A/N: Have some more Memori because they've literally taken over my brain.

Warnings for: soulmate-identifying marks AU, some language (because it's Murphy, okay), mentions of canon-typical discrimination (with regard to Emori's hand.)

Title comes from "Flipside" by Lana del Rey. Also, in case it's not clear, in this AU, soul marks appear when your soulmate does something significant, such as touches you a certain way.

Murphy's soul mark is on his wrist, so hey, it could be worse. At least it's not on his face. He's probably going to die alone out here in the wilderness, like when somebody eventually finds this bunker and kills him for it, but at least he won't go with something written on his forehead like a total fucking idiot.

Her name, Emori, is written in what looks like ink but really isn't, a permanent black smear on the inside of his wrist. He'd only noticed it when he'd stripped out of his filthy clothes and exchanged them for new ones (well, as new as can be when they've been hanging in a closet for a century.) It's just his luck, really, for his soul mark to appear when a girl punches him in the face and leaves him for dead.

He's not as bitter as one might expect, because he'd never really put too much stock in soulmates anyway. The Ark didn't give a shit if you were meant to be, and neither does Earth. People die, people betray you, and in the end, you die, too. It all comes down to how long you manage to put it off.

Every soul mark is slightly different, but Murphy assumes his is fairly standard. It tingles occasionally, but he figures that's his skin adjusting to the change or some shit. He manages to get the ancient shower working (the water smells overwhelmingly of rust, but it runs clean enough after a few minutes) and scrubs at the mark with a cloth, but of course it doesn't come off. The tingling stops, though, so that might have just been an itch due to how dirty he's been for two months straight.

There are cases where soul marks can actually change a person's body chemistry when they show up – supposedly, people can have some kind of mental connection with their soulmate, although that's so rare that Murphy's only ever heard about it in school or in old movies. But because the universe clearly hasn't fucked him over enough, he's the one who hits that lucky jackpot.

It happens for the first time when he's taking a nice nap in the armchair by the TV. His sleep is fairly dreamless, but for some reason, he jerks awake out of nowhere, his pulse pounding like a drumbeat in his ears. When he opens his eyes, all he can see is darkness – no, there's a flashlight in one of his hands, but his hands aren't his hands. One of them is harder to use than it should be – it's wrapped in cloth, almost like it's injured. Or deformed.

Emori, he tries to say, and she hears him even though he makes no sound.

"John?" she says, but then she slips away like water through a sieve as his vision clears. He's still in the bunker, of course. He'd never left – not physically, at least. But the quickness of his heartbeat and the memory of sand under his boots confirms what happened – he'd seen through Emori's eyes, and she's moving like a bat out of hell. Where to, he doesn't know (but something about the way she'd said his name gives him the strange feeling it has something to do with him.)

"Fuck," he says out loud, but the only person around to hear him is the ghost of the dude who'd offed himself on the couch.

If his mark is trying to tell him something by showing him that vision of Emori, Murphy doesn't have a clue what it is. There's miles and a minefield between them, so even if he wanted to help her, he's way too far away. She's on her own, just like he is.

He can't make it back to sleep – he can't shake Emori's feeling of urgency, her need to get somewhere. Unfortunately, there's not much by way of distraction in the bunker except listening to music and reading books, and Murphy's not much of a reader. He can see how somebody might have lost their shit and shot themselves in here, although he has no intention of doing the same.

Hours pass, and nothing strange happens. He chalks it up as a fluke, or a one-time thing, and then of-fucking-course it happens again. He's pouring himself a glass of scotch to enjoy with a sandwich made of 97-year-old dried bread and some kind of meat paste and then suddenly he's not standing at the kitchen counter, he's back in the Dead Zone, staring down at what looks like dismembered body parts partially buried under sand.

Fuck, he thinks, and instinctively tries to step back, but he's not in control here. He thinks she might hear him – he can feel her surprise, or maybe that's his own – but she doesn't say anything back this time. She's nervous. Not about the body parts on the ground, though; those don't seem to bother her much. She's scared because she knows what the body parts mean – she's in a minefield.

What the fuck are you doing, Murphy says. Turn around. Go home.

Maybe she can't actually hear him, or maybe she's ignoring him, because she doesn't turn around and haul ass in the other direction like she should. She reaches into the incredibly heavy pack strapped to her back and pulls out a rod, which she promptly extends into some kind of cane. Murphy watches, trapped, as she starts thumping it lightly on the dirt in front of her, exactly like Jaha had.

If she blows up, he's going to blow up, too, he realizes. That cane isn't long enough. If she hits a mine, it'll probably still kill her. He's lived through this experience before, but it's worse now, because he's going to have to feel her die and wake up afterwards –

Don't fucking die, he thinks, and for good measure, please.

It's a familiar agony, watching her tap, tap, tap, taking one step at a time. Murphy wakes up slowly this time, Emori's presence fading away until suddenly he is standing in the kitchen again. There is blood on the counter. He's broken the glass in his fist and there's a cut running down the side of his index finger. It hurts like hell and he wonders if maybe, miles away, Emori can feel the sting.

(While he's rinsing the cut a few moments later, he wonders if he'll still feel her die, even if he doesn't have to watch.)

No more visions seem immediately forthcoming, so Murphy takes a few moments to assess the situation (which unfortunately sounds a lot like something Bellamy would say.) Emori is clearly on her way to what she thinks is the City of Light, possibly to find him. He has no idea how she'd known about the landmines, unless of course this freaky bond of theirs goes both ways and she'd seen it coming. But if that's the case, why is she bothering to come when there's no City of Light waiting for her?

If Emori somehow makes it here without stepping on a bomb or getting eaten by a sea monster, he doesn't know what she hopes to accomplish. All he can do, really, is sit here and wait to find out.

Murphy keeps falling in and out of Emori's mind all day, and finally he notices a pattern; any time she's feeling particularly tense, he's there. When she calms down, it's like an invisible hand drags him back to himself. He spends the day like he's in the minefield all over again, waiting for Emori to take a wrong step and give him a taste of what death feels like.

I'm not worth dying for, he tells her once, even though he still hasn't figured out how to make her hear him again. Turn back while you still can.

Emori must eventually stop for the night, because Murphy is finally able to get some rest without any visions. Even then, though, he dreams of her, and the steady look in her eyes as she'd said, "Good luck, John." He wakes feeling odd; her betrayal still stings, but he's still never liked his given name more than from her lips.

It's been too long without an update on her condition – and fuck, now he's actually invested – but Murphy has no way to tell whether she's dead or asleep or just safe. Feeling incredibly stupid, he takes a seat in the armchair and closes his eyes as if meditating, and just thinks really hard. First he tries visualizing where she might be, but while she seems to be following his path through the Dead Zone, she could be anywhere – still in the minefield, even. Next he tries picturing her face, warm brown eyes and the swirling designs tattooed from her forehead down to her cheek, and when that doesn't work, he thinks, fuck, come on, Emori.

Just like that he's blinded by sunlight, but a second later Emori raises her bandaged hand and covers her eyes, muttering under her breath in her language. She's reached the solar panels, and while she doesn't seem surprised by their presence, she clearly doesn't trust them. She looks up, searching the sky, but unlike when Murphy had been there only days before, no drone shows up to lead the way. After a minute or two, Emori squares her shoulders and starts walking again, giving the humming panels a fairly wide berth.

He stays with her until she reaches the sea, remaining silent and holding tight to the connection he's forged, sure that if he relaxes he'll lose her again. There is no boat waiting for her on the shore, but she doesn't take it as the "abandon all hope, ye who enter here" sign that it clearly is. Instead, she looks up and down the coastline as if contemplating something, then picks a direction seemingly at random and starts walking. It takes her at least an hour, but finally she stumbles upon something useful – an abandoned raft, barely big enough for one person to lay down comfortably. It must have been left behind fairly recently, because Emori inspects the wood and finds it not badly rotted.

While Murphy observes, powerless in the back of Emori's head, she lifts the raft and drags it to the water's edge. She seems more and more nervous the closer she gets to the waterline, but never once does she hesitate. Murphy doubts she's that good of a swimmer – she can't possibly have been exposed to much water in a desert wasteland – but then again, he grew up in space, so she's probably better off than he is in that department. There's also the possibility that she'd been watching from inside his head and knows about the demonic sea monster waiting to eat her, in which case she is either incredibly brave or totally insane. (Possibly both.)

Murphy's fairly certain that the raft isn't going to hold her weight without sinking, but surprisingly, it floats. She doesn't have anything to row with, although she figures out how to awkwardly steer with the cane she'd used in the minefield, but the raft is light enough that she can use her hands to propel it. She must know about the monster, then, because she's very careful to make as little splash as possible.

She drifts along in silence, and if it weren't for the fact that he's watching the entire thing through her eyes and waiting for something to come up out of the depths and swallow them both whole, it could be peaceful. A couple of blindingly white birds – seagulls, Murphy thinks, remembering a picture from one of his mostly ignored childhood textbooks – fly past overhead, and Emori watches them go with interest, clearly not recognizing them. He can't see her smile but he can feel it, and it's nice. Weird, but nice. He wishes he knew more about seagulls, so he could tell her if she ever makes it to the shore uneaten.

The sun is getting very low in the sky when Emori spots the lighthouse in the distance, and it spurs her on. Distantly, Murphy is aware that his body is hungry and tired, but because he's not exactly present at the moment, the discomfort is bearable. He can't leave Emori now, because she's making more noise, her quicker paddling causing water to slosh gently but noticeably against the raft. If she isn't careful, she's going to draw that thing's attention, and then it'll be the end of the game for her. There's no way she'll survive on nothing but a tiny raft, still too far from the safety of the beach.

It seems to take Emori eons, but finally, the beach is close enough to see, and Murphy dares to let himself hope that she might make it unscathed. Then something makes a quiet splash near her raft, and Murphy thinks, game over.

Every muscle in Emori's body tenses, and she pulls her hands out of the water immediately, her gaze searching the sea's rippling surface for signs of trouble. She barely catches sight of something glinting in the water – the monster's skin, maybe, or teeth – before it starts moving toward her like a speeding bullet. But Emori is fast, too, and she reaches back and yanks something out of her pack. It's the rocket launcher that her friend on the horse had been holding back in the Dead Zone – well, that explains why her pack's been so heavy.

The monster swims under her first, rocking the raft so violently that it is an honest to God fucking miracle that Emori stays on it. She doesn't scream, but she does yell something at the monster that Murphy figures is a curse word, even if he doesn't speak Grounder. The monster rolls in the water, turning its massive body around for another go, and Emori lifts the heavy gun and fires.

She hits the thing, alright, but she doesn't shoot it dead. The blast from the rocket and the monster's thrashing, wounded body send Emori flying off the raft and into the reddening water, which is so cold that it hits Murphy like a slap in the face and jolts him back into his own body.

"No," he says, half-wild, his heart pounding as fast as Emori's had been seconds before. "Fuck."

Murphy doesn't even think about it, he just scrambles out of the chair and bolts for the door. She isn't far from the shore, not far at all; she can still swim, or maybe the waves will pull her in – fuck, he doesn't know, but he can't sit here and wait any longer.

"Emori!" he yells when he reaches the beach. He can't see her anywhere, and there's no answering shout. Still, there's no doubt miles and miles of coastline, and she hadn't been aiming directly at the lighthouse. Just because she hasn't washed up at his front door doesn't mean the worst has happened.

He tries connecting with her again and again as he walks along the water's edge, but either she's dead or he can't reach her. He calls her name for hours, until it's too dark to see farther than ten feet in front of him and his stomach is starting to cramp from consuming literally nothing all day. Murphy returns to the bunker and scarfs down something to eat before falling into a restless sleep, wherein he dreams of water as cold and dark as outer space.

The next morning he wakes up shivering and with a crick in his neck, but he shrugs on his jacket and leaves the bunker again, taking a piece of bread to eat while he looks for Emori. Murphy knows, with a hollow finality, that she's probably dead by now if he hasn't seen into her mind after this long. Hopefully the monster had killed her quickly, though his dreams the night before had been so vivid that perhaps they'd been real, and maybe he'd felt her sinking to the bottom of the sea. No matter what, she's come too far for him to just let her rot on the beach; he'll bury her, if there's anything washed up to bury.

He walks down the beach until the sun is high in the sky, yelling her name every once in a while, albeit more quietly and less urgently than he had the night before. He's just about to turn around and head back, maybe to head past the bunker a ways in the opposite direction in case a current had pulled her in a different direction, when he calls her name one last time. "Emori!"

It's so quiet that he thinks, perhaps, that he is hallucinating. "John?"

Murphy spins around in a circle, gaze roving, and then he sees her, sitting up in some bushes at the tree line. He runs to her and drops to his knees on the ground next to her. She's covered in sand from head to toe and her clothes are stained and stiff with dried blood, but she's alive. "Are you alright?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says, staring up at him and looking just as stunned as he feels. "You're alive."

He blinks at her, nonplused. "Uh," he says. "Yeah."

She shakes her head as if to clear it, but it doesn't look like it works. "I was sure," she insists. "I was sure you were dead."

"Well, I hate to disappoint," Murphy says, and she gives a hoarse bark of laughter. He's slightly surprised by the warm feeling the sound sparks in his chest; he thought he'd still be pissed off at her if she actually made it here, but mostly he's just relieved that she's not fish food. Her surety about him being dead does raise a few questions, though. "If you thought I was dead, why did you come here? Actually, how did you even know where I was?"

"I saw it," she says, staring at him like she still can't really believe he's alive. "In my head. I watched you crossing the Dead Zone, then the sea. The last thing I saw was when your friend left you bleeding on the beach."

His friend. Murphy suddenly realizes he has no way to know if Jaha's still alive or not; he's so used to being left behind that he'd taken Jaha's promise to return for him as an empty one and hasn't considered it since. "It was just a flesh wound," Murphy says dryly, lifting his sleeve to show her where he's wrapped the wound in cloth. He hasn't paid much attention to the injury since the last time he'd bandaged it, and the fabric is stained a rosy pink. "That still doesn't explain why you bothered to come."

The astonishment is slowly fading from her expression, and now she's giving him a rather serious look. "There are rituals to perform when a soulmate dies," she says, as if he ought to know this. "The mark is sacred and it has to be honored when death comes, even if – even if the soulmates aren't together at the time."

He stares back at her. "Oh," he says. "Guess we ditched that tradition in orbit."

This joke falls flat, possibly because Emori doesn't really get it (and Murphy sure as shit can't explain any science to her, so he just lets it go.) "Even in the Dead Zone, most people respect the bond. It isn't important to your people?" she asks, confused.

"Not really," Murphy says, looking down at his wrist, where her name stands out starkly against his skin. "It's just a mark."

Emori's face is carefully blank, but he thinks maybe there's a hint of disappointment in her eyes when he looks back up at her. "Oh," she says. "I see."

"But I think it's cool," he says quickly, but honestly. "You were willing to come all this way to honor my death. Even though I'm not sure how you would have done it if I'd gotten eaten by that hellspawn out there."

She laughs a little at that, averting her eyes, and he says sincerely, "No, seriously. Nobody on this planet would give a shit if I got eaten by Godzilla's cousin, but you would."

Her smile softens into something a little shy and she meets his eyes, and honestly, if she keeps looking at him like that, Murphy's willing to forget the whole "she robbed me at knifepoint and left me for dead" thing happened. "I would," she agrees. This is followed by, "What does 'Godzilla' mean?"

"Oh," Murphy says. "It's a really old movie. But it's also this giant lizard that causes a shit-ton of property damage and kills a bunch of people."

Emori just stares at him, then repeats, "A giant lizard?"

"I was making a comparison," Murphy says, exasperated, and Emori grins at him, suddenly and beautifully. Despite himself, Murphy grins back.

It's kind of uncomfortable kneeling over her in the bushes like this, but he has more questions to ask. "So, what happens now?" he asks. "Are you going to go back to the Dead Zone now that I'm alive and kicking?"

Emori's smile fades. "I can't," she says. "At least, not right away. My older brother – Otan – he didn't want me to leave. I had to sneak away in the night. He's going to be very angry with me if I return."

So that explains why his first link with Emori had happened while she'd been running through the Dead Zone in the middle of the night. "You ditched your brother to come find my rotting corpse?" he asks, dumbfounded. "Shit. That's dedication."

She's blushing, but she sets her jaw and meets his gaze straight-on. "People like me aren't supposed to have soulmates," she says, lifting her hand – the one that makes her "different." She's lost her mitten at some point, but Murphy's attention is drawn to her wrist, where John is forever branded on her skin. "I had to do what I could for you, especially after the way I left you."

It's not quite an apology, but then again, Emori is like everybody else on the ground – just trying to survive. She can't apologize for the way the ground has forced her to live, and Murphy understands that part of her a little better now. Still, there's a note of remorse in her voice.

"I get it," he says. "People like me aren't supposed to have soulmates, either."

She looks pensive. "And yet we have the rarest bond of all," she muses. "I thought I heard your voice once. You said my name. Were you really there?"

"Yeah," he says. "I was shouting in the back of your head about what an idiot you were for following me – no offense – but I guess that time I got lucky and you heard me."

"You had plenty of reason to think I was being an idiot," she concedes. "I probably was."

"But a brave one," he says. "And I can respect that."

Emori smiles. "Maybe we can work on understanding our bond together," she suggests. "We might be able to speak to each other, with a little practice."

"Yeah," Murphy agrees quickly. "We can do that. I have a place to stay and I'm willing to share."

She eyes his relatively clean clothing – it's actually the least prissy stuff he could find in the bunker, but still, he looks like a total asshole – and says, "I figured you must have found yourself a place to stay."

"It can be ours," Murphy offers. "If you want it to be."

"Sure," she says, and he doesn't miss the way her cheeks have gone pink again. He finds it weirdly endearing.

"So," he asks, eager to get moving. The fact that she is covered in dried blood and probably injured is not lost on him. "Where are you hurt? Can you walk?"

She looks at him, befuddled, then glances down at her clothing. "Oh," she says, realization dawning on her. "Oh, no. This isn't my blood, John."

If there has to be a girl he's meant to be with, Murphy decides as he leans in and kisses her right then and there, he's pretty fucking glad it's this one.