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whumpshaped · 3 months

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tw addiction whump, alcohol, past trauma, pet whump, rocky recovery, flashbacks, emeto, paranoia, self-blame, self-deprecation, dehumanisation

Once Whumpee had gotten out and was allowed to make their own decisions again, they decided it would be prudent to make as many bad ones in as short a time frame as humanly possible. Their first trip out of the hospital had brought them straight to the liquor store, and they bought as much alcohol as their court settlement could pay for. They wanted nothing but to forget. Forget the trial, forget their captivity, forget…

Sit pretty for me. There you go, good boy. Aren’t you a good little pet?

They swallowed and threw the money on the counter, then grabbed their beverages and left without a word. They didn’t give the cashier enough time to recognise them from the news.

The bottles kept clinking together quite obnoxiously as Whumpee struggled to bring all of them up the stairs to their apartment. They clinked even more as they tried to put them down one by one without breaking any so they could fish their key out of their pocket. They groaned when they realised they would have to repeat the whole thing again; pick up the bottles one by one, bring them inside, push the door closed with their hip, put them down one by one, lock the door.

They stared at the collection of all the different beverages they had laid out in front of them. Vodka, gin, whiskey, whatever they could find on the shelves, they’d bought. They had no idea what they liked. They doubted they liked any of it.

Whumpee glanced towards the window, shame immediately rising in their chest. What if someone saw them? Would the people judge them? Would the knowledge of their trauma make it worse in their mind or better? Would they accept them as just another failure of society, someone who had been too weak to handle the hand life had dealt them? Or would they scream and shout about the unfairness, the fact that someone as useless as them had been given such a large sum of money, only so they could blow it on substances?

They stepped up to the window and hastily closed the blinds. Nobody would see them like this. Not now, not ever.

Whumpee’s resolution to avoid others whenever they were wasted had crumbled in the first few days, because they’d thought it appropriate to go out and try to make friends. They had been so desperately lonely.

They’d woken up one day on a public bench, being watched over by a stranger. They had excused themself and rushed home, drowning out the memory with more alcohol right after having thrown up the last of the previous day’s shots.

But it seemed like their drunk mind wanted nothing but the tentative familiarity of that chance meeting to be repeated over and over again, because they found themself back on the bench every other day. Caretaker — as the stranger had introduced themself — was always kind to them, and always made sure no one else bothered them on their leisurely strolls. They were… different, odd, but a safe kind of odd, the kind of odd Whumpee felt comfortable inviting into their depressing little apartment after just a week of knowing them.

One week? Two weeks? Whumpee couldn’t remember. It hadn’t been a long time, probably, because their first supply of alcohol was still going strong.

“I don’t think I should,” Caretaker said awkwardly. “I mean… Are you sure you want me there?”

“Yeah… yeah, I… I don’t have anyone else, really…” they slurred, blissfully unaware of how much of a target they were putting on their back. It was nothing but luck that Caretaker didn’t jump on the opportunity to burgle the victim of one of the most famous legal cases, who, as everyone seemed to be aware of, was sitting on a pile of cash.

“Don’t say that,” they said quietly, and Whumpee instinctively assumed it was out of pity.

“Why? It’s true. Everyone knows, ‘cuz I walk around here every single fucking day, and I’m always fucking alone.” They gave Caretaker a lazy grin. “Not right now, I guess, but it’s not like you’re constantly with me, huh? And eeeeveryone hates me for it, they want me fucking gone, they want me off the public property, and away from their children, and they look at me like I’m no different than the pile of fucking trash they leave out every Tuesday!”

“Alright, alright, but don’t fucking tell everyone that you’re constantly alone. At least lie about it.”

That made Whumpee stop in their tracks, their dumb smile faltering a little. “Huh?”

“There are bad people in this world, Whumpee. You should know that better than anyone. Just lie and say you’re going to a friend’s place, or going back home to your family. No need to make it known that you’re easy pickings.”

Whumpee stared at them blankly, trying to process the words. “Huh…?” Was Caretaker… not saying it as a means to comfort them?

“I’ll explain one more time once we get to your place, if you still wanna bring me back.”

Of course they did. They wanted it more now than ever.

“Pet me?” Whumpee asked abruptly.

“What? Like a dog?”

Whumpee tensed. Even in their drunken haze, the comparison sent them back to the place they’d so painstakingly escaped. “I… guess so.”

Caretaker seemed to notice the change in atmosphere too, and they put two and two together. “Oh, fuck, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I was just surprised—”

“It doesn’t matter.” They pushed their head against Caretaker’s thigh. Admittedly, the alcohol made it easier to forget, even if not to forgive. “Pet me?”

“Are you sure it’s okay?”

“I’m asking you.”

Caretaker hesitantly lifted a hand and placed it on top of Whumpee’s head. They carefully carded their fingers through the soft hair, gently scratching their scalp as they went. Whumpee had the feeling Caretaker was being overly cautious, so they nuzzled against their hand as a way of encouragement.

“It’s okay if you think of me as a dog,” Whumpee said before they could stop themself. It wasn’t okay, but they didn’t want Caretaker to hold back on the headpats just because they thought it might trigger something in them. Even if it might.

“It’s not,” they said anyway. “I’d never think of you as a dog.”

Whumpee huffed. “Maybe it’d make everything easier, honestly. You wouldn’t fault a dog for being useless. You’d just coo at it endlessly, everyone would. ‘Aww, look at that adorable, useless dog. Who cares what it can do for me? All it has to do is lie there and be adorable.’”

“Do you think of yourself as a dog?” Caretaker asked softly.

“I sank lower than a dog ages ago, I think. I’d have to work really hard to get back up there. I’m more like… a roly poly.”

Caretaker petted them mutely for a while, repeating the pleasant motions and slowly lulling Whumpee to sleep. “I like roly polies,” they murmured before Whumpee could’ve fully drifted off. “And I like dogs too. But…” Their petting stopped, and they let out a heavy sigh. “I like you so much more and so differently than any animal.”

“You’re gonna die of alcohol poisoning one day, you know.”

“I’m gonna die of withdrawal…” Whumpee made a half-hearted attempt to get the bottle from Caretaker, but they held it up and out of their reach. “You know you can’t keep it from me if you want me alive…”

“Oh, I can. We’re gonna work on it, bit by bit. And right now, you’re not getting any.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“Nope.”

“You’re gonna kill me.”

Caretaker rolled their eyes. “I know what I’m doing.”

Whumpee rolled over onto their back, trying to ignore the nausea. The ceiling was swirling and morphing, and they had no desire to ever see it come to a stop again. “I’d rather get alcohol poisoning than die of withdrawal, I think. I don’t know how either of them are, but I know I don’t want to be sober.”

“Hopefully, you won’t ever know how either of them are.”

Whumpee scoffed. “I didn’t want to know what being a human pet was like, and here we are. Not only do I know, but thanks to the fucking trials, everyone else knows too.”

“That doesn’t mean everything you don’t want happening to you will suddenly happen. You don’t have to run head first into a wall just because you feel like it’s coming at you and you want to strike first. Walls don’t usually move. Not when you’re sober.”

“Huh?”

Caretaker sat down on the sofa next to them, gently rubbing their arm. “I think you deserve a better life, Whumpee. Even if you don’t want any.”

“I don’t—” The nausea suddenly became unbearable, and they pushed themself off the couch to stumble into the bathroom. They didn’t reach the toilet.

They had no idea what they’d meant to say before the accident. No one would ever know.

#whump #whump drabble #addiction whump #alcohol #past trauma #pet whump #recovery fic #flashbacks #emeto #paranoia #self-blame #self-deprecation #dehumanisation #comfort

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staycalmandhugaclone · 4 months

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Identity Pt 6 (Extra Scene)

Part (6) of Identity, the next arc of Doc's Misadventures! If you're new, start at the beginning with Touch Starved!

There are two people in particular to blame for this chapter. You know who are are, and I love you for it.

Warnings: Big emotions in this - rage, guilt, blame, and the like. There do be a bit of fighting, but it's not gory. Brief description of water torture. Profanity

WC: 2,032

No one moved, breath nearly trapped in their chests as they watched the pair steadily make their way out of the hanger. Crosshair noted the stiffness in her movements, the slight hitch in her step, and his teeth ground at the certainty that her shoulder was only a small part of what she’d suffered.

“What the kriff did you do?!” He snarled at the group of regs still staring toward the now empty hallway. He’d half-expected Hunter or Echo to growl some half-hearted warning for him to back down, but they seemed just as eager for answers as he was, and the unspoken permission that granted him, the justification in loosing his rage on the remaining members of the 104th left him near shaking, face twisted with the full display of his fury.

“We followed our orders; just like she did… Things just… got complicated.” The one with the double oval on his forehead replied, and the dejection in his voice only worsened Crosshair’s anger.

“The hell does that mean?” His voice ground between gritted teeth, body innately taking a half-step forward.

“It means there were unforeseen circumstances that caused problems, and that you lot aren’t cleared to know anything more.” The clone bearing a wolf-head emblem said, not shying from the very real threat in the sniper’s posture as he tread forward to place himself pointedly between his men and the enraged squad before him.

“I don’t give a Sith’s tit about your mission. The kriff happened to her, and why didn’t any of you stop it?!” He spat, shoulders pulling back as he towered over the Sergent.

“No time.” Another reg replied gruffly from behind the telltale helm of a pilot. “When everythin’ went down, we were all too far away to do anything, an’ they had her whisked off to the other side of planet before we could reach her.”

“She was alone?!” Echo nearly shouted from behind him. Crosshair didn’t question Hunter’s silence thus far, assured that his brother was listening, calculating; that he could smell the cocktail of adrenaline filling each of them and was comparing their heart rates, their body language, the tension in their every taut muscle to figure out just how far they could be pushed before snapping, how much information they might glean from tongues loosened by shame and guilt.

“There wasn’t supposed to be any combat where she was.” The last one sighed, his head dropping toward his chest.

“Can’t help but notice not one of you has a damn scratch, so how’d she end up like that in a non-combat zone with you lot still looking like damn shinies?!” Cross shot back, disdain dripping from every word.

“That’s enough!” The pilot barked, moving stiffly forward to stand beside his brother. “Think you’re something special? That you’re all high and mighty just ‘cause you’ve got some damn crush? Well, how ‘bout we compare how many times she’s been hurt working with you than with us?!”

He nearly ignored the subtle shift of Hunter’s hand signaling him to back off, but caught himself mere heartbeats before throwing himself forward, fists clenched hard enough to shake.

“If you’re referring to combat ops, given the general nature of your missions, which tend toward community outreach and long-distance support, in addition to the fact that her most grievous injuries were caused directly by your commander’s intentional actions, statistically speaking, that comparison wouldn’t do much to support your argument.” The subtle note of annoyance in Tech’s retort was just enough to draw a huff of something too dark to be likened to laughter from Crosshair.

“Still haven’t given a reason why she was alone.” Wrecker’s voice was quiet, and that alone left Crosshair leaning slightly to the side lest he find himself between them should the massive clone decide he was done listening. “She’s a medic – can’t really do that if she’s not with you.”

“She wasn’t there as a medic.” The first reg explained wearily.

“Then why was she there? Why pull her from our unit at all?” Hunter asked, carefully masking his own anger with a feigned gentleness.

“Comet.” The Sergent called, helm shifting to stare pointedly at his brother. The silence that followed that warning only sought to fuel Crosshair’s ire while worsening the 104th’s collective remorse.

“We needed someone who could blend in with the Separatists.”

“Boost!”

The man who’d spoken drew a sharp breath at the reprimand in his brother’s tone, head snapping up to stare him down as he wrenched his helmet free.

“No! Dammit, Sinker, they should know what happened! You think needing to keep it a secret is going to do her any good?! Hell, that one’s clearly read plenty of our old mission briefs already!” Boost roared, hand snapping toward Tech. “Why the hell wouldn’t he read this one? The only difference between us telling them now and him reading about it later is how much time they’ll have to get their shebs ready to help her when she’s back.”

Despite his lingering urge to lash out, Crosshair found himself both quieted and unnerved anew at the man’s words, torn between wanting to berate them for their carelessness and appreciating Boost’s argument.

“I know…” Sinker replied, voice nearly breaking beneath the weight of remorse threatening to overwhelm him, “but that’s not our call to make.” Comet and the other one, the pilot, had both turned their attention from Crosshair and their brothers, as though waiting to see who’d cede first that they might be granted permission to speak freely.

“Then you go right ahead and report me, Sergent.” Boost spat.

“Our contact chose the location.” Sinker’s shoulders fell at Comet’s quiet whisper, but he offered no further dispute. “It was a gathering for high-ranking Separatists. The plan was her to get in, get a datachip, and monitor security while we broke into the gala’s database to get more info… get a little something extra for the effort. Apparently, our contact had ulterior motives, too. He planted a bomb. She got caught in the blast, and then she was blamed for it.”

Air hissed through Crosshair’s teeth; dread twisted through his chest at the knowledge of what a Separatist interrogation entailed.

“We got to her as quick as we could.” The pilot continued, arms crossing over his chest at the guilt clearly sown through his own words. “Beat up some guards, tracked all the outbound ships… finally had to hunt down the damn contact himself to figure out where they took her.” He didn’t need to look back to know his brothers stood as stiff as he did, waiting for that final blow of what exactly had happened.

“They had her for about eight hours.” Resigned, Sinker finally turned back to face him, movements weary as he also reached up to remove his helmet, and Cross couldn’t help but be slightly surprised to find that the man shared his silver hair color, a fact that instantly annoyed him further, but he held his tongue as he waited for the reg to continue. “We know she was unconscious most of that time, but when she woke up…”

“Enough with all the kriffin’ stalling. Just tell us wha’ happened.” Wrecker growled impatiently.

“She was drowned.” Comet stated bluntly, and Crosshair’s blood went cold. “They drowned her, brought her back, and waterboarded her trying to find out who was behind the explosion.”

He could feel his heart racing, felt his breath quicken, every thought screaming at him to fight, to forgo all fear of reprimand or consequence for the relief of even a moment’s outburst, because that was something he knew. He knew how to deal with the pain of raw knuckles and split lips. He knew the taste of disappointment his brothers would harbor in the aftermath of his rashness. He knew the sting of defeat and the empty pride of victory, and, in that moment, held no preference for either. He merely needed the distraction; that familiarity, because the ache in his chest, the way it threatened to cripple him and rend him into a frenzy too overcome with grief and guilt to think straight was something he didn’t know how to deal with, and that terrified him.

“I assume she’s been given appropriate treatment to prevent lung infections?” The emptiness in Tech’s voice robbed Crosshair of that lingering rage to which he’d been clinging, leaving him cold and void of the will to drag himself back to the forefront of a confrontation that no longer promised anything of the respite he’d longed for.

“Yeah.” Boost answered quietly. “She also has a burn on her calf… wrists and ankles got torn up from fighting the restraints… pretty sure that’s how she dislocated her shoulder, too. We got it all cleaned and bandaged, but… just keep an eye on it.” There. That last comment was all it took to rekindle his anger, and he grasped it like the fleeting lifeline it was.

“Think it’s pretty clear we don’t need your advice on how to keep her safe.” He drawled, head tilting just enough to portray the depth of his contempt.

“That’s it.” The pilot growled, throwing himself forward without further thought or warning. In that split second before they collided, Crosshair felt the very edge of his lips twitch up into a broken smile born of relief and ruined by a guilt he’d deal with later.

In an instant, everyone was shouting, and he thrived in that moment of chaos as the man’s fist crashed into his jaw. Already, several hands were grabbing for him, straining to wrench him back, but not before he landed his own strike, knee plowing into his stomach with enough force to wrench the air from his lungs despite the plates of heavy armor. Crosshair just managed a final punch to his assailant’s head before Wrecker forced himself between them, iron grip locked around the reg’s shoulder in a threat even the haughty pilot couldn’t feign ignorance to.

In the brief fray, he’d failed to notice the split second of distraction tear Hunter’s attention away from them, but he instantly froze as his brother hauled him near enough to whisper harshly into his ear.

“Cody commed me. It’s Doc.” Already, Hunter was pulling away from him, torn between ending the fight and answering the summons. “Don’t make things worse.” He added with a snarl forced into barely audible growl. Expression faltering into horrified dread, Cross merely nodded. Hunter didn’t hesitate before turning and dashing from the hanger, and then all Crosshair could hear was the heaviness of his own breathing, the way his heart pounded in chest beneath that rush of emotions resurging mercilessly in the wake of his vain attempt to escape them.

He glanced back to find his brothers studying him carefully, confusion clear in their eyes as they waited for some explanation, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak, not when the other squad stood watching him with that same attentiveness. Without a word, he merely nodded toward the hallway leading to their temporary bunkroom, sparing not so much as a glare back to the men he still sought to blame for all of this; for calling her away, for letting her get hurt, for reminding him just how easily he might lose her because of this Force-forsaken war.

He didn’t listen to the hushed voices of the 104th as he began walking away; barely let himself note the sets of footsteps voicing his own squad belatedly falling in line behind him. He couldn’t think beyond the fruitless need to know why Cody had called Hunter, what had happened in the debrief; mind demanding he find some means to force his way into that kriffing office in his brother’s stead, and his rage grew at the knowledge that there wasn’t a damn thing he could do but wait. All his training as a sniper, years of drilling the importance of patience into him, of forming that patience into a weapon honed to perfection; it was all useless against this, and he couldn’t keep himself from slamming his fist into the wall in a final fit of frustration as they neared the still foreign barracks.

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emotionallychargedtowel · 1 year

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The Eighth Sense e5 & e6: portraying trauma with nuance

Episodes 5 and 6 of The Eighth Sense have really blown up a discourse bomb in tumblr’s BL scene. I had been putting off watching these episodes because I had gathered that episode 6 ended with something pretty distressing, and stuff like that sometimes hits me pretty hard, especially when it’s left as a cliffhanger. But I was already tempted to rip off the band-aid and watch it anyway, and then everyone has been debating aspects of these episodes. So I just had to see what all the discussion was about and figure out my own take on it.

In case it’s not obvious, the following will have spoilers for the series up to and including episode 6. I have a lot to say about this, because it touches on subjects that have been a major focus for me in my personal life, in my previous work as a trainee therapist, and in my research and writing. But I want this to be a manageable read, so I’m going to put things in bullet form when I can to keep them brief and organized and I’m going to make some section headings to help with skimming or skipping around. But before I launch into the rest, there’s one thing I should get out of the way: I don’t think any part of episodes 5 or 6 are a hallucination, a dream, or otherwise did not occur. I do think that there are aspects of the way the show portrays certain things that indicate dissociation and/or an acute trauma response. I’ll talk more about that below. (Hey, @waitmyturtles, this is the epic TES post I’ve been writing off and on for two days! I hope it’s of interest.)

Here are the section headings I’ll use below, to give a sense of what I’m going to talk about:

Conceptualizing Jae Won: Or, what I think is happening with him

Jae Won’s therapist - comments and interpretations

Jae Won’s therapist - medication management

Human beings’ amazing capacity for self-blame

Interpreting show production choices psychologically

Are the creators of The Eighth Sense going to pull a “who shot JR?” move?

Conceptualizing Jae Won: Or, what I think is happening with him

We don’t know how his younger brother died, but we know that he died in front of Jae Won when they were together, and it’s clear that he blames himself. I would be shocked if he was actually at fault even a little bit. But it does appear to have happened “on his watch” in a sense that lends itself to blaming himself. This is a huge issue, one that I’ll discuss in more detail later on.

Even before his brother’s death, Jae Won was clearly under a ton of pressure from his parents. And his father appears to be emotionally and, almost certainly, physically abusive. This is also far more likely to have pre-dated his brother’s death than to have only developed afterward.

In addition to pressure and abuse, I think it’s pretty clear that Jae Won was a parentified child. This means that he was put in a position of having to take care of his parents’ emotional needs as a child. This kind of role reversal has profound effects throughout the parentified person’s life.

Jae Won’s self-blame about his brother’s death means he was always going to be predisposed to stay stuck in the chronic version of the acute trauma response instead of moving through the natural healing process. In other words, he was almost certain to develop PTSD.

This is less clearly shown in the show, but my impression is that Jae Won has a deep-seated depressive tendency that existed before the loss of his brother. This would make sense for someone who faced the family-of-origin difficulties that he did.

When he did develop PTSD, as I have no doubt he did, Jae Won’s existing challenges were going to make him even more likely to develop the depressive symptoms of PTSD than others. We’ve seen some of these in the show already:

feeling alienated from others, unable to form meaningful connections with them,

anhedonia (an inability to feel positive emotions), and

negative beliefs about himself, other people, and the world.

All of this is happening at once. He’s dealing with PTSD, but he also still has all the same habits and beliefs he had before due to the parentification and training in people-pleasing, so he’s supposed to bottle up all of this pain. And if it’s his fault (in his mind) that his brother died, how much more does he owe his parents than he ever did before? This is a distorted, unhealthy way of thinking about all of it, but these kinds of maladaptive thoughts and expectations happen all the time with trauma survivors.

Jae Won’s therapist really sums all of this up very well when she says, “All your worries, not doing what you want to do because you do not want to let your parents down, and trying hard to be a good person to everyone because you do not want to disappoint others. Don’t you think it might be all because of your younger brother? Your younger brother, who got into an accident while with you. Your younger brother, who you couldn’t protect. And you are struggling to live your life for him as well.”

Jae Won’s therapist - comments and interpretations

I went into this series feeling nervous about its portrayal of therapy. I was very excited that therapy was being portrayed at all, mind you! It’s horrifying how seldom we see therapy mentioned as an option, much less shown, either in BLs or kdramas, and I’ve hoped for this to change for a long time now. But therapy is shown in an inaccurate way so often in media. And often, we see therapists and other mental health professionals breaking ethical rules. So I was on my guard, big time.

There’s one thing I really take issue with about Jae Won’s therapist, and it’s somewhat of a small thing: her office is way, way too dark! I just don’t think that kind of low lighting, with a lot of the illumination coming from her aquarium and other tinted light sources, is professional or conducive to therapy work. Of course, it’s obvious that her office is lit in this way because it looks cool and sets a certain mood for the show. And that’s fine. It’s a very stylized show in a lot of ways. But it makes me a little tweaky to watch it.

Some of the things she does in the therapy space with Jae Won are a bit open to interpretation, and could be debated. But I view her in a fairly charitable light, and I found that a favorable interpretation wasn’t difficult to justify at all. I ended up viewing her (so far, at least) as a very skillful and effective therapist.

I loved it when she joked, in the first scene after the credits for episode 1, “For God’s sake! Just tell me what your worries are!” Jae Won isn’t great at sharing. He’s been trained from early childhood not to show his messy, vulnerable emotions around authority figures. Jae Won is not an easy client by any stretch, so she may have been showing a mild version of some real frustration with him when she began that comment with mock-hostility. But he seems really sensitive to criticism, real or perceived. Coming at him directly about this could be risky. Using humor is a good way to get around this sensitivity pretty effectively. It’s worth noting, though, that I wouldn’t endorse this kind of move by a therapist unless they knew a client very well and had built a solid rapport with them.

The comment I quoted above (”Don’t you think it might be all because of your younger brother?”) connects so many of Jae Won’s interpersonal difficulties to the loss of his brother in a skillful way. It was very astute and well-put. But there are some things I would quibble with about it.

First, I’m kind of surprised that she is only saying this explicitly this far into therapy with Jae Won. It seems rather late to make such an observation considering this constellation of issues has, without a doubt, been in place the entire time they’ve been working together. This could definitely have been done sooner.

At the same time, paradoxically, it’s delivered abruptly, as if she blurted it out too soon. Actually, the abruptness comes from the fact that there’s not sufficient lead-up to the comment in their discussion beforehand.

Though the show’s treatment of mental health is strong overall, I think this part of this scene suffered from flawed writing. If I had written this scene, I would have made a change that I think would have resolved both of these issues. Instead of introducing this insight as if the therapist has just voiced it for the first time, I would have presented it as something she and Jae Won have touched on together more than once during their work together. Anyone who’s been to therapy knows that the same ideas, which appear as shocking revelations at first, often have to be returned to many times and worked through before we can benefit from them. She could have said something like, “This is that issue we’ve talked about before, right? It seems like another case of your beliefs about your brother’s death causing trouble in other areas of your life.”

Even better, she could have been shown quoting some kind of metaphor or shorthand Jae Won came up with himself when they’d spoken about this previously. For example, I had a client once who used to talk about metaphorically carrying around a giant, heavy book where he wrote down all of his failures. He described it in a similar way to “the catalog of mistakes” (I’m not going to share his actual wording, of course). Whenever I would use his wording, saying “the catalog of mistakes” or even “the catalog,” all of our prior discussion of that issue came into both our minds immediately. It also served as a reminder of our rapport and the importance I placed on his perspective.

Jae Won’s therapist - medication management

There’s one other area of Jae Won’s interactions with his therapist that is a bit hard to interpret. The exchange he has with his therapist about the amount of medication she’ll prescribe to him certainly seems important, but it’s hard to tell what exactly it means.

One thing that complicates this is the fact that he is receiving therapy and medication management services from the same provider. In other words, she seems to be a psychiatrist who provides therapy services. In most parts of the United States, this is rare (though that wasn’t always the case). I haven’t been able to tell whether this is more commonplace in South Korea.

Because she’s a prescriber and a therapist, asking for three weeks’ worth of medication instead of two also means waiting longer before having another therapy session. Maybe Jae Won really is just busy and trying to cut down on demands on his time, but this doesn’t seem too likely. It’s also possible that he’s seeking a greater quantity of his medication for some purpose, such as abusing it or using it for self-harm or to end his life. But he also could just be trying to put off his next therapy session to a later date because of his difficulty talking about vulnerable topics, something he demonstrates at multiple points in his therapy session. Similarly, when his therapist says she can extend his prescription to three weeks but not a month, because, as she puts it, “I need to do my job,” this could be in reference to the medication or her therapy work. Part of her job is keeping him from having access to too large an amount of medication at once, while another part is having therapy sessions with him (that are frequent enough to be useful). It’s hard to tell which of the two she was referring to, or whether it could be something else entirely. So I don’t think there’s one clearly correct interpretation here. But I do think we should be attentive to the possibility that he might be medication-seeking, possibly with the aim of using the medication for self-harm.

Human beings’ amazing capacity for self-blame

Even if you have experienced trauma or have been close to someone who has, unless you’ve spent time with a sizable sample of trauma survivors, it’s hard to understand just how readily people blame themselves for traumatic experiences. I had had personal experience with this as a survivor of intimate partner violence before I ever did any training in trauma therapy, but I was still totally floored when I observed firsthand just how often this happens and how unjustifiable every single instance of self-blame I encountered in clients turned out to be.

This is actually a big area for me as a researcher so I’m going to try not to go off on a massive tangent, but I think this is important. When we experience trauma, one of the most frequent responses people have is to blame themselves. I used to describe this to clients as a “deal with the devil.” Blaming ourselves allows us to feel like we have control over whether such things will happen to us (and/or those we care about) in the future. If we tell ourselves, “the trauma only happened to me because I did something bad, or something wrong,” then we can also tell ourselves, “but I’ll never do the bad or wrong thing again so from now on I’ll be safe.”

It’s very tempting to make this bargain, but it is an extremely bad deal. Self-blame is one of the biggest reasons some people get stuck in their acute trauma response instead of completing the healing process, resulting in PTSD. That feeling of control isn’t worth that. But human beings are so tempted to make this trade. When I was doing trauma therapy as a trainee, I saw example after example of folks who did seriously remarkable amounts of mental gymnastics in order to justify blaming themselves for their trauma. I’m going to talk briefly now about a client I had many years ago, without giving any details that could be remotely identifying. This person had witnessed the death of a close friend when they were in combat together. I did prolonged exposure therapy with this person, meaning he had to tell me the story of his friend’s death again and again and again. When we do this type of work, it usually seems at first like the client is telling the exact same story again and again without any real change. But little changes crop up gradually and accumulate and after a while, you find the story has made big shifts. And occasionally, a big change happens.

This client started out telling his story in a way that looked for every possible reason his friend’s death could have been his fault. And wow, was he ever grasping at straws. It was almost as if he had said something as nonsensical as “I had oatmeal for breakfast that day and maybe that’s why my friend died.” Every miniscule decision he had made that day could, in his eyes, potentially have caused his friend’s death in some mysterious and imperceptible way. It would have been absurd had it not been so sad. But thankfully, as we continued the exposure work, his story gradually changed and these justifications for self-blame started to fall away a little at a time.

Then, one day, a crucial detail was added to the story that blew me away. After weeks of telling the story in the usual way, my client mentioned for the first time that just before his friend was hit, he had called out a warning to him, which the friend had ignored. He’d mentioned countless ways he might be to blame--none of them remotely justified--but had never told me about the one very clear way in which he had tried to prevent his friend’s death. When I pointed this out, my client was shocked that he had never mentioned that detail before. We spent a lot of time unpacking what all of this meant. It was the single biggest turning point in his therapy. So, yeah. People have an amazing capacity for figuring out even the slimmest of pretexts for self-blame, and it’s abundantly clear that Jae Won is exercising that capacity big time. I’m pretty certain we’ll find out that he has been blaming himself a lot for what happened while having no real justification for doing so.

(Side note: I have tons more thoughts about trauma, self-blame, victim-blaming more generally, and other related psychological constructs--these are all longstanding research interests of mine--but I’m going to stop here because this thing is already ridiculously long. But if anyone reading this ever wants to discuss any of this further, please feel free to hit me up! I love talking about these things.)

Interpreting show production choices psychologically

Let’s review where we find Jae Won toward the beginning of the show. I’ve talked about how Jae Won had a lot of psychological difficulties before the story started. His family of origin situation was damaging even before he lost his brother, and then he had to contend with trauma and complicated grief. After that, he went through a breakup (possibly due to his partner cheating on him), completed his military service, and then had to make the transition back to civilian life, which isn’t easy under the best of circumstances.

And then he meets Ji Hyun, and his feelings for him unsettle the precarious set of strategies that he’s been using to get by. Ji Hyun makes Jae Won feel tempted to let his guard down and be himself. He places a degree of trust in Jae Won that challenges his cynicism and makes him feel tempted to trust Ji Hyun in return--to trust him to an extent that would normally be out of the question for him. Ji Hyun shakes things up, and while this is mostly a very positive thing--there are a lot of things in Jae Won’s life that urgently need to change--it’s also rather destabilizing in the short term.

Then the shit starts to hit the fan when Jae Won wakes up after staying out late drinking to hear his father pounding on his door. And the makers of the show start to play around with cinematography, editing, sound design, and other aspects of the show’s production to evoke Jae Won’s inner experience. After his dad pounds on his door, the way the show is shot and edited changes.

This disjointed editing and other distortions of typical filmmaking at this point in episode 5 have reminded some folks on here of a dissociative state, and I can see why. I would agree that it has a dissociative flavor. There are two prominent types of dissociation (which can happen simultaneously):

derealization, a feeling that the world around us isn’t real--it may feel empty, strange, or just plain wrong; and

depersonalization, in which we feel like we’re seeing ourselves from the outside, as if the person we’re observing isn’t us.

It’s tricky to talk about either of these in the context of tv/film because as viewers watching a fictional story unfold in a TV show, we are by definition:

perceiving that the world the characters inhabit doesn’t seem real, because it isn’t

looking at the characters from the outside, because they aren’t us (and they aren’t real)

But there are conventions of film and tv production that give us a sense of realism and of seeing things from characters’ points of view, and when Jae Won is dissociating we see those conventions get suspended or distorted. For example:

Conventional editing creates a flow of time that feels realistic (partly because we learn the “language” of film from a young age and interpret it that way). At important moments in The Eighth Sense, the editing breaks the rules of conventional editing, often messing with the viewers’ sense of time. Contexts change abruptly, as when Jae Won suddenly goes from being at home to being in his car. At other points, dialogue also goes out of sync.

Shot-reverse shot techniques help to approximate seeing things from the characters’ perspectives, situating us in the story so that we don’t feel like we’re observing from a distance. The most notable moment when this rule is broken happens when Jae Won is upset about his camera being damaged. We see him telling someone between sobs that the camera was a gift from his younger brother, but that person (assumably his dad) isn’t shown at all--not even a shoulder or the back of a head.

There’s also a lot of use of shallow depth of field (something the show uses in other ways as well), putting Jae Won in focus while his surroundings become a blur, making the world around him look hazy and unreal.

The sequence where Ji Hyun and Jae Won kiss in the ocean puts their dialogue way out of sync. On my first viewing, this just seemed like an interesting choice, one that gave the scene a sort of dreamlike quality. I’ve seen this strategy used before, as well, without any reference to mental illness, usually in art films. The first example that came to mind for me was from a Godard movie. It would be a valid option regardless of mental health-related content in a show. But after what immediately follows, I think that scene is portraying a trauma memory. Sometimes benign events that happened just before something traumatic become encoded with trauma memories rather than our usual type. (To put it briefly, trauma memories are encoded and stored in a different part of the brain from our everyday memories, and this is why they “behave” differently and have a different sensory quality from typical memories. Trauma recovery often involves some degree of re-encoding these memories in a more normal manner.)

Basically, the show sometimes puts the viewer into an approximation of a derealized and depersonalized state, particularly relative to what we’re used to as TV watchers. At other points, it shows characters’ experiences as if they were traumatic memories.

Are the creators of The Eighth Sense going to pull a “who shot JR?” move?

All this being said, I think that Jae Won’s dissociative moments, while very concerning and doubtless extremely distressing for him, do not point toward any sort of severe dissociative disorder like Dissociative Identity Disorder, nor do they make me concerned that his reality-testing (his ability to effectively distinguish what is and isn’t real) is impaired. I also don’t see any signs of cognitive impairment that would create a similar degree of confusion about reality. As a result, I don’t think the show’s use of signs of dissociation suggests that entire sections of the story will later be shown not to have happened.

Here’s the thing about dissociation. On paper, it sounds like an extreme symptom that approaches the kind of severe mental illness that includes symptoms like hallucinations and delusions. But the vast majority of the time, it’s very different from psychosis. And it’s also, in my opinion, more of a spectrum than we care to acknowledge most of the time. When we look at it that way, we can see that in a sense, Jae Won is at least a tiny bit dissociated a whole lot of the time. But frankly, so am I. It’s not uncommon for trauma survivors. It’s very different from something that would result in impaired reality-testing.

It’s possible that the show will end up revealing that Jae Won’s mental illness has resulted in him imagining entire segments of the show. These types of symptoms are often portrayed in media, for a couple of reasons: 1) people just find psychosis fascinating, and 2) these types of symptoms are very handy for creating plot twists and other interesting narrative devices. It’s not hard to think of examples of this. Fight Club, Black Swan, Shutter Island...the list goes on and on. But these portrayals are almost always inaccurate and exploitative. So far, the folks who make The Eighth Sense have shown a great deal of nuanced awareness of and sensitivity toward mental health matters, so I don’t think they would use this kind of cheap plot device. But they might. If so, I’ll find that pretty disappointing.

There is one thing the showrunners are doing that is somewhat sneaky in a way that’s could look analogous to that. Others have pointed out that Jae Won and his therapist are wearing the same clothes in every therapy scene, suggesting that we’re seeing the same therapy session interspersed with the other events of the series. In other words, the therapy session operates on a very different timeline from the rest of the story. We don’t know where to situate it relative to the rest of the plot. But I don’t see that as tied to the show’s portrayal of Jae Won’s mental health, nor does it seem exploitative or out of left field.

To sum up:

So far, The Eighth Sense has been remarkably accurate regarding psychological matters and has portrayed therapy and the use of psychotropic medication in a mostly positive and realistic light. I get the feeling the writers/directors/etc. have had some experience receiving mental health treatment. I really hope they maintain this level of quality throughout the remainder of the series.

I don’t think Jae Won’s PTSD (or his depression/anxiety) are sufficient for him to experience psychosis. I don’t expect entire segments of the show will be revealed to be an elaborate lie or hallucination, and if they are, I would consider that to be an example of poor writing and an unrealistic and potentially harmful representation of mental illness.

#The Eighth Sense #psychology of BL #trauma #self-blame #dissociation #media portrayals of mental illness #media portrayals of psychotherapy #media portrayals of trauma #jae won x ji hyun

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feverdreamsanddelusions · 4 months

Note

Ohohoho I adore your Bad Caretaker ask game! If you're accepting asks from it, how about no. 14? <3

bad caretaker ask game

14. caretaker is victim blaming

[tw bad caretaker, victim blaming, abusive relationship, past domestic abuse, self-blame, self-deprecation, guilt]

"Hey, hey, what's going on? Whumpee?" Caretaker jumped up from the couch and ran over, making Whumpee flinch back and pull their borrowed jacket tighter around their shivering body.

"I'm home!" They tried to sound lighthearted and cheery, but their voice came out timid and shaky. "It's n-nothing, I... I just need a shower..."

"There's– there are bruises on your face, Whumpee... What happened? Whose jacket is this?"

"I, I don't know... I'll bring it back tomorrow, I don't know..."

"Who hurt you?"

"I don't know!" Whumpee stepped back, pressing themself against the wall. "I don't know... It was all very chaotic, I just wanna take a shower, please..."

"Are you hurt anywhere else besides your face?" Caretaker pressed.

"N-no, no, it's fine, I'm fine, please... I just want a shower, I just– I just need to take a shower." They pushed past their friend and ran up the stairs, ignoring the concerned yelling from behind. They locked themself in the bathroom and started running the water immediately, hoping it'd drown out the noise.

They just needed to clean their body. That was all they needed. A fresh start. Something pleasant after a very unpleasant encounter.

They spent at least two hours hiding in there before they ventured out into the hall with nothing but a towel and the jacket around their body. They slipped inside their bedroom and quickly threw on some pyjamas, jumping into bed right as Caretaker opened the door.

"Whumpee, we need to talk," they said carefully, and Whumpee knew there was no sense in pretending they were already asleep. "Please. I'm worried."

"I'm fine," they mumbled.

"Someone hurt you while you were out. And pretty badly, too."

"I don't wanna talk about it."

Caretaker walked inside and sat on the edge of their bed, sighing heavily. "Okay, let me guess. You went to a bar, rejected some asshole, they hit you, someone interfered and gave you their jacket to cover up, and now we're here."

Whumpee swallowed. "Y-yeah."

There was a moment of hesitation as Caretaker tried to decipher whether they were being honest. "Yeah?"

"Yeah, that's... that's what happened."

"That's not what happened. What part am I wrong about?"

Whumpee took a shaky breath and shook their head. "You're not wrong. And you weren't wrong when you said I shouldn't go to bars anymore. And you weren't wrong when you told me not to wear that dress. It was my fault."

"No... no, you're hiding something. I can tell you're hiding something." Whumpee could almost hear the gears turning in their friend's head, and it scared them half to death. But surely, they weren't that predictable, right? "Oh, fuck's sake. You can't tell me– It wasn't a random person hitting on you, was it? Were you going on a date? Were you meeting that fucking asshole again? That's why you were wearing the dress! Their favourite dress."

Maybe they were that predictable.

Whumpee shot up in bed, eyes wide. "No! No, that's not–"

Caretaker grabbed them by the face, finally getting a good look at the fresh bruises. "Stop fucking lying to me. Are you crazy? How many times are you going to go back? Are you enjoying this?"

"No!" Whumpee teared up as their friend dug their fingers into the tender flesh, but they didn't seem to care. "No–"

"Is it their jacket? Did they hit you and then apologise? Gave you their stupid jacket and called you a cab? You know they only gave it to you so you'd have to go back, yeah?"

"It's not theirs, it's not, I swear–"

Caretaker shoved them away and stood up from the bed. "Stop swearing. What's wrong with you? All you do is fucking lie. This is fucking ridiculous. Honestly, why did you even move out? Why did you move out and move in with me if you were gonna continue seeing them for a couple slaps every night?"

Whumpee didn't even have the words to respond anymore. It felt like opening their mouth was just going to make it worse, cause them to bawl, or both.

"You're... I don't even want to do this right now. Fuck this. Fuck you." Caretaker took a couple steps towards the bedroom door before turning back around, apparently not yet done with bashing them. "I did everything I could to get you away from Whumper. Everything. I made sure you could stay here, I took care of you, I listened to you cry for days on end, I would've helped you file a fucking police report. I would've fucking testified! How long has this been going on? How long have you been seeing them again?"

"I'm– I'm not–"

"Stop fucking lying!" they snapped, and Whumpee covered their ears with a small cry of fear. "Fuck it! Fuck it, then! I don't care! Maybe you two deserve each other."

Whumpee could hear the door slamming shut after them, and they dissolved into a sobbing mess. They didn't want this. They didn't want any of this. But Whumper had been so different the last couple times they'd met up, they thought... they thought they'd changed. Really changed. Even this night had just been a slip up. A mistake. Whumpee had been at fault anyway. Like always. Even Caretaker thought that.

They hugged their knees to their chest and tried to cry as quietly as possible. They didn't want to escalate the situation any further.

Maybe Whumper would take them back tomorrow, if they apologised for making them so angry while giving the jacket back. Maybe they could go back to living with them. Caretaker was right — they deserved whatever that house held in store for them.

#thank you :)#whump #whump drabble #bad caretaker #victim blaming #abusive relationship #past domestic abuse #self-blame #self-deprecation #guilt #res writes

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little-peril-stories · 4 months

Text

The Queen of Lies: The Drop, Part II

Story Intro | Content Warnings | Mood Board | Vibey Song Lyrics | Ao3

Contents: lady whump, guy whump, being threatened, being chased, injury, blood, self-blame/victim-blaming

Previous | Masterlist | Next

Word count: 5500 || Approx reading time: 22 mins

The Drop, Part II

Teaser: He wasn’t alone, at least not yet. Because against all odds, Bree hadn’t bailed on him, nor had she turned him in, and perhaps most surprising of all, her crazy husband hadn’t found her and taken her away.

Silence had never been his favourite thing. Quiet, sure, peace and calm and all that—good for when his mind filled up with too many thoughts that needed somewhere to explode out of in a mess but had nowhere to go, and the soft strum of midnight in the city or the song of wind and bird calls in the trees helped to soothe the storm.

Silence, though.

Silence filled up empty spaces in a bad way. And when his mind was reeling, silence crowded up against those thoughts—shoved them around and twisted them into something worse. Like a crack in the ice on a frozen pond, silence shattered beneath your feet and pulled you into darkness, screeching into your bones and spearing right through your heart and soul until all you could think of was how heavy the world actually was, no matter how damn hard you were trying to forget.

The townhouse was silent.

He’d known it would be, and yet the confirmation crunched and snapped inside him, anyway.

Must have been at least a week since they fucked off—no, longer. Dust coated the table in a way Spider would’ve never allowed; there were no boots by the door; there wasn’t a hint of heat in the fireplace. Just ice-cold ashes and a few charred chunks of wood.

Fox gripped tightly to the edge of the table, watching his hands paint streaks in the layer of dust. He’d known it would be cold and empty and silent.

It still hurt.

He stood, drowning, long enough that he forgot entirely how long he’d been standing there at all.

Dropping the message had been easy. Perfect. Smooth. Quick. And he should have gone back to the inn. That would have been the smart thing to do.

Temptation had won out, and here he was. Temptation had led him straight to heartache. Temptation had proved to him that, for the first time ever, really, he was alone.

Except that wasn’t truly true, was it?

He released his grip on the table and stared down at his dusty fingertips and smudged palms. Ignored the way his shoulder complained at how he’d stood with his muscles so tightly wound, rigidly enough to hurt, reminding him that it wasn’t fully healed yet. His hands twitched in memory of being held by smaller, daintier ones—hands that had not shied away from his when, inarguably, they should have stayed far, far away.

He wasn’t alone, at least not yet. Because against all odds, Bree hadn’t bailed on him, nor had she turned him in, and perhaps most surprising of all, her crazy husband hadn’t found her and taken her away.

His stomach turned. She’d been so eager to help him, to drop a message for the others, all for his sake. But she was alone out there. They’d argued about it—whether to stay together or split up. Logic had won out.

Logic was a huge bitch. He was the one who’d pushed for splitting up, and that goddamn logic felt like nothing more than a savage scam now.

Heaving a sigh, Fox looked around the empty room one last time. Nothing had changed. Still cold. Still silent.

Perhaps it was time for goodbye, then. If Wolf and Spider and Hare were really gone.

In the dust on the table, he began to scrawl. Just in case. Because maybe, just maybe, there was a sliver of hope.

I’m alive.

Underneath, a series of letters.

He paused before the last one, but some compulsion drew his fingers through the dust again.

***

The evening had turned unpleasantly cold—the kind of autumn night that smelled a bit like snow but didn’t have the decency to even spill any. Fox kicked at stones on the road as he walked, unable to shake a feeling of unease. Maybe he shouldn’t have gone to the townhouse. It was probably a terrible move. And leaving that message? The damn initials? Stupid. Spider would fucking kill him if she saw it.

Or she’d be glad to find out he was alive.

He shook a few hairs out of his eyes, pissed off at how they tickled uncomfortably against his eyelashes. Damn hat, shoving his hair forward so it fell in the most annoying place.

God, what had he been thinking, going back there?

What if someone had seen him? What if constables were tearing the damn place apart right now?

He came to a stop and forced himself to take a breath. The thoughts were getting out of control.

“Sounds like we got a problem here, don’t it?”

Fox frowned at the rough voice sneering somewhere around a corner. It sounded vaguely familiar. Unpleasantly familiar.

It sounded like a guy he was pretty sure he didn’t like.

“You gotta know whose turf this is,” the voice drawled. Fox’s arms prickled beneath his coat. “And I never seen no pansy little shitheads like you around here before. ’Specially not a mouthy little bastard in a fancy-ass coat like that. So, where the hell’d you come from, fella?”

Oh, he did fucking know that voice. It belonged to a guy he’d once punched in the face (and who’d punched him back, but that was beside the point). A guy who needed another knock on the head, apparently, because what was that bullshit he was spewing aboutwhose turf this was?

It certainly wasn’t his.

This was IA territory, and no matter what his brother said about not starting shit with the other crews working the suckers in town who left their pockets unguarded, Fox was not about to let this asshole go around claiming that some other gang had somehow overtaken it.

As a high-pitched voice protested whatever that fucker was doing, Fox started forward, then paused.

His shoulder. It still ached. It probably wouldn’t take much to fuck it up again.

“Empty them nice pockets of yours, kid, and maybe we’ll let you pass through with a warning. Maybe.”

Keep walking. That was all he had to do.

“What are you doing?” their victim squeaked. “Just leave me—”

One of the nasty voices burst into a laugh, while the other said, “Fuck, what’s wrong with this guy?”

A cry that was more of a shriek.

And then—

“What the fuck?”

The cry rang in his ears, too loud and too familiar.

“Shit…” Even before the guy went on, Fox knew what he was about to say. “Shit. It’s a girl.”

He was around the corner before he’d even quite realized that he had started to move.

“Hey.”

There she was, flat against the wall where those two motherfuckers from—what were they called? Something stupid—something with an S. Stealthy…sneaky…sorry. Sorry Sixes. That’s who they ran for.

Two bastards from the Sorry Sixes had cornered her.

Those big brown eyes went straight to him, and he almost died, because she looked so scared.

But.

She also looked royally pissed.

It wasn’t like when she’d yelled at him to smarten up and stop being a vulgar, disrespectful prick while he was still in jail, or her frantic, furious tirade to Mrs. Bristow when she convinced her to let them go. It wasn’t like her trembly, worried sort of frustration from when they’d fought about splitting up to cover more ground. It wasn’t like the endless, exhausted annoyance that crossed her face every time she had to destroy another goddamn poster.

This was something new, like something had split inside her, like she had decided she was fucking sick of being pushed around.

“This little cross-dressing freak your woman?” asked the one with his knife at Bree’s throat. Blond haired, blue eyed, mean-looking as a feral dog. “Been acting all shady-like, sneaking around on Sorry Six streets. You oughta keep her a bit more under control.”

“Yeah, about that,” Fox said through gritted teeth, unable to identify which part of that little speech infuriated him the most.

“About what?” the other one asked, shaking greasy red curls away from his narrowed eyes. “Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

“This ain’t your territory,” Fox said tightly, stepping a little closer. Bree’s eyes widened.

In a tiny, subtle movement, her gaze flicking to his bad shoulder, she shook her head. As if, somehow, after only knowing him for a few weeks, she knew exactly what he was about to get himself into. And what a terrible idea it was.

The Sixes snorted. “Says who?”

“Says me.”

“Well, guess I gotta ask again,” the short one said. “Who the fuck are you?”

As Fox stepped into the gas light, the blond guy’s head tilted to the side. “Wait a minute. I know this ugly face.” He shoved Bree back against the wall—whether for dramatic effect or because she’d been trying to slip away, it was hard to tell. But she winced, and at his side, Fox’s hands clenched.

“Think I kicked your ass one time,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like it did much good. Need another go?”

“Fox,” Bree hissed.

“Oh, that’s it. Fox,” the big one mimicked. “IA, ain’t you? How’d you get outta jail? Heard you got busted like an idiot.” He grinned. “Your mug’s been all over this city. You better watch your step, or we gonna be reading a big, splashy headline ’bout you in a day or so.”

With a gruesome, taunting grimace, the ginger mimed getting hanged, tilting his head as if his neck had been snapped.

“Didn’t know you could read,” Fox said, as his blood ran hot. Bree closed her eyes.

The redhead guffawed. “Ha, ha. Hilarious, Dog Boy.”

“Dog Boy. Good one. You come up with that yourself?” He stepped a little closer; neither of them moved. “Get your fucking hands off her.”

“And if I don’t? What you gonna do about it? Your wimpy freak of a leader gonna come and wag his finger at me?” The fucker with the knife laughed. “Last I heard, IA’s dead. And…” His voice trailed off for a moment as he dragged that stare back over Bree’s face. “And they’re looking for both of you.”

Fox heard the words—heard the taunt, the refusal to leave Bree alone, and the pointed jab at his brother. They burst at him like sparks, dropping in painful pinpricks he could not ignore.

He was about to leap, bum shoulder be damned, when Bree kicked the guy holding her right in the goddamn jewels.

“Fucking shit!” Fox yelped as she tore away from the wall, gasping. “You gone crazy?”

“Maybe,” she said, grabbing his arm. “Don’t fight. Let’s g—”

Rich of her, to tell him not to fight when she was the one who had just slammed her leg right into her attacker’s nuts.

And pretty optimistic, seeing as the short one was barrelling straight toward the both of them.

“Bree, get out of here.” Fox didn’t know if she would listen—had a bad feeling, after the assault she’d just launched on the asshole with the knife, that she would not—but the command tore out of him anyway, because neither of these fuckers was going to touch her again, not if he had anything to do with it. How had she even run into them, anyway? Her drop point was blocks away.

A story he could get out of her later, because right now there was an ass that needed kicking.

“You’re going to get h—” She squealed into silence as the blond guy recovered from his howls of pain, repositioned his knife, and shot forward.

“Ah, fuck!” The short one’s fist slammed into Fox’s shoulder just as Bree somehow did what he could not—sidestep her attacker. She still cried out, her voice mingling with his cursing as pain tore through his shoulder. “Bree, for fuck’s sake, just run! I can handle—”

Granted, he would handle it better if he weren’t so busy yelling at her to get lost. The ginger caught him with a knock on his jaw. No big deal. Nothing he couldn’t get back up from.

And he had to get back up from it, because the tall motherfucker with the knife was moving again.

“This ain’t IA territory no more,” the little one hissed. “Not since you landed your sorry ass in jail and the rest of your crew fucked off.”

Fox forgot that his shoulder and his jaw hurt, and he forgot he was being stupid. He sprang forward and knocked the goddamn asshole and his hideous, taunting mouth to the ground.

He shouldn’t have looked away from Bree, though.

The big guy caught hold of her hair, and she shrieked when he yanked her toward him and snarled, “Didn’t know IA had their hands on such cute little gals. ’Specially one who also got her face plastered on every damn wall in this town.”

She gasped and tilted her head back as he kept pulling on her hair. “What are you doing? Let me go, you disgusting, wicked, horrid—”

God, it would almost be sweet, watching her trying to throw out insults like that, if it weren’t so fucking horrifying.

The knife. Back at her throat.

No no no no no no no—

“Pretty little reward for the constable’s pretty little wife,” the blond one said, and as Fox struggled to figure out exactly how he was going to get both of them out of this mess, the other Six swept his feet from under him.

“And a reward for this asshole, too.” Black spots danced before Fox’s eyes as his bad arm was pressed into his back, followed by the other. “You just nothing but talk, eh? Dog Boy’s all bark and no bite.”

Fuck. Fuck.

In the distance, a whistle blasted through the air. Deep-throated shouts. Clicking, scraping footsteps.

“Would you look at that,” said the tall one smugly. “Coppers are nearby. Won’t they be surprised to see what we found?”

“You fucking idiots,” Fox snarled. “They could just arrest you both, too.”

With a growl, the red-haired one twisted his bad arm a little tighter. Fox gasped.

“C’mon, Mrs. Constable,” the big guy said, taking the knife from Bree’s neck for just long enough to pull her arms behind her, too, and shove her to her knees. “Ain’t you lucky? Gonna see your loony of a husband again.” He grinned at his friend. “And we’re gonna get an extra payday, huh?”

His friend cackled, and Fox found Bree’s gaze as they began to call into the night for the police to come running.

The freezing cobblestone underneath him should have been what chilled him to the bone. But what he saw in Bree’s eyes stabbed right into him like ice.

“I’m not going back,” she whispered. So quiet, he was almost only reading her lips. “I’m not. I’m not. I’m—”

“What’re you saying, missus?” The blond peered into her face. “I don’t like your husband much, neither, but I’ll sure take his money.”

“I said…” Bree glared up at him. “I said I’m not going back.”

Wetness gleamed beneath her eyes now, eerie and flashing in the yellow light.

“Let g-go of m-my hands,” she said suddenly. Whimpering. Trembling. “I’ll…I’ll give you whatever I have. That’s what y-you want, right?”

The big guy twirled his knife in his free hand, laughing. “Gonna get a lot more for taking you in, Mrs. Constable. But thanks anyway.”

“Please,” she said, sobbing. “You’re hurting me.”

Her downcast eyes flicked up momentarily and met Fox’s.

“I’ll give you whatever you want,” she whimpered, the instant of silent communication gone, and she craned her neck to look up at the shithead holding onto her. “Please. I’ve got m-money—”

What? Whatever she had in her pockets, it wasn’t much.

Fucking fuck, she was running a scam.

The tall Six growled but let go, pulling her up again to brandish the knife in front of her face.

Mewling quietly to herself, Bree picked at her pockets with shaking hands, and shot Fox a look.

“On three,” she mouthed, as if he were somehow wise to whatever plan she had concocted. Down by her pocket, her fingers counted: one—two—three—

Whatever clumsy but earnest assault she launched into with a shriek, Fox missed, because he gritted his teeth and threw his body upwards, which destroyed his aching muscles and fucked-up shoulder exactly as much as he’d expected it to, but he didn’t really have much choice or much time to come up with something better, and honestly, it worked just fine, with the ginger caught off guard. Fox forced him to roll, and with his arm pretty much out of commission, landed the most forceful kick he could muster right in his potato-shaped nose.

“Come on!” He latched onto Bree’s hand the moment he was on his feet. She hadn’t done much to incapacitate the big guy, but it looked like she had managed to kick him in the shins or something, which was going to have to be good enough to give them time to run. Because as much as he wanted to pummel both of these jerks into the ground, his arm said absolutely not, and if the constables really were on their way, they needed to get gone.

“What the fuck happened back there?” he gasped when they’d made it far enough from the frustrated yowling of the Sixes and the cops that only ordinary evening-in-the-city sounds swelled around them. “How’d you even run into those pricks?”

“I got lost,” she said. “It’s a long—”

“You could’ve been hurt!”

As if she somehow hadn’t expected him to be mad, she blanched. The flicker of hurt, though, was quickly replaced by her own anger. “Me?” she retorted. “You jumped right in, knowing your shoulder is still healing! What were you thinking?”

“You kicked that guy in the nuts! What if he’d been just a little nastier, huh? You know what he could’ve done to you?”

His breath was fighting against him—struggling to get in, screeching and scratching on the way out. Fuck, he’d been in fights, and yeah, he’d been clobbered before, not that he much liked admitting it, but this feeling in his chest was new, clawing at him from the inside, tight and only growing.

“Bree, you could have died!”

What had he been thinking, for god’s sake, letting her drop a message? Letting her get involved? How stupid was he? Everyone else knew it. They’d told him time and time again. Idiot. Reckless. Foolhardy. Impulsive. Thoughtless. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid—

“Fox, you’re hurting me,” Bree whispered, and he looked down toward the hand squeezing hers.

Shit.

“Fuck. I’m sorry.” He let go, staring at the fingers that had been about to crush hers. Stupid and ill-fucking-tempered, after all that bullshit of Bree, I’m not him and trying to be better than the soul-sucking demon she’d married and here he was, yelling at her and scaring the shit out of her and hurting her, damn it all. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

The words died.

His fingers were slick with blood.

And he was pretty goddamn sure it wasn’t his.

“Bree…”

Her eyes went from his face to his bloody hand, and she gasped softly. “Oh. What did you—”

“It’s not mine,” he said, reaching for the hand he’d been clasping, and the sight of it nearly had him hurling his guts into the street, not because he had a problem with blood, for fuck’s sake, but because of whose blood it was. And how it dripped from her fingers, flowing freely. And fast.

“Oh, my—” Her face went a little green as she realized she was the one leaving a blood trail. “I don’t even know when—”

“Shit,” he hissed, watching dark red splatter onto the stone beneath them. “That looks bad.”

“I’m…I’m sure it’s…” For a moment, he could just see it: her eyelids fluttering closed, her limp body falling to the stone, him having to carry her in his arms while hoping she wouldn’t bleed out then and there…

And then she fumbled for a handkerchief, pressing it against the jagged slice that bastard had left on her forearm, right up to her wrist.

“It’s going to be fine,” she said firmly, even though she was pale.

He watched the starched cotton blossom with wet, seeping darkness, then pulled off his scarf. “Use this.” His hands shook as he pressed the wool to her arm, wrapping it with clumsy fingers.

How long till they got to the inn? Too long. Maybe the scarf would help staunch the blood. But it needed a real bandage. And she probably needed to not be running through the streets in a panic.

“I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely. “I wasn’t trying to scare you.”

She didn’t move her hands from where they held the makeshift bandage to her arm. But her gaze tilted upwards. “You don’t scare me.”

He swallowed.

“Tell me if you start to feel real bad, okay?” He itched to take her hand in his, so strongly it was almost making him twitch. But she needed to keep pressure on that goddamn cut. “We gotta keep moving. But we’re almost there.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, looking around nervously, a shiver wracking her body. “I don’t know where we are.”

“We’re not going back to the inn. Not with your arm looking like that.” Her eyes widened, but after a moment, she seemed to realize that he was, for once in his life, following a sensible impulse and not a harebrained one.

“Okay,” she said softly. “I trust you.”

Fox was struck by how fiercely he wanted to just scoop her into his arms and carry her all the way—how much she looked like she needed it. But she stayed on her own two feet, and even though she winced with each jarring step, as the night fell colder and deeper around them, she did not complain. He had to force himself to stay far, far away from the question of why she handled her pain so stoically.

“Just a minute,” he said when they got there, as he pried a loose board from the steps and fished around in the dark, trying to find the key. “Fuck! Where is it?” He’d just dropped it back there an hour ago at most. Where the hell could it have gone?

He heard her soft intake of breath, startled and nervous, and he ordered himself to calm the fuck down.

“Sorry,” he muttered, finally grasping the key and shoving the board back into place. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t find…”

“It’s all right.” Was he imagining it, or was her voice growing faint?

Getting the goddamn key into the lock was even more of an ordeal. He was on the verge of just breaking down the door and facing the consequences later when the lock clicked and the door swung open.

“Got bandages somewhere,” he said, helping her through the entryway—he knew every uneven floorboard, every sharp corner, but she didn’t. “I just—I mean—I—fuck—” Where was he supposed to start? “Water. Right? Wash it. Needs to be…”

“Fox…”

“It’s usually me with the stupid injuries,” he said as he guided her toward the kitchen, “the dumb, idiot, clumsy, dumb fuck who’s hurt, and everyone else is running around finding me bandages, not the other way around, so I don’t really—”

“Just—”

“But I think—I gotta boil water, right? So it’s clean? Or whatever? Does that sound right?”

Stupid, stupid, stupid. The word danced around his head, taunting him, unwilling to let him forget for even an instant how foolish it had been to let Bree get anywhere close to IA life.

So what had he done?

Brought her to its headquarters.

Its empty, abandoned headquarters—but IA’s former stronghold, nonetheless.

He tore through the cupboards. God, the others were so damn organized, far more than he was, so you’d think he be able to find a single fucking bandage somewhere.

“Got it,” he said, leaving the cupboard door wide open and turning back toward Bree

“Fox!”

The scarf hit the floor more heavily than it should have.

“You’re panicking,” she said. Her handkerchief stuck to her skin; even in the dim light, he could see how wrong it was. The wrong colour, pasted and slick against her arm.

“No, I’m not.” Fuck, her fingers were cold. They found his as he pressed the new bandage to her cut.

“Yes, you are.”

“I’m not—”

“I’m okay.” Weak light, moon and lamp glows mingled, drifted in, just enough to see that her cheeks were wet and her lip was trembling. “I’m okay.”

“Fuck that,” he said, forgetting who he was talking to for a moment. Until she flinched. “You’re crying.”

“Y-yes,” she said. “I think—I think it’s—it’s catching up with me now.” She drew a shuddering breath. “I was scared. I was scared. I was so scared.” She took a step closer. “When I saw you, when you came around the corner, I felt—I was—I was so—I felt safer, but then—when I thought they might hurt you, and then when they were going to turn us in, and the thought of you—” She gasped, and then she pressed against him, her head to his chest. “Of Baden hurting you again—”

That made him sputter. “Of him hurting me again?” She was shaking. From cold? Leftover terror? Blood loss? Wracking sobs? “You serious?”

“He almost killed you.”

“God, Bree, what d’you think he’d do to you?” His voice cracked. “For being the one to help me? You think I could—you think I could handle that? Him getting his hands on you? So he could…he could…”

Before he even quite realized what he was doing, he had wrapped his arms around her, embracing that fragile form as if his body could shield her from the horrors of her past.

“Those constables,” Bree whispered, leaning into him. “They were after me.”

“After you?”

“I ran into my friends,” she said. “They recognized me. Taking down the posters. I—Alice, I think she would have looked the other way, but—but Marguerite, she… She looked… She thought I had gone…” A choking gasp. “She yelled for the police, so I ran. That’s why I was lost. And how I ended up there.”

“It’s okay,” he said, holding tighter. “They didn’t catch you.”

“But if they’d caught you, it would have been all my fault.”

He pulled away then. “No. It wouldn’t have.”

“And that boy hurt your arm,” she said shakily. “Because I—I made them angry—I wasn’t trying to—”

“Not your fault either,” he said. “They’re both shitheads. Plain and simple.”

She laughed, weepy but genuine, and it was beautiful. It brought him back from that fuzzy, floating realm of rage that seemed to exist outside of time and space, that turned the world white and red and black and made his thoughts go hazy and made him just want to scream and lash out and make the pain and the people causing it go away. That laugh, even thick and choked with tears, grounded him. Reminded him of why he’d been so pissed off in the first place. Who he’d been so desperate to protect.

He pressed one hand to her cheek. She didn’t startle, didn’t flinch. When he slid it down to the tip of her chin, and with the gentlest, barest force he could muster, tilted it up so he could look into her eyes, she didn’t pull away.

“None of it was your fault,” he said. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I’m sorry for making you think…” His mouth had gone dry. “I was scared, too.”

Scared of what, exactly?

Bree brushed away the tears that still glittered on her cheeks. “I’m worried I’m getting blood on your coat.”

Blood. “Shit!” He was supposed to be boiling water. Apologizing and explaining and cuddling were all great, but they weren’t going to do much to help her sliced-open arm. “Let me—god, I’m sorry, I’m really terrible at this whole thing—”

He bolted for the door. When you lived in an old-ass townhouse, you got the pleasure of using the old-ass well down the road instead of the fancy-ass running water the rich folk got. And if no one had been in the house for weeks, there sure as hell wasn’t any water inside. “Sit down, okay? I’m coming back. I’ll—I’m just going for water—I’ll be right there!”

He fled before she could comment on what a piss-poor medic he made, or on the fact that he still had to get a goddamn fire going before he could even think about boiling water.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. At least the inn would have had hot, clean water ready to use.

But it was farther away.

But it was safer.

But she’d have kept bleeding into the street.

Water in tow, he skidded back inside and went straight for the oven, flinging open the cast-iron door and throwing in the first flammable things he could find. He really had to concentrate, to focus his energy on lighting the kindling and making sure the logs took to flame, because his mind was racing again, too fast and too loud. If Bree said anything, he didn’t hear.

When he finally turned around, water heating and candles lit so they could actually see, her head lay on her good arm—her body slumped over the table.

“Shit! You okay?” He flew to her side. Landed on his knees.

Her eyes fluttered open immediately. “Yes. I’m just resting.” Slowly, she sat up. “You were here already.”

“Huh?”

She pointed to the message he’d written in dust earlier that day—such a short time ago, yet it felt like decades. “What does it mean?”

“What do you mean, what does it mean?” He stood up again, embarrassed that he’d panicked when she’d merely closed her eyes in exhaustion. An inspection of her arm showed that no new blood had soaked through the bandage she still held against it. “It says I’m alive.”

“Not that,” she said. He tried to catch any resentment in her voice. But she didn’t sound surprised that he’d been to the house already. “The other part. The letters.”

He looked again at the initials. It was so obvious to him—but of course, to her, it meant nothing.

“You really wanna know?”

His heart was still racing, but as he looked over the letters, his mind calmed once more, and his limbs moved without frenzy—one hand to stroke her cheek, an unconscious movement he couldn’t have resisted even if he wanted to, and the other to take her unbandaged arm.

“Of course.” Her eyes were on him. When he moved her hand, though, she looked to the table, to the letter B, and what he was writing there with the tip of her finger.

Bree.

She frowned, confused, until he did it again. Guided her finger to form the rest of the letters that were missing behind the W.

Silence draped over them, but it wasn’t the boggy, drowning, thought-twisting kind. It was the kind that made him forget why the house was so silent. It was the kind that dripped with sweetness and with promise, that inhabited the space between strangers and not, between fear and loyalty, between the past and the future.

“Will,” she breathed. “Your name is Will.”

No doubt. No mistrust. Not even a question; it was as if, by some magic, she had always known, and the revelation was no surprise. The sound of his name coming from those lips was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard, like birdsong after a storm or the crunch of boots on a fresh, white crust of snow.

“My name is Will,” he echoed.

Bree was silent again, gazing at him with wide, shining eyes. In unison, they drew closer, and Will’s entire body tingled with every possibility contained in the moments between them, in their shivering breaths that seemed to go in and out as one, and in the crackling air that seemed now to connect rather than separate.

And then she was the one with her arms around him, those bird’s wings enveloping him as if they might never let go, and her lips were pressed to his. Her kiss was warm, as soft as air, almost, and just as life-giving. It tasted the way he imagined starlight would: sweet and bright and colourful, like strawberries in summer, like apples in autumn, like cinnamon and sugar and just-brewed tea.

With his pounding heart rattling every inch of his body, Will Wardrew kissed Bree Scarlett back, and even though their world was in shambles and maybe always had been, there was a moment where everything—everything—was right.

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#lps the queen of lies #tqol thiefcam #whump #whump story #whump writing #original writing #original story #original content #lady whump #guy whump #romance #angst #tw threatened #tw chased #injury #blood #self-blame #tw victim-blaming

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flowersarefreetherapy · 3 months

Text

My Love Is Mine All Mine

CW: hospital setting, character death, mourning, unhealthy relationships, pet whump, brief violence, implied past violence, implied past noncon, brief mention of disordered eating, begging, sexually degrading language, self harm (not graphic or a lot, but it in here), self-blame

The heart monitor beeps out a steady rhythm, one Cameron finds himself counting in a desperate attempt to hold on to hope. His tailbone goes numb and he shifts on the cold plastic chair, trying to move as little as possible.

Angelina and Andrew don’t pay attention to him. She sits at her father’s bedside, Andrew’s hand on her thigh, scrolling through Instagram. Emmaleigh slumps on the chair next to Cameron, eyes glued to her iPad screen. Lucas, Angelina’s brother, just left, saying something about talking to a lawyer and coming back at a later time. Cameron doesn’t want to pay attention. He wants to be at Patrick’s side, curled up close like he is supposed to be. Not trapped in a corner of the room with a literal child.

“Mom!” Emmaleigh whines. “I’m hungry!”

Angelina’s gaze remains locked on her phone. “Andrew, would you take her to get some food? I don’t want to leave Father.”

Andrew nods. “Come on, Emma. Let’s go get something from the cafe.”

“No! I want McDonald’s!”

Cameron rolls his eyes. Of course she wants McDonald’s. Maybe they could bring some back and he could try the fries? They look so good on the television and he’s wanted to try them for years. Patrick never let him. That much grease and fast food ruins his figure. Cameron knows this.

But you won’t have to worry about what you eat much longer, will you?

No. Patrick is going to be okay. This is just a small cold. It’s nothing awful. He’s strong and has good lungs and whatever the doctors say, they’re wrong. They don’t know his master like he does.

Andrew gives in, as he always does. Soon it is just Cameron and Angelina in the room with Patrick. She still isn’t paying him any attention. Nor is she looking at Patrick. Cameron swallows back a scream. This is her father in the hospital and she doesn’t care! He cares! He could take better care of Patrick than anyone here!

The chair creaks as Cameron stands and walks over to the hospital bed. He moves softly, relying on all his training to stay as quiet as possible. Angelina doesn’t look up. Cameron perches on the edge of the bed and takes Patrick’s hand. It feels so much weaker than he remembers. Thin, papery skin and fragile bones when he remembers a strong, unwavering grip pushing the knife through his skin.

Cameron swallows back a sob and curls up next to his master. There’s barely any room on the bed, but he folds his knees close to his chest, resting his head on Patrick’s chest. He can hear every breath rattle in his lungs. It’s alright, there’s medicine and monitors and this will be okay. His master is strong. He can survive this.

Angelina scoffs, but doesn’t move him from the bed. Cameron is grateful for the small blessing. The sterile air of a hospital burns his nose, bringing back other memories. He squeezes his eyes shut against the white light, grabbing his master’s hand.

You aren’t there. You aren’t there. You have a master. Someone chose you, remember? You weren’t abandoned.

The beeping and shallow breathing pulls him into a half-wake trance. Cameron’s eyelids grow heavy. For a moment, he’s back in their bed, the thick comforter keeping him down as his master shifts next to him. He’ll be awake soon. Will it be the knife? Or the ropes? Or maybe just round after round that will leave him bleeding in the shower? A shudder of pleasure slips down Cameron’s spine at the thought.

Fingers dig into his shoulder. Yanking him from the bed. Cameron cries out as his head hits the wall, a blow hard enough to blur his vision. He blinks hard. White coats and shouting, so much shouting. Drawn out beeps. Light glints off a needle and Cameron flinches. He folds himself in a corner, hugging his knees tightly to his chest.

“Please, please, please, I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’ll be good, I’ll be better, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry, so sorry.”

Where is his master? Where is he? Why hasn’t he come for him? Cameron blinks back tears. It’ll be okay. Patrick will get him. He’ll pick him up and kiss him, tasting like whiskey and cigars, and he’ll be safe. Cameron knows he’s safe. He hasn’t been sent back there. He’s been too good for his master to have that happen.

Silence. Emmaleigh crying. Angelina stands stiffly, expressionless. Cameron uncurls, ignoring the annoyed looks from the doctors. They’ve hated him from the moment he was brought here. It doesn’t matter to him anyway.

“. . . what happened?” he whispers.

Emmaleigh cries harder. The iPad lays forgotten on that stupid chair. Cameron crawls to the edge of the hospital bed. It’s too quiet.

Don’t look. Don’t ask. You know. Just sit in the corner and hope they forget about you. Don’t make this worse than it already is.

His master’s face is lax and pale, a shade Cameron has only seen once before. A Guard trainee who was supposed to show him his place, only to die overnight from what the handlers called internal bleeding. He’s seen death before. He knows what it looks like. But it doesn’t happen to those he loves. It isn’t supposed to happen to his master.

“Sir?” Cameron whispers, grabbing his master’s hand. It’s cold. Bile burns the back of his throat. “Sir, please, say something. I-please don’t leave me!”

“Get away from my father, whore!” Angelina’s nails scrap across his scalp as she pulls him away. Cameron yelps, scrambling to ease the sudden pain. “Don’t you dare pretend you cared about him! All you cared about was who would fuck you!”

“Please!” Cameron sobs. Tears burn down his cheeks. Patrick said he was a pretty crier, that he looked best when he cried. “Please, please, I love him! Please, let me say goodbye!”

Angelina shakes his head. His head hits the stupid plastic chair. White explodes across his vision and Cameron swallows back a sob. Angelina’s voice rises, but he can’t hear a single word she says. His knees hurt, his vision blurs from tears and pain, and he can’t draw in a full breath. Cameron stares at the hospital bed, blinking hard. Maybe he can see his master again. One more time.

Then Angelin’s fingers are no longer in his hair. Andrew holds her and Emmaleigh tightly, all three of them crying. Cameron huddles against the wall. He can’t breathe. His chest throbs with pain and no amount of crying lessens it. He curls up again and screams into his knees. Quiet. Patrick prefers–no, preferred. He’s gone now, remember, idiot?--to hear him scream. Loud and painful and Cameron rakes his nails across his skin in an effort to feel the shattering of his heart be mirrored across his skin.

The family slowly collects personal belongings. There’s not a lot. Patrick was sick suddenly. Cameron flinches. This is his fault. If he hadn’t insisted on going ice skating, then Patrick wouldn’t have gotten sick, and this wouldn’t have happened. His fault. His master died because he was a selfish, horrible Pet.

My master’s desires are my own. My master’s desires are my own. My master’s desires are my own. I am not my own. I belong to my master, I belong to my master, I belong to my master.

. . . who do I belong to?

“Get up, slut.”

Andrew grips his arm and hauls him to his feet. Cameron stumbles beside him, suddenly feeling far too cold in his crop top and tights. The nurses and other patients stare at him. For the first time in years, heat creeps up his cheeks and down his neck. He ducks his head and focuses only on the too-white tile under his feet.

It’s odd. Walking outside, hearing traffic, feeling the winter wind against his face, sunlight sparkling off the light dusting of snow that fell overnight–and knowing his master is dead.

Dead.

Cameron chokes on a sob. His master is dead. Gone. Truly gone.

“Shut up,” Andrew snaps. “I don’t know why you’re so weepy. You are nothing but a sidepiece and a bedwarmer. You never cared about him.”

I did! I loved him and he loved me and we were going to have forever! He was never, ever going to leave me!

The words stick in his throat and all Cameron can do is cry. He doesn’t stop, not even when he’s shoved into the backseat of Angelina’s car and told to stay quiet. Emmaleigh’s sobs cover the sound of his own.

We were supposed to have forever.

#cameron #patrick #hospital setting #character death #mourning #unhealthy relationship #pet whump #knife wounds #implied past violence #implied past noncon #begging #sexually degrading language #self-blame #food mention #grief

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goldenavenger02 · 4 months

Text

the monsters turned out to be just trees

He pushed himself onto his toes to sneak past both Sora and Riyu before letting himself out of the sliding door and started to walk after letting himself back down onto the soles of his feet.

He didn't know where he was going, but he couldn't lay there, not when he was the only thing that kept Sora off of death's doorstep that afternoon.

"Arin! Arin, hold pressure on this while I find Kai!"

"On it!" His hands went right to the wound where the bright red slowly but surely seeped into his black gloves and his knees started to get scratched on the concrete.

"A-Arin?" Her voice was shaking as she grasped her hand around his upper arm.

"Lloyd's getting help, stay awake."

"I-it hurts!" The end of her sentence came out in a shout as he pressed down harder to try and keep her blood inside of her body.

"I know, I know it hurts, but you have to stay awake, Sora."

Arin panted as he awoke to darkness with his hand grasping onto his chest and tears in his eyes as he heard Riyu's snores filling the room.

"Sora?" Arin couldn't help but whisper as he laid on his back in the darkness, "Sora, are you awake?"

He heard a pained groan break through the sounds of sleep coming from the dragon which made his heart pang with regret, "now. You okay?"

"Y-yeah," Arin insisted as he sat up, hoping that she couldn't hear where tears had filled his throat moments before he had chosen to whisper, "yeah, just go back to sleep."

But, this was Sora, who knew him better than he knew himself and before he knew it, she was sitting up with her hand hovering over her injured side.

He was motionless as he watched the blade made out of black and yellow metal slice right through Sora's skin, blood splattering on the ground around her where the crimson shone brightly in the sun.

"Come on, tell me what's going on," she stopped to pull in a particularly shaky inhale that Arin was pretty sure was from the pain, "are you thinking about them again? Your parents?"

"Get away from her!" Arin shouted as he grabbed the first piece of metal he could, before twisting himself into Spinjitzu and flinging the object right at the guy who still had a sword buried deep in Sora's skin.

"No, I just…had a nightmare." Arin insisted, scratching at the back of his neck. 'It's not like I'm lying about that, but she doesn't need to be upset right now.'

"Okay," if she doubted him, she wasn't expressing it as she laid back down with her hand still clasped around her side, "just try and go back to sleep if you can."

"Will do." Arin nodded as he laid back down and stared at the long faded glow-in-the-dark stars that covered the ceiling.

He scrubbed at the red that he knew was covering his black gloves, trying not to throw up at the coppery smell of his friend's life that had been at risk under his palms, all while knowing that he was never going to get her pained shout out of his head.

Arin waited until he heard her breathing even out before he got out of his bed slowly, letting his feet hit the wooden floor with a quiet 'thud'.

He pushed himself onto his toes to sneak past both Sora and Riyu before letting himself out of the sliding door and started to walk after letting himself back down onto the soles of his feet.

He didn't know where he was going, but he couldn't lay there, not when he was the only thing that kept Sora off of death's doorstep that afternoon.

'Maybe I should get some training in,' he pondered briefly, but shook it off when he remembered the warning of his master, 'Lloyd said training while tired puts you at more harm.'

So, he made his way toward the kitchen instead to get a glass of water.

His mom had always made sure to get him a glass of water and even a chocolate chip cookie whenever he had a nightmare after she had held him close, wiped his eyes and double-checked for monsters under the bed.

It was nights like these, when the tree branches outside of the windows would smack against it in the wind that made the parent-sized hole in Arin's heart throb more than usual; nights where he couldn't help but wonder if they would still be proud of him, even though he hadn't stopped that guy from hurting Sora.

But as he filled his glass with water, he couldn't help but try and listen in on the hushed voices he could hear coming from…somewhere in the monastery. 'Who else is awake at…it has to be nearly three in the morning.'

He gulped down his water and set the glass in the left side of the sink next to the rest of the dishes that were still soaking off the burnt grease from cooking dinner before inching closer and closer toward the whispers, pushing himself onto his toes once again.

"First Master!" one of the voices shouted, but as he tip-toed toward the bedroom with light peeking out from under the door, he couldn't identify who was yelling.

"You are so stupid," a second voice that had to be Kai responded, "and this is gonna sting."

"That was just you cleaning it?!"

"This is really gnarly looking. Deep breath."

"I am not a kid any more," the voice was strained which made it harder to identify, "I don't need you to baby me-shit!" Arin heard a hand hit the wall hard after the curse.

"This isn't me babying you," Kai retorted with a bite of anger in his voice, "this is me making sure you don't kill yourself by bleeding out. You're lucky I didn't wake Zane up to deal with you."

"I could have dealt with it."

"Do you know how hard it is to clean a wound to the back? You would have gotten it infected, you little shit."

"If you're gonna keep being a dick, just-" The first voice stopped to hiss, but the walls continued to distort it, "go back to bed and get your beauty sleep."

"I can't, because someone," Kai's emphasis on the word "someone" followed by a quick exclamation of pain didn't leave much to Arin's imagination as to what was happening behind the thin door, "decided to lie to everyone when asked if anyone besides Sora was injured."

"I was gonna tell Zane."

"When your god genes kicked in and healed it up? Those aren't going to always save you, Lloyd."

'Wait, Lloyd?' Arin thought with confusion.

He remembered Lloyd clearly and thoroughly telling both him and Sora that if they got hurt, even if they didn't notice at first due to adrenaline, to let someone know so the wounds didn't get worse and yet…then again, he couldn't help but also remember the times where Lloyd reminisced on his time as a student.

Where he would directly disobey Master Wu's teaching and instruction, even if he would also explain why not listening to his master had ended badly for him and the other ninja like his life was one big cautionary tale.

And yet, here he was, listening in on Lloyd after doing the exact same thing that he told them not to do.

'Surely he had a good reason, even if it's just one that he thinks is good,' Arin tried to reassure himself, 'he tried to upkeep the whole monastery by himself after all, and he put all of Master Wu's responsibilities on himself outside of keeping things clean.'

"Gotcha!"

Arin couldn't stop himself from shouting as he was tackled to the ground and a flame was held too close to his face for comfort.

"Kai, get off of him!" Lloyd insisted as he pulled at the fire ninja's shoulder before reaching his hand out for Arin to take, "are you okay?"

But all he could focus on as he let him pull him to his feet was the fact that Lloyd's pajama shirt had been haphazardly pulled on and with it, he could clearly see the bandages that looped around his stomach.

"I should be asking you that."

"What?" Lloyd questioned but looked down when Kai cleared his throat and straightened out his shirt so it hung over the waistband of his pants, "that's…that's nothing. Don't worry about it."

"It's not "nothing", I just had to stitch you back together," Kai retorted before looking right at Arin, "but he's right, you don't need to worry about it. Humpty-Dumpty has been put back together again, thanks to yours truly."

"Kai, I need to have this conversation with Arin," when all Kai did was nod, Arin had to stifle his giggle when Lloyd had to emphasize, "alone."

"Fine, fine, but then you two get your asses in bed, it's almost sunrise."

"I am not running any sunrise exercises until Sora is healed."

"That is not the point I was trying to get across and you know it, you little insomniac," Lloyd's groan only resulted in Kai reaching over to ruffle up Lloyd's already impressive bed-head which made it impossible for Arin to keep himself from laughing, "you shouldn't even be training them while you're hurt-"

"Okay, goodnight!" Lloyd shouted which finally got Kai to raise his hands in surrender and walk to his room while he ran a hand over his face before finally redirecting his attention so his bright green eyes met Arin's dark brown ones, "I'm sure you have questions, or criticism so…get it out."

"Is that normal?" Arin found himself asking despite the many other "whys" and "hows" running through his head.

"Kai's obnoxious teasing? Yes."

"I meant you getting hurt, or…" he stopped to let his glance wander toward his and Sora's room before returning to his Master's eyes, "any of us getting hurt."

Lloyd sighed and looked down at the floor, which filled Arin with regret for the second time that night, before looking back up at him, "I want you to trust me, so I'm not gonna lie to you. I don't think there has been a single fight where we haven't come out of it injured."

"Really?"

"Usually it's just bruises or scrapes, sometimes a minor concussion or a couple of stitches," Lloyd elaborated, "but, what happened to Sora and I, that isn't exactly common, and we're going to be okay."

"How do you know that?" Arin asked as he fought himself from adding, 'because I cannot lose anyone else.'

"Because we always are," Lloyd shrugged before ushering Arin to his room, "we should get some sleep, even if it's just so Kai doesn't yell at both of us tomorrow."

"Okay," Arin nodded even though he wasn't sure Kai could actually be that angry with Lloyd, "goodnight, Lloyd."

And with that, he turned his back on his master and started to make his way back to his bedroom, only to realize that maybe the sound of tree branches hitting the windows wasn't as jarring as it was before.

#lego ninjago #ninjago #my writing #fic #dragons rising #ninjago arin #ninjago sora #lloyd garmadon #ninjago kai #light angst #mild gore #blood and injury #nightmares #self-blame #mission gone wrong #swearing

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dkniade · 10 months

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Dawn Winds, Heed My Vision

Venti is dissociating and he stumbles to Angel’s Share to get help from Diluc.

It was inspired by that one Diluc comic I did, where I decided the other voice is Venti. I’ve done some drabbles before but I think this was my first time writing a proper fic with Diluc? Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Venti Has PTSD (Genshin Impact), Dissociation, Flashback, Self-Blame, Guilt, Snow, snowstorm, Night, Alcohol, Blood, Poison, (last three are brief), Mentioned Dvalin, Mentioned Durin

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howifeltabouthim · 1 year

Quote

As she thought of it all she hated herself. Over and over again she had told herself that she had so mismanaged the latter years of her life that it was impossible for her not to hate herself.

Anthony Trollope, from Can You Forgive Her?

#self-hatred #i'm a mess #ruined my life #self-blame #self reproach #hard on yourself #fuckup #the wasted years #quotes #lit #words #excerpts #quote #literature #classics #personal #anthony trollope #can you forgive her?

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unwelcome-ozian · 11 months

Photo

#shame #trauma effects #trauma #abuse #self-blame

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stellarcoachman · 7 months

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Chapter 6 of Twisting Tracks

Prompt: Recording CW: Disaster, Bombing, Self-Blame, Injury Summary: Emmet watches the recording of the incident that occurred at Gear Station.

#whumptober2023 #no.6 #recording #submas #fic #disaster #bombing #self-blame #inury

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whumpshaped · 6 months

Note

Whumpers not allowing whumpees on furniture (and caretakers ALLOWING them on furniture).

That's it. That's the ask.

tw dehumanisation, self-blame, self-deprecation, conditioned whumpee, pet whump, past trauma

Whumpee had fallen asleep. They'd only meant to rest a bit on the sofa, just a couple hours before they resumed their chores, and they'd fallen asleep.

They'd already taken a risk when they'd curled up among the fluffy throw pillows, but they'd thought it was a risk worth taking for a speck of comfort. A mere hour on a soft surface had sounded too good to their abused mind and body, too damn good after months and years of hardwood floors and their own shirts for pillows.

They'd thought they could avoid Caretaker catching them. And now here they were, standing in the doorway and staring at them with open surprise on their face.

Whumpee scrambled to get off the sofa, knowing well that pets weren't allowed on furniture, already thinking about all the horrible punishments they'd have to go through for violating such a basic rule.

"I'm sorry," they cried desperately, crawling over to Caretaker and bowing so deep their forehead was resting against the floor. The floor on which they should've been sleeping, instead of their master's soft couch. "I'm so sorry, please, I don't know what I was thinking, please forgive me! I'm so sorry!"

Caretaker quickly threw their bag on the floor and crouched down, gently nudging Whumpee by the shoulders to sit up. "Hey... Hey, Whumpee... It's okay, come on..."

"I'm s-so sorry, I was bad, I was disobedient, I knew I shouldn't do it and that's why I tried to do it behind your back... I'm sorry... It's, it's better that I failed, because otherwise I would've gotten away with breaking rules and lying and–"

"Oh, sweetheart..." They sighed, and Whumpee could hear the disappointment, and they couldn't believe they'd betrayed the trust of such a kind master.

"P-please, mercy," they whimpered. "I know I d-don't deserve it, I know..."

"There's no rule that prohibits you from using the furniture, Whumpee."

In one ear, out the other. Of course there was. It was so obvious, it was common sense, it had been drilled into them, and they'd knowingly violated it. Still, they stayed quiet, too afraid to argue with their owner.

"Can you sit up?" they asked gently, and Whumpee tore themself away from the floor, terrified of facing their master. "Good, that's good. Let's just calm down for a second, yeah?"

Whumpee had never felt less calm in their life. They were sobbing uncontrollably, unable to comply with even the simplest of orders, such as 'breathe'. They were making it worse, they were sure of it.

Yet... Caretaker didn't seem particularly angry. Of course, anger wasn't needed to dish out some horrendous punishment, Whumpee had learned that the hard way. But this felt different. Caretaker felt patient.

"I'm sorry," they blurted out again when they felt less frantic, and Caretaker smiled sadly.

"I know. But there's no need. You didn't do anything wrong in my eyes."

"B-but, but I– I dirtied the furniture–"

"Whumpee, listen to me." Caretaker cupped their cheeks, looking completely serious. "You're not dirty. You're not dirty for being you, you're not dirty by virtue of being a pet, or whatever that sick fuck has told you. Yeah? You can't just dirty my sofa, or the guest bed, or the plates in the kitchen, or anything just by touching them, unless you're deliberately smearing mud on them or something. Have you done that to the sofa? It doesn't look like you have. You're okay."

Whumpee swallowed and nodded, eager to agree and appease their master; despite the fact that their sentiment was in direct opposition with what they'd been taught over years. "I– I understand."

"Good. That's good. I'm glad. I'm not going to force you to use the furniture if it's too scary for now. But I want you to understand that it's not forbidden."

They nodded again, and Caretaker seemed pleased with their reaction. Pleased enough to let go of them and stand up, extending a hand to pull them up as well. Whumpee took it hesitantly.

"It'd make me very happy if we could get to a level where you're comfortable using everything in my house," Caretaker went on. "I know it'll take time, but... just know that that's the goal I have in mind. Today has been a step in the right direction, I hope."

general drabbles taglist: @ashh-ed @whumpsday @whump-queen @the-scrapegoat @hidden-dreamland @rosewriteswhump @dismemberment-on-a-tuesday-night @whumpkinpie @delicateprincepaper @whumppmuhw @whump-em @cyborg0109 @morning-star-whump @justanotherlokifan @2in1whump @lthrboy @justletmereadmywhump @florissimps @anonymous-tiangou

#whump #whump drabble #comfort #dehumanisation #self-blame #self-deprecation #conditioned whumpee #pet whump #past trauma #asks #recovery fic

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staycalmandhugaclone · 3 months

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Identity Pt 8

Part (8) of Identity, the next arc of Doc's Misadventures! If you're new, start at the beginning with Touch Starved!

At a whopping 27,000 words, this accidentally became the biggest arc in the series. Oops. Anyway, I've certainly been a bit possessed about getting it done, so here yuh go!

Warnings: Honestly, aside from the standard guilt and regret, this chapter is mostly fluff

WC: 2,913

He held me until my breath eased back into a quiet, rhythmic ebb and flow free of even the occasional hitched gasp. At some point, he’d shifted just enough to lean his shoulder against the wall, hand lightly clasped around the back of my neck as his fingers trailed absently atop the skin peaking out between my blacks and hairline. Part of me knew I shouldn’t stay like this; that hiding against him only delayed confronting the guilt I’d see in Wolffe’s eyes, the trepidation and doubt in Cody’s, but it was so easy to pretend otherwise, to keep my face nestled against his throat and let all thought of what responsibility awaited us beyond those walls fade as seconds turned into minutes.

A crippling realization struck me in that moment. I was hiding. I was hiding from the risk of another mission and another near disaster. I was hiding from the damage that had already been caused and the inevitable destruction still awaiting me. I was hiding from the certainty that even worse might be befall those around me at any moment; doubtless of just how effortlessly that might break whatever fleeting reserves of strength somehow managed to keep me going through all that had already happened, and I knew that that very fear of them getting hurt was likely the only thing keeping me from yielding that I might be there to help them in any way I could.

But it wasn’t just the fear of impending nightmares that kept me curled in the arms of a man I remembered hiding from so many months prior, back when we were strangers and I shied from the intensity that burned in his eyes when faced with even a simple question; the deep quiet he’d fall into while considering every aspect of a problem before coming to a decision, and the unease that would fill me at the mere thought of finding myself the subject of that frightening focus. So much had happened since then, and I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything but grateful for his presence in that moment, for the calm he granted me even as reality seemed to shift with a wretched understanding.

I was hiding from Wolffe; from the way his voice had threatened to break when last we spoke, from the tension that stole the effortless visage of command from him whenever we’d found ourselves alone. I was hiding from the squad that I could no longer think of as mine, from the longing in their eyes for a time that was now gone and would never again grant us the incredible breadth of comfort once gleaned from the sense of family we had found in each other, now felt only with a nostalgia tarnished by the horrors filling these past few days.

I wanted to weep anew at the thought of those coming farewell’s weighted beneath guilt and regret and the want for a denial we knew to be useless. In that moment, I longed to let myself be weak; to beg Hunter to tell Wolffe to leave that I wouldn’t have to face him at all, and I hated myself for that weakness.

The gentle dance of his touch stilled; fingers half buried in my hair as he subtly turned his gaze toward me; waiting. I drew a slow, resigned breath, held it in a final plea for even a few seconds’ more of a delay, and finally let it out in a controlled sigh as I pulled away from him.

“Thank you.” I whispered, eyes raising to just glimpse his. His thumb swept once more along the length of my neck before finally letting his hand fall briefly to my arm and then to the floor near his waist.

“Don’t need to thank me, Doc.” He replied softly, attention carefully locked on me. My lips drew up in an empty smile as I turned to glance thoughtlessly around the room. When I began to draw movement back into my limbs, weight shifting to balance atop a knee in preparation of forcing myself to my feet, Hunter quickly reached back out to me, arm looping around my shoulders as though anticipating the way my muscles would instantly waver at that first hint of strain. I was no stranger to the way grief and fear and panic left one so hopelessly drained yet always found myself unprepared for how ruthlessly that exhaustion struck. Unphased, I leaned into his support; let myself rely on his strength in the absence of my own as he carefully pulled me up alongside him.

“If we stay in here much longer, they might get the wrong idea.” I muttered, peaking towards him to see the way his brow cocked in surprise, but he let out a quiet chuckle at the weary smirk I managed to shoot him.

“The last thing I need is Crosshair hearing those kinds of rumors from regs…” He grumbled back, and I was shocked at how easily the huff of laughter escaped me. “Are you okay to walk?” He asked, voice dropping into a whisper as though that might prevent it from robbing us of that brief, precious moment of lightness. I nodded, forcing my back straight despite the reluctance weighing down my shoulders. “Alright.” He murmured and I tried to ignore the chill left in the wake of his touch as he slowly stepped away from me.

Whatever conversation had filled the silence beyond the office walls ceased with a harsh finality the instant that door began to open. I could feel Hunter standing just behind me, attention still following my every movement as though I might tumble without warning. Cody was the first to approach me, helm tucked under his arm and expression still somehow void of the disappointment I kept expecting to find.

“Commander, I-” He dismissed whatever attempt at an apology I was still trying to piece together with a simple wave of his hand and subtle shake of his head.

“Just get to the barracks and try to get some rest.” The innate authority in his voice was softened by a compassion that I still found myself shocked to hear from someone in his position and could only respond with a small nod.

“I can come back tomorrow – answer any other questions you have.” I offered, but he again dismissed it.

“Between what you’ve already told me and what I discussed with Commander Wolffe, there’s no need for that. Just take some time; try not to lose yourself in what happened.” He barely whispered those final words, willing them into me with a quiet understanding that I couldn’t begin to pretend I didn’t need. He ducked his head in a small bow before stepping past me into his office, and I hesitated just a moment longer before turning toward Wolffe.

“Guess I overestimated myself.” I mumbled, voice straining past the stiffness in my jaw, and I wasn’t sure how to respond to the subtle feeling of Hunter’s hand coming to rest against the armor sweeping across my lower back, nor my inability to deny the depth of comfort it gave me.

“No one’s holding that against you.” He replied softly before his gaze shifted to the man behind me. “Take care of her.” There was none of that disdain he’d once regarded Hunter with; no sneer of disapproval, and Hunter mirrored that unspoken respect with a silent nod.

“Wolffe.” I called hesitantly just as he’d begun to walk away, nearly cringing at the remorse in my own voice; the threat of shame. “I don’t… Will you tell the others I’ll be okay? I just… I can’t…” How could I explain the way it would cripple me to see their guilt again? To hear their apologies despite knowing they’d done nothing to warrant such sorrow?

“Don’t worry about them.” He explained, voice quiet but no less commanding for it. “Just be safe, kid.” There… just lingering beneath that infallible composure… Even Wolffe couldn’t keep the traces of an apology from his farewell. Gaze falling lest I note even a glimmer of regret in those stern eyes, I fought to offer some trace of a smile before turning away. The sense of finality in that farewell left my breath trembling slightly, and even the way Hunter shifted nearer to me did little to ease the sense of loss twisting through my chest.

“Cody’s already granting us clearance for the mission details.” He didn’t look at me when he said it, gaze once more hidden behind that dark visor as we walked unhurried through the corridors of the Negotiator. “You don’t have to, but if you want to talk about it…” My head fell slightly at the gentle invitation, and I knew he could hear how my heartbeat quickened at the mere thought. When I gave no answer, he didn’t press, but I couldn’t dispel the tension that lingered in the silence between us.

“I don’t think Wrecker’s ever going to let you go off on another mission without us.” He added a moment later, somehow managing to sow a wisp of humor into his voice, and a small scoff escaped me.

“Even if it’s the 104th calling you again?” There was something beneath the teasing lilt in his voice, but I was too weary to try to name it.

“Given my track record, I don’t think he’ll hear any arguments from me…” I grumbled.

“I didn’t know I’d be working with them this time until after I’d boarded the transport.” His helm shifted toward me, and I could easily picture the way his brows had surely risen above eyes widened with surprise. “But, no.” I added quietly, pace unchanged as I tried not to think too deeply on the painful words slipping over my tongue. “I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to work with them again.” Hunter stopped walking. I didn’t, intent on not falling back into the remorse that was all too eager to overwhelm me again.

“I’m sorry.” He murmured, treading back to my side. I gave a weak shrug, collecting my thoughts a moment before responding.

“Too much has changed… Besides, they have a jedi watching their backs. Without me, you lot only have dumb luck and sheer stubbornness.” A quiet chuckle just sounded through his comm system, and I found myself joining him in with a snicker of my own as his hand reached up to lightly jostle my helmet. It was heartbreaking – that conscious understanding that I no longer belonged with the 104th, but I had harbored no doubts that it was the right choice; that the 99 had become my family in a way the others never could.

“Doc!” Wrecker’s shout boomed through the nearly empty barracks, and I barely had time to draw in breath for a reply I never got to speak before his arms locked around my waist to hoist me up in an embrace far softer than his normal hugs. Still, laughter sputtered from my lips at the welcomed display of affection I would always treasure from the man, hand automatically darting out to his shoulder to steady myself despite the knowledge that he’d never let me fall.

“It’s almost like you missed me or something.” I teased, earning a brilliant smile from him that was so utterly free of shame or hesitation as he gently set me back down.

“Those regs need to find their own nat-born next time! It’s not fair for them to just come and steal yuh away whenever they want.” He complained, hands lingering on my hips for just a moment longer to ensure I was steady before stepping back.

Two rows of double bunks stretched out before me in a room designed to hold at least a company of one hundred though the entirety of it had been reserved for our tiny squad. Crosshair stood leaning against one of the upper bunks a few rows away with his arms wrapped tightly across his chest, attention locked on me from the corner of his eye while Echo and Tech sat together atop a lower cot a mere handful of strides from the door, the telltale mess of cables strewn between them warning of some half-started project.

“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that.” I reassured him in a gentle sigh. “Pretty sure this was a one-time thing.” I could see the concern lingering in his gaze despite his efforts to hide it beneath his usual glee, the subtle threat of anger it fueled, and had to look away.

“Hey stranger.” I said softly. His chest bucked slightly around a sharp breath, mouth just beginning to open before closing tightly in a final bout of hesitation, but then he let out a small huff, forcing some of that tightness from his shoulders.

The instant I glimpsed him, the arc quick pushed himself to his feet, eyes torn between meeting my gaze and darting away as his jaw tensed around whatever attempt at a greeting caught in his throat. Had he been there when I first landed? Had I simply been too lost in my own thoughts to notice? My heart sank at the thought, just managing to offer the ghost of a smile in the face of how stiffly he held himself.

“Hey.” He whispered, and I heard clearly the apology in it, but it was nothing like those plaguing every word uttered amongst the 104th. There was a warmth in his apology; a subtle self-deprecation softened with something near enough to humor that my smile bloomed with relief.

“I see you two have been making the most of this little vacation.” I started, looking pointedly at the assortment of mysteriously procured supplies. He glanced quickly over his shoulder as though he’d forgotten the project entirely before turning back to me.

“Echo suggested a few interesting modifications to his cybernetic legs.” Tech stated before his brother could try to explain. “This is merely the initial prototype. Rebuilding his legs entirely will take significantly longer than a few days, but this will allow us to test the efficiency of our new design.” I looked back to the arc with surprise and found him fighting a sheepish grin.

My head fell toward my chest, stomach churning with regret for having offered at all despite Tech’s automatic “thank you.” Swallowing back the anxiety threatening to coil through my gut, I finally let myself glance toward the tall sniper still watching me from just the corner of his eye, and the little thrill of glee that seeing him shot through me offered a precious sliver of relief. He barely reacted as I approached him, head just shifting to follow my movements until barely a foot lay between us, and I let out a heavy sigh full of mock guilt and remorse.

“Wow.” I chirped, pleased to hear they’d managed to be so productive despite how strained things had been over the past few weeks, “Let me know if you need any help synching it to the neural interface.” Echo’s face darkened for barely the breadth of a heartbeat, but it was enough to remind me that the effortless connection that once came so easily to us still lay far beyond my grasp.

“I may have jinxed myself.” I muttered, and a quiet chuckle escaped me at the way he cocked his brow, unimpressed by my admission. “Was I right? Did you mope the entire time I was gone?”

“Yes.” Hunter called from the front of the barracks, kindling my chuckle into a short burst of laughter as Cross shot his brother a lethal glare.

“Just got back and you’re already trying to cause trouble.” He growled under his breath, earning a coy smirk from me. Only then did he begin to abandon that impartial veneer, weight shifting as he pushed himself away from the bunks to reach for me, and I could feel my entire body lighten with the deep sigh that fled my lips at that first rush of warmth from his embrace.

“Are you okay?” He asked, words barely audible as they danced through my hair. The rote reassurance so nearly fell from my lips absent a moment’s thought before catching in my throat. I could feel him tense in those brief seconds of hesitation before I reluctantly shook my head.

“Not yet.” I answered, voice heavy with every unspoken reason forbidding me from trying to convince him otherwise. “But I’m really glad to be back.” He went still for a long moment, but then his arms tightened almost harshly around me, body curling over mine as though he might hide me from what darkness lingered behind the veil of empty smiles.

We both knew there would be no walking away from the damage wrought during my time apart from them, but I let myself relish that moment of stillness; the hum of quiet conversation between Hunter and Wrecker, the rhythmic clicks and hisses of tools augmenting metal and wire beneath Echo and Tech’s ministrations, the steady thrum of Crosshair’s heartbeat dancing against me as I rested my forehead to his neck, shamelessly letting myself vanish in that heady spice and tang of blasterfire. Every day spent fighting this war brought untold risks and dangers, but I held no reservations that this was exactly where I belonged, and no threat was great enough to see me leave them for even a moment more.

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