1 + 2 | EMBERS TO FIRESTORM | THE 100 | JOHN MURPHY

FOUR

F O U R

Althea liked to sit at the edge of camp with her back resting against a tree, her eyes closed and crows squawking up above. Every now and then she would mutter to them with a sad smile "We're all going to die down here. You, me and everyone."

In response, they'd screech but Althea didn't care.

She only cared when Bellamy Blake strode over to her and shook her shoulder. "Wake up," He commands as if he were he ruler of the ground already. She saw no king, she saw no ruler. All she saw was what was beneath the hard exterior. A coward pretending to be a man.

"I wasn't sleeping," She says lightly, her voice floating and mirroring a song. Her tone of voice irritated him. He yanked her to her feet in one, strong movement. Devoid of care, she smiled again. "What do you need me to do, Bellamy Blake?"

He didn't know how she knew his name, but he didn't want to care. "You can help Murphy collect water. He does love a bit of human company, he's the friendliest kid you'll ever meet down here."

"Everyone down here is a criminal," Althea responds simply. He lets go of her black jacket and steps away, unnerved by the ghostly smile and her dead, empty eyes.

"Murphy is waiting," He tells her before sauntering off to command someone who cared more about what he had to say. It was like everything he said to her drifted irrelevantly. She made him feel like a waste of space with her eyes and he hated that.

Althea watched him leave with the attitude in his walk that made her chuckle to herself as she pushes herself away from the trees.

The boy, who she could only assume was Murphy, was stood with a permanent expression of anger waiting for her. She walked up to him, her feet light on the ground. He turned to face her as soon as the sound of her approach reached his ears.

She analysed him quicker than he could blink. His eyes were dark and filled with a kind of emptiness similar to her own. His hair was not well looked after and his lips were pulled into a snarl as he looked her over. She knew he was about to snap. Instead, she cut in. "We should go and get that water."

"We could have already been and gotten back, but you took your sweet time getting here," He grumbles as they begin to walk into the forest.

She holds her bucket firmly in both hands as they trek through the forest, stepping over fallen logs and ducking under clawing branches.

They'd been walking in silence, but Murphy had been watching her darting eyes and her tapping fingers. Now, he broke the silence. "I've never seen you before," He says. She knew he was going to be rude.

"We were locked in cells, Murphy," She points out, her lips pulling into a slight smile. "Of course you haven't seen me before." She looks back at him with that smile on her lips that made him want to hit it right off, but also with those eyes that never shone and her cheeks that never tinted. He saw her as beautifully empty.

Now he could see the bruise and cut on her lip and he wanted to ask her where it came from, but he didn't even know her name.

She was captivating, but if you looked at her too long you saw every single one of her flaws. Just what she didn't want to happen. Althea saw his roaming eyes and turned her head away, her hair fanning out. Her finger reaches up to scrape the stray hair behind her ear once more.

"You could at least introduce yourself seeing as you know my name, but I don't know yours," Murphy says, his interest apparent.

"Althea Barnes," She replies shortly and with a sudden coldness creeping into her voice.

They walked the rest of the distance in silence, glancing at one another when they thought the other wasn't watching and just trying to figure each other out piece by piece. But, she was an incomplete puzzle to begin with and him, he was a puzzle with a thousand pieces that just didn't seem to fit.