Whumpuary 2023.4 (Torture)

He doesn't mind the accommodations.

For two years, he was drunk beyond his wits, sleeping in any gutter that wasn't already occupied by another hobo. Afterwards, he had taken to boarding together with whores. So. Of course he doesn't mind the cell. It's got a bed (no mattress, though), it's got a bucket to piss in, it's got absolutely no rats, and that's far better than where he's lived at. There's even food and water. Occasionally.

So no, he doesn't mind that he's chained up sometimes, or beat up, or threatened with vague promises of more pain to come. Last time a secure guard punched him in the stomach, he spat on the man. Hit him straight up in the eye, too. The sheer high of it carried him for an entire day. He passed out bruised and broken and still smiling through splintered teeth.

"Don't you know when to fucking stop?" the guards kept asking.

"Never did."

It's just another one of their rhetorical questions. They ask a myriad of shit he doesn't have any answer for. So unfair. When he actually knows the answer to something, he gets decked in the face for being fucking hilarious. His own teeth tear through his gums and his mouth fills with blood. Hurts like a bitch. Once, however, they'd dragged him naked through the courtyard and washed him down like a mutt, middle of winter. He'd lost one toe to that.

So no, he doesn't mind.

It's not the harsh stone beneath his body, whenever he gets some rest. It's not the stale food nor the rancid water, nor knowing when he'll have the opportunity to take his fill. It's not even the beatings. The men are so unskilled, it's like child's play. He's faced worthier opponents in kindergarten.

It's just that – sometimes he gets lonely, that's all. Most of the guards don't reply to him, egging them on, except with a fist. The contact is… He doesn't wanna say it's good, because he never got used to hurting, so there's that. But it's warm and it's human and it's something, so he'll take the bruising and the broken bones and losing every inch of his body, slowly, because what's going to be the death of him isn't a man tying him down and stripping the layers off of his skin.

They will, inevitably, realize he knows nothing.

One day, they'll lock his cell, like they often do. And he's gonna wait a bit for his rations, like he often does. And he's gonna wait for someone to come. He's just gonna have to keep waiting, but this time — a future time, a time he doesn't know when, doesn't know if it's this or another, here or in years, sooner or later — that time, precisely? Nobody will.

So forget the cell, forget getting kicked the shit out of him. (Forget him, eventually.) He's gonna be locked up and forgotten. And that's the true torture.

Whumpuary 2023.3 (Stay with me)

It's a lovely evening when they leave her.

The weather has been foul lately, but a huge cloud just passed over the previous weekend, taking the storm with it in its wake, and the mornings had become unusually bright. Not a single droplet of water, too. Seagulls sing in the port and the city is bustling with the pent up energy of every tradesman who had been forced to keep inside.

"Watch it," a man's shoulder hits her squarely in the chest as he pushes past her. She has to disentangle herself from the crowd; when it's sunny, the port crawls with fishermen, orphans, and whores. There's no place for a woman to stand watching ships that have gone away.

It's okay. I didn't even want it anyway.

The thought flares in her mind with the same insistence it once did before. She remembers thinking it for the first time she arrived the town. Back then, she'd seen a gown – a beautiful green, deep and velvety and more expensive than anything she had ever owned. She saved and saved for it, and she'd stopped by the store everyday, watching her reflection on the glass and imagining herself on it until the day the dress was entirely gone.

It's okay. I didn't even want it anyway.

She didn't have the money to spare on it, anyways. All she'd saved and she purchased a pair of gloves. They weren't quite as pretty, but they had, indeed, been expensive. She kept the pair in the bottom of her drawer like a precious treasure, but in truth, she couldn't bear to look at them. Which is a wonder why she can stare at the ocean for so long – her boys were gone, off to some distant shore – and unlike the gloves, she can't keep anything of them as a reminder of the thing she didn't, doesn't, definitely want.

Can't even put a name to it.

It had been… nice. Not as beautiful as the green dress, that's for sure. She'd been smarter now, and knew better than to let her imagination get the better of her. So she definitely didn't imagine letting them keep her company at home, nor entwining fingers, nor smiling and laughing more than she did. When they had been there, she kept to herself, smiled little, and tensed whenever one of them sought comfort. She never invited them in.

But it's okay. It's not like I wanted it.

(She had said it out loud, though, just once. Hoping no one would hear. I'll help you and you'll help me; that means staying here by my side. But she'd spat it out too fast and too painfully, and maybe they had paid just as much attention to it as she willed them too. Better than to believe they heard it and were now gone.)

The sky is so clear the twilight paints the water a bright orange. Children cackle nearby. Beneath her boots, she feels the pebbles of the port square, same as she did, when the three of them had first met by the shore.

There's not a single ship in the horizon.

They're gone, she thinks, and this is not a startling realization. They're truly and well gone, and I'm never going to have them again.

Just like the dress, she never had them in the first place. It's okay. She can't miss what she didn't have.

I don't want it. I never wanted it. I don't need them. I'm better on my own. There will be others. It doesn't matter, it never did, and I knew better.

The startling thing is – she's crying. Even if it's okay. Even if she didn't want it in the first place.

(Oh, but she wanted it, and she wanted them, and she kept it all hidden and locked up and willed it away so badly because she knew it wouldn't be forever. She wanted it and the worst part is that they're gone and she still does.)

Whumpuary 2023.2 (Infection)

Oh, gods. There's something buried beneath his skin.

A whimper escapes his throat unbidden. His breath has been shaky ever since his capture, a raspy and troubled thing, but he's never actually made any sound before. It doesn't matter how lightly —his ears stand up in alert. It does nothing, nothing to dissuade him from the anxiety that threatens to burst his heart from the rib cage.

Calm down, he thinks, rubbing his arms. It does very little to soothe his nervousness. He feels the itch there. He claws the itch. Scratches. For one second, it's so good he moans, rocking ever so gently back and forth. Just. Don't think. Breathe. In. Out. Don't think about what's causing the itch. Scratch.

Red welts all over his arms, and the skin is bloated and warm there, when he's done. At least it's stopped moving. When he pinches the skin he cut open, a thick, viscous black liquid emerges. It smells sewage foul. He squeezes until it's gone, and blood finally, gladly seeps outs. He could cry from relief.

When he does, the streaks running down his cheek feel unmistakably slimy. It takes so much from him, to finally get the courage to wipe them with the back of his hand. Like he won't be able to come out from it again. He's almost afraid to breathe this time.

Pressing his palm against the skin of his cheek, his hand comes back tinted black.

He's gotta find some self control now. Please. He begs. Bites the inside of his mouth (just enough that it smarts and he stops crying, just enough, not too much, please, don't let him draw blood). His stomach is twisting and turning, and he can not, will not fucking vomit, because what is inside of him? With his left hand pressed against his moving belly, he knows he can't bring himself to face it.

Whumpuary 2023.1 (Nightmares)

There's a reason why he doesn't sleep anymore.

He sighs and pushes himself a little further. Just another word on a page. The candlelight trembles close to him, and that's when the man knows he's exhaling too sharply, keeping himself awake only out of the force of his sheer will. The ink on the pages in front of him has lost all meaning.

"...and if it's something I have done, all I need is to understand why…"

His handwritten looks sloppy. He forces himself to look at her name again, focusing on it with his eyes open until they ache, until it's reduced to nothing more than loops in the L and Es.

Ink on paper.

The tremor overtakes his writing hand. He looks at it with the detachment of a madman – or at least, of someone who has not had enough shut eye in three days.

Eyes back to paper, he tells himself. Write. Do it neatly. Apologize. Beg, if you need to. Best to lay your feelings down than to fall asleep.

So he puts pen to paper. It doesn't matter his smarts have dulled and his eyes are red and there's a headache building in the back of his nape. It doesn't matter that the coffee had long past cooled in his cup, turning his stomach whenever he pauses long enough for a sip. It doesn't matter that he's been reduced to an unsteady, trembling mess, and that by the first light of the morning sun, he's still going to be a mess, but he will have to bullshit it and smile.

He writes.

(A letter he will never send, of course. He's raving mad for her, but not entirely crazy, not yet, not until he falls asleep and has no control over himself anymore…)

Writes what he wants to say, but never will. That he misses when there was no space between their bodies. The feel of her hair, tangled between his fingers. How comfortable she became in his arms.

It's better when he's dreaming awake. If he closes his eyes, however. If he closes his eyes, he remembers things that never happened. Words unsaid. Time never spent. Futures unknown. All the could've beens that simply…

were not.

So he stays awake, in his dark room, with only pen and paper for company, least the nightmares come.