happy "grab your whumpee by the hair and slam their head into the floor/desk/table and break their nose and/or concuss them" wednesday. thursday? depends on time zone...
drag them upright again afterwards i want to see the dazed look on their face and the trickle of blood from their nose and down their chin that they're in no state to care about
okay. completely doxxing myself here because this is absolutely worth it
we got five emergency kinship-placed foster boys two months ago with no notice, and it turned our lives upside down. I love them so so so so much, but we need to be able to afford to keep them just one more month until school starts and I can get a job again (I've been having to stay home to watch them since no daycare will take them)
They've been neglected and abused and forgotten, and I will NOT let them be separated. If we can't stay afloat and get into a new house (landlord just told us to move out. haha. isn't that great.), the kids will be split up into separate foster homes.
Absolutely anything you can give will help us, otherwise, reblogging would mean the world to me and these kids. We just need to get the word out there and get a little help to get past this month. We're already through all our savings and I've started selling all the furniture to keep up.
We have food covered for the kids through different programs, but rent and utilities has been / will be going up a LOT.
I will write quite literally anything you want. I don't care if it's a squick at this point. Or draw. Whatever you want. Commissions are open, the go fund me link is here. You have my kofi in my bio. If paypal or venmo works better, just let me know and I can get that to you, too. Anything at all helps.
Help us keep five brothers from being separated by the foster system!
… Shannon Teske needs your support for Keep Five Brothers Fr
CW: Langdon is 15. CWs include slavery, referenced collars, referenced abuse, and dreams of murder most foul
Langdon is fifteen years old when they take the inhaler out of his hand and put a gun in it instead.
"It's okay," Brewster says, with a slight, friendly smile, patting him on the back. Brewster's older than he is by more than a decade, if only just. They look sort of the same, most of the staff does, with curly dark hair and eyes a little too big for their face.
Plus, the black leather collars, white button-ups, and plain black pants all staff wears for every waking hour. He got his first work uniform, all three pieces, at four, like everybody does.
Not all the staff looks exactly alike, though. Some of them, like Vander, have almost unsettlingly bright blue eyes, too. Runs in the master's family, which means it runs in the staff family, even though no one talks about it. Langdon's are blue. Brewster's are a color like a stormcloud in some lights. Something about both your parents having blue eye genes, but since Langdon's never been to school, all he knows about genes is what he's seen on TV when it's his night to pick a show.
Greg, his sister's husband, came to live with them from another house when he was three years old. His eyes are brown. His hair is stick-straight, lighter in color. His smile doesn't have the same sort of lilt to it.
Greg doesn't have Marcoset blood poisoning him, not like Vander - whose nerves are broken and don't feel pain, leaving him scarred and forcing Brewster to be his shadow all the time to keep him from hurting himself. Not like Langdon himself, who can barely work outside for half an hour without his inhaler close at hand. Not like Rita, who hardly ever leaves the bed, or Henry, who was born deaf and is probably going blind, too. Too much toxic blood in just about everybody.
The medic thinks he and Brewster are both the master's. Anyone who said that out loud where the master might hear would be whipped.
Personally, Langdon thinks Brewster is too happy to be Isaac Marcoset's son. Isaac Marcoset has a library of scowls and glares for any occasion, and only one or two smiles.
Brewster turns him to face the targets, breaking him from his thoughts. They're just wooden cutouts in vaguely human shapes that have had crude faces with horrible Os of surprise painted under their little dot-eyes. "We're just testing you out. Take the shots, see if you hit the targets. These two guys here, and if you hit those, those bottles I lined up on the tree trunks over there."
"I don't want to do this," Langdon says, voice low, a little airy. Even with his inhaler, his lungs fight whenever he's scared, or if he works too hard. The inhaler just holds off the worst of it. He hates the heavy weight of the handgun he's holding. Hates how good it feels. "Brewster, I-I don't want-"
"I know." Brewster keeps a hand on his shoulder, his bright smile dimming a little with sympathy. "I know, Lan. But we don't have much of a fucking choice, yeah? Boss says you learn to shoot, you learn to shoot. Van and I learned when we were like... ten or eleven. We started going on jobs around your age, so... You got a few years to wait that we didn't, right? That's some luck. Kept you safe as long as we could."
"Right." His chest hitches as he stares at the targets. Big black circle-eyes, bigger black circle-mouth. "Lucky."
His breath is thin. His lungs protest every movement he makes, but Brewster's right - there's no choice. If Isaac Marcoset wants another trigger on hand, Langdon is fifteen and that's as old as Van and Brewster were the first time they killed someone.
He aims. Brewster slides something like a heavy headphone set over his head, the noise of the birds suddenly silent. Langdon bites his lower lip.
Just like Brewster taught him. Safety off only when you're ready. No finger on the trigger til it's time.
If he thinks of Isaac Marcoset instead of the wooden target when he fires, that's his own business.
He hears, dimly, the sound of Brewster yelling but ignores it as he fires at the next target - Miss Delia and all her cruelties the image he holds this time. Then the bottles, one by one by one. The gun kicks a little but it feels good, too.
At the end, he missed more than half the bottles.
But the targets, Isaac and Delia Marcoset in his mind, have been shot right through the center.
Brewster takes the headphones off and hugs him, but Langdon can't take his eyes off the holes he just shot through the wood.
Leaving the estate for the first time in his life, taking off his collar and wearing other clothes, making choices for himself... It could all be as easy as two shots, aimed right.
"... Can I keep practicing?" His voice is hoarse. His lungs catch but he ignores the way his head goes light.
"I knew you'd like it once you tried," Brewster says cheerfully. "Let me reload for you, show you how to do it. You did fucking awesome, little man. You're going to be as good a shot as me one day, I can already tell."
Langdon thinks of red spreading over Miss Delia's stupid pristine tablecloth, she and her husband slumped over the table while Langdon walks away. Gets in a car, maybe. Goes somewhere, anywhere else.
"I hope so," He says softly, and gives Brewster a smile. "Show me how to reload."
The bones of this could work in several settings, but let's say royal whump. Whumpee is either a ruler or heir. Whumper has conquered Whumpee's kingdom, and taken Whumpee captive, "marrying" Whumpee to further legitimise their conquest. Whumpee is stripped of all power and now a puppet ruler. And on top of that, Whumper sexually abuses Whumpee. Whumpee is kept in the lap of luxury, but they can't leave Whumper's palace and they're basically Whumper's sex slave.
Whumpee is initially defiant, and after a few nights, Whumper takes them to the basement/dungeon/etc to meet Whumper's other high-profile prisoner, and "see exactly how good they have it".
The other prisoner... again, could be from a lot of backgrounds, but I'm inclined towards "dissident or traitor from Whumper's own side". They were there before Gilded Cage!Whumpee. Whoever they once were, it's not immediately apparent, nor is it relevant, because no one deserves that treatment. They're slumped in a filthy cell, maybe chained up, completely unresponsive to Whumper and Gilded Cage!Whumpee's entry, and they've clearly been brutalised both physically and sexually, over and over again.
Whumper tells Gilded Cage!Whumpee that if they fail Whumper, they're going to the basement too, and it's a one-way trip. They kick Basement!Whumpee around a bit, which they still hardly react to except maybe trying to curl up, and then take Gilded Cage!Whumpee back upstairs.
Gilded Cage!Whumpee has been successfully threatened into obedience. Mostly. But... while they're not allowed out of the castle, they still mostly have run of the castle, and they start sneaking down to visit Basement!Whumpee. They're sort of allowed to - to reinforce the threat - but they're certainly not supposed to help or comfort their fellow prisoner. Of course, that's what they do. Bringing them water or food (though at first they don't touch it), talking softly to them, or sometimes talking very desperately to them, holding their hand through the bars, just... anything that might help, in hopes Basement!Whumpee will respond to them, so they can be co-conspirators in an escape attempt, or at least, so they won't be alone.
Not the original Whumpee, but the original person wanted?
I’m thinking it’s an interesting dynamic. Caretaker sees themself in Whumpee, possibly quite literally, depending on degree of physical resemblance. They see what they somehow escaped. Do they feel guilty?
And Whumpee also sees the resemblance. They see the person who lived the unmarried life, the one they never had. Do they resent that?.
Publicly, the Bartlett House Grant funded domestic violence transitional housing.
That was what the brochures said. That was what the auditors saw. That was what city offices, nonprofit boards, and respectable donors could understand without choking on the truth.
In reality, the Bartlett House Grant funded illegal personhood infrastructure.
It paid for papers that could survive a traffic stop. It paid for doctors who knew when not to enter something into a searchable system. It paid for burner phones, back exits, quiet vans, changed locks, dental work, scar treatment, GED fees, forged employment histories, and enough cash to get someone across three county lines before a retrieval team knew they were gone.
It paid for soup. Socks. Coats. Bus tickets. Glasses. Tampons. Compression braces. A mattress in a room with a door that locked from the inside.
It paid for people to learn, slowly and badly and painfully, that they were allowed to close that door.
The public story was clean.
The truth had teeth.
Kestrel knew that better than anyone.
Before Asryn Pharmaceutical. Before the Wickham Foundation. Before boardrooms and gala lights and the particular violence of being called Mrs. Wickham by people who would have once called her property without blinking.
Before all of that, there had been Charity and Rho’s first safehouse.
Not the network. Not the grant. Not the carefully layered shell organizations with respectable names and unremarkable tax filings.
Just a house.
A stubborn, drafty, underfunded house with bad plumbing, mismatched mugs, a back door that stuck in winter, and a kitchen table scarred by years of elbows, pill bottles, paperwork, and people learning how to eat without permission.
Kestrel had lived there.
She had arrived with no idea what to do with her hands when no one was giving orders. She had slept badly. She had catalogued exits. She had flinched at kindness and gone silent at questions that were too gentle because gentleness felt like a trap with better manners.
Charity had not tried to save her.
Rho had not tried to own her recovery.
They had given her a room. Food. A schedule that could be ignored. Rules that existed to protect people instead of discipline them. A place at the table even when she stood in the doorway like a threat no one had activated yet.
They had taught her the shape of freedom by refusing to make it pretty.
Freedom was not a speech.
It was not a hand on her shoulder and someone saying she was safe now.
Freedom was Charity saying, “You can answer or you can not answer.”
It was Rho saying, “Door locks from your side.”
It was a donated sweatshirt with the tag already cut out.
It was being allowed to hate oatmeal.
It was being allowed to say no and not be punished for the pause before it.
So when Kestrel built the Bartlett House Grant years later, she did not build it as charity.
She built it as repayment.
No, not repayment.
Repayment implied a debt Charity and Rho had never claimed.
She built it as continuity.
A way to make sure the first house did not have to stay one house. A way to make sure the work did not depend on whether Charity could shame a pharmacist into donating antibiotics or whether Rho could stretch one grocery run across twelve people and a dog that technically belonged to no one.
Kestrel did not micromanage Charity and Rho.
She knew better.
She had once been the person in the upstairs bedroom listening to adults discuss money in low voices and understanding, with the cold clarity of the newly rescued, that safety could be interrupted by a broken furnace.
She knew what it did to a house when the people running it had to beg.
She knew what it did to residents when survival came with visible strain.
So she made sure Charity never had to ask twice.
Sometimes not even once.
A quarterly report would arrive.
Beds full.
Two new intakes.
One compromised route.
Need pediatric optometry.
Boiler failing.
Rho says the western house needs exterior cameras.
Kestrel would read it.
Then money would move.
Not always from the same account. Not always through the same arm of the Foundation. Sometimes it came as a maintenance grant. Sometimes as rural health outreach. Sometimes as domestic violence emergency support. Sometimes as anonymous donor matching because Wick had smiled at someone over champagne and made them believe compassion had been their idea.
Sometimes it came in cash.
Charity always knew that meant the situation was worse than the paperwork could say.
A sealed envelope under a vending machine at Falwell Memorial.
A duffel in Lucky Johnson’s trunk.
A cashier’s check folded into an aggressively dull zoning report.
Once, twenty thousand dollars in a diaper bag with yellow ducks on it.
Charity called immediately.
“A diaper bag?”
“It was available,” Kestrel said.
“It says Mommy’s Little Miracle.”
“No one searched it.”
“That is not a defense.”
“It appears to be one.”
Rho laughed so hard in the background that Charity had to put the phone down.
Kestrel sat at her desk afterward with the receiver still warm in her hand and let herself feel pleased for exactly four seconds.
Then another message came in.
Need to move someone tonight. Owner is connected.
The pleasure vanished.
Kestrel answered before her pulse could change.
Done.
That was the rule of Bartlett House.
No one begged.
No one performed gratitude.
No resident stood in front of donors and turned their worst days into proof of the Foundation’s goodness.
Kestrel had written that clause herself.
Resident privacy shall supersede promotional interest in all cases.
Wick had read it over her shoulder and said, “That’s almost tender.”
“It’s policy.”
“Your version of a love letter.”
She had ignored him because he was smiling and because he was right.
Charity never thanked her in the polished voice people used at galas.
Rho never treated the money like benevolence.
They used it.
That was the point.
They replaced locks. They bought groceries. They paid doctors. They moved runaways through rain and snow and three a.m. silence. They kept the houses warm. They kept the exits clear. They kept people alive long enough for personhood to stop feeling like a story other people got to have.
The first time Charity said, “You understand I don’t work for you,” Kestrel had gone very still.
They were sitting at the old kitchen table in the first house.
The same table.
Different decade. Same scars.
Kestrel looked at the burn mark near the corner where Rho had once set down a pan too fast because someone screamed upstairs. She remembered sitting at that table with both hands wrapped around a mug she had not chosen, learning that nobody would take it away if she did not drink quickly enough.
“Yes,” Kestrel said.
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“If this becomes yours, I burn the stream and start over.”
Kestrel looked up.
Most people stepped back when she looked at them like that.
Charity did not.
Charity Bartlett had met Kestrel before Kestrel had learned how to make her stillness look civilized.
“If I ever try,” Kestrel said, “I expect you to.”
Charity watched her for a long moment.
Then she nodded once.
“Fine. The south house needs a new roof.”
Kestrel opened her laptop.
“How soon?”
“Before the next storm.”
Kestrel began typing.
Outside, the old safehouse creaked in the wind.
The first house.
The beginning of everything.
The place where Kestrel had learned that rescue was not the same as ownership wearing a softer face.
The Bartlett House Grant was not mercy from a distance.
It was a door held open by someone who remembered exactly what it cost to walk through.
Whumpee's return home is celebrated from friends and family. They're overjoyed, hugging them, celebrating their safety, so happy to have whumpee safe and sound.
You are never letting a WIP rot. You are doing it a service. Your WIP is a sourdough starter and the five words you wrote that one day were all it needed to sustain itself. It will bubble and be ready when you are.
"you're going to break soon, whumpee, i can tell." whumper swipes a strand of hair out of their face, "it's okay. you can do it. it'll be easier if you do."
wij day 7 | create a whump prompt for someone else to fill
listen, i am basic, so it's not like this hasn't been done before 🤷♀️ but consider.
whumpee siding with whumper.
- whumper and their whumpee are kidnapped and held captive together by super-whumper. there's no way whumpee will make it out alone. they have to take initiative, to support whumper, and to work together.
- or, whumper being injured / sick. but whumpee depends on them for survival. maybe they are so far out in the wild that only whumper knows the way back. or whumper's allies are so powerful, if something were to happen to whumper, whumpee knows it's a death sentence. so it's up to them to keep them alive and nurse them back to health.
idk i just love a nice shift in dynamics. maybe you do, too? there's a day in whumpmas in july dedicated to filling today's prompts (maybe the 31st?). if you like that image too, do it then or at any other time
wij day 3 | prompt: restraints | just a little scene set in my Pet Safety series | @whumpmasinjuly-archive
Bradley tells adventure stories.
No content warnings, just, family Woodward is a mess, and Rosa is traumatized. Set in the BBU.
"Ooooh no, now, the evil dragons are reeeeeeally angry that Captain Raccoon and Rosa broke into the space fortress and that they got away with the princess, and then…"
Rosa smiled softly as Bradley didn't stop babbling. He gestured at his stuffed animals, mimicked dramatic explosions, let the lego starship they'd built together fly at the glowing stars over his bed with sputtering noises that no starship should possibly make. The boy looked like his Dad, from the soft mop of straight black hair to the light brown skin and the wild intelligence sparkling in his eyes. But while Cory used his sharp wits to terrorize everyone around him (and to earn a fortune), Bradley's imagination was caught up in creativity and adventure stories. She wished he'd stay like that forever. She was sure he wouldn't.
"Rosa!" He pulled at her hand. "Rosa, nooooo, I said you need to hide! The evil dragon has seen you! Phooooooooooooooosh, she's breathing fire!"
"Oh no! They hit me!" Rosa dove back into the game. She grabbed her pink cape, the same one Bradley and Captain Raccoon wore, she'd sewn them herself back in the Laundry Room, and shook it dramatically. "My cape is on fire!"
Bradley giggled in delight. "You're losing your superpowers! Oh no! You can't fly! Madam Dragon will catch you!" He lowered his voice into a dangerous hiss, to impersonate the attacking Dragon. "Rooooooss-sss-sssa, you can't essssscape!"
Her blood froze in her veins.
She couldn't move.
The plush dragon crashed into her face.
"You lossssst, har har har!"
Rosa's legs gave in. Her knees landed on legos and the requisites for an intergalactic battle. It felt like cold, flat white tiles.
"Please," she breathed.
"You sssssssought you could get away wissssss the Princesssss?" It wasn't Bradley's childish voice. It wasn't Madam Dragon's fictional voice. It was Cory's voice, Renee's voices, the voices of the handlers, and it was real, and it was true, and it was consuming her, and the Princess suddenly had a name that was lodged in deep in Rosa's heart.
"You're our prissssssoner now, and foreveeeer."
A wooden clank echoed from behind her, like the handle of a skipping rope dropping on a wooden floor, which was odd, because there was no wood in the facilities, there were tiles and metal and cold cruel hands.
"You need to fight, Rosa", the voice of a kid whispered into her ear, while the toy rope was sloppily wound around her wrists. "Come on, you need to fight, or they catch the princess!"
She knew how it ended.
The restraints were too tight. The fight was over, before it had started.
The princess was lost.
Rosa was the dragons' forever.
Her eyes were too dry to cry.
"Rosa?" Bradley whispered.
"Rosa?" Cory pushed open the door. Sucked in a sharp breath. Started to laugh. "Oh Bradley, my boy," he mumbled. "You really are your mother's child after all. Come on, kid. Let me show you, how to tie knots that really hold."
Sometimes, whumpee secretly resents being rescued. They'd finally adapted, come to terms with everything and gotten good at living within the constraints whumper set. Now they have to do it all over again, with everyone insisting that this is better for them. And this time, they're expected to be grateful for it.
