#maybe whumpee’s just tired. and pretending to give up made everything easier; so eventually they do

[whump-is-love-whump-is-life]

Ok but— feigned compliance turning into real obedience

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Daniel Michaelson’s Story: Nate Vandrum, Two Years Before Daniel

(this is late for @whumptober2019 - it was planned for Day 18, Muffled Scream - but hey, it’s fun, so I’m posting it. This is Nate Vandrum, the Denners’ prior whumpee and Daniel Michaelson’s eventual savior of sorts, during his initial captivity when both twins are alive. TW/SW: knives, blood, abusive behavior, the Denners are awful)

Ashley’s sitting on his lap, facing him with her arms around his neck, crossed at the wrists just behind his head. She is close, so close her eerily pretty face takes up his entire field of vision. Slightly narrowed eyes, upswept at the corners and oddly feline, high cheekbones, wide mouth, white-blonde hair and eyebrows that seem sometimes to nearly disappear against equally-white skin.

The spitting image of her brother, nearly identical - but colder.

"You could have more scars," She murmurs in a voice like velvet soaked in whiskey, and as she leans in he turns his head to the side, looking away from her, trying to find a spot on the wall he can stare at instead.

Looking away is the best he can do. He has spent hours memorizing every mark on the walls while they turn him into someone other than who he used to be.

"Oh, Nate. Don't be so rude." She rolls her hips forward so they press against his, and he swallows hard at the way it doesn’t feel that bad at all. "You know the rules, don't you?"

There are so many rules.

Never pull away from Ashley or Abraham Denner. Never reject a touch. Never ask why. Say thank you for every gift you are given, and remember that every breath is a gift we give you now. Do whatever you are told to do, as soon as you are told. 

Take each bruise, each bleeding wound, with gratitude.

Be our pet.

Fall in love.

He'd like to pretend they cannot force the last one on him, but Bram has been gone all day and Nate misses him - his touch, even the bruising ones, his kiss, his everything.

He'd been with them for years, and somewhere in there - somewhere between the pain and the things they do to him and the way they hold him afterward - his deep abiding hatred and urge to escape have been twisted, broken, reshaped.

Ashley he cannot be forced to love, but that's not what she wants, anyway. 

Only Bram wants his love. 

Ashley just wants his obedience and fear, and those are so much easier to give.

He slowly turns his head back to face her, jaw locked tightly, feeling the ring they put through his lip on one side shifting.

When his green eyes meet her blue, she laughs, a soft low sound from deep in her chest. "Fuck, that's so good to watch. Are you going to admit I’m right now? Hm? My Brammie won't be home til late, it's just… you and me and this argument we don’t have to be having."

Nate can feel the blade in her hand graze, gentle as a kiss, against the back of his neck. He does not stiffen up or go tense - never pull away from the Denners - and Ashley never lets the edge of a blade touch someone accidentally. 

This is how she is choosing to touch him, and he has to accept it, even if it hurts.

Especially when it hurts.

“I’m not having an argument,” He says, feeling the blade move a little, the softest kiss of sharpness, around the side, up and down the line of the vein in the side of his neck, not quite cutting, not yet. Then over his Adam’s apple, smiling at him as he swallows hard and the blade pricks, just the slightly bit.

“What are you doing, then?” Her voice is a purr, a rumble in her chest. 

“Not having an argument.” Nate fixes his eyes on hers, tries to look unintimidated, like the person he maybe used to be. “You’re just wrong.”

She lets the blade slice, just the barest bit, and Nate hisses air through his teeth, picturing the droplet of bright red welling up. She darts her head forward and he feels the wet press of her tongue as she licks it up. He used to get nauseous at that feeling. Now he feels nothing at all. “You don’t get to tell us we’re wrong. God damn do I love it when your blood is hot.”

She is playing with him, of course - this is a game. Ashley Denner has always been a cat and Nathaniel Vandrum little more than the mouse she is not allowed to consume, because her twin brother loves him and has declared he gets to live.

If he stays relaxed, if he looks bored, she might get bored, too, and walk away. Maybe. 

She might decide to slice the collar again, the cuts in smooth lines that go around and around his neck but never too deep. If she does that, he must hold still. For every flinch or noise he makes, she’ll wind the knife another time.

He is very good at holding still for Ashley’s knife, now.

Never reject a touch.

She is safer when Bram’s home, because Bram loves him, and he hurts Nate because he loves him, because he has to be fixed, made better. If he’s good, if he does what he’s told to do, Bram won’t hurt him very much at all.

This relationship only works if you understand your place, Nate. You're my pet and I love you - we’re going to be together forever. But if you don’t understand that you belong to me, then I’ll have to break up with you, and then you’ll have to die.

Bram loves him, and he wants to keep Nate as a pet forever, and there are moments when Nate forgets who he is.

He was a professor, back home. He had a whole life before he met them. 

Some days, it’s hard to remember that - and in those moments, he loves Bram, too, and all he wants is to make him happy. In those moments he feels like maybe he was meant for this, born to be with Bram and Ashley, born to kneel for Bram, that every single second of his life was leading up to the night they followed him home.

Bram says it all the time. You need to understand that you loved us already. You just didn't know it yet, before we found you.

I love you, Nate, so much, so much you get to live, with me forever. You'll never leave me. You'll never run. 

If you leave me, I'll cut parts of you off until you never leave again. 

I love you, Nate. I love you. I love you so much.

Now say it back or I’ll get the razor blades out again.

Bram Denner's a psychopath, and Nathaniel Vandrum is sometimes still himself and sometimes a pet, and he has no idea how long he can hold any part of himself together. He has no idea how much more of this there will be, only that it will last for the rest of his life, and one day they will get tired of him and kill him and at least it would all be over, then. 

If Bram is a psychopath, Ashley is something even worse.

“You know, when you’re like this, I can see why Brammie loves you so much.” She shifts around again, leaning in close to kiss his cheek, a trail of kisses to his ear, down the side of his neck over the healing cuts that itch and itch, licking at the still-bleeding place she’d let the knife cut in. “You've got a nice jaw, good mouth, pretty nice eyes… I get it, I really do."

Other than the fact that she is clearly female, Ashley Denner looks exactly like her twin brother. Sometimes when they are hurting him, Nate can’t remember which one he is currently begging to stop, calls the one with the knife or the whip or the cane by the wrong name, and they laugh and laugh and hit him harder until he gets it right the next time.

“Thanks for the compliment,” Nate says dryly. He doesn’t stammer yet - the stammer comes later, after he tries one more time to escape and Bram hits him too hard in the head a few times. He doesn’t stammer yet. “But you’re still wrong.”

He is currently tied to a chair because the two of them are both fucking idiots, and they refuse to listen to someone who knows something they don’t.

If she were anyone else, the weight of her hips pressing lightly against his would have been supremely pleasant. Even with Ashley being exactly who she is, it isn’t exactly a bad feeling. He tries to remember when feelings like this came from people who weren’t in the process of slowly destroying him, piece by piece.

“I’m not wrong,” She says, rolling her eyes.

The knife trails down the side of his neck, over his collarbone, traces the line of it. There’s never enough food (not enough sleep, either - when one of them is done with him the other is only getting started) and he’s lost weight since he came here, defining the muscles they force him to exercise to build.

When he is good, he eats enough, but the days he is good are the days he starts to forget who he used to be, and so he’s never good for enough days in a row to fully lose the hunger.

He has to remember who he used to be.

He has to remember that he is a person.

He has to remember long enough to find the opportunity to escape.

“You are wrong.” Another prick of the knife, just above his collarbone this time, and he manages not to wince at the bright flash of pain as the knife digs in a little deeper. “You can’t be identical twins, Ashley.”

“Why not?” She cuts a smooth line across the length of his collarbone and up to his shoulder, and Nate lets his head fall back, teeth ground together as hard as they can to keep his jaw shut, shifting but not flinching away as the skin separates like she’s cutting butter, not him, and the blood wells up in a line.

She licks it away, a low pleased growl in her throat, and her other hand holds him still by the back of his neck, fingernails digging in hard, dimpling the skin until they ache, too. 

“You’re a man and a woman,” He manages, voice strained with keeping control. Never reject a touch. Never pull away. Follow the rules. 

Be grateful for the pain, because every breath is a gift we have chosen to give you.

“I fail to see the problem with that,” Ashley says against his skin. She moves the knife away and for a second he thinks maybe this will be all, this will be enough to satisfy her.

“Identical twins have to be the same biological sex. It’s a single person’s genes that get split into two eggs. You’re not identical twins.”

She pulls back and looks at him, chewing on her lower lip thoughtfully. “We were a single person, once, then we split in two. Male and female, like twin gods in the myths.”

Nate takes a deep breath.

She’s moved the knife back and away, and is watching him with no anger in her eyes. Maybe this time he’ll get through to her.

“Identical twins are always the same biological sex.”

“Unless they’re gods,” She counters.

“No,” Nate says trying to sound patient but his collarbone and shoulder ache from the cuts and he just wants her to undo the handcuffs and let him get out of the chair. “Even those stories about the gods - they’d have been fraternal twins. That’s what you are - you’re fraternal twins.”

“We’re identical.”

“No. You’re similar.”

She frowned. “No. We are identical twins.”

“You are very similar-looking fraternal twins, Ashley.”

“I’m going to tell Brammie you said that when you come home,” Ashley says, sitting back and away from him now, resting her weight entirely on his lower thighs where they connect to his knees. He swallows, knowing what’s coming, but somehow he can’t let this go.

He doesn’t love her.

She doesn’t want him to.

And she’s wrong.

“I’m going to tell him you said we’re not identical.” She changes her grip on the knife and he knows what is about to happen next. 

He turns his head away one more time, closes his eyes, and waits. 

“He’s going to be so upset with you, Nate.”

The blade of the knife jams straight through his shoulder and out the other side, buries itself with an audible thunk into the wood back of the chair, and Nate only barely keeps his mouth shut to muffle the scream.

Ashley leans in close again, watching him with wide eyes like a child looking into the reptile cage at the zoo, her head slowly tilting to one side until a bit of wavy blonde hair falls across her cheek. “No, Nate. I want to hear you. Turns me on.”

He shakes his head, biting down on his lower lip until it bleeds, the agony spreading from his shoulder down his arm, into his chest, the feel of wet blood running in rivulets down his chest and back. 

“I say we are identical twins, Nate. And I say you’re going to scream.”

She smiles, twists the knife as hard as she can, and Nate’s back arches him nearly out of the chair at the pain, still biting his lip, the cry trapped in his throat, keep it down, don’t make noise, she likes that too much and she’ll want too much afterward, don’t-

She twists again, and then time Nate screams, head thrown back, pulling helplessly trying to free himself, the handcuffs rattling hard against the back of the chair. Ashley grinds her hips into his and starts to laugh, a strange high-pitched hyena laughter, yanking the knife back out and somehow that hurts worse and he screams again.

He always tries to hold it back.

He always screams in the end.

“There we go. That’s our good, good boy. Now… are we identical twins, Nate?”

He’s breathing hard, panting really, like the dog they always tell him he is until he earns being a person. He can’t speak for the pain, can barely hear her over the buzzing agony, and all he can do is shake his head. “Fra-... fraternal,” He grinds out. 

“Oooh, you are a masochist today,” Ashley says. Her voice is warm and playful but her eyes are very, very cold. “You are indeed. Okay, Nate. Have it your way.”

When the knife buries itself in his other shoulder, he doesn’t try to muffle the scream this time, just lets himself collapse and drown in it, in the sound from his own throat, in the pain that rattles the walls. She yanks it back out and he groans again, head dropping, black hair in his eyes.

Ashley twists her fingers into that hair and yanks his head back up. When he finally opens his eyes, narrowed against the ache, she waits until she is sure he is looking at her and slowly licks his blood off the blade.

“Bad puppy,” She says, and her lips are smeared red with his blood. “You’re a very, very bad dog. Let’s see how much of you is left by the time my Brammie gets home.”