#psychological whump
Prompt #20
“Why don’t you accept that you’re human too ?! We all make mistakes you don’t have to torture yourself over them !”
Hero raised his voice unintentionally, with Villian not being able to react as fast as he once did. Shaking his head as he forced himself to keep going.
“Because I’m a monster, like you - and everyone else said,”
Hero felt his heart break, was he what caused this sudden decline ?
“No you’re not - I should’ve been trying to help you..not fight you - I made it worse with all of this ! You’re not a monster ! You’re just misguided and I can help you if you just let me,”
“I don’t deserve help,, from anyone”
Prompt #5
“You think … just by - hurting me — you can break me ?”
“Well, I can certainly try,, it doesn’t seem like you’ll last very long either by the looks of it, shame really - I was starting to have fun”
During A’s recovery, therapy appointments/visits occur like clockwork in order to maintain a memorable routine.
However, one day A wakes up, and realises they’ve slept past the time the nurse comes to do their rounds. Had they slept through it? They don’t normally… They sit and wait, noting that soon the physical therapist should be arriving. When they don’t, A worries more: even more so when their friend/significant other doesn’t arrive at their scheduled time.
It’s at this point (running low on painkillers and patience), that A takes it upon themselves to investigate.
They could find that 1) The friends/doctors/nurses have all been kidnapped and being held hostage in another medical ward and require saving. Or 2) An evil entity roams the halls, chasing after A at every chance they get until A manages to evade their pursuit.
Either way, it all ends when they wake up again… in their bed and surrounded by the medical team and worried friends.
Apparently their condition worsened due to an infection, and they had spent the better part of a week staving off a near deadly fever.
In the white, padded room, the clock ticks by agonisingly slowly - one day in the room is three in real life.
Torture that goes on for hours in the real world, takes only minutes according to the clocks the whumpee can see.
A would have ignore it… if the ticking wasn’t so damn loud.
A Month Of Whump Mafia Madness: Rite of passage/Initiation.
@iaminamoodymoodtoday,@wildfaewhump,@ishouldblogmore,@lektric-whump,@that-one-thespian,@raigash,@suspicious-whumping-egg
-
Bennett Kennedy was a traitor.
He sat at the desk in his little room, a white-walled, thin-carpeted square broken only by the locked door and the small, thickly-barred window. He was below ground, as best he could tell through the clouded glass, in a converted basement. He was delivered a tray of food each day good enough for three meals, and there was even an en suite with drinkable water in the tap. It was obvious that he wasn’t the first to live here. The bathroom had scratches in the doorframe from someone keeping count of the days. The mattress had a dip in the centre. In the middle of a sleepless night, it was like he could feel the ghosts of previous abductees breathing in the same air.
Most of his nights were sleepless now.
The desk was had recently been sanded down. It was obvious by the fresh, unblemished grain of the wood. Perhaps the person in here before him had left a message he wasn’t allowed to read.
On the desk was a stack of plain paper, and two wax crayons. It would have been funny, if it wasn’t obviously done to make sure he had nothing sharp to use as a weapon. Not that Bennett was stupid enough to try and stab Alfonse Dechart’s guards with a ballpoint pen, but there was no accounting for desperation.
Each day, he sat at the desk with the Crayola Black Stars in his hand and wrote as much as he could think of about work. They weren’t selective. On the first day he wrote about the layout of the headquarters. By the sixth day he was writing about what everyone ate for lunch and where they went if they wanted coffee.
All of it was treated the same. The more he wrote, the better things got.
“It will be much worse if the heroes get hold of you”, the villain said softly. “You have to learn to use your healing powers on yourself. If you can’t block your pain signals, you won’t survive an interrogation.” Their gloved hand moved to their sidekick’s next unbroken finger and began to apply pressure. “So try again. Three, two, one-”
In truth, this had always been an inevitablility.
“You’re awake,” the hero said, with something of a soft tone, something of a pitying one. Sealseam looked up at them, feeling the ache underneath his eyes, the tired stress in both hollows of his jaw.
Heartstar was different, here, than they were in a fight. Their color palate stayed much the same, a dusty gold that didn’t shimmer unless it caught the sun, deep browns that matched their eyes and night-dark blues for accents. Their long, dirty-gold hair was down, free hanging, and with their cape exchanged for a floor-trailing shawl they looked like some mix between a Lord of the Rings character and some Catholic saint immortalized in stain glass. They lacked the stony pragmatism they showed on the street. The ice cold, statuesque tension in their jaw and eyes and mathematical deeds.
“I’m awake,” Sealseam agreed, keeping his tone dead, already trying to squirrel himself away in that distant place within his mind, the one where all sensations were muted and the pain didn’t beat as hard, the one his boss, Heartstar’s nemesis, had helped him build.
“How’s your head?” Heartstar asked, extending their hand—the very hand Sealseam had witnessed weilding a lance the last time he’d been conscious—to gently caress the side of his skull. Sealseam bore it. Didn’t flinch away. He knew there was worse to come.
He didn’t answer.
“We know your identity,” Heartstar stated, though it didn’t feel quite as much like a threat as it should have. “Mine has always been public, as I never bothered with masks,” they continued, with something of a self-depricating chuckle. “We haven’t made yours known, though. My team is the only group that knows you’re here, aside from Splitter.” Even just hearing his boss’s villain title was enough to make him flinch. Heartstar paused at that, then sat in the modest chair next to the bed Sealseam was strapped to. It seemed too small for them, like their aura took up more space than the chair could possibly hope to support.
“We need a little information from you, alright?” Sealseam braced. Here it comes. He’d prepared for it, at least. Splitter had trained him for this, broken his bones, he’d reset them and healed them over and over, he’d be able to take it, he could withstand it all. “I promise you won’t be hurt, and if you speak willing my team has the kind of sway necessary to grant you amnesty. Will you?”
Sealseam grit his teeth, worked his jaw, then forced himself to spit on Heartstar’s stupid, golden robes. They blinked, not seeming at all angered or put off, just a little surprised, then huffed out a sigh through their nose. Like they’d expected this, but were disappointed anyway.
“You know,” they said, taking a tissue from the side table and cleaning the spit, “my face has always been public, but my main power has never been disclosed. Can you guess as to what it is?”
Sealseam felt cold dread pooling in his gut, the momentary rush from spitting now chilled down to his bones. He knew Heartstar had super strength, a certain degree of invulnerability or at least toughness that let them withstand things that would break a normal human, and could fly for short distances. Common side-powers that many of the supernatural had. But Sealseam had not ever caught even a whiff of what Heartstar’s true power could be.
“Something so evil-sounding your reputation would never recover from it, if word got out?”
Heartstar laughed, though it was a pained sound. “You’re not far off, actually.”
Thoughts of electrocution, burning, suffocation, bleeding, all forms of torment ricocheted through Sealseam’s head. He could heal himself, he could withstand it, he’d practiced, Splitter had taught him.
“Meanwhile your powers are so naturally suited for healing, yet you’re a villain’s doctor.” They sounded… almost sad.
“Looks like we’ve both made our choices,” Sealseam grit, wishing he sounded more defiant than he felt.
“I suppose we have.” It was coming, it was coming, he could heal himself but in the meantime it was going to hurt. “Hey,” Heartstar said, tone so achingly gentle it made his breath catch, “look at me.”
Gentle fingers tilted his chin, and he found his eyes drawn to their face without really thinking. His eyes met their brown ones, and
The whole
World
Tilted.
Sealseam blinked, breath caught in his chest, and then he let out a deep sigh, smiling. Oh. Oh! Heartstar, they—! Oh, they were, well they were everything! Why had he ever opposed them? Now he could see, now he understood much better, Heartstar was the greatest person in all this universe. In all the multiverse! Heartstar was better than anyone, better than Sealseam’s own life, better than a god! They were the only thing that mattered, the only thing that had ever mattered, every single event in history had just been a cosmic foundation building up to the exact events it would take to create Heartstar.
They pressed their lips to Sealseam’s forehead, and even Atlas shuddered.
“Heartstar,” he breathed, the restraints on his wrists catching him, preventing him from reaching out and touching Heartstar, his everything, his compass’s point.
“There you go,” Heartstar said, and they were sad, intolerably sad, staring at him with such exquisite sadness Sealseam would kill himself if it meant ridding them of the thing that would bother them so. “Will you please answer my questions now?”
“Of course!” Sealseam said urgently. He’d been such a foolish waste of breath, before, to deny them anything. “Anything, anything you want, my very life, I’d give it, if it was for you.”
“Thank you, but not that, please,” they said, the skin around their eyes tightening even further. “Just the information; I want you alive and unharmed, okay? I don’t want bad things to happen to you.”
Sealseam nodded, agreeing practically before the words were out of their mouth. Anything they wanted, he would do. This was beyond love, this was beyond even devotion, Sealseam knew from now on every breath of the rest of his life would only be taken if it was in service to Heartstar.
“Aw, shit, you had to enthrall him?” Heartstar’s own sidekick, Greensilver, said as she entered the room, notebook in hand.
“Unfortunately,” Heartstar said, “Let’s just get the information and add him with the rest, alright?”
“You’re the boss,” she said casually, shrugging and adjusting her oval glasses.
“Yes,” Heartstar said heavily, “I know.”
@haro-whumps, i am already in love with heartstar (what a badass name!!) i really felt their struggle and anguish with their “villainous” power and their struggle to do the right thing here - obviously mind-control is more ethical than torture to get information but I still felt how much they struggled with this.
they just seem like a conflicted, gentle person and I feel for them honestly (cause I sense that they live in a world where people are separated into Good and Bad categories of powers and I am here for it)
I need to know everything about heartstar’s hopefully extremely angsty backstory immediately
and also!!! poor stoic sealseam…his bracing for torture, his own determination to do his mentor proud…and all to fail so immediately cause he could never win here. agh, thats incredible, we love a dutiful servant!
please add me to the taglist!!
“Do you know where you are?” the person asked them.
“No,” they replied, eyes darting around the cold white room, their limbs strapped to the bed they laid upon.
“Do you know who you are?” the person continued.
“No.” they hesitantly responded. They had no idea what was going on. All they knew was they wanted to flee this place as quickly as possible.
“Good.” the person smiled, “then the operation was a success.”
“The operation?”
“Yes, you’re here at the reeducation facility. The operation you just underwent was the first step in your recovery.”
