VIOLENT DELIGHTS¹ ━━ John Murphy

𝖛𝖎. Dyadic

𝖉𝖞𝖆𝖉𝖎𝖈

          AZGEDA is colder than Glass remembered. There is ice and there is snow. There is the Queen.

But there is no John Murphy.

She replays their last conversation over and over and over. Only this time, she doesn't say the wrong things.

Sometimes she's even on her knees, begging him to stay.

⚔️

THE DESERT, as John Murphy has come to find out, is a sea of seething sunbeams and sands suffocating with sorrow.

Heat rages. The skies scream with cerulean heat and the sun scorches overhead. Everything about this place seems to be determined to make Murphy as miserable as possible right before killing him off completely. How many people has he seen die already? He can't keep track anymore. Though keeping count would be kind of sick, wouldn't it?

Glass probably kept count, he thinks sadistically. Fucking psychopath.

He hates her. Really, he does.

That night they spent together keeps coming back, as much as he pushes it away. It can't be healthy. But he'd thought briefly that they'd had a chance. Thought. He doesn't know what to think anymore. All he knows is that he'd rather think of anyone but her.

Well. Her and Jaha. But whatever.

They never would have worked. Him and Glass. Glass and John Murphy. Once upon a time, back on the Ark, Murphy heard something about a theory of multiverses, how there's a galaxy for each and every possibility. Even with that, he still doesn't think it would have happened. Nothing about them has ever been compatible. Him, a boy from the stars, and her, a girl stuck on the ground.

John Murphy and Glass.

Glass and John Murphy.

But fuck, he'd lived and died for those secret moments, spent on stolen and borrowed time.

     Sometimes Glass had felt like a girl he could love. Like, really, really love. Yet that was the problem. Girls like Glass — gods like Glass — aren't meant for human things like love.

     After all, how could something so divine and otherworldly, born to rattle the stars, ever grow to care for him? He is nothing to her. He always was. He was an idiot for forgetting.

Even the shape of her name spells out pain, yet when he'd uttered Finn's name during that fight, he'd closed his fist around something delicate inside of her. And that delicate bit of her shattered. He hurt her. He'd wanted to, though. To do to her what she'd just done to him, the way she'd destroyed him with so few words.

Only he had never expected the fragments of glass to cut them both so deep.

Then again, isn't love what you bleed?

Fuck this, Murphy thinks.

Fuck.

This.

⚔️

SWEAT pours down her face in rivulets. Grunting, Glass thrusts the borrowed short-sword back and forth, up and down. Parrying, cutting, fading. False edges and advances, shedding and deflecting. More defensive than offensive.