#dislocated joint

You want to open a jar?

Make a strength check with disadvantage

Bruce bows his head as his shoulders heave, ropes straining against his wrists. They’re tied up above his head in a way that makes everything from his shoulders up hurt - though that could also be the amount of time he’s been strung up for.

He looks up through his hair. It’s been a long, long few hours - maybe more. There’s no sense of time in this room; no windows, no dripping water, no nothing. There’s him, strung up like a hog, and there’s the captor, lazily walking around the room, and there’s his son.

His son- Damian, curled up on his side, one arm curled around his stomach. His eyes are screwed up and his body tries to shrink in on itself, to give their captor less area to hit. The other arm circles his head as though to protect it.

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“Quit your squirmin'. You’re gonna make it worse.”

Ramses goes still, or as still as he can manage, tearing up fistfuls of grass in an effort to stay grounded. “Fuck you snappin’ at me for?” he asks, voice too strained to carry any real heat. Everything hurts, hurts bad enough to make breathing difficult, but it’s his legs that hurt worst of all. It's almost more than he can handle. And it's taking everything in him to stay this side of sane.

Adrenaline keeps him restless, eyes roving, like the monster that did this to him might still be around. He knows it isn’t, knows it’s dead; he saw Hacksaw kill it. But there’s no telling how quickly another might come along to take its place.

Ramses tries to sit up. He doesn’t get more than an inch off the ground before Cain shoves him back down by the shoulders.

“Hey -- don’t you fuckin’ go anywhere! Gimme your hand,” Cain demands.

Ramses squints up at him. He’s grateful for the way Cain’s blocking out the sun, and mostly grateful for the not-so-gentle offer of comfort.

“Give it here,” Cain repeats. Too tired to argue, Ramses obeys. “Now, you squeeze as hard as you want, break my hand if you gotta, but you hold still. If you move and fuck shit up permanently, I ain’t carrying your damaged ass around.” It’s a lie and they both know it. “Aight?”

The pain becomes unmanageable just as Ramses goes to answer. In the end he can only nod, swallowing down nausea and blinking spots out of his vision.

"You could have done that the whole time, couldn't you?"

Kiril knows there's something badly wrong with his shoulder. He knows that it's most likely dislocated, and he knows that leaving it any longer will only cause more damage. His right hand is numb, but the shoulder still burns with pain at even a hint of pressure.

Logically, he should find Kreso, or someone who might help him, but a larger part of him knows that those bridges have been burnt, and they would be more likely to close the door in his face than listen to a request for help. So rather than finding someone to do it for him, he decides to try and reset it himself.

He can survive it. He survived years without any painkillers or anaesthesia, and he can do it again. He's had worse injuries, deeper wounds, and he's managed all of them. If he's gone soft from the readily available drugs, that's his fault and he deserves the pain just as much as Aeron says.

Starting is the hardest part, and he takes almost five minutes just to prepare himself. His back is against the wall, providing something to push against. It's not the most ideal method, but it's the best one that he can come up with through the haze of exhaustion, pain, and fog that seems to have come over his mind.

Pressing the heel of his palm against his shoulder causes white spots to dance in his vision as the pain erupts, but he keeps pushing nonetheless, gritting his teeth and forcing himself to keep breathing. For a few minutes, it seems that nothing is happening, and the pain builds to a level where he almost taps out.

Then, something shifts and an entirely different pain washes through his body. The first thing he notices is a sharp, searing pain, deep in the joint, one that almost knocks the air out of his lungs. The second is the sensation of pins and needles running up and down his arm, accompanied by a twitch in his hand that wasn't there before.