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suspicious-pools-of-blood · 5 months ago

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The Night They Fled

This modern AU piece was inspired by "When You Hurt Me The Most" by Stream of Passion. It's a beautiful song, and, more importantly, the lyrics are whumpy as all hell. Go listen to it before you read this.

Taglist: @evilwriter-originals @literary-dandy

CW: whumpee getting their face cut up, stitches, mentions of beating and whipping

It was cold, the night they fled. The pain had become more than they could take. They knew they were not allowed to leave -- they themself had agreed to that, so long ago. Had they really known what they were getting themself into at the time? Perhaps. If they were being honest, they weren’t totally sure what they used to think. The past year all blended together into a blur of pain and passion and violence and sex and they didn’t know how much of it they were truly conscious for.

It had been a brutal past few days. Esir had been beaten badly enough that it still hurt to breathe, they had been belted until bruises the size of a grown man’s splayed hand formed on their back, they had been whipped bloody, and just for fun, she had also taken a knife to their face for the first time.

She had threatened to do so before, but that was all it was -- a threat. She would drag the tip of the blade along their jawline, maybe let it come to rest directly under their eye, if she really wanted them to sweat. But she had never really cut them there -- they were too pretty for that, she said; it would be a waste of a beautiful face, she said. Not this time. This time she had used her sharpest knife, the one she saved for special occasions, because of how easily it split open skin with even the lightest touch. They had kept their mouth shut when they screamed; they had tried not to move a muscle, in case they made it worse. The blade was so, so close to their eye, and was already cutting so much deeper than they had ever experienced there.

She gripped their jaw in her free hand to keep their head still where it was pressed against the hard wood beneath them. She straddled them on the floor, trapping their arms against their sides and pinning them down with her weight. They felt like they couldn’t breathe, though whether that was due to the rising panic in their chest or the better part of 200 pounds pressing down on them was uncertain. They could feel the skin of their cheek being split apart, could feel the intense sting of the air entering the open wound, could feel the warm liquid run down the side of their face and drip into their ear as the blood began to spill out.

It hurt. Of course it fucking hurt. But the pain induced a deeper fear in them, a fear that reoccurred every once in a while, the fear that she wasn’t in control. They knew she didn’t intend to kill them or injure them too badly or permanently, but sometimes they weren’t confident that she knew her own strength, or their own fragility. There were times that she pulled them into a stress position that, if she added any more pressure, would surely break something. Maybe a shoulder, maybe their spine. Other times she beat them badly enough that it occurred to them that she might just do irreparable damage to their internal organs. She had yet to actually do any of these things, but the fear was always there when she got that rough, especially if she wasn’t sober. And this time -- this time the fear was most certainly there. They could smell the whiskey on her breath as soon as she had gotten close to them and there was a look in her eyes that told them she needed them to hurt. And when they felt the cold steel of the flat of the blade press against their skin, they whined pitifully and tried to squirm away, but as soon as it turned to the sharp edge they froze completely still, every muscle tense and their breath held, even as tears blurred their vision, distorting the glint from the blade that lingered in the periphery.

Hours later, they sat on a stool at the kitchen counter and winced as Elvan disinfected the lacerations on their face, then applied something that, after a few minutes, reduced the sensation in the whole area. She opened up a suture kit and they looked away. They didn’t like needles, and they most certainly did not want to think about a sewing needle going through their face. When they saw movement approaching in their peripheral vision they squeezed their eyes shut and tried to stay quiet as they felt the needle pierce their skin and the thread be pulled through. The sensation was revolting. They were glad they weren’t feeling it in full.

After she was done stitching them up, they stood in the bathroom and stared at themself in the mirror. The entire left side of their face was covered in a series of parallel horizontal cuts, seven in total, evenly spaced from just below their eye down to their jawline, from just in front of their ear to the corner of their mouth. A dozen neat sutures ran in and out of the skin perpendicular to the cuts, top to bottom, with tiny knots at the ends. These cuts would surely scar. Every movement, no matter how small, of the muscles in their face hurt like hell, even blinking.

Somehow it felt different this time. They had witnessed the damage she inflicted on their body countless times before, but they could separate themself from that. For some reason, now that it was on their face, it was as if her influence had tainted the only part of themself that had still remained untouched, the part that held their identity. She had given them plenty of bruises on their face before -- they were no stranger to the sensation of a black eye -- but never something like this, never something that would last forever. Not there.

What were they doing? What were they doing here? Why were they giving themself so completely to her to destroy? They could be living their own life out there. They could be a normal person. Right? Maybe not. Maybe they wouldn’t be successful. But they sure as hell could try.

Once the decision was made, it was quite easy to execute it. They were not allowed to leave, but it is not as if Elvan did all that much to prevent it. They did not really have any belongings -- they had some clothes, but no shoes and no jacket, no phone or ID and certainly no money to their name. But if they were going to leave, they needed to do it before they changed their mind. Before these cuts scarred over and they forgot how they felt right now.

And that was how they found themself awake at 4 o’clock in the morning the following night. Elvan had sent them to the living room to sleep on the couch until they healed up a bit -- she did this every so often, when she knew she had gone too far with them; for a few days, she would leave them more or less alone, fulfilling her needs in the back of gay bars instead, like she used to do, before them. Tonight she had stumbled home intoxicated after fucking some baby butch senseless in a cramped, graffiti-covered bathroom stall, dropped her bag just inside the front door, and stripped down on her way to her room, leaving her clothes strewn across the living room floor before collapsing onto the bed to sleep off the past few hours.

They had already been asleep when she had come home, and the front door slamming shut had awoken them with a start. She had shooed them away before they could even offer to help her, so they retreated to a safe distance and watched to be sure she made it safely to bed. It did not take long for her breathing to become deep and steady, and once it seemed to have settled into that pattern, they silently padded over to her bedroom and eased the door closed, twisting the doorknob so it would close smoothly without an audible click. They turned back to the living room and picked up the clothes -- jeans, undershirt, t-shirt, socks -- like a trail of breadcrumbs between her room and the front door. They turned the clothes right side out and folded them to make a neat pile by her bedroom door, then went back to the entrance of the apartment. She had attempted to hang up her jacket on its hook by the door, but had mostly just thrown it in the general right direction where it fell to the floor unheeded. They picked the jacket up to return it to its place. It was a sturdy motorcycle jacket, made of thick leather; they hefted it from one hand to the other to feel the comforting weight of it, when they noticed something shift. There was something in the inside pocket. They fished it out and found themself holding her wallet. Made of smooth, worn leather, patinated from years of use and handling, it was itself of non-negligible weight. They looked back at Elvan’s closed bedroom door. They could hear her faintly snoring from the other side. They looked back at the wallet. They hung up the jacket that they were still holding onto, then, after another glance to the bedroom door and back to the wallet, they parted the opening of the wallet to look inside. Their heart raced as they thumbed through the series of bills, ordered by denomination, ranging from numerous twenties to a smaller -- though still considerable -- number of hundreds. They hesitated for a long moment, looking back again at the closed bedroom door. Their hand wandered up to the leather collar around their neck. They ran their fingertips along the stitching on the edges and the cold metal of the buckle and rivets. Then their hand went up further to lightly ghost over the grid of lacerations and stitches in their cheek. It almost hurt more now than it did initially last night. They pulled a single fifty dollar bill from the wallet, folded it up, and tucked it into the waistband of their briefs. They returned the wallet to the inside pocket of the jacket and, keeping an eye on the bedroom door and listening for any sound out of place, they took a deep breath and unbuckled their collar. There was no sense in trying to hide what they were doing; as soon as she got up in the morning and didn’t see them there, she would know what happened. So they placed the collar on the dining table, and taking one last look around the apartment that had been their home -- their prison -- they undid the locks on the door, turned the knob, and pulled it open for the first time in over a year.

And as they walked quickly down the street, the cool night air not yet warmed by the spring sun biting at their extremities, the faint pre-dawn light began to turn the sky from black to deep blue, and Calyx desperately hoped they had made the right decision.

#whump #mine #Rising Angel #Elvan Kanatçık #Calyx Harlow

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