#posted after midnight

[coffeeangelinabox]

Whumpril #30: We're Out of Time

Jemma has no memory of life beyond the slave camp. Many of the people there have worked in the Delta grade jobs - those things carried out by mechanoids on the core worlds and by the dregs of society everywhere else. But Jemma has always been here. 

It was the slave pens (Domain sanctioned and paid for) who had the illegal enhancements carried out. Who cares what they do with slaves after all? And who will find out anyway?

The Domain cares little when her enhanced body is able to do more and for longer and on less rations. 

It has always been her life, but Jemma, alone and seemingly vulnerable and able to bring up a whole trench’s numbers if she’s contributing to the weigh in (and with no one to protect her if she is blamed and whipped or starved for being under) is a valuable commodity amongst the work parties. She is taken up by groups that already have families, that value her help in keeping them out from under the lash, and, partnered with those who are mothers and fathers, grandfathers and aunts already, she hears the stories the Domain would have kept from her. She learns mythology and history and tales of ancient heroes (mixed up and blended together and wrong, she learns later). She learns enough to give her steel and will. She learns enough to endure. 

And endure Jemma does, steady and strong and resilient. She sacrifices for those in her trench party, taking blows that are not hers because that is what those she admires so would do. She goes without to ensure that the old and the weak and the sick and the young have what they need, or at least, all she can give them. She passes the stories on, taking strength from their retelling. 

And she endures.

One day, she promises herself, she will be free of this place, of these people. She will have a ship and a place in the stars and she will let no one catch her, will kill anyone who tries. But for those decades, and decades they are, Jemma’s toil is not over quickly, she bows her head and murmurs her “yes, sirs” and apologies.

Then comes the new overseer. He’s a fantastic, far more than those who Jemma has slaved under before. A boon she might be in his mines, in his forest clearing, in the backbreaking work of tunnelling beneath the surface to build cities out of this sun’s radiation. This overseer however doesn’t care, he cares more that she is enhanced, and that such a thing is a disgusting perversion of humanity.  

He could simply have her executed. He has that power and that right over the lives and deaths of those in his pens. But he’s too sadistic for that. He wants to destroy her first, to smash her open and rip all that makes her out. 

Jemma is long conditioned to empty pleas, to begging to amuse the people that own her, no matter how it makes her seethe inside. She does it because she has no choice and because one day she will be free of all of this…if she can only survive. 

The overseer however is not satisfied with her empty pleas and meaningless repetitions. He wants her to break. 

He starts with physical punishments. Increasing her quota until even a whole trench of enhanced couldn’t make it. He whips her bloody for failing, starves her whole party until they turn on her. When that doesn’t work, when it just makes her glare at him, eyes cool and stony and steel utterly unbowed, he begins with the mental. He keeps her in solitary without even a pail for her bodily needs. He locks her in the dark until even Jemma’s will cracks a little and she lowers herself to asking for light, for company, for something.

Then he does it to the others and makes her work. Telling her he’ll release them when she meets her quotas. 

Her palms are bloody with work. She stops sleeping. Volunteering for more work parties and more. It’s never enough to satisfy him.

She’s beaten one day by her fellow prisoners when two of their number die in those rock cages. 

He laughs when she’s up and working just a few hours later, arm held awkwardly against her body to protect the awkward break. 

He laughs again the night she goes to him of her own volition. Laughs as she falls to her knees in front of him and pleads with him to just kill her if he so wants, but to stop this. He enjoys the lack of anger and instead the deepening despair in her eyes when he says no.

Jemma’s plans morph from vague affirmations to real desperation. She has to get out of her. She’s out of time now. He will destroy her and kill her and all those who have cared for her and sheltered her will die first, as appetisers to her eventual, inevitable defeat. 

It’s appallingly dangerous. Jemma knows what they do to escaped slaves, what they do to enhanced. She knows that the overseer will punish her by having not just her, but those she has known for her whole life time ripped apart too. Possibly literally. But there is every possibility she will have to watch that anyway just to hurt her. For the first time in her life, the risk is worth taking. 

The last time people talked to her, before she was considered nothing but a jinx and dangerous to know,they told stories she had never heard before. A young man, moved from the delta workforce to the slave pens for seditious meetings had spoken of a hero, real life and fighting against the Domain even now. 

“This Darrow,” she demands in a harsh whisper, and he looks up. Eyes calculating, but not unfriendly, not like some of the others. “Do you know where to find him?”

He considers her, and nods slowly. “Yeah.”

[kosalus]

bicep meme 2 electric boogaloo with dame aylin and isobel

[hawberries]

it is a citizen's divine right to draw a little Kaveh on her birthday

[atoms--with--issues]

Today was productive. That does not mean it was good.

[dissolvedvoid]

Sean Brennan of London After Midnight / Ghastly Magazine issue 2, 1992

[metalheadgothic]

𓉸 𝔰𝔢𝔞𝔫 𝔟𝔯𝔢𝔫𝔫𝔞𝔫 - 𝔩𝔬𝔫𝔡𝔬𝔫 𝔞𝔣𝔱𝔢𝔯 𝔪𝔦𝔡𝔫𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱 .ᐟ

[aringofsalt]

some highlights from buck's instagram ft. tommy, maddie, and the 118

911 social media series 🚨

[kenmentine]

blinkies i made

[napping-sapphic]

I just want to fall in love with someone who makes me feel safe like even when we’re angry or sad or upset i just want to know that both of us are still going to be okay

[atlas-and-the-time]

The greater grief

[cuntylestat]

you say change religions, now i spend sundays with you

(youtube)

[coffeeangelinabox]

Whumpril #26: How Could You?

He hadn’t believed it. Not even when it had been David that told him, not even when he’d been offered proof. 

Instead, he’d believed completely in David’s charade, awaiting betrayal and so not seeing which angle the knife aimed at his back truly came from. He’d allowed himself to reject proof of his senses, assuming it was faked or that his mind was being somehow tampered with, because Lee would never…

Except that he would. He did. 

And except that Darrow is no better. He gave up everything, everyone, just to save the person that mattered to him. Lee hadn’t really done differently, had he? Hell, they’d both been saving the same person. 

If it wasn’t for the fact that his interrogator had been David, that David had done his dissembling, that he’d hurt him badly enough and suddenly enough for his confession to turn to shrieks…For all his softness, for all his refusals to kill, for all his regular insistences that he wouldn’t withstand torture, nor sacrifice another of the crew, David has turned out to be the only one with the steel to see through what Darrow has always espoused. 

“How could you?” he asks Lee, and means the question for himself.

His eyes sweep him as they have done a thousand times, cataloguing cuts and bruises and dirt, calculating how badly hurt his child is, what he needs from Darrow. 

Lee turns dull eyes on him. “Are you going to leave me here?” His voice wavers between bravado and demand and plea.

Darrow is powerfully reminded of his sulky adolescence. When every order was questioned. And yet how, he would still seek shelter and comfort in Darrow’s shadow when the bridge shook under fire or the lights flickered for want of fuel. 

He knows how it happens. He had, after all, done the same.

“Of course not.” 

He guns down a dozen guards, burns through crucial wiring that will, if it’s not repaired quickly, condemn the station and all aboard her to a slow burn. He doesn’t offer Lee a weapon, and he lets him walk unaided. 

[felassan]

🌅 pov it's early morning in the Lighthouse. Rook wanders into the communal kitchen and Lucanis looks up at them from where he's been waiting at the breakfast bar like "Coffee, mi amor?" ☕

[denimshortsdean]

Cas really read dean to filth within an inch of his LIFE three (3) minutes after meeting him (What's the matter? You don't think you deserve to be saved?), threatened him the very next time he saw him (You should show me some respect. I'm the one who dragged you out of hell. I can throw you back in.), then the time after that overshared about being a good little soldier (Can I tell you something if you promise not to tell another soul? I'm not a... hammer, as you say. I have questions. I have doubts)

absolutely insane writing from the destiel show

[tea-earl-grey]

Happy Threshold Day!!!!! More art to come in the morning...

[asklesbianonceler]

Mom moment