For @febuwhump 2024 Day 5: Rope Burn
Summary: Jonathan Sims' many failed attempts to escape from The Circus of the Other result in a lot of bruises, blisters, and rope burn. Nikola is, predictably, unimpressed.
Jon was almost capable of convincing himself that he was almost there—that if he tugged a bit harder, if he yanked his wrists or his ankles in just the right way, he would be free, and he would never have to see another mannequin again in his life.
He had been attempting to convince himself of this for the past three weeks, and even though there were no signs of him getting remotely closer to his goal, that didn’t seem a fair reason to him to stop trying—both to escape and to believe that it was possible.
When he jerked his right hand forwards as hard as he possibly could, he wheezed at the pain that jolted through his entire hand. It was too much work to scream anymore, after three weeks. Besides, they’d gagged him as soon as they realized just what he was able to do with his voice. Unfortunate, he thought, because maybe if he was able to speak, then he could at least attempt to compel himself to believe in the possibility of escape. Though ideally, he would simply be able to convince them to just let him out in the first place.
It had been a bad idea trying to free his right hand first, Jon decided. Even though it was his dominant hand, the burn that Jude Perry had left across all of his skin was still raw and unhealed in its entirety, and the ropes agitated it more and more with every passing day, despite Nikola’s best efforts.
So he tried again, this time his left wrist. And again, and again, and again.
It must have been an hour of nonstop twisting and writhing, trying to do anything to loosen the bonds on his skin, but no matter how hard he bit down on the gag between his teeth, no matter how hard he worked to not-scream, no matter how hard he sometimes did cry out when it hurt too badly not to—he was no closer to his goal.
“Oh dear, oh, Archivist,” a voice called from behind the curtains. The perpetual shadows that he was kept it made it difficult to see anything more than silhouettes, but that voice was unmistakable, and so were the deliberate, stilted footsteps that accompanied it. “Oh, Jon! You wouldn’t be trying to escape again, would you? And so close to moisturizing, too? How silly!”
All of his muscles seized up for a moment at that, and then Jon resumed his frantic pulling, though it hurt more than he could say, his right hand fully on fire again at the rough cords that bound him. It didn’t matter if he could escape or not, he hardly cared at this point, but he wasn’t going to let her have an easy time, and he wasn’t going to just lie there while her horribly, waxy, plasticky hands ran their way over his skin.
He wasn’t going to let her believe at any point that she had won. Because if she believed that…well, then, he just might start to believe it himself.
But a moment later a hand touched Jon’s wrist, and he yelped, the sound muffled.
“Oh, come now, Archivist, don’t be ridiculous,” Nikola told him cheerfully. “You must know you won’t be able to get out of here, and look! You’ve undone all of my hard work, tsk tsk.” Without the slightest bit of gentleness she undid the knots that tied his right wrist down, and he flexed his fingers, feeling the blood return to them. Ever so slowly, she began to unwind the various dressings across his hand, across his wrist. The skin graft was healing well—better, Jon had to admit, than it would have if he alone had been caring for it. Nikola had taken quite good care to get quality lotion for his skin—with vitamin E and a custom silicone mixture, she informed him, that would be quite helpful for reducing scarring—and seemed to take no small measure of pride in the fact that she was well-versed in caring for skin grafts.
Jon did not want to think for a moment about how or why that was the case.
“Now, Archivist, we’ve talked about this!” Nikola said, voice light and airy with disapproval. “You simply must stop tugging at these restraints, why, aren’t we just so lucky that this hand is all bandaged up so that you can’t hurt it any more than it already is! But you seem quite determined to make certain that your other limbs are not so, and, why, that’s just very inconsiderate of you. Why, look! We’re running out of places to move the ropes, and it would be such a shame to have to take alternate measures—which, of course, we would have to if that were the case.”
Jon stared at his left arm as she treated his right, and tried to ignore the feeling of the firm, circular motions she used as ever to moisturize the skin, taking great care around the edges. Both Nikola and the physical therapist had explained the ways in which a graft would often be particularly tight at the places where it met healthy skin, that it was important to take both early and consistent care to ensure that wouldn’t be an ongoing problem, or at least to minimize it.
He didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to hear Nikola’s chatter; he shuddered at her touch; he stared at his left arm and the many, many bruises that laced it, the abrasions all up and down his skin. Every time he tried too hard to escape and the ropes broke the skin, blistered and burned and bruised, Nikola would inevitably return, and she would tut tut at him and his escape attempts, and then she would undo the ropes and treat the rope burn beneath, reminding him all the while that she wouldn’t be able to wear his skin if he got infected blisters, because that would simply be gauche, and embarrassing to boot. And then she would re-tie the ropes, just far enough up or down his arm that they wouldn’t slip and continue to irritate the cuts, and leave him to his silence. And once again, he would do his best to escape, even when it meant attempting to dislocate his fingers to pull them through, even when it meant making Jude Perry’s burn worse, even when it meant bruises and scars and rope burns across his entire bare chest. It didn’t matter, because Nikola would simply return and treat them with her antibiotic creams and her aloe-based creams and her aromatic creams and her scar-reduction creams and her acid-formula creams and anything that she had.
Jon could hardly hear her voice anymore, even as he felt the ropes being re-tied around his right arm, and he turned to look at that side instead as she moved to his left. He felt Nikola’s touch as if he were three feet outside of himself, and did his best to think of the Institute, and the people there. No, it wasn’t good, there was little love lost for him from the other staff there, but…he didn’t have much else to hold onto, not at this point.
And so he thought about that. And even if he couldn’t escape, even if he couldn’t get out and get back there, back to them…
Well. At least he could do his best to make the Unknowing a bit embarrassing for Nikola.
