorry for the part I played in this. Would you give me a second chance, too?”
He assumes Bellamy patched up his arm where he tore at it in his fever, that Bellamy was the one who held his wrists so tight. He hates himself for needing Bellamy, or wanting him, or wanting to feel wanted by him. “Anything for you,” he says, and hopes it sounds sarcastic.
From the cautious smile on Bellamy’s face, he assumes it doesn’t. Bellamy reaches down slow and wipes the tears from his cheeks. The blood on his face stains the tips of Bellamy’s fingers red. Bottle it, John wants to tell him, so you can tear me to pieces later and paint with it on my grave. “Good,” Bellamy says a little more emotionally than he clearly planned. “Good,” again, and reaches out to touch his face.
He resolves to keep this for as long as he can, like he kept his mother alive, like he kept himself alive, like he keeps himself alive. He closes his eyes, exhausted still. He wants to say, “do you love me?” or “will you?” or “could you?” but he knows what the answer will be, because he can’t be loved. He hears the voice, like a memory of things that haven’t happened, even as he drifts off again.
“I tried, baby. I tried.”