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sleepywhump · 8 days ago

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i know that there will be better days

prompt: nightmares

whumpee: river cartwright

fandom: slough house

hiiii this one's set post-standing by the wall and as such has spoilers for slough house. i am very sorry to my lovely friends who have only seen the show or have not made it through all the books however this prompt simply spoke to me and i knew what i had to do. if you do read this i hope you enjoy!!!

Catherine would be lying if she said she wasn’t a bit concerned about River.

Granted, she knows, as he’d been so keen to tell her, that he’d passed the medical. She’s heard him insist, time and time again, that he’s fine.

But she’s also seen him falter upon standing, brace his hands against his desk, sink back into his chair. She’s seen him turn up with dark circles beneath his eyes so pronounced they’d looked as if they’d been painted on. She’s seen him hastily exit his room, slam the toilet door behind him, heard the sound of gagging.

She hasn’t brought any of this up to River himself, of course. In the first place, she doesn’t think he would appreciate it. In the second place, she knows he’d just brush it all off with one of those catchall I’m fine’s that Catherine knows don’t fool anyone, except perhaps Roddy.

So she’s hardly planning on saying anything when she catches River sleeping at his desk. God knows he’s looked especially rough the last few days. She’s half considering locating a blanket—not that she especially trusts any soft item found in Slough House—when a soft noise from the sleeping form slouched onto the desk halts her in her tracks.

He sounds distressed, afraid. Painful memories twist in Catherine’s chest. Part of her wants to leave, to let River have some of that sense of dignity he so desperately clings to, to not get involved. Part of her insists she stay.

It’s this latter part of her that wins out, owing not so much to any mental calculations on her part as to another quiet and pained noise from River.

She can hardly just let him suffer.

Catherine approaches him cautiously, like one might approach a feral cat. She doesn’t know whether he’ll take kindly to being woken, whether she might receive a startled lashing-out.

She steadies herself, then reaches out a hand and lightly taps River on the shoulder.

He shoots upright, and Catherine instinctively steps back, startled. River looks around, his eyes wide. He’s panting and his whole body is shaking and, contrary to lashing out angrily, he actually looks as if he is about to cry.

“It’s alright, River,” Catherine says, stepping in close to him again. “It was only a nightmare.”

He looks up at her for a second, then back down. The breaths he’s taking sound painful, too quick and too sharp. She wants to help.

“I—” he starts, but that’s all he’s able to get out. He looks so afraid, so young, and Catherine thinks of herself, of the hellish visions of Charles that had tormented her for years, and she makes up her mind.

She bends over a bit—it’s not the best angle, to be sure, and her back protests, but no matter—and carefully, hesitantly, wraps her arms around him, the way she’d wanted to before, but hadn’t quite had the guts to go through with.

He stiffens up for a second, and Catherine worries that she’s made a terrible mistake.

But then he softens again, and she can feel the way he’s still trembling, the way his breathing is still erratic and harsh. The residual fear and grief are palpable in the air.

She doesn’t realize that he’s crying, at first, with how much he’s shaking. But after a few seconds, she notices that the shoulder of her dress is damp, and if she really focuses, she can hear River sniffling very quietly. He’s good, evidently, at being silent.

Catherine has never seen him cry before. Of course, she’s never seen him have a nightmare before, either, so there’s multiple new experiences happening for her today. But she knows him. The way he always insists that he’s fine, even when he’s not. The way he’d rather ignore his own suffering than confront it head-on.

He’s been through hell, recently. Not that any of the slow horses have had a particularly easy go of it, but Novichok—it’s the stuff of horror stories, not the fate of disgraced MI5 agents.

All this to say, she puts a lot of value onto this moment, right here. River crying into her shoulder in his office in the middle of a Thursday afternoon. She’s aware of the kind of suffering it’s taken to get him to this breaking point. She hates it, but she’ll be damned if she won’t do what she can to help.

And so she holds on. Her legs start to cramp, a bit, but she pays them no mind. It’s River.

He lets go after quite some time. Catherine stands back up, does not wince at the twinging in her legs and back, and smooths out her dress.

“Sorry,” River says. His voice is scratchy, but he’s no longer shaking and his breathing has mostly returned to normal. There are tear tracks running down his cheeks and his eyes are rimmed with red. “Sorry, I didn’t—I’ll just—”

“River,” Catherine interrupts, and he stops, looks up at her, rubs a hand beneath his eyes.

“It’s alright,” she continues. “You’re allowed to not be fine, you know.”

He kind of looks like he’s about to start crying again. Catherine isn’t sure whether either of them are really equipped for this. “I am fine, I’m—I have to be fine.”

Catherine shakes her head. “You were dosed with an incredibly toxic nerve agent, not to mention everything else you’ve gone through these past few years. I’d be surprised if you were somehow truly fine.”

River gives her a little sort of half-smile that is almost more painful for her than the crying. “Okay,” he says, and he sounds like he’s admitting to something terrible. “Okay, yeah, I’m—maybe I’m not…entirely fine.”

He slumps deeper into his chair, scrubs at his eyes again. Catherine recalls her very first AA meeting—“I’m Catherine and I’m an alcoholic”—how afraid she’d been to admit to anyone else that she had a problem, that she wasn’t able to handle it on her own. River’s situation is, of course, drastically different, but there’s an element there that Catherine recognizes all the same.

She wishes that there was something she could say to make this easier. But she knows that the only way to heal is time, that the only way out, as cliché as it may sound, is through.

“I know you’re not,” is what she settles on saying, at last. “But you will be.”

River looks up at her again and there’s a faint glimmer of his usual self poking through everything else. It makes her feel vaguely hopeful, and she puts a hand onto his shoulder, glad of the contact now she’s broken the seal.

“I think I’ll make some tea,” she says, a thinly veiled offer, an opened door.

“Yeah, alright,” River replies, and it feels like a small, but important, step has been taken.

thanks so much for reading! i am planning to do a deeper dive into river post-novichok at some point but who knows when that will be. in any case i enjoyed doing a little exploration of that here, hope you liked!

#whump #fic #slow horses #slough house #river cartwright #nightmares #comfort #emotional whump #catherine standish

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sleepywhump · 1 month ago

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Nightmares and fevers from Little Dorrit (2008)

Highly recommend if you cannot get enough of Mr Darcy. Whilst not the same time period the vibes are very similar and with some whump to boot! Classic Dickens but with a happy ending!

(I swear early 2000s is where the good stuff is!)

#whump #sleepywhump #nightmares #fever #little dorrit #Arthur Clennam #matthew macfadyen

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sleepywhump · 5 months ago

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Macgyver (2016) 4.10