Team leader stares at the picture on their monitor, the video frozen, showing the frame that gave them the confirmation of what they already feared: whumper has gotten what they wanted.
The frame shows whumpee, barely conscious in a dimly lit room, their half-naked body covered in cuts, bruises and blood. Whumper sent them a video, commenting how strong whumpee acts.
"But for how long?", whumper asks in the video, and team leader grits their teeth as they remember the chuckle that followed these words. They are determined to get whumpee back, but how?
As team leader calls the rest of the team, the others seem to know that something's up. Time's crucial in this situation, but how will they find whumpee? Will they be in time?
Team leader's heart races as they wait for the others to arrive, eyes again trained on the picture on their monitor. For how long will whumpee be strong?
I just want to be clear this is a no whumper situation, it’s hard to explain but the cabin is a sort of supernatural situation, bigger on the inside than the outside and they were lost inside for nearly a week, he was not being held captive by any one person. This isn't a long term captivity setting.
Also for the record, the two primary characters in this story have not been nor are currently involved with each other, their friendship is strictly platonic. I’m sure some people in the fandom do ship them, this fic was written with a platonic friendship in mind.
And if someone familiar with the podcast stumbles upon this, don’t mind me 😇 this was me being like “Yeah he coulda been more fucked up from that” and started writing, and then realized I’d misremembered the scene because it had been about 2 years since I listened to it last. Just making it more whumpy and then expanding from there~!
Tagging @randomlifeunit!!
~~~~
Watching them bring Nic out of the cabin is an image that will stick with me forever, no matter how much I want to forget. He looked awful. His face and clothes were streaked with blood, what little colour of his flesh I could see was pale, alabaster in the afternoon sun. His brown hair was a mess, half plastered to his head and half standing nearly on end with a mixture of dried blood and mud. He seemed completely unable to focus on his surroundings, confused and blinking warily around the clearing. For a moment his eyes settled on me and I held my breath, hoping for a flicker of recognition. Instead it seemed like he looked right through me, as though I wasn't even there.
He took slow steps away from the cabin with an officer on either side of him, their hands gripping just above his elbows as they guided him towards one of their trucks. I could hear the sirens of an ambulance making its way down the goat trail winding through the forest.
I took a step forward and called out to him. "Nic?"
His head turned towards my voice ever so slightly, but his blue eyes remained unfocused and unseeing. Before I could say anything more, they turned white as they rolled back in his head and the officers exclaimed as every muscle in his body spasmed and clenched. His head snapped back and his legs collapsed under him, the officers holding him doing their best to slowly guide him to the ground.
"Nic! Oh my god, Nic can you hear me?" I dropped to my knees next to his head, and one of the officers put his hand out to me to keep me back, but I was too scared to touch him anyways. His head bashed against the grass and the sounds that tore from his throat in a strangled cry made my stomach clench.
I heard the ambulance trundle into the clearing behind me, voices calling out to them and moments later there was a flurry of activity as the paramedics swarmed around us. The officer that had tried to keep me back now had his hands on my shoulders, trying to pull me back to give them space. I did as they asked, begrudgingly, but tried to stay as close as possible.
Despite his convulsions, one of the paramedics was able to hold his arm still enough to get an intravenous started. From where I kneeled I could see how dehydrated he was, so it took a couple of tries. They got fluids flowing and a needle injected a medication that I didn't see the name of into the port of the IV line.
Another minute passed before the seizure ended and he finally slumped against the ground. I realized I’d been holding my breath for most of it and I gasped in oxygen.
"Nic?" His name felt like it was ripped from my throat, it hurt so much to see him like this.
"Ma'am, do you know him?" One of the paramedics asked. I wiped my fingers under my eyes, trying to get rid of the tears pooling at the corners.
"Yes, he's my coworker and friend. Uh, his name's Nic. Nic Silver.”
“Does he have a history of seizures?”
I wracked my brain, trying to remember, but nothing came up. I feel like that would be something I would have remembered if he’d ever mentioned before. “No, not that I know of, but I’ve known him for a while and he’s never mentioned it.”
“Okay.” The medic shone his penlight in Nic’s eyes, calling his name and speaking almost conversationally with him as they checked him over, talking through what they were doing, asking him if he could open his eyes or squeeze their fingers if he could hear them. There was no response to any of it.
One of them pulled his bloody shirt up and revealed bruises and several deep gashes across his chest, some crusted over but others bleeding anew with the removal of the shirt. They expertly cleaned and packed the wounds in no time before the head paramedic said, “get ready to transport.”
In a flurry of activity they suddenly had Nic on a backboard and then transferred to the gurney and into the ambulance. The paramedic told me what hospital they were heading for before jumping back into the driver seat and taking off back down the windy road out of the forest and suddenly I was surrounded by the rest of the PRA team. I’d almost forgotten they were even with me on this search and immediately the interns babbled with questions, wanting to know if Nic was okay or if the medics had said anything about his condition.
I had just thrown up my hands to quiet the onslaught of questions when two men in black suits pushed through the group and I could see that look in their eyes like they were about to demand information from me.
This day was about to get even longer.
~~~
It was well after dark by the time I was leaving the police station that the black suits had sequestered an office in to question me and my team about what we knew of Nic and the other three who’d been with him in the cabin. The interns hadn’t read Nic’s journal that I’ve been reading for you so the only information they had was a timeline of when they last saw Nic or heard from him, their stories were easily corroborated and they were sent home before me.
They had a lot more questions for me, but I won’t get into it right now. I’m sure what you actually want to hear about is how Nic is doing.
I got to the hospital around 11:30 that night and prepared myself to plead with the nurses to let me see him. Thankfully with it being such a small hospital, they didn’t so much have designated daytime visiting hours but rather night time quiet hours and they allowed me in if I promised to not disturb the peace and keep any conversation to a reasonable level. I saw a couple more of the black suits milling around, watching anyone walking through the halls suspiciously and keeping a close eye on the rooms that I presumed were occupied by the members of Nic’s group. I could hear a woman wailing from a room at the very far end of the ward where two officers stood guard outside her closed door.
One officer sat outside Nic’s room who asked me who I was and how I knew Nic, writing down everything before letting me enter.
I stepped into the room and gently closed the door behind me.
The room was dim, the only light coming from the lamp set into the wall above the head of his bed. It cast shadows across Nic’s face, making him look even more gaunt than usual. His face has always had a sort of gaunt look to it, but six days of walking and only living off berries and mushrooms like he had mentioned in his journal had only made it worse. And that presumed they had still been able to find sustenance for the latter part of their journey since the last entry I read was from day four. With how often he spends doing research late into the night it’s not unusual to see dark bags around his eyes, but the shadows around his eyes were even deeper now and his left temple sported a dark purple bruise.
I approached the bed as close as I dared. He looked… better than when he walked out of the cabin, I suppose. Someone had cleaned him up, he had been changed into a hospital gown instead of the bloody and muddy clothes he’d been found in and his skin wiped clean. His hair had been rinsed out and some of his thick curls were still damp where they poked out over top of a bandage wrapped around his head. He seemed to be sleeping, or fully unconscious, I couldn’t really say. He looked peaceful though.
The heart monitor beeped quietly and steadily and I pulled the chair from the corner of the room up next to the bed and sat down, settling in for as long as the staff would allow me to stay. A nurse came in every half hour and we would chat while she checked on Nic. Her name was Nancy and she couldn’t tell me much without the doctor there, but she did say that Nic hadn’t woken up since he had been brought in. A couple times through out the night she pulled the blanket down to his waist and opened the front of his gown a bit to check that he wasn’t bleeding through any bandages and I got a look at the bruises that mottled his torso. There was hardly an unblemished spot on him.
“Can I touch him?” I finally asked her around two in the morning.
“Oh! Of course dear,” Nancy said. She sounded surprised that I even needed to ask, which now I know it sounded strange that I even had to ask, but I think I needed that reassurance. That if I touched him I wasn’t going to hurt him any more, or if I touched him I would break the illusion and I would wake up to realize we hadn’t found him at all, that this body in the bed wasn’t him.
She seemed to read the conflict on me face and she came around to the side of the bed I was sat and took my hand. With her other hand she gently lifted Nic’s hand from where it rested on top of the blanket and guided my hand under his.
As soon as our hands touched I broke into tears. He was so cold, I couldn’t help it. I could hear the heart monitor still beeping steadily on, but it was hardly a reassurance in that moment. I know I said it out loud at one point, how cold he was, and Nancy directed my hands to his wrist, placing the tips of my fingers into the pulse point and pressing ever so gently. I concentrated on that, the small gentle thrum against my fingers, something more tangible than the little peaks on a monitor. I didn’t even notice that Nancy had slipped out of the room until she returned with a warmed blanket, draping it over Nic and tucking it around his shoulders so it covered everything but his head, even getting my arms under it so I could stay holding onto his hand. She gave me a small smile when I whispered a thank you before carrying on with her rounds.
I must have fallen asleep at some point after that. It was almost five AM when I woke up, the horizon outside starting to lighten with pre-dawn light. At first I didn’t know what had woken me up, Nancy wasn’t in the room and the door was shut, the hallway outside quiet as far as I could tell.
And then the fingers resting in my hand flexed a bit and I looked up at his face to find him looking back at me through half lidded eyes. The side of his mouth twitched up into a smirk and I felt my eyes watering again.
“Hey,” he whispered, “Long time no see.”
“Hey yourself,” I sobbed back. It was a relief to see him awake and able to recognize me, to see that stupid little smirk and hear his voice again. I cried more than I should’ve, but I finally got myself together and was able to call Nancy in, who got him to drink a little bit of water and asked some questions.
He didn’t remember anything that had happened, couldn’t say where he’d been or for how long. At the time, the last thing he could remember was going to the book shop to wait for someone to show up, it wasn’t until later that he was able to tell me who he was waiting for and who it was that showed up instead. But that’s something for him to tell you about himself.
He was understandably really tired still and fell asleep mid-sentence a few minutes after Nancy left again, so I sat holding his hand and watched as the sun came up. My phone dinged as people in the PRA group chat decided it was finally a reasonable hour to start requesting an update on Nic, or if I was still at the police station or was I at home. I realized maybe I should have said something last night about where I was.
I typed out a really short update, letting the team know where I was, that Nic had woken up and was able to have a coherent conversation for a few minutes and that he was sleeping peacefully at the moment. There were many replies of relief and several volunteers to go sit with him so I could go home and sleep for a few hours, which I accepted but told them to give me a couple more hours with him.
For now I just wanted to sit and keep reassuring myself that this was real, Nic was going to be okay and not let him out of my sight for just a little while more.
A has to remain awake in order to keep the team safe, and still doesn't sleep until after the event has passed. Queue the worried team manhandling a sleep-deprived and delirious A into bed.
“It’s okay, we’re all safe now.”
“You’ve looked after us, now its time for us to look after you.”
"You guys are up late."
"Can't sleep either?"
"Any progress?"
"No. He's still in a coma. At least he isn't in any pain."
"Maybe if I went alone, maybe—"
"It's not open for discussion."
"I'm not good at sitting still."
"I understand. Believe me, I appreciate how you feel. Look, we have closed down that section of the infirmary but if you feel the need to… What I mean to say is if you would like to have a private goodbye, you should probably do it soon."
"Are we really there?"
"I think we might be."
"Dr. Weir, I need to speak to you immediately."
"What is it?"
"Meet me in your office. I think I have an idea."
