(mostly) whump

Anon, we have a problem. I tried to write your prompt but Antoni is not in the mood for happy so I hope you love angst!

Tagging @astrobly, @finder-of-rings, and @burtlederp who have asked to be tagged in all my writing

CW: Scarring discussion, referenced past burns, vaguely referenced noncon, vaguely referenced torture, referenced self-injury (just a fucky headspace)

He hides the sketchbooks. He buys them at a little art store he knows no one else he knows will go to, with the bit of money he gets as a stipend for his new identity as Jake’s official employee. He curls up in the corner of the room he has all to himself now, fills them from front to back, and then stacks them inside a box he hides under three other boxes in the very back of his closet.

As soon as he finishes one sketchbook, he buys a new blank one. Something in him stirs at the sight of empty pages that need to be filled, covered from corner to corner in words and pictures. He draws eyes, over and over and over again. Eyes like his own but different. He draws hands, clenched in fists or carefully relaxed, with some dark liquid dripping down.

He draws Chris, the wisps of his longer hair, the smile that lights his face. The drawings keep changing, though, the hair gets shorter and sort of curly like Antoni’s or the eyes start to tilt up just slightly at each end, feline almost. He tears those drawings out and throws them away.

He keeps drawing his own face, over and over and over again. He draws arms and covers them with burn scars and then throws those drawings away, too, when he starts to itch under his clothes, to itch and ache. 

The first books are strange - his hand had trembled so badly. He’d drawn Mr. Davies, mostly, and he’d had to stop, headaches came and went like thunderclaps that wrecked and ruined his mind for days on end, but the more he drew - the further he pushed himself - the more things he didn’t recall came back to him as muscle memory instead. 

The eyes that looked so cold and unforgiving became other eyes that were warmer. 

He must have been someone who drew, he must have, because too much came back too quickly for it to be otherwise. But... he never drew, with Mr. Davies - or he did but only in secret spaces, in tiny crumpled-up notepad papers that had Mr. Davies’s to-do lists he’d finished on the other side, carefully thrown out as soon as he’d finished the picture that had been locked in his thoughts. 

Mr. Davies never found them, he thinks - Antoni often wonders what would have happened if he had. Would he have been happy? Would that have been enough, if he could have kept Antoni as a painter or something instead? 

Antoni would have painted instead of begging, if he’d known it was an option. He could have drawn ‘please’ in a thousand ways that would be more effective than speaking the word had been.

Begging hadn’t been good enough, but maybe he had begged the wrong way.

That thought, though, made him think of the woman he had left behind to suffer, and twisted his stomach and heart in cold guilty knots, so he tried to push that away, as far and as deep as it could go.

Lately, he finds himself drawing trees.

Sticks with leaves that become branches that become trunks that root deep into the earth. Leaves that point at the ends or are gently rounded, the veins that show through the undersides like his own bluish-purple through pale skin at his wrists, except on the left side where one burn had been pushed so deeply that he can’t see the vein beneath the skin any longer there.

He draws leaves with burns, holes straight through them with charred black in a circle around it, the veins that disappear into the place where the fire ruined them. 

He left her to burn in his place.

The FedEx man had rung the doorbell and every other time Antoni had obeyed the order to wait until he left and then take the package inside, but this one time - the house was silent, Mr. Davies was out and the woman who suffered alongside him was sleeping in Mr. Davies’s bed, recovering from whatever had been done the night before. 

Antoni - his name wasn’t Antoni, yet, but still he likes to think that this was the moment Antoni was born - opened the door, looked the surprised man in the purple-and-black uniform in the face, and said, “Will you take me in your truck?”

The FedEx guy had breathed out, all at once, a sudden harsh exhale. 

Then he said yes.

Antoni walked away and left the woman there to be punished for his escape, and he draws her, too, sometimes. He draws her face, the sadness in her eyes, the waves in her hair. 

Then, when he has finished drawing her, he draws himself, and he lays marks on his neck and his cheeks that aren’t there in real life, he digs in with graphite the scars he deserves for what he did.

A scar here and the burn there, right on his face for everyone to see.

Jake would know, then, that Antoni is the kind to walk away and let others be hurt for his own need to run. Chris would know that Antoni cannot care for anyone, because he cares too much about himself. Natalie would understand that Antoni has used her as a stepping stone to build a life but he’s too selfish to help someone else when it matters-

He draws himself like Dorian Gray’s portrait, he lays in all his sins and the wrongs he has done. He writes them on his skin in the drawings, tiny little words, abandonment, selfishness.

Maybe in the drawings, he is begging for forgiveness in a different way.

CW: Sick whumpee, some referenced past captivity/noncon, lying to doctors

"Did you grow up in a smoking household?" The doctor's voice is brusque and distant as she listens to his breathing. Antoni tenses at the gentle pressure of the stethoscope over his shirt, expanding his narrow chest in a slow, deep breath - but when he goes to exhale, he ends up coughing so hard she has to pull back, watching him.

"I am sorry? Say again?" He can't stop thinking about all the ways in which she has touched him - fingertips pressing at swollen lymph nodes under his jaw, lightly testing them for signs of pain. The wooden thing like a popsicle stick pressing his tongue down, the strep throat test that went farther than-... than Mr. Davies ever did-

By the time a few seconds had passed, he'd been struggling to pull himself back into the present, and everything now feels like it's on a delay. She speaks, and he hears gibberish, and only after time passes do the words reform in his mind into phrases and sentences, the questions he must answer.

"I'm wondering if you grew up in a household where people smoked often." She hums and moves around him, pressing the stethoscope to his back. "Inhale."

He follows the command.

"Exhale, please."

He manages to keep the cough to only a shake of his shoulders this time, a soft huff that never quite leaves his throat. His thighs ache, and the bones in his upper arms. He closes his eyes, leaning slowly forward, wishing now he had asked Nat to come back with him, not left her in the urgent care waiting room.

This urgent care is supposed to be mostly safe for them, but you never know. He can't know. His hands close into fists.

"Another inhale," She says, nearly whispering. When he breathes in, she hums. "I can hear it. Can you feel that? Like a crackling wheeze?"

"Yes," He says on the exhale, then leans over and coughs into his elbow. The coughs keep coming, his throat tightly closed, body shaking until spots dance at his eyes when he can breathe again. The doctor rubs slow circles into his back and his skin crawls with disgust at even this small platonic touch.

He shudders, closing his eyes. His throat feels like it's been scraped raw by the force of his coughing, and when he breathes in his lungs briefly protest and refuse to inflate. There's a half-second's panic before the oxygen settles in.

He doesn't know how long it takes for his breathing to calm. He can hear the wheezing, clearer than ever, a whistling sound with the crackling in his lungs beneath. He can't stop having little coughs, not enough to hurt beyond his shredded throat, just enough to remind him that he can't quite breathe.

"Here," She says, handing him a glass of water. He chugs it as soon as he feels safe to, the cold liquid trickling down his throat. He can feel it expand inside him, can nearly feel the chill until it reaches his stomach. It seems to calm some of the itching in his throat. A little. "I'm going to check on the results of that stress test. I'll be right back."

She pats him on the arm, and Antoni makes himself hold still and not pull away. When she's gone, he slowly lays back on the high exam table, lightly padded and with a long strip of paper bordered in abstract flowers that shifts underneath him. His eyes close again.

His head throbs, above and behind his eyes, and he focuses on breathing. He's been sick like this before - in Mr. Davies's house, and there wasn't anything except hot water with lemon and honey and time that could fix it.

He'd been beaten three or four times for coughing too loud and too long, locked in the little cell he called a room until Mr. Davies had the patience to deal with his 'noises'.

It had gotten better, eventually.

Probably it will now, too.

He doesn't hear the door open. Instead, he feels fingertips touching his arm and gasps, sitting up all at once. "I am sorry, sir-"

The doctor blinks, pulling her hand back, watching him as he shivers in panic - as much that he has been caught, that someone now knows, as in the memory of a very different person touching him for very different reasons. "Antoni? I think you fell asleep."

"... Oh. How, how long has it..."

"Thirty minutes or so. I had another patient I stopped by to speak to and it ran a little long... the strep test came back negative, and based on your symptoms and what I'm seeing, I think we're dealing with a pretty severe case of bronchitis. Have you gotten bronchitis often in life?"

Being perfectly and utterly honest, he answers, "I don't know. Ah, but I know I did get sick very like this a-a few years ago-" He isn't sure how long it had been between that illness and freedom. "And I have often been sick." Also very honest.

"Hm. And did you grow up with a lot of smoking in the house?"

Antoni thinks about clove smoke blown in his face, in the air all around him, forced down his throat if he wanted any oxygen at all. "I lived with someone who smoked very much," He finally says, after hesitating. "I often have had smoke around me."

"Thought so. All right, I'm going to get you a stronger cough suppressant than what you can get at the store, but this stuff isn't kidding - no driving or anything when you take it, okay?"

Antoni smiles, thinly. "No problem."

"Great. Otherwise, it's mostly just rest, fluids, and time. Should clear up in two weeks or so. If you're struggling with bronchitis often, I'm wondering if you shouldn't speak to your primary care physician about the possibility of asthma. It's very common in adults who grew up in smoking households and can go undiagnosed for a long time. Do you have a PCP I could call...?"

"No." He answers quickly. Maybe too quickly. "I have no insurance."

"Right, okay." She doesn't bat an eyelash, and he relaxes a little in relief. "Well, call us back and get another appointment if you don't start feeling better in a few more days. We can look into getting you access to an inhaler, but I want to see what happens with this bronchial infection first. Remember - rest, fluids, and time. Okay?"

She smiles brightly at him, this doctor who cannot be any older than he is, in her long brown ponytail and slightly oversized white coat. He smiles back, more hesitantly, before coughing again.

"Rest, fluids, time," She repeats before she disappears back out the door.

He blinks.

Well, he must be done then. That was his dismissal.

He slides back off the exam table, glad he didn't have to take off his shirt.

CW: Burns, verbal and physical abuse, conditioned responses, PTSD/trauma recovery after pet whump

"Beg, love."

The voice, deep and thickly accented in a lilting upper-class way, follows him in his sleep, through his days. It haunts the back of his mind, chases him into the kitchen and whispers in his ears in the shower. 

He hears whispers of the voice when he folds clean laundry, when it’s his turn on the chart to scrub the bathroom that week. It prickles along his neck, makes the hairs stand up in alarm, when he’s in the middle of telling Chris a story or pouring his perfect clear, chilled vodka into a glass to drink. 

Through it all, when he is smiling or frowning or scared or happy, he knows there is a voice that murmured, “Beg.”

He knows he did. He knows it was never enough.

The begging - whether whispered or pleaded or screamed or cried - was never the right kind, never quite what the man was looking for. He would beg, and then the man would click his tongue against his teeth and murmur, “Not quite right, boy, but we’ll get there. Left arm.”

And he would hold his arm out, trembling, for the man to take with thick fingers that wrapped around his thin wrist while he sought out the undamaged spot, the bit of skin still unharmed. 

He would focus on the lit cigarette hanging off the man’s lip, the smoke settling into his lungs in a heavy weight, a smell that clung to his hair and clothes and yellowed the walls up by the ceiling with time. 

Focus, and wait for the man to reach up to take a long drag, remove the cigarette, and deliberately press it into the unmarked skin, listening to the wails, the crying, the simple hisses of indrawn breath, that he received in return.

“Perhaps next time,” The man would say, and give him the scraps of affection that his whole world revolved around.

Maybe a pat to the head, or a caress to the side of his face. Sometimes, if the man was very pleased with how well he had taken the burn, he would let him sit at his feet while he drank his afternoon or evening tea.

Nothing else, but it was all he had to look forward to.

When he was done with his suffering, he’d call in the girl - like him and not like him. She suffered, too. In training he had been taught that they didn’t, the ones like her, but she had all the same shadows in her eyes that he had in his, and worse ones, too. 

Once the girl was there, he would be dismissed, and go to nurse his wounds alone, in the little room off the master bedroom he’d been given.

Beg. Not quite right. Perhaps next time.

The words follow him because they’re burned into his skin. Each little circle of scarring represents one of them, and there are so many scars. 

He has made himself a man of small, quiet smiles and compassion, of pots of soup bubbling on the stove and an endless willingness to help and do whatever he can. He carves back his accent from the blocky stone they’d built of his tongue.

He had sworn, once, in the language they had taken from him. A hissed иди трахни себя had been met with the worst moment. The hardest begging. The most desperate pleas.

The man’s horrible disappointment.

And a lit cigarette put out on his tongue.

Antoni is a calm man. He smiles, gently, serenely. Cooks the foods that let him rebuild the pieces of himself that were lost. 

He is there with a hug and good advice, with eternal undying support and loyalty to the people who gave him a place to stay when the burn on his tongue - the worst and last time he let the man put a cigarette out on any part of his body - was still new.

He doesn’t know why the rest of the burns weren’t bad enough to make him leave. He doesn’t know why the burn to his tongue was the only one where he couldn’t stay.

He doesn’t know why he didn’t ask the girl if she would leave with him. All he knows is that he saw a chance, a moment, and he took it. 

And now he sits on a couch with Jake at the other end and Chris between them, cradled under Jake’s arm but with his bare feet pressed against Antoni’s leg as if desperate to hold onto them both, and knows that his serenity is a mask he wears, and no one sees the face underneath.

Antoni watches TV, laughs at the right moments, makes popcorn with parmesan and rosemary, and thinks about the next time he’ll sit with the therapist alone, or even in group, maybe, and say, I still hear it.

Safe, perfectly safe, and free. It doesn’t matter. The burns ache and itch as if they’re new, even his tongue sometimes itches like the burn hasn’t faded, even though he knows it had. 

He rubs at his arms through the fabric of his long-sleeved shirt. Sometimes at night, alone, when Chris is in Jake’s room, he’ll take off the shirt and run fingertips over circle after circle after circle of scar, some of them pink still, some of them a faded, silvery beige. Some rougher, some smoother with age. The oldest scars are between his shoulder blades. The newest scars, other than his tongue, were pressed in a circle around one wrist, like a bracelet he can never take off.

He only looks at the scars when he is totally alone.

Then he slips the shirt - and the mask, and the smile - back on and pretends that everything is fine. He is healing, it’s true, but... still, in the back of his mind, the voice.

“Beg.”

CW: PTSD, conditioned behavior, degrading language, dehumanization, pet whump, noncon touch (nonsexual)

Come here, love. 

The voice is low, with that thick English accent that will make his skin crawl for the rest of his life. The ashtray moves quickly, without hesitation, eyes locked on Mr. Davies’s face, trying to read every minute change in his expression, to understand whether tonight will be meant for keeping his mouth closed to hold in his need to scream, or to keep his mouth open for something far worse.

There’s a good lad. Good as any well-trained dog, aren’t you? 

Thick fingers move through his curly dark hair, and he leans into the touch, eyes closed. When the fingers grip on, grab, force his head to the side, he goes as limp as he can without moving off his knees. He allows his head to be tilted far to the right, baring the left side of his neck. 

Smoke moves thick in the air around Mr. Davies, sickly-sweet clove cigarette between his teeth, but it won’t be for long.

Mr. Davies brushes a bit of dust off the ashtray’s shoulder, gives him a little shake with the hand in his hair

Antoni-

No, that’s not yet his name. The ashtray doesn’t have one. 

Beg, love.

As always, the command is given with soft confidence that he will obey.

As always, he does. 

He begs, and pleads, and it is never enough. Maybe next time, Mr. Davies murmurs. Maybe next time you’ll do it correctly.

His collar bites into the skin of his throat as his head is forced even further to the right, his ear nearly touching his shoulder. His breath catches in his throat, the embered end of the cigarette held tightly between his owner’s thumb and fingers the only thing he can focus on in all of reality. 

Antoni, I, I need-

Here you go, love, Mr. Davies whispers. Even the softest whisper from his owner drowns out any other sound. His voice is loving, affectionate, as he grinds the cigarette into the side of the ashtray’s neck. One sin atoned. If only you were able to stop committing new ones.

The pain shatters him.

He doesn’t scream.

His place is not to scream - it is the woman’s place to scream, in the bedroom, at night - while the man listens in his own bed and sings lullabies he can’t quite remember to drown out the sound.

He is not allowed to scream. 

Antoni!

The ashtray’s mouth opens in a rush of air that he has to catch, desperately, as any sound will lead to far worse than a burn. All that escapes him is a strangled moan, one that could nearly be mistaken for passion. 

Good, love, Mr. Davies praises, and with tears in his eyes, the ashtray feels so, so grateful for the mercy that comes with the cigarette is put away, the sweet smell of cloves mixing with the scent of burnt skin. 

The ashtray keeps breathing in pants, eyes wide, and his body shakes as if there are hands on him, he can hear something breaking through. He can’t look away from Mr. Davies, though, he can’t, he can’t or it will be worse, so much worse, there is so much worse than the burns, he’ll do anything not to be thrown in the bathtub with ice overnight again, there are too many sins to atone and he has no way to earn forgiveness. 

The pain is fierce, throbbing, and endless, and he keeps shaking-

“Ant! Antoni! An, Antoni, Antoni, wake-wake up, are you, are you you you awake? Are, are you-... are you awake yet, are you-”

Antoni’s eyes snap open with a gasped inhale. There is weight on him, warm and living, and he struggles in a sudden instinctive fear of it. Weight on him isn’t right, there shouldn’t be, Mr. Davies would never-

The weight is Chris. 

Air rushes out of his lungs all at once in a thin, whimpering moan. The scar on the left side of his neck itches with such severity it feels like pain, phantom cigarette searing already-damaged skin. 

“Ch-Chrisha?” His voice wavers more than he’d like. “Chrisha, wha-... what are... what are you doing?”

He gets his answer when thunder booms, rattling windowsills, and Chris shudders on top of him, nuzzling into his neck, desperate for reassurance. The redhead rolls off and tucks in against his side before Antoni can even begin to formulate any kind of true conscious thought. 

His breath is warm against the itching scar on Antoni’s neck. Somehow, the warmth soothes the burn. Antoni breathes in, thin and whistling through a throat that feels closed with an old, old fear, and then exhales again, as slowly as he can.

“Sc-scared,” Chris whispers, and then whines, flinching when thunder booms again. Antoni can feel it in the bedframe, rattling right up into his bones. The storm must be right overhead - the thunder comes so fast on the heels of the lightning that there is really no time between them at all.

He moves with creaking slowness to hold Chris, sliding one hand up into the fine, soft red hair, stroking there gently, while his other arm slides behind the boy’s back and holds on tight. 

“Please,” Chris whispers. “Jake is, is, is, is gone with, with his, um, with the, uh, the the the-the-the girl, he, um, Addie, and I, I just-”

Lightning- flash of blinding light through the window, barely caught by curtains. Squeaking fear from Chris, burying himself with gasping, tearful breaths against Antoni.

“I understand,” Antoni says, keeping his own voice low, unbothered, even as he nearness of the storm sets his own nerves alight in worry. On the side table next to the bed, his phone starts to vibrate, and Antoni gives a thin, slight smile, knowing who the text messages will be from without having to check.

He’ll get back to Jake later. For now, he holds Chris, and feels thoroughly unable to help him. Unqualified, not right for the job. A scarecrow playacting at being a man.

“I have you,” He whispers. “I have you, Chrisha.”

“D-Don’t make me, make, make, don’t put put put me outside,” Chris whimpers. “Please, please don’t make me go, go, go-go-go outside, please-”

“Never. Not ever. You are safe here, Chrisha.”

Safe with a hollowed man whose body is coated is evidence of the crimes he can never earn forgiveness for, crimes he can’t even recall. It’s not much of a promise of safety at all.

But he holds on tight, and for the moment - for Chris - it’s enough.

---

@comfy-whumpee​ requested “Traumatic Touch Aversion” for Antoni and here it is! Antoni’s first meeting with Nat when he came to stay at her safehouse. Also listing @wildfaewhump​ who loves all things Antoni.

CW: Referenced burns/scarring, touch aversion, conditioning, pet whump reference, box boy, self-injury (reopening wound at the end)

They meet in what was supposed to be a brand new subdivision, back before the recession scattered the developers and contractors to the wind and left this grassy cleared patch of ground just outside the city, complete with poured paved little road and a few poured concrete slab foundations, like grave markers for the homes that were never built here, the people who never had the chance to move in.

A reminder of the world where you can do everything right and the whim of a few individuals, who live so far away from you, can create an avalanche that buries your plans. Nat is old hat at that, of course - she’s buried her plans twice now, and built new ones right on top of the old. She was going to work in journalism, and then she was going to be the best marketing director WRU ever had, and then…

And then she walked away.

Bought a house with some of her inheritance from her dad, fixed it up for a few months, and… started over.

She likes this life just fine, because it leads her here, to places like this, to clandestine meetings after dark.

Nat’s truck is parked in a cul-de-sac that loops around empty grass, where they might have built a playground, if the neighborhood had gone up. Or put in a pool. Ahead of her is the SUV of the man she’s meeting, so far out in the sticks that she doesn’t worry about being seen, not here. Not in the evening light, with the sky burning down to night. 

She hops down from the truck, short and strong, her long brown braid smacking in the middle of her back as she goes, in her signature flannel over a t-shirt and jeans. You look like Kurt Cobain’s mom, Jake had told her once, and she’d pointed out that she’d be Kurt Cobain’s little sister, thank you very much, she was in Driver’s Ed when all that happened, and hadn’t that blown his mind for a while. 

She’s smiling, a little, as the breeze picks up. It’s the time of year when the hottest winds blow, licking through her hair and over her skin. Like living in a kiln. Nat feels like she cracks a little more each year in the heat.

Still can’t give up her flannels, though. She’ll be cold in the ground before she wears anything else, ever again. Flannels and sensible sneakers or work boots, and that’s the farmer in her that just refuses to fade away.

Those years wearing suits and heels, she felt like she was playacting, wearing a costume picked out by someone else that didn’t fit. This is who she is, and she can’t be anything else. She wouldn’t be, not ever again, anyway.

“Evening, Nat,” One of the two men she is here to meet calls out, and she raises a hand in greeting. Paul is in his fifties, ten years or so older than Nat herself. He’s been living the lib life for decades, was the one she used to call fifteen times a week with a thousand crises she didn’t know how to solve. 

Now she’s the one the younger safehouse owners call, and it’s kind of funny… in a lot of ways, 42 still feels like 24 felt, only she’s less confused and gives a lot less of a fuck about fitting in or following the expectations set out for what makes a good life.

The other man standing next to him is younger, and doesn’t look up. That’s the one that Nat is really here to see. That’s the rescued runaway pet she’s here, in the end, to try and save.

Opportunities for casual/pointless/petty violence.

Shoving / dragging whumpee every time they need to start moving.

Slamming the whumpee's head down into the desk/table they're sitting at.

Throwing an item at whumpee to get their attention (preferably something fast, hard and heavy)

Whumper kicking/slapping/shaking whumpee awake as they walk past

Whumper grabbing whumpee's jaw every time they want whumpee to look at them,

Knocking whatever they're holding/carrying out of their hands.

Shoulder-barging/shoving whumpee into a wall every time whumper walks past them.

Dragging them upright by their collar/throat

Thumping 'playfully' on the shoulder/thigh at every opportunity.

Whumper who would punish Whumpee for taking too long to answer VS Caretaker who patiently waits for Whumpee to gather their thoughts

Whumper forcibly stripping Whumpee down and spraying them with a hose VS Caretaker who readies everything for a nice warm bath for Whumpee and then leaves so they can enjoy it in comfortable privacy

Whumper who would sneer and mock Whumpee expressing fear, misery, pain VS Caretaker who validates them with loving concern

Whumper threatening and taunting Whumpee until they hyperventilate VS Caretaker who guides Whumpee through soothing, calming breaths

Whumper starving Whumpee or making them “earn” food VS Caretaker preparing their favorite comfort foods and bringing it to them

Whumper whose touch and mere presence would make Whumpee tense with fear VS Caretaker who gives Whumpee the space and/or gentle touch they need to feel safe

Series masterlist

This one was a long time coming, huh? Thank you so much for your patience while I got this written!

Hero fiddled with the radio again, switching it to the one of the news broadcast channels once more.

Reports are flooding in that Hero was sighted in the White House this morning, fleeing from several armed agents-

And again, Scientist turned the dial back to the pop station.

Submitted by Anon - thanks!

Nonhuman whumpee has a disease that only affects nonhumans

Other nonhumans cant interact with whumpee, or they'll get the disease too, so the whumpee must be cared for by humans.

6 and 7 for Bea

1 and 2 for Adrian (bc we all know he's traumatised too)

10 and 11 for Angel

- Ruth

Thank you so much for these asks, Ruth! <3 (Trauma Ask Game, here)

-- Bea --

Do they have healthy coping mechanisms? If so, what are they?

I feel like we're starting with the hardest question. She's in fact much less affected by PTSD than other characters. Bea copes in ways that I can't entirely grasp. She's been through horrible things, but she's very much living in the now. She is able to see beauty and promise in the world around her, she found ways to see herself as contributing to 'good'. Physical activity certainly helps her cope, dancing, fighting and running, all things that root her in the presence. Helping others is also a big factor, (and she somehow manages to do that without retraumatising herself much better than Adrian does).

Have they any unhealthy ways of thinking or talking about the trauma in question?

Mostly, that "it wasn't that bad". Which is wrong, but maybe not unhealthy in most contexts. She technically does know it was bad. But she's here now, right? Bad things happen to many people. It's normal. Nobody should make a fuzz about it.

--- Adrian --

What would your OC say is their biggest trauma?

Not being able to help Eric.

What actually is your OC's biggest trauma?

Not being able to help Eric. (He is right about that one). And stacked on that, very many moments of not being able to help, and witnessing the cruelty of WRU, an organization that he is (even if it's subversive) part of. Seeing the human sides of his colleagues, and then the inhuman things they do without batting an eye.

-- Angel --

Are there any ways their friends or family help them cope? Do they have a support system?

Angel is eventually loosely associated with a pet lib activist network, who can give her access to a professional support system. Most notably, Miguel does what he can to support her and respectfully address her trauma and help her through it. She gives him a hard time, though, and they often clash.

Her roommate Lourdes (@wildfaewhump) and Angel support each other, mostly through silent company, deep understanding, and unwavering acceptance. Not always healthy, but very good and certainly a support system.

And lastly, her eventual adoptive son (lol), Tim's teenage nephew Bradley. Bradley is very hurt, very soft, and stubbornly loyal to her. He needs an adult in his life and somehow chooses Angel. Standing up to that challenge helps her grow so much, and Bradley going to therapy and learning how to deal with stuff indirectly makes her learn a lot about herself too.

Are they angry about what happened? What are some feelings they have about what happened?

She is angry. Very much. That is the dominating feeling about all that happened; anger at WRU, at Thane, at Dami, at past her, at everyone who let these things happen. Anger, and maybe a little bit of grief for the much cleaner life she could've had.

Found family, living weapon, religious whump, royalty whump, pet whump (caretaker new master my love), hero whump, medical whump, whether the whump has been going on for years of 20 minutes, really, anything!

oooooo that is really good

oooooo