"I'm not sure I understand," Caretaker frowned. They leaned back against the kitchen counter, watching as Whumpee glared at them from the dining room table. "You're always saying that you believe you're your own person, and that you deserve to be taken seriously. All I did was agree with you-"
"It's fucking weird!" Whumpee snapped. "Of course I say those things - I believe them. I benefit from those things. You don't!"
They'd half expected Caretaker to realise their mistake and agree. Instead, Caretaker continued to stare at them with that infuriating little frown on their face. No anger, just confusion. "Why wouldn't I benefit from taking you seriously? You're very intelligent. You've got a good heart."
Caretaker's head tilted to the side a little, examining them in a way that made Whumpee instinctively shrink into themselves. "I don't think you do really believe those things, which is sad, because I do."
Price x f!Reader.
-
Dom/sub dynamics. whipping. vivisection as a metaphor for love. boot riding. throat-fucking. angst. aftercare. 18+ MDNI. Ao3
The bedroom is dim when you enter, lights turned low. Price watches you stop in your tracks at the unexpected darkness; watches you look around and catch sight of him.
He’s in the chair in the corner of the room. Hasn’t been waiting long—expected you to arrive, in fact, around this very moment. Your schedule and all of its minute quirks, tiny variations you might insert out of hunger, or boredom, or fixation on some new hobby, play out like clockwork in the back of his mind, no matter when or where he is.
A mnemonic. More accurately, a memorare. Entreaty to some higher power, as if to remind Death that he has someone far more important to get home to.
You take him in. His ankle is propped up on the opposite knee, glass of scotch hanging carelessly from his fingers, crystalline bottom brushing the carpeted floor. Your eyes focus on the orange-red cherry of his cigar—
—you startle a little when you meet his gaze.
He doesn’t blame you. His pulse beats heavy through his veins. Every breath he takes is slow and controlled, miasmic as it leaves his lungs. He feels less a man and more a vessel for something seething and wrathful, smog rolling in and in again on itself, eddying when it hits the boundaries keeping it contained.
Noxious. Fetid.
The glow of his cigar probably reflects in his eyes.
Borderline pyrolic.
You look at the coiled whip resting ophidian and black over his thigh. His free hand rests along it, thumbnail toying with the braided leather.
“Not a word,” he says evenly. His voice leaves him like it’s coated in sandpaper, debriding the column of his esophagus.
Your gaze snaps back up to his. Holds it.
Searching, maybe.
Your lips do not part. Instead, you wait.
The next breath he takes comes and goes a little easier—but only just.
“Strip,” he says, “and cuff yourself to your post.”
On a better night—a kinder one—he would’ve asked if you needed more directions. Checked in first, even, or warned you ahead of time of his intentions. This thing that exists between the two of you was cultivated in the open, fertilized with his own candor as he told you what he wanted, needed, like turning over a rock to see what squirmed beneath it. It grew as you trellised it together and discovered, through trial and error, what you needed to survive it.
Reward incentives. Good reason to give a damn about what he tells you to do.
But tonight is not a kind one. Venom pumps through his veins—caustic. Acrid. Hissing and spitting in his chest, already drawn back and ready to strike.
Maybe you can tell, as you stand there, watching him. Maybe you don’t feel like protesting. Or, just maybe, you need this, too, need it in the way you’ve begged him for in the past when the present moment felt ephemeral and unreal—because you obey.
You toe out of your heels. Pull your shirt over your head, your skirt down your legs. It’s an outfit he’s expressed appreciation for in the past; the wide drape of the collar exposing your clavicles, the long seams down your hips that buckle as your thighs hold the fabric taut.
You fold everything like a good girl and set them aside on the bed, and then remove your bra and panties—nude silk, no lace, sensible and comfortable and paid for with his card—to place them atop the pile.
Price isn’t in a mood to care why you acquiesce. All that matters to him is that you walk to your nightstand and remove the padded cuffs from the drawer, then to the bedpost on your side of the bed. You remove the endcap hiding the loop of steed embedded into the wood, fasten yourself with a padlock only he has the key to—
And then you kneel, naked, on the carpeted floor.
Giving him your bare back, the dim light sinking shadows into the notches of your spine.
Price says nothing. He doesn’t have a kind word anywhere in his alveoli. There usually aren’t any, when he first comes home, nor could a single one get past the bars of his vocal cords if it tried. This has grown too nacreous, too hypergranulated in his mantle, and it demands excision. He taps the ash from his cigar and sips at his scotch, the dregs burning a line hot and corrosive down his throat.
He sets the glass aside. Rises.
Brandishes the whip once with a sharp snap.
You flinch; your skin is filmy and thin in the gloaming. Horripilation lifts the follicles along your bare arms; the scant light of the bedroom catches your hair standing on end.
He watches a slow tremble work its way to your suspended fingers. Your back expands as you take a deep breath in, and contracts as you exhale, shadows the width of his fingers pooling into and draining away from the valleys between your extruded ribs.
You pull in another deep breath, one, two, three, four, five, and let it go at the same meter. Calming the anticipation the way he taught you.
He draws his arm back, lunges, and the whip cracks against your bare back.
You gasp sharply and go rigid in shock. Price watches the pain spread outward from the lash into your limbs. Bleeding down into the fibers of your muscles; sinking through osseous matter into your marrow like dye takes to cloth. You shift on your knees, a shiver snaking its way up your back.
It’s always cataclysmic, that first bite of pain. Every nerve ending suddenly alive and on high alert. Charged up. Inadvertently destining the next strike to fall even harder by sensory comparison.
Then, the welt appears, rising in reply to the scourge. A clean, sharp return stroke, an echo of the braided leather just beginning its reverberation.
Something cleaves in Price’s chest. Some tight membrane splits open, seeping felsic, hot and black, dripping steadily into his bloodstream. Effusive. Not a dam breaking, but a fissure in the stone.
Your breathing quickens—
And then he whips you again, harder, laying the stroke right next to the first. You cry out when it lands, but he leaves no time for you to prepare for the third, drawing, lunging, and lashing again at unspoiled skin.
You shake in your bonds. He whips you again, laying another diagonally from shoulder to hip as fog blooms across his vision. You wail like breaking glass, china falling from the cabinet, cut crystal flowering in pieces on hardwood floor.
The same tenor he hears when he has you on your back, cock burrowed in your cunt and bullying the plug of your cervix.
Too much, too hard, but your nails dig into his arse and you cry even harder when he lets up.
He whips you again. Welts lift across the known topography of your back—intersecting every angle of your shoulder blades, orogenies shifting and transforming the landscape into something new.
Only passing familiar with the dips and curves he often walks the tips of his fingers across.
Again. The planes of your back tighten, as if solidity will lessen the impact of the lash. Again, right across the tight line of your shoulders—you shriek, thrashing, hands fisting as you pull and swing futilely in the cuffs.
Geography added to. New land raised like it was beckoned by the hand of God. Hot and magamatic on the inside, too delicate to touch without collapsing in on itself.
Again. He snaps the whip, shaping the parabola with the jerk of his arm, shaping the line of a hill like a child’s drawing, then brings it down, sharply, cutting the fall across the meat of your hip. A hillside he often dwarfs with the ugly size of his hands.
Price envies the whip sometimes for its privilege. He’s never been able to lay hands on you directly for its purpose; not easily, at least. The flat of his palms have known the meat of your arse, have made ample flesh ripple like tossing stones across water, but he can’t employ them for much else without turning his own stomach.
He can pull your hair, wrap your throat in his grasp, shackle your wrists or the slopes of your hips in an iron grip, dig his fingers into your thighs and stomach like trying to tunnel through wedges of clay. Often afterwards he’s transfixed by the marks he leaves behind—dotted bruises aligned with the arc and spread of his fingers, or blotchy oblongs fitted to the heel of his hand.
Indelible evidence that Price Was Here.
He’ll try to match the grip that left them, his touch as light and gentle as a dove’s wing; a paintbrush without pigment, remembering the strokes it left behind. Synapses in his brain firing colors to match, claiming them for himself.
He put them there. That makes them his. That makes you his.
But striking you barehanded is beyond even his limits. No matter that you’d allow it. Have allowed it—
He whips you again. Draw. Lunge. Crack. You jolt against the bedpost, throw your head back, buck your entire body to work the pain through it.
One scene, similar to this, tephra building up in his craw and threatening to catalyze if he didn’t find some hurried way to exorcise it.
Some mission gone bad; some idiot disobeying his orders. People dying who didn’t need to.
He’d slapped you across the face, after forcing you to your knees with his fist in your hair—sent you tumbling to the floor. The next thing that had occurred to him had been to swing his foot back—
And the bile had risen so quickly up his throat that he’d frozen. He’d stared at you, on the floor. Lying there, sprawled and waiting. Fear in your eyes—but you weren’t moving.
His collapse after had been swift. He’d fallen to his knees and crawled to you, gathered you up like a stuffed toy and buried his mouth in your hair and hadn’t let you go for nearly three hours. Price can count on one hand how many times he’s cried in his adult life, and this had added one more to the tally.
It’s one thing to send his fury along through leather or wood or crop, and quite another to deliver it to you like you actually deserve it.
So, the whip.
You moan as the next stroke hits. Something long and stretched-out. Caramelized—molasses subducting the bite of the fall, sucrose splitting in the phreatic churn of draw, lunge, lash.
He pauses briefly to look you over. Claw-mark weals, like he’s been dragging his blunt nails down your back, hatch the skin paralleling your spine. Your heels press divots into the bare cheeks of your arse; you squirm in his gaze, drawing them together as you tighten your thighs.
There’s a moment when pain transforms. When heat fills the empty spaces between moving, frantic particles and melds in around them. Capturing them in place.
The calcaneus of one foot finds its way between your folds as you shift; your whole body twitches from it, and you lift your hips a little. There’s an obscene squelch as you settle down again, slick dribbling down your heel into the arch.
Price lunges. The whip cracks. You low like a trapped animal, grinding, and the pitch of your voice swoops upward when he lays another lash right on top of the previous.
Dangerous. Taunting something welling up to the surface, testing what it can take before it breaks. Price knows better.
Knows better, but the roil and hiss in his gut yawns wider with every lash, trembling as a fed appetite is only whetted. Horrible feedback loop—the cry of your voice, he often thinks, is the only thing that could possibly satisfy him, but when he gets it, Price can’t be satisfied.
A taste demands mouthful. A meal demands a banquet. When he hears you wail, he wonders how many different ways he can make you do it, how many octaves are there, hidden away, for him to tease out of you.
He knows everything about you. Everything. He knows every dip and curve of your body, every jutting bone, every creaky joint, every fold and roll and wrinkle. Sometimes he thinks he's got individual hair follicles memorized.
With the whip, or the scourge, or any other tool, the reward for his greed is ephemeral. The known plains present themselves as blank canvas, and for a while, after his work is wrought, there’s something new for him to fixate on. New patterns to trace his fingers along.
Sometimes he thinks he wants to cut you open, just to see what more of you he’s been missing.
Stomach. Lungs. Intestines. Arterial pathways leading to your soft, beating heart. All he wants, he thinks, is to see them. Say hello to them. Run his tongue along their membranes, caress each tiny capillary webbing them together with the lightest brush of his teeth, if only just to organize his experience of them into the archives of you that he keeps locked behind his ribs.
More of you. He always wants more of you.
He lunges again. The whip sings in the air, and the cracker bites again into your flesh. You undulate like rippling water, breath coming out in erratic stops and starts, and then you give a full body yank against your cuffs—
This time, he’s broken skin.
You curl in on yourself, suddenly going still. Your thighs tighten; your scapulae rise, shoulders touching the lobes of your ears.
As you’re if holding onto something that will escape; balancing, on an unsteady surface, something fragile. Delicate as spun glass.
It isn’t deep. A pearl of crimson wells up in the trough, collapsing when the mass betrays the surface tension. It trails a thin, straight line down your back as it slips between stark weals still yet to split open.
You haven’t moved; your body is a trembling fist.
Price takes a long, ragged breath. He asks the question, although he already knows the answer.
“Did you come?”
You shake your head.
Of course not. His good fucking girl—you’re waiting for permission.
Price extracts the little key from his trouser pocket and goes to where your wrists hang limp from the bedpost. The lock turns with a small click, and your arms drop like heavy stones. A breath of relief, involuntary, leaves you.
Price wraps your hair around his fist and yanks you back a little like pulling a dog on a leash. He rounds you, looming above your kneeling form, and wedges the tip of his boot between your knees.
It’s not a new pair. He’s had them for years, and the leather shows it, even despite regular maintenance. They’re brutish things, squarish and unkindly shaped, rough at the edges. Meant to trample underbrush and kick through teeth. A scratched-up battering ram between the soft skin of your thighs.
You lift your hips immediately to open the way for him. Automatic. Pavlovian.
He lifts the toe against your clit in reward, circles it, dragging your folds around. Your lips fall open; glittering, rheumy eyes stare up at him as your cuffed hands circle his knee.
Something soft in Price’s chest touches the inside of his sternum.
His hand goes to the zipper at his groin, and he draws his cock out. In the furor of the lash, he hadn’t even realized how hard he was, but he feels blistering in his own palm, the head ruddy and ugly with it, the veins thick and pulsing. Equally as inappropriate to subject you to.
He drags your head to his cock with his firm grasp in your hair. You don’t need to be told—your mouth drops, and he pushes in without preamble, grunting short and hard when the flat of your tongue melts along the broad artery on the underside of his shaft.
“Rut,” he husks, shifting his boot beneath you, “until you come.”
You moan around him. The vibration of your vocal cords travels up his cock, reverberating with an intensity that has him shoving into your throat with a snarl. You choke at the intrusion, saliva bubbling at the corners of your mouth, but your hips bear down on his boot, thighs clenching it at the sides.
Your whole body rolls and humps against his leg, cuffed wrists coming up so your hands can wrap around the meat of his thigh. You scrabble at the canvas, dig your nails into the weave of his trousers like you want to tear through it to get at his skin underneath.
The whole time, your eyes never leave his, glistening with tears that shiver on your lashes as they threaten to fall. He grits his teeth as your lips pull out around him as he withdraws, and then thrusts short and hard into your mouth in time with the frantic cant of your pussy up and down his boot.
He can feel the heat of your sex even through the leather, could swear that he can count the contractions as you clench around nothing, the tiny bud of your neglected clitoris rasping against the unkind fibers of his boot laces.
Obedient to perfection.
You’re past the threshold as you lean back a little, levering your body to change the angle at which your pussy engulfs his foot, and he half-steps forward to follow you so his cock doesn’t escape your mouth. You roll against him, a full-body wave that lifts chest, then stomach, then hips—
And then he sees it take you as you freeze in place, muscles tensing all at once.
Your eyes roll back, throat convulsing around him as quick, reedy mewls travel up his shaft in quick succession. Your whole body shakes with it, frenetic as you hump his boot to prolong it, loosening the knot he’d tied with your vigor.
He pulls out a little to let you breathe through the end of it, but when you realize what he’s doing you dig your nails into his thigh, following him back. You catch his gaze with yours, eyes pleading, brows knitting together in entreaty. The claws become cupped hands, stroking up and down, and you bob your head a little, hollowing your cheeks.
Price huffs a breath. He hadn’t planned for an orgasm for himself for this. Rewards are for people who earn them.
This—this isn’t that.
But your eyelids lower in pleasure as you take him deeper, saliva slicking the way to his base, and Price has never been able to deny you anything.
His grip around your hair becomes a soft palm on the back of your head, guiding you steady, and he props his shin up along your stomach, knee between your breasts to give you balance.
It’s an orison; tossed into the caldera, something precious given to gravity and the incandescent fate at the other side of it. Your lips melt around him softly, tongue skimming his length like the reaching strand of a candle flame twirling around the tip of his finger.
He loves you so frightfully much.
“That’s it,” he huffs. “Such a good girl for me, aren’t you?”
You moan in your throat, eyes closed, lashes against your damp cheeks.
“Yeah,” he continues, digging his fingers into your hair. “Too good for the likes of me—mmm—”
You suckle around him, pulling all the way back to mouth at the head of his cock before engulfing him again, cuffed hands rising higher to nestle one into the crevice of his groin and thigh and to spread the other over his hip. His breath quickens, and he brings his other hand to the back of your head, digging the fingers of both into your scalp.
You accept the roll of his hips with a little laugh that escapes through your nose, opening your jaw wide; making room for him to take what he pleases, again, how he pleases, as he thrusts faster, harder, taking what you give freely and delving harder for even more—
The head of his cock bullies your soft palette as his pubic hair tickles your lips, and then it shoots through him, up and down his spine, and he rams into your throat, forcing your nose to his mons as his cock pulsates, erupting hot and viscous, heartbeat forcing his cum out in deep, rhythmic pulses he feels across his whole body.
When you swallow around him his whole body heats up, balls clenching as they empty themselves into you, and he punches his hips in again short and hard as the last vestiges of his climax play out.
You hold him in your throat until he pulls you away, and then you take a long, wet gasp, hot breath fanning across his softening cock as it falls down, drained out. Tear tracks are silvery down your face, lashes stuck together with lipids and salt.
He brings one hand to your cheek, caressing beneath your eye gently with one callused thumb. Sweat beads along your hairline, and your skin is sticky and humid, glistening with perspiration that pools in your collarbones.
He feels his own sweat running down his chest, along and around the follicles of his chest hair and down toward his navel. Your eyes follow each drop; he thinks you’d lean forward and lick them up, if he told you to, even though he can see the exhaustion pulling at you.
“You good?” he finally asks, his voice coated in grit, but steady as it leaves him.
It’s what he always says, after.
You open your eyes to meet his, and this, too, is a moment repeated. He searches. Waits for doubt or fear or dismay to flicker in your gaze, some omen that he’s gone too far, that this, finally, has been too much for you to take from him.
You grace him with a little smile. The lines of your face are slack and loose. Your expression is smooth—languid, floating on satisfaction.
“I’m good,” you say, calm and tranquil—
And the smoke clears from his eyes.
-
He rubs the indent around your finger, branded by your wedding ring in your clenching fist, and brings the knuckle to his mouth to kiss his apology into your skin.
“What happened?” you ask.
You’re boneless, splayed on the mattress with your belly to the duvet. Your head rests against the pillow, face turned toward him.
Even in the haze of afterglow, filaments of oxytocin and dopamine unspooling, your eyes are sharp. Insightful.
You know him too well.
John kisses your ring finger again and returns to the oblations he owes for his violence. The lines on your back are ugly, dotted with broken capillaries and set to linger for weeks. He applies aloe gel, cooled in the fridge, in a thick, generous layer with a soft brush. The kind your aesthetician uses on the rare occasion you treat yourself to some time at the spa, dragging the bristles lightly across your face, around the apples of your cheeks and the corners of your lips.
Softer than he can possibly touch you right now with his callused fingers. A consequence of his vice; flayed skin, lifted weals, cannot tolerate the weight or heat of his hand, no matter how curative or contrite. He destines his own gentle touch to futility.
The one place he broke skin will probably take a month to heal.
A puff of air zips by his ear again. So close as to be your gasp. The rock behind him explodes around a .50 caliber round. Fragments of dry stone, osseous and pale, shower his neck and back.
“The usual,” Price says.
With a q-tip, John dabs bacitracin along the open gash down one side of your back. It isn’t very long or very deep. It might not even scar.
When John is gone—deployed or dead, the difference is negligible, really—there will be no evidence of his presence in your life that you can’t get rid of. It kept occurring to him throughout his deployment, after the near miss.
Everything of his in the house you share, you can box up and donate. Deep clean the place to eradicate whatever traces of his scent are left behind. You can cut your hair in some new style he’ll never see, wear all new clothes, choose a new perfume.
You can take off your wedding band. Shove it in a box in some forgotten drawer, or just pawn it.
It’s childish. Downright adolescent. Snapping your bra like a pimply cunt in secondary school, because the only way he knows how to etch himself into the bedrock of your memory is with pain.
“I’m sorry,” you say, reaching out with one lolling hand.
He leaves the q-tip on your back and clasps it between both of his own, bringing the curl of your fingers to his mouth. He kisses down the side of your palm, trails his lips down the soft skin of your forearm. Squeezes so hard he feels the bones in your hands shift.
You’re sorry. He took a whip to your back, made you hump his boot like an animal, and fucked your face like a whore, all because he couldn’t stand the thought that you would someday be without him. And you’re sorry.
“You’re somethin’ else,” he murmurs, scratching at the soft part of your wrist with his beard.
It seems even the softest version of his affection must somehow be abrasive.
There’s a little smile playing across your lips as you close your eyes. A deep, serene breath leaves you.
He places your hand back on the bed and dips the brush back into the aloe, loading it generously up to the ferrule. The brush make little furrows in the gel as he lays it down, the layer already thick; he floats the flat of the bristles overtop, smoothing over his contrition, and then, idly, he wedges them in again, carving runnels down through the clear to your skin.
You must fall asleep as he does, or at least you enjoy it enough to indulge him. John follows the lines of each lash from beginning to end, tracing their length, mapping the way they’ve changed your skin.
In a few weeks, as he cares for them, they’ll fade away completely. Left only to memory—both his and yours. But for now, you’ll feel them every day. Feel him every day, even when he’s not there, brushing along the inside of your shirt, stinging with every light touch.
Remembering the hand that held the lash.
He smooths the painted lines over and begins again.
-
a/n: this started as a casual one-off and became a loose masterstudy of @yeyinde's writing style. Lev, affectionately, you are insane. I know this because in writing this I also went insane.
Also dedicated to @391780. Please never stop being kinky online. I live for it.
Also that one part was inspired by this piece of art.
my evil stinky opinion this morning is that i don´t think you should even consider getting plushies factory made (this in includes makeship campaigns) as an artist if you haven´t even made 20-30 plushies yourself.
i can not stress how labour intense it is. Especially complex patterns. You do not understand it until you tried doing it yourself.
If you did that and you still want to make a factory worth of people work on hundreds of plushies for you. that´s your choice but at least make that choice with some understanding of what the process feels like.
content: second person pov, choose your own adventure, living weapon whump, living weapon whumpee, conditioned whumpee
You weigh your options. You miss your uncomfortable bunk bed back with the organisation. You miss your roommates. You don't know how well you'll sleep on a park bench. All things considered, Freddie's offer should be a no-brainer.
Except you've been thoroughly trained to distrust anyone not affiliated with the facility. And as bad as a weapon you may be, their messaging about the outside being dangerous sticks in your mind. There's no way you can accept the offer.
"Okay," you say quietly, clinging to the jacket, the only thing standing between you and the crisp, night air. "Thank you."
"Don't mention it. Hey, um... Are those... Bruises?"
There's no way she spotted the barely forming bruising on your body in the dim park lighting. "No," you lie.
"Look, um— I still don't know your name. Well, um... Look, I'm worried about you. Are you really sure you want to sleep here? Alone?"
"Yes."
"Well... Okay. Keep the jacket. Be safe. I'll be... going, then. Home. I live just down the street, under 56. If you change your mind... just knock, okay? Even if it's the middle of the night. Just knock, and I'll let you in."
"You're not looking out for your own safety," you say before you can really process the words. "I mean— Sorry. You're trying to look out for a stranger, but you're clearly... You're not..."
Freddie laughs. "I guess I'm not. I just have this feeling..."
"What feeling?"
"I don't know how to describe it. I have a younger sibling, they live in the city. You remind me of them."
Oh.
"I'm not your sibling," you point out. "You can't just— You can't just accept people into your home because they remind you of family."
"You're right, of course. Still... Just knock, okay? I'll be going."
"Good night, Freddie," you say, and despite yourself, you sound a little dejected. It was nice to have company for a little while. "Thank you for the jacket."
Freddie smiles and waves. She walks off. You're alone in the park again. You crawl back onto the bench Freddie found you on, and you curl up, pulling her jacket as tight around yourself as you possibly can.
56. That's where she lives, just down the street. You could go and knock, and you're sure she would open with a big smile on her face. But you're not doing that.
You inhale, hold, exhale. The air going in and out of your broken nose hurts every time. Despite that, despite your many injuries, you manage to fall asleep.
You awake to screaming.
You jump up, ready to assess danger, ready to fight off whoever wants to hurt you—
You find a family of four, parents and two little children. One of the children is screaming... in joy? They're running around, the older chasing the younger, and you can't figure out what's so fun about simulated battle. You've certainly never screamed in joy when running from 'enemies' (older people in the organisation, acting out enemies).
You exhale. You're safe. For now.
Your stomach rumbles.
You don't have any way of getting food. You've never been to a 'store' before. And you're pretty sure they expect money from you there, in exchange for the food. Your handler sure has complained a lot about money.
56. Down the street. You could ask Freddie for some morsels.
Go and ask her for food.
Forage in the park.
Try to shoplift.
Just go without. You've starved for days at a time before.
content: second person pov, choose your own adventure, living weapon whump, living weapon whumpee, conditioned whumpee
You weigh your options. You miss your uncomfortable bunk bed back with the organisation. You miss your roommates. You don't know how well you'll sleep on a park bench. All things considered, Freddie's offer should be a no-brainer.
Except you've been thoroughly trained to distrust anyone not affiliated with the facility. And as bad as a weapon you may be, their messaging about the outside being dangerous sticks in your mind. There's no way you can accept the offer.
"Okay," you say quietly, clinging to the jacket, the only thing standing between you and the crisp, night air. "Thank you."
"Don't mention it. Hey, um... Are those... Bruises?"
There's no way she spotted the barely forming bruising on your body in the dim park lighting. "No," you lie.
"Look, um— I still don't know your name. Well, um... Look, I'm worried about you. Are you really sure you want to sleep here? Alone?"
"Yes."
"Well... Okay. Keep the jacket. Be safe. I'll be... going, then. Home. I live just down the street, under 56. If you change your mind... just knock, okay? Even if it's the middle of the night. Just knock, and I'll let you in."
"You're not looking out for your own safety," you say before you can really process the words. "I mean— Sorry. You're trying to look out for a stranger, but you're clearly... You're not..."
Freddie laughs. "I guess I'm not. I just have this feeling..."
"What feeling?"
"I don't know how to describe it. I have a younger sibling, they live in the city. You remind me of them."
Oh.
"I'm not your sibling," you point out. "You can't just— You can't just accept people into your home because they remind you of family."
"You're right, of course. Still... Just knock, okay? I'll be going."
"Good night, Freddie," you say, and despite yourself, you sound a little dejected. It was nice to have company for a little while. "Thank you for the jacket."
Freddie smiles and waves. She walks off. You're alone in the park again. You crawl back onto the bench Freddie found you on, and you curl up, pulling her jacket as tight around yourself as you possibly can.
56. That's where she lives, just down the street. You could go and knock, and you're sure she would open with a big smile on her face. But you're not doing that.
You inhale, hold, exhale. The air going in and out of your broken nose hurts every time. Despite that, despite your many injuries, you manage to fall asleep.
You awake to screaming.
You jump up, ready to assess danger, ready to fight off whoever wants to hurt you—
You find a family of four, parents and two little children. One of the children is screaming... in joy? They're running around, the older chasing the younger, and you can't figure out what's so fun about simulated battle. You've certainly never screamed in joy when running from 'enemies' (older people in the organisation, acting out enemies).
You exhale. You're safe. For now.
Your stomach rumbles.
You don't have any way of getting food. You've never been to a 'store' before. And you're pretty sure they expect money from you there, in exchange for the food. Your handler sure has complained a lot about money.
56. Down the street. You could ask Freddie for some morsels.
Go and ask her for food.
Forage in the park.
Try to shoplift.
Just go without. You've starved for days at a time before.
content: second person pov, choose your own adventure, living weapon whump, living weapon whumpee, conditioned whumpee, starvation, past trauma
You swallow. This is stupid. This is dangerous. Your handler would beat you black and blue if she knew what you were about to say. "Okay," you force the word out like it's hurting you. "Thank you, Freddie."
Freddie smiles at you. "Come on in. You can sit by the table while I prepare dinner."
You take a tentative step towards her. Then another. Soon, you're walking inside the lion's den, deeper and deeper, entering through a doorway into a baby blue kitchen with a round table and four chairs. You awkwardly sit down, hands folded in your lap.
"Oh my," Freddie says, brows furrowing. What now? What did you do? Did you make a mistake? "In this light... Oh dear. I couldn't see it that well in the park, but you're... Did someone hurt you?"
You stay quiet. You might've done many uncharacteristic things during your brief relationship with Freddie, but you're certainly not about to sell out your handler. She only did what she had a right to do.
Freddie goes on, undeterred. "That building. I know there's something shady going on in there."
No, she doesn't know. Nobody outside the facility knows. At most, she has a hunch. And if you don't confirm her hunch, she has no way of verifying it.
"I'm sorry for being unsightly," you say instead, and she once again hurries to correct you.
"No! No, that's not— I'm sorry, did it come off that way? I just... I'm worried about you. You don't have anywhere to stay, anything to eat, and you're hurt. Maybe a visit to the hospital..." She trails off. "Well, that can all happen after we ate. After you ate. Do you like spaghetti?"
You've never had spaghetti.
"Yes," you say anyway.
"Great. I have some leftover from yesterday, I think it'll be enough for the two of us."
Freddie heats it up in the microwave, then plates it and places one plate and utensils in front of you. You stare at it.
She takes a seat across from you and takes a fork in her hand, so you follow her example and take the fork as well. She doesn't start eating. She seems like she's waiting for you to start. Your stomach rumbles.
It's... a lot of pressure, suddenly. You don't know how to eat pasta. You've never had pasta.
You stare at it intently.
Continue waiting for Freddie to start eating so you can copy her.
Stab the fork into the pasta and hope some of it sticks.
“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”
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