#wrongfully accused

Remember him ❤️

allthewhumpygoodness:

Thinkin about. Hmm. Someone in a Medievalish setting that just gets Absolutely Fucked Up. They’re a prisoner of some kind (probably wrongly accused for whatever it was) who’s been kept in a dungeon cell for days, beaten and starved in an attempt to get information out of them. Not to mention it’s the dead of winter and their cell is freezing. The damp and the cold make them shiver constantly, their nose running, a cough growing deep in their chest. They wonder if they’ll just freeze to death before they can be officially killed. Some nights they’re in such misery they hope they do.

And then the king/noble/city leader decides it’s not worth their time anymore, and the wumpee will just be executed. But due to the nature of their “crime”, it’s public and it’s bad. First they’re beaten and whipped in front of half the city, in the cold, while the crowd jeers. They try to keep it together, to stay both stoic and conscious through the whole ordeal, but for the last few lashes they pass out, unable to hold on any longer.

The next thing they know they’re tied to a post outside the city walls, half naked, their wounds untended, the night freezing around them. The cold and the pain are unbearable, and they spend the next hour slipping in and out of consciousness - even when a rider takes sight of them and hurries over, shaking them by one icy shoulder to check if they’re alive at all.

They don’t even fully wake up when their bonds are cut, and they’re wrapped in a stranger’s cloak and hauled onto the back of a horse; though the concerned, encouraging mutterings in their ear might just penetrate the painful fog they’re cradled in. It’s hard to tell.

When the stranger gets home, to the far away house they’ve been on the road back to for nearly three days, they don’t care much who Whumpee is or what’s happened to them, all they know is they’re carrying a bleeding, unconscious, half frozen little person in their arms and that person must stay alive if they have any say in it at all. Their family is all there around the warm fire, siblings, spouse, children, and their eyes go collectively wide when they emerge from the doorway, covered head to foot in snow and bearing a small and motionless bundle in their arms. And then the automatic response to seeing another person in pain sets in, and everybody chips in to help.

So the whumpee is laid out next to the roaring fire, their bleeding wounds cleaned and staunched, bruises soothed with clumps of snow from outside. They’re so battered it breaks the heart of nearly everyone in the room to look at them - each of them wondering privately how they’re even alive at all.

But Whumpee is a stubborn one, more so than even they realized. And in those long hours of that night, their skin takes on an eventual light flush, better than the waxy pallour that tinged it before, and their breathing slows and evens, the look of pain on their face calming as they slip into real sleep. But there’s tension in the air of that house. Everyone is watching, waiting for this strange guest to open their eyes and reveal themselves to the family that lives there - who has, for all they known, put themselves in danger for taking them in.