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goes-whump-in-the-night · 13 hours ago

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🤫 🎬 🌸 for Rory! ('On Call' hurt my soul a lot ;; , poor Rory!) - @whumpawaydarling

time off (pt. 1)

Synopsis: Rory...tries to figure out what to do when she has choices. The first choice is obvious. Follow up to On Call.

Content Warning: immortal whumpee, lady whumpee, escape attempts, aftermath of torture, mentions of past nsfwhump, recovery under whumper's terms, self-caretaking, whumpee remembering how to person, musicals

Author's Notes: Well, if it hurts, then clearly, I'm doing my job right!

It took Rory well over an hour to even begin to process the message Blake’s words. She just sat there on the bed where they had left her, barely thinking at all, those words just repeating in her head over and over again.

"After that performance, I think you've deserved a little time off yourself."

Rory had gotten used to staying wherever they left her, post-torture, if only because there was never anywhere else to go, and nothing to do but relive the latest horrors. Here, in the hotel suite, it felt no different at first, so she sat, still sore and aching inside, occasionally rubbing her bruised throat, just thinking about all those people who had watched her being abused and strangled in the corner of a screen while casually going on with their business talk.

"After that performance, I think you've deserved a little time off yourself."

She kept wondering if they were going to take her out of here the same way they had brought her in - in the suitcase. It was likely, she thought - they usually kept it consistent, and once they knew something especially bothered or was upsetting for her, they tended to push on the pressure point until they found some way to break her a little more. They might not even give her the drugs before putting her in when they went back, or maybe not enough to keep her under the whole time, allowing her to wake up for an extended panic mid-air.

"After that performance, I think you've deserved a little time off yourself."

But, it was the concept of time that got Rory off that train of thought in the first place. Because months or a year or however long she had been in this stupid situation hadn't broken her lifelong habit of occasionally checking the time, and she did that now as well - but unlike all the other times she had looked for it in the past months or year or however long, this time, she actually found a digital clock sat on the nightstand beside the bed.

Time.

3:25 - with the little dot in the PM position.

Rory stared at that clock for so long, it ticked over to 3:26, 3:27. She gave a general count of the seconds, getting about 60 for each minute that passed. It was all the way up to 3:39 before Rory was really sure.

She knew what time it was.

She would know when an hour passed here, and an hour after that, and another after that. She would know when it was midnight. She would know when it was 6 am. She would know when all the lines lined up at 11:11, and when they would reflect each other at 12:21.

With trembling hands, Rory reached out and grabbed the clock. It actually seemed more well-made than the cheap ones she'd been used to buying in her old life, but it was still the same buttons and icons on top that she recognized. She used her thumb to move one of the switches over by two settings, and -

Music started to play. It was a pop song from a few years ago, one Rory had gotten sick of hearing on the radio in one of her short-lived retail jobs. It was trite and generic and the way it had come back on at least twice an hour, every hour, had made her hate both the song and its artist for having the gall to write it.

It was the most beautiful thing Rory had ever heard. She pressed the stereo to her forehead, letting that song, and the next one, and the next one and the next one rumble into her until it was 4:02.

Then, she turned the music up as loud as she could, got up from the bed, and started looking for a way out.

First thing, she tried all the doors. She knew, obviously, that anything leading out was going to be locked, and she would probably find Garret or Sienna waiting outside even if it wasn't, but she had to check, because she would never live it down if she didn't.

The two doors that seemed mostly likely to lead outside - locked, unsurprisingly, but also unflinching when she attempted to throw her whole weight against them, in a way that made her think she would break long before the door did. She did find doors that led to bathrooms, closets, and more sheltered bedrooms, but ignored those for the time being.

After barricading the outward doors with whatever furniture she could find that wasn't bolted down - which was its own ordeal, as Rory realized very quickly it had been a long time since she had been allowed this much physically involved activity, but fuck it, she wasn't going to make it any either for them to drag her out of here - she went to focus on the windows. That seemed easy enough, as the entire back wall of the suite was made of glass that looked out over whatever city they were in.

Rory looked out through them, trying to get a lay of the situation. No balcony access from this suite, it seemed, and based on the dizzying height she looked down from, she guessed they had left her dozens of stories above the street below. If she got out this way, she would either have to get very good at climbing or very ready for a long, sharp fall.

This almost deterred her for a second, until she remembered - the worst it could do was kill her. That thought gave her a morbid laugh. Yeah - worst case scenario, she fucked up some other rich bastard's fancy car and Blake had to pay for damages while justifying why he, specifically, needed to scrape her naked body out of the wreckage. And best case -

Rory went to grab the most battering ram-esque fixture in the suite she could find. Her first try with some stupid faux marble display column fizzled out when her attempt to lift it nearly got her a broken foot as she remembered: this was a rich people hotel. That was probably four feet of actual marble.

So she settled for a metal trash can instead, and attempted to bash that through the glass wall - only for it to practically bounce off and send Rory tumbling back to the floor with its momentum.

She tried again, of course - and again, and again, and again. Different objects, different angles, different techniques, but by the time the clock read 6:37 and Rory was hearing that one pop song again for the third time that evening, she was sweaty and exhausted and out of breath and beginning to accept that this stupid wall was impermeable to everything at her disposal.

Rory collapsed in a defeated heap amongst her abandoned tools and put her face in her hands. It felt like this should be a time to cry, if ever there was one. So close to the potential for freedom, and all that stood between her and that next big step was literally an invisible wall. Of all times, now should be the point where she screamed and howled and cried for her frustration at the unfairness of it all.

But the emotion just wasn't there right now. She suspected she would've needed a lot more hope for escape in the first place in order for it to be crushed badly enough to make her cry, and in reality she knew - Blake was never going to let her go that easily. All of this had been nothing but going through the motions, to satisfy her need to lash out.

So at no later that 6:39 pm, Rory picked herself up from the floor and slunk into one of the bedrooms, locking the door behind her.

It was not lost on Rory that one bedroom in this suite had more square footage than the studio she'd been living in before her first death. Hell, the sprawling bed alone was probably bigger than the minuscule "kitchen" she'd had, and there was a whole other suite out there she had mostly only seen so far through frantic lenses of fear and a desire to escape.

Assuming she was still here tomorrow and didn't wake up after the fever dream this was back in her familiar cell, there would be time to look through all that later. But at the moment, the main thought on Rory's mind was wondering about the last time she'd actually slept on a bed.

They had kept her on a bed, technically, in the morgue where she had first woken up - which the stunned doctors had refused to let her leave out of a desire to run endless tests on her, despite her wishes to leave. But she had been drugged and restrained through most of that, to what was a horrid hospital bed at best, so that barely counted.

It hadn't been with Kyle and Grant, that was for sure. They had kept her tied up on the floor in their disgusting basement for most of her time there, only occasionally moving her to a mildew-smelling futon if they needed to clean around her or wanted her in a better position for something else.

Blake, of course, only allowed her a thin strip of a mat to sleep on in her cell, but he took her out on occasion. Maybe the last time that had included sleep was...the aphrodisiac thing? A lot of Rory's memories of her various tortures had started to blur together, but that one in particular remained hazily humiliating in her brain. Hours and hours strapped to a bed while a series of painful orgasm ripped through her in waves, knowing all of it was being recorded and invasively questioned by Blake “doctor” for the sake of some scientific bullshit.

But it had been a soft bed - and Rory had been allowed to sleep there for the...night? Day? Whatever time - it was 6:43 now, there was a clock in here too - when they were done with her. So, she supposed that counted.

As Rory crawled into bed, ripping all the covers and sheets free from where they had been neatly tucked in, her first thought was that this would do more than count. This would be sleep in a bed, full stop. The mattress felt unbelievably soft and welcoming beneath her, and she buried her face in the pillows, inhaling deeply and enraptured by the soft crinkle of the linens around her. It even smelled clean in here.

She pulled the plush duvet around herself - around her sweaty, exhausted body, not caring how badly she defiled the white linens by association - creating a cocoon of comfort. She grabbed all the pillows next, piling them around her head like some kind of protective rampart, and settled into all of it with a massive sigh, intending to fall sleep right there and then.

But -

" - a little time off - a little time off - a little time off - a little time off - "

Rory's eyes sluggishly pulled themselves back open at just 7:27 pm, after too long of failing to sleep. It should have been almost immediate. Given the way her body was literally trembling between the exhaustion and the desperately needed relief the bed offered, Rory knew she should've been asleep right off. But she just couldn't get her mind to rest in the same way her body craved, because -

Well -

"This is fucking weird," Rory murmured to herself. She rose to a sitting position and looked around the bedroom.

Where was - where was the fake-out? The moved goal posts? Where was Garret, ready to kick in the door on command and drag her out of her imagined safety? Where was Sienna, ready to manhandle every part of her as she shoved her into a travel kennel? Where was Blake, taunting that he might offer her a little more time in the room if she slept on his lap like a good little pet?

" - a little time - a little time - a little time - a little time - "

Rory began to smack her head with the heels of her palms, growling, "Shut up, shut up, shut up," before crumpling her hands around the sheets in frustration. She couldn't let this - the one chance she would have for however long to act like a person and actually rest get ruined because she couldn't stop thinking about when it would be ripped away from her. She knew it wasn't going to last forever, of course she fucking knew that, so she had to just fucking get over it or else she might as well be back in her cell.

With a deep breath, Rory reached over to the radio clock on her left, thinking maybe some music would help clear her thoughts while she tried to sleep, but something else she spotted on the nightstand made her flinch.

It was a remote - innocuous enough on its own, but all her recent experiences with remotes had involved ones designed to hurt or humiliate her from a comfortable distance. After a moment's hesitation though, Rory recognized it as something bigger and more complex than the remotes usually tied to her collars and toys.

It was a TV remote.

"But there's no..."

Rory stared quizzically at the blank stretch of paneling in front of her bed for a moment, until it occurred to her -

She picked up the remote and looked it over until she saw a button with an icon that looked like two triangles pushing to opposite sides. She pressed it, again flinching slightly at the soft, mechanical whir that started, but then watched as the panels before her began to split open - revealing a stupidly big widescreen television behind them.

Rory nearly laughed at the utter lack of necessity to it all. "Oh, this is some real rich people shit," she murmured, and then pressed the big red power button to turn the TV on.

What she was greeted with was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not any sort of live television or actual channels. Blake might be allowing her to know the time for this little vacation, but apparently he didn't want her knowing any current events - including what date it was.

Instead, what she found was a catalogue of what seemed to be...movies. A lot of movies. Maybe all of them? Or at least a hell of a lot more than she could remember seeing on any other service back home. The only thing that seemed to be missing, as she scrolled through genres and decades and collections and regions, was recent releases, with nothing that had come out within the past few years available - another detail that made Rory roll her eyes. Blake hadn't even given her the courtesy of trying to guess the date based on what movies had come out recently.

"Dickhead," she muttered, before continuing to scroll.

It was 8:15 pm when Rory realized she had been looking for something to help her sleep longer than she had even tried to fall asleep in the first place - and was also no closer to making a decision than when she'd started. Because -

Well, honestly, she didn't actually want to watch any of her old favorites, because she didn't want to be reminded of home like that, and she didn't want to watch any action movies, because how was she supposed to sleep to the tune of 8,000 machine gun car crashes, and she didn't want to watch a romance, because she'd had enough fucked up attention placed on her that the thought of witnessing someone else's intimacy kind of made her skin crawl, and she didn't want to watch horror, because her life was its own horror show, and she didn't want to watch comedy, because - because -

Because she just couldn't choose. It'd been so long since she'd had an actual choice in anything - a choice that had more meaning "do you want to degrade yourself and be tortured nicely, or be a bitch and have it worse?" It made her pulse race, just the thought of picking something that might actually be wrong, which was embarrassing enough, because it was just a movie, it was just a fucking movie, and if she didn't like it, she could just quit and watch one of a billion other movies -

And yet, there was something soothing in itself about just looking, and leaving all her paths open. But she couldn't just let looking be her whole time.

At 8:20 pm, Rory forced her hand, because it had to be something. She threw on a decade of American movies, closed her eyes, clicked down through the list, and then pressed OK until something started playing.

She almost turned it off immediately when she realized it was a musical.

Rory had never exactly loved musicals. They were tolerable if she was watching them with someone else who liked them, but the whole conceit of everyone singing and dancing about their every emotion didn't really agree with her.

But the bit of persuasion she gave herself that she didn't have to like it, she could just live with it, wound up turning into...something resembling actual enjoyment? Like - yes, singing about your feelings was still dumb in her book, but there was something both soft and colorful about the world this story existed in that drew her in more than she’d expected.

It was all the costumes, and the sets, and the lighting, and the choreography, everything a little larger than life. It was that extra stretch of being removed from reality, of a world where everyone understood their problems so perfectly that they could put them to music and no one really got hurt because all the fights were in dance. All that allowed Rory to let herself fully seep into the story without quite so much latent anxiety, because there was less fear she would actually be hurt by this.

By the end of the first act, Rory's blanket cocoon and pillow rampart had migrated with her down the length of the bed as she repositioned herself to lie on her stomach, closer to the TV. By the end of the second, she had turned on the subtitles so she could sort of half-sing along with the characters.

By the end of the movie, she hadn't thought about Blake in over an hour, and she let the autoplay take her into another musical right afterwards.

Before midnight, Rory was asleep.

#whump writing #whump oc #immortal whumpee #whump recovery

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