"whumpee mistaken for a whumper by caretaker because they """"punished""" other whumpees to make sure the consequences for accidents remained manageable" is truly THE trope of all time. fear? check. guilt? check. misunderstandings? check.
(Content: living weapon whumpee, past child abuse, referenced physical abuse, angst, conditioned whumpee)
~
katkittykat: imagine its the wrong house
nodiving: lmfaoooooo
~
The neighborhood was dark, dark, dark this time of night, only a thin winding string of streetlights to distinguish it from the encroaching wilderness. Nevertheless, it was a neighborhood, and that gained the ship more proximity to society than it’d had for most of its life. The little imperial suburb was dead quiet as Delta entered.
He’d left Lorelai a little ways behind, half-awake in her ship to keep watch. They both had business, but these missions came one at a time. She didn’t want to leave him, and he didn’t want to be left. Still, there was no accounting for just how lonely Delta felt as he walked through the thinning tree-line, just beyond the backyards.
The target stood out just as lightless as the others had been. A quick pulse flared out, searching for bodies, any signs of life — but all the readings came up as birds and as insects, little teeming things. The house was empty. No. Small motions. The feeling of water running, comforting even as a phantom sensation against his sixth sense.
A fish tank.
Delta approached the building. Silently, he worked the mechanism of the back window until he was able to slide it open. He lifted himself up into its frame, pulling one leg up and over into the house’s quiet interior. The gentle trickle of water grew audible. Only the light of dormant electronics — and the strange and ghostly blue of the tank — guided his way. He took a moment to appreciate the aquarium. Sharp-toothed, docile things stared back at him with curious eyes. Even small things like that were enough to make him homesick.
Delta found a comfortable seat in the empty living room and waited.
~
Tires crunched on the gravel of the driveway, and a two long beams of light were cast through the front windows to herald the car’s arrival. Delta steadied himself, settling further into the chair as one hand creeped up towards the lamp.
The front door opened, and only for a minute was the entering figure silhouetted against the night sky. As the door closed, all the darkness was made equal again. Delta’s pulse still beat beneath his conscious attention — and he could parse the figure just fine. He reached one psychic limb out to lock the door as he flickered the lamp light on.
Simon startled, falling back against the door in an appropriate panic. He did this before his eyes had adjusted, before he even recognized the intruder. When the door did not open, and he saw the scene in front of him, it did not work to calm him.
Delta was looking more like his old self than he had in years. His black hair hung loose at a familiar length, and his eyes glowed with the same dangerous intensity. He was dressed in black now, so as not to draw attention to himself as he moved through the undergrowth. It all worked to make the image more dreamlike and uncanny as he lounged there, in the flesh. He watched impassively as the old scientist came to his senses — whatever sense remained.
“Oh my god,” Simon said in hushed greeting.
“…Oh my god.”
“Hello, Simon,” Delta returned.
“Delta.” There was a controlled curtness in how the man handled his name. A little too firm to be soothing. Simon slid back against the wall, scanning with wide eyes behind larger spectacles. “…Hey. Hey,” Simon said when the boy started to move. One of his hands raised up —open palm — to stop him, or to signal one half of a surrender. The scientist spoke more hastily.
“I know you’re mad at me,” Simon soothed. “And you have every right to be. But let’s talk about this first, okay? We’ll talk. Don’t do anything rash.”
The fear was plain on his face. Delta tilted his head to the side. He frowned.
“I’m not here to hurt you, Simon.” His voice came out calmer, softer. It was hushed too, with a kind of mute horror. How could he even think that? When had Delta ever hurt him?
Nevertheless, Simon’s gaze remained fearful and untrusting.
“You’re alive,” he stated.
“Yes,” Delta confirmed.
The scientist shook his head as he slowly pulled himself away from the door, further into the house. He said: “I knew there was something…” but he trailed off and did not finish the thought. Delta watched him with a placid ease. His power hummed throughout the room, granting him an unfamiliar kind of safety. They both knew it.
“I need to sit down, okay?” Simon said. He sort
of staggered over to the counter, leaning up against one of the kitchen stools. His movement was agitated. He was dressed well. He no longer stared at Delta — either because the disbelief was fading or because he recognized that he wouldn’t see anything coming, if it did come. “What do you want?”
“…What do I want?” Delta repeated back, deadpan.
“Yes. I-,” Simon cut himself off, pausing to press his hand to his temple. He took a deep breath, and spoke less hurried from there on: “Forgive me, Delta. It’s been a rough few years.”
That it had.
“But — how are you alive?” Simon asked.
He was met with the same unyielding cyan blankness. Simon deflated a little in return. It didn’t take much for him to tell when Delta was in a bad mood.
“Industry secret. You’ll forgive me if I don’t share the specifics with you. Surely,” Delta managed. It sent a little jolt through him, bordering much too close to real rudeness. Simon let him get away with a lot, but taking a tone like that was unacceptable.
“Mm.” Simon removed his jacket. “Sure. You’ve earned that. Did you- did you mean that earlier? That you’re not here to hurt me?”
“Why would I want to hurt you?” Delta asked, wholly genuine. “You were nice to me.”
“We tortured you.”
Delta shrunk back, shifting uncomfortably in the seat. Chills ran up and down him. It didn’t feel good to hear. Almost timidly, he said: “Can’t you just be happy to see me?”
“Oh, come here,” Simon sighed. His exasperation could be dangerous. “Let me look at you.”
Obediently, Delta rose and approached. Simon, thankfully, was not so bold as to attempt to touch him. Delta might not have been able to handle that.
There wasn’t all that much to see. Long black sleeves and loose pants covered most of Delta’s skin, leaving really just his hands and face exposed. No bruises were visible anywhere, nor extent at all. There was just the electrical scarring along his bare neck.
Simon studied him for a few long moments, before his composure began to crumble.
“Oh, honey,” he lamented, shielding his eyes with his hand. He sniffled. “You look healthy.”
Delta flushed blue beneath the skin, growing bashful under the appraisal. He felt nervously at his wrists, as if appreciating the flesh there, the fact it wasn’t rubbed raw. Simon recovered quickly enough. Somewhat. His eyes were oddly bright even in the dim light, and his voice still came out a little choked. Only in that moment did Delta realize how much older his handler looked.
“I’m not an idiot, Delta. I know I failed you,” Simon spelled out with caution. Despite the slow rhythm, his manner was intense and serious. “It was never supposed to be like that. You were still a child. I should’ve done a better job of protecting you. I’m sorry.”
Something shattered in the back of the weapon’s mind. Dangerous tears surged forward in the recesses, but the company kept them at bay. Delta still couldn’t quite bring himself to cry in front of a handler. He bit his own lip hard before he could find the words to speak again. Borrowed words. He echoed them back:
“You’re sorry now?” He couldn’t keep the bitter frustration out of his voice. Delta took a step back, looking around the room like it might hold the answers for him. He glowered: “Why is everyone sorry now? Instead of when it mattered? I don’t need it now. It doesn’t do me any good.”
The pain in his chest was so immense for a second that he could hardly breathe. That wasn’t what he wanted to say. He didn’t want to be angry. He didn’t want to be hurt.
“…Everyone?” Simon parsed. A few beats of silence passed. He sounded more fearful as he spoke again, but retained a cautious gentleness. “Delta, what did you come here for?”
With that, Delta stood down, falling a few steps back into the darkness as he tried to recover a more natural way of existing in the space. His own directive had felt distant for a moment, swept up as he was in the shock of seeing him. He felt like Simon had disarmed him somehow.
“Just want what’s mine,” Delta remembered. “I want any files you have on me. Everything you documented. You owe it to me.”
His handler considered this for a moment. He propped one elbow on the counter, staring off into space: “Is that all?”
It was.
“Alright.” Simon rapped his knuckles against the surface, standing up. “Sit tight. Can I get you anything? Are they feeding you enough?”
“I’m okay, sir.” Delta watched him carefully.
The sightline had to be maintained. He paid careful attention to Simon’s hands, to anything he touched. The scientist moved further into the kitchen. He turned the burner on beneath the kettle. The flame of the stove provided a new, surreal light to the space.
“It’s Galatea, isn’t it?” Simon guessed. “Took you in?”
Delta didn’t respond at first. After careful consideration, he answered: “I don’t belong to anyone now.”
A blush rose up to his cheeks as he said it. He found it a little trite, a little embarrassing to admit, but he meant it sincerely. It’d taken a lot of work to internalize. It still felt so new.
Simon placed dried leaves into two mugs. Delta read the writing on them: from interplanetary conferences, from tourist traps. It tickled him a little to recognize the names. He’d killed people there.
It took about twenty minutes for all the physical documents to be gathered in one place. Only with great hesitance did Delta let his handler out of his sight, and not once did he dim the sphere of influence. The phone lines to the house had been cut in preparation, but as far as he could tell, Simon made no attempt to alert anyone. Instead, he poured the hot water over the leaves, sliding the drink over to Delta.
Simon must have noticed the hesitation, because he took a sip from his own cup before he spoke.
“Do you think I’m going to drug you?” he asked.
“You have drugged me,” Delta stared.
“Ah. Touché.” Simon shrugged. He took another sip. “I missed you terribly, Delta. I’ve replayed those final weeks over and over again in my mind for as long as you’ve been gone. I’m glad that you’re free now. I wouldn’t do anything to harm you.”
“…Wouldn’t you?” Delta asked softly. “You beat me until I cried.”
Simon looked at him sadly. “I’m sorry. I told you I was sorry.”
He seemed like he wanted to say something else, but was having difficulty with it. Delta glanced around the room. He felt tempted to give the man an out, some dormant draw of sympathy. But the pain was so acute. He was so sad.
“I’m retired,” Simon followed up, eventually. “I’ve tried to put it all behind me. I don’t do much of anything these days. Besides litigation. Maybe you heard.”
Delta raised an eyebrow in polite inquiry. Simon seemed to smile at that, amused at the flicker of emotion on a face so characterized by its absence. He continued.
“Nezu gave me the runaround. Did it to virtually everyone on Paris’s staff, but he had a special interest in me. Told me it was the labs or the rope. I refused. I told him I’d be no good at it, that my expertise had nothing to do with whatever freak show he was running. He got me blacklisted, but he seems reluctant to have me killed. He thinks if he intimidates me enough, I’ll cave. But I don’t want anything to do with it. I won’t make the same mistake twice.”
There was a lot of shock that came with the whole notion of Simon speaking to him like a person. In captivity, he treated Delta much like a child. The subtle acknowledgment of his intelligence, of his capacity for reason — it left him a little bitter. But he turned the information over in his head. He resisted the urge to apologize for the trouble.
“Do you think I was a mistake?” Delta tilted his head.
Simon hesitated. He said: “I love you, Delta. I’m sorry.”
Delta nodded, blushing. Okay. He didn’t know how he would’ve answered that either, in all fairness.
The mention of Nezu and the labs made him very, very nervous. The term freak show made him very, very upset.
“It’s okay,” Delta answered. “I’m not mad at you. I’m really not. I never wanted for you to get hurt over any of this.”
He played idly with the sleeve of his shirt. The documents were spread out before him like an autopsy, and he was reluctant to touch it the way he might shrink back near a corpse.
“Are you going to be okay?” Delta mouthed.
Simon shrugged, taking another sip from his cup. Delta’s remained untouched. Carefully, he placed his nails by the nearest workbook.
A cursory glance over the papers revealed their exact age. They were all dated after Simon had taken the case, and recounted events and developments in the same person. Delta read out a physical description of himself as a young teenager, at a shorter height, with injuries that must have been very shocking to see the first time. Simon’s footnotes described him as quiet and polite and smug.
Delta bit his lip. A map of a nearby canyon was dotted with crosses which marked how the practice was going. There were readouts of his blood pressure throughout the training day, how his neural activity fluctuated. There were progress reports. Write ups.
107 had to be disciplined today. The doctor gave him twenty with the cane, which nears the legal limit for someone his age. I’m told he doesn’t receive the same protections legally, but it’s still a good benchmark to follow.
This wasn’t even what he came here for. Why pause to read it?
When he looked up, Simon’s gaze was settled on that same excerpt, lips pressed tight together with what was only sane mortification. The vision comforted Delta somewhat. Barely.
He flipped the page, skimming a few further mission reports. Allusions to the then-living Constantine, which made his heart hurt. Medical documents. More sparsely, fragments of Delta’s own psyche that he’d for some reason felt compelled to reveal.
Kid had a dream about wading in dark water. He said he could feel skin and hair beneath his feet, like he was treading over a drowned corpse. He couldn’t breathe when he woke up. I put him on oxygen and gave him some pills to calm down. I’ll let him sleep late tomorrow to make up for it.
That wasn’t what he came here for either.
~
“…Most of this is useless to me,” Delta concluded, having worked through the whole hoard.
Simon glanced up. He’d been trawling through it too, a gesture that read to Delta as blatantly nostalgic.
“You’re not the first one to come asking for these, for the record. Government asked me to hand over all of it, as well as all of Martino’s work. I told them it’d already been destroyed. That was a real request of his, by the way. He never wanted the experiments replicated. Threw a fit when anyone tried to talk to him about cloning. God forbid.”
Simon tapped his fingers gently on the counter, and seemed to consider his words very carefully. Quietly, he asked: “Whatever happened to him, anyway?”
“I killed him,” Delta answered.
The room fell silent, void of air. All that remained was the gentle trickle and the rippling of water from the aquarium in the adjacent room. Delta did his best not to look Simon in the face after that, eyes carefully averted, but he could sense the displeasure written across it.
“…He had children,” Simon said finally.
“Oh, he had children?” Delta scoffed.
Contempt grew in him like a cancer, and for a minute he felt too sick for words. Simon raised his hands in mock surrender. Even he had to have understood how he’d misspoken.
Delta sulked, too caught up in the death dream to parse what had been said at first. He glanced up.
“…Did you just say Martino’s work was destroyed?” he repeated. He could practically hear his own heart rate increasing.
“Well, I said that. But it isn’t. I’ve still got most of the hard copies backed up, and I saved his work computer.” Simon winked.
Delta’s hands stilled on the countertop as his expression grew vastly more intense. “Please bring them to me immediately.”
He did so. Delta wondered why he hadn’t just gathered them from the jump, but upon closer inspection, much of it was borderline incomprehensible. He’d need Apollo to translate it for him, if he really wanted to know. And he wasn’t sure if he did. The sections he could understand were not comforting.
There were two laptops. Delta recognized both, but only one made his heart drop.
“Found it when I searched your room,” Simon said casually. “I never mentioned it to anyone. I couldn’t get it unlocked, so I figured you didn’t want anyone going through it.”
Delta froze, staring at him. He couldn’t quite place the feeling. Gratitude was the closest thing. He supposed this unnamable regard was the one which had characterized most of his interactions with Simon, and which might only increase from then on.
He gathered the laptops up, throwing them in his bag.
“They’re both locked,” Simon clarified. “Be careful not to break them.”
“I got it,” Delta answered. Or, at least Kitty would have it. He was shaking a little. Don’t break it. Don’t break it.
It was getting late. He’d stayed longer than he meant to. Lorelai would worry. He needed enough time to retreat under cover of darkness. But Delta gave a final glance around the room, and felt his own resistance. He’d lose control of the room when he left it.
“Are you going to be okay?” he repeated. “The litigation, I mean. Are they going to let you off the hook for it? Is there anything I can do?”
Delta had been let off the hook in a way that still shocked him to this day. He found himself wishing the same for most of his contemporaries. Neither Simon nor Paris ever seemed to be punished for what they’d actually done wrong. The Empire always came down on them for the wrong reasons.
“We’ll see,” Simon answered, a slightly grating air of mystery. Gentler, he added: “Don’t worry, kiddo. I can handle myself. I handled the rest of it.”
Of course. There would have been nobody else around to manage the aftermath. By all accounts, Simon was the sole survivor.
Delta had heard the story before, but he did his part now to confirm. He wanted another source: “Do you know what happened to Paris?”
“Nope. He left about a week after you. Probably dead in a ditch right now, good fucking riddance.”
Delta didn’t object to that. He shifted the bag on his shoulder. “Did he say anything to you?”
“Please don’t go looking for him now,” Simon begged. “It’s not worth being wherever he ended up. Stay out of imperial territory, Delta. Haven’t you gotten your fill of it? You shouldn’t have even come this close.”
Delta shrugged. He didn’t feel like he was in any danger. Even the next part felt more like a formality than anything else.
“I trust you’ll keep this meeting between us, then? That I won’t have to worry about you ratting me out?”
“Come on. Who do you think I am? I owe you that much.”
“Alright. Remember I know where you live.”
“You can’t even say it with a straight face.”
Delta frowned. He thought his face was straight. But he couldn’t bring himself to seriously threaten the man. It felt improper and it felt mean. It was a betrayal of his own heart.
He stepped forward cautiously. Despite all the discordant context, Simon somehow seemed to understand what he wanted. He extended his arms as Delta got closer, wrapping him up into a hug.
“Thank you,” Delta said, muffled.
Simon ruffled his hair, which brought a self-conscious glow to his face. Delta slowly pulled away, making his way back to the window.
“Take care of yourself, Delta,” Simon called after him.
Delta nodded, mouthing a small “you too” as he exited.
He felt the weight of the laptops in his bag, and found a real comfort in it.
Lately I've been so fascinated by the concept of characters being grabbed/held by the face, not even as just a whump or angst thing.
Like a parent telling their child that of course they love them, caressing their face with both hands, a thumb smearing away salty tears.
Two lovers holding each other by the face, pulling their faces together into a kiss.
There's something so intense about a whumper forcing/tilting whumpee's head up with both hands, fully ahold of whumpee's jaw or cheeks.
And I'm always a huge fan of a nonhuman character being gently held on both sides of their head too by human character.
Is it a show of mesmerization, pity, love, yearning... The vulnerability of letting someone have their hands on your head. The invasiveness of someone doing so unexpectedly. The intimate affect of someone doing so lovingly.
in order to truly get rid of misogyny in fandoms we need to treat girl characters the same way we treat guy characters. Say you’d hit her with your car. Say you want to see her crying and trying and failing to keep her emotions hidden. Say you want her to get worse. Say you want to chew on her like a squeaky toy. For feminism
fantasy really did cook with dragons as an allegory for weapons of mass destruction, more specifically as a symbolic manifestation of the insatiable greed that drives men to seek to claim ownership and control over such weapons
like oh man i sure hope your dismissal and objectification of highly independent and intelligent beings as "savage beasts" and the fiercely possessive pride you take in their subjugation doesn't reflect your broader ideological values haha. can you even imagine.
happy "grab your whumpee by the hair and slam their head into the floor/desk/table and break their nose and/or concuss them" wednesday. thursday? depends on time zone...
drag them upright again afterwards i want to see the dazed look on their face and the trickle of blood from their nose and down their chin that they're in no state to care about
I hope every writer who sees this writes LOADS the next few months. Like freetime opens up, no writers block, the ability to focus, etc etc you're able to write loads & make lots of progress <3
romaincrisis
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