Day 23 of Whumptober 2022: Infected
Day 23 of Whumptober 2022!
No. 23 AT THE END OF THEIR ROPE
Forced to Kneel | Tied to a Table | “Hold them down.”
Timeline-wise my current shorts go: Day 2 -> Day 15 -> Day 5 -> Day 16 -> Day 1 -> Day 18 -> Day 22 -> Day 13 - > (Day 4 -> Day 9*) -> Day 3 -> Day 7 -> Day 8 -> Day 21 - > Day 19 -> Day 6 -> Day 11 -> Day 12 -> Day 23 -> Day 14 -> Day 17 -> Day 20
*Day 4 and 9 do not happen in the same AU where Ludwig exists.
Day 10 is a modern AU.
Victor is my human fleshsmith inventor (KibblesTasty Homebrew class) from a long-running DnD adventure.
Ludwig Richter is a tiefling and a former gravedigger turned archeologist who wields a rifle and a battle shovel named Charon that I play in a TTRPG.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/42580737 (AO3 link)
Infected
“Hold him down!” Victor does not often bark out orders but when he does, people listen without a trace of hesitation.
Two guards and the chef all pile up on top of the head archeologist who is growling and bucking against them violently.
“Careful with his legs and tail!” He warns, coming around the infected man with a bandana of one of the assistant archeologists.
“Calm down, honey.” He coos kneeling next to the head, careful to avoid his teeth and horns. “Now, open your mouth.”
Ludwig goes for a bite at that moment and Victor puts the cloth between his jaws and ties is around his head to block his sharp tiefling teeth. He then proceeds to wrap a rope around his ankles, knees and gradually tie him completely up.
“Now, bring him to my tent and tie him to the surgery chair. I’ll need to remove the parasite.”
He jogs to the tent first to prepare his tools. He will need some heavy sedation to keep him from wriggling.
Finally, his partner is places on the chair and strapped to it. His head is secured against the back. He is blindfolded and a more convenient gag is placed in his mouth. His tail is tied to his own leg. Victor has gotten whipped by it once at full force by accident and it was not pleasant for either of them.
Victor injects him with the highest dose he deems safe and orders the workers to leave them alone, so he can focus on his work.
“Alright, my dear.” He pets his lover’s hair between the horns to make sure he is not moving. “I’m going to drill a hole in your skull now. Grab that bastard and pull it out. It’s going to hurt. A lot. But I’m going to do it with love… not sure if it only works for cooking but we’ll see. Now, I will need you to drink this. It will help me… secure your life while I work. I know the parasite and all, but it should not have a desire to kill you, so it should let you pass it down the right path.”
He carefully ungags the man and slowly pours the potion into his mouth, while making sure his teeth have no chance to close on his fingers. Fortunately, the sedative has worked its magic and Ludwig’s attempts to bite him or spit the liquid out do not work as intended. He puts the gag back in and strokes the handle of his scalpel and hand drill that are lying on the table near him.
“Good thing, you’re not the first victim we’ve encountered.” Victor giggles, excited for the new procedure. “I know exactly where to drill.”
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Day 1 of Whumptober 2022: Grapes
Day 1 of Whumptober 2022
Adverse Effects | Unconventional Restraints | “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
I tried going for all three prompts at once.
Victor is my human fleshsmith inventor (KibblesTasty Homebrew class) from a long-running DnD adventure. Otty is an adorable gnome assistant from his backstory.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/42067779 (Same thing as below)
Grapes
A brief and quickly muffled incoherent scream is followed by one that is much easier to understand:
“DOCTOR!”
Victor is out of the bathtub in a second. The tone of Otty’s scream tells him he has no time to waste. He forgoes proper dressing up and soon he bursts into the sickroom in his new white bathrobe, his bare feet almost sending him flying across the clean white tiles of the laboratory on his way.
He can see the issue right away. There is only one patient currently in his care. And her head and upper body is barely visible behind a blanket of bloodied vines that have burst out of her mouth and are now wrapping around her and creeping down the bed.
The middle-aged elf came to them only a few hours ago complaining of a mild stomach pain soon after ingesting some odd grape-like fruit her traveler friend brought. Aside from the complaint she seemed fine. Victor gave her a well-tested mixture against food poisoning and some antihistaminic pills and let her sleep in the sickroom in case neither helped… Well…
“This… wasn’t supposed to happen,” he muses approaching the patient who seems to have passed out from shock but is still showing signs of life, “I’m sure I gave her actual medicine not something from… ah… the test cabinet… Right?”
“Definitely!” Otty nods frantically pacing a couple meters away from the bed. He recognizes fear in her eyes. “Just the usual.”
The blood and parts of viscera on the vines indicated that the immensity of the inside damage and judging by the rapid growth might soon start tearing her completely apart. Victor can barely see her face from behind the vines. He reaches out behind him and a scalpel is placed into his hand right away. He trained Otty quite well. Though now is not the time for pride.
“A parasitic vine plant with berries resembling grapes… according to the subject. The vines, that are rapidly growing, have found their way out of the stomach through the mouth of the subject inflicting a lot of internal damage of their way. They are of dark green coloration and… have pinkish-red buds that are increasing in size right before our eyes,” Victor dictates as he cuts into the vines on the face to try removing them. “My normal scalpel is able to easily cut through them. Despite the removal of some of the vines the rest of the plant does not seem to react in any way. This… parasitic grape does not appear to be capable of active or passive self-defense... For now…”
Victor pries the vines from the upper half of the patient’s face but before he can touch her the woman’s body twitches violently and her eyes fly open on their own. She lets out a weak wet gurgling noise, adding a spray of red to his white robe. She seems to be semi-conscious of her situation as her eyes fill with tears and focus on the Doctor. She gurgles again.
“Ah… It appears that the patient is capable of consciousness at this stage of the parasite’s growth!” Victor announces to Otty who is scribing his every word tirelessly as he wipes blood off his face and turns his attention back to the elven woman. “Don’t worry, my dear. You will feel better in a just few moments… Just let me…”
He cuts into more vines on the head to clear the space, makes sure his aim is perfect and hilts his scalpel instantly killing the woman.
“Unfortunatelly, the patient had to be euthanized.” He grunts tearing the tool out of her head. “Grab us… something flammable or caustic and a bigger knife, just in case, and sit down with me, Otty. Let's see what happens next. It seems that this “grape” vine does not need a living victim to continue its growth.”
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Health and Hybrids (XXIII)👽👻💚
[I can't remember the original prompt posters for the life of me but here's a mashup between a cryptid!Danny, presumed-alien!Danny, dp x dc, and the prompt made the one body horror meat grinder fic.]
🖤Chapter navigation can be found here🖤 Click to browse previous updates.
💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts 💚 (now featuring mediocre mouseover translations, only available on a computer)
Where we last left off... J'onn broke the news that Danny thinks he's going to be forced into combat in exchange for his medical care. Everyone disliked that™.
Trigger warnings for this story: body horror | gore | post-dissection fic | dehumanization (probably) | my nonexistent attempts at following DC canon. On with the show.
💚👻👽👻💚
COME GET YOUR NEW ART HERE 💥🍳!!💥 IT'S FIBERCRAFT!!Shoutout to @rainbowbeansprout for crocheting a fic accurate injured ghost Danny!! That's outstanding!!
💚👻👽👻💚
So, Wally broke all of the bones in his legs yesterday.
Which is…not ideal. Still. He’s pretty used to it at this point, though, and he’s already mostly healed.
It’s just that. Well.
…The rest of healing is kind of…time-consuming.
So Wally’s in basketball shorts and a mask and a t-shirt he’d started using as pajamas when he was in college and he’s on the med floor of the Watchtower, and yet another physical therapist is helping him bend his leg back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, because he’d tripped in the middle of the Speedforce and busted everything hip-down.
So. (Back, and forth. Back, and forth. Back…) This sucks.
“Do we have to do this every time?” Wally asks, as if there isn’t a team of medical professionals kept on hand to deal with Superpower-wrought Super Medical Problems.
“Do you have to shatter your legs every time?” the PT asks back wryly, which, hey! The pressure pressing up against his bare foot is an additional stressor to the sass. “Bend this more for me, Flash. You can do it.”
Wally grumbles, and pretends the angle his leg is bending at doesn’t make him wince. Wow is he going to have to build his flexibility back up again.
The physical therapy room looks just like any other gym, basically; a lot of squishy mats in playful colors, a lot of grippy tape; a LOT of wipeable vinyl surfaces that can be sanitized at a moment’s notice. It smells kind of weird and plasticky and kind of like alcohol cleaner.
It’s not his favorite room in the Watchtower, but, eh. It could be way worse. What’s unusual is the whirrr of the door opening and closing in one of the private care rooms for another patient, since, you know...HIPAA and all that. Wally assumes. Or is it costume confidentiality once you leave Earth's atmosphere...?
Usually everyone knows who’s stopping in for PE through the sheer power of the Justice League gossip groupchats. (There’s at least nine. Wally’s in four of them. He aspires to be in two more by April.) There hasn’t been a big fight that requires long-term medical care in a while, and there’s no one Wally can think of who’d need this kind of recovery.
Something’s buzzing at the outside of his awareness, though. It sounds kind of…
Wally perks up. “Hey, the alien kid’s here!”
The PT holding Wally up at the waist hums. Her name is Cindy, and judging from their previous conversations, she thinks that Wally is the dumbest man alive. “There’s a million of those, Flash. Which one?”
“The one who bit Superman,” Wally adds.
Judging by the face Cindy makes, this clarifies nothing.
“Most recently,” Wally stresses, carefully not wincing as his leg gets stretched out again, only to be pulled back into position as tightly as before. “OW. Cindy, you’re killing me.”
Cindy makes a strangled noise. She asks: “What, again?” which is how Wally remembers that he got torn back out of the time stream not all that long ago, and it may be a big gauche to joke about your own death with the people who care about it.
Whoops. Wally winces. “…Nevermind?”
The other PTs make various fussy and annoyed noises, but the alien kid is wheeled onto the other side of the medical floor’s only gym. (The actual training floors are on another level. Wally wishes he was there. Alone.)
(Without four PTs clinging to his legs at all times.)
Wally waves. It’s a nice enough gesture, and now that the alien-phantasm-turned-flesh-and-blood-boy is more physically embodied than he used to be, the boy even deigns to carefully wave back.
The kid’s PTs—Wally thinks at least one of them is from the team that supervises Bart and his super-powered-leg-problems—end up encouraging the alien kid’s chair round to the soft mats where the kid can lay down. He ends up in the exact same position Wally is—horizontal on the floor, legs forcibly pinwheeled by enthusiastic but firm PTs.
Wally can physically feel the kid’s astonishment and discontentment buzzing in the air as he figures out what’s being done to him. Wally can’t help but laugh.
The kid angles his head towards the speedster. His face still looks—well, it looks…bad. It looks bad, unhealed and still threatening to weep neon green body fluids; there’s a wet, living crack running up and down his face that makes eye contact kind of hard. His hands are all spidery—this kid can probably hold and grip things, but the previous breakage have left his hands a little too easy to splay, a little too oddly-angled. He’s too thin to keep himself fully upright for long. When he looks at you, his eyes shake like a poorly lined-up television signal.
Martian Manhunter had said that he’d once looked like a healthy, happy human child. His current form is a reflection of the injuries he’d experienced since.
...What a thing for a kid to go through. Wally wouldn’t wish this sort of injury on anyone.
“Alright, up you go,” the PT above him—Rhys, Wally remembers at the very last second—orders, and Wally is prompted to let the man help him back upright. “Over to the bars for you. You think your legs are up to bearing that kind of weight as you try out walking?”
“…Sure,” Wally lies to Rhys. It’ll be fine. Probably. By the time he gets over there, his legs might have already speed-healed by then. “Hand me the—?”
“Yeah, yeah, here’s the crutches. Don’t destroy yourself trying to make this happen, okay?”
So Wally gets set up at the glorified playground equipment in his least restrictive gym clothes, one long iron bar under one arm, and one long iron bar under the other. Two full-size physical therapists spot him as the speedster completes the most strenuous task available to him at the moment: walking across a very short distance without putting his full weight on his legs.
Wally puts one shaking leg in front of the other. The steps are slow. The urge to zoom to the end of the little bowling lane he’s stuck in—and therefore shatter his legs under the speedforce, again—is irresistibly temping.
Healing sucks. And Wally’s even got the longer end of the stick.
In the end, Wally sticks the landing. He is unreasonably sweaty. He is miserable. But he makes it to the end. Every one of the witnessing PTs applauds as if this is a great success. It’s literally not. It’s the inevitable result of pushing himself too far for the third time this year.
A question buzzes through the air, fluffing through Wally’s hair and the little fine hairs up and down his body. It’s nothing but inquisitive—whatareyoudoing whatareyoudoing?
Wally lets the PT maneuver a chair underneath him. It gives him enough breathing room to turn his upper torso, and he ends up catching the eye of the little alien kid in the corner. He’s sat on a yoga ball, two members of his medical team and one of the kids’ PTs trying to get his attention back to his exercises.
“Hey,” Wally realizes suddenly. “Your casts are gone!”
The kids’ legs are actually bare, which Wally’s never seen before. They’re twiggy, sure, stretched taut over a bone frame, and discolored and pale, but they’re legs. Wally hadn’t even known the alien had possessed legs until he’d formed a physical body months and months ago.
“Dude, that’s great!”
Happy/smug/proud vibrates through the room, making Wally’s teeth buzz. The kid smiles through a half-split lip, and bounces on the yoga ball ever so slightly.
“Good,” the kid says, surprising Wally, his PTs, and the kid’s usual medical team. He was talking already?! He thought J’onn had said—
“Hurt?” the boy asks, concern/concern flooding through the air. Oh. Right. He’s probably here for his busted legs; it would make sense that by virtue of the setting, Wally would be injured too.
And, sure, Wally busted his legs, but he at least heals with all the swiftness of the speedforce. “Meh.” Wally waves off the question. “I’m fine. It’ll be quick for me; some rehab and some lunch and a few days off, and I’ll be in shipshape.”
Wait. Wally’s eyes scrunches up. Is using wordplay appropriate with this kid…?
“Pain?” the kid asks, and turned his attention to the closest member of his medical team. “He pain?”
The medical professional sighs, which finally clues Wally in that the man is no longer masked. Hey, the kid is out of medical isolation! “The Flash has his own medication, thankfully. His doctors know what to do.”
The kid frowns. He doesn’t get it. He looks at Wally, and he looks at the staffer, who shrugs. “It’s the usual indicator word he uses for pain medication. He’s wondering if you’re hurt enough to need some.”
Wally hums. On one hand, it’s sweet that the alien kid is worried about him. It’s a huge step upwards from the alien who spent all his time hiding in abandoned meeting rooms and occasionally biting Superheroes.
On the other hand, the kid doesn’t just look worried that Wally might not be getting care; he looks scared.
Something happened to this kid. Something he can't shake off.
Wally breathes in, and breathes out.
—And breathes in sharply when Cindy starts wiggling his feet. She doesn’t respond at all to his glare, because she is a professional, and he is not a big baby of a superhero.
Mean.
“I’m fine,” Wally finally responds, trying to alleviate the kid’s concerns through sheer vibes-telepathy alone. Who knows if it’s working, but it makes Wally feel better about trying at the very least. “I’ve got my own team to fix me up, and they do a good job of taking care of me. Even if they’re bullying me at my most vulnerable.”
“Anything for you, boss,” Cindy volleys back cheerfully. “Gimme your other leg.”
The tension in the air slowly dissipates. The kid doesn’t stop shooting occasional looks at the unadorned, half-out-of-uniform Flash, but he does let Bart’s little PT team get to working on stretching out his previously-bound now-physical legs and getting him upright—if only for a few seconds at a time, balanced precariously by humans who actually touch his back and arms and hips and legs.
Wally’s session wraps up before the kid’s does. He’s not in any rush. He gets onto the walking crutches Rhys leaves out for his temporary use and lopes over to watch, occasionally hooting and applauding when the kid pulls off something no one’d been sure he could do.
The double handed high-five Wally offers him at the end is punctuated with shaky eye contact, two working hands, and a green-threaded beaming grin.
*
Diana cheerfully digs into her kebab lunch, plastic cutlery pushed to their maximum limit before threatening to break under her prodigious strength. “You know, Batman,” she starts, beaming, “My charge gave me his name the other day.”
Bruce sets down his muenster-ham-and-whole-wheat sandwich mid-bite. “I’ll need to hear everything,” he says immediately, to which Diana tuts.
“Oh, Batman, I could never break his trust like that,” she says, sweet as anything. She finesses a bite of lamb from the skewer and takes a neat bite.
“…Wonder Woman,” Batman says.
“Hm?”
“Diana.”
“Is there something you needed, Bruce?” Diana asks, pleased with herself. There genuinely is very little that could be done with a vague description of a now-altered human form and a first name alone; besides, she genuinely does feel that hearing the boy’s name come from others’ lips would be upsetting for him. Danny offered his name to Diana alone, and so it shall remain until hers alone he offers it to others.
Still, she is not above bragging.
“I need information.” Bruce’s face underneath his mask is stone.
Diana dips a second chunk of lamb into a little container of tzatziki sauce. “Well, then,” she points out, “Shouldn’t you spend some time building rapport with my charge, then?”
The feared Batman of Gotham, father of a half-dozen highly trained heroes, bristles like a wet cat. The demeanor is almost comical. He knows what he looks like to non-Gothamite children. He knows his suit will make this fight for common familiarity an uphill battle.
Diana smugly works through her lunch and ignores Bruce’s silent brooding as he does the same.
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