And so concludes @azertyrobaz's mini-comfortember! Thank you so much for having this event, I enjoyed writing/drawing/creating for it so much!
This story is inspired by this art work, which took place after this chapter.
TW/CW: medical whump, aftermath of a surgery (tonsillectomy), slave whump, intimate whumper, (temporarily) nonverbal whumpee
“Awww, my sweet boy, did you miss me?” Thomas asked.
He knew Khaled might not respond, with his throat still healing a mere twelve hours after surgery. However, the way the boy pressed up into him and buried his face into the crook of his neck communicated the exact answer he was hoping for. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he replied smugly.
He enjoyed the clinginess for another minute or so, then carefully broke the embrace to pass his slave a backpack. “It’s a spare change of clothes -some of your more comfortable ones- and a cup of applesauce,” he explained. His dear boy was still shirtless, with nothing but the red sarong on his waist and golden chains on his body. And he knew he hadn’t eaten since yesterday afternoon. “I figured you’d probably want out of that, and to eat something besides whatever intravenous crap Lenore’s been feeding you.”
Khaled took the backpack and unzipped it to inspect its contents. A t-shirt, a pair of yoga pants, clean boxer briefs, socks, sneakers, and a cup of applesauce (sans spoon to eat it with) –it was all there. The boy smiled, then looked up to his master with gratitude written all over his expression. “Thank y-”
Thomas raised a hand. “Stop. Stop talking. Stop, you sound terrible.” Khaled shut his mouth and hung his head self-consciously, rummaging through the backpack and taking out each item one by one to lay on his hospital bed. Thomas sighed. He only said that so as not to aggravate the healing process; the sooner Khaled’s throat healed, the sooner they could resume their usual activities, but until then? “Don’t talk any more than necessary, and finish getting changed while I get you discharged,” he told him. Khaled had already slipped out of the jewelry and was tugging on the t-shirt when he left him to check out.
A desk was positioned outside of the winding corridors and near the front of the entrance they passed through late last night. Another woman, dark-skinned with limp wavy hair, sat at the desk, staring dead-eyed at the computer as she input data and intermittently slurped a liquid from a straw in a tumbler. The austere-looking collar around her throat marked her as another one of the doctor’s …assistants... Unlike the last one though, this ‘assistant’ didn’t have a scar over where her vocal chords would be.
The printer whirred to life behind her as it output page after page of discharge paperwork. The woman swiveled around in her desk chair and retrieved it, as well as a bottle of mystery pills she conjured up from below the desk. “Read this, sign this, pay here, and make him take these,” she recited lifelessly. She took another loud slurp of the mystery beverage.
Thomas skimmed the paperwork, signed and dated where he needed to, and only groaned a little when he slid the payment across the desk. A visit to Lenore was going to be expensive, he’d prepared for and accepted that fact, but it still hurt to fork over so much money, even if it was for a good cause.
Speaking of which, that good cause came hesitantly walking out to the front desk area, fully changed now, with the backpack slung over one shoulder. Thomas quickly forgot how much money he’d just dropped. What mattered was that Khaled would get better, and that he wouldn’t have to go another night without him. “Come on, boy,” he beckoned. The slave came to his side quickly, letting himself be led out of the clinic doors. “Let’s go home.”
Le Tag List: @kabie-whump @rainydaywhump @whumped-by-glitter @skittles-the-whumpee @generic-whumperz
Looked at someone's ofmd prompt, and it made me think of a scene from my story.
Basically for context; wulf ended up getting stabbed, but where he was stabbed was the appendix, which was inflamed, so after the fight ended, wulf ended up going through an impromptu appendectomy.
And well, wulf was very much out of it due to a mix of bloodloss and painkillers, so the reason that chalakon's blushing is because wulf accidentally confessed his feelings for him.
But yeah, wulf was basically unconscious/semiconscious but not lucid for a few days because he had to recover.
It feels like she is on a cloud, drifting weightlessly. It feels like she’s being smothered by cotton, drowning her inch by inch.
She succumbs.
~#~
She wakes up. There is white above her. There is white around her. There is dark hair and widening eyes.
She closes her eyes. The darkness is waiting.
~#~
She wakes up. Her arm is trapped beneath her, tingling with numbness. She tries to wrench it free and unbalances.
She is falling. There are hands on her, sudden and tight, holding her down. Fear crawls up her throat.
She flails harder, but their grip just constricts. Tighter and tighter until she can feel nothing again.
~#~
She wakes up. She can recognize the pillow under her cheek, the edge of it tickling her nose. She does not open her eyes. She can feel the blanket underneath her curled fingers. She can feel the ridges of bandages against her back.
There are murmurs around her. She does not listen. She does not want to listen.
She doesn’t know when she falls back asleep.
~#~
She wakes up. Someone is poking something into her arm. She should be alarmed. It tugs at her, a thought of pain and fire and darkness and despair. She ignores it. There is no pain here.
Numbness quickly follows.
~#~
She wakes up. She can feel something warm in her hands, curling between her fingers. She takes a long time to place that it is a hand.
She attempts to curl her fingers and the hand tightens around her. The effort exhausts her.
She slips away to the sound of her name.
~#~
She wakes up. She opens her eyes, and waits as the white resolves itself into shapes she can comprehend.
Dark hair. Solemn eyes. A tremulous smile. “Maia,” Claude says when she finally meets her gaze.
“Claude,” Maia says. It is difficult to think. It is difficult to remember. But the taste of Claude’s name – of her begging – is not easy to forget.
“You’re awake,” Claude smiles at her. Maia does not smile back. She doesn’t make an effort to uncurl her fingers from Claude’s. She doesn’t have the energy for it.
“How are you feeling?” Claude asks, when the silence has stretched on for long enough.
Maia considers for a long moment. Her body aches, buzzing with the weakness of exhaustion, compounded by the lightness she feels. It’s as if she will float away at any moment, and she does not have the strength to grip at anything solid. It feels like control is slipping through her slack fingers.
“Tired,” she says.
“Does – does your back hurt?” Claude’s face spasms as she says the words, but Maia cannot track it.
“No,” she says, because it’s true. It is difficult to feel anything, let alone pain.
But she can certainly remember it – that wrenching, sucking agony, the chill of numbness that had followed each one, the shudder of returning to consciousness from whiteout pain, the acrid taste of death in her mouth, the burning.
“That’s good,” Claude says. She pats Maia’s hand. Maia is struck with the overwhelming urge to yank her hand away – she tries, and her muscles groan in lethargy, twitching before falling still.
The buzzing swirls around and swallows her up.
~#~
She wakes up. She can hear footsteps. She opens her eyes.
She closes her eyes. That is not a face she wants to see. She closes her eyes and wills herself back to dreams.
~#~
She wakes up. She recognizes the alien curl to her thoughts only now that it’s gone. Her mind feels…light. Free, in a way it wasn’t before. The sympathy for those creatures is gone. The empathy – it was never hers to begin with.
Her thoughts are fiercer. Angrier. She hates the creatures in a way she never did before. Hates what they are. Hates what they did to her. Hates what they reduced her to.
She does not hate her friends. That gnawing loathing was the alien’s. She does not hate Claude – she cannot, the woman only thought she was doing what was best.
It doesn’t lessen the betrayal. It doesn’t lessen the abandonment. It doesn’t lessen the fear.
They ignored her once. Her desperate, pleading wishes. They were acting in her best interest. She knows now, how little her word is worth to them.
She does not hate her friends. She is terrified of them.
Her legs lie like fallen logs. She can barely feel the blanket on her legs, though she knows it’s heavy on her stomach. They do not respond to her, no matter how hard she tries.
The effort exhausts her.
~#~
She wakes up. There is a hand in hers again. What does it matter? She cannot stop them. She cannot stop anybody.
Her fingers can barely curl, her legs are useless, every movement exhausts her. She is not particularly talented or valuable to keep. She knows that this compound is temporary, as all things are temporary in their new world. The aliens can come today, or tomorrow, or the day after. They will be overrun. They will flee.
No one will carry her with them. No one will care. She would rather them leave a bullet in her head then leave her behind.
She would rather them leave a bullet in her head now, then leave her to imagine all sorts of horrible futures, one after the other.
In her nightmares, it burns.
It burns as the black slime crawls back into her, as that heavy presence settles down, as things bite into her skin with awful pain.
It burns with cold, awful reality.
She does not open her eyes. She lays there, and listens to the murmurs, to the snatches of conversation she can barely understand. Her hand is released and there are footsteps and someone else takes the seat. Their fingers are colder.
She listens to the low humming. The door creaks open. A cool, dispassionate voice – no. No. No.
Her consciousness drags her back down to oblivion.
~#~
She wakes. The room is silent and only when she opens her eyes does she realize that the silence still has presence.
She is still, frozen in place. Laden turns a page, and then looks up from the file in his hands and blinks. He doesn’t look surprised to see her awake.
“Does your back hurt?” he asks, the same, level voice with which he tore into her back.
Maia considers her options and goes with a simple truth. “No.”
“Does anything else hurt?” he asks.
This time, the answer is less simple and less truthful. “No.”
Laden closes the file in his arms and gets up, and the movement sends fear coiling into her heart. It is an irrational fear – the thing is out of her, there is absolutely no reason for them to be cutting into her, there is no reason to strap her down on a table, there is no reason to hurt her.
The world has never needed a reason to hurt those who are defenseless, and the sharp realization startles her.
“There a couple of tests to run while you’re awake,” he says, “Do you feel up to it?”
A question. He never cared for her answer before.
She is tired. She doesn’t want to test him now. She doesn’t want her illusion of safety shattered into pieces she can never put back together.
“Yes,” she says.
Laden nods at her and leaves the room. He returns soon, with a clipboard and a stethoscope. He asks her simple questions – about the day and where they are, about the day when the world ended, about the day the alien burrowed under her skin.
His stethoscope is cold on her back and it shifts around the bandages, around the wounds she can no longer feel. She shivers.
“The final thing is to test how bad the damage is,” he says, moving to her feet.
Maia does not understand. “My spine broke,” she says hoarsely, “The alien – the parasite fused enough of it together that I could walk.”
“Yes,” Laden says, as if he wasn’t the one who ripped it out.
“I think the limits of science have been tested in the past few years,” Laden says gently, “Of what is possible and what is not.”
Maia stares at him, and then lowers her gaze. There is no point in an argument. Perhaps if they think she can heal, she won’t be cast aside or left behind.
“Look up at the ceiling, please,” he says, his voice slipping back to its steady, mechanical tone and Maia shivers as she follows the order. His hands are nowhere near her back.
“Can you feel that?” he asks, and she has no idea what he’s talking about. She feels no change.
“No,” she says.
He hums and she closes her eyes.
“Can you feel that?” he asks again, and this time his question is accompanied by a slight pressure on her toe.
She doesn’t know if she’s imagining it or not. “Yes.”
He hums again. She can feel her toes moving, can feel light and fluttery touches on her feet. She keeps her eyes closed.
“Can you try and wiggle your toes?” he asks.
Maia tries. She tries and tries and tries, imagines it so fiercely she gives herself a headache, a scream caught in her throat as her body tenses. She tries so hard she can feel the darkness begin to creep as exhaustion pulls at her muscles but she pushes through it with panic and dread and –
“Maia,” Laden says sharply and her eyes fly open.
Laden is staring at her, and her toes are twitching.
“You can stop now,” he says and Maia sinks deeper into the bed. Everything aches.
“Can it,” she starts hoarsely, and swallows, “Can it heal? Can I walk again?”
“We can certainly try,” Laden says softly, “This is certainly an encouraging sign.”
There is no room for try.
Maia drifts off as exhaustion wins, a new goal clutched to her heart. She has to be able to walk again. No matter what it takes, no matter how bad it hurts, no matter how much it drains her.
She cannot stay defenseless. Not in a world where both strength and luck are necessary for survival.
Lovely bouquet from our kids. Thanks, Jason and Carrie. They are my favorite colors. 🙂
In my last post three months ago I shared that I had a successful lumpectomy to remove a stage one cancer in my left breast. Before the words had left the doctor saying that they got it all, she called back to say that the margins were not clear.
Not to worry, I was still stage two minus the lymph…
