Whump Collection Bucket

Because when Whumper finally, finally died, someone new came. Someone gentle. Whumpee had no concept of gentle. She hissed and clawed and fought and spat and did everything in her power to get away from this new person who said things like 'I'll take care of you' and 'It's been twenty-four years since you've been taken captive, I understand your distrust' and 'Please, I'm trying to help'. There was no help in this wretched place of torment.

Yet, the stranger remained gentle. Throughout all of her starved efforts to fight them off, they remained unbearably gentle as they lifted her off the grimy floor and bridal carried her upstairs, into the bathroom to wash her.

She wasn't in the same reality as them. She saw shadowy figures that made her flinch, she saw bugs crawling all over her skin, she twitched and whined and she didn't know if she remembered how to communicate at all like a normal person. Communication had lost meaning decades ago, when she realised there was nothing she could say to stop the torture.

The water was warm when she was lowered into it. Decades of sleep deprivation caught up with her, and though she was insistent on trying to stay awake and fight her 'rescuer', she couldn't not give into the soft warmth of the bath. She fell asleep, for the first time in twenty-four years.

She woke up in fresh clothes, on a freshly made bed. She felt… less insane than before she had gone to sleep. She still saw shadows and monsters in every corner, and she still screamed and made the new person rush into the room, but she wasn't chained anymore, which was weird and unusual.

"What is it?" they asked, looking around the room frantically to find out what freaked her out. She couldn't say. She just saw them. Crawling up and down walls. She saw Whumper, risen from the dead, her face twisted in awful ways, sometimes grinning cruelly, sometimes contorted in anger. She closed her eyes and yet the picture remained. She heard her voice, telling her to get down from the furniture. So she did, because she was always keen on avoiding extra punishment. She threw herself on the floor and wept. "Whumpee…"

The stranger who had introduced themself as Caretaker knelt by her side, and having learned by now that trying to touch her would cause her to bite them, they didn't attempt to reach out.

"You're okay," they said instead while she cried and cried and cried. "She's gone. Whumper's gone. You're okay, cry it out. You're gonna be okay."

Days passed. Whumpee was given food, slowly, even though she wanted to eat it all at once. She could've ravaged the fridge — she did ravage it one time, only to throw it all back up because her starved stomach couldn't handle it. She tried to eat the thrown up food. Caretaker had to physically restrain her to keep her from doing that.

They went slow. Step by step. Whumpee felt less and less like a cornered animal. She almost felt normal some days. Some days, it all felt like a distant nightmare; there were no permanent injuries or scars to prove it had happened, so had it really?

The hallucinations and the voices were only proof she was insane, not that she'd been tortured into a psychotic break.

But Caretaker was patient. They never forced things. She got to sleep on a bed, and eat real food instead of dead cockroaches, and sometimes Caretaker read for her, or sang to her, or a number of other things that 'friends' did together. They gifted her a colouring book, saying it would help with anxiety.

"It's not a lot," they'd said sheepishly. "It won't take away decades of torment. But it's something."

She coloured religiously. She coloured through the voices screaming at her to kill herself despite it not being an option, she coloured through phantom feelings of her hands on her body. She coloured. And she gathered up the courage one day to meekly present the finished pages to Caretaker. They were ecstatic to see them.

"These are so pretty!" they'd said. "So vibrant and full of life! You have a real talent for this!"

They bought her more colouring books. She coloured for hours. She coloured, hunched over on the floor, until her back ached and legs fell asleep. Slowly, throughout months and years, she regained some of her sanity. She talked with Caretaker sometimes, even if forming words after decades passed in silence or screaming — no inbetween — left her almost completely nonverbal. She still couldn't talk when she got real scared. Like, real scared.

"I was thinking maybe a walk would do you good," Caretaker said one day. Whumpee recoiled from the very idea. Her? Outside the house? Maybe others would've thought it strange; a captive person should want to go outside, no? But she couldn't bring herself to. The inside was scary, but the inside was the devil she knew. The outside… That was the real deal. Anyone could snatch her up and away from Caretaker, and then what? No, she was fine being inside. "No? Well, maybe some other time."

Years passed. Whumpee eventually mustered up the courage to go on small walks outside, with Caretaker, only ever with Caretaker. She realised lying in sunny patches on the living room floor wasn't the full 'walking out in daylight' experience. That summer breeze experienced through an open window was nothing like the light breeze outside. The outside was vast and unknown, marvellous and terrifying.

Caretaker was aging. Slowly, but Whumpee noticed. She noticed when their smile lines deepened. When crow's feet were beginning to set in and make a home by Caretaker's eyes. Whumpee was horrified.

She would be alone again.

Caretaker knew her past. They knew her quirks. They knew Whumper. She wasn't equipped for a life of her own, without assistance, but how would she ever ask for assistance when she could barely string a sentence together? And she was immortal. People were bound to take advantage of her. Like Whumper had. People like her were out there. And that thought was frightening.

"I love you," Caretaker said one day when they were sitting by the dinner table. "You know that, right?" They were old and frail, yet their voice was still the same gentle tone. Whumpee nodded. She was colouring a picture of a mermaid. "If I had a family… Oh, Whumpee. What am I to do with you now that I don't have a family? I only have you."

Whumpee pressed down the coloured pencil so hard that the point broke. She didn't want to think about it. She didn't want to become a family heirloom either, but maybe that would've been better than being left all alone?

Would she starve again? Would she ever sleep in a bed again?

"I will make arrangements so that someone takes care of you," they promised. "I swear it."

Whumpee didn't want to have these conversations. Whumpee wanted to believe Caretaker would live forever with her. But she needed to assist them with eating and getting up and down the stairs and it was becoming increasingly obvious that they weren't going to make it till next winter. They joked about not having to buy another winter coat. Whumpee didn't laugh.

The autumn day on which Whumpee found their body was chilly and dark. She gathered all her confidence and texted a funeral home. She left the house before they arrived to take the body. She left a note and money on the table.

She didn't trust whoever Caretaker entrusted with her care. She left with nothing but a backpack full of colouring books and food, disappearing into the woods near where Caretaker had lived.

She set down her backpack and took out one of her colouring books. It was a paint by numbers one. She took a red pencil in her hand and shooed away all the ants that wanted to crawl up onto the page.