#old injuries

[whump-and-other-misfortunes]

Whumpuary 2024 Day 6

6. (Jan 11-12) Exhaustion / Blindfolded / Old Injuries  

cw reluctant whumper, exhaustion, blood loss, vampire whumper, human whumpee, scars, intimate whumper 

Whumpee stood in front of the mirror, head tilted to the side as their fingers traced the bite marks going down their neck. They were in various stages of healing—some had faded to white scars, others were bruised and scabbing, and the most recent one was still an aggravated red. If Whumpee scratched at it, it would start bleeding again easily. 

“You okay?” 

They glanced up quickly. “I didn’t hear you come in.” 

Whumper shrugged, eyes locking with theirs in the mirror. “Perks of being a creature of the night, I suppose. Very sneaky.” 

“Right,” Whumpee said with a chuckle. 

A moment of silence passed, with both of their gazes drifting to Whumpee’s neck. Most of the marks were concentrated there, but others were hidden by Whumpee’s clothes. Their wrists, the inside of their elbow, their thighs. 

“You look tired,” Whumper pointed out. 

“I’m fine.” The constant blood loss left them exhausted and perpetually dizzy, but it really was fine. Whumper worried too much. 

They frowned, closing the distance between them and Whumpee. Whumper kissed their neck gently, lips fitting over one of the older bites. “I wish they didn’t scar so much.” 

“I don’t mind,” Whumpee muttered. “I like the reminders of you. Knowing that I can give you what you need, instead of letting you worry about where your next meal is coming from. Or hurting someone who doesn’t want this.” 

Whumper nodded slightly, eyes meeting theirs in the mirror. “We can’t keep doing this forever, though. Someday I'm gonna take too much, and then I don’t know what I'd do with myself.” 

Whumpee took in their own reflection—the pallid skin, distant eyes and dark circles, thin frame—and wondered if that day was very far in the future.  

[tabbytabbytabby]

A Steddie aesthetic for @whumpuary No.6: Exhaustion / old injuries

[whumpshots]

Whump ABC #24

Based on the results of this poll.

_

Whumpee rubs their eyes when they lie down again, caretaker telling them again and again that they need to rest. Compared to other things, whumpee just feels tired, but if caretaker is so insistent, they'll just listen to them.

When the other returns from the talk with the doctor, they are weirdly quiet. Whumpee cracks one eye open and sees caretaker look at them with ... something weird in their eyes. Something they can't quite identify yet.

"Hm?", whumpee grunts and manages to open the other eye, dizziness making it a little hard to see.

"I just saw your x-rays," they begin and swallow. Whumpee furrows their brows questioningly and waits for caretaker to continue. "Nothing broken, but you need to rest more," they finally say and chew on their bottom-lip.

"What else?" Whumpee feels annoyed by how weird caretaker acts and sighs.

"Your x-ray also showed something else. Something ... older." Their eyes meet for a second and whumpee softly snorts before looking up at the ceiling.

"Oh ... That was years ago, don't worry about it too much," they dismiss and start chewing on their own bottom-lip before they feel caretaker's hand on theirs. Years ago means that whumpee was a child, teenager at most when all this happened. But they have buried those memories.

[cattomint]

unwillingness to accept oneself will only make huerfanos a tus experiencias. donde debe (s) ir?

[melanie-ohara]

Alive, Just to Watch the Bruises Heal - Chapter 2

Whumpuary, Day 12 - Prompt: Old Injuries

Shepard wants her old scars back, and there's only one person she trusts to do it

Okay, this one is probably the nastiest my whump stories are going to get. Be warned: blood, injury, trauma, and some very bad coping mechanisms.

AO3 Here

Shepard rolled over and looked at Thane. His eyes were closed and his breathing measured, but she didn't think he was asleep. She hadn't taken the anti-hallucinogens Mordin had provided to counteract the toxins in Thane's saliva and sweat, and though the first rush of chemical stimulation had come and gone while they had sex, Shepard was still pleasantly high. Logically, she knew Thane was immune to his own effects, but she couldn't help but wonder what it would feel like to live like this all the time. It was the first time in months she hadn't been in pain.

Shepard's eyes trailed along the shape of Thane's profile: the gentle slope of his brow to the dip of his eyes, his flat reptilian nose and full, smooth lips. By the time her gaze came to rest on his chin, he was looking at her too. 

"What are you looking at, Siha?" he asked.

"The most beautiful man I've ever seen," Shepard replied. She hadn't told him that he was the first man she had bedded since her awkward academy years, or that he was the first person to see her naked since Cerberus had pressed her resisting body into service. She had a feeling he knew anyway. 

Thane smiled, and reached over to cup her face in his hand. She let her eyes closed and pressed against him so she could feel the strange membrane that joined his middle fingers against her ear. It would be so easy to fall asleep, comfortable and pain-free, but she pushed the temptation away. There was something she had been wanting to take care of and now, with the suicide mission looming, she didn't want to put it off anymore. She leaned forwards and pressed a soft kiss to Thane's forehead, and then got out of bed.

"Shepard?" he asked, sitting up to watch her in confusion as she pulled on a sports bra and underwear. Now that Miranda owed her for saving her sister, she had convinced her to disable the monitoring devices in her bedroom.

"I need to ask something of you," she said without looking at him. She pulled open the bottom drawer of the wardrobe and dipped her hand inside. 

"Anything," Thane said. When Shepard stood again, he had slipped out of bed and into his own underwear. She hadn't even heard him move. 

"It's still creepy how quiet you can be," she said, and Thane dipped his head in a bashful apology. "And… maybe don't be too quick to agree. You haven't heard what I want yet."

"What do you have behind your back?" Thane asked, gently resting his hand on her arm. He didn't want her to notice, but she could tell he was growing suspicious. She swallowed and took her hands from behind her back to show him the knife. 

It was a honed turian blade, used for skinning in traditional wild animal hunts, and Shepard had sharpened it until it rivaled Chakwas' surgical tools. Carefully, Thane took it from her and felt the weight, turning it over in his lightly scaled hands and running a finger along the flat of the blade. 

"This is an impressive blade," Thane said. "What is it you want from me, Siha?" 

Shepard had to turn away from him before she could answer. She watched the way the cool blue light from the fish tank swirled on the floor grating instead and swallowed the lump of fear swelling in her throat before she said anything. "Before Cerberus got their hands on me, before I… died - " she stopped suddenly, but Thane laid a hand on her shoulder to prompt her to continue. "Before I died, I had scars. Different scars. Scars that Cerberus erased." She turned back to him and looked him in the eyes. "I want them back." 

Thane looked from her down to the knife in his hand and then back again.

"Siha, I - "

"I know what you're going to say," Shepard said. "But I'm not me without them. These are marks I got on Elysium, Therum, Ilos, the Citadel. I could have had them removed - hell, Udina offered to pay for the surgery when I got famous so my headshots wouldn't look so off-putting." She took a step towards him and clasped her hand around his wrist. "They're a reminder of everything I've lost. Everything I've fought for. Everything I still fight for."

She stopped and looked at him, pleading, but he shook his head. "You're not lucid, Shepard. My toxins are still in your bloodstream, affecting your judgement."

"I'm not asking this on a whim, Thane," Shepard said softly. "I've been planning this since before we first met."

"Then why ask me?" 

Shepard sighed and let go of his wrist. "Mordin could do it. He probably wouldn't even ask questions. Doctor Chakwas, if I could put up with the psych eval she'd put me through. Or Miranda, she gave me all these new scars." She paused to look at him again, hoping he'd see the truth of it in her blown-out pupils. "But I trust you more than any of them. You're the only one I want to trust my body to. My past. And I know you have the precision and skill to do it. I want it to be you."

Thane was silent for a long time, and Shepard had to bite her lip to resist the urge to beg. He turned the knife in his hands while he considered it - considered her - his eyes on the fine edge of the blue-black blade. Was it sharp enough to slice her skin neatly? Could he wield a blade against a woman he loved? Could he stand to make her bleed?

Finally, he held the knife still. "Where?" he said.

"Thank you, Thane," Shepard breathed. 

She called up her omni-tool and flicked through the images she had prepared. A lot of them came from official Alliance media just after The Battle of the Citadel, but she'd had to use pictures she'd taken herself for the marks her uniform covered. A lot of them had Liara in them originally. 

"Here," she said, enlarging a picture of her leg and rotating it in the air so Thane could see. A pale scar cut along her calf, just below her knee. "This one first." 

He knelt and lifted her leg into his lap. The way he touched her now, examining her skin to find the exact angle for the knife, reminded her of how he had treated her in bed: there was that same methodical, conditioned fluidity to his movements that made her feel so safe. He pressed a kiss to her knee and she closed her eyes briefly. While she was distracted, he slashed the knife quickly across her flesh and she gasped in shock. 

A glancing slice from the beam of a geth ghost energy weapon, that would have destroyed her knee if aimed just a little better.

"I am sorry," Thane said, but Shepard shook her head and lifted her leg out of his grip, tilting it to look at the new wound. Other than the fresh blood trailing down her calf, it looked exactly the way it used to. Exactly the way it should.

"It's perfect," she said. Maybe it was the drell toxins clouding her mind, but other than a dull ache she didn't even feel it. Thane didn't return her smile, but he did nod in understanding. His past was dark and painful too, and Shepard knew if anyone would understand the need to bear a constant reminder of suffering, it would be Thane. She pulled up the next image.

A new Cerberus scar ran from Shepard's sternum to her belly button, where something had been put inside her and sewn up again, but before there had been a long scar that crossed from under ribs to the centre of her stomach. Thane turned the knife into a reverse grip, kissed Shepard lightly where the cotton of her underwear met her skin, and then quickly stood and made his cut.

A knife fight behind a bar, where a batarian slaver had tried to grab a teenage boy.

The cut hurt more, but Shepard didn't care. She ignored the blood too, this time. The first time she had got that wound it had been deep, and the blood was all she could think about. If the batarian hadn't assumed he'd killed her and run off, she was sure she wouldn't have survived. It was good to have the reminder back where it belonged. 

"Another," Shepard said. She had thought she was checking Thane could keep going, but it came out like a demand. 

She was about to try again when Thane took her hand and used it to flip to the next image - a high-resolution shot of her face, from her brief time as the Alliance poster girl. 

"These are the last three," she said, and left the question implied. 

"I understand," Thane said, examining the short scar that traced its way from the side of her neck to her collar bone.

"It stops just here," Shepard said, touching a finger to her own skin and leaving a fingerprint of blood to mark the spot. "I couldn't - " before she could explain that all the topless pictures she still had featured distinctive blue hands on her skin, Thane had slashed her with the knife. 

A shot from a rifle that had pierced her hardsuit. If not for the automatic medigel sealing her skin, she would have bled out in minutes. Liara had been there to see it.

Blood seeped into the cotton of her bra and Shepard nodded.

"This one is important," she said. She was starting to feel a tingle in her fingertips, but she knew the Cerberus implants would keep her from losing too much blood. 

Thane ran the tip of the knife over the image first, tracing the long cut that traveled down from above her left eye, across her face, over her lips, and down to her chin on the opposite side. 

"Siha," Thane whispered. 

"I survived it the first time, and it was much worse than it looks," Shepard said. She wasn't prepared for this to end yet, not when she was so close to being complete again. 

"It will hurt."

"I know." 

"Close your eyes."

Shepard did as she was told, and though she knew the next thing she was going to feel would send her back to that frozen street on Elysium all those years ago, Thane made her feel too safe to care. Instead of the knife, though, he gave her his lips first, pressing them to hers with an urgency he hadn't show her before. She kissed him back, feeling the prickle of the toxin in his saliva spark against her lips. Just as she was wondering if it was intentional - if he was dosing her to keep the pain at bay - the knife interrupted her train of thought.

A spear from kishock harpoon gun, fired from the top of the building next to her, had narrowly missed her head. Instead, it had slashed across her face and turned her skin and muscle to hot pulp. Occasionally she still dreamed about screaming.

Shepard nearly fell to her knees as the sharp pain lanced through her. Unlike the original injury, Thane had deliberately missed her eye, and it was her split-open lips that hurt her the most. Her mouth filled with blood and the iron tang made her feel sick.

"Medi-gel," she managed to burble through the mess, and spat it out as Thane quickly passed the minifacturer of his own omni-tool over her lips, stemming the bleeding in a few seconds. 

"We should stop," Thane said.

"I'm fine," Shepard insisted, a little thickly through her numb lips. "You said it would hurt, and it did." 

Thane had to understand that it was what she needed. None of the pain came close to the agony of the first few weeks of implant adjustment, and she had waged war across the Traverse without anybody even suspecting anything was wrong. The scars Thane was recreating for her had almost ended her on the days she got them, but in the days since they reminded her she was alive. The cuts hurt now, but every single one made her feel lighter. Better. She couldn't explain it to him, but the last one was the smallest of the lot and stopping now would leave her feeling as incomplete as if Cerberus had left off one of her limbs.

Thane sighed and switched the knife to his other hand. "Last one," he said.

"Last one."

This time he didn't try and make it a surprise - the cut was completely straight, which was maybe unsurprising given who gave it to her, and it meant that Thane needed to steady the blade with his other hand, pressing his palm over the back of the knife to keep it in place. Again, Shepard felt the comforting presence of his webbed middle fingers against her ear, and she smiled at him. Finally, he smiled back. Instead of letting him make the cut, Shepard took a sudden step forwards, and felt the knife dig in and slice through.

Saren's mutated corpse had slashed for her head and she had taken a step back just in time. His longest talon raked across her right cheek in a perfectly uniform arc.

Thane dropped the knife and wrapped his arms around her, welcoming her lips on his despite the blood that smeared onto his skin. It was over. She was back. 

"Thank you, Thane," she whispered into his skin, "I know that was hard."

"Anything for you, Siha," he whispered back. They kissed again, but Thane pulled away after far too short a time. "Medigel," he said, and his tone told Shepard that he was not to be argued with. She nodded, and let him take care of her.

The slow application of gel let Thane run his fingers over his handiwork, and Shepard couldn't help but see it as symbolic. He had made her whole again, and now he was healing her old injuries. Making her better. By the end, she was tingling from the drell toxins that had got into her blood when they kissed and she felt warm and delicate from the gentle heat of the medigel. Above all, she felt loved. Thane insisted on taking her to the shower so he could wash of the blood, but she stopped at the fishtank to look at her reflection in the glass.

She looked like she had crawled out of hell, and in a way she had. Blood streaked down her face where the new scars were still a vicious red. It got in her hair and stained her underwear. When she opened her mouth, she could see the stains of red on her teeth. She wondered if this was how she'd looked on Elysium, when they found her broken body. 

It felt good to be herself again.

[kyanako5972]

Whumpuary 6

Old injuries (Weave Sutari, ~32)

After ten years, the scars ought to look different, but... I can only do so much with a quick ink drawing.

[littlebunnyman]

flotsam

He wakes in total darkness. He doesn't remember how he got here.

Read on Ao3

Prompt 6, fic 6! Prompts: Exhaustion | Blindfolded | Old Injuries

You can find all my Whumpuary fics in my series on Ao3

[iamnotathornbird]

accurate, except it's my knee, not my ankle.

where's that picture that ruined my life

[megabunnie]

I used to be able to throw around 125 plus pounds without a single issue. Then Things™️ happened almost a decade ago that jacked up my right side- Shoulder, hip and knee. Then awhile later my body started to turn on itself, and I would be lucky to be able to lift 50lbs on a * REALLY Good* day.

Ive been able to handle the up to 50lbish boxes at work since I started. I've had to modify a lot of movements but it hasn't been too bad for the most part and aside from getting things and putting them back in the freezer there isn't a lot of lifting or twisting involved in most of my work.

Today I was defeated by a 5lb box of muffins. It was at the same height as the top of my head. I was not twisting weird or leaning. I reached up, grabbed it, pulled it about three inches, and hit the floor of the freezer. Pretty sure I saw the afterlife. I could not uncurl for a good ten minutes and it took another five before I could stand. I regulated myself to washing apples for the rest of the day. Thank fuck it was a PD day and not a day we had to serve kids. I'm not sure I would have been able to hide it if we had lunch service today. I have very limited range of motion right now.

Im scared about tomorrow. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to unpan and box the pizzas in the morning, let alone serve or do dishes.

I do not want to go be seen. In addition to the cost, of which we do NOT have the money to cover, I've only been with the school since October, I don't have fmla or anything protections wise and if they tell me I can't work for awhile I'm fucked. I love my job. It's been fantastic. I don't want to lose it. It was so so so hard to find employment that fits my childcare schedule. I'm at a loss.

[woelfin-sheeps-clothing]

Caved and got Threads! Mainly to follow threads from freelancers, but if you’ve been waiting to follow me on threads for whatever reason now you can 🤣 I’m not a big Twitter person or into Twitter-esque things, so odds are I won’t use this much beyond posting art.

Small update on me: heads not been in the game and my old injury has flared up something fierce for the first time in a while, so making art has been a bit hard. I’m hoping with some rest my arm will be a bit more functional again!

[cannedpeachess]

Hey so like real quick does anyone else have that recurring thing where you move in a totally normal way but then your back says “Fuck ALL OF THAT SHIT, and fuck YOU in particular,” and then your spinal column magically transforms into a ramshackle stack of loose shale and used hypodermic needles?????

Asking for a friend

[vintage-tigre]

Photo portrait by Helmut Newton, 1987

[paintedcrows]

Totally Normal Trigonometry Things

[sepia-stained-sunset]

Damian Wayne's colleagues at Mercy West Hospital only discover their prodigious young doctor has a connection to the local vigilantes when Batgirl storms into the ER one night with a wrenched shoulder, marches up to him and says "downtown robbery case. Subject had a mole on his left cheek, slightly too big right eye, unibrow. Strong chin, oval face"

And Damian just sighs, goes "give me ten minutes", grabs a pad of writing paper, draws her a sketch in six minutes and sets her arm in four. His colleagues guess correctly that this is not the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last.

[mayakern]

rodeo had to go under anesthesia to get some x-rays today and he did not know what to do with himself. my silly little man 😭

[whumpshots]

Whumptober #19

Trope of the day: “I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”

_

Hushed voices follow whumpee as they walk down the hallway, team leader and caretaker keeping their heads together, shooting whumpee a glance every now and then. The latter knows it's been some time since they started limping again, but instead of sharing their concerns with them, the other two just talk to each other.

Whumpee stops midway and turns to face the others, both of them surprised by their sudden movement. "I don't know what you guys are talking about, but keeping secrets is not your strongsuit. I've heard you whispering for days."

Their heart stutters for a moment, they know they aren't as helpful as they used to be, old injuries acting up at the worst of times. But whumpee doesn't want to be unhelpful, they just want to belong. Caretaker steps forward with an apologetic smile. "We were just-"

“I’m not as stupid as you think I am,” whumpee interrupts them and looks up at them with a stern look in their eyes. "What is it this time? Am I too weak? Too slow? Tell me," they demand and feel their fists clench instinctively. It wouldn't be the first time a team decides to get rid of them ... whumpee feels the betrayal choke them.