#im postin the prompts out of order bc i want a semblance of a chronology for this lmao

[whump-captain]

No. 17 - Hanging by a threat

Breaking point | Stress positions | Reluctant caretaker

1500 words | OC: Kintsugi (follows on from here)

Taglist (feel free to ask to be added/removed!): @thatsgonnaleaveamark

does a character still count as a caretaker if they don't actually end up doing the caretaking? ask Lucy! she'd hate it

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CN: bad/reluctant caretaker (both honestly), aftermath of torture, cuts, blood, broken arm, captivity, guns, self-loathing, first aid, painkillers

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When Lucy returned, Diaz was leaning against the door outside, sneaking bites of chocolate candies from the pocket of his vest. He offered her one but she shook her head.

Under her arm she held a bundle of stiff green fabric - a custom-packed first aid kit that a nurse had wordlessly handed her when she'd arrived in the medical wing. She'd had a quick rummage through it and had been relieved to find its contents to be fairly basic. Hopefully that meant she wouldn't be too out of her depth.

She still couldn't believe she'd been roped into cleaning up Linde's mess. Make sure the prisoner doesn't die, he had said, as if it hadn't been him who'd been beating the guy within an inch of his life. Why was she now responsible for fixing his fuck-ups? She wasn't even trained for this; she knew rudimentary first aid but nothing that would make her the first choice for medical duty. There was a whole hospital here, for fuck's sake, with qualified staff and state-of-the-art equipment. Linde was out of his bloody mind.

Lucy pushed the heavy door open and slipped into the cell. The narrow room was well lit, the walls painted a neutral pale blue. A single, waist-height cupboard clung to the wall by the door to the tiny bathroom segment and beyond it, opposite the entrance, was the bed - a flat berth extending straight from the wall. On it, curled into fetal position, laid Ethan Lythmer; Linde's supposed spy.

At the sound of Lucy's footsteps, he jerked up. His features were twisted, eyes wide with terror behind his crooked, broken glasses. The whole right half of his face was covered in blood, both dried and fresh, shades of red clashing between flaking patches of almost black and the bright crimson lines running down his cheek. Red stained his clothes as well; in drops around his collar from where it trickled down from his chin but also in elongated blotches on his shoulders, one next to another in an obviously deliberate pattern.

Lucy could guess now what had happened to him.

She set her rifle down, leaning it against the wall. Then, unrolling the first aid kit, she crossed the length of the cell. Lythmer recoiled, hid behind a raised forearm as he pushed himself further back into the wall.

Lucy sighed. "Relax," she said, holding the kit up to show him. "I'm here to patch you up."

She sat down on the bunk and Lythmer curled in on himself even tighter. From up close, she could see the source of the blood: a deep, clean-edged cut above his eyebrow, still weeping a thin rivulet of crimson. She also noticed the bruises that covered his left arm: black and purple, spilling out from where the forearm deformed with uneven, horrible swelling.

The fracture she could do nothing about. There was no sling in the first aid kit, or even a triangular bandage - which meant Linde wanted that injury untreated.

Exploitable.

All she had was a few packs of disinfecting wipes, antiseptic cream, skin closures, some dressings, and half a box of painkillers - six doses in total. Bare-bones. She guessed her job was mainly to dress the cuts: the one on his face and whatever more was hidden under his clothes. Wonderful interrogation method Linde had invented, she thought. Bloodletting; straight out of the fucking dark ages. All it had achieved was to give her more pointless work to do.

She laid out one of each supplies next to her and set the rest down on the floor. A stinging smell of disinfectant filled the air as she opened the wipes. Best to start with the blood, she thought, make it easier to see what she was dealing with.

The second she leaned towards him, Lythmer flinched away. He drew his knees up like a shield between them and whispered: "Please, don't."

"I'm trying to clean your wound," Lucy said sharply. "You're still bleeding."

He shook his head frantically. He buried his face in his bloodied hair, clawed his hand through it to pull it down over the gash on his forehead. Lucy guessed Linde had used that injury against him, too. Her memory conjured the sound of screams; her imagination - a deadly grip on damaged skin, fingers digging into raw flesh to cause as much pain as possible. She grimaced.

This time she was comfortable with her disgust - she had a personal stake in it. If Linde hadn't been a pettily cruel piece of shit, she wouldn't have to sit here and play nurse. The anger was refreshing - finally, it had a cause that she could understand. When she looked at the terror carved into Lythmer's features, she remembered that her time here was not her own. She was pissed off at Linde, rightfully so, because he had dragged her into his bullshit MI6 roleplay when she had no reason to care either about him or his so-called spy.

All she wanted was to do her job and be left alone. But even that wasn't allowed to be simple and now she had to try and play good cop to Linde's fucking terrible cop.

She wasn't a good cop. She wasn't a good anything. She was a grunt with a gun and she was sick of both other people and her own doubts trying to force her to be something else.

"Do it yourself, then," she said abruptly, tossing the wipe down on the cot.

She gave Lythmer a cold look but he couldn't see her, huddled again into a tangle of bloodied limbs. Bracing for another hit.

Lucy felt his fear, heard his stuttering breaths and saw the violent tremble of his whole body. She remembered his screams again, remembered every time she herself had dragged him to Linde's interrogations. She remembered that glint of manic fear in his eyes whenever he had looked at Linde. She recognized it now, when from under the blood and bruises, he looked at her.

It made her sick to her stomach.

And that feeling made no fucking sense.

She stood up suddenly and snatched the first aid kit from the floor.

"You've got gauze and dressings here," she said, throwing the white packets onto the bed. "And skin closures, but good bloody luck with those without a mirror." She scoffed. "The cream is antiseptic, put it on each wound before you wrap it. If you get an infection, Linde is going to throw a strop and he'll think it's my fault." Fistful at a time, she emptied the kit into a messy pile and shoved the fabric pouch into the front pocket of her vest. Then she paused.

"I can't leave you with those."

She gathered back up the small blister packs of painkillers. The pills rattled dryly in her fist. There wasn't enough there to overdose on, but she was nowhere near a fucking expert, was she? And if Linde came back tomorrow to find a corpse, she didn't even want to imagine the shitstorm he would start. It was safer to just take the drugs back and eliminate the risk.

She slipped the pills into her thigh pocket. The crinkle of plastic mixed with a soft rustle from the cot. Lythmer uncoiled slightly now that she had stepped away. She saw how much he was shaking, not only with fear, she realized, but also with pain. The way he held his left hand frozen in a strange half-curl, as if afraid to move his fingers; the way his head dipped to the side, as if the wound was weighing it down; the way his breath caught on quiet gasps and small, involuntary groans whenever some deeper shiver jostled something that was damaged. It wasn't hard to see.

Something stabbed her through the chest and she told herself it was anger again.

She threw open the cupboard and grabbed from it a simple plastic cup. With the other hand, she fished a pack of pills back out from her pocket and cracked two of them into the cup before slamming it down on the countertop.

Lythmer didn't flinch at that. When she gave him a pointed glare, he met her gaze from under a curtain of tangled hair - and she saw in his eyes a cold, quiet rage.

He didn't thank her.

If he had, she'd have flown off the fucking handle.

A bitter smile crept onto her lips and she scoffed a short chuckle. There was Linde's reward: zero information and a hatred like Lucy had rarely seen before. Exactly what they both deserved.

When she picked up her rifle, everything was back to where it belonged.

She was cruel and she was hated. She was the grunt with the gun.

She didn't return the painkillers to the medical wing and kept them in her pocket instead.