#augustofwhump

MAIN PROMPTS:

Day 1: resentment / infection / sinister

Day 2: electricity / dislocation / drugs

Day 3: lonely / paradise / cold

Day 4: shackles / support / stoic

Day 5: gunpoint / gristle / terror

Day 6: high / choking / charred

Day 7: needles / tense / smile

Day 8: angel / bite / mercy

Day 9: fresh meat / tragedy / selfish

Day 10: payback / beast / beating

Day 11: cpr / corrosive / coughing blood

Day 12: storm / stumbling / squirm

Day 13: cave in / catatonic / plane crash

Day 14: itch / skin / hooks

Day 15: hidden enemy / crime / body

Day 16: broken promise / flood / still waters

Day 17: chemicals / count / chronic condition

Day 18: flayed / knew it / shattered

Day 19: head trauma / wires / fuzzy

Day 20: training / jealousy / woozy

Day 21: sorrow / sanguine / system

Day 22: watching / bonded / resistance

Day 23: blanket / bold / crowbar

Day 24: draining / deadly / doomed

Day 25: twisted / aversion / crunch

Day 26: listless / misstep / remember

Day 27: rest / behave / title

Day 28: party / mania / limit

Day 29: exile / leash / fault

Day 30: quiet / pinned / perfect

Day 31: free day

ALT PROMPTS:

Alien

Headline

Tradeoff

Disappear

Freak show

Worry

Power hungry

Shadows

Reconditioning

Blindfold

Reunion

GUIDELINES:

Prompts should ideally be responded to in the form of whump

Creators can make any type of media they want (Yes, this includes any kind of media, no matter how niche. As long as it’s creative, it’s allowed)

Tag & trigger warn your content accordingly. This includes marking NSFW and putting up proper barriers against minors seeing it

You can complete these prompts in tandem with any other event or other prompts (such as in combination with Bad Things Happen Bingo, AU-gust, etc.)

DO NOT use ai or plagiarize

Tag your works as #augustofwhump and/or #augustofwhump2026. In addition to that, you can also tag this account — @augustofwhump. I’ll try to reblog whatever I can!

Extra info and clarifications here

The August of Whump 2026 ao3 collection is here!

"Like- like what?" he asked under his breath. His head spun. He tried to collect his thoughts, gritting his teeth through the pain as the Doctor continued slicing his way inside his abdomen.

"Tell me why I should do this for you."

He let out a groan, shaking in agony and frustration.

"Come on." the Doctor taunted.

"I-I don't fucking know! I can't really think while you're elbow-deep in my stomach."

The painkillers didn't do much, as usually, the dose kept to the bare minimum, only to stop him from passing out on the table. The sensation of being cut open wasn't really something he got used to, no matter how many times he had to suffer through it.

"How about this." the Doctor started, "If you let me take something, I'll give you anaesthesia. The real kind. You'll fall asleep and won't feel or remember anything."

"Take something?"

"Yes. Something from inside you."

"So like- A finger won't do, right?"

"I don't want to start amputating yet."

The Patient would've started sobbing at the implication, the thought of being slowly hollowed out and having all necessary parts removed, eventually ending up as a limbless shell of a human, kept alive solely at the Doctor's mercy. But he did not have the time or the capacity to really think about that.

He instead considered his chances, closing his eyes shut, attempting to ignore the white-hot pain searing through his body. Everything the Doctor could take, they have already taken. His appendix, gallbladder, parts of his liver, his spleen. His tonsils have been removed when he was a child– and he wasn't even sure if that would have sufficed for them.

"A-A rib?" he said, which granted a surprised raise of eyebrows from their tormentor. "I mean- there's not much left in me to take."

"I suppose you're right. Although that would mean an other incision. Apart from the one I've already made." they sunk their gloved fingers in the cut in the middle of his abdomen.

"I'm not- I'm not having you take my guts out. Fuck that."

The Doctor laughed.

"Yes, that would've been my first option. But if you're so dead set on your ribs, we can do that." they said while drawing a syringe full of a white substance.

Moi’s father dragged the chair to one side of the room before pointing at it and looking at his son.

“Sit down,” he ordered.

Moi’s legs trembled, but he obeyed, walking with slow, heavy movements before lowering himself onto the hard wooden chair.

The man then walked over to the table full of tools and returned holding a roll of duct tape. He peeled the edge free and began binding Moi’s wrists behind the chair’s backrest. The young man stayed frozen, not even bothering to struggle, a chill running down his spine at the sharp rip of the tape as it wrapped around him, immobilizing his arms.

“Right,” his father said once he was done. “Now you’re going to stay there. This time you’re going to watch me work.”

The words took a moment to sink in, but eventually Moi’s brain caught up to what they meant.

“What…?”

Before he could say anything more, he was interrupted by Liam’s cry as his father punched him in the stomach. The young man collapsed to the floor, curling in on himself in an attempt to regain his breath. The man straddled him, ripping his shirt off, then grabbed a coil of rope and tied Liam’s wrists in front of him, moving on to his legs right after.

Used to mistreatment, Liam didn’t even try to struggle or defend himself, only letting out muffled protests when a rag was shoved roughly into his mouth and sealed over with a strip of duct tape.

Meanwhile, Moi stared, his mouth open, heart pounding in his chest.

“Dad, what are you going to do?” he asked, swallowing hard. A thousand images flashed in his mind, each worse than the last, each something he desperately didn’t want to see.

“You need to learn, Moisés,” his father said. With another coil of rope, he tied Liam’s wrists and then passed the rope over one of the ceiling beams, pulling and pulling until the young man was lifted, hanging by his arms, his feet just inches above the floor.

With his bare chest showing old marks of abuse, Liam looked like a slab of meat on display at a butcher’s shop.

The man tied the end of the rope to a metal ring in the floor, then gave Liam’s sunken stomach a shove, making him sway forward and back like a piñata.

“Watch closely, Moisés. This is what happens when you disobey me.”

A furious punch landed against Liam’s abdomen. His eyes shot open and a muffled groan of pain slipped past the gag. A second, a third blow followed, then another, and another, and another still.

Moi’s lower lip began to tremble. He tried to get up, but with his hands bound behind the chair’s back, he couldn’t stop his best friend from being treated like a punching bag.

The man kept hitting and hitting. The basement filled with the sound of flesh on bone, skin against skin, Liam’s muffled cries of pain, and Moi’s ragged breathing.

“Dad, please stop, stop!” Moi cried. He had started sobbing, pathetic whimpers escaping his lips no matter how hard he tried to hold them back.

Liam opened his eyes and gave him a sad look.

His father turned and walked toward him.

“You think that just because you ask me, I’m going to stop, you worthless little shit? You betrayed me, and you expect me to forgive you just like that? The only reason I’m not killing that son of a bitch is because I want you to learn, to learn the consequences of your actions, what I can do if you disobey me. I’m going to make him suffer, and you’re going to watch so you learn that your actions have consequences, so you learn never to defy me again. Understood?”

Moi didn’t answer, his wet eyes fixed on his father, more sobs and garbled apologies spilling from his throat.

“DID YOU UNDERSTAND ME OR NOT?!” the man roared. His voice thundered off the four walls like a storm.

“Y-yes!” Moi answered. He took a deep breath and bit his lip.

His father looked at him with disgust and contempt.

“I feel like slapping those tears right off your face, you pathetic little fag,” he spat, before turning back to the table of tools. He picked up a wooden stick, once part of a broom. “You’re going to count to fifty.”

He swung his arm back and struck forward. The wood cracked against Liam’s abdomen with a loud snap. Liam let out a cry of pain. Moi sat frozen, jaw hanging open. Suddenly, his voice wouldn’t come out.

“I didn’t hear you start,” his father said, delivering a second strike, this one to the ribs. The smell of blood rose as skin split open.

“T-two!” Moi exclaimed.

His father gave him a reproachful look.

“Two? I didn’t hear you say One. Start over.”

He delivered a third blow. Liam’s muffled screams of agony grew, and tears slid down his face.

Moi swallowed hard.

“One,” he said. The number burned on his tongue.

Another strike followed, the stick whistling through the air before crashing hard into its target.

“Two…”

Time passed slow and agonizing.

Moi felt like he barely had air to speak, but he forced himself to count loud and clear. If he didn’t, his father wouldn’t acknowledge it.

After the twenty-eighth blow (which was really the thirty-second), Liam seemed to lose consciousness. His head fell limp forward, and he no longer reacted to the pain. Still, Moi’s father made him count all the way to fifty, after which he finally let the stick fall to the floor, now spattered with scarlet.

That’s when Moi broke down crying. His throat burned, felt tight, breathing hurt, his lungs compressed, his face stung as if the tears were acid eating away at his skin—but no pain could compare to the ache in his heart, to Liam’s pain.

Liam still hung from the ceiling, a bloody trophy. The skin of his chest, stomach, sides, and back was raw, stamped with the stick’s shape as though branded, some spots even bleeding. Was he still breathing? Moi couldn’t see clearly through his tears.

Moi’s father lowered Liam, running his hands over the injured skin.

“He’ll just have a few broken ribs, he won’t die,” he announced.

He untied Liam’s hands only to bind them again, this time behind his back, and replaced the duct tape in his mouth with a thinner rag, wedged between his teeth and tied behind his head.

“There. Now you won’t be whining that he’ll choke to death or something,” he said, dragging the limp body over to the mattress in the corner and letting him drop onto it.

He walked over to his son and cut the tape binding him. With a hard yank, he pulled him from the chair and dragged him up the stairs, out of the basement.

“P-please, Dad, let me stay with him, he’s hurt…”

His father silenced him with a single look.

“Wait until next weekend,” he said, shoving Moi into his room and slamming the door shut.

Moi stayed on the floor, dissolving into tears. The pain in his gut made him think it was from hunger, but food was the last thing on his mind—this pain felt like his very existence was being eaten away.

It’s my fault, he repeated in his head.

He imagined Liam waking up alone in the basement, bound and gagged, black and blue, knowing he could have save himself the beating if Moi didn't try to escape.

The young man scratched at his arms, trying to chase away the crawling under his skin. The memories of when his father beat him came back in crushing sensations, remembering the times he had to hide his own black and blue marks, times when Liam was the only one who tried to defend him.

And now Liam was…

Think about that every time you believe you can run away, a sinister voice in his mind said.

Moi had always believed that by accepting this pact, he was doing something good—that he was giving himself a chance to act, to take care of Liam, to keep his friend alive while he looked for a way to escape his father’s control. But now he understood the truth: he had never had any power here. Neither of them had. Moi was nothing but a forced witness to the violence of a father who had never seen him as anything but a disappointment and who, even fourteen years later, still ruled that house with an iron fist and blood.

No, escape was impossible. Moi knew that now.

The young man only hoped that Liam could survive until the next time they saw each other, so he could at least apologize. Saying sorry was the only thing he could do.

To be continued...

Taglist: @spooksydoo

The river rages behind him but for just a moment he is still.

His body aches from trying to stay afloat, and if he manages to get out of here without losing anything important, he knows he'll be covered in bruises tomorrow. The banks might not be made of solid rock but that doesn't mean they hadn't hurt when he'd been thrown into them.

Scott tightens his grip on the overhanging branch. Hand by hand, he slowly pulls himself further into the small pool on the side of the river, and then hauls his upper body onto the bank. The ground is wet from the rain and the beginning of autumn is evident in the covering of leaves, all of which slip under the fabric of his suit. He knows if he's not careful, he'll slide right back into the river, and the water is dangerous for more than the way it has battered him about. Hypothermia becomes more of a concern with every passing minute he's stuck here.

But his brothers will be looking for him soon, if they aren't already, and so Scott digs around in his pocket and finds a ziptie. They all carry them, for the obvious reasons of being useful in a rescue but also for the children they don’t trust to hold onto them while getting them out of nooks and crannies and a harness isn't readily available. It may hurt a child to have their ziptied hands slung around someone’s neck, but a hurting child isn’t a dead child, and Scott’s seen enough of those in real life and each time he closes his eyes to last longer than a lifetime.

Scott knows the risks. There will be debris flowing past without end in a river like this and after such a storm, and he knows well how it could hit him and rip him in half in less than a second. But his arms shake when he tries to do anything more than lying on the crumpled leaves, his lungs can't seem to get up enough of the water to function properly, and his watch has been flashing for the past minute. The tracker is active, his brothers will be here soon. He only has to hang on a little longer, and he's willing to take any risk necessary to ensure his brothers don't follow a tracker to the bottom of the river.

The zipcord slips around his right arm and the branch. It's edges cut into his skin. Leaning forward, he pulls it tight with his shaking left hand until it feels secure enough that he could sink into the earth itself.

The strangers slice his stomach wide open and Brooklyn isn’t thinking about it. It’s not that he doesn’t feel it. Compared to this he’s never truly felt anything, the pain as bright as the white lamps above him. They burn his retinas as the blade sears inch by inch, left to right, carving a bloody gape above his pubic line. The strangers, silhouetted in the light, their features lost to the black of the shadows, are talking casually while they do it. Not to Brooklyn. Never to Brooklyn. He’s met them before. He thinks he’s met them before, that they’ve reset his broken bones in his cell, that they’ve forced pain meds into his throat when the skin over his ribs turned to mottled blues and purples, a midnight sky of bruises after a punishment. They didn’t fucking talk to him then either.

The metal gurney is unforgiving, was cool against his skin when they hauled him up onto it, but now it’s damp and hot with his sweat, his prison grey t-shirt lifted up over his protruding belly and soaked against the trembling line of his back. It’s a suffocating heat, midsummer somewhere deep underground. No escape, no clean air to breathe. The men opening him up, the tip of their blade pressed inside him, are deft with their weapon but not with their bedside manner. The air is thick with the copper stench of his blood, the sickly tang of his yellowy fat as it oozes from the wound and slips over his damp skin, slithers into the creases between his stomach and his thighs and gathers there. Wet. Warm. Wrong on the outside of him. Nobody reminds Brooklyn to breathe.

His body knows how to do this. For the last eight months that’s all anyone’s said to him, or it feels that way when his mind drags him back from the blinding flames of this agony — the surgeon’s grunt when he carves that much deeper — and throws Brooklyn back into the past. It’s darker there, cooler, but not really any better. He’s screaming now and he was screaming then, thick globs of blood at the back of his throat from wailing.

He tries to picture the garden. When he needs to escape, draw a line between his mind and what’s being done to his body, he wants to see trees rustling softly in the breeze and bugs scuttling freely through sun-kissed grass. The garden doesn’t come today, no pair of reclinable chairs with some old graphic novel propped open over one arm. No ice cold glasses of pink lemonade and the knowledge that he’s safe and warm there. Instead it’s eight months ago, and Brooklyn is already deep in the soil, layers of concrete the only thing between him and the worms. He remembers the victorious glint in the master’s eye when he caught him throwing up in the corner of his cell that day. He’d let himself in just to clang the door locked behind him, stalked smugly towards him with a scoff, the heels of his boots blunt as they clipped the cold ground. Brooklyn hadn’t the strength to shove him away this time, couldn’t stomach the thought of another punishment for doing so. So he’d crouched there in the older man’s shadow, and waited for what was to come.

“See?” The master had said, fingers in his hair, grip tightening when he flinched and grit his teeth. Brooklyn’s lips were wet with bile, and the master tutted when Brooklyn growled at him. “I told you this would happen. Your body takes what it’s given and it knows what to do.”

“Fuck you,” Brooklyn had bit, throat thick with the nausea echoing through him. He was familiar enough with the master’s expressions that he could feel the amused twitch of his lips on the air, the way his grating little chuckle betrayed the pull of his brows, the misplaced glee all over his weathered visage.

“As you wish,” he’d murmured. He’d tightened his hand to a fist and yanked hard, threw Brooklyn onto the floor and knelt over him. His fingers went straight to his belt buckle.

Brooklyn tries to conjure that garden. Isabel’s garden. He’d loved that space, loved the time they shared relaxing in it — barefoot in the scorching heat of summer, holding hands in the coolness of Spring. Visions of the garden bring Isabel’s scent on the air, her voice on the breeze, but Brooklyn never turns to see her. He might choke on the relief at knowing he’d conjured her, that some part of his terrified mind still remembered her. It wouldn’t take long, though, for his stomach to sour at the thought of trying to visit her like that — while the master used his body in whichever savage fashion compelled him that day. He’d squeeze his eyes more tightly shut, until all he could see was the red film of his eyelids peppered with trembling black spots. The master would whisper terrible things, his voice louder than Isabel’s plea that he stay with her.

'Don’t leave yet, sweetheart. You’re not alone, Brook. Don’t go.'

“You’re so good at this,” the master would say. “So tight and wet and loud for me.”

The body is a more exact a science than the mind. In some ways, the master and his acolytes — his ten favourite men — are right about that. Brooklyn’s body knows how to do what is needed of it here. It always has. His body knows how to burn when the pain becomes a wildfire, the smoke of soreness and humiliation turning his lungs to tight, coiled mulch. It knows how to send agony through his veins like the whir of a siren — emergency, emergency, emergency. It knows how to suffer and how to repair itself, but these men above him pull him deftly apart today.

His body knows how to jerk and jolt through the surgery — the assault. He’s a marionette under the blade, one set of knuckles tight around the blade and the other pinning him down by his shoulders. The hard parts of his body thump loudly against the rusting silver of the gurney. He thrashes without meaning to, flesh against metal in a rhythmless panic, fingerprint bruises pressed into his shoulders. Terror eats its way through his flesh, a living creature when he’s already sick to the stomach of a living thing squirming inside him.

There’s no justice to the sickness that’s grown in his body. Not terminal, inherently, but still a wound he doesn’t think he can heal from. Bloating and vomiting and sparse spots of blood, his testosterone already flushed down the toilet in front of him, every vial wrenched open at the master’s own hand as three of his men held Brooklyn down, kept him pinned on his stomach on his stained, threadbare mattress, one of them crouched on the small of his back, Brooklyn’s eyes peeled open by their thumbs and their forefingers, forced to watch. And their laughter, their laughter, their laughter. It echoes through him even still, in the rare hours when he’s alone in his cell.

He’ll kill them all someday, he decided in that moment. And he will. One day he fucking will.

Today the surgeons hold the wound roughly open, hands slipping over his skin, hot and slippery with his blood. Today they push the tip of the blade even deeper, viscera squelching as it bursts out and splatters all of them. Gripped by the pain of being ripped wide apart, Brooklyn screams until he loses his voice. After that his mouth hangs open, eyes squeezed shut, every muscle locked tight. His consciousness wavers, something black creeping in at the edges and threatening to swallow him under. One of them grips his jaw, thumb and forefinger, the heat of his own blood smeared over his jaw. He snaps his eyes open and his gaze struggles to settle, vision blurred and unfocused. He fights against his body now, to keep his eyes from rolling back into his head.

“Don’t die on us, girl,” the man snarls, face so close Brooklyn tastes the putrid stench of his breath. His vision blurs and slips out of focus. Wet fingernails dig into his skin. “Don’t you dare fucking die on us. The master ain’t done with you yet. You don’t get to disobey the master.”

Brooklyn almost scoffs. As if, when Brooklyn slights him by dying, the master will follow him into the afterlife and drag him back into his cell. Brooklyn has spat in the master’s face, has bitten so hard he broke the skin of his hand, has bitten him in other places too. The broken bones lasted longer than the spark of victory it brought him, but he’d do it all over again, every time.

Whatever the surgeon sees in his eyes, he shoves Brooklyn’s face away with a scoff.

“Almost there now,” says the other guy, voice distorted by the desperate whir of Brooklyn’s blood, the way his head turns thick and fuzzy as his consciousness falters and slips. He’s drowning slowly in the sea of his agony, the din of it turning his body to a carcass, broken and searing, no better than roadkill with its stomach torn open. “It’s almost over.”

There’s no comfort in that. It’s always almost over, and then it never is. Brooklyn already knows that. It’s almost over and then the next man arrives. It’s almost over and then he’s pressed into the next set of waiting hands.

They dig the blade into his uterus.

The violent tug of metal undoing his deepest, most intimate organs. His flesh parts for it the knife, a betrayal. Everything warm and wet spilling out of him. He bleeds onto the table and it drips onto the floor, the staccato splat-splat-splat against cold concrete floor as the surgeons pin him down and lean over him, feet shuffling over the blood soaked concrete.

He bites back the instinct to beg them to stop, the words coiled tight in his raw, ruined throat. When the master is with him, he fights the same urge because he’ll only be mocked for it, long ago lost his tolerance for begging for mercy and incurring only more pointed brutality. On the slippery heat of the gurney it’s different. Because beneath the feeling of his flesh being carved asunder, his organs cleaved open by metal, he wants this. He needs it, quite simply, to happen.

The knifeman slices him deeply enough that Brooklyn feels the gape of his stomach, hot and wet and bleeding freely. Cotton wool in his head growing thicker, every heartbeat more sluggish than the last, jolting through his body like the bells of a crumbling church. The agony is vibrant, a mastery of horror. Brooklyn’s mouth hangs open, his eyes wet and unblinking. Then the blade is set down and the surgeon’s fingers are squelching into the wound, both hands pushing deeper and deeper into the mess of him. He’s determined, doesn’t hesitate. Brooklyn wails and arches his back. The tears the wound with his movements.

The master never stopped telling Brooklyn to recite things, even when he proved that he wouldn’t. That he wants what’s happening, needs his body to be used this way, that he’s glad to be locked in that cell with his clothes off. Brooklyn would bite his tongue through to bleeding, would take the master’s punishments as they came. He wouldn’t beg for more and he wouldn’t plead for it to be over. Never. Never.

But this. He needs this. It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to him — worse than the master, worse than his men — but he needs it. He needs them to cure him of this terrible sickness. He chokes on the taste of the blood in his throat and he’s glad that it keeps him from begging.

He needs it.

He needs them to take out the baby.

“This is so fucking disgusting,” says the one with his hands in him. The pain of it shatters the air all around him. His lungs ache and his eyes sting with tears and sweat and he can’t make a noise but he can’t close his mouth. The second man pins him down roughly, slams him hard into the damp of the gurney. “Are we losing her?”

“She’s fine,” says the second man. “Keep going.”

Brooklyn spent years learning how to be grateful to his body, how to forgive it and reshape it and accept it all at once. This slight, however, is unforgivable, and there are times when it’s easier to dig his nails into his flesh and drag them slowly through the skin than it is to blame the man who sent this sickness into him in the first place. He shakes violently on the gurney, eyes fixed on the ceiling, a damp stain creeping in through the paintwork.

Brooklyn has been pregnant once before. Briefly. In the throes of passion he rode Isabel despite her not wearing a condom. They were right there in the dresser, but her cheeks were petal pink with lust and she told him she’d always wanted to come in him. He’d never wanted to get pregnant, not even in the days when he’d thought he was a girl. It had always seemed violating to him, a horror story of shifting bones and stretching organs, but the air crackled sweetly and carnally between them when Isabel reached to tug at his hair and pushed her hips up beneath him. She was gorgeous like that, lips parted, a devilish glint in her eye as she murmured she was going to breed him, leave him full and helplessly knocked up. The fantasy lit something desperate inside them. He’d clamped down so hard on her at the height of his orgasm, fallen forward until their lips met hungrily, frantically. She came inside him with her tongue in his mouth and her arms slung tightly around his neck. It left them both panting and sweat damp together, with no idea it had actually taken.

When the test came back positive, Isabel filled his freezer with ice cream and stacked his bedside table with comic books from her shelves. She came with him for the abortion and then it was over. They watched gameshows in the evening, Isabel calling out every answer. She got more condoms from the internet and hid them in stupid places around his flat to make him laugh. In the fridge. Inside cups. In his shoes. Hysterical, halfway to ruin, he almost laughs now at the memory.

“Almost there,” says the surgeon, voice distant and shapeless, like he’s hearing it from underwater. His eyes roll back into his head.

“We’re losing her. Fuck.”

“I got it. I got it. That’s it.”

He thinks of the cells that slipped out of him years ago, the near miss they moved on from so seamlessly. He thinks of the thing they’re ripping out of him now, and passes out before he hears its first cry.

-

The first person who comes to him after the birth, when he stirs in his cell with his clothes off, is the master. Of course it is. Brooklyn barely listens as the master critiques his appearance. The loose skin, the stretch marks, the way his stomach isn’t totally flat yet. He doesn’t mention the child, or if he does Brooklyn tugs his mind somewhere else in that moment. The master kneels onto the mattress, hands on Brooklyn’s knees to part them, voice low as he promises he’ll be gentle. The second person is the surgeon who pinned him down by his shoulders, here to redo the stitches popped open, to wipe the fresh blood from his stomach.

The third person who comes is a stranger with their hood up and their face concealed in its shadows. Brooklyn’s stomach slips, sick with sheer dread. Familiar figures stalking towards the bars of his cell are never good, but strangers are proponents of worse. The master was a stranger once. His favourite men, including the surgeons, were the same. Together they make the eleven people who pay Brooklyn almost all of his visits. Sometimes his men are ‘released’ and replaced, and the newest always enter his life with something vicious to prove, as though Brooklyn’s body is some kind of training ground. The bloodier the outcome of their first meeting the better, the master always watching from the shadows.

And yet, Brooklyn does not feel the master’s presence this time. He’s familiar enough with it to know it by the way the air changes, an eerie whisper against his skin, the hair on his nape drawn upright in dread, goosebumps crawling over his flesh. Today there is no such sensation.

Regardless, Brooklyn pulls his knees to his chest and presses himself to the wall of the cell. He glares out at the stranger, their head down, the way they pause at the edge of his bed and their breath stutters, hitches in a way that stills him. It’s like hearing the opening of an old treasured song, the chords of it almost forgotten and yet familiar enough to stir something vital inside him. He blinks, searches the figure’s frame for an answer.

“I know you,” he manages, voice changed since screaming through the c-section. He’s always hoarse and ragged now, an older man’s voice dragged out of a young man’s failing body. Changed. Permanently damaged.

“Brooklyn,” comes the reply. His name is spoken in barely a whisper, and yet the cadence of the voice steals the breath from him. His lips part, eyes unblinking as he watches her, sees the tremor in her hands as she reaches for her hood and pushes it down to her shoulders.

He’s never seen Isabel like this before. The thick waves of blonde are gone now, her hair cropped close to the scalp instead. There’s a scar on her face, deep and freshly healed down the length of one cheek, the scar white and the skin all around it pink. Her jaw is set tight and there’s a spark in her eyes, determination, a precursor to victory — and love. Love in the depths of her autumn brown eyes. He can’t speak, can’t even say her name. The sound that chokes out of him is barely a breath. It’s relief, violent as it floods him, its waters hot and its currents dragging him swiftly to Isabel. He’s in her arms moments later, saved and disbelieving in the very same moment. It's the first time he's been held this way in a year, the first time he's been touched with care and not malice. He doesn’t ask what she’s doing here, or how she tricked the master and his men like this. All he does is hold and let himself be held, presses his wet face into the curve of her neck as she strokes his hair and shushes him under her breath. He clings to her like she might vanish.

“It’s almost over,” she tells him. “We can’t stay here, Brook. We have to go, and it has to be now. Can you stand? Walk?”

“Yes,” Brooklyn tells her, not really sure if it’s true. He trusts the searing adrenaline, feverish inside him and regenerating his wasting muscles. He could run marathons for his freedom with Isabel at his side. She has to help him swing his legs over the mattress, her hands cold on the bare flesh of his calves. He always thought he’d memorised every inch of her — for this moment and all the others he’d need her, for all the times he went to her garden and turned away from the memory of her — but there’s a roughness to her hands, a strangeness. He swallows. “Are you real?”

“Come on, Brooklyn,” she tells him, voice a hushed and frantic warning. Running out of time, running out of time. He looks at the determined set of her jaw, reaches out to brush his fingers over her cheekbone.

“Am I dissociating?” he whispers. “I can’t feel the pain. Th-the scar.”

Isabel pauses then, Brooklyn’s heart rabbiting hard in his chest, no idea what she’ll say or how she’ll make him believe her. He so desperately wants to believe her, but the only thing that has ever been brought to him here is cruelty and pain and abuse. She says nothing. Instead all she does is look at him, expression crumpling as he touches her cheek. He presses the pads of his fingers to her skin, and in turn she caresses the back of his trembling hand.

“They did things to me,” he whispers. “I’m different now, Izzy.”

“I’m different too,” she whispers. A lance of protectiveness under his ribs, closer to heartbreak than he’d like. Her long hair gone, face sharpened by weight loss. He reaches out for the scar on her face.

“Am I dissociating?” he asks again, dread thrumming through him at the lack of an answer, fingertips tracing the ropey white skin. “It doesn’t hurt anymore. It should hurt. It — it always hurts, Izzy.”

She almost laughs and it almost terrifies him, but it’s a humourless thing and her eyes grow softer and wet.

“There’s only one way to find out,” she whispers. “Isn’t there? Come with me now. Come with me.”

“Yes,” Brooklyn whispers. Trembling badly, chest pulled almost too tight to breathe, he leans into her, puts his weight and his trust and his very last ember of hope into her. He closes his eyes, and when he prays, eyes closed as he’s pulled carefully to his feet, he prays only to Isabel.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Isabel whispers, the two of their bodies one clumsy entity as she manoeuvres him towards the door of his cell.

“The baby,” Brooklyn mumbles, dread in his belly at the thought of leaving a defenceless human being to be raised here.

“Later,” Isabel says. “We’ll figure that out later, okay? Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” Brooklyn rasps, jostled against her side by the gait of her frame. Under Isabel’s touch — her softness, her care — the reality of what’s been done to him feels as sharp as a blade. He’s been violated on levels he could have scarcely imagined. Rusted blades and broken bones, ravenous cisgender men slipping into his cell. He’s been dragged into hell itself. His throat thickens. His eyes well with tears.

“Let’s go then,” she tells him, voice tight and hushed as they sneak from his cell and into the long, dim lit corridor. He nods, willing his body to work with her, to lock step, to hold out until they make it to safety. He’s never been here without one of his captors. His pulse pounds at the thought. Love and hope turn him almost hysterical, the breathless terror of being captured and punished — of something terrible happening to Isabel.