Another favourite of mine is when whumpee is fighting sleep/unconsciousness SO hard. theyre probably delirious with exhaustion/fever/drugs and they don't understand what's happening properly, and that makes them so, so scared. Their eyelids droop as they cling onto caretaker, their fingers slipping as sleep drags them down. They can hardly move, weak and terrified and unable to do anything but listen to their slowly slowing heartbeat.
Caretaker does their best to shush and quiet and comfort them, trying to explain in a way Whumpee understands, that it's alright, they're safe. Do they understand and finally let themselves sleep, or do they keep panicking until they physically can't stay awake?
Warnings: descriptions of violence (not graphic), death of a (made up) minor character, brief mention of vomiting
Words: ~3K
Takes place early during season 1.
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Her fingers slipped through Daniel’s grasp. Her screams rang in his ears as she fell, all the way down, down, down over the edge of the abyss, into nothing.
Therma had been in the wrong place at the wrong time: rock-climbing for fun, unstable ground, the edge of a dangerous cliff and a long, long drop. SG-1 had come to help the young alien archeologist that Daniel had been working with for the better part of a week, with Sam, Teal’c and Jack stopping to assess the best way to reach the terrified woman dangling from the lip of the precipice, and Daniel…
Daniel had just… rushed in.
But he had failed. She was gone. He lay there empty-handed atop the dirt and jagged rocks on the edge of the precipice, vertigo setting in, feeling as if his heart had plummeted over the edge with her while the townspeople gathered around the base of the escarpment calling her name.
Daniel stood slowly and stiffly from his recumbent position, knees scraped beneath his pants. Murmurs went up among the crowd when they saw he was alone, and he could practically feel their recrimination like a tangible thing as he shook his head sadly at this needless loss. A tremor ran through the earth, evidence of its instability, but he barely noticed. Hands soon grasped his arms accompanied by a voice: “C’mon, let’s get outta here.”
Jack tugged him away from the edge and led him back down the escarpment, supporting his clumsy attempts to descend. They scrabbled over loose stones and sloping ground made more treacherous by the quakes and reached the bottom to greet the murmuring townspeople swarming around him.
Faces accused. Eyes stared into his soul, asking, ‘why?’ Daniel looked away. He did not want to see. He did not want to hear. He let his team mates bear him away.
————
Hours later, after Daniel dressed in his black suit and tie he made his way down the deserted hallway from their accommodations to the place where Therma’s funeral was to be held.
Sam, Jack and Teal’c had already gone. It had taken Daniel a long time to complete simple tasks with fumbling fingers and paralyzing memories. His drifting thoughts and sluggish steps were interrupted by two men approaching from an adjoining hallway. One was tall and middle-aged with a thick head of messy black hair and an angular face so like Therma’s. Daniel assumed this was her father. The other man was young with brown hair and cold accusing eyes whom Daniel surmised was her husband.
“You’re the one?” asked the dead woman’s father, voice warbling with emotion. Daniel nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“You tried,” said the man thickly through tears making trails down his face, and the calm softness of his voice tore through Daniel’s psyche, because he knew how it felt. He knew, because he had failed to save Sha’re from the grasp of the Goa’uld. Yet Sha’re wasn’t dead yet. His actions, for better or worse, had never led to someone’s death before now.
“I’m so sorry.” Daniel’s mouth formed the words. Something strange was happening, a numbness spreading over his body and mind like a thick fog that he could not see through. That pivotal microsecond where something had shifted and Therma’s fingers had slid out of his own past the point of no return kept playing over and over, to the exclusion of all else.
The two men walked away in silence. Daniel stayed where he was, leaning against the wall, shoulders slumped and his head bowed down to his chest. A third set of footsteps passed by, and a fourth, but Daniel paid them no mind. A fifth set barely entered into Daniel’s perception, so far sunk into the numbness inexorably spreading, and the vivid memories of that fateful day when Sha’re was taken, merging into the Therma’s screams as she fell from his grasp. It was only when rough hands yanked him forward and delivered a punch straight to his gut that Daniel was shaken out of the trance-like state he’d fallen into.
“You killed her,” a deep voice growled with another blow to the same spot on the left side of his abdomen. Daniel’s swift glance took in the impression of long hair and handsome features before he was forced to bend over from the pain and to protect his middle from a third blow.
“I loved her,” said the voice, getting in more blows despite Daniel’s efforts, “and you took her away.”
“I-I’m so sorry,” Daniel repeated.
“You should have waited for the professionals, or the soldiers on your team to perform the rescue properly,” the man accused. “Therma might have lived. Instead, you rushed in without thinking, and now she’s dead!” Another punch.
“I tried… I tried my best to save her.”
“Wasn’t good enough.”
“She-she-she couldn’t hold on.”
“Because you should have given her a rope, not your hands. Idiot! Why didn’t you wait? Why didn’t you let someone with a brain go up on that cliff?”
Another vicious strike made contact. Daniel groaned, unable to speak. Who was this man? An uncle? A brother? Couldn’t be. Therma had two sisters. They and her father were the young woman’s only surviving family.
The guy struck again while Daniel contemplated his attacker’s identity. “We were going to elope,” he said with desperation that bordered on insanity. Huh. A lover, then. “We would have lived far away from this place, made a fresh start, but you—” a punch “—took her—” another punch “—away from me!”
Hunched over, unable to defend himself from both the physical and verbal assaults, Daniel could only pant for breath and pray for the beating to stop. He fell to the ground and curled up to protect his abdomen and head, enduring the kicks to his back that followed until the blows stopped suddenly and without a word stalked away.
For a handful of moments Daniel was frozen in place, stuck, rooted to the spot, his vision threatening to turn black with unconsciousness. He tried to move. Oh. Ohhhh, that hurt! Something inside him had gone wrong. He felt nauseous and dizzy with blinding pain shooting outward from his left side.
He got up slowly, cradling the injury. Somehow he continued walking toward the chapel’s funeral hall and located the isle where his team were sitting, dressed in their fancy Air Force uniforms or traditional Chulakian robes.
“Hey, you okay?” asked Sam as Daniel awkwardly slid into the pew, absently rubbing at an ache in his left shoulder and trying not to hunch over the greater pain in his abdomen.
He thought of answering no, of telling Sam about the man in the hallway, but he couldn’t. He didn’t. He deserved the pain. “I just… really regret what happened,” he answered truthfully.
This seemed to satisfy his team, and they faced forward when the priest entered with somber musicians and began the service.
Daniel barely heard or saw anything that followed. The priest told them to stand. He stood. The priest told them to sit. He sat. Time seemed to warp in on itself while Daniel stared at the flower arrangements, noticing every detail about the shape of the petals, the curvature of the stems, the droplets of water running down the vase.
Kneeling. The kneeler was hard beneath his knees. Kneeling, the hard rock scraping his skin while sweaty fingers tried to grasp the unfortunate Therma. Kneeling. Feretti’s blood on his hands, frightened shouts of the injured Abydonians, Sha’re and Skaara gone.
Standing again. Nausea and lightheadedness. Intense pain. The priest was saying Last Rights. The ceremony was over. Funny, Daniel couldn’t seem to remember much about any of it, like someone had scooped out his memory and stuffed the hole with cotton.
Daniel felt shaky, unstable, like the quaking earth that had given rise to this terrible tragedy. The floor became suddenly very close to his face. Shouts. Noise. People running. What was going on? Someone gave his cheeks a couple of gentle slaps. “Daniel… Daniel, what’s goin’ on? Talk to me.” Jack’s voice.
“My fault. Couldn’t save her. Like Sha’re.” Daniel was barely aware of the words coming out of his mouth. Blackness pulled him under and he passed out.
* * *
Sam Carter watched Daniel stand from the kneeler, watched his face go completely white and sweaty, then watched him crumple in slow motion at the moment that Therma’s funeral service ended.
“What happened? Is he ill?”
“Stress, do you think?”
“Poor boy’s overwhelmed with sadness.”
Sam heard all the murmurs from the passing mourners. Sam was pretty sure what ailed Daniel was none of those things. “No. I think he’s hurt,” said Sam.
“How do you figure that?” countered Colonel O’Neill. “There’s not a mark on him. Besides, how could he have gotten hurt bad enough to pass out while he was getting dressed, huh?”
“Sir,” was all Sam said before she moved aside Daniel’s black suit jacket and gently untucked and lifted his shirt to reveal heavy bruising all over his abdomen, especially on the left side of his stomach, which appeared… wrong.
“Ah geez,” said O’Neill. “Looks like someone beat the crap out of him.”
“Who could have done such a thing?” wondered Teal’c, his expression stony with suppressed anger.
“I don’t know, and the only one who could tell us is unconscious.”
“Well let’s stop talking and get him the hell out of here,” barked Colonel O’Neill. He and Teal’c set to work carrying the unconscious archeologist, heedless of the whispers and comments coming from passing mourners still wondering what had happened. The flash of cold eyes caught Sam’s attention within the face of a handsome man, but she was concentrating on herding people out of the way so Colonel O’Neill and Teal’c had a clear path, and when she glanced back, the man was gone.
They reached the nearby Stargate and Sam radioed for help while Teal’c and Colonel O’Neill brought Daniel through to safety.
“Dangerously low blood pressure,” diagnosed Janet Fraiser, worry creasing her face while her medics finished setting up the IVs. “Possible spleen damage. He’s bleeding internally. Let’s get him into surgery.”
Sam watched Daniel’s gurney disappear around the corner with sadness clouding her features.
“If I ever lay eyes on the person who did this,” growled O’Neill threateningly, looking every bit the Black Ops soldier he’d been.
“I think I might have a suspect,” said Sam while they followed General Hammond to their debrief, being allowed to have their post-mission check-ups after they spoke with the general. “After Daniel collapsed at the end of the funeral, I saw a man watching us. I didn’t like the look on his face, it was like… like he was satisfied or happy that Daniel was hurt. Gave me the creeps.”
“Why didn’t you say something back there?” asked the colonel.
“The man was only there for a second. When I turned around he was gone, and at the time, I was more focused on clearing the way for you to carry Daniel back to the Stargate.”
“I believe I saw him as well,” said Teal’c. “A man of roughly seventy of your inches with hair longer and lighter than Daniel Jackson’s.”
“Tell Hammond,” said Colonel O’Neill right away. “Maybe we can go back to P8S-522 and bring him in for questioning.”
After the briefing, they each submitted themselves for examination by Doctor Fraiser. “His spleen was damaged,” she explained. “Doctor Warner is attempting to repair it without removing it, but if we can’t…” Fraiser trailed off.
“If you can’t, what?” said O’Neill hiding his alarm beneath a frown.
The physician answered, “He’d be grounded, permanently. His immune system would be too compromised for off-world travel.”
No one could think of a reply to that, so Sam asked, “when can we see him?”
“Not until after he’s out of post-op. I promise I’ll let you know the minute he can have visitors. Until then, please get some rest.”
The physician strode back into the infirmary to assist Doctor Warner with the surgery, and that was that.
Nobody moved. One by one they took seats in the waiting area, except Teal’c who paced ruts in the floor. Colonel O’Neill fell into a doze, his snores filling the space. Teal’c eventually settled into a deep meditation on the remaining chair, and soon, Sam followed her team mates in slumber.
* * *
“Colonel… Colonel.”
Jack started awake. There was Doctor Fraiser calling his name. “What’s wrong? Is Daniel outta surgery?”
“He is.”
“And?”
The physician paused and took a breath, unsmiling. “We were able to repair the damage to Doctor Jackson’s spleen, so he’ll still be able to travel off-world. You should know there were some complications during the surgery, and he’s currently running a temperature, so we’ll need to monitor him closely. For this reason, he’ll be spending some time in the ICU.”
“Can we still see him?” asked Jack.
“Yes, for a few minutes, as long as you stay out of the way.”
“You won’t even notice us, Doc,” Jack assured.
Fraiser nodded and they all filed into the ICU after her. Daniel was lying partially propped up with lots of tubes and wires snaking out from beneath his hospital gown and an oxygen cannula beneath his nose. His fluttered eyes open when they approached.
“Hi, Daniel, how are you feeling?” asked Carter.
“W-where… where?”
Daniel was disoriented.
“You’re in the infirmary. Doc had to operate.”
Whether from the residual effects of the anesthesia or the painkillers, Daniel was too out of it to comprehend what was happening. He tried to struggle.
“Stay still, Danny. You’ll pull your IVs out.”
Daniel wasn’t listening. Suddenly, he lurched to one side and started vomiting over the bedclothes. Nurses rushed to join Doctor Fraiser to contain the rest of the mess, since Daniel wasn’t finished, and to increase his anti-nausea medication. Alarms went off left and right.
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to leave,” said Fraiser.
“We won’t be in your way, Doc, promise,” Jack cajoled.
Fraiser didn’t look up from what she was doing to respond. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t have all of you in here.”
“How about just one of us?” asked Carter with a glance toward Jack.
Fraiser didn’t respond until the alarms stopped wailing and Daniel appeared to be stable for the moment. All but one of the nurses left. Fraiser turned to face the three other members of SG-1 and sighed in resignation. “Fine. But only one of you.”
“We’ll see you later, sir,” said Carter while Teal’c inclined his head, and they exited the infirmary.
Jack thanked them softly as they left and sat down to begin his bedside vigil. He pulled a plastic chair toward him and sat down, leaning forward slightly watching Daniel’s chest rise and fall in shallow motions, unsure of whether the man was unconscious or simply too spent to keep his eyes open. After a minute, with a glance around to check that no one was watching, Jack grasped Daniel’s lax hand.
He understood the guilt Daniel carried with him over the capture of Sha’re, and now over the death of this alien woman that he’d been unable to save. The linguist was still so young and, like all of them, so new to the Stargate program. Yet while the rest of the team were military, warriors after a fashion, Daniel was not. His was the steepest learning curve for getting used to this “going through the ‘gate” thing because he had to learn how to handle weapons and adopt a more detached military mindset. Daniel often felt things so passionately that he was prone to being be overwhelmed by his emotions. It made things hard on him, especially when things went wrong off-world, as Jack was coming to realize had a tendency to happen.
So lost in his thoughts was Jack that many hours passed while he sat stiffly in the chair, refusing suggestions to eat or sleep. He didn’t notice at first when Daniel opened his eyes again. Jack gave Daniel’s hand an awkward pat. “Hey,” he said.
The linguist remained silent, too weak to reply, but he offered Jack the barest hint of a smile laced with a wince of pain.
“Carter and Teal’c were here earlier. Fraiser kicked them out, so you’re stuck with me.”
Another brief lifting of Daniel’s mouth outlined a tiny smile of appreciation.
“Hey listen… what happened today wasn’t your fault. You tried to save the girl, it didn’t work out. Now, I know some of the townspeople criticized you for rushing in to rescue her without any tools or equipment. I wanna tell you that if you hadn’t gone up there right away she’d have fallen long before Carter, Teal’c and I got up there with our ropes and stuff. She’d have died alone without ever seeing a friendly face. Maybe if you’d had your pack on you things might have been different, but that’s not your fault either. So don’t beat yourself up over this, okay?”
Daniel’s eyes fluttered closed momentarily, and when they opened he gave a weak nod and looked away, studying the IV line in his arm. That was the best Jack was going to get.
“Hammond gave us the green light to go back to P8S-522,” he continued. Daniel grimaced subtly. “Teal’c’s got a good description of the person who mighta done this to you, so we’ll need your help making a positive ID when we bring him in.”
Daniel’s heart rate increased and he turned to meet Jack’s eyes. “We’re gonna nail that son of a bitch,” Jack promised. “Nobody has the right to beat up my archeologist. One thing you’re gonna find is that I’ll never let anyone hurt a member of my team without having to answer to me for it.”
Doctor Fraiser soon appeared to check Daniel’s vitals and to insist that Jack leave to get something to eat
“Get some rest.” Jack patted Daniel’s knee, and was gone.
Daniel took a deep breath and let it out, wincing at the pain this caused. Somehow he felt better knowing that even if he still blamed himself, even if others still blamed him, Jack and the rest of his team did not, and he had a CO who would go to bat for him and who believed in him.
fictional character: *can’t bring their powers back down to a safe level after losing control of them and has to be given a cooldown hug by the person they love because they’re the only person who can safely approach them*
We love it when an injured character winces as they try (unsuccessfully) to sit up. It's a popular trope for a reason.
I would also like to draw your attention to when it hurts to lay down. Yes, they'll definitely be more comfortable lying down than sitting up, or maybe they're so exhausted they could barely stay upright even if they wanted to. But getting there? Maybe they have a friend there to help with an hand behind their back, maybe they have to lean on their arms and try to slowly ease themselves down without pulling or jarring anything too much. Either way though, there are winces and grimaces and sharp intakes of breath, and muscles shaking and tensing and maybe suddenly giving out on them. And at the end, finally sinking into the mattress or makeshift bed, their jaw is still clenched and eyes squeezed shut and breath coming in short gasps and body rigid for several moments afterward as they wait for the pain to fade away.
You know what I love? When characters are almost unconscious, but not quite.
Slumped over, a complete ragdoll in the others’ hands, but alert enough to groan softly at different sensations, eyes hooded and glazed, just wide enough to gather a blurry image of their surroundings. Though they’re dizzy and their limbs feel like lead, they gain comfort in the others’ touch, unconsciously leaning into them, eyelids fluttering in hazy relief at the soothing, concerned gestures.
The just-rescued cradle- the rescued character is injured/weak/overcome and is protectively clutched to their rescuer's chest in a half-sitting position, head lolling against their chest/crook of their supporting elbow, perhaps one feeble hand clutching a sleeve or hem, other characters gathering around and the rest of the conversation flowing over their head apart from the supporting character's reassurances.
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