ostensiblywhump

[ostensiblywhump]

quick important post. this isn’t my usual type of stuff but im putting this out here for awareness.

there’s someone in the whump community who’s recently been gaining some traction. their posts haven’t really gotten super popular but they have circulated a bit and keep popping up on my page. youve probably seen them yourself if you’re a member of this community.

I never really interacted with their content just because realism in whump art isn’t my personal cup of tea (obviously if it’s yours, that’s fine and keep doing your thing, that’s not what this post is about), but a friend of mine decided to look a little bit further into things. it turns out this user has a history of using ai for writing, and seems to have a pro-generative ai stance.

they also use ai for all of their “art” (screenshots from a friend). even after being made aware of the harm that ai does, they have said that they will continue to use it.

this has been pointed out before by a few other people in the community, but I wanted to make a post for more reach since a lot of bigger names in the community who have denounced ai have been spreading around this content without knowing.

i know i’m kind of preaching to the choir but generative ai should not be tolerated in a space like this. the whump community was founded by fanfiction writers— the same fanfiction writers who are having their work scraped for generative ai without their permission or knowledge. generative ai has done so much harm to fandom spaces this year alone, and with the recent scrape of ao3, we should be fighting harder against it. allowing this to remain unchecked in this community is dangerous.

that, combined with the real harm generative ai does, makes this very kind of content go against the fundamental beliefs and morals of the whump community. i know i can’t speak for the community as a whole, but i have not found a single member here who would knowingly endorse generative ai. it just feels incredibly shitty for this person to not even mention that this work is ai (except for the one post included above). with how much effort and emotion people put into their stories and art, using ai to try and replicate that comes off as just incredibly distasteful.

the forbes article linked above to water consumption and ai isn’t even the only example i can think of when it comes to the harm ai’s done. if the whole “destroying the planet”, and “scraping work from artists, writers, and animators without consent” wasn’t enough for you, then i honest to god don’t know what will be. maybe the many, many accounts of ai being used to allow people to spread child pornography and irl gore videos of horrific events? it’s not harmless. it’s immoral on a fundamental level. in a world where ai is being shoved into people’s faces left and right with the integration of it into basically every corner of the internet, i think i can speak for us all when i say we want to keep this corner ai-free.

ai does not belong in creative spaces, least of all the whump community.

[ostensiblywhump]

nothinggg better than torturing an emotionally repressed character until every single trauma they've ever refused to process starts spilling uncontrollably out of the cracks. like a matryoshka doll situation of repressed trauma and baby you better believe i'm going in there with a hammer

[ostensiblywhump]

Oooh oooh! Here’s another bondage trope I hate:

When the main character is tied up differently than everyone else, but just so they can escape easier!

Because, you know, they’re just SO special that the antagonists conveniently decided they get lighter restraints, just as a treat.

[ostensiblywhump]

Five Types of Living Weapon Whumpees

The guard dog -> loyalty has been ingrained into their bones, following their handler around like their shadow. No one dares stand against the organization because of the legendary dread surrounding this living weapon. They hardly say a word but every movement is calculated, eyes always darting, always watching. (“You always were their lapdog.”)

The loose cannon -> dangerous for both sides. Always talking back and never predictable, their value is dependent on their skill. If it wasn’t for that, they’d be dead a long time ago. Their loyalty is earned, not bought. No one wants to be on their bad side, walking on tip toe whenever they show up. And they enjoy it. (“What’s everyone looking at? Aren’t you happy to see me? I even brought my rifle!”)

The broken down -> most common type of whumpee I’ve seen. They’ve been overpowered and forced into the commission. They hate their handler more than anything else but see no way out. When they’re told to shoot, they don’t even blink. It’s always “yes, sir” this and “yes, sir” that. If they feel any sympathy, they don’t show it. They’ll do anything to avoid punishment and flinch at quick movements. Nothing they face on the field is worse than the cards they’ve been dealt. (“I understand, sir/ ma’am. I-I’m sorry.”)

The dissenter -> Usually recruited into the organization or joined as a last ditch option. Not necessarily against using their abilities or skill, they just hate being told what to do. As time goes on and their disobedience is punished over and over again, they grow reluctant. Bitter. With every order, they slip in a snarky comment. Roll their eyes. Anything to assert their own identity. Or what’s left of it. (“ah ah ah, you didn’t think i’d notice? The middle finger was a bit much. I’m afraid it will have to go.”)

The ghost in the machine -> known only by their codename by outsiders and by their number in the organization, they’ve been stripped of all humanity. They live, breathe, and think by their handlers orders. They’ve been told over and over again that they are just a weapon. And a weapon does what it’s told. Their anonymity is attached to the organization in the same way a gun is simply an extension of their arm. But at night they still stare up at the ceiling with a blank stare— did they ever a life before this? They can’t remember. (“It’s not like it’s a person. It doesn’t have feelings like that.”)

[ostensiblywhump]

Is it really your name if nobody uses it?

You insist that's your name, but that's not the name I gave you. That's not your name anymore.

You can pretend like it is, for a while.

But how long will it take before you begin to forget?

Every time I use your name, your real name. You forget your old one, bit by bit. You perk up every time I call you, because you know that's who you are now.

I can hear you, you know. Each night, repeating it to over and over, trying to convince yourself that this isn't who you are, that you're still who you were before we met.

It's funny to see you try, but one day you'll lose the only thing that ties you to your old life.

Soon, Adam will be gone.

...Or was it Alan? It's so hard to keep track of a name you never hear.

Your eyes widen with dread, a pit forming in your stomach as you feel like a part of you just died.

You can't remember.

[ostensiblywhump]

healed scars in whump writing: a tip

a friendly reminder that surgery scars, even ones that are healed and years old, are felt anytime you stretch that part of your body.

have scars on your chest or back? you feel them when you reach up to turn the light off before bed. scars on your knees? you feel them anytime you bend your leg too far.

it doesn't hurt, at least not in my case, (it feels somewhat like if you put a finger inside your mouth and pull the skin of your cheek out - a gentle pull, but no pain) but i've never seen this detail written into whump or recovery fics and when i do, it always adds so much more realism into the story.

in some cases (and here, i'm speaking solely in relation to scars on your chest, since that's what i know from experience) the healed scars will be so sensitive to external stimuli that even wearing clothes is tortorous. alternatively, the whumpee could loose all sensation in the area. i was given about a 10% possibility that one of those might happen to me, and thankfully I avoided it but they'd both be interesting to see written into whump fics, especially recovery ones.

[ostensiblywhump]

best aus for whump material? I wanna write whump but I've never seriously ventured to that corner of fandom before. lmk your favorite whump aus please :)

[ostensiblywhump]

Owners of magic shops don't take kindly to thieves.

Whumpuary 2025

Day 17 (Alt prompt) Hair Horn pulling

Day 27 Rescue

Champion taglist: @thewhumpywitch , @ostensiblywhump , @scoundrelwithboba

[ostensiblywhump]

Whumpuary day 31

Squeaking in at like midnight just to get at least one more day done! I might try finally posting my day 17 piece, but for now, this.

Something good about my writing ... I wrote a fight scene during Whumpuary for the first time in years and I really like how it came out. Maybe it wasn't the best grammatically, considering I did the fight bits in present tense and dialogue/introspection in past tense as an experiment, but I think I did well on that!

I also think I did a pretty good job on writing around pain. Like, describing how a character and their body reacted to it, instead of trying to prosaically describe it. The writing version of drawing an egg on white paper! It's supposed to make your writing sound stronger and I did it, especially with Talbot's piece.

Lastly, for the days I did do, I used all the prompts for those days! I dunno, I'm pretty proud of that. And I got further than I did for Augusnippets! So even though I didn't complete everything like I wanted to, I'm happy with what I did :D

[ostensiblywhump]

So many people do not understand the relationship between climate change and cold weather.

[ostensiblywhump]

injecting Claire Jones by madilyn mei directly into my veins while i work on overdue day 17 for whumpuary, which I thought wasn't going to be indicative of what i was writing, I just wanted to listen to it on repeat again and i already had an idea cooking, but now ANOTHER idea has fuckin' t-boned me based on it and. well i gotta at least TRY it

[ostensiblywhump]

Crimson

Whumpuary day 15: handcuffed | dead | "please, stop"

Word count: 1,242

Content warnings: dehumanization, death, blood, experimentation (this one's heavier than other prompts I've filled, take care of yourselves)

———(0)———

He’s utterly still when he jerks awake, only a hitch in the rhythm of his breathing betraying him. Fox lays there, lets the tension keep him a coiled spring while he listens.

Breathing, from multiple places, in the steady cadence of sleep; one breath carries a nasal snore with it, from a nose broken too many times to ever be quiet again. The thrumming rattle of the vent, positioned directly above where his bunk is shoved up against the wall. Electricity, its high-pitched whine inescapable when there’s so little noise to distract from it.

(Screaming, screaming. Always the screaming. Always the—sounds. Indescribable, and it’ll never try otherwise, in the same manner as pivoting away from thoughts about anything that might make it disobey orders. Always that voice, so amused.)

Command barracks. The tension bleeds out of him, and his eyes open to unlit ceiling.

(Darkness, dancing light. The play of shadows against the featureless stone above it. It can’t see anything else—after all, it’s been ordered to not move. The gray swims, moves like it’s breathing. It blinks, and it’s only the candles playing tricks on it. It’s only visual fatigue. The burn in its eyes is only from keeping them open for too long. In its defense, it can be hard to tell whether not moving also means not blinking.)

Force, stop—no.

Fox turns his head away. Stone is a lumbering, sprawled heap—for a brother so contained and quiet during his waking hours, it can be strange to see him like this, limbs akimbo and snoring away. Above Stone, Thire would be in his customary blanket ball if it weren’t for the fact that he had night shift this cycle. Mal is ramrod straight on its back, blanketless, the barest rise and fall of its chest the only indication that it’s alive. Hound’s breathing whistles just the slightest bit, his face smushed into his pillow as he sleeps on his stomach. Fence has an arm dangling off his bunk, turned on his side and almost looking like he’s reaching for something.

Fox stops looking before he can do more than make Thorn shift a bit in his sleep. The wonders of an uncanny sense for staring, and a trainer that was fond of surprising his trainees while they were ‘safe’ in their sleep pods. It’d made for some interesting first few weeks, when Thorn hadn’t gotten used to the barracks yet and had resorted to squeezing himself into the weirdest places, just to get an uninterrupted nap.

(Screaming.)

His next exhale is too shallow to be called a sigh. Fox levers himself up, swings his legs off his bunk into his waiting boots, and silently makes his way out of the barracks, snagging the neat stack of his armor as he goes. He’s not going to get any more sleep tonight, so his insomnia might as well be productive.

He clips on armor as he goes; by the time he’s in his office, only his greaves and helmet are left. He sets his bucket on his desk to watch the door for him, latches the greaves on, kicks each leg once to settle the plates. His wrists rotate to do the same for his vambraces.

(Metal, cinched tight, not quite skin-warmed yet. The pinch of the handcuffs goes away—has it moved? It’s moved. It didn’t even realize. A searing washes through its brain, and it knows it tenses, but it won’t disobey orders any more than that. Bad enough that the handcuffs are necessary—it’ll be in enough pain without punishment being added on.)

His hands are given a firm shake, and nearly his head, too, before Fox aborts the motion. Work. Things to sign. Something to focus on.

His office doesn’t have a window to outside—it’s a security nightmare, and having an openable window is just an excuse for the smog to invade. The false window does a good enough job at showing him how much time passes, as its display lightens, smog-choked sky going paler and brighter as this side of Coruscant turns its face towards the sun. There’s always speeder traffic, but it starts picking up, the morning rush starting to hit.

(“Please!”)

Review incident report, sign off as read, file it away. Squint at a requisitions form Fence sent him, like the extra scrutiny will stop whatever shenanigans his quartermaster tries with the numbers on this thing, sign off, file it.

(“Please, please, I—please—!”

“Please what, clone?”)

Untense his fingers before he breaks his stylus. Start skimming a follow-up medical review Mal sent him. Realize he’s read the same line three times, because Mal has the blandest writing style Fox has ever seen.

(“Please, no? Please, don’t? Please, stop? Is that it, clone?”)

Breathe. Leave Mal’s review for later, when he’s been fortified by caf and food. Breathe. In an attempt to get Fox to stop working during his sleeping hours, Thorn and Thire programmed his caf machine to only function during the day, and because Fox isn’t Cody and didn’t have to do punishment detail with the mechanic or slicer classes, he hasn’t figured out how to reverse it yet. Breathe.

(A—sound. A shriek that rings.

Breathe. Metal around its wrists. Breathe. Shadows endlessly devouring the candlelight. Breathe. Do not move, do not speak, do not remember.)

Kark. Kark.

(“I think you’ve forgotten what you are, despite myself saying it twice in the past minute. You are a clone, and you are made—”

Not a scream. A gurgle.

“—to obey.”

A silence.

“After such a display, I’m almost tempted to dispose of this. Ah, but what a fascinating corpse. It would be a shame.”)

Fox gazes down at the hand that’s latched onto the handle of a drawer, tight and trembling around the metal. Despite his desperate grip, the drawer slides out slowly, quietly. It’s mostly random office things in this one—sticky notes, styluses, a tiny little datapad maintenance kit. A half-full packet of pens meant for flimsi that he won off Hound. A plastoid pentagon, rounded lengthwise in an arc, painted completely Guard crimson.

He can’t even be sure if it’s Topsy’s armor—his metatarsal guard, the part fitted over the bridge of a boot, covering the laces there and preventing, say, a tetchy natborn from trying to stab you in the foot with a shiv. There’s nothing on the inside to individualize it, and Guards disappear far too often on patrol.

It could be some other Guard’s armor that Fox showed up white-knuckling, shaking and forgetful and not even knowing where or why he’d gone. (And with a body full of micro-tears and fractures, as Mal had told him while eyeballing him like a Kaminoan mentally filling out a decom order.) There’s plenty of Guards it could’ve been, with so many reasons why the metatarsal guard was the only piece he recovered.

(“Droid. Move the cadaver, prepare it for autopsy. You, clean up all this blood—hmm, no. Belay that. Move that one over there. It might motivate it to not fail in the same way the previous one did.”)

Fox studies that guard, nearly unblinking, until the door swishes open to Thire, his exhausted disapproval radiating from him. The morning rush is in full swing. His caf machine hums, turning itself on. The drawer reels shut, hiding Topsy’s guard from view. Fox officially clocks on for another day.

(“Your turn, CC-1010.”)

[ostensiblywhump]

Practiced Prey

Whumpuary day 13: close call | sleep | choking

Word count: 1,080

Content warnings: none

———(0)———

Rock presses him back, keeps him in place, when Archaios flails awake with a gasp that nearly shrieks. He knows humans bury their dead, entomb them; the harsh confines of the space he’d carefully maneuvered himself into, once comforting, now makes every nightmare and the dim memory they’re based from reel through his head.

(Limp and savaged bodies left to the elements; what if his corpse is left in this coffin sized just for him—?)

He catches that thought, puts it back in the dark corner it belongs to. Makes his exhale come out measured, if shuddery. If his senses are right about the thing that woke him up—and he’s had centuries to hone them—then panicking is death, and he needs to move, now.

First things first. He grimaces at himself, the expanse of his body fit snug into the cave. Well, cavern, more like. His true form is large. And freeing though it is, to finally unseal it and spend hours reacquainting himself with it, it isn’t at all stealthy to be the very thing someone is hunting for. Better to be a dime-a-dozen human.

He moves his right paw to rest on the seals scarred into his opposite foreleg, trickles the barest flicker of magic into it, and braces.

An indeterminate amount of time later, Archaios wheezes on the ground, braced on palms and knees instead of laid down on his haunches. Every inch of him is alight, but he doesn’t have time to recover slowly from being forcibly rearranged into a human shape.

Left hand going up this time, trembling fingers instead of steady claws, and it’s a different kind of agony, having one’s magic being crushed down and shoved into a form that’s far too tiny, but it’s an agony all the same. It’s also worth it. He has no idea what got someone on his tail this time, but having his magic unsealed is just asking to leave a trail of it, letting someone track him down no matter how far or fast he runs.

He crawls at a snail’s pace to the pile of clothing he left behind when he unsealed himself, aftershocks vibrating through him and making him fumble his grip as he pulls on his shirt. A tearing sound makes him hiss—he only has so many clothes!—but there’s nothing to be done for it. Not when he’s not moving fast enough. He’ll take accidentally-ripped clothes over being killed.

Standing is … an experience. He sways, nearly eats stone when his senses scream at him and he collides his face with the wall. His confined magic already affects how much space he feels like he has to inflate his lungs—now, with impending doom encroaching, unwilling to be ignored, it catches at something and makes him hack, silvery wisps wanting to travel up with his hitching breaths and flee. He is every inch a scrabbling thing, desperate to escape.

“Calm—” he says, as he recovers a regular rhythm of air. Inhale, exhale. Like a normal person. Like a human. Not some terrified creature. He’s spending precious seconds keeping himself from screaming, instead of running like he needs to. Forfend, but he’s supposed to be old hat at this by now.

He goes upright again, steadier this time. His first step forward is more of a shuffle, but he speeds up as he goes, no matter if the freezing rock prickles at his pain-sensitive skin as he speed-walks with bare feet. A swipe that’s more of a jerking motion, and his wards carved into the entrance of the cave shatter with a sound like breaking glass, the wind gouging an unrecoverable strip out of the runes.

This location is a bust, now that someone’s found it. Shame, really—he’s paranoid about having dens big enough for his true form, so he only has so many. He can’t hide all the signs that he was here, but he can make it harder to tell how recently he abandoned this place.

His toes brush snow, and he breaks into a run, only wobbling a little—over the surface, not through. Better for not leaving footprints, and he doesn’t have to masquerade as completely magic-less just yet. Hmm, would it be better to use the wind to propel him, while he’s at it?

No, probably not. Walking on top of snow is undetectable, but wind isn’t. He’s fast enough with just his feet.

He gets … fairly far. He can still see the cave entrance, a distant gray smear against white, when his ears pick up on something large and way too fast for its size. At the same time, his magic sense sends a frantic shiver down his spine, and he needs to find a hidey-hole now.

The cave he was in is part of a large mountain range, steep enough that it’s a mosaic of dark rock and blinding white. This is good, because his clothes are dark and he’s pale in human form, so he’ll blend in. He just needs some place where it’ll be hard to see him and be unbothered by animals looking for a meal.

He’s in luck—well, he’s been lucky to be alive for the past centuries, so thank goodness that’s going strong for him. On a severe slope, trees have stubbornly dug in, snow-covered and prickly. Even better, a couple steps into the scraggly treeline, he spies two trees that are particularly close. One was tough enough to thrive; the other, not so much, branches bare or with brown needles, snapped at the base of its trunk and long since fallen. It’s formed a little v, bracketed at one side by its still-living companion. Partially obscured by needle-full branches and snow, it’s the best he’s going to get.

No sooner than he’s hidden himself in the little hollow and gone absolutely still (just because he’s human-shaped doesn’t mean he has to breathe and fidget like a human), a furious bellow rips through the air, echoing off the snow. Snowflakes drift from branches, disturbed from rest by the shockwave of it.

Swirling silver scratches at the confines of his ribs, whispers to run, reaches up and claws up his throat—he breaks his stillness to clasp a hand over his mouth, teeth gritting and lips pressing tight together against the choking cough trying to break his silence.

He rides out the seize of his lungs and the rage of his hunter. He waits.

[ostensiblywhump]

The Millstone—Emerald or Crimson?

Whumpuary day 11: "I didn't ask for this" | blood | abandoned

Word count: 1,101

Content warnings: none

———(0)———

Maa likes brushing her thumbs under Brier’s eyes. Who knows why, but it’s with that smile with eyes that see something else, so if Brier asks, maa might not even hear the question.

“Maa?” she says anyways, her mother’s callused thumb scraping over her eyelid. “Why do you do that?”

“Hmmm?” maa hums, and blinks, now actually looking at Brier. Her bells go ting-ting-ting, rising up like a question.

“This!” Brier says, plopping her hand over her maa’s.

“Ah,” maa says, and smiles again. The smile she gets when the man she says to call maba leaves. “Because your blood is green.”

Brier blinks, then scowls, because: “That doesn’t make sense, maa! My blood’s red!” She tripped and scraped her knee while playing with the other kids in the village they were in last week, and it was definitely red. It stained the bottom of her skirt a little. Maa had to scrub a lot to get it out.

Maa laughs, but her song doesn’t change from the deep, long bell, like the one Brier once heard ringing for a funeral. “You’re right,” she agrees. “It’s red, silly me. I meant your eyes are green.”

She leans in a little, and the gold of her gaze pins Brier in place. Her song still rings for a funeral.

“Green as the mountains, the forests, the country itself. It means you’ll rule one day, little heir, just like your ma’ba.”

Maa lets go, and lets Brier go, and Brier has her answer that didn’t really sound like an answer. It doesn’t stop her from frowning still, because if she’s going to be like maba, then ‘you’ll rule one day’ just sounds like ‘you’ll leave one day.’

———

The man Brier is told to call maba is back. It doesn’t make sense—her brothers like him when he’s here, and he’s nice, but shouldn’t he be thann, not maa? Maa stays. Thann is the one that comes and goes.

But Brier is good, and does her best to do what maa says. So she does.

She’s with maba now, learning how to show the animals that she’s a friend. It’s hard, because she can’t hear her own song, but she has to make a sound that the animals can hear and know is friendly, not confused or frustrated or whatever she’s feeling instead. But maba just tells her, “Try again.”

Brier flops sideways—one of the good things about maba is that he doesn’t care if she moves or fidgets, like maa does when she’s showing Brier how to do things. He just cares about her actually doing the stuff he’s showing her. “Mabaaa,” she says. “It’s hard. Can’t I try again tomorrow?”

“Not without my supervision,” maba says. “And I will be going tomorrow. So you must learn today, or wait until when I visit next.”

Brier groans. “Why can’t maa super-vise? Then I have every day to practice and I can show you I did it when you come back!”

“Because she cannot do what we can.”

“Maa can do anything!”

“Not this.”

“Why not?”

“Because she wasn’t born to it.”

Brier’s face scrunches. “Maba, I don’t know what that means. What does being born have to do with being friends with animals?”

Maba’s head tilts, green eyes staring. Brier stares back, because she’s really good at staring contests, and she wants to know why maba thinks maa can’t do a stupid thing like making animal friends when she can do everything, and she … likes looking at maba’s eyes. They’re the only ones she’s seen that are like hers—everyone has yellow or brown or black or sometimes blue or gray, but never green. Only maba, and only her.

“Belladonna wasn’t born to rule,” maba says, and Brier is confused for a second until she remembers that’s the word her family calls maa. “She can’t project her—song. Can’t impose her presence. Her eyes aren’t green, so it’s not in her blood.”

His head stops tilting, and his face doesn’t change, but it never changes anyways. It’s his song that presses down on Brier, a boom-crash like lightning strikes and glass breaking at the same time. It makes Brier lose the staring contest, and her hands to curl into the grass.

“It’s in your blood,” he tells her. “It’s your nature, mine, and no one else’s. You were born to rule.”

His song dulls suddenly, lightning trapped behind glass again. Learning how to breathe without a song putting a weight on her lungs, Brier doesn’t say anything to the contrary.

———

“You were born to rule,” Bion hisses. “It’s your blood, and to reject it is to reject the heart beating in your chest, my Ruler.”

The two times Brier was told that outright, she said nothing. Now, she laughs, giving voice to all the discontent she’d felt those two times and this one, when someone tried shoveling that load of horse-shit with her.

“I didn’t ask for it in the first place,” she says, dropping down to Bion’s level and speaking in their mother tongue. Maybe that’ll make this stupid old scribe actually listen. “And my so-called heart must not be so vital to me, if it abandoned me before I learned that it wasn’t worth anything.”

It isn’t logical. She was taken away from her maa and eldest brother, not abandoned. And when her other brother disappeared after years of surviving together on the mainland, it had hurt, but even in her darkest moments, she always suspected he was taken in turn, not anything else.

But scrabbling in the mud, young, alone, face throbbing with the scales pushing themselves out of her skin and in such blinding pain, she’d called for her maa, her brothers, even her maba. Three of those hadn’t, couldn’t, answer for years already at that point. But one always had, and when only silence replied to her desperation, it had been ….

What had their homeland done for her? For Bion, even? Given them both something to yearn for, only to yank it away in a wash of carnage and despair. It had placed this duty on her, marked her with these eyes, and crushed her with the burden of it. Blood and birthright meant nothing, when all it did was hurt you.

“If you’re so fixated on blood, then listen to your ruler as you are born to do, my people,” Brier says. “Heal, retake your life away from the homeland and the damage it did. And then you’ll know that you never needed a 15-year-old with green eyes to tell you how to be happy.”

[ostensiblywhump]

Explosion Ribbon

Whumpuary day 9: trapped under rubble | gunpoint | out of time

Word count: 865

Content warnings: major injury, vomiting, blood, fear of death

———(0)———

Oh. That’s … a very large rock.

Then his vision dims, and goes even more topsy-turvy than it already was, and—

Talbot snaps into lucidity with his body screaming at him. A sharp bit of what is probably shattered cobblestone is digging into his cheek, and his tongue is gritty with dust and minerals. He spits out the taste—splutters, more like, then retches when his stomach takes that as permission to rebel, the movement jostling every hurt in him. He doesn’t bring anything up except the acrid warning of bile in the back of his throat; he didn’t eat breakfast today. Probably. He probably didn’t eat breakfast today.

His eyelashes are choked with dust too, when he blinks heavy eyelids. It is incredibly tempting to let that weight win, let it sink him down into sleep, into the embrace of the harsh ground. Especially with the strengthening sunlight driving a spike through his eye. Ow.

He cringes into the cracked cobble in an attempt to get away from the light; it only serves to send a jolt through his body again, and his leg reminds him, very loudly and un-ignorably, that it is present and does not like existing at this moment. Well, that makes two of them. If his leg was an actual person. And not a leg. Which is not sentient. Or at least can’t be assigned … something values. Cannot be personified. Have personification.

… He may be concussed.

The light is very upset to be ignored. So is his leg. Definitely concussed. Except for the leg; that’s not a concussion symptom. What is up with that stupid thing, anyway? Stupid leg. Check that, why is he concussed? He should … find that out. Ugh.

Cracking his eyes open again is an immediate regret, as is starting to crane his neck. He’s basically one giant bruise, sharper sensations in his head (concussion) leg (who knows what) and lung. Lung? He breathes in, and it’s shallow, quick, comes back out in a weak cough. It rattles faintly, wet. Punctured lung. Not something he can solve. He keeps slowly shuffling around, abused bones creaking at every motion.

Oh. That’s … a lot of debris. And a very large rock. Well, a very large piece of wall, more like. And a flash of yellow, made nearly indistinguishable from its gray surroundings by the powdered rubble settling on everything.

Tal snaps his head over, cringes when it makes his head spin and his next breath to come out more ragged, but it is a yellow thing—an important yellow thing, actually, because it’s a head of familiar blond hair, Ruika’s characteristic fluffball hairstyle, nearly buried under the wreckage of the house Tal is starting to remember they were in. He can only see that hair and a scraped-up, dirty arm, poking out of the debris and angled towards where Tal is.

His heart leaps up to join the bile aftertaste in his throat—neither Ruika’s arm nor his head is moving, not a quip coming out of that mouth that doesn’t know how to stop running any more than the boy it belongs to. With everything covering him, Tal can’t even see if he’s breath—

“Ruika,” he mouths, too choked by dust, by injury and fear, to make any noise. He coughs, swallows dryly, gasps an inhale that hurts to make so deep, and his next attempt is audible, if raspy: “Ruika.”

Nothing.

“Ruika,” Tal says again. “Ruika. Ruika! Rui—”

“Well, isn’t this a sight to see.”

The kick of adrenaline makes his turn hurt less, as Talbot stares at the last person he’d want to see approaching, uninjured and swaggering towards him with a grin on his face. Their target, the man they were trying to find. The one that probably made the house explode on them. (The one who killed Ru—no. No counting bodies before confirmed death.)

“Wouldja look at that!” the man says, stopped just out of arm’s reach of Tal. Not out of striking distance, if Tal actually thought he could muster enough concentration to manipulate blood. “Two of my worst inconveniences, all wrapped up and presented at my feet.”

Tal doesn’t answer, too busy trying to scrape together some kind of offense. No way can he get the knife sheathed at his belt before this man (what was his name?) fouls the attempt, and it’s very hard to do hemokinesis when you’re concussed and don’t really have the blood to spare. Also, fuck this guy and his attempt to make Tal beg, he’s not getting shit out of oh hell that’s a gun.

“Nothing to say?” the man says, barrel of the gun pointed straight at Tal.

“Not to you,” Tal says, and the gun’s safety audibly clicks off. Oh. Maybe he should’ve tried begging. Or talking, or taking a swing, or trying to hold out for Piri, or literally anything to make this man decide he’s more useful dead.

“Then I guess this is goodbye,” the man says, mock-regretful, and as time slows down, Tal watching the man’s trigger finger tighten, all he can hope for is Piri to pop up and pull off a miracle.

[ostensiblywhump]

"As far as your family knows, you're dead. Executed as another lowly traitor. So no, there won't be anyone looking for you."

Whumpuary 2025

Day 7 "No one is coming."

Day 15 Handcuffed

Champion taglist: @thewhumpywitch , @ostensiblywhump , @scoundrelwithboba

[ostensiblywhump]

Coming for You

Whumpuary day 7: unfair fight | insomnia | "no one is coming"

Word count: 931

Content warnings: none

———(0)———

Duck, charge left a few steps, stomp, let the ice out. Karmic only had a split-second to see frost covering soldiers up to their hips, boots frozen to the ground, before he dove out of the way. True to form, half a dozen bolts (sleep shots? Kill shots?) shot through where he’d just been, and he nearly went into a roll before he remembered himself.

Stumble, run, swipe at the air and send wind screeching outwards. It wouldn’t cut—he heard men cry out as they were blasted back, the crackle of them flying through their own perimeter, a clatter when one of them must’ve dropped their weapon. He skidded to a stop as a soldier swung a spear into his path, then angled the sharp edge at him and swung for his torso oh fuck no—

Karmic jumped, easily clearing the soldier’s head, then cleared the soldier’s head of the last few seconds by kicking him viciously in the forehead. Leap away, clasp hands and strike down, let the mini-blizzard do its job.

He landed and was at the perimeter by the time he let it die down; a casual swipe cleared away some snow so he could see the ward, utterly ignoring the soldier on the outside maintaining it. He had experience in breaking wards; if he could just find a weak point …

“You have to know this isn’t sustainable.”

Oh, fucking wonderful. A mage good enough at her job that she could talk while working.

“We have you surrounded,” the soldier continued. “There’s a lot of us, and only one of you, and we’re getting reinforcements, while no one is coming for you.” A pause, before she said, “And you seem to be protecting something.”

His boots, gloves, and scarf were already gone, exposing his claws and fangs, so Karmic let the snarl bubbling up tear out of him. Saw the soldier flinch, then he went straight up, kicking off the perimeter ward to sail over the soldier that had been crunching through knee-deep snow at him, breathed through the shock punishing him for a ‘breach’. The great thing about a ward meant to keep you in was that it gave you some extra walls to bounce off of—

The perimeter flickered. His head banged against something, hard, and his snarl turned into a yelp, trajectory interrupted. He barely kept upright as he tumbled to the ground, falling hard onto his knees. He blindly swiped out more wind, staggered up and into a dash before someone on the outside tried shooting him while he was stationary, and flicked a glance up.

They’d changed the ward parameters to lower the ceiling. Shit. No escaping over people’s heads for him anymore. Silver lining, no overhead swings for these guys—no, the perimeter didn’t affect them, fuck, fuck, fuck! Fuck them, fuck this, fuck him for getting two hours of sleep in the last 48 hours and he kept forgetting things!

Sor mewled, a quiet, terrified sound that cut through the recriminations.

Clutch an arm to the kangaroo pocket Sor's hiding in; keep running, over the snow instead of through because he’s not a loser like these assholes without polar affinity. Zigzag before running in a straight line got him shot. The soldiers had recovered from the blizzard, and had the numbers to let some slowly crack the ice on their brethren’s boots while other charged at him. Crouch under a spear strike, grip the haft and freeze the fucker’s gloves to his weapon, kick out and foul another soldier’s footing, spin and launch the aforementioned fucker at a different soldier.

Okay, space to think—not space to think. A bolt grazed Karmic’s arm, sending a heady wave of drowsiness crashing over him; he managed to turn over before he hit the ground stomach-first, pinching himself hard to stay awake. Sleep shots, then. Great, he’d hate for his decision to leave these guys alive to be wrong. What the hell did the king’s soldiers want with him, anyway? No, no time.

Alright. Shoot upright, punch a soldier in the jaw. It was looking more unlikely by the second that he was getting out of this. Make the man trying to grapple him regret it by clawing at every available soft spot. But being captured alive meant that he could escape later, or just wait to be released. Nut shot right, wind swipe left. So maybe—

Duck a bolt, sprint at the perimeter.

This ward-keeper was less composed than that one woman, startling at his approach. Whatever. Karmic plunged a hand into his kangaroo pocket, heard his hoodie tear as Sor’s claws yanked away from where they were keeping him secure. He held Sor to his face, wide orange eyes meeting Karmic’s, and he said, commanded, “Run! We’ll meet later!”

Then he threw.

Sleepyhead though Sor was, a cat was a cat; as he soared through the perimeter, Karmic saw him uncoil and move, ready to land running, saw soldiers recoil and shout at the little gray missile pitched at them. Then Karmic spun around and bodily hurled himself at a soldier.

Stomp on the woman’s solar plexus to keep her down, wrest away her spear, turn and promptly break the spear’s haft on another person’s shoulder. Toss the useless spear at someone’s face, follow it with a fist ready to punch. Feel his whole body jerk right from an impact to his side, lose all sensation in his limbs, watch his darkening vision turn sideways as he collapsed.

At least he’d get some sleep now.

He let his eyes close.