Day 1: (Re-)Introduce yourself and/or your creations
Blog introductions are a staple of the whump community! Browsing tags such as "#whump intro" and "#whump community" you can see new whumpers introducing themselves every day. If you haven't formally introduced yourself yet, take today as an opportunity to do so! Tell us as much or as little about yourself as you want--who you are, what sorts of whump you love, what content we can expect to see on your blog, favorite color, etc.!
If you've been around a while and have already introduced yourself, feel free to re-introduce yourself for any new followers, or take a moment to give an overview of any whumpy projects you may be working on at the moment!
You can reblog this post with your introduction, or make your own post. And don't forget to browse the reblogs here and the relevant tags to see other people's intros! You might just find your new favorite story or a wonderful new friend!
20s, she/her (but of course default they/them is fine).
I’m on the classic hurt/comfort end of the whump spectrum; my ‘area of interest’ is low-tech comfort and caretaking in the aftermath of adventures and heroics. Historical and fantasy are my favorite, but I’ll also go for modern field/wilderness and domestic.
My blog is mostly just a place for me to keep track of wonderful little things other people post that make me feel all warm and fuzzy or that I relate to as an h/c lover. My preferred media are text and art, though I have found the occasional gif that I enjoy. Predominantly reblogs, but I occasionally write tropes / aesthetics / scene ideas. I have a very short masterlist of ficlets.
If you have any similar interests you want to talk about, feel free to ask or message :)
Thinking about fevers. Burning hot skin and flushed cheeks and bright eyes. Shivering and painful chills, coughs and laboured breaths. A heart pounding against ribs. Babbling and nonsensical words. Characters spilling secrets or fears they would never admit if they were well. Talking about things that make perfect sense to their feverish mind and world, things that make absolutely no sense to their worried caretakers.
The dizziness and the headaches and the roaring sound of rushing blood in their ears. The restlessness, despite the stabbing pain every movement sends through their body. Limbs like iron weights, heavy and hard to move. Characters pushing and fighting against their caretakers, trying to get up from their place of rest, even when hands push them back down, a cold cloth to the head and soft murmured words of, "Shh, it's okay. Just rest. You're okay."
This is part 2 of the Restless comic. Just wanted to add more scenes of my take of the post-Raccoon City for Leon, Claire, and Sherry. I also had an idea of making a comic for when Leon was a kid but decided to incorporate it here instead. The Dandelion thing and the Sully character is part of the headcanons me and @loveiscosmicsin made for Leon. Sully will be the cop that Leon looks up to and is inspired from to be a cop himself. Hopefuly, I can make stories with Sully and Leon in the future.
I don't know if that mafia thing with Leon's parents is really canon or just pseudo-canon but I went with it in this story. But since Leon is inspired from the movie Leon the Professional, I decided to add a bit of Mathilda's story into what happened to his parents.
Again special thanks to @loveiscosmicsin and @theycallmedarling for helping me fix my typos and horrible English.
The order came the evening before from the local field commander, in an abandoned farmhouse that smelled of cold ash, the cheap fish oil used in farmers’ lamps, and the damp of a building standing empty for weeks.
The brief was given quickly by a man with a great deal else to arrange: Hygonosuke’s unit would go up the eastern road at first light, through the wooded slopes, and push the rebels off the high ground above the millet fields while the main force came in from the west and broke them. Hyogonosuke's forty would then hold the far side and take any of the rebels who were trying to run.
He understood his unit’s part and found it a good one.
Nobody told him his forty men were the distraction, the noise the rebels would be looking at while the soldiers who were coming to kill them came from the other side.
Hyogonosuke carried the orders back to his own fire the way a man carries good news, and sat down with Daisaburo to think it through.
Daisaburo was his lead ashigaru, a tall, broad-shouldered man who had been fighting since he was fifteen and knew more than Hyogonosuke about nearly everything that mattered in the field, though he never said much about it. He listened, deep in thought, with a dried grass stem shifting between his teeth, a small fidget he had developed at some point. His eyes were on the dark in the direction of the fields and the hill, and when Hyogonosuke said they would go up on foot he nodded, because he had been thinking it already. The hill was steep and wooded, with dense undergrowth. A man on a horse there would not get far.
They went over the plan twice: the order of the men, the pace, what to do if the rebels gave ground, and Daisaburo said little, agreed with most, and let the small part he did not agree with pass, because it was not worth the breath to mention it when the commander had already made his decision.
Hyogonosuke found Tasuke afterward and told him to stay back in camp, taking care of his horse, and keeping the fire going for their return, which would likely come late in the day when the temperature had already dropped and when a stoked fire would be most welcome. Tasuke complained good-naturedly about being left behind to tend the fire like an old woman, and Hyogonosuke assured him an old woman who kept a good fire would be the most welcome thing in the valley, more welcome after battle than all the tea houses of the capital. Tasuke conceded the point and went to gather more firewood.
In the morning, Hyogonosuke put on his armor. It was a plain suit with dark blue lacing, simple and unadorned, well-made but new, without the age or ornament armor took on over the years. He had had it made in Kumamoto, choosing the kind of pattern his grandfather would have selected for himself, simple and meant for use, not appearances, like the rebuilt mansion in the valley, like the way Hyogonosuke had been taught to hold a sword.
He did not put on a helmet. He had thought about it and he’d thought about the woods, the underbrush, and the way his kabuto narrowed what he could hear and see, and then he had decided against it, instead opting for a hachigane, an armored headband, which was what most of his men wore. So dressed he was nearly one of them, a plain man in plain armor among a unit of plain men, which was not a thing he thought about, but which would not have troubled him either way.
He marched out with his forty strung behind him in the thin autumn light. The valley was beautiful. The millet on the slopes had mostly been cut by this time of year, but the fields still smelled of it, dry and faintly sweet, and on the hillsides the maples had turned, their reds and yellows brilliant against the pale morning sky.
A pair of cranes lifted from a harvested rice paddy as the column passed, hanging white over the blue before vanishing behind the ridge.
"The cranes will come back," Hyogonosuke said, to say something.
"Mn," Daisaburo agreed, still watching the ridge.
The open ground ran out where the fields met the foot of the slope, and the road became a lane that climbed up into the trees between two wooded rises. It was already narrow, wide enough only for two men abreast and not three, and as it climbed it grew steep, so that the forty bunched on it, the men behind closing on the men in front where the ground slowed them, packing tight on the one strip of open ground between the brush.
Hyogonosuke felt something was wrong before he could have articulated the feeling and thought for a split second that he had spent much time studying swordsmanship and not much, by comparison, studying the military arts. Beside him, Daisaburo's grass stem had gone still in his teeth. They both knew, in the same moment, that men should not be stacked up like this on steep ground with cover to either side, and both of them knew it too late. There was no order to give that would unmake it. The column was already on the lane, the lane was already climbing, and you cannot pour forty men backward down a hill in good order on a word.
The attack came before they reached the high ground.
The first volley fired down out of the brush above them, and three men dropped before the sound had finished rolling across the hillside. The ashigaru to Hyogonosuke’s left took a shot through the gap between the do of his armor and the shoulder. He did not so much fall as simply stop, upright one instant, sitting in the road the next, legs awkawardly underneath him, hands pressed flat to his chest in the reflexive gesture of a man trying to keep inside him what no longer wished to stay there.
His name is Matsuda. He has two sons in Higo. These were facts Hyogonosuke had carried for nine months without once giving them much thought, and now they arrived all at once with specific weight.
The man beside Matsuda took a shot through the lower jaw, which came away from the rest of his face, tearing the flesh and sending the bone into lane, and he neither sat nor fell but stood, producing a sound unlike anything Hyogonosuke had heard a human mouth make, high and wet and unbroken, until the second volley came and put him down. The sound stopped on its own.
Move, something said, very far back in Hyogonosuke’s mind. Move, or you will sit down in the road and die where Matsuda is sitting.
He drew his sword and shouted the advance up the hill.
The men in front pressed back into the men behind as the next volley tore through them, and an elbow caught Hyogonosuke across the face hard enough to make his vision go white. A dead man fell against him with that particular slack and heaviness of something that had, until seconds ago, been a person. The weight brought him down, falling sideways, his knee striking the road, his shoulder catching something that drove the air out of him. He got a hand under the body to push it off and it would not move the way a thing should. It was only weight, dense and unhelpful, the arms swinging loose, and he had to brace and shove twice before it rolled.
Somewhere in that shoving against the dead weight, the day came loose from him.
He could not afterward have said when it happened, only that the world drew off to a small distance and stayed there. Everything in the gun smoke and the shadowy dark of the woods became unreal, far and slightly slow, the movement reaching him in pieces rather than a flow, as though he were blinking a beat too long and losing the middle of every movement, so that men came at him already halfway through their coming, jumping from one shape to another without crossing the space between.
His body went on without him. The sword knew the work. The part of him that should have chosen each cut stood behind his eyes and watched the cuts be made, watching and doing having come apart, and after that he was not entirely there.
He had made himself, across twenty years of training his muscle memory, into a very good sword, and a sword does not deliberate. It goes through what is in front of its edge and asks nothing.
The people stopped being people and became shapes. A shape with a spear held low, male, older than him. A smaller shape that swung something, cut across where its neck would be. He did not look at the faces, or rather, he didn't see the faces. Even his own men, when they came near him in the murk, reached him only as fragments that did not add to anything; a shape with a blade of grass at its teeth, working a long weapon in wide arcs off to his right, there one minute, and then, when the wide whistling of it stopped, not there the next. A shape going down with a lacquered comb spilling from the front of his clothing. None of it had names. The names were waiting for him further down the day, and he did not know it.
His injuries accumulated as he moved forward through the fight without his noting any of them. A bamboo spear-point scraped along his forearm; he did not feel it. A small blade laid a line across the back of his hand. A branch, or something like it, tore his cheek. None of them deep, none of them mattering on their own, but all of them adding up, a tax taken in small coins, so that he bled from a dozen places without knowing it as he went on.
Then the old man came at him from the left, low and fast, a long-handled kama held in both hands, the heavy rice sickle lashed to a pole; a farm tool, but a man who has swung one through thirty seasons of harvest has arms like braided rope and no waste in him at all. He came in under Hyogonosuke's guard, and the curved blade went into the outside of the thigh and pulled, raking down through the meat of it in a long deep stroke, and this one Hyogonosuke felt: a hot wide line that gaped when he moved and let the blood come fast and dark down his leg, the muscle of the thigh showing pale at the edges of it before the blood filled the wound and ran over. The sword answered the old man without Hyogonosuke's asking it to, and he went down among the leaves with the kama handle still in his hands, and disappeared in the blur. But the leg was wrong now, Hyogonosuke could feel it but not consciously understand why. It would still carry him, on the day's terror if nothing else, but it had gone uncertain, and every step was a step taken on something that might fold.
The fog had risen off the wet valley floor and come down off the high ground at midday, swallowing the gun-smoke, much thicker than the smoke had been, and the air had gone cold and close with it, the first word of weather. Then the sky opened and the rain came down hard and straight, bitterly cold, hissing in the leaves, and within minutes the ground was slick mud underfoot and the brush poured water and the world closed down further still.
Hyogonosuke’s hair came loose and plastered itself across his face. The blood from a dozen small wounds thinned and ran pink, soaking down through the lacing of the do into the clothing beneath, so that he was wet to the skin with rain and blood, and the leg's long wound ran freely in the wet and would not clot.
He moved through the downpour and fog as through hanging curtains, one and the next and the next, the leg failing a little under him on the slick ground, and sometimes the curtain held a person, and sometimes the person held a weapon, and the sword answered and the curtain closed again.
The woman came from his right. He had a half-instant of seeing her: not old, a farmer's work kimono hitched up and her hair bound back, a matchlock gun braced low against her hip, and then she fired, and he threw himself left, but the bad leg betrayed him in the throwing. The bullet did not pass him. It caught him along the side of the face, a hot iron laid from the corner of his eye back across to the ear, the burn of the muzzle arriving with it, the powder so close it drove into the skin of his cheek. Then he was down, and the right side of the world had changed. The eye filled and streamed and would not clear, stinging, the lid fighting to shut and stay shut, the whole right of his sight gone to water and blur. A high ringing started deep in that ear, the ear itself gone strange and far, sounds reaching it as though he was at the bottom of a well. The right half of him had dropped away into water and noise.
She did not give him the ground. She came at him with the matchlock swung up like a club, brought it down across his shoulder and then the side of his head, and he went flat. His sword was gone from his hand, lost in the mud and the dark where he could not see for the streaming eye and the rain. Then she was on him with a short blade and he had nothing. He caught her wrists and they fought for it on the ground, her weight on him, the blade coming down by inches, held off by inches. She was strong in the particular inexhaustible way of someone who has stopped caring whether she will die. He was bleeding and half-blind and exhausted. He heard himself make a sound meant to be a word, low, almost a plea, torn and broken in his hoarse throat but shaped by home, by the speech of the valley above Nara: "Stop."
It did not stop her. In the struggle the blade turned, he never knew by whose strength, his or hers, or the two together, and went into her. The fight left her by degrees and then all at once, and she settled onto him heavy and still. He had to push her off the way he had pushed the dead man off, against the same unhelpful weight, and got up onto his knees in the mud, gasping, scrabbling with his broken-fingered right hand for the sword he had lost.
The boy came while he was still down. He came out of the brush small and fast, the sword he held too big for him, gripped in both hands wrong, the way a person holds a sword when he has never been shown how to do it correctly. Hyogonosuke, on his knees in the mud with one eye streaming and his broken hand painfully closing on the grip of his own found sword at last, knew only that the shape was small and did not know how to hold a blade. It was not a fight. It was the brutal short arithmetic of a trained man on the ground and an untrained child rushing him, and the arithmetic worked itself out the way it had to; the small shape went down. Only when it was down and still did the smallness of it finally reach him, the wrongness of how small, how light it had been against the sword. He knelt over the dead boy, breathing in great gasps he could not get the bottom of, then pushed himself up on the failing leg and stumbled forward away from it, because his legs would carry him forward and not back, out through a last curtain of fog into a thinning of the trees, a slight clearing, the ground opening a little to the sky.
The clouds broke, tearing open overhead, the rain falling off to nothing, and the moon came through full and sudden, drenching the world below in silver light and stark shadows that, for a minute, left him stunned in the brightness, as if the world had suddenly come into focus for the first time.
He turned, trying to get his bearings after hours of dark, wet, and fog, and the first thing the moon showed him was the face of the boy he had just killed, turned up out of the leaves a few feet behind where he had stumbled clear.
The face was his little brother's face. It could not be. His brother was four hundred ri away, whole and asleep in the valley, but Hyogonosuke's mind, breaking, handed him the first face it had available, and the face it had for a dead young boy was his brother's. Hyogonosuke made a sound and went backward from it, the sword falling out of his hand into the mud, his heels skidding, scrambling away on the ground from the small, upturned face the moon would not stop showing him.
He went downhill.
He did not decide to; his body turned from the clearing and the face and went down, away from the high ground, and he did not look back up the slope to where the worst of the late fighting had been, where the dead lay in the dark under the trees where he would never have to see them. He went down, and the moon came with him, riding clear in the sky the rain had emptied, laying its cold complete light over everything, and as he went it showed him the remnants of the day.
The woman was next. She lay a little down the slope on her back, her hair come loose, the short blade still in her chest, and the moon gave her the face of the woman who sold daikon and pickles at the market below the castle at Nara. She had the same square set to the jaw, so that he had killed the daikon-seller, who had surely never in her life held a blade meant for anything besides cutting vegetables.
Then the others, in whatever order the descent gave them.
The old man with the kama still in his hands, his thigh-stroke paid back to him in kind, his belly opened where the sword had gone in, and the yellow of the fat showing at the lips of the wound. The moon gave his deep-lined face to the man whose house stood by the bridge in Yagyu village, who mended his baskets in the doorway and waved to the children going past, so that Hyogonosuke went by him knowing he had killed the man by the bridge and knowing at the same time it was not the man by the bridge, but unable to hold the two apart.
And one of his own. A shape with a young face. Hyogonosuke knew this one, the knowing arriving all at once with the name and everything attached to it: this was a man of his forty, who had come at him in the fog as confused and blind as everyone else, and it had been Hyogonosuke's own sword that had answered the shape and put him down. The man had given him a persimmon once, in the practice yard in Kumamoto, held out in both hands with an embarrassed grin the way young men offer things to their commanders, because Hyogonosuke had let slip that he liked persimmons. He had been perhaps twenty. The persimmon had been very good.
Hyogonosuke stood over what he had done to him and could not breathe.
The sound came back, in a manner, and could hear them now in the tree line, some nearer some further, over the ringing and the bottom-of-the-well deadness of his right ear. Some of the forty were not yet finished. A voice somewhere up the slope screamed, high and steady, with no words. Another, lower, said something, over and over, that might have been a name or a prayer. Another only made a sound. They were dying up there in the dark the moon did not reach, where he could not have found them through the brush and the fog if he had tried, and he did not try.
He went down away from them, away from the sound, away from the faces, stumbling now on the ruined leg, half-fleeing, the faces flooding up at him out of the moonlit ground faster than he could pass them. Behind him the voices thinned, one going quiet and then another, the screaming dropping out and then the praying, until by the time the trees gave way and he came out onto the open, sloped, bare, millet field at the edge of the forest, there was no sound behind him. The last of the forty had finished while he walked.
He was in the field now, the open ground his men had crossed that morning in the frost with the cranes going up before them, and the field had its dead too, the ones who had dropped on the approach, lying out in the stubble in the moonlight in whatever shapes their deaths had left them. He came in among them, and that was where the weight came down on him.
He understood it dimly as his armor — the weight of the do, the sode, the soaked clothing — but it had become the weight of the whole day pressing him toward the ground, and worse than the weight was what came with it: the certainty that there were hands on him. The dead man from the lane. The woman he had pushed off himself. The shapes that had come at him in the grey curtains and sheeting rain. All of them had hold of him at once, gripping his arms, his shoulders, his legs, bearing him down, and he could not draw breath under them. He tried to tell them to let go. He tried to scream it, to turn and roar at them to get off, leave him be, and what came out of his throat was only sound, hoarse and shapeless, no words in it at all, and his good hand went tearing at the cords of his armor.
He got them loose and dragged the do off over his head and flung it into the mud and pulled at the rest, the sode, the ties, his broken fingers useless, the other hand clumsy with panic, and got most of it off him, and still the hands did not let go. The weight was gone; the grip was not. He could feel them on him exactly where the armor had been, holding him, drawing him down into the field, and there was no fighting it, because it was no longer on the outside of him.
The hoarse sound he was making broke apart and became sobbing, and he went down into the cold wet ground sobbing, with no words for any of it and no one left to hear them if there had been.
He drew his knees to his chest, wrapped both arms around them, pressed his forehead against them, and shut his eyes.
Be small. Be still. Be a stone in the bank, a clod of turned earth, anything that is not a man who has to be here.
He gave himself to the cold ground and let it have him, because the hands were drawing him into it anyway, and it was easier to go than to be pulled.
Something is wrong with me, he understood, from very far off, something past the bleeding leg and the streaming eye and the cold. The thigh had gone deep, he half-knew, a bad wound under the crust forming on it now, and only the day's terror had kept him upright and moving on it. He had not slept in two nights. He had not eaten since the sweet potatoes. His mind would not hold a thought; he reached for one and it slid out of his grip like a wet stone and left him holding nothing, and he could not keep hold even of his own alarm, that too slid away, and he let it, because there was nothing left in him to hold it.
The cold came down with the clear sky. By the deepest part of the night a thin frost had begun to form on the beaten millet, on the dead, on the bare back of his neck, and the wet in his clothes stiffened.
The moon crossed the whole sky.
Hyogonosuke was still folded there when it set, still there when the east began to go grey: the sword somewhere on the hill behind him, the thigh stiff in its crust, two fingers of his right hand bent wrong, the side of his face a black dried track from the eye-corner to the clotted ear, the powder driven dark into the skin of his cheek, the eye still weeping, the ringing a constant tide. He was cold all the way through, so cold his body had stopped shivering some hours before, which he knew, distantly, to be a bad sign, and could do nothing about.
It was beginning to drizzle again, soft on the frost, when Kato's soldiers came.
I just wanted you to know that my last couple of weeks have been a complete shit show and I really appreciate your comments, likes, and reblogs on my stuff here and on AO3. They really make my day.
I am so sorry to hear that things have been rough! I really hope it improves soon.
Seeing / reading your work is such a delight, and I'm happy to be able to send some smiles back :)
Whump fans -- Do you remember your dreams when you wake up? If so, do you ever have dreams you would consider "whumpy", in whatever way you personally define it?
A) Yes I remember sometimes, yes they have sometimes been whumpy (plz say more in the comments/tags!!)
B) Yes I remember sometimes, no they are never whumpy
C) No I don't remember them
Do you remember your dreams when you wake up? If so, do you ever have dreams you would consider "whumpy", in whatever way you personally define it?
Yes I remember sometimes, yes they have sometimes been whumpy
Yes I remember sometimes, no they are never whumpy
After the fall of Osaka, Kanbei has only one goal left: get Sadayuki home to Mino alive. Wounded by a spear and carrying an infection no doctor can stop, Sadayuki grows weaker with every mile north. As roads close, doors are shut against them, and hope slips away, Kanbei never leaves his side. Some promises are kept to the very end.
---
Content warnings: major character death, suicide, graphic injury, fever
---
They left Osaka with the smoke still standing over the castle, two men among thousands walking north to get away from the city, and Tokugawa troops moved through the ruined town behind them like water filling a broken bowl.
Kanbei found Sadayuki at a burned-out storehouse on the last day of the battle, after he'd already spent an hour certain he was dead. Sadayuki was sitting against the wall with his hand pressed to his side, gray in the face, and he looked up and produced the same crooked grin he had worn since they were seven years old and first became friends.
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
"I thought I had."
"Not yet." He put out his free hand. "Help me up."
Kanbei did, and they walked out of Osaka together. Kanbei didn't look too closely at the hand pressed to that side because Sadayuki said the spear had gone in shallow and come out clean and there was no time at any rate, there was never any time; the road north was full of men in a hurry to stop being samurai of a defeated house.
They had been born a few streets apart in a castle town in Mino, and Kanbei could not remember a time before he had known Sadayuki. He remembered instead all the evenings he had spent not at his own house but at Sadayuk's, the long summers in the garden, because his own home was unsafe whenever his father was drinking, which was most nights, and the sound of breaking cups and his mother's thin voice followed him as he ran out the gate.
Sadayuki's family had never once asked why he came so often or stayed so late. They simply set out another portion for dinner and laid out a spare futon, and Sadayuki's mother mended the tears in his kimono without comment.
So the two boys had grown up more like brothers than friends, and then, when they were grown and had taken their places among their lord's retainers, into something that lasted. Such bonds between young men were common enough and were meant to end when the younger took his adult name. Theirs did not. Eight years on, the men they stood watch with had stopped remarking on it.
---
It was three days before Kanbei made Sadayuki show him the wound.
---
They stopped at midday in a stand of bamboo off the road, and Sadayuki lowered himself down with the particular care of a man who worked out exactly which movements he can afford, and Kanbei watched him do it and said, not unkindly but also not in a way that was a request that could be refused, "Let me see."
"It's nothing."
"Then it costs you nothing to show me."
"Kanbei—"
You've been favoring it since Osaka. You sleep on your right. You went white going up that bank this morning and thought I didn't see." He knelt in front of him. "Sada. Please. Let me see it."
Sadayuki looked at him a long moment. Then, with a sigh that was half a laugh, he began working to take off his kobakama and shitagi. "You were always like this. Do you remember, when I broke my wrist and hid it, and you told my mother."
"You'd have kept using it."
"I would have." His hands slowed. He got the clothes loose and then paused over the poorly wrapped bandage made from strips of cloth that, Kanbei realized, had come from the bottom hem of his undergarment. "It isn't pretty."
"I don't need it to be pretty."
Sadayuki undid the bandages. Below the ribs on the left side was a wound the width of two fingers that had not closed. The edges were pulled apart and dark, the flesh around them swollen and hot-looking, and the whole of it wept a thin fluid onto the cloth. The smell that came off it when the wrappings came away was not the smell of a wound healing.
Kanbei looked at it and did not let his face change.
"Well?" said Sadayuki lightly.
"It wants a doctor." He was already getting to and stripping off his own undergarment, tearing strips from the hem, which was cleaner than what Sadayuki had been using. "That's all. It wants a doctor and it wants to be kept clean, and you've been walking with it for three days and telling me it's nothing."
"There's a doctor in every post town."
"Then we'll easily find one." Kanbeu wrapped it, gently, his hands careful, and drew the cloth snug and no tighter. "Lift your arm." He tucked the end securely. "There."
Sadayuki caught his wrist as he pulled away. He said, "It's not so bad as your face says it is."
"My face says nothing."
"Your face," Sadayuki said, "has never in its life said nothing," and Kanbei bent his head and pressed a kiss to his forehead, briefly, and got up to see about the fire.
---
The first doctor was in a post town on the Ise road, an old man with ink-stained fingertips, and he took one look at the two of them — filthy, carrying swords, their clothing stiff with somebody's blood still — and asked where they had come from.
Kanbei said, "The south."
"How far south?"
"Far enough."
The old man's face did not move at all. "I have a wife," he said. "There are men riding through here twice a week asking after Osaka men, and they've burned two houses in this town already for less than sheltering one." He looked at Sadayuki, at the way he was standing, and something in the look was not unkind. "I'm sorry. But go on quickly, and don't say you stopped here."
The second was two days further, and would not open the door at all.
The third took their money, every last mon they had between them, which was little enough, looked at the wound and pressed at it with his fingers until Sadayuki's winced, and said that the flesh had turned and wanted drawing, and gave them a paper packet of powdered something to make a poultice with, and told them to come back in a week. They could not come back in a week, they'd be a week closer to home by then.
Kanbei made the poultice anyway, every night for six nights, kneeling over Sadayuki in whatever shelter they had found, working the paste warm between his palms first so it would not shock him with the cold.
It did nothing.
On the seventh night, unwrapping him, Kanbei saw that the redness had spread past the width he could measure with his own hand, and that at the lower edge of it the skin had gone a dusky purple, and that there were fine, dark lines running up toward the ribs like the veins in a leaf.
"e sat back on his heels.
"That bad?" Sadayuki said. He was watching Kanbei's face, as he had always been able to read Kanbei's face.
"It's spreading."
"Ah." Sadayuki closed his eyes. After a moment he said, "I'm sorry. I should have told you at Osaka. I thought—" He stopped. Breathed. "I thought if we just kept moving I'd get home, and my mother would—"
His mother, who had set an extra bowl at the table for a frightened boy all those years ago, and laid out a spare futon, and mended his kimono without comment.
"I just wanted to make it home," Sadayuki said.
"I know." Kanbei's voice was steady, which cost him something. "We're not finished yet. Sleep."
They tried the temples after that.
At the first, a young monk gave them rice and let them sleep in the temple hall and said, apologetically, that there was no one there with any healing skill. At the second, an older monk looked at Sadayuki's face and told Kanbei quietly, out of earshot, to think about where he wanted his friend to be when he died. Kanbei told him to keep his mouth shut. Then he begged his pardon and asked him for prayers, and the old monk did, and gave them what rice he could spare, and stood at the gate watching them go.
At the third temple the gate did not open. There was a notice pasted to the post beside it, in a clean official hand, listing what would be done to those who sheltered the servants any men of the fallen house, and Kanbei read it twice and then took Sadayuki's arm and turned him around and led him back down the steps.
He offered his sword to a pawnshop in a village whose name he never learned, and the clerk, who was not a bad man, said, "Where's a ronin going to be without his sword?" and gave him some rice anyway, and told him to keep the blade.
---
By the fifth week Sadayuki could not walk more than half a ri without stopping, and by the end of that week he could not walk at all, so Kanbei carried him.
He carried him on his back, arms hooked under his thighs, Sadayuki's forearms crossed loose at his collarbone and his cheek against the back of Kanbei's shoulder, and Sadayuki's breath went in and out against his neck, and Kanbei counted his own steps and stopped every two hundred to rest, and hated the stopping, because getting Sadayuki up again was worse each time. He weighed almost nothing by then. That was the thing Kanbei could not stop thinking about, the whole of that last week, the terrible lightness of him — this man who had once thrown him into the Nagara river on a dare, who had carried a wounded ashigaru a full ri at Osaka without complaining, folded now onto his back like a child.
"Put me down," Sadayuki said, sometimes, into his neck. "You'll ruin yourself."
"Be quiet."
"Kanbei."
"Be quiet and hold on."
Once, half asleep, he murmured something about the persimmon tree in his mother's garden, and Kanbei answered him as though the question had been sensible, and told him yes, it would be flowering now, cream and pale yellow petals, and they would see it soon.
He kept walking. There was nothing else in the world to do but keep walking.
He found the hollow on the sixth day of carrying Sadayuki, in the rain. He had seen the abandoned farmhouse from the grade above an hour earlier and walked past it, because they did not stop in daylight if they could help it; and then it had begun to rain, a steady drizzle still cold with early spring, and Sadayuki had begun to shiver against his back in a way that would not stop, and Kanbei put a hand back to feel his forehead and found him feverish, and turned around.
He carried him down. The path was mud and he went down twice onto one knee and did not let him fall, and did not put him down, not once, not even to rest, and by the time he ducked through the doorway into the dark of the old house his arms had gone into a kind of numbness, and his knees stung, and his own breath was sobbing in his chest.
The house must have stood empty for years. There was a single main room stepping up from the entrance with its packed earth floor, a sunken irori choked with old ash, and a roof that held over perhaps half the space and let the rain through the rest. Pegs on the wall where tools had hung. A broken loom in a corner. Mouse droppings along the walls. But the ground by the hearth was dry, and it was out of the wind.
Kanbei laid Sadayuki down there as carefully as he had ever done anything, and then knelt over him a moment with his hands on either side of him, getting his breath, water running off his hair onto Sadayuki's face.
Sadayuki opened his eyes. "You're crying," he observed.
"It's raining."
"Mm," said Sadayuki, and closed his eyes again, and Kanbei went to make a fire.
---
Those were the last days.
There was a stream at the bottom of the hollow and that first evening Kanbei settled Sadayuki besides the fire, his own shitagi folded under his head as a pillow, and said he would be gone the length of a hundred breaths. Sadayuki, already sliding under, nodded; and Kanbei went out into the wet blue dusk with the dented pot he'd found in the house and ran the whole way there and the whole way back with his heart going like a hoofbeat, certain that in the little time he had been gone Sadayuki's breathing would have stopped.
It had not. He stood in the doorway and watched the rise and fall of his chest for a moment before he could trust his legs to carry him the rest of the way in.
Kanbei gave him water first. He knelt and got an arm under his shoulders and lifted his head into the crook of it and tipped the pot to his mouth a little at a time — wet the lips first, then let him drink, a swallow, a rest, a swallow — because the throat of a man that weak can drown from a mouthful. Half of it ran into his face. Kanbei wiped his chin with his sleeve between swallows and talked to him the whole time, low, the way you speak to a horse or a frightened child or a man you love. "There. Slowly. There's no hurry, we've all night. Little more. Good."
Kanbei cooked the last of the rice down soft, long past what anyone would call done, into a thin white gruel a man too weak to chew could take, and fed it to Sadayuki off the ends of his fingers because he had nothing else for utensils; and later, when Sadayuki roused enough, let him drink it slowly from the tilted pot the way he had taken the water. Three mouthfuls was a good evening. Kanbei told him it was a good evening and ate what was left himself so none went to waste. Then he went to refill the pot with water and set it by the edge of the fire to warm again for whenever the next waking came.
The wakings came less and less. That was what he watched, in those days — how the clear stretches shortened and the fever lengthened, how Sadayuki would surface and know him and even, once, make some ghost of a joke.
"You've turned into a decent nursemaid."
"I've had practice. You were a sickly child."
"I was not. I was delicate."
And then the fever would pull him back down into the muttering country where he was not always certain where he was or which year.
Kanbei learned the tides of it. He learned when a word would reach him and when nothing would. He kept the fire fed. When the shivering came, teeth going, Sadayuki's whole body shaking hard enough to wrench at the wound, Kanbei lay down alongside him and put his own warmth against him and held him through it with his hand spread flat on his chest to feel it rise, and did not sleep, and did not move.
And still he had to leave. Water did not fetch itself and the fire ate wood faster than he could gather it. He learned the shortest path to the stream and exactly how long an armful of dry-enough wood cost him, and he was never gone a breath longer than he had to be, and all the time he was gone some part of him strained back toward the house, listening for a silence he was afraid to come home to.
Once he came back to find Sadayuki lying twisted in a way that must have hurt, calling — not for him, but for his mother, in a small lost voice that went through Kanbei like cold water. He dropped the wood in the doorway and crossed the room in two strides and gathered him up against his chest.
"I'm here. Sada. I'm here, I only went for wood, I'm here."
"Kanbei?"
"Yes."
"Don't—" His hand moved, found a fistful of Kanbei's kimono, and held it. "Don't go far."
"No," Kanbei said. "No. Nowhere."
He did not go far after that, and he went fast, and he came back faster.
---
The wound went past anything the eye should have to see. The dark of it spread up under the ribs. The smell got into everything, into Kanbei's own hair and clothes, so that he stopped being able to smell it at all and only knew it was worse because each time he opened the dressing the marks had climbed higher.
There was nothing to be done for it. He changed the bandages anyway, gently, warming his hands first; and washed the used cloths in the stream and dried them at the fire and used them again, because there were no others; and he did all of it with his face perfectly still, because Sadayuki could read his face even at the bottom of the fever, and Kanbei was not going to let the last thing he read there be despair.
He talked to him while he did it. About the persimmon tree and the garden. About a festival when they were fifteen and Sadayuki had somehow lost one of his geta in the crowd and walked home barefoot, singing. About the Nagara river. He was not always certain he was heard, but he thought a man might hear such things even so.
On what he thought was the fourth or fifth day — he had stopped being sure — Sadayuki came up clear one last time, clearer than he had been since the road, the way a lamp will flare just before the oil is gone. His eyes found Kanbei and knew him completely, and there was something in them that was almost calm.
"Kanbei."
"I'm here." He came and knelt and took his hand.
"You should go on. Home." His voice was a thread. "Before the passes close. Tell my mother—" He stopped, and something crossed his face, and he let that go, because there was nothing to tell her that would be any use to her. He tried again. "You could still make it."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"I knew you'd say that." A breath of the old grin, the seven-year-old's grin, the one Kanbei had first seen across a garden wall. "I only thought I ought to give you the chance to be sensible. Once. In your life."
"You've never given me a sensible thing in your life," Kanbei said, "and I've never wanted one," and lifted his hand and held it against his own cheek.
Sadayuki's fingers moved a little there. There was almost no strength in them.
"Stay," he said.
Kanbei was never afterward certain whether he had meant stay here, or stay with me, or something older, some request from far back down the long road of the two of them, from a garden in Mino twenty years gone. It did not matter. The answer was the same to all of it.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "Do you hear me? Not anywhere."
And Sadayuki, satisfied, let his eyes close.
---
The fever took him back down after that and did not give him up again.
His breathing changed toward the end of that night, going shallow, then labored, each breath dragged in and let out slow, with long frightening pauses between where Kanbei counted his own heartbeats and waited.
He did not let go of him. He held him against his chest with his Sadayuk's head at the hollow of his shoulder, the way they had slept a hundred nights on campaigns, and he talked to him, low and steady, the whole night through — about the persimmon tree, about the festival, about the green hills of Mino and how good it would be to see them again, though he no longer believed either of them would.
The rain had stopped by the time it was over. In the gray before dawn the pauses grew longer, and longer, and then there was one that did not end.
Kanbei went on holding Sadayuki a long while after. He could not be the one to say it was finished.
---
When at last he laid him down, he did it carefully, straightening his limbs, drawing the ruined shitagi over the wound so that it was hidden, closing his eyes as one is meant to.
Sadayuki's face had lost the drawn grayness of the last weeks. In the dim light he looked almost young again, almost the boy from over the garden wall, and Kanbei sat beside him a long time and looked at that face and did not think much of anything at all.
Then he thought about the road.
It was still there. North and east through the hills, and he could take it. He could walk out of this hollow and follow the Nakasendo home to Mino and stand at Sadayuki's gate and tell a woman who had once fed him an mended his kimono that her son had died in an abandoned farmhouse in the mountains, and that he, Kanbei, had lived.
He did not want it because there was no shape to it. A road without Sadayuki at the end of it was not a road, only a distance; and he had spent the whole of his life going toward wherever Sadayuki was — four streets over, an extra bowl, a spare futon, the far side of a bad night — and there was no such place anywhere in the world now, and would not be again.
The fire had burned to nothing. Outside, the first birds had started, and pale light was coming into the hollow, and far off across the wet, green hills a temple bell was ringing the hour.
Kanbei drew his sword and laid it across his knees, sittinh a while in the quiet beside Sadayuki, and was not afraid. It seemed a small thing, and a simple one, next to everything else.
He had never wanted to be anywhere Sadayuki was not.
He did not intend to start now.
They were found by a woodcutter who wandered down into the hollow, and then by the men he brought back from the nearest village: two samurai of the losing side, dead in an abandoned farmhouse far from any road that went anywhere. Nobody knew their names or their domain. The villagers, being kind, buried them together at the edge of the old overgrown field and set a single stone, and in time the brush grew up around it, and the names of the two men who had known each other their whole lives and had wanted only to go home were lost entirely, as such names usually are.
But the village remembered, for a generation or so, that the two had been buried side by side because it had seemed to the woodcutter who found them, that one had lain himself down very deliberately close to the other, as near as he could get, the way a man lies down beside someone he does not intend to leave.
It didn’t take very long for Munetoshi to return to his eldest son’s room after seeing the doctor and his apprentice off at the gate. He carefully shut the shoji behind him before settling beside Toshikatsu’s bed, an unusually grim expression darkening his face even though he had tried his best to arrange his features into something resembling his usual calm.
Of course, Toshikatsu noticed right away.
“Chichiue,” he said, his usual bright smile spreading across his face to cheer up his father. “That expression doesn’t suit you at all. Really, there’s nothing to look so glum about. I’m fine. Honestly. It doesn’t even hurt.” That was a lie because it did hurt, but not so badly he couldn’t manage. “And I have plenty of practice being laid up in bed from last time.”
Last time had been four years earlier when Toshikatsu, then 16 years of age, had gone into battle for his first time, under lord Matsunaga at Toda-ji temple. What a disaster that had been: Matsunaga’s troops had set fire to the hall with the great Buddha statue, which later caused an uproar across the country and did little to endear him to the people of Yamato province.
Toshikatsu hadn’t been involved in the fire because he’d never even made it as far as the hall. Just minutes after setting foot on the battlefield, he’d been shot in the hip and carried off for treatment. He’d spent the next three months back home in Yagyu village staring at the ceiling of his room, impatiently waiting for his injury to heal. He had a small, raised scar to show for it, barely longer than his thumb and not quite as wide, shaped like a sickle, and bright pink like a plum blossom. It was a downright paltry scar, considering how infected the wound had been in the second week, and the actual damage it had inflicted, of which he was reminded daily because the stiffness in his hip caused him to limp. He found it embarrassing, but it wasn’t anything that kept him from serving Matsunaga alongside his father.
“This isn’t like last time,” Munetoshi said dryly.
Toshikatsu sighed. “It’s going to take even longer to heal this time, isn’t it?” He tried his best not to let his father hear the disappointment or annoyance in his voice. Really, what kind of absolute idiot got himself injured twice in as many battles, and nearly in the same location at that? He forced the smile back on his face, trying to keep the conversation lighthearted. “You’d better stock up on books because I’ve read everything in your library last time, some of it twice, and …”
“Toshikatsu!” Munetoshi interrupted him, raising his voice ever so slightly as he said his son’s name, but then continued more quietly: “It’s different from last time because this injury isn’t something doctors can fix.”
“I don’t understand, chichiue. What does that mean?”
Munetoshi found it difficult to meet his son’s eyes when he said, “The doctor says it’s unlikely you’ll walk again.”
It seemed, for a minute, as if his brain had stopped working. He tried to take a deep breath but it felt as if all of the air had left his lungs - a jolting feeling like falling from a horse that had suddenly tripped at full gallop. The silence that had fallen over the room pressed on his eardrums like the buzz of mosquitoes. Everything seemed very far away, as if he were a ghost floating along the ceiling watching the scene unfold below.
“I don’t understand,” he repeated, and even his voice sounded far away, like a stranger speaking in another room.
His fingers twisted into the fabric of his blanket and for a split second he thought, If I pull it over my head and go to sleep, will I wake up tomorrow and find this was only a nightmare?
And then, a memory surfaced: He was five years old, the age his youngest brother was now. He had climbed the tree in the center of their garden, an ancient plum that had grown large before their house had even been built. The view from the highest branch he’d been able to reach had been amazing - over the roof and across the valley. The sudden drop when he’d lost his footing had been terrifying and when he’d hit the ground, a dull thud against packed earth, he’d been convinced his spirit had popped out of his body and hovered above to look at his broken form.
It had been his father who’d rushed to his side first, and picked him up ever so carefully and held him close, cradling him against his warm chest. He’d never seen his father look this frightened before or since, but the expression remained seared in his memory. And then, Toshikatsu had coughed, spitting up copious amounts of blood because he’d bitten his tongue when he hit the ground, and started wailing at the top of his lungs because he was going to die. He wasn’t, of course. He wasn’t even injured save for a few scrapes from the branches he’d hit on his way down, but his father had held him patiently until, eventually, Toshikatsu ran out of tears.
He didn’t know why this memory had come to mind now, but he wondered: If I cried now, what would my father’s reaction be? Would he be embarrassed? Would he still hold me?
Toshikatsu took a deep breath, but he could feel his chin quiver and he wasn’t entirely sure he could keep himself together. He bit his lip, waiting for that feeling to go away.
“What does the doctor know, anyway?” he eventually said angrily, trying to project hardness into his voice and keep his words even, but still, his voice cracked. He pulled the covers against his chest and buried his face. If he couldn’t keep himself from spilling tears like a child, at least he could hide them.
It came as such a surprise when his father pulled him close and held him, that Toshikatsu almost pushed him away, startled, before finally allowing himself to sob into his shoulder.
An educational post for writers: the effects of malnutrition/starvation:
Malnutrition/starvation has a bunch of really fucky effects, and I see whump people use malnutrition/starvation from time to time, (i am utilizing it now, hence the post) but rarely do they depict the horrific suffering. I have actually starved before, so here's my medically accurate advice on what that looks like:
Among the most prominent of effects of lack of food/lack of nutritious food ironically not depicted, for it is the most common nutritional deficit on earth, is anemia - lack of iron means your body doesnt produce blood like it used to, which at a point makes you cold all the time! It also messes with your bodily sense of blood pressure, making you more likely to notice tiny changes, which in turn can trigger dizziness, severe anxiety, heart palpitations, fainting, and vascillations between cognitive clarity and a foggy feeling. Lack of iron causes lack of red blood cells, which means you can't distribute oxygen as efficiently. This causes fatigue, a general sense of unwellness, called "malaise", and causes you to breathe and your heart to beat faster than they normally should. This, in turn, can trigger more anxiety! Anemia is a very anxiety inducing deficiency on its own because your body knows it's in trouble and it definitely wants to tell you about it!
It only takes about 3-4 days without food to develop anemia to this degree, though it can take as little as 2 if you already have deficits. If you are eating food but it's lacking in iron this transition can take 2-3 weeks, as your body uses up its iron reserves located in your liver, spleen and bone marrow (where red blood cells are produced).
Malnutrition and especially starvation also screws with your electrolytes, making you prone to dizzy spells and vertigo, and can seriously affect the myelin sheathes around your nerves and the delicate proteins in your brain, which combined with electrolyte imbalance and probable anemia can cause anything from blurred vision, headaches, fatigue and cognitive impairment (pervasive brain fog), at best, all the way up to the moderate landing of muscle spasms and ataxia (loss of coordination) and functional loss of senses like sight and hearing, to the severe landing of seizures and total organ failure. Also, malnourished muscles hurt!!! They hurt to touch, they hurt to move, it hurts to exist!
I once went 8 full days with little to no food, so I know this stuff from experience. Let me tell you, hunger pains are God fucking awful and paradoxically make you feel very nauseous and can cause vomiting, (your body wants to get rid of the concentrated stomach acid) and are truly indescribable in their instinctual ability to instill desperation, depression and terror. You would eat a lot of things you never thought you would after just three days without food. At 8, I was very strongly considering eating my pet birds. I had already begun eating their seeds. The only thing that saved them was one measly bag of potato chips, the very last thing resembling human food in the pantry (the vending machine size chips) on day 6, which gave me just enough salt and fat to rethink that idea.
Anyway, muscles! Hurt!!! Especially if you don't eat a lot of protein to start out. Muscular degeneration or "digestion" (ketosis) can happen surprisingly fast if you arent eating anything at all. 5-7 days usually if you are healthy, though 3 is not unheard of, especially if you are expending a lot of calories and have very little fat. It's quirky hallmark? A strangely sweet and metallic taste in your mouth. Like a penny coated in sugar water. The ache is hard to describe, but it is constantly there, and honestly wore me down psychologically more than the hunger pains, which curiously went away after day 4, only coming back with a vengeance when I tried to eat anything. It hurt to move, it hurt to think about moving, and the constant low level pain was absolute torture. The fatigue didn't help. I normally slept about 6-9 hours. During that time after day 3 or so, I started sleeping 15 or more, in bursts, and had very little energy to do anything but rest. Every now and then I'd get a burst of restlessness, my body pushing me to find food or drink water. It was unpleasant. The headaches were pretty bad too, at first.
Malnutrition, and specifically a lack of protein, also causes pervasive muscle aches and all the neurologic issues mentioned above.
My experience led me to the development of ataxia that has never completely gone away. I remember the panic of nearly blacking out while trying to stand too, and not being able to cognitively focus on anything, much less visually focus. (Started about day 5). Mind you, I was 15 years old and weighed only 89 lbs prior to this period, with a fast metabolism and very little fat. After it I weighed 81 lbs. 8lbs in 8 days is a lot of weight to lose, and boy did my body hate me for some time after that. But my insomnia was cured for a while!
Anyway, i hope this proves insightful for all your whumping and torturous needs. I didn't plan on making it so personal, but hey, I've lived through that, so it seemed relevant to add that here.
“Lack of iron causes lack of red blood cells, which means you can't distribute oxygen as efficiently. This causes fatigue, a general sense of unwellness, called "malaise", and causes you to breathe and your heart to beat faster than they normally should. This, in turn, can trigger more anxiety!”
This is fascinating. But how do you recover from such a starvation experience? What does it take, and how does one get better? Is recovery pretty fast, or is it slow?
I recovered my mental faculties first. As soon as I had carbs in me I immediately felt better, and all I wanted to do was eat and eat and eat. I wasn't even "hungry" exactly, there was just this overwhelming urge to stuff my face.
But I knew that was a bad idea.
When you don't eat for a while, your digestion goes out of whack. You can't process food the same way, cause you've starved the bacteria that digests your food for you in your gut and stomach. Plus your stomach acid isn't being produced as much, and the smooth muscle loses its flexibility somewhat and "shrinks" (contracts). It means you feel full quickly, but are not satisfied at all by it. You just want to keep eating, and a kind of war begins between the impulse to keep eating and the feeling of a full belly. Many people vomit because they lose out to the impulse and their stomach, not having the enzymes or acid to digest much, and being cramped up so it can't move things, can't take it. That's why you start with starches. Carbs. They digest easiest, and restore your electrolyte imbalance.
After eating enough bread to just fill me up, I noticed almost immediately that I felt more alert and springy. But I still ached terribly. In fact it felt worse as the sugars entered my system 20 minutes later and my body shifted out of crisis conservation mode and into damage control mode, sending help to damaged muscles and nerves. Healing those creates inflammation, which increases the pain.
I kept on a diet of pretty much nothing but simple carbs like bread and potatoes, for three days, spending most the time sleeping off the fever that sprung from the inflammation. (101F). I then ate some turkey the landlord had brought us (more on that below the cut) in small bits. I was surprised to find it tasted disgusting, since I normally like turkey, and took that as a sign my body wasn't ready for that yet. It was probably a wise choice. I craved fat, and salt, so ate mashed potatoes like they were going out of style. My body sang and I felt so elated at even the smell of them that I literally ate nothing but that for another three days. I had more energy and the fever was receding, though I had headaches daily and BOY was my gut unhappy, but luckily I only had diarrhea. Long enough, (2 weeks or so) and you lose the ability to digest much at all, leaving you with a gut paralyzed by gas.
So I ate mashed potato until the turkey caught my nose. It smelled good, so taking my bodily cues, I ate some. Slowly. My headache almost immediately lessened, and i got a jolt of feel-good all over me, so I stated mixing it into the potatoes and transitioning slowly over 4 days onto eating the turkey on its own. I didn't want to shock my system in its fragile state, since there was no way to a hospital except by medi-evac by helicopter. (More context below the cut), assuming the weather allowed. If something went wrong I had no real help. People often died in this town due to medical emergencies.
And so it went with everything. I focused on carbs and protein, since that's what I craved, and just took it as slow as I could. It took a week of damn near eating half a turkey before my muscles improved, and the headaches went away entirely. Then we had beef in the form of hamburger, which I HATE, but never in my life had I loved it more. It was iron, fat, protein and salt. Combined with fried potatoes I was in bliss, and began to recover much more quickly. I was still weak and fatigued for another week or so, and still had bad dizzy spells, but those improved by weeks end.
All in all it took about a month to recover to where I had been before, body and mind, though I was functional after 2 weeks.
Context below the cut, for the curious:
We lived in a small mountain town in Northern CA with passes at both ends, which was the only way in or out of town. Those passes closed from November to May, no one in, no one out. That meant that from November to May, there were zero supply or food trucks coming in. There were exactly two places in town you could buy food at all - a CVS and the tiniest Wal-Mart ever, which was only the grocery. We had to travel north to Ashland or Medford, OR, regularly, to bulk buy food and sneak it back over the CA border. Everyone in town did this. We knew the passes would close, but we severely underestimated the severity of winter weather on the eastern slope of the cascades, at 4.5k feet elevation. We expected the passes to open at least periodically, and stocked food accordingly. They did not.
We had just used up most of our food supply by early November, and thought we would have time for another trip north to restock. We did not. A freak weather system came in November 3rd, and stayed into Thanksgiving. I was ok until Thanksgiving break, because I was eating at school. But by that time we had used up nearly every edible thing in the house already. My mother is stubborn and proud and insisted we could make it until the storm passed and the passes would re open. They never did.
She got by being fed by her coworkers, and bringing home scraps, for that's all you could call them. A few mouthfuls does not ease the hunger at all, and actually makes it feel more torturous, so after a few days I just stopped eating them. It was too much. It wasn't until day 6 or so that i ate the scraps again after the chips spurred my hunger back.
My mother finally caved to our landlord on day 8 that we were unprepared for the "starving time" as they called it, which we thought was a joke since it was our first winter living there and we didn't really know anyone, since we were "outsiders" and thus not really received warmly by the 3k people living there.
The landlord was suitably appalled and would probably have contacted authorities if there was any that could have helped. Instead his wife spent two full weeks bringing food to our house, including a whole turkey. She stayed around with me while my mom was at work, making sure I ate and was doing better since my mom had mentioned I was sleeping all the time and she wasn't sure what was wrong. (DUH?)
There was no hospital. A urgent care was next to the jail, but it had two doctors and was only open three days a week for a few hours. They had three nurses between them. All they could do was stabilize, in the event of a rattlesnake bite (not uncommon) and prescribe meds. If you needed help, a helicopter had to come and get you from Redding, which was a 4 hour drive in good weather.
So yes. Lesson learned kids - listen to the locals! They're not usually half as crazy as they sound!
character b is in the hospital room, in a lot of pain as the doctors are cleaning their injury(s) or setting their bones. The doctors sent character an out into the hall, and now character a is leaning their forehead against the wall, knowing character b is suffering on the other side. Tears are running down character A’s face, and they’re shaking. They can vaguely hear crying coming from the room, and it’s physically hurting them. Please, kid. I’m right here. I didn’t leave you. Please be okay…
Medic character! Whump! I don’t ever see enough of this but I feel like there’s so much potential (one of my OCs is a healer and this has been on my mind)
- Staying awake for days, only catching brief sleep in between watches and tending to more wounded.
- Refusing to let themselves be the sick or hurt one because others need them.
- Getting kidnapped by the villains because they need a healer for one of their own
- Losing a patient, not being able to sleep, replaying everything they could have done differently over and over.
- Blood soaked clothes, clean hands.
- Holding someone in their last moments and being strong for them. Breaking down the second they’re gone, but continuing to work. There’s no time.
- Quarantined after being exposed to a toxin/contagious disease.
- Dehydration, lack of food, sleep depravation
- Abusing caffeine
- Needing to be pulled away from someone they’re trying to resucitate
- Getting seriously injured, and having to coach their friend through dressing their wound/field surgery. Pale and shaking with the pain but telling their friend “You’re doing great. You’re almost done.” Before giving them the next step.
- Taking the misplaced anger from a patients loved one when nothing can be done.
- Getting hurt and knowing they are going to die. Telling the others that they’re going to be fine. To keep going, they’re going to catch up. Sliding down a wall and letting themselves bleed.
a friendly reminder that even a light fever, a few hours of missed meals, or even a little bit of dehydration can become a huge problem with the right kind of physical activity. if you want to make your kind-of-sick whumpee pass out from exhaustion, have them carry heavy things for a bit. like groceries, or laundry, or cleaning that requires them to move through the house a lot. you don't need a serious problem to make serious symptoms :)
Nothing like caretaker who learns that whumpee is back and that they’re hurt and runs through the halls, across the yard, down the stairs, while everyone around is watching. They storm into the room, and oh that little pause before they walk up to the bed more slowly and shyly.
Whumpee was not expecting caretaker to be this worried about them and they raise their head in surprise, while somebody else is already tending to their injuries.
character b gets shot with an arrow, and the medical people have to carefully cut around it to pull it out without tearing. bonus points if they don’t have any anesthesia. character b doesn’t know what’s going on and is too weak to fight, so tears just run silently down their face while character a is beside them whispering over and over “I’m so sorry, kid…I’m so sorry.”
