Aftermath

[The direct aftermath of Rules [Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3]! I have an idea for the overall plot of this project, but uh... as for chronology we’ll just have to see now 😂 Anyway, Sebastian does some necessary first aid and is a creep about it; Lorcan has a bad time. 

Tagging @whump-whump-whump-it-up @castielamigos-whump-side-blog @iaminamoodymoodtoday @galaxywhump @whatwasmyprevioususername @whole-and-apart-and-between @quirkykayleetam @im-just-here-for-the-whump as requested -- as usual, just let me know if you’d like to be added! 

General themes/things included: nothing too heavy this time, just general injury aftercare (cleaning, bandaging, etc) so descriptions of pain/injury; broken bones discussed/featured in flashbacks. Some hints towards Sebastian’s particular brand of crazy, too.]

At some point, Lorcan found he was dreaming.

  He couldn’t make sense of the dreams; they were just flashes of sound and colour and feeling, and then they would fade away the instant that he knew they were only dreams. For some reason he thought it was important to remember them, and it frustrated him to find they just slipped away, fading faster each time he tried to chase them. He had no idea why remembering them seemed to be so important to him, but the more it happened the more he vaguely realised that there was something else going on under the surface of all this, something large and threatening that he was trying his best to avoid. It was easier to avoid it if he had something else to focus on, and so Lorcan threw himself back into chasing his dreams, despite its uselessness.

  Sometimes, in the dreams, he caught hold of things that didn’t help him forget. It was strange, because the things he caught weren’t unpleasant; they weren’t threatening in themselves. It was always glimpses of brief memories, from a time that for some reason Lorcan thought of as before. They were never anything remarkable, either – the sense of his office on a warm spring day, the windows open and the breeze bringing through the smell of fresh-cut grass that mingled with the scent of the old books on his desk; the noise and movement of a swaying train as he travelled into work, crammed between countless other commuters and hearing the murmur of dozens of conversations in the brief silence between two songs; the quieter murmur of his students as he prepared to begin the lesson – he always clapped his hands once before he started, he remembered, and that always settled everyone down. Why did it seem so strange to think of? Why did such regular memories awaken a sense of terror in him?

  The pain threatened to answer that question for him. Lorcan was suddenly aware of it, and then he realised that it had been there the whole time. Wherever he was, deep inside his own head, he was at least partially protected from it. He could sense it there, a dull and distant ache, and he knew that it was bad. It had to be, because he was growing all the more aware of the fact that this was no ordinary sleep, and that something terrible had happened – if he was this aware of pain despite being so distant from the cause, he could only imagine the intensity of it when he returned properly. As for where he was returning from, Lorcan didn’t know. He also didn’t care much for finding out. It was safe here, in the dark with the fleeting dreams. Despite the unease some of the dreams brought to him, Lorcan knew that whatever lurked beyond them was worse. He would rather stay there, trying to puzzle them out, in a place where the pain couldn’t touch him. He never wanted to come back.

So Ireland just went into full lockdown. I am officially stuck inside with my family. My twin told me it'll be like being in the womb again. We'll see if one of us strangles the other this time.

I was tagged by @castielamigos-whump-side-blog -- thank you! I thought I’d put mine here because I didn’t want to make the thread too long, and I’m not that interesting anyway 😂

Quarantine is interesting so far. My twin keeps putting his head into my room and coming out with torture methods he's invented. Finally asked him why and he was like "You know, for those stories you write where you're mean to your characters".

Rules [Part 3]

[The third and final part of Rules! Part 1 can be read here, and Part 2 here. Absolutely astounded that I managed to write all these chronologically, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this and I have a general outline for how I want things to go now, so hopefully I can keep kind of making sense! As requested, tagging @whump-whump-whump-it-up @castielamigos-whump-side-blog @iaminamoodymoodtoday @galaxywhump @whatwasmyprevioususername @whole-and-apart-and-between and @quirkykayleetam -- let me know if you’d like to be added!

General themes/things included: conditioning, possessiveness, restraints, forced alcohol consumption, referenced noncon touching, referenced noncon nudity, (very light) implied noncon, graphic physical violence/depictions of pain, leg/shin injuries, begging, and plenty of punishment.]

There had been wine over dinner.

  Not a lot of it, admittedly, but Lorcan hadn’t been a heavy drinker since his own university days, and he had also spent the last week starving. Despite the fact it had only been one glass, it had gone right to his head, and not in the pleasant way. Rather than a warm, tipsy buzz, Lorcan could already feel the beginnings of a dull headache; his thoughts were sluggish, his words slow, and he was sure Sebastian had done it on purpose. He was sure Sebastian had set him up to fail.

  Dinner had been regrettably exquisite. There was no other way to describe it. Evidently Sebastian had used his time well, remote as he said the house was. Even if it had been painstakingly served to him mouthful by mouthful, while he remained tied to a chair and feeling the collar bump against his throat every time he swallowed, it had still managed to be delicious. Every so often Sebastian would raise the glass of wine to Lorcan’s lips and force him to take a decent mouthful of it, not taking no for an answer.

  “It goes with the fucking meat,” he had muttered, with genuine annoyance, and Lorcan had felt as though Sebastian thought him some kind of savage for even considering not drinking it.

  Now Lorcan was beginning to realise there had been another motive. After a third of the generous glass was gone, Sebastian had began laying the rules down thick and fast, seemingly well aware that there was no way that Lorcan would be able to memorise them all at once. It was a cruel thing – Lorcan knew he would inevitably be punished every time he forgot one, but the cruellest part of all was the fact that Lorcan’s memory, ordinarily, was incredibly good. He was capable of remembering vast amounts of information in one sitting, especially if they were in list form; had he not been plied with alcohol, Lorcan could have probably remembered them all. Sebastian, he thought, had perhaps noticed this about him. It had become evidently clear over dinner that Sebastian was very familiar with him, though Lorcan couldn’t work out how. Sebastian, well aware he looked young enough to get away with it, had already confessed to sitting in on a few of Lorcan’s lectures; he had also hidden in Lorcan’s house for three days, and likely snooped around his possessions, unpleasant as that was to think about. Even so, that didn’t explain how Sebastian had somehow managed to identify him as someone who might be able to remember these things, and deliberately sabotage him. Lorcan was beginning to realise that whatever game they were playing, he was at a bigger disadvantage than he had ever thought.

  The dishes had been cleared from the table now, and Lorcan had been left briefly alone. He could think better when Sebastian was out of the room, and despite the wine, the food had returned some of his senses to him. Shame had already crept into him, spreading through him with incessant force; he couldn’t even think about how he had behaved over that damn soup without the colour rising to his cheeks. Had it really been that simple to have him saying whatever Sebastian wanted? To have him begging and clamouring to do the right thing? How had that happened so quickly? Lorcan had never seriously considered a situation like this before, but if he had, he would have liked to think he would be the kind of person to hold out. He had read books where people had ended up in kind of similar situations – tortured by brutal regimes or enemies attempting to get them to betray a plan or confess to fabricated crimes – and he had obviously always told himself he would hold out, or he would at least not break immediately. Now he had to consider what Sebastian had managed to make him do over a bowl of soup; he could have laughed, the situation was so ridiculous.

  Sebastian came back into the room, whistling to himself, and Lorcan felt a flicker of anger take hold. It found plenty to feed on, and by the time Sebastian had crossed to the table and pulled his own chair around to place it near Lorcan’s, Lorcan knew he wasn’t hiding any of it on his face. Even as he told himself he would regret it, he didn’t care. He couldn’t care. Sebastian would surely kill him eventually anyway – wasn’t it better to die when he still had some of his dignity intact?

Rules [Part 2]

[This is the second part of Rules [Part 1 here] and while I might leave it as a two-part piece I miiight make it into three parts? Who knows. Definitely not me! I can’t believe so many of you want to be tagged now, thank you! Tagging @castielamigos-whump-side-blog, @whump-whump-whump-it-up, @iaminamoodymoodtoday, @galaxywhump, @whatwasmyprevioususername, and @whole-and-apart-and-between; as usual let me know if you want to be added as well!

General themes/things included: lots more psychological conditioning, very possessive whumper, restraints, starvation as punishment/food as manipulation, electrical torture, general physical violence, and a healthy dose of humiliation.]

Lorcan had no idea what to expect when he was finally led out of the cellar, but somehow he was still surprised. He had thought the house would look much the same as the cellar – disused and admittedly kind of creepy – but to his surprise the house looked lived in. Everything was arranged as though it would be in any other home – there was furniture, the place was impeccably clean; there were even things hung on the walls, and somewhere Lorcan was sure that he could hear the hum of a washing machine, and he wondered if this was perhaps a second home. If Sebastian made a habit of this, it made sense he would have somewhere to do whatever it was while remaining undisturbed, and Lorcan didn’t think someone would use their regular house for such a purpose.

  The house was dimly lit, with all the curtains being closed, but Lorcan didn’t think that was out of any privacy concerns. He could feel how empty it was outside the house, the complete absence of people. It was eerie, and not something he was used to now he lived in London, but he remembered the feeling well from his childhood. He had grown up in a house right against the clifftops in the west of Ireland – he knew well what it felt like to know that there was nothing but wilderness outside. Despite the fact that he hadn’t yet seriously devoted himself to a plan of escape, he felt some of the hope bleed out of him. If there was nothing but miles and miles of countryside out there, how was he going to stand a chance of getting away?

  Escape was a laughable prospect right now. His limbs ached from being shut in the cellar for a week, and his steps were uneven and unsteady. Not to mention the aftereffects of the electricity – Lorcan could still feel himself twitching on occasion, sometimes violently enough that it would make him stumble. When he wasn’t actively twitching he was sure he could feel himself right on the edge of it, and he remained tense, constantly anticipating it.

  Something he could not ignore, despite all his pain and worry, was the fact that something in the house smelled delicious.

  “I’ve been cooking,” Sebastian said, evidently noticing Lorcan grow more and more interested in his surroundings as the smell grew stronger. “I do love cooking, you know. There’s not much else to do out here, especially when all the maintenance is done, so dedicating a few hours a night to the kitchen really isn’t a big deal. It does get lonely, though, having nobody to appreciate it.”

  Lorcan, his mouth watering like it never had before, thought that Sebastian could probably serve him microwaved trash and he would be grateful for it right now. It had been a week since he had eaten. His body had given up telling him he was hungry days ago, figuring there was no use, but now it had been reminded that food most certainly existed out in the world it was reminding him with full force – he thought he would pass out from the hunger.

  He’s probably going to sit there and make you watch him eat, he thought suddenly. It was enough to shake him out of his wistful thoughts. He felt his stomach drop, trying to find some way to deny it to himself but knowing it was likely all the same. He didn’t know what he would do if that was the case. He was worried he might cry.

  “Sit,” Sebastian said, pressing on Lorcan’s shoulder.

Rules [Part 1]

[Another chronological piece, shocker! This is a direct sequel to Beginning, and should be one part of a two-part piece (though of course that’s subject to change, because of who I am as a person 😩 Tagging @castielamigos-whump-side-blog and @whump-whump-whump-it-up as requested, let me know if you want to be added!

General themes/things included: very possessive whumper, restraints, beginnings of psychological conditioning, general neglect (starvation etc), references to forced drugging, and electrical torture.]

So far, Lorcan had only managed to work out that he was in a cellar. Where that cellar was, he couldn’t be sure – outside of making an educated guess that it was attached to a house, he was all out of ideas. There were small windows up by the ceiling, but they were narrow – barely half a foot in width – and they were so covered over with grime that they were only good for telling if it was day or night. During the daytime they let in a reasonable amount of light, and Lorcan could see that the cellar was mostly empty. There was a boiler in the corner, some old furniture in such a state of rot that it seemed to be falling apart under its own weight, and not much else. The floor was grimy, the place was cold in the way that a place is when it hasn’t had heating for years; the floor underneath him seemed to force the cold into him, somewhere deep in his bones where he was sure he’d never quite shake it. The room smelled musty, of dust and damp and mould, and most infuriatingly of all it was exactly the kind of place that Lorcan had expected to find himself in.

  Like a fucking horror movie, he had thought, when he had first been sentient enough to do so. He wasn’t quite sure when that was exactly, because his memories from before were fragmented and he had no idea what order they went in, but he was sure of that much. His first thought had been sarcastic, and it was something of a relief. Despite the situation he had found himself in – how wrong it was, how alien – he was still himself.

  The time between his capture and his sudden awareness in the cellar was a mystery to him. He vaguely remembered losing consciousness in his kitchen, and then he remembered a series of hazy half-memories that could have easily been dreams. He couldn’t see much in these memories, but he could remember what he had heard: the low hum of a radio, the sound of tires on the road. Every time his memories seemed to be growing crisper around the edges, they would fade again – Lorcan would fall into that same unsteady blackness that had overcome him in his kitchen.

  Now it had been almost a week, judging from the way the light faded and returned at the small windows. Lorcan had managed to fill in all the blanks in his memory, as best as he could. He knew, of course, that he had been kidnapped. He knew his kidnapper had apparently been living in his house for several days before making his move. The injuries still healing over his body told him that there had been no small amount of violence in his capture, and the fact that Lorcan didn’t note any defensive injuries on himself showed that he had been taken by surprise. Not that Lorcan fancied his chances in a fairer fight – he had never been a fan of violence. He had never been in a fight in his life.

  So he had been kidnapped, and he had been taken to this cellar, but as for the location of said cellar and the reason he had been taken, he didn’t know. His captor, he remembered, had mentioned something about that, but Lorcan couldn’t remember the details. He hadn’t seen much of him since, either – just three times in total, when he had brought him water. There hadn’t been any food so far, but Lorcan was past feeling hunger. He didn’t even remember feeling any hunger pains at all, and he supposed the adrenaline was enough to keep it at bay. He didn’t think it was right, to be this on edge for so long. He had tried to calm himself, to think logically, but for all his yelling at people in horror movies for their stupid decisions, he had quickly worked out that it was difficult to keep his wits about him when he had found himself kidnapped and thrown in a cellar, handcuffed to an old pipe. Lorcan had quickly pulled at it, testing the pipe’s strength, but there had been no give at all and the sound of metal clanging on metal had been far too loud. He had heard a floorboard creak above his head the last time, and he had quickly stopped.