It wasn’t the small space Amira minded, it was the damned curtains everywhere.
“They’re for privacy” the workers had explained when she first arrived, clutching her shattered arm to her chest. But didn’t everyone already know that privacy was a lost cause here? The smells of shit and vomit didn’t care about a few strips of fabric, and nor did the screams of the soon-to-be-dead.
And those workers, had placed her in the middle of the compound - no sightlines, no exits. The cot was too low to stand on and try to see over the curtains.
“It’s safe here.” the workers had explained. But she had seen the tension between the less-broken patients. The way they held the tension in their bodies, had tracked each others movements - hers too - and how they angled themselves into easy reaching distance of heavier objects.
Amira knew full well that anyone could barrel through the curtains separating off her “room” at any time. From any direction. And while there was a little she could do with the woven food tray, she’d still be fucked.
She’d walk out if it wasn’t against direct orders and doing so would involve her not unlikely aggressive arrest. On the bright side, it meant that no one was going to attack her. Probably a lie.
She’d named all of the round objects in the space, then the white ones, then the ones that had come from natural means. She’d counted backward from 200 by sevens. She’d completed forty rounds of her inhale-pause-exhale-pause pattern.
She was out of ways to ignore the tension growing in her arms and legs, the pain in her chest, the way her breath was coming in shallower.
The doors somewhere at the front of the compound swung open loudly - Amira started.
Pain screeched up her arm, and she hissed.
It wouldn’t be a problem if she could just see the damned exits for fuck’s sake. But no. This is how it was going to be.
She let out a short, cynical laugh - the kind of angry amusement that only rose up when things were screwed and utterly out of her control.
Amira was like this a lot she realized. Not that it made a kind of difference. If it could keep her alive, she’d take it.
Now she just had to wait it out, the pain in her arm, the racing heart, the brain the kept fucking her over and keeping her not dead yet in that vicious cycle.
Amira shook her head. This wasn’t going to go away for at least the next few hours, so she might as well get comfy.
Summary: Bucky’s worst nightmare comes true when a group of radicals attack a Wakandan Vibranium mine and Shuri goes missing.
A/N: This fic series is a labor of love between @purselover2and@constantwriter85. This is our very first collaboration together, born out of our love for WinterPrincess and our desire to address a few issues TFATWS missed out on. We hope you like it! This fic contains spoilers for the show, so heed the warnings. Dividers by @firefly-graphics
Can I get more uhhh claustrophobic characters trapped in elevators?
Maybe they were too exhausted to take the stairs. They thought they could endure it since it’s a quick ride but when the elevator breaks down and they have no idea how long it will be before they get out, they just start to lose it.
Whumpee’s feet fumbled and slid across the carpet as they scrambled to keep up with Whumper. Fingers bruised deep into their arm, wrenching their shoulder forward as they were dragged upstairs to the office.
Whumpee stumbled forward, tripping over the rug as Whumper shoved them into the room. They clattered to a halt on top of the antique trunk Whumper used as a coffee table.
“Get in.”
Whumpee glanced around the room. “Ge-….what?”
“Getin.” Whumper nodded to the trunk behind them.
Whumpee twisted to stare at it. It was- it was barely bigger than them! Whumper couldn’t be serious. “Wh-why?”
“Because you’re going to be bleeding a whole lot less if you get in yourself instead of making me put you there.”
Not the question.
Whumpee swallowed with some difficulty, but managed to turn on their knees, picking at the cool metal hatch pin until it came up. They stared over their shoulder. “Please - a-at least tell me what I did.”
Whumper snorted out a mirthless laugh. “You’re doing it right now. Does that give you a hint?”
Whumpee’s eyes twitched away, heat rising to their face, they started at the small dark corner of the box. Their legs and fingers were trembling.
No,all of them was trembling. The tremor wound from their lungs down through every horrified cell of their body, scratching at their mind and screaming at them to stop.
Slowly - so slowly - they lowered themself inside.
.
(To be continued with the rest of the claustrophobe scene…)
Finally getting back to my WIP, as yet untitled. This is a pretty intense scene.
——-
It was cold, a bone-deep, silent cold. Alex tried to remember why he was so cold; his mind floundered. He didn’t want to move, didn’t want to think, just wished he could get warm again and fall back asleep. There was a smell in his nostrils like the lab: harsh with disinfectant, heavy with something organic and dead. The lab… he didn’t want to think about work. He just wanted to get warm, to be done with the sickening ache in his head.
He tried to turn on his side and found he couldn’t. The bed beneath him was a smooth steel slab, covered in what felt like vinyl sheeting that did nothing to keep out the cold. As he turned, his shoulder struck the edge of a rail, then wedged against another steel slab overhead.
The feeling of confinement was enough to kick his brain into gear. Pushing back panic, he reached out: his hands found more vinyl, over and around him, cocooning him, and beyond that, the edges of the slab he lay on, seated in its rails. The vinyl bag restricted him from reaching into the corners of the space, but he had a sense of its dimensions. Around three feet wide, maybe two feet tall, and just deep enough contain his body. The realization pressed on Alex’s sanity. He knew where he was.
This is a dream, this is a nightmare and I’ll wake up. But there was no change, no breaking of the dream. Alex sucked a deep breath, trying to clear his head, but the air inside the bag was already stale. His body protested movement, pain registering as he began to shiver. This was too real. This was real life.
He scrabbled at the inside of his cocoon. Where was the zipper? Body bags weren’t meant to be gotten out of from the inside, neither were morgue drawers. Why was he here? Terror flooded in like a tide, swirling a flotsam of disjointed memories. He had been to the outlets with Rosa, they both had the day off and she wanted to look at strollers. What next? Driving, singing the wrong lyrics to a song on the radio and laughing about it, stopping at an intersection, and- and-
Whatever happened next swirled away with a throb of his head. He reached up and felt gauze covering his forehead. There had been an impact, bone-jarring, and a feeling of horror. The distinctive shape of headlights on a make and model he could never remember the name of. A fading cacophony of action all around him, a long, long way off.
Rosa! Rosa and the baby!
“Hey, hey!” He beat on the roof of the drawer. His voice tore in his throat, he couldn’t even tell how loud he was over the roar of his panic. Was he really even alive? Maybe this was what it was like—maybe they would open his drawer and see nothing but a still corpse, even while he struggled to get their attention. If he wasn’t dead, he would be soon. Already his limbs were getting stiff from the cold, his movements uncoordinated. He was hyperventilating, burning oxygen too fast.
Our Father- Our Father who art- he couldn’t remember the rest. Help me, help me, help me!
Somethingbanged on the outside of his drawer, followed by a rattling and shaking. The door of the cooler flung open and light flooded in.
Summary:Suffering from amnesia that eradicated all memories of his past, Peter is forced to learn to survive underground in a nuclear shelter with a cranky man after waking up in a post-apocalyptic world. The teenager will soon realize that the hardest thing to surmount is neither the end of the world, nor the loss of memory, but cohabitation.
Were they really worthy of being humanity’s last hope?
Up there, there’s freedom. But around, only indifferent walls. In them, windows feeding on still cerulean daylight. Laid down, dusty trails for the few curious or in need. Ahead, the narrowing pathways of “traboules”, awaiting. In the air, stale smells getting thicker with every step. But up there, freedom. Left and right, ancient walls in unhurried decay. On the ground, remains of some hasty lunch. Half concealed, a mattress prepared for another cold night in Lyon. In front of the eyes, half darkness. Under tired legs, slippery pavement. In the hand, dark bitterness from Vox Populi. In mouth, burnt coffee and faint hops. In memory, a faint milk stout sweetness, quickly gone. On all sides, growing crushing claustrophobia. Up there? Freedom.
