#abdominals be damned i will have a piece of fruit at the end of every meal

[adobodemon]

meeee!!!!!

[pumpkin-spice-whump-latte]

Unfixable: Carlos

I didn’t really understand how fun it was to cut your own character to pieces until I wrote it. 

briefly references #17: Stay With Me 

might have been what was happening during #18: Muffled Scream, or at least for part of it

tagging @straight-to-the-pain because they inspired me~

content includes: VIVISECTION, descriptive gore, blood, intimate whumper, creepy whumper, noncon touching, passing out, and because I can’t seem to go a few days without it, torture

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Carlos thought at first that someone had set him on fire.

He came to with a sharp, deeply violent burning in his midsection, making him gasp and squirm against the leather straps that held his ankles and wrists. There was nowhere to hide from it though; he couldn’t even curl up on himself. The only thing he could do was look down and see–

See Dr. Tillman cutting into him with a scalpel.

He let out a blood curdling scream, prompting the scientist to glance up from his work with a small smile.

“Ah, good. You’re awake.” The burning Carlos had felt had been his body trying to process the pain of something very sharp opening a bloody, fleshy line through the muscles of his abdomen. It carved it’s way down in a long diagonal line, upper right all the way down to left hip, slicing through layers of skin and muscle. His entire body tried to thrash away from the pain, back arching up as far as it could from the operating table, but the blade always followed him wherever he tried to wiggle. Soon enough the scientist had a hand down against him, forcing him to be still as he finished opening a bloody mouth where there should never have been one.

Carlos tugged at his restraints, panic gripping him and turning his blood to ice. Turning his will to live into something stronger than his common sense, and he would have torn off his own limbs or broken a damn bone if it meant getting away from the horror and pain. But with all that screaming and struggling he only succeeded in getting a gentle hand petting through his hair. Trailing blood along his forehead in little warm, drippy lines.

“Oh, shh. Shh, shhh now. Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing. I’m a man of science.” When Carlos met Tillman’s eyes he could see a strange glint behind them. The normally placid, detached blue was glassy, the pupils blown. There was a fire that danced behind those eyes that just made everything feel that much more Wrong.

A dread settled deep within him then. Bigger than the fear. More ancient even than pain.

Then the scientist made another incision, this time in an opposite diagonal line across the first. It made a large X across Carlos’ stomach, and then he couldn’t see those doom-bringer eyes anymore. He couldn’t see anything anymore as he threw his head back and screeched against the pain. This time he was only answered with a low, dark chuckle. Tillman was amused and Carlos actually might have laughed too. He might have laughed and laughed and laughed until he went crazy, because that seemed like a better fate than staying lucid for this. He thought that at the very least he might pass out from the agony, from the shattering knowledge that he was being cut open and couldn’t stop it, but blessed darkness never came.

A few moments later he could feel cool air rushing against a part of him that hadn’t ever been meant to feel it. He felt the four cross sections of his skin being pulled back and clamped open, so that when he dared to glance back down…

He could see himself. The inside of himself. Dark red like murder, wet and sloppy looking, and terrifyingly vulnerable.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?” His words came out sharp with rage and fear. Bruised with pain. None of the monolithic dread yet but that’s because Carlos was still, in part, himself. He still had a good bit of his own fire.

Tillman only slipped two gloved fingers into the mass of his blood and guts. “You’re doing very, very good Carlos. Hang in there my boy. Wasn’t time for… For any anesthetic. You were fading fast. Had to do something.” Carlos could barely keep up with what was being said, let alone understand any of it. He was too busy feeling every soft, intimate drag of those fingers as they practically fucked into him. Some perverse imitation of a lover. All the while Tillman’s eyes held Carlos’ gaze captive, not allowing him to look away or deny this was really happening to his own body.

“Arrg… Stop! PLEASE!” His chest heaved, beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, and the rest of him shuddered helplessly as Tillman sank his hand further into his guts. It made a sickening squelching sound that he could somehow hear between his panting and rising sobs.

Before today he’d had no idea you could feel someone touching you inside like that. He’d never had occasion to even need to think about it. But no, no. There were nerve endings even along the deepest curve of his lower intestine, ones that only knew a song of pain and nothing else. He was learning about them today mothers and fuckers and they were singing a backup chorus to his nearly broken screams.

“You see organs… Don’t lie.” Dr. Tillman spoke above him in little more than a hushed whisper, but every word still stabbed into him like a knife. Like a surgeon’s scalpel. Like two fingers, and then five, and a hand curling oh-so-gently and carefully around something deep within him and sending a sensation of awful pressure and hammering pain.

“They may fail, eventually, but it isn’t their fault. They spend their lives as diligent, loyal subjects of the body. So fragile and yet… So strong at the same time.”

Carlos only heard this as a faint buzzing that might have been words. He couldn’t take a full breath, sucking in little gasps of air between hitching sobs as fat tears rolled down the sides of his face. His eyes were saucer wide and shining, he was burning, his whole being was a quivering mass of blood and guts and fire and it would never stop. His brain wouldn’t let him just pass–

___

When he opened his eyes again Tillman was still there. Carlos let out a moan of agony as the pain reintroduced itself (how do you do?) and as the scientist raised one gore covered finger to Carlos’ neck. How long had he even been out? A couple minutes? He swept his gaze down across his bloody chest to his lower body. Things looked basically the same. He still looked like a messy peeled fruit and he cursed his brain and body for only letting him escape this for a few minutes instead of nuking his entire consciousness till he woke up somewhere with less horror. What a bitch.

That finger–that finger that had just been inside him–traced a slow, deliberate line straight across Carlos’ neck as Tillman stared down at his captive. He looked like an abandoned lighthouse. The lamp was shining, sure, but nobody was home. “I could just kill you now. Slit your thhhhhhroat, my d-dear boy.”

“Then do it! F-fu-UCK YOU MOTHERFUCKER DO IT.” No matter how scared he was, no matter how much pain made him stumble through the words, he’d still say them. He was determined to say them till he fucking died.

Tillman leaned in close. One of his hands was still buried in Carlos’ abdominal cavity, and this time it wriggled a gentle path upwards. He felt knuckles brush against his ribs. The tissue that cradled his lungs and heart. He felt the soft wetness of Tillman’s tongue as it licked over the blood line on his neck. “I might as well kill you. You can n-never be fixed. No matter what I…what I do…” His awful minty breath tickled against Carlos’ cheek. Tears cooled against his skin as he shook in his restraints and tried desperately not to feel the scientist counting his ribs from the inside. He wondered how long he could even last, opened up like this, and why he hadn’t already died.

Maybe he was already dead.

Maybe he was in hell.

___

He’d passed out again without realizing it, the only evidence being that one moment Tillman was squeezing his internal organs like they were his personal stress balls, the next he was standing over Carlos with a bloody mass in his hand.

“Is that… Is that my…?” He was so cold. He was shaking all over but still so damned cold.

“Kidney? Why, yes. It’s quite bad. See?” The scientist held Carlos’ own kidney up under his nose for his inspection, but he could see nothing wrong with it. He knew with a kind of sickening certainty that there had been nothing wrong with it.

“I’m afraid that’s all we can do. There’s so much e-else that I could… Fix. In here.” The scientist paused to turn his vacant gaze back down to Carlos’ ruined insides. A long coil of his intestines lay limply against his hip. He could see a shock of white bone somewhere. 

“I’m going to have to ask you to please stay silent now while I stitch things back up. You squeal very nicely but I need to concentrate now, dear boy.”

A thick wad of gauze bandages was stuffed deep into Carlos’ mouth, and he made some kind of sound around them. Defiance? Pleading? He wasn’t sure anymore. Tillman reached a hand in again and this time found something hard. Something boney. It was his spi–

___

Moving through the hallway. Ceiling passing by like dull clouds of stucco. The pain had followed him even here. It would never stop stalking behind him. How much blood had he lost? Where was Ben? How much blood can someone even–

___

A kitchen. A warm kitchen and a fleeting feeling of being safe. Ben was there. Ben couldn’t stay. It was better that way though. The pain would eat Ben if he stayed. The world shook and the pain gobbled Carlos whole.

___

“…subject responding well to the replacement?….”

“…at least another week in recov…”

“…can’t be sure the body won’t reject…”

“…of course we included the tracking devi…”

“….the normal payment of course, Dr. Till…”

___

When he looked down again his insides were back on the inside. He touched a couple shaking fingers to the healing X scar that marred his entire torso. Ugly staples made ugly railroads across his body. The pain had stayed, but it was drowned enough to stop screaming. Why bother giving him pain meds now?? Carlos tried to focus on the surroundings of the room. Was this a hospital? Was…was he actually OUT??

Tillman stepped into his field of vision like a satellite passing over the sun and blotting out it’s light. His eyes were back to Detached Doctor mode.

“Good afternoon. And how are we feeling?”

There was a smudge of red at the corner of Tillman’s placid mouth.

Carlos opened his own and screamed.

[maximusthewolfe]

hope in the hopeless

Time Dwarf gets a sandwich. Margo and Eliot go camping. 

Also on AO3

It took Eliot too long to realize that Margo was gone. To more accurately define “too long” in this particular fiasco: it took a slide to the center of the Earth, ham sandwich in hand to exchange for as many psychedelic Fillorian cave mushrooms as he could carry, a gloriously freeing trip that started somewhere around minute 45 of the slide back up to the surface, and a quiet, aching hollow that told him he needed more mushrooms to realize that Margo was gone.

He weighed a mushroom in his hand, staring at it like it held answers to questions he was too chickenshit to ask, before he shoved it back in his pocket and pulled out his flask instead. "Bambi, you better be grateful for this," he muttered under his breath before throwing his head back and gulping greedily. After drinking until he coughed from the burn in his throat, he capped the flask and set off in the direction of the dungeons. It was the only place he could imagine her being. Even on Margo's most furious days, she'd never stayed angry at him this long.

Annoyed, frustrated, and terrifyingly close to sober, Eliot twisted his fingers expertly, blowing the guards at the front of the dungeons away without a second thought. They hit opposing walls like rag dolls and if they were unconscious or dead, he didn't really give a damn.

"This is a little melodramatic, don't you think? Even for us," he mused when he found Margo, clinging to a drab piece of cloth on a cold, stone bench.

"Get me the fuck out of here, would you?" Margo hissed, standing from the bench and meeting Eliot at the bars of her cell.

Eliot knew Fillory wasn't really one for progress, but he thought maybe three centuries would have brought a little more advancement in the way of holding cells. He supposed he should be blessing the kingdom's ridiculous, archaic ways for making this so easy. He glanced up at her for the first time since her dramatic exit. There was a tension in Margo's brow, a tired, sad something in her eyes that hurt for Eliot to look too closely at. Hurt even more to think he might have caused it.

"You sure you don't need a little more alone time?" Eliot sniped, already raising the ring of keys he'd levitated off one of the immobile guards.

"I'm not alone, that's the fucking problem," Margo said, glancing back at the concrete bench. Another quip about fairy overlords being so 300 years ago danced on the tip of his tongue when a strange static filled the air in the cell and, with a few flickering spasms of light, there was Josh.

Oh.

With haste he hadn't felt since returning to his body, he rushed forward, slotting the key into place and turning it, opening the gate and tugging Margo out by the wrist just as he heard Josh's worried, quiet voice echo.

Margo, wherever you are.

"Time for our grand exit," Eliot said, raising his voice to drown out whatever came next. He pretended not to feel the way Margo's shoulders shuddered under his arms as he led them out and hurried them away from the castle.

They were settled somewhere in the Darkling Woods by the time the suns started to set. Margo started a fire with her fingers in record time and with impressively explosive results. Eliot tried not to think of what allowed that power. Eliot tried not to think of a lot of things. He stood from the log he was perched on and walked away from the roaring flames, turning to face the darkness of the wilds around him. He reached into his pocket and broke off a piece of mushroom, and quickly popped it into his mouth.

Eliot didn't want to take away Margo's chance at happiness, not really. But she was all he had, now. He'd seen the pain on her face in that cell. Seen the toll it had taken on her. And here he was, cursing her for it. Cursing the fact that she'd been visited by the trauma ghost of about-to-be-beheaded Josh because it was something. It was more than he would ever see.

"At least you get that," he wanted to say.

He wanted to scream it, to shout until his throat was raw about how she had real memories, from this timeline. About how she had the opportunity to make the right choice, and she did. About how he would give anything including the pathetic, bourbon-washed excuse for a life he was drowning in now, to be visited by the ghost of Q. But that wasn't the kind of thing you got when the man you loved didn't just die - he was obliterated.

All Eliot had was a memory of cowardice. A flash of what he prayed was hope in a short-lived freedom. And something he wished he could forget.

It was right after he'd returned to his body. Right after cooperative magic and Margo's insane desert axes saved his life and almost ended it. Margo was the sweetest thing he could have hoped to see in that moment. Her saving him, it was the image he was clinging to for however long he was trapped inside his own mind. She was everything, everything, everything. His Bambi had saved him. What he hadn't dared to hope for, though, that surprised him. His eyes shifted, just past Margo's shoulder, and there he was. Right there. Almost within reach, if he had any abdominal muscles left to speak of.

Fierce, determined, inimitable Q. Tutting like the world depended on it. Tutting like it was the last thing he would ever do. Both were true, as it turned out.

Eliot remembered looking, staring, drinking in the sight of him. It was equal parts heartbreaking and life-affirming. The kind of feeling that started somewhere beneath the giant gash in his stomach and grew, glowing and brilliant, until he felt like it was pouring out of every piece of him. The kind of thing he assumed all the Renaissance writers were on about all those years.

Peaches and plums. Let's try again.

It was there, stuck somewhere in the back of his throat. He was sure it would burst out of him if only Quentin would look over at him.

But he never did. Whatever ancient, unstoppable essence the monster was made of after the axe slashed through him filtered into the bottle and Quentin capped it, grabbed it, lightning-fast. His jaw was set. He hiked the strap of the bottle over his shoulder. Penny popped in. Quentin nodded. The muscle just below his temple flexed, restrained. So much restraint. Then they were gone and the vignette of Eliot's vision faded to black. When he woke up, Q was gone.

Hopeless.

He didn't want to tell Margo that this was hopeless. After everything she'd done to save him. After everything she was still doing to try and bring him back from yet another brink. She deserved to know he wasn't giving up. But hopeless was the only thing he felt. It was a hungry, vicious void inside of him that refused to be sated. It wanted only to consume everything inside of him, everything around him, until he existed in a black hole that felt as insistently, pervasively empty as the hopelessness itself. Empty, he thought, might be better.

He returned to the fire, ignoring the flickering against Margo's sorrow-lined face and how familiar it looked. Ignored the phantom fuzz of a fucking stone fruit in his fingertips as he sat down beside her.

"I'm not giving up," Margo said, resolute.

When they were first years, there was a night, basked in the warmth of red wine and before apocalypse was their baseline state of existence, when Margo looked up at him, her head in his lap, and smiled. Eliot had asked what dirty things she was dreaming up, and Margo had laughed, a softer laugh than he'd ever heard out of his sharp-edged Bambi. "I think I need you," she'd said. At the time, he'd grinned back and waved a hand in the air for vague emphasis. "Of course you do. I'm fucking fabulous," he'd quipped back. But he'd never understood why she said that. Margo fought for what she wanted. He was fairly certain he'd never been resolute about anything other than ascots and alcohol. Eliot needed Margo far more than Margo needed Eliot, from where he stood.

"I know," he said finally, shoving away the memory as the crackling of the fire reminded him they weren’t in the Physical Kids’ Cottage. They weren’t lying on the floor in a too-damp forest. They were here, now, in a reality he was ready to forget.

His muscles were starting to loosen up, his thoughts slipping through the spaces in his mind that the mushrooms created. He was moments away from losing himself in the sway of the fire or the rustle of the leaves on the trees just beyond it. He needed the escape, needed to feel fine again. But he could give Margo something before he slipped into sweet, sweet oblivion. He wanted to. Needed to. Hopelessness wouldn't stop tugging at his ankles, grasping at his wrists and beckoning him into its dark embrace. But if he couldn't fulfill his promise the way he had intended, maybe he could get somewhere close. If Margo needed him, maybe he could, for once, let himself be needed.

Be braver.

"We'll find a way," he said. Margo slid her hand over to cover one of his, and maybe it was the mushrooms slowly leeching away his pain and replacing it with a technicolor version of the wind and the sky, but there was something about the way she squeezed his fingers that said he'd finally done something right.

It wasn't enough, but it could be enough for now.