No. 3 - STICKS AND STONES MAY BREAK MY BONES BUT...
taunting | insults | “Who did this to you?”
There is always something. A letter posted through the front foor. A text. An email. Always from accounts that disappeared hours later, numbers that ceased to exist, untraceable, unreachable.
Sometimes they hold recordings filled with screams, or soft spoken pleas, sometimes just hints of things that drive their imagination into awful, dark, twisting places. Sometimes bloody fingerprints, or red lettering scrawled with a scratchy fountain pen nib... and it doesn't take much guesswork to know that's blood, too. Once, just once, they received a photo. Dark eyes, bruised skin, and thin lipped grimace staring up at them. They'd burned that one.
It never asked for anything, it wasn't a ransom demand. It was just a way of inflicting pain. Salt in the wound. Dread in the stomach. Hopes fading.
It was too much today, it was just too much.
"I wish you were here," Caretaker says into the quiet, too-still room. So empty with Whumpee missing, too lonely with the worry of Whumpee's whereabouts hanging over them.
Their face darkens. Their hands twist in their shirt and they throw their head back and squeeze their eyes shut.
Quieter, nearly a whisper that they have to choke out through a throat closing up with unshed tears, they add. "I just wish you weren't there."