summer

[CN: sensory overload, brief mention of deathwish]

Northlight has been listening to the drip for fifteen years. It disappears only in the height of summer, where the white stone radiates coolness to beat back the intrusion of the sun, and the air gets thick and heavy with moisture that does no good to the captive on the floor between the pillars.

Summers are terrible. Sometimes they get water, sometimes not, but it is never enough. Other times, their captors don’t even bother. The nourishment is all half-tasteless meals and the dribbled stream of water that trickles through to them from the gutter.

The drip absorbs his whole consciousness. He feels sick and bloated with the noise some days. Others, the noises are torture, harsh snaps across the taut silence, and in others still it is the silence that tries to kill him, and the droplets are the sweet release from an endless screaming nothing.

Sometimes they land on skin and the change in temperature burns like molten wax. Other times it seems to disappear before he can even turn his head.

One day, they think, and many days like this after, the dripping sinking into their skin is a torture deserved only by the most evil of people. Each drip is a cold splatter as good as a knife on their under-touched skin. Some of them roll down like the gliding of a blade, like they are opening a seam along him.

Some days they scream to cover the sound. They hum and cry and talk until it can barely be heard. Some days this works to drown the water in their voice. Others, it’s just another sound to tear at their mind until their thoughts lie in tatters.

It’s a drill driving into their head. It’s a pluck on the frayed strings of their nerves. It’s endless, it’s everything, and Northlight has never wanted to die as intensely as they do at the sounds.

Until the summer sun comes and raises the moisture into the air, and their throat dries and their lips shrivel and their body becomes a molten husk, and it is silent. At last, silence, as summer has returned, and all the water rolls up into thick storm clouds that vanish the bright daylight and change the tension in the air.

When the heavens open, Northlight feels like dancing. Instead, he just cries. He barely has the moisture in his parchment body to do so, but that problem is quickly solved. The rain rushes down around the temple, around him, through the cracks in the ceiling and the drip returns in a symphony that buries the unbearable sound in a wave of its companions.

Frantic and ecstatic, Northlight tips their head back to taste the sweet hot rain of the summer storm, mouth wide and eyes closed in desperate worship. They drink the life that water grants them, gulping through erratic splashes, shivering at the loss of warmth, and then all too suddenly, it passes.

The shower stops. Northlight, part-soaked and part-sobbing, feels the silence return keenly, carving into his ears, the slice of a knife through his body, with the arrhythmic jerks and stops of the drip, drip, drip, returned with a vengeance, the price for the precious rain.

Embrace

[The last entry in @whumptober2019! Amazing work everyone who did any.]

Small. Not so much slouched as sagging where he stood, empty of the energy required to keep his shoulders up. The fat and muscle wasted from his body, leaving only skin and skeleton behind. Limbs were drawn in, as if he were moving through a close crowd on a hot day - but the closest person was five feet away.

Everything about him, small. Jim’s heart broke even as it mended, at the sight of his Ty. He hurried forwards on instinct and wrapped him up the hug he’d been dreaming of for over a year.

Small. So light, so little left of him. What there was trembled in his arms.

“Let go,” someone said.

“What?”

“You should let go. He doesn’t like being touched.”

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Loyalty

@whumptober2019. We did day 29 on day 28 so here’s alt no.9

Most of the time, Ellis has nightmares. Occasionally, though, he has dreams.

He dreams of being outside. He dreams of the breeze. Simple, tiny moment, and it makes him s sad he almost cries when he wakes up and sees the window. The breeze is one of the many things he has lost, because he has to be kept.

He dreams of grass between his toes and the feeling of unfiltered sun. He dreams of the ocean, rumbling under his skin. He dreams of tucking hair behind his eat to eat an over-salted bag of chips at the beach, wind blasting the sand over the ground, seagulls lurking for a chance to steal from him. Nic, barely dressed, bobbing in the water like they’ve never lived on land.

Nic.

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Haunting 4

[It’s @whumptober2019 again, and another alt prompt, bound. Read in order.]

When Ellis woke, he was alone. Silence. Pitch black. A body that wouldn’t move. All he knew was that he was somewhere warm, and he was upright, and the air tasted like cigarettes.

Something must have shown on his face, because an alien thought spoke. Good morning, pet.

Ellis heard a whimper, and realised it had been him. He hadn’t heard it in his own ears, but through the connection to the – voice, the man who – who was definitely, absolutely real, now.

The man who had to be sitting right next to him, for Ellis to be able to hear his own laboured breathing.

There was a touch on his face, and Ellis felt it being lifted. You’ll be weak for a little while, the man said. I hope you’ll forgive me. You’re very cute like this.

His head was still too thick for him to parse that. How could he be cute? He couldn’t even move.

Do you want to see?

Ellis didn’t, couldn’t reply, but suddenly he saw. Images in his head, clearer than any thought he’d ever had. Ellis recognised that he was looking down on himself, slumped limply in a chair, still wearing the jumper and jeans from earlier, familiar, but – but blindfolded, gagged, ankles tied to the chair legs with thick twine, wrists bound to the chair’s arms, and the faint glimpse of earplugs too as the hand on his chin tilted his head to the side. He was too numb to have figured this out himself, and that scared him. The fact that he couldn’t feel his heart thumping or his breathing speeding up in fear scared him too. It was as if he only existed in this projection in his own mind, in the eyes of his captor.

So cute, the man repeated fondly. Too dazed to move, too weak to fight. Don’t worry, I won’t keep you tied up like this for long. Just until I know you can be good for me.

What was good? What did he want, so that he’d let Ellis go? The vision moved, the man gently releasing his chin and letting it fall back down again. Then, a hand raked through his hair, smoothing it back. He felt that. He felt the hand, the light fingers. Distantly, Ellis knew he was being petted, and it sickened him. He wasn’t an animal to be tamed, he was a person. He wanted to be out of here. He wanted Nic.

I have some errands to attend to. I’ll be back later to check on you. Don’t hurt anyone while I’m gone.

As suddenly as it had appeared, the image in Ellis’s head vanished. There was one more stroke of his scalp, and then that vanished too. There was no noise, either. He was alone.

He was alone for what felt like days.

Maybe the man came, looked him over, went again. Maybe he didn’t. Ellis had no way of knowing. The lack of movement made his body ache and the bindings wore at his skin with every twitch he made to try and relieve the feeling. With no water and no food, the horrible weakness in his body didn’t abate either, and his head never fully settled. He tried to speak, but had no way of knowing if he did, because he couldn’t hear. Even the smell of cigarettes had faded when the man had left.

Don’t hurt anyone? How could he? He was alone. So alone, and so tired. He tried to keep the image of home in his head, of Nic, of safety, but it paled in comparison to the image he’d seen of himself at this man’s mercy. Nic’s voice was hazy and far away, when the man’s was so clear even now in his memory, or real, in the dark. Adorable. Too weak to fight. Be good for me.

Nothing else. His body faded out of existence. His senses were useless. Ellis floated, semi-conscious, through the hours, as if sinking through a black, bottomless sea.

Yet more continuation of the Iesin shot down & auctioned series

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Talvos left. 

Talvos left him. Talvos found him, Talvos saw him, and he left. 

The words tumble over and over through Iesin’s mind, taking up the space where the mysteries used to sing, filling it with a dreadful cacophony of agony and despair instead. 

Talvos left.

The first touch to the wires below Iesin drags a hoarse, exhausted moan from him. Every vibration of movement sets off others, in a rippling chain-reaction that tears at each tiny hole in his flesh. He’s lost track of how long he’s been up here, suspended in fine, delicate balance and supported by his own weight used against him, each limb a counter-weight to another, each wire that pierces him a structural necessity to the finely-woven display running above and below and through him. Now, at the prospect of unthreading all of it, he shakes with helpless, bone-weary fear, and voices that fear in trembling huffs of air that only occasionally graze the edges of sound.

The flash of hope that scorched through him when he looked up to see Talvos, realized that against all odds, beyond Iesin’s wildest imaginings, his beloved had found him - that’s gone now, turned to an anguish that is sharp and dark and hungry by the stone-still distance in Talvos’ eyes, by the disregard in his tone as he discussed Iesin like every other human who has come in to gawk at him, and then by the straight, confident set of his back as he walked away.

Talvos left.

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