#fight flight freeze or avoid
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Some little fandoodles xp
We have Vale from Lives worth living
As well as an interpretation of changling Loop from to cut you open- before I realized they had an already drawn design. Ooopsys~~ x3c
If interested you should read em, both are amazing
#isat spoilers#two hats spoilers#lives worth living au#Changeling loop au#fanfic fanart#isat loop#I assumed loop would keep the skirt short so they could run easier in it#but the length was probably mentioned and I didn’t notice#so now they just have a new skirt#>:3#also Vale is trying to phase through a wall#they don’t wanna be there#avoidance is a Siffrens natural defense measure#fight flight freeze or avoid#and vale still has it#spoilers
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brand new target
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#flatland#vincent#cw eyestrain#each word/color corresponds to a specific character and the way they react to what happens to them#trey is fight: he retaliates against r line by challenging her dogma and ideologies + physically often runs away and lashes out at others#vincent is flight: after being stabbed his immediate response is to run as far away as he can from danger#equilateris is freeze: when he is attacked in the raid he freezes up and does not attempt to fight against his death#oblisi is fawn: she attempts to befriend and please r line by following anything she says in order to avoid conflict/danger#vincent is r. lines new target for her cruelty and vengeance towards the world#also why vincent is drawn more cartoony/simplistically: r. line does not see him as an equal being. she only sees him as a brand new victim#she does not care about him as a person. she only wants to take out her anger and resentment and he happens to be the one that falls under-#her claws#an unnecessarily cruel game of cat and mouse
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Just finished another class on how to not put my foot in my mouth and it's soooo validating to know people have to learn these skills like anything else. I've signed up for uhhh I think this is like my 3rd or 4th? And experts on how to not sound like a dick will school me and 30 other professionals on how to not sound like a dick. Wiiiiiiild how much there is to learn on the intricacies of communication :O
#Creepy chatter#Professionally I've been trained on the SCARF model a lot but this is the first they linked neuroscience :o#We discussed how to avoid accidentally triggering fight/flight/freeze by limiting perceived social threats#Which is sooo neat bc I've had a similar discussion w my therapist and both said essentially the same thing#Your brain DOES experience social threat/injury just like a physical threat/injury. Right down to a pain sensation.#Just like lol...being aware of that can make navigating conversations a little more understandable tbh#In F/F/F mode your brain literally does not use its logic center. We have entered unga bunga survival instincts.#Idk I have been enjoying this type of learning. Very psychology based w a focus on improving relationships :)
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there’s nothing like a phobia-induced panic attack to really wake you up in the morning
#screaming crying throwing up but i mean all that literally#my first interaction of the day was a standoff with the big spider chilling in my kitchen sink#i wish i just had a phobia of heights or something bc then i could just avoid being up high#but nooo it had to be spiders. unfortunately i do not control the spiders#i wonder if people who don’t have phobias understand the depth and intensity of the fear a phobia causes#you see the trigger and it’s straight into fight/flight/freeze no warning#your brain is 100% CONVINCED that your life is in peril#do you understand how exhausting that is when your phobia is of something commonplace and completely out of your control like spiders#for real every time i kill a spider it’s the bravest thing ive ever done#and yet i feel so guilty about it bc i try not to kill bugs. i prefer to capture and release#but i really really cannot pick up spiders. those guys have to die im so sorry i can’t do it im not strong enough#they’re like sith lords to me. too dangerous to be kept alive#ro speaks#ro rants about their phobia in a desperate attempt to calm down#arachnophobia#spiders#phobias#panic attacks
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I was on the wikipedia page for phobias just for fun but just discovered theres an actual word for a fear of being touched.. 🥹
#haphephobia.... and they list guts from berserk under pop culture references 😢😢😭😭 thats my guy....#not gonna lie i teared up a bit i didnt realise it 'counted' as an actual phobia#i find it really difficult to talk abt but i have a complicated relationship w touch/physical contact (likely trauma babeyy)#and while i do crave it a lot i also have a very physical reflexive fear response especially if its intentional + i dont expect it#which can sometimes even get triggered just being in proximity to ppl bc like. even the possibility sets me on fucking edge#it would be nice to be as physically affectionate as i naturally want to be without dealing w my fight/flight/freeze but alas#its weird bc there are some random situations where it doesnt get triggered at all but its so unpredictable every time#and varies wildly person to person for seemingly no reason. there r strangers im innately more comfortable with but also friends ive known#for years and will never be comfortable around. i think part of that depends on how strongly the other person communicates and whether-#i feel as if theyre demonstrably able to respect boundaries not just mine but their own too + understand theyre not always fixed#ideally i need to have had this conversation with them so i Know they understand. which is rly difficult i find it so hard to admit#and i have a complicated mental block where i need the other person to naturally bring it up which very very rarely ever happens#idk just an atmosphere of safety yknow. i think its intentional touch that specifically makes me panic bc im usually fine w like-#bustling crowds or even expected social rules like handshakes at interviews. bc its not like they're Trying To Touch Me its just rote idk#hopefully eventually ill reach a place where im able to unpack it and reduce its severity bc man sometimes its fucking heartbreaking to me#bc i do genuinely really like physical contact im an incredibly physical person its my main way of interacting w the world#and the way having to force myself to avoid it meshes w my rsd too augh.... its a clusterfuck#even just having one person im completely comfortable with. maaaaan.#almost makes me miss my ex. at least i was mostly cool around them#god its sucked lately ive been having weird vivid dreams related to it. but whatever its so far down my list of problems to prioritize#and at least i dont get it w my familys dog so i can cuddle her :^) i miss her i cant wait to see her next month :D#anywayyyy thats enough im so tired goodnight every1...#.diaries
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Struggling with emotional scenes? Here are some tips for writing emotion!
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1. While you’re writing, try to build an explanation for their feelings. What triggered their emotion? Is their reaction rational or are they overreacting? Do they fight, flight, fawn or freeze when provoked? Do they feel threatened?
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2. Show, don’t tell. Describe what is happening instead of plainly stating the situation. Try not to use words like sad, happy, devastated, in pain, angry, nervous, scared, or worried. They cut back on the emotional integrity of the scene and make it hard for readers to connect with your characters. Here are some different behaviors for different emotions.
-Eager-
Bouncing up and down
Unable to sit still
Breathing deeply
Fidgeting
Pretending to do something
Trying to stay busy
Constantly looking at the clock
-Nervous-
Red and hot face
Sweaty palms
Voice cracks
Shaky hands
Biting nails
Biting lips/inside of cheek
Wide eyes
Shallow breathing
Heart racing
-Excited-
Wide smile
Squeal/scream
Bouncing up and down
Fidgeting
Playing with hands
Tapping foot
Talking fast
Tapping pencil
Pacing back and forth
-Scared-
Curling up/bringing knees to head
Closing eyes
Covering ears
Stop breathing or breathing quickly
Biting nails
Shaking
Gritting teeth
Hugging/squeezing something tight
-Frustrated-
Stomping
Grunting/mumbling/yelling
Deep breaths
Red and hot face
Hitting/kicking something
Pointing
Straining/veins become more visible
-Sobbing-
Eyes filling up with tears
Eyes burn/turn red
Red cheeks
Face becomes puffy
Pursed lips
Holding head down
Hyperventilating
Fast blinking
Trying not to blink/holding back tears
-Happy-
Smiling wide
Laughing loudly
Cheeks hurting
Talking loudly
Higher pitched voice
Animated/expressive
-Upset-
Walking slowly/shuffling feet
Head down/avoiding eye contact
Biting inside of cheek
Dissociation
Keeping quiet
Fidgeting
-Bored-
Pacing back and forth
Sighing loudly
Complaining
Fidgeting
Blank face
Looking for something to do
Making up stories
Talking about random topics
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3. Try and bring some trauma into your character’s emotions. For example, something might happen that reminds them of a suppressed/traumatic memory. This is an easy way to hook your reader and have them really feel like your character is a real person with real emotions. They might have some internal conflict they need to work through and a certain situation reminds them of that. They might become irritable at the thought of their traumatic experience and they might snap at whoever is nearby.
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4. Most characters won’t dump their entire backstory or feelings in a conversation. Try and reserve your character’s emotions to make more interesting scenes later on. For example, your character may be triggered and someone may ask them what’s wrong. Will they give in, soften up and share? Or will they cut themself off and say they’re fine? Also take into account that your character might not know the other character very well and won’t be comfortable sharing personal information with them, like details regarding their trauma.
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5. Last but not least, you don’t need to have a major event happen to connect emotionally with your audience. You don’t have to kill off a character every time you need to spice up your story, even simple interactions can just help your readers understand your character better. Show how they react to certain topics or situations. Describe their feelings, their surroundings, their body language. Their defense mechanisms will help the audience to better understand what kind of person they are.
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#writerscommunity#writing community#writers community#writing help#creative writing#story writing#fiction writing#writers on tumblr#writeblr#writing#vocabulary#writing tips#helping writers#references for writers#writing reference#writing advice#writing resources#writing tips and tricks#grammar#english language#english#synonyms#linguistics#fanfiction tips#character building#creative writers#fanfic tips#creative expression#motivation#creative inspiration
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animal, sick as they come
summary: Ghost has been starving his whole life. Never enough food to fill his stomach, never enough blood to cover his hands, always leaving him hungry and ready to snap. You’re the supposed solution to his problem, willing or not. (or: the kidnapped home chef au)
wc: 14.2k
cw: graphic nonconsensual sex, kidnapping but you’re lowkey chill about it, rough sex, pain play, dirty talk & light degradation, non-consensual spanking, rough/painful anal sex, gratuitous description of cooking/food written by someone who once lit a pot of boiling water on fire and is really just trying her best
read on ao3 - see the pinterest board
You may have never been kidnapped before, but you can’t imagine this is how it’s supposed to go.
The masked man looms in the doorway to the kitchen, shoulders so wide that he can’t stand in the opening properly because he wouldn’t even fit, the very top of his head hidden by the worn frame. He’s a beast of a man, hulking in every sense of the word, and you can’t help but wonder how he managed to sneak up on you in the first place. Surely you’re not that unaware of your surroundings? He’s easily 6’4, probably no less than three hundred pounds.
Not much time had passed since you’d woken in a dark room with a thudding pain between your temples, mouth dry and throat swollen. You were sure you’d been blindfolded at first, eyes dry and heavy, until ice-cold water splashed onto your face and your eyes flew open on instinct.
He’d just… been there. One minute you were walking home, trying to avoid large puddles and squinting through pouring rain, and the next you were shivering and scared, your captor towering over your crumpled and bound form.
You’d lost control of your bladder the moment the sight of him registered. He’d looked down, snorted, and lumbered away to find a hose.
You’d been inconsolable when he told you to strip, shaking with your sobs and keeping your arms wrapped tight around your chest. Even when he’d grunted ‘m not gonna fuck you when you reek of fuckin’ piss, you hadn’t been able to calm enough to follow his demands. It was only when he’d reached up to run a hand over his face and his shirt lifted just enough for you to get a glimpse of the piece on his hip that you’d been snapped away from your panic.
You can see the shape of it now, tucked in its holster. You’re fucking terrified that at any moment he could pull it out and end your life, like that. It would take hardly any effort at all. Just a twitch of the finger and bam, you go from captive to corpse.
“How long’ll it be?” The man grunts, massive arms crossed over his chest, breaking you out of your fearful stupor.
You blink at him, wide-eyed and silent. He’d given you clothes – clothes that fit, to your comfort and horror – so you’ve been spared the further indignity of forced nudity, but the extra layer doesn’t make you feel much safer.
He dips his chin when you don’t answer, dark eyes boring into yours. That only makes you clam up more, joints stiff.
He huffs. “Dinner. When’re you gonna fuckin’ feed me, bird?”
You stare at him, baffled. “What?” It’s the first word you’ve said to him without sobbing, and your voice trembles, shrill and weak.
He steps forward, angling his shoulders to fit into the room, fuck, and you skitter back, pressing yourself to the wooden cabinets. They’re tall, taller than the countertops in any house you’ve ever lived in, and the lip presses into the middle of your back.
“There’s food in the fridge,” he grunts. “Get to work.”
You’re not sure you could move even if you wanted to, your fight-or-flight instinct having settled firmly on freeze.
He rumbles low in his chest and plants one hand on the island in the center of the kitchen, leaning over it. He’s so tall that his head nearly reaches the other side of the counter, hardly a foot away from yours. The counters are the perfect height for him.
“What’s not clicking, girl?”
You pinch yourself, a quick twist of skin to make sure that this is all real and you’re not just trapped in the world’s most confusing nightmare.
“I-I don’t… you want me t-to cook? For you?” You manage, voice strangled.
He looks spectacularly unimpressed with your lack of understanding, and a distant part of you recognizes that you should probably be worried about making your captor displeased so quickly. However, the far larger part of you hasn’t had a rational thought since he hosed you down with freezing water and is still almost entirely useless.
He turns to the side to open his fridge, hand dwarfing the handle, and drops a chunk of frozen meat on the counter. It’s wrapped in brown parchment paper, a little string holding it closed. The fridge rattles with how harshly he closes the door and you can’t help but flinch.
If he weren’t closer to the exit than he is to you, you’d have bolted away the second he turned his back. But he’s close enough that he could reach out and grab you with one hand if you got to the doorway, and you can’t even bring yourself to think about what he might do if you were caught.
“Cook it.” He nods at the meat, voice bored like this is simple. Like it’s obvious, and your lack of understanding is an inconvenience that he’s rapidly losing patience with.
You listen, because it is obvious. He’s the captor, you’re the captive. At any moment, at the slightest whim, he could shoot you, strangle you, beat you, or a dozen worse things you can’t imagine for fear of ruining his dinner with your bile.
He has every advantage and you don’t have anything but the shapeless hoodie and sweatpants he gave you. Here, you are nothing and he is everything.
So with shaking hands and tears streaming down your face nearly the entire time, you listen.
You find a pan – he doesn’t help you and it’s incredibly awkward to try and dig around in unfamiliar cabinets without turning your back to him, but you manage it – and get the burner turned on. He steps out of the doorway again, still watching you from the hallway, and that gives you just enough bravery to inch towards the fridge, snatching the butter from it like he might lurch forward at any minute.
It’s a good cut of meat. A ribeye, think and with not much fat on it. You’ve worked in the resturaunt business for a long time and it’s obvious to you that this is cut by a local butcher, not some packing plant. This is fresh.
You have to stand with your back to the counter beside the stove to keep him in your eyeline. He doesn’t seem to mind, though the black balaclava covering him from scalp to neckline keeps almost all of his expressions a mystery to you.
“How do you want it?” You manage to ask, after what must be five minutes of psyching yourself up internally and darting your eyes between him and the meat.
“Rare,” he says, and you find that you’re not exactly surprised by his answer.
Basting the meat is the hardest part, but you manage. You’ve watched your father do this since you were born, spent countless nights in the corner of your parent’s restaurant watching line cooks and chefs and dishwashers and paying them all far more attention than you ever did your homework, nodding off in class the next day because the restaurant was open until eleven and your parents never once left early.
You could cook this meat in your sleep. Even with his minimal ingredients (he just shakes his head when you ask where the garlic is, and you quickly realize the only seasonings you have to work with are salt and pepper), you’re confident that the meat has come out tender and juicy, if flavorless.
There are no sides. No drinks. No dessert. If you’d made this meal for either one of your parents, they’d lecture you for so long that the steak would go stone cold.
You don’t have a plate to serve it on. When you ask tentatively about the dishes, voice hardly audible to even you, the man doesn’t answer.
He instead begins to stride towards you, sending you careening around the island to try and keep as far from him as possible, hips crashing into the sharp edges of the counter and socks slipping across the tile. He ignores you completely as he leans over the over, sniffing loudly.
You’ve thrown yourself, completely unintentionally, to the side of the counter with a large and well-stocked knife block. Before you even really think about it, you’re gripping a carving knife with both hands and holding it straight out in front of you, like you’re hoping he runs into you and impales himself. It’s probably your best bet, considering your knees are nearly knocking and barely holding you up.
He is entirely unconcerned by you. He grabs an oven mitt that was either always black or has been scorched so badly that it’s been darkened, the back of it split with its thin lining peeking out, and grabs the cast-iron by its handle, turning back to the rest of the kitchen.
He snorts when he sees you, the sound distinctly amused and unafraid. “You think you could hurt me? With that thing?”
You may be shaking in fear, the knife quivering in front of you even with your knuckles clenched so tight they nearly spasm, but you still manage to find yourself almost offended.
“I’ll stab you,” you threaten, voice quiet but the steadiest it’s been since you woke up in that damp basement. “I’ll do it.”
The cheeks of the balaclava pull up, the imprint of his lips clear throught the fabric as he smiles, an indent where his teeth must be. “Don’t think you’ll like what happens if you try, pet.”
He steps around the island again, striding for the door and completely dismissing you. At least, that’s what you think until he calls, “Follow,” over his shoulder, like you’re an animal being called to heel.
The dining room is visible from the kitchen, a section of one wall carved out so you can see into each room from the other. You only lose sight of him for a second before he reappears on the other side of the wall, heading to sit at the table.
The room has a horrible dark red carpet, the walls the same old-fashioned panneling as the hallway he’d dragged you down hardly an hour earlier. He seats himself at the head of a small rectangular table. It’s the only chair in the room despite the fact that five more could easily fit at the table, one leg shorter than the other. There’s nothing on the walls, no decor anywhere, just one table and one chair for one man.
You linger in the doorway, shifty and nervous, halfway to rushing back to the kitchen if only for some deluded sense of familiarity you’ve already built.
“Don’t make me chase you,” he warns, eyes narrowing into a brief glare before he drops the pan in front of himself, silverware already set at his place, cast iron still smoking. “Neither of us’ll like it if you ruin my meal, bird.”
Then, he digs in.
You’ve seen a lot of people eat. More people than you can count, in fact. You’ve seen them eat good food, bad food, life-changingly good and life-changingly bad food. As a child you’d been fascinated by the expressions on customers’ faces when they tried something new for the first time.
A woman with her eyes squeezed shut and eyebrows raised high as she bites into a new chocolate cake recipe your mother spent weeks making you taste test, moaning so loudly her husband had blushed. A man nearly collapsing over his bowl of soup on a cold winter day, just barely keeping his tie from falling into it as he desperately shoveled another bite into his mouth. You’ve seen people cry over your father’s wagyu, pepper your mother’s face with kisses after tasting her dacquoise.
This man eats like none you’ve ever seen before.
He’s like an animal. It takes him just a second to push his mask up to his nose, revealing pale skin decorated with atrophic and keloid scars both, then he’s pulling the pan as close to his chest as he can and hunching over it like a predator guarding its kill.
He seems entirely unworried about burning his wrists on the edges of the pan, instead focused on tearing his steak into barely bite sized pieces with his fork and messily rubbing it in the extra butter still pooling in the bottom of the pan.
He doesn’t even pick the first piece up with his fork. He pinches it between two fingers and pushes it between thin, scarred lips, ignoring what must be a burn on his fingertips. He chews twice, then swallows. His digits shine under the low light of his dining room, juice from the meat dripping down his fingers to cover his hand, nails choppy and with a little piece of fat stuck under one until he digs it out with his tooth.
You gape as he does it again and again, pushing two, then three pieces into his mouth at once as he works through the meat.
It was a massive steak. It took more than half an hour to cook, if the clock on his stove is right. It’s gone in less than five minutes.
He moans as he eats, nearly pornographic in a way that makes you shift in discomfort. The steak is rare enough that the juice dripping from it is pink, the meat itself a brighter color than the man’s thin lips. Juice sluices down his chin as he chews with his mouth open, bits of the meat caught between crooked teeth.
When he gets to the last piece of the cut, half of it submerged in butter, he holds it in front of himself for just a moment. Then, he turns to you for the first time since he left the kitchen.
His lips are flat, expressionless, as he holds the piece of steak up in front of himself. His elbow is planted firmly on the table to keep his hand in his eyeline, and he looks at you expectantly, silent.
Your stomach growls, loud enough for him to hear. His lips twitch up in a smirk before he smothers it. You glare. You have no idea how long the drugs knocked you out for, how many days it’s been since your breakfast omlette. Standing over the oven, smelling the steak as it cooked, has made you hungry.
The two of you are silent as you inch forward, hardly daring to lift your feet from the carpet. It doesn’t take you very long to reach the table, not when the room is as small as it is.
You shift the knife to just your dominant hand, your now free hand reaching forward slowly as you keep your eyes trained on his. The steak is still so hot that steam is still curling from the pink center of it, right between his eyes. He’s still as a statue.
Then, the second your fingertips brush the meat, he snatches it back, slipping it between his lips.
You flinch back as your mouth drops open, offended and startled by his sudden movement. Your fist tightens around the knife, no longer so limp at your side.
He chews with his mouth open, smiling meanly at you. His teeth are stained pink from the juices, and you think for a moment that it almost looks like his gums are melting.
“Forget your manners, pet?’ He asks, only swallowing once he’s finished talking.
You wince at the lack of manners, your p’s and q’s brow beaten into you with a stiff wooden spoon to the back of your hand when you were young, shocked to see someone ignore what you’ve always seen as instinctual and then ask you about manners. “What?”
He leans forward in his seat, greasy hand set on his jean-clad knee. “You didn’t say please.”
You blink at him, caught in some sort of trance that you have no idea how to pull yourself out from. “Oh.”
He sits, still and silent, for several long moments, belly rising and falling beneath his folded fingers, before speaking again. “You’ll call me Ghost while you’re here.”
Your brows furrow a bit but you nod, fingers trembling where they rest limp against your thighs, knife almost entirely forgotten in this almost-hypnosis he’s dragged you into. You can’t quite make your lips move enough to give him a verbal answer, but he seems to accept the nod.
He snorts, eyes narrowed as he looks at you. He doesn’t even have to tilt his head up even though he’s the one sitting. The realization makes you sweat, something hot igniting low in your belly.
Before you even register that Ghost is moving, he’s snatched the knife from your now-slackened grip. He drops it into the pan immediately, the handle and blade both becoming drenched in the butter.
You’d nearly forgotten you even had the knife but the lack of it now drags the fear back up your throat, makes your heartbeat louder and your fingertips colder.
“Don’t need that,” he grunts, leaning back and folding his hands over his belly, fingers sliding against the fabric and already staining. This close, you can see that it hangs over the hem of his pants just enough to cover the button. You swallow thickly.
“‘S good,” Ghost says, looking you up and down. Just like in the kitchen, the chair and table here are taller than what you used to, like they were tailor made for your captor instead of bought from a store. You’re only barely taller than him even as he sits, but he somehow still manages to make you feel like he’s looking down on you.
There’s something in you that keeps you from backing away, even though being hardly a foot away from him makes the backs of your eyes sting with tears. It’s like your feet have sunk through the floor, like you’re up to your knees in shag carpeting and you can’t even try to get yourself out until the behemoth before you looks away.
“Congratulations, girl,” he rumbles, lips quirked up into a mean smile. “You just bought yourself a life, right here with me.”
You can’t stop the tears from falling, shaking hands clapped to your mouth in a fruitless attempt to muffle your sob.
Ghost leans forward, smile growing when you stumble back until the small of your back meets the half-wall. “What’re you cryin’ about, doll?” He lowers his voice, like he’s sharing a joke with you. “Think I won’t treat my new pet well?”
Your heart feels like it’s going to beat so hard it gives out, its galloping thump felt even in your teeth, gums numbing. Your tears blur your vision, but you can see enough to know when he stands from his set, the chair creaking as he scuffs towards you.
He comes into focus when he crouches in front of you, his knees hovering just above your naked feet, toes curling into the carpet in a futile attempt to get as far from him as you can.
“I won’t,” he says lowly, hot breath gusting over your face and lighting your nerves on fire. “Not until you earn it. Y’hear me?”
Whimpers eek through your fingers at his words. There’s something in his eyes that still looks hungry, little drops of grease dripping from Ghost’s fingers to your toes, and it makes you feel like prey just inches away from the predator’s jaw.
His hand darts out, smacking your clothed thigh and making you yelp.
“Don’t fuckin’ ignore me,” he snarls, sharp and sudden anger upon him like a wave, your thigh stinging from his hit.
You nod as soon as the chain of words connects in your brain to mean something, head bobbing up and down quickly in desperation to avoid any more physical contact.
His eyes narrow, unimpressed. “Repeat it, then.”
“I have to–” you cut yourself off, breath suddering out of you almost painfully. “I have to earn it.”
“Earn what?”
Exasperation mixes with terror, eyelids straining to stay widened, unwilling to miss another twitch from him.
Think I won’t treat my new pet well? He’d said. You have to earn it.
You can’t think of a way to distill that down into a singular answer, not quick enough for him, at least.
“I don’t– I don’t know,” you sob.
His movement is slow this time, but it’s no more possible for you to avoid his touch than it was when you hadn’t seen anything coming. His hand drags into your hair, nails catching on scalp, and he tugs your head back, slamming it into the wall.
“Everything,” he hisses, the fabric covering his nose brushing against yours, snot sliding down your fingers. “You earn everything here. You work for it all. Get it?”
You can hardly nod this time, his fingers tightening around the strands of your hair and pulling at your scalp, but thankfully it’s enough for him.
“Good,” he spits, leaning back and standing, dragging you with him.
Once you’re standing, half crouched to try your best to ease the pain rippling from your head but pushed up on your toes so his hand isn’t practically lifting you, Ghost grabs you by the elbow instead and drags you out of the room before you can even fully realize what’s happening.
He grabs you in the exact spot he had when he’d dragged you to the kitchen in the first place, each finger laid precisely where there were already bruises emerging. His grip so tight you can’t even think of trying to rip away – you imagine your arm would come off your body before Ghost’s hand came off of you.
He drags you from the dining room and down a small hallway. From what you’ve seen of the house, and what you can remember that isn’t clouded over by a haze of panic, the floor-plan is closed off, more claustrophobic than anything else.
Every room seems connected by a new hallway and they're each thin enough that you couldn’t walk by the man’s side – the two of you might not even be able to walk chest to chest without somehow getting wedged between the wood-panneling, considering the bulk of him.
Your toes drag, catching on the warped wood floor as he pulls you behind him. Your hands are wrapped around his wrist in a wasted but desperate attempt to keep everything below his grip from going numb, leaving your choking whines and sobs and pleas to rush out of you, voice bouncing off the panneled walls.
Ghost ignores you entirely, doesn’t even seem to notice when you dig your nails into his skin and you try your best to yank.
You start to grasp at the walls, trying to slow his stride in whatever way you can. You have no idea where he’s taking you, no idea what you’d do even if you did somehow manage to break free from him, but you try nonetheless.
He doesn’t react, no matter how much you scream and hiss, no matter how much you claw and kick and make your body dead weight, nearly breaking your wrist from the way you yank and twist.
It’s only when your fingers catch on the edge of something thin that you’re given a tangible thing to wrap your hope around.
You only realize it’s a picture frame once you’ve already yanked it from the wall, the photo itself a complete mystery to you.
It’s the adrenaline that makes you pull back and slam the frame glass-first into the side of his head, reaching up as high as you can to make contact. There’s a horrible crack when glass meets fabric, a screech when you drag it down the side of his face, glass catching on mask and skin and more glass.
Ghost doesn’t let you go but he does stumble into the wall, grunting like a bull and batting your opportune weapon like it’s hardly more than an annoying mosquito, sending it crashing to the ground despite your death grip.
He falls back into the wall, tugs you with him with enough force to nearly knock you off your feet, your head a mix of fear and victory and adrenaline and pain and more fear, coherent thoughts a far-off dream.
“Little fuckin’ cunt,” you hear him spit, heavy boot smashing fallen glass into further pieces as he turns to press you against the wall with his body, heavy and hot against you.
His eyes are raging, scarred lips curled to bare his teeth and little pieces of glass sticking from his skin and balaclava.
You only have about four drops of blood to speak of for your desperate attack, and with your kidnapper furious and holding you down all you can manage to think is why the fuck did I do that? What was I thinking?
There’s no room for anything but shame when you’re staring down the barrel of God only knows what he’ll deicde to do to you.
“Off to a bad fuckin’ start,” he hisses, spittle landing across your cheeks. “Thought I’d be nice to you. Send you off to sleep with hardly a damn scratch.”
Ghost snarls, shakes his head like a beast shaking off fleas. Glass goes flying around his head. You can hardly breathe.
“Tha’s not good enough for you, is it?” He says, hand coming up to lock around your throat. You’d cry out if he left you enough air, but he’s squeezing so tight you can barely get enough breath to stay conscious.
“You need a heavy hand, ‘s that it, pet? Need someone to show you what happens when you fuckin’ misbehave?” He pulls your head a few inches away from the wall on the last word, slamming you back enough to rattle your brain in your skull, eyes unfocused and hardly seeing and unable to groan with his hand squeezing your airway shut.
You try to shake your head, can’t manage to do anything more than shift with the grip on your throat. You think, briefly, about how he could snap your neck with one hand. His palm rests over your vocal chords, fingertips pressing against the nape of your neck. A flick of his wrist and you’d be dead. You think your heart may give out, overwhelmed and unable to keep up with everything Ghost is drawing from you, spitting at you.
Capture myopathy, a friend told you once, sitting beside you in a required biology class only one of you was interested in. When a rabbit is so scared that their heart gives out on them and they die. Just like that. Snap. Easy dinner for a fox. Isn’t that sick?
Sick. She’d said. This, you think, is sicker than anything a fox could do to a rabbit.
“You’re lucky your meat was good,” he says, tone calming into something less rageful and more frustrated, hand loosening enough to let you breathe more easily but still keeping you from speaking. “Don’t mind trainin’ you up knowin’ you’ll be an investment. Just need some work, huh?”
You try your best to nod, eager to pick training over certain death any day.
He hums, thumb stroking the crease of your skin between neck and shoulder and you can’t stop your shiver.
“Don’t worry, bird.” His teeth gleam when he flashes them, finally leaving your space. He practically throws you in front of him with the hand on your neck, letting it shift to wrap around your nape so he can guide you forward. “I’ve had pets before. All those tears tell me you’ll at least be easier to break in than the boy was.”
You only have a brief moment to wonder who the fuck the boy is, if he’s in this house, and what that could possible mean for you, before Ghost is nudging open a rickety door and nudging you down the stairs.
He lets you go once you’re firmly on the narrow staircase and taking slow, tentative steps out of fear you’ll miss one in the dark. Ghost takes his hand from you, looming as you make your leaden-footed way down.
You can’t stop your sniffles or your tears, terrified of the nightmares that must be waiting at the bottom of the staircase and back in the basement you’d woken up in. You know some of what waits for you, what the room will look like and what will be in it – Ghost had been with you since he dragged you to the kitchen, there would’ve been no time for him to change anything – but you’ve got no idea what training means or what Ghost will do to you when your feet hit concrete.
You don’t move any further into the room when you reach the bottom, Ghost easily stepping around you and choosing to ignore you in favor of looking for whatever he’s decided he needs. The sight of a small carabiner with keys latched to one of his belt loops makes your idea of running back up to the door leave as quick as it comes.
“Over here,” Ghost calls, back turned to you as he crouches down and fiddles with something at the wall.
You don’t move, feet anchored to the floor.
He huffs when he doesn’t hear you following him, shifting one knee to rest on the ground so he can turn over his shoulder and level you with an unimpressed look.
“You really want to make me come get you?” He rumbles, and the threat is enough to get you rushing forward then pulling to just as sudden as stop just out of his arm’s reach.
It doesn’t matter much, you can’t really do anything to stop him when Ghost’s arm darts back to grab you by the knee, his torso leaning back to get a hand on you and tugging you forward.
You can’t keep yourself from falling to your knees right at his side, nothing around for you to grab onto other than him and even looking at a face-full of concrete you know not to make any unnecessary contact with Ghost, not if you can help it.
The weight around your neck is sudden and unexpected, his quick movements around your head even moreso. You don’t even have enough time to decide if it would be worth it to try and fight him off before there’s a resolute click, and he’s pulling back with something thick wrapped around his knuckles.
It’s a chain. Silver, hardly a hint of rust on it, thick and well-kept, and leading right back up to your neck.
You don’t put it together until shaky hands come up to press around the- the collar. Thick leather, two or three inches wide, just tight enough that you can feel it on every exhale.
A collar. A collar with a chain leash, heavy enough that you can feel the hint of pressure pulling you towards Ghost, the length of the chain that’s not tight in his fist resting in loops by his boot.
You can’t do anything but stare up at him, wide eyed and trembling, can’t begin to think of what to do before he’s standing and tugging you with him.
“Here now,” he grunts, not bothering to give you any time to get to your feet. You sort of stumble after him, knee scraping the ground as your head is jerked along. You can’t let yourself lag at all, not unless you want to get dragged along by your neck.
You feel like you’re moving through quicksand, every move only making things worse for you. Every forced step forward is another step closer to him, every jerk of your head pulls at the hair stuck in the back of the collar that he hadn’t bothered to move before locking it onto you, every panicked breath only serves to keep your breathing short and hitched.
Ghost drops himself onto the small cot pressed against the wall, it’s metal legs creaking under his weight. You can’t straighten fully with how short he keeps the chain, which leves you in a terribly vulnerable hunched position, eye-level with his stomach and bent at the waist, knee throbbing.
“Over my knee,” he rumbles, voice quiet. “Get this over with.”
You stare up at him with wide eyes, panting open-mouthed, drooling. A panicked animal with its leg caught in a trap, unable to do anything but stare up at the jaws closing around its body.
“Please,” you beg, voice hardly a whisper. “Don’t hurt me.”
His eyes are hard behind the mask, mouth a firm line as he looks down at you. You can feel your heartbeat in your throat beneath the thick leather.
Ghost doesn’t give you another chance to obey. One quick jerk of his hand and you’re toppeling forward, choking on spit and holding your hands out to catch yourself.
He manhandles you quickly – one hand on the chain yanking it further down, head forced lower than his knee while his other hand grabs you by the hips and hefts you on top of him, elbow jamming itself between your thighs while blood rushes to your head.
You yelp, legs kicking out as you push at the bed with one hand, the rough ground with the other, throwing your head back and forth as much as you can with the leash giving you almost no room to move.
“Settle,” Ghost hisses. You don’t listen, can’t listen with the way panic alone rules your mind, and in response he lands a harsh smack on the center of your ass, enough to push you forward a few inches.
Your pleas come to a sudden stop, breath stuck in your throat as you absorb the pain, a noticeable sting even through the sweatpants.
“You’re gettin’ fifty,” he grunts when you’ve gone silent, tucking two fingers in the back of your pants and tugging them down, lifting up one knee to lift your torso so he can yank them to your waist. “Take ‘em, then we’re done.”
“No, no, please, God,” you choke, one hand flying to your mouth and pressing against it. Tears stream down your face, cheeks blazing with heat, a horrible mix of terrified and humiliated that leaves you all but limp over his legs.
Ghost snorts above you and you jump when you feel his cold hand make a pass over the fat of your ass. “Won’t be thinkin’ that much longer.”
You only have a brief moment to think hysterically is he making a joke right now? before there’s a horrible pain on your ass, the smack loud in the otherwise silent room.
It takes a second for the pain to hit you, but when it does you yowl. You push up on his thigh with both hands as another smack rains down, pulling as hard as you can against the chain.
“Stop, stop, stop it!” You screech, toes sliding uselessly against the cement as you writhe, all of your struggles doing absolutely nothing to stop his hand from falling again, this time right on the center of both cheeks.
“Y-You can’t- you can’t d-do this!” You wail, throat filled with tears and snot as you realize you can’t even get close to standing, not with his grip on the chain as immovable as it is. “Stop!”
His next smack is his hardest, his grip around the chain loosening at just the right time to allow you to be sent sprawling over his lap, sobbing at the pain that lights up your backside. It hurts, and now your forehead is nearly pressed to the floor, leaving you completely off balance.
Ghost grunts as he shifts one of his legs, tucking your flailing limbs between his thighs and forcing you to be bent over just the one thigh, knees hovering inches off the ground.
“Stop your fuckin’ wailin’, Christ,” he hisses, peppering you with more spanks, each of them as hard as the last and forcing all the air out of your lungs. “Damn lucky this is all you’re gettin’. I should make you count ‘em, start over every time you get one wrong.”
You cry out at that, wriggling desperately and only serving to push your ass further into the air, trapped on both ends.
“We’d be here all damn night,” Ghost mutters to himself, hardly audible over your fit. “One picture ain’t worth bruisin’ my hand over.”
Your feet just barely brush against his thighs when you manage to kick up, but you’re embarrassed to find that you don’t have the strength to do much more than hang limply in his hold, one hand reluctantly wrapped around his calf to keep yourself from falling to the floor.
Your tears and sobs don’t stop as he continues his assault on your ass, but there’s a part of you that almost… settles. Not into the pain, not when he’s smacking you hard enough to jolt your body forward and make you wail at every new touch, but into the steadiness of his smacks.
He doesn’t wait more than a second between hits, each spank no heavier or lighter than the last. It hurts, hurts worse than anytime you’ve burned or cut yourself in the kitchen, but after the first minute or so your body comes to expect what’s coming.
That doesn’t make it any easier to handle. You couldn’t stop your crying if you tried, like his hand is resting on your tearducts instead of your ass, squeezing every bit of moisture out of your eyes.
He stops at some point, hand resting on your cheeks. He squeezes, nails digging in deep, and pulls your cheeks apart. You sniffle at the indignity, free hand covering your eyes as your face crumples.
“Half way through now,” Ghost says, ignoring the way you cry out. You can’t imagine taking one more hit, let alone twenty five.
He shifts back on the cot and for a moment you have absolutely no idea what’s happening. It’s not until he not-so-gently readjusts your legs, his own laid out flat in front of him with his feet hanging off the cot, your body readjusted so you’re lying properly over his thighs.
It’s more comfortable, certainly, but you’re not sure you want comfortable right now. It feels impossible to imagine the brute above you as thinking of your comfort, completely analogous to his actions and leaving you a confused and weak mess.
Ghost shifts his hand along with the rest of him, dropping the chain entirely in favor of resting a heavy palm on the back of your neck, equally as effective at keeping you still. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t comment on your heaving breaths or shaking thighs, just lets you breathe with your hands curled beneath your chest and your forehead pressed to the thin sheet covering the cot.
The next spank catches you completely off guard, your body having gone limp and leaving you unprepared for the sudden pain. It reignites your sobbing, your throat on fire from all the screaming you’ve done. You can hear your voice crack as you absorb the pain, shoulder shaking.
“Christ,” Ghost sighs, hand briefly leaving your ass.
He’s lifting you by your hair a moment later, thick fingers laced through the tresses as he pulls your head back and stuffs something in your mouth. You whimer at the feeling, tongue working at the frankly disgusting taste, brows furrowed.
“Keep that there,” he orders, and you just barely get a glance of the side of his head before he’s shoving you back down, face-first. You realize, blinking slowly, that he’s shoved his mask in your mouth. “Can’t be bothered to teach you to shut the hell up, gonna hafta work on that once you learn how to behave.”
He spanks you again and this time your sob is muffled as you bite down on the fabric and grind it between your teeth.
His pace is slower now, hand more thudding than stinging. It feels like he’s putting his weight behind every smack, each one delivered with what you’re sure is bruising force. Though truly you can’t tell much of a difference, not with your whole ass already feeling like it’s on fire.
It gets harder and harder to differentiate between new and old pain as he lays brutal spanks over spots that are already hot and throbbing, varying the strength of each smack this time. You sink into the pain, limp and unable to do anything but take it.
“Better,” Ghost says, the rough pads of his fingers rubbing your scalp when you jerk at the sound of his voice. His next hit lands on the crease between your thigh and your ass, but your whine is almost silent. “Can hear myself think now, for one.”
Another smack, and your body doesn’t even jerk this time. You’re not even fully present in yourself, mind floating. You don’t quite feel like an outside observer, more like you’re just a few inches removed from the situation. All your sensations feel dulled, and you bear the pain as best you can.
“Can enjoy the sight too,” you hear him say, and suddenly there are pauses between each smack, a little break Ghost takes to rub your glowing ass and thighs as much as he wants before laying another handprint across your soft skin.
“‘S too bad I don’t fuck where I eat,” he muses, and you groan into the mask at a particularly rough hit. “You don’t take much fightin’. I like that in a girl. Go down real easy with a firm hand, don’t you?”
You shake your head as best as you can, which really isn’t much at all. He snorts at your effort, tightens his fingers to keep your head still.
You’re sapped of all energy, unable to move even as his punishing spanks linger lower on your ass, and even when he bullies a hand between your thighs and spreads your legs.
“Look at that,” he says, voice low. You can feel it through his stomach, goosebumps racing from your ribs to the rest of you. “Dirty girl, are you?”
You’ve got enough wherewithal to try and squeeze your legs shut when his fingers prod at your center, yanked back into your body at the sharp turn from painful to… something else.
He strokes two fingers over your slit, and you groan at just how much slick you can feel him spreading. You have no idea when it happened, have no idea why it happened, but you’re drenched between your thighs. Your cunt feels as hot as your ass, and the realization yanks a horrible little whine from you.
“Guess that wasn’t much of a punishment,” Ghost muses, spreading your lips and letting cool air ghost over you. You feel him blow a breath across you and struggle more than you have since he’d laid you flat across him, knees coming to tuck up under yourself.
“No,” he says simply, landing a horrible, smarting slap to your pussy. It sends you flat to your tummy again, squirming against him and wailing through the pain. It hurts. “Down, girl. No strugglin’ now.”
He only continues to stroke you, now pushing the steadily dripping wetness from your clit to your asshole, making you tense and writhe where you’re pinned, his order ignored.
“Think I’ll do the last few here,” he says, landing another harsh smack to your center, this time focused on your clit. “Make sure you remember your lesson.”
He doesn’t wait any longer, just begins to lay quick, harsh slaps all across your cunt – your spread lips, your hole itself, your clit. Once, even, on your bottom hole, digging his nails into your stinging cheeks to spread you wide for him.
It hurts more than any of the smacks to your ass did, undeniably, but you’re sapped of all energy and find yourself hardly able to cry, let alone struggle. You’re too busy being swept away in a maelstrom of pain-pleasure you’ve never experienced before to even try defending yourself.
Your only option is to lie still and wait for him to finish with you. So that’s all you do.
It feels like it’s been an eternity when he finally stops.
The hand near your ass gropes you firmly, pinching what you can already feel are tiny little raised spots from where his palm landed the hardest.
You don’t have the energy to even think of struggling when he finally moves you off him, letting you flop uselessly to the cot as he moves out from under you. There’s the sound of metal clinking, the tension from the collar finally eased as he lets it go completely.
He doesn’t bother to pull your pants up, but he does nudge your legs closed. It’s a bit of decency you didn’t expect from him.
You can’t do much more than blink wearily at him as Ghost reaches to tug his mask from your mouth, lip curling in disgust at the drops of saliva that fall from it. Good, you think. That’s just the start of what you deserve, bastard.
He crouches in front of you a moment later, bringing his face into full focus in front of you.
He’s… not traditionally attractive, that’s for sure. Even your defeated and exhausted mind can recognize that you would’ve avoided this man had you seen him on the street. Probably would’ve even risked being seen as rude and crossed to another sidewalk before he walked past you. Seeing as this is where you’ve ended up, your instincts wouldn’t have been wrong about him.
He’s got a square head and blond hair buzzed close to the scalp. The scars you’d seen across his cheeks and jaw extend further up his face, something textured across his temple that you can’t guess the cause of, eyebrows patchy and only half-grown in from burns, little bumps decorating his scalp.
But there’s something captivating about him. In his eyes, maybe, such a dark blue that you can only tell they’re not brown because he’s hardly a foot from you. There’s something about him that says look at me. Don’t forget where I am.
Though maybe, you think deliriously, you’re only thinking that because he’s the captor who just spanked your ass raw and dragged his fingers through your cunt.
“Rule one,” Ghost rumbles quietly, breath gusting over your lips. “You hurt me, I hurt you. Heard?”
It takes all the energy you have left to nod, eyes falling shut even as the little prey voice in the back of your head screams at the danger so near, never mind that you haven’t been able to do anything to keep him from you. You’re too loud to listen to the voice anyways, only a very distant part of you acknowledging it as you slip into a sort of half-sleep.
You don’t hear him leave.
From there you settle, bizarrely, into a routine.
Every day begins with you waking up in the basement. Always before Ghost comes to get you, some primal instinct buried deep knowing that you need enough time every morning to brace yourself for seeing him.
He locks the chain, the leash, to a hook on the wall a couple feet above your cot every night, the key to the padlock always left on him. The chain is long enough to give you plenty of room to roll and shift in bed at night but it’s too short for you to reach the small bathroom across the basement. There’s no clock for you to keep track of time with but you spend what must be half an hour every morning just sitting on the cot, waiting for Ghost to come get you.
He’s always nearly stumbling when he comes down the basement stairs to fetch you, sleep keeping his bones heavy. It’s only in the mornings when you see him with his shoulders hunched, movements weighted down, any other time he’s perfectly alert.
You think, at first, that your best shot at trying to hurt him would be in those early mornings when he’s groggy and slow moving, but Ghost never lets you off the chain when he’s like that. It’s always after he’s stiffened up, shoulders rolling back and permanent-scowl firmly back in place.
He’ll unhook the chain from the wall first, rarely saying a word as he half-drags-half-leads you over to the bathroom, doesn’t let you close the door while you do your business and shower.
(There’s a way he looks at you in the morning, when he’s at his rawest. Something animal and hungry in a way you don’t see even when you serve him his meals, pupils blown and lingering on your curves, unabashedly staring at your ass when you glance over your shoulder at him.
It had been terrible, at first, to get naked in front of him. He’d just stare, and most days you could see his hardness tenting his pants. Hell, some days he came down the stairs with his cock making itself plenty known, not a speck of shame in him.
You’d once listened to him jack himself off while you were in the shower. You’d had to step over the puddle of cum on the tile when he’d tugged you out of the room, nearly slipped into it when he’d pulled you just a little more harshly than usual.)
The chain stays in the basement, always unlatched from your throat along with the collar before he shepherds you up the creaky stairs, never much more than a foot or two away from you.
Then, breakfast.
It had taken a while for you to really believe him after he’d said you were only there to cook. What kind of person kidnaps a woman just to keep her as a private chef? But days went by where he never once touched you any more than necessary to get the collar on and off, his only reaction to your body a seemingly unintentional erection and usually ignored when you were naked.
Days, weeks pass where all you do is cook. Three meals a day, snacks when he’s hungry (which seems to be always).
Ghost’s cabinets were bare the first week of your captivity. He had enough meat in his freezer to last him months, but little else. There was a loaf of bread on the counter, a few condiments in the fridge with crusted lids and misshaped bottles, and some cans of soup in the pantry. Nothing else. He’d drop a cut of meat on the counter and expect you to work with it and seemed plenty content when you served him the blandest roast chicken of your life.
It took you three days until you worked up the nerve to ask him to go grocery shopping. It was the first thing you said to him that wasn’t a plea for your freedom.
You’d been terrified that you’d end up face down ass up over his thighs again, your ass still bruised from his first punishment and his subsequent much quicker corrections. But he’d hardly reacted, had just given you a piece of paper and a short pencil with bite-marks on the eraser, told you to write what you thought you needed.
He locked you in the basement for hours (you tracked the sun through the sole window as best you could, left behind fear and anger for boredom around what you guessed was the three hour mark) when he left. Briefly, you’d regretted asking in the first place. If the bastard wanted to eat nothing but protein and die of a nutrient deficiency, who were you to stop him? It would serve him right.
But you have nightmares, sometimes, of being stuck in the basement. Your captor dead in his bed, fallen to the bathroom floor with his head cracked open, bleeding out in the forest one of the times he goes off hunting. And you, stuck here, chained to a wall. No key, no way out, no one to find you.
A part of you had breathed a sigh of relief when he came home, letting you up to the kitchen and supervising while you dug through the plastic bags and put everything where you wanted it.
He doesn’t… do much during the days, is the thing.
He goes hunting, sometimes. You find that that seems to be his most consistent outing. He’ll spend hours out there at a time, sometimes coming back with nothing and other times coming back with a twelve-point buck you watch him drain through the kitchen window. He also has to keep his weapons – his many, many weapons – in shape, and you find that it’s not rare to spend an afternoon watching him clean guns or sharpen knives.
You enjoy his hunting moods most. He’ll disappear for hours on end to even find his kill, then spend days skinning and preparing the meat, then doing whatever it is he does in his shed with the bits of the body he doesn’t bring you to cook. Those days spent in the forest or the shed for him guarantee you hours of time alone, which isn’t nearly so miserable when he doesn’t keep you in the basement.
Sometimes he goes out after dinner. You’ll hear the front door slam shut after he locks you up in the basement, his truck’s old engine loud enough to be obvious when he revs it. You’re never sure where he goes, who he might even go with since he never takes calls, but you also have little interest in asking.
But most nights he watches TV. Almost exclusively old VHS recordings of The Price is Right, Wheel of Fortune, Password, and shows so out-of-date you’re sure you could count the pixels on the screen. He’ll roll himself a blunt and relax into an old recliner with cracked leather, eyes half-lidded and hazy.
(You watched him rest a hand in his pants, once. He hadn’t even been focusing on the TV, eyes far away and breathing heavy as he stroked himself slowly beneath his jeans. You don’t even think he finished, he was just… relaxing. You’d decided to just be glad he wasn’t coming after you for that job.)
Sometimes he’ll watch the same Manchester United games every night for a week straight, grunt approvingly or shout at the TV at the same points no matter how many times you’ve seen him watch it. By the end of your first month in his captivity, you could guess who scored every goal in the team’s 2012 championship game. You have absolutely no idea why he doesn’t just turn on the newest games.
You learn quickly that Ghost mounted a hook to nearly every wall in the house, and that he’s not shy about chaining you in the same place for hours at a time and leaving you to your own non-existent devices while he lumbers off. You spend the most time in the kitchen, undoubtedly, but you find that the horrible plush carpet in his living room isn’t too uncomfortable to sit on either.
It doesn’t take many days for your fear to turn to boredom, is the thing. Absolute, complete, mind-numbing boredom. There’s simply nothing to do but watch Ghost, and for a kidnapper he’s turned out to be spectacularly uninteresting.
He’d laid out the rules in the first few days. You hurt him, he hurts you. Listen to his orders, don’t make him repeat himself. Don’t try to escape, you won’t find anyone to help anyway and he doesn’t want to chase you down. Don’t try to fuck with the food you make him, he expects good meals consistently.
It had been the third you’d struggled most with, though you could hardly blame yourself. You’d thought he was going to make you bleed when he caught you trying to throw yourself out of a recently-broken window.
He’d taken you over his lap a few more times for smaller infractions too. To make sure the lessons stick, he’d said. They did. Ghost hits hard, and even after just his first punishment you’d been plenty cowed. You don’t give him many reasons to punish you again.
The bright spots in your life are, as they have always seemed to be, food orientated.
There’s a part of you that hates how much time you think of ways to quite literally serve him, but you have nothing else to do. He may enjoy his shows, but after about two weeks you think you may go insane if you have to focus on much more Tom Kennedy in an other-wise silent house.
You spend long hours staring out his windows at the foggy forest surrounding the cabin, running through the recipes you’d wanted to try before you’d been taken, notes for your parents’ dishes that were never listened to, plans on what you could make for Ghost himself with what he would provide.
And he does. Provide, that is. He provides plenty.
The fifth day of your captivity, he drops a chicken carcass on the wood island. Whole, unplucked, the blood from its neck still drying.
“I can’t…” You start, hesitating at the doorway to the kitchen as he moves further in. “I’m not a butcher. I can’t cook it like that.”
Ghost looks over at you, mask covering his expression. You find that it’s a fifty-fifty chance he doesn’t pull it on in the morning, dependent on some factor you’re not allowed to know.
“I’ll cut it up,” he grunts, turning his back to you and tugging a drawer open, digging around noisily. “Don’t need you to do anythin’ but cook it.”
You shift from foot to foot as he turns back to the bird, empty trash bag at his side and carving knife in his hand.
For a man who you’ve always assumed to be inept in the kitchen, he handles the bird like a professional. He has it plucked in less than a minute, his mess minimal.
His butchering is less impressive, though no less effective. He’s a bit of a slob with his cuts, reckless with his knife in a way that has you craning your neck to see just how much breast is left on the bone.
Ghost is slow-moving, careful in a way you’ve never seen him when he pops the thigh from the leg joint. It must’ve been a well-fed bird during its life, there’s plenty of meat for his thumb to dig into as he carefully rotates and pulls, not too much strength but not too little. A balance he seems to struggle to find before the thigh finally pops away from the body easily, and he moves on.
It’s… intimate is the wrong word, but it’s not far off. His hands – damp from being washed, something you’d been glad to see him do without you needing to draw his attention back to you – are shiny with the bird’s juices covering them, his thick fingers brutalizing the delicate, pale meat. The job is done quickly and cleanly enough to leave you plenty of meat.
He doesn’t butcher it completely for you. He leaves the wing connected to the breast, the breast and the tenderloin one large piece of meat when he lays his carving knife on the counter. His most precise cuts are around the oysters, each of them dug out and set to the side quickly.
It’s not a quiet process, his knife cutting through bone and joint. But it feels particularly loud with the only other sound the soft humming of the fridge, the call of a bird outside the window.
You feel squirmy for reasons you can’t quite place when he’s finished, bird butchered and glistening under the dim kitchen light. The look he gives you, heavy and stifling, doesn’t help.
You make him get mason jars next time he goes to the store, mourning all the stock that goes to waste because you’ve got no way to store it. He praises the tenderloins you make for dinner that night, voice rough in a way that makes your cheeks heat.
Most of the food he buys for you to work with is store-bought, but the meat continues to be fresh. He enjoys the food most when he kills it himself – he moans when he bites into a piece of duck in a way that you feel no shame in calling pornographic – but you learn that he’ll settle for anything fresh.
There’s a calendar on the inside of the pantry.
It’s an old military one, each of the pictures a dramatic shot of a soldier, covered in filth more often than not and staring across some sort of beautiful landscape. It’s from 2014, each of the pages worn and ripped where fingers have pinched and flipped. Each of the days is already marked off with an X in the box, some of them even with little notes written in different colors from over the years.
G birthday in Lancaster
S appointment - needs ride
L retirement on base
You know when he flips it to read June that you’ve been with him a month. You’re not happy, far from it, but you don’t spend everyday shaking in fear.
You know what to expect from Ghost, he knows what he expects from you, and you’ve settled into an almost-peaceful cohabitation.
He takes to ordering you prettier clothes about halfway through your second week. Sweatpants get traded in for sundresses and uncomfortably tiny shorts, sweatshirts exchanged for cardigans and low-back tank-tops.
Some days, watching him feed the chickens through the window in your daisy-print sundress and flour-covered apron, you feel almost like a homesteader’s wife.
If not for the chains hanging from the walls, of course.
You’re wearing one of those dresses when Ghost comes to visit you in the kitchen, nearly six weeks after he’d taken you.
He’d been letting you wander the house off-leash more and more, in small doses. Whether confident in his ability to catch you or your inability to get far from the cabin, you’re not sure, but you’re thankful nonetheless. You’re still a little sore from your last escape attempt, ass smarting from his belt, and haven’t quite gotten into your head to try again yet.
You’re leaning over the counter, tasting a fresh brownie from the middle of the pan while he smokes with his Wheel of Fortune on, having sent you off with a pat on the ass and a I want somethin’ sweet, doll.
You’ve never been nearly as good at baking as you have cooking, and you’re not sure you’ve perfected your brownie recipe yet. But you’ve always had a bit of a sweet tooth, and Ghost keeps his house cold. Biting into a still-steaming gooey brownie, the top just enough of a crust to give the bite texture, the chocolate melting into your tongue, is one of the best things you’ve done since you first woke up in that basement.
You don’t realize you’ve made a noise until there’s an echo behind you, Ghost’s groan so quiet it’s nearly drowned out by the TV in the other room.
You jerk back from the counter, hands braced on the rounded corner as you look over your shoulder, sure that there’s a pipe groaning in the wall.
Instead you see your kidnapper, already hardly a step away and boxing you into the counter, hulking body smothering you with ease.
Your spine goes ramrod straight, brownie abandoned in its pan as he presses himself into you, hard chest pushing against your softer back. You’re silent, stiff, too surprised and scared to do more than wait.
“‘S got you moanin’ in here?” Ghost rumbles, heavy against you. “Thought I said I wanted a treat.”
“I–” You gasp, arching when he presses his hips into you. His sweatpants don’t do anything to disguise his length and you can feel every inch of him against your back. “I–I made brownies.”
“Hm…” One hand comes to rest on your hip, his head lowering enough that you can see his profile in your peripheral. “Let’s have it then.”
You don’t move at first, fingertips tingling and lips pressed tightly together.
He huffs, smacks your ass once. He pushes the fabric of your dress up just enough to clip your skin, simple granny panties doing little to soften the blow. You gasp and jerk forward, soft stomach pressing into the counter.
“Give me one,” he says, hand rubbing where he’d just spanked, fingertips just dipping under the edge of your underwear. “C’mon, bird, I want a bite.”
Your fingers quiver as you lift the brownie in your hand to his lips, holding it just over his shoulder as he feels you up with both hands, roughly kneading the cheeks of your ass as you try to stay as still as possible.
Ghost gives you more of his weight and bites the brownie, the sharp edges of his teeth scraping your knuckles. You jump at the feeling, unwittingly grinding yourself against him.
“Fuck, pet,” he moans, face dropping to rest his forehead against your temple. You can do nothing but stare at the cabinet. “That’s fuckin’ delicious. I need another bite.”
You’re reaching towards the pan to cut him another piece when you realize he’s shifting to his knees behind you.
“Ghost,” you whine when he takes your hips in his hands, hefting you up so you’re fully resting on the island with your toes unable to even skim the tile. Your eyes are wide as you stare at the backsplash, unable to quite believe what’s happening.
“Hush,” he scolds, and you get a smack to the thigh for your trouble. “I want my sweet thing.”
Ghost eats your cunt the same way he eats your food: voraciously, messily, and shamelessly.
He gives you no warm up, no time to prepare for something he’s only hinted at wanting to do before. There’s one broad swipe of his tongue across your sex, then his lips wrapping around your clit and your eyes rolling back into your skull.
You’re not sure that he cares about your pleasure, but he’s certainly giving you plenty. He licks from cunt to clit again and again, tongue quick and stiff against where you’re sensitive and drawing breathy moans from you, nails scratching uslessly at the counter.
He focuses mostly on your hole, licking up your slick like it’s the best thing his tongue has ever touched and leaving you pushing back for more unconsciously, wanting more than just the tip of his tongue inside you.
“Greedy,” he huffs when you nearly slip off the counter. He slips two fingers into your leaking hole and you squeal at the stretch, noticeable even with his mouth working you over. “This is for me, not you, pet. Settle down and let me eat.”
You cry out when he laps at your clit, quick, broad licks over the bud and just enough pressure to make your mouth hang open. He gives you almost too much suction, your brain rattling around between your ears when he crooks his fingers and tugs.
He uses just one hand on your thigh and two fingers in your cunt to shove you up the counter, giving him more space to have you practically sitting on his face. He laps around his own fingers, fucking with you just enough to coax more slick for him to drink, your knees knocking against the cabinet.
Eventually, what feels like it must be hours later, you come. The combination of Ghost’s fingers pressing at just the right spot, the suction on your clit and the sound of his mouth against you making you feel insane and finally pushing you over the edge.
It’s heaven, to have him lick and suck you through your orgasm. Your limbs feel tingly, bright white starbusts flying behind your eyes as you go limp across the counter, head pressing against the backsplash.
It isn’t until he doesn’t pull out his fingers, doesn’t pull his tongue away, that you start to feel truly gone, a puppet dancing to his tune, a piece of fruit squeezing whatever juice he wants into his mouth for as long as he wants.
“Not done with you yet,” you hear him murmur, the rumble of his voice against your cunt making you moan from overstimulation. “Gonna drain you dry, pretty thing. Shouldn’t have made yourself so sweet if you didn’t want me taking it all.”
You want to growl that you can’t make yourself taste like anything, but he slips a third finger into your hold, curls his fingers and rubs his knuckles against your g-spot, and you’re coming too hard to even attempt a protest.
By the time he pulls your dress back down and pets your ass, taking a brownie from the pan without even bothering to use the knife to cut himself a piece, there’s nearly as much drool dripping from your mouth as there is your cunt.
From there, your life centers around two things: food and sex. Both of them exist only because of and with Ghost, him your constant companion as you unwillingly grow more and more comfortable in his house.
You cook him a stew made from cow leg he’d dropped on your counter that morning. Small russet potatoes float in the broth, popped into his mouth whole and swallowed almost as completely, pieces of carrots he chews to mush and celery he avoids, wine soaked meat leaving grease stains down his shirt.
Ghost puts you on your knees beneath the table, feeds you his cock while he feeds himself your food. You suck him as well as you can, trace your tongue over the thick vein up the side of his cock, ignore the throbbing in your jaw and try to push his foreskin back to suckle on his head. He wraps his fingers around the base of his cock, doesn’t let himself come until he’s finished with his meal. You can’t tell if his groaning is for your work on the stew or your work beneath the table.
Fuckin’ heaven, that mouth. Want me to send you off with a full belly, huh? Bet you like your meal as much as I like mine.
Half a dozen eggs, scrambled, served with enough bacon to make you feel sick from the smell alone and half-soaked in maple syrup.
You, needy and desperate, grinding your cunt across his thigh. You lean back as far as you can with your hands carefully resting on the table at your back, desperate to avoid his syrup-sticky fingers, and end up with a view of his cock lancing you. He scoops your slick up with his clean fingers, picks up another piece of bacon and rips it in half, offers you the bit he doesn’t take.
Please, please, Ghost, I need it so bad, it hurts and it’s supposed to, love, I said I wanted a show with my breakfast, didn’t I?
A rack of lamb, sliding off the bone, bites of it shared between Ghost and you as three of his fingers work slowly in and out of your ass, leisurely and for his viewing pleasure more than your own orgasm. Red juices smeared across your lips and face, dripping down his chin and staining his fingers. A thumb on your clit, meat shoved between your teeth as you come.
Gonna fuck you here too. Gonna make it hurt, listen to you cry a little when I eat. Oh, hush, you’ll be fine, don’t get yourself worked up. Not yet, at least. My cock’ll spread you out at least twice this much, save your tears for when you’ll need ‘em, pet.
Sticky fruit laid across your stomach, cantaloupe and watermelon and kiwi and banana. His fingers picking them off you piece by piece, savoring them as he fucks you hard. You laid flat to the table, legs spread why and throat sore from your cries, the stark difference between the way he relishes the food and the way he fucks you like an animal making you feel wanted in a way that threatens to drown you.
You need it bad, don’t you? Slut. Pretty, tasty, perfect little slut. Fuckin’ squeezin’ my dick off, goddamm, honey. Gonna fuck you full, gonna fill you up and feed you plenty.
Stir fry you make with hog maw, a recipe you’d never tried before given to you by a girl in cooking school who was set to inherit her parent’s restaurant. His face moving between your cunt and his meal, your whines about a UTI and cross-contamination go ignored, and he holds his bowl beneath your cunt while he strokes your g-spot with two calloused fingers.
Tightest fuckin’ cunt in the world. Pretty little thing and her pretty little meals, just made for me, huh? ‘S that right, pet? You’re made just for me and my mouth and my cock, hm? Gonna give me a nice little dressing for my food?
A night spent in his bed, after you make him angel-food cake from scratch. Waking up to a cock pressed against your ass, chain leash and collar heavy around your throat and locked around the headboard but the sheets soft under your skin, pillows thick and his own body warm in a way the basement never gets.
Ghost isn’t awake yet. He’s snoring like a freight train, completely unaware of the way you stare at him in the blue-dark of the early dawn hours.
The chain is heavy in your hand, cold against your soft palms. You feel almost like you’re in a trance, the world still hazy around its edges as you shift to kneel over him.
You don’t know how much strength it takes to strangle a person, but evidentially you don’t use enough.
You wrap the chain tight around either knuckle, press your hands hard into the mattress on either side of his head, and hold your own breath. His snores quiet, his breathing shudders. He coughs once, twice, you feel his hips and legs begin to shift beneath you and you really put your body weight behind your hold. He goes still.
Then, his eyes fly open.
There’s hardly time for you to think fuck before he’s flipping you onto your stomach, harsh hand shoving you into the mattress while another rips the chain from your hands and pulls.
You wail a breath as your head is pulled back, scalp nearly touching your spine as Ghost forces your back into a steep arch, ass pushed into the air.
“Fuckin’ hell,” he hisses. You can’t tell if the heat in his words is rage or hunger or some sick mix of both, have even less of an idea which one you should be hoping it is. “You tryin’ to fuckin’ kill me?”
You can barely breathe through the anticipation, the fear that’s been gone for so many days suddenly wrapped around you as tight as the collar, but you find enough breath to shout when he lands a horribly heavy hit across your ass.
“Ghost!” You shout when he only follows it with several more, eyes squeezed shut as he overwhelms you in pain and discomfort.
“What?” He snarls, fingers clipping your cunt and making your squeal. “What, now you don’t like pain? I watched you cream my cock without a single finger in your cunt last night, girl, but this?” Another spank, harder than you’ve ever taken and burning. “This too much for you?”
You huff, squirming as much as you can in your strained position.
“You wake me up with a goddamn chain around my neck and bitch when I beat your ass for it?” His voice is nearing a shout now, thick with what you’re sure is anger. “You’re gonna try and kill me in my own fuckin’ bed and pitch a fit when I make you sorry?”
You can’t find it in you to do anything but cry, chest tight and eyes squeezed tighter while he doles out punishment, bruising slaps landing anywhere from your cheeks to your cunt to your thighs to your hole, his hand spreading you wide for him.
“Spread,” he grunts eventually, a harsh hand shoving your knees wide. “Need to get to that hole.”
You don’t get to listen, he makes you do what he wants without giving you a chance to, and then lays a dozen terrible, painful smacks to your asshole.
You’re nearly screaming through them all, feet slamming into the bed as the pain rushes through you. He yanks the chain hard when you try to pull forward and bury your face in the pillow, forcing you to keep the tortuous pose he’s holding you to.
You feel the bed rocking with the force of his hits, spit and tears dripping down your face as you can do nothing but lay there and take it.
“Naughty, naughty fuckin’ thing,” he spits, two rough fingers pushing into your cunt with little care for your cry. “My own little chef tryin’ to strangle me, I can’t fuckin’ believe it. I bring you here to feed me, give you a load in your stomach anytime you need it, and you wrap your leash ‘round my throat?��
“I’m– I’m sorry!” You wail, inconsolable as he roughly rubs a palm over your clit, your cunt quickly getting slick. You’re still damp from the way he’d bent you over earlier, a mix of his and your cum wet between your thighs.
“Not good enough,” Ghost hisses. He quickly fucks his fingers back inside you, once twice, then pulls them out again.
You go taut as a board when those slick fingers move up, towards your far, far tighter hole.
“No,” you gasp, struggling even pinned as you are, a sense of panic shrouding your mind. “No, no, nonono, you can’t, oh God, please, Ghost, don’t–”
Ghost drops the chain in favor of grabbing you by the throat, tearing you back so violently that you’re staring at his sneer upside down.
“Shut the fuck up.” His spit is tacky when it lands on your cheek, mixing with your tears, and his smile looks evil as he glares down at you. “Gonna make sure you don’t even think of that shit again. Gotta make it hurt if you’re gonna learn a lesson.”
You sob as he lets you go, head finally falling limp to the bed as you turn your face to the side so you can still breathe. You watch as he reaches for a half-full bottle of lube on his bedside table, the label peeling and stained.
“Gonna cry for me some more?” He coos, laughing when you jump at the cold feel of the lube on your ass, thighs tense with nerves. “You know I like it when you make yourself look silly, pet. Go on, cry all you want. Still gonna fuck you.”
One finger pushes the lube into your ass, then two, then three. He gives you no time to adjust, only one thrust from each digit before he forces you to stretch further, lands slaps across your ass seemingly whenever he feels like it.
“Ghost, pl-ease,” you cry when you feel the hot head of him press against you, sure that it’ll be excruciating.
He threads a hand into your hair, pulls you up enough that he can bend to speak into your ear.
“You’ll call me Simon while I fuck your ass,” he says, voice low. “I wanna hear you scream it when I hurt you, pet.”
You listen to him against your will, the scream he wanted tearing from you and echoing the sheer pain of being fucked by someone as massive as Ghost with such little prep.
Your hole feels like it’s on fire, the pain racing through the rest of your body and leaving you limp and panting, only able to close your eyes and endure as he mercilessly pushes forward, uncaring of your pained hiccups and cries.
“Simon,” you whine when he bottoms out, warm balls settling against your neglected cunt. “Hurts…”
His laugh is mean, nasty in your ear. “Good, fuck, say it again, girl. Tell me how much it hurts.”
“So bad…” is all you manage, even just those words warbling off into nothing as he pulls out, fucking himself back in with a harsh thrust that nearly chokes you.
“Can’t believe you tried it,” he huffs, bracing himself over you as he sets a ruthless pace, no consideration for your comfort. You can see the chain in his right hand, feel the way it just barely tugs at your neck with how viciously you’re moving along the bed. “Been waitin’ for you to give me a chance to do this to you, to fuck you up.”
Your fists clench in the sheets as you do your best to breathe through the pain, the slide of the lube only making his thrusts marginally easier to endure.
“Been waitin’ to get my cock in this hole. Wanted to watch you cry and make you put your tears in the food, gape your little hole and make you ride me while I smoke, shit. Tightest ass I’ve ever felt, love, goddamn. ‘S that feel good?” A slap to the side of your face, rousing you. “You feel good with my cock drilling your little ass?”
“No,” you moan, miserable.
“Good,” he hisses, thrusts quickly becoming uncoordinated as he stares down at your ruined face, his eyes gleaming. “You’re so much sweeter when you’re hurtin’, girl. Wanna keep you like this all the time.”
You sob at the idea, already unable to imagine how excruciating it’ll be to sit tomorrow with your ass covered in welts.
“C’mon, c’mon,” Ghost pants, staring at you ravenously. “Cry a little more for me, attagirl…”
You feel his cum shoot deep inside you before his thrusts slow, the heat spreading as he fucked you through his orgasm, face twisted in pleasure. Your tears haven’t slowed, even as the pain lessened and lessened throughout your fucking.
“Fuck, fuck, that feels good,” he breathes, grinding himself against you as he empties the last of himself inside you.
You feel nearly catatonic as he pulls out, only able to whine when he slips free from your hole and then again when he rearranges you on the bed, limbs sore and neck stiff as he continues to hold you by the leash.
“Took it well,” he grunts, shifting to lay on his back again and tossing the lube to the table beside him. “You gonna pull that shit again?”
You sniffle shaking your head no, only verbally answering when he cocks an eyebrow. “No, Simon.”
He smirks. “I’d love if you did,” he whispers, like it’s a secret. “Would love if you gave me another chance to ruin you. Just go ahead, love. I’ll tear into you whenever you want.” He tilts his head, considering for a moment. “Whenever I want too. ‘Cause you’re mine to do whatever I want with, aren’t you?”
You nod, hands tucked beneath your chin as he tugs you closer by the hip, fingers pressing into rapidly developing bruises and making you whimper.
“Yeah, gonna fuck you ‘til you cry as often as I want. And you’ll gimme those tears every time, won’t you?”
All you can do is nod, a part of you calmed and feeling safer as you watch the predator’s teeth pull away from the prey’s neck when he nods.
The plate you balance is larger than your face and still nearly overflowing with food.
It’s filled to the edges with steak, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, and rolls. You have a bottle of wine tucked under one arm, a corkscrew held between your lips and one glass in your hand as you saunter towards Simon.
“Smells good,” he grunts. You’ve learned that his compliments are concise but rare, and you greedily take in the praise from him. “Enough for us both?”
You snort. There’s enough food on your plate to feed five people, easily. But Ghost’s stomach is never-ending, and you’d made sure that there would be no way he’d go to bed hungry.
He spreads his thighs as you approach, pats one of them like you’re not already lowering yourself to him. He takes the glasses while you lay the plate, setting his silverware to the side as he opens the bottle and fills the glass nearly to the brim.
You hum as you take in a breath of the food, that familiar sense of pride from a meal well-made settling in your chest.
Ghost cuts the food while you lean back on his chest, watching his thick fingers work.
He lifts one of the little pieces of steak to your mouth once he’s cut it, swiping it through the potatoes and guiding you to look at him with a finger on your jaw.
He presses the tender, rare meat between your lips and you take it greedily, letting your eyes slip shut as you savor the taste. He kisses you almost immediately after, passes his tongue over the food before you can even swallow, but lets you keep it.
You giggle when he pulls back, swiping a thumb over the potato on your lip. He picks himself up another bite, pinches a bit of carrot with his steak and swallows without chewing, a moan slipping from his lips. You feel yourself dampening against his thigh, breath hitching.
“Happy Valentine’s day,” you say, voice quiet and held just between the two of you.
He snorts, ever unromantic. “Eat up, doll. Wanna have you for dessert after a meal this good.”
You smile softly at him, opening your mouth willingly when he lifts a bite of food to your lips.
#dark fic#ghost x reader#simon ghost riley x reader#simon riley x reader#ghost riley x reader#ghost cod x reader#call of duty fanfic#call of duty smut#bo writes#cod fanfic#cod smut
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Thanks, Anon!
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#poll#polls#thanks anon!#Submitted June 11#anonymous#submitted by anonymous#anonpolls#poll blog#random polls#tumblr polls
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please please PLEASE can we have an Autobot version of the how to catch a human post?! Begging on my knees here lol
Im sorry this took a bit longer i had so much fun writing this ! And besides that i got distracted by some of the TF comics that can be found online ! I just read the two whole comics about Drift becoming an autobot and man alive was that cool :3🧡
I'm also currently job-hunting and studying so there was not as much time to be online or make art as much as i'd like :'(🧡
But i hope you'll enjoy this one !! ( 。ớ ᴗờ)🧡
P.s. - I know this is a bit different from the decepticon one bc i made this one in the more First Contact universe♡
Autobot recommendation for handling/capturing fragile organics: Humans
Foreword on behalf of Autobots
Humans are delicate, skittish creatures who rely on their instincts, emotions, and have a surprising amount of unpredictability. They are small, fragile, and prone to bouts of irrational behavior when startled or cornered. Despite their size and vulnerability, they possess an extraordinary will to survive, making them both a challenge and a responsibility to handle correctly.
This guide was written for Autobots tasked with capturing, securing, or calming a human in scenarios where their cooperation is necessary but unlikely. Treat them as you would a frightened turbomouse: with patience and care.
1: Recognizing the human creature
1.1 PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
Humans are organics with relatively uniform structure but remarkable fragility. Standing approximately not even quarter of the height of a minicon, they lack protective exoskeletons or natural armor. Their bodies are composed of soft tissues supported by brittle bones, making them particularly susceptible to external forces.
Their skin is their first line of defense, but it is thin and prone to tearing. Cybertronian scanners often mistake minor abrasions as critical damage—while rarely life-threatening, these injuries cause them significant distress. Be mindful of their soft exteriors.
Humans rely heavily on their sensory organs to navigate their environment. Their eyes are sensitive to bright light, and their ears to loud or unexpected noises. Both can cause disorientation, so avoid shining headlights directly at them or using amplified vocalizers during interactions.
1.2 BEHAVIORAL TRAITS
Humans exhibit a wide range of behaviors, often dictated by their emotional state. Unlike Cybertronians, who generally act with calculated logic, humans are impulsive. When frightened, their actions often defy rationality.
• Flight Response: A common reaction to danger, humans may attempt to flee without assessing their surroundings. This can lead them into greater peril, such as running toward an active battlefield or hazardous terrain. They are pretty fast for their size, but their stamina is limited. A frightened human will often collapse after prolonged exertion.
• Fight Response: Though rare, humans under stress may lash out. Their attacks, though feeble, can include throwing objects, kicking, or attempting to strike a Cybertronians. While their strength is negligible, their determination should not be underestimated.
• Freeze Response: Some humans become motionless when overwhelmed, effectively shutting down all voluntary movement. This reaction can make them difficult to rescue, as they may refuse to cooperate or acknowledge external stimuli.
2: Identifying stress signals
2.1 VOCAL CUES
Humans communicate distress through an array of strange vocalizations, often at high volume. Screaming is the most obvious indicator of fear, but rapid speech, muttering, or even complete silence can also signal distress. Listen carefully to their tone—shaky or uneven sounds often betray underlying anxiety.
2.2 PHYSICAL REACTIONS
Their bodies exhibit telltale signs of stress: trembling limbs, widened organic optics, or clenched fists. Sweating, though imperceptible to Cybertronian optics, is another key indicator. Advanced scanners can detect elevated heart rates and shallow breathing, both of which correlate with heightened fear.
2.3 ERRATIC MOVEMENTS
Humans under duress often behave unpredictably, darting in random directions or making illogical choices. For example, a human might attempt to climb unstable structures or hide in areas that provide no real protection. These behaviors stem from primal survival instincts and should not be interpreted as strategic actions.
3: Non-threatening approaches
3.1 MINIMIZING YOUR PRESENCE
Humans perceive large objects, especially moving ones, as threats. To avoid provoking unnecessary fear, always begin your approach in a non-intimidating manner. Transforming into vehicle mode is highly effective; many humans associate vehicles with utility and safety, not danger.
When in robot mode, avoid towering over them. Lowering yourself to their eye level by kneeling or sitting creates a sense of equality and reduces the perception of dominance.
3.2 VOCAL REASURRANCE
Humans respond well to calm, steady voices. Speak slowly, using simple phrases even though they will not understand Cybertronian language. Avoid Cybertronian technical jargon or complicated explanations, as humand won't even understand and will confuse or frighten them further.
If the human continues to panic, repeat your reassurances while maintaining a soft tone. Over time, they will begin to associate your voice tone with safety.
3.3 BODY LANGUAGE
Body language is as important as spoken words. Humans are highly visual creatures and will interpret your movements as cues for intent. Keep your gestures slow and deliberate. Avoid sudden movements, as these can be perceived as aggression.
Extend a hand palm-up when offering assistance, a universal gesture of peace. Keep your frame neutral—crossed arms, clenched fists, or rigid postures might be misinterpreted as hostility.
4: Techniques for securing a human
4.1 NON-CONTACT METHODS
Whenever possible, prioritize techniques that do not involve physical interaction.
• Guided Pathways: Create barriers using objects or your own body to funnel the human toward safety. This method is particularly effective in open environments where direct contact might cause them to flee in the wrong direction.
• Stasis Bubbles: Deploy low-energy containment fields to immobilize the human. These fields should be calibrated to avoid discomfort and allow full mobility once the immediate danger has passed.
4.2 DIRECT CONTACT METHODS
Important note: When physical interaction is unavoidable, use the utmost care.
• Lifting and Restraint: Cradle the human gently in both hands, supporting their head and limbs. Apply no more force than necessary to prevent them from struggling or falling.
• Transport Compartments: Many Autobots have interior compartments designed for transporting fragile cargo. Ensure these are padded, ventilated, and free of sharp edges before placing a human inside.
4.3 ENVIROMEMTAL ADJUSTMENTS
Humans are profoundly influenced by their surroundings. Dim lighting, soft sounds, and warm temperatures can help calm them during capture. Conversely, loud noises, flashing lights, or sudden temperature changes will heighten their distress.
5: Transporting the human
5.1 SAFE COMPARTMENTS
Select a secure compartment that protects the human from external hazards while allowing them to move comfortably. The space should include basic life-support features such as climate control and breathable air.
5.2 CONTINUOUS MONITORING
Scan the human regularly for signs of injury or stress. If their condition deteriorates, stop immediately and address their needs. Humans are highly vulnerable to dehydration, exhaustion, and emotional fatigue.
6: Release and recovery
6.1 GRADUAL DISENGAGMENT
When the mission is complete, release the human in a controlled manner. Begin by reducing your proximity, allowing them to acclimate to their surroundings. Avoid abrupt departures, which may leave them feeling abandoned or confused.
6.2 PROVIDING REASSURANCE
Humans value closure. Rather than explain, show your actions and reassure them of their safety. If possible, provide additional assistance, such as guiding them back to their community or offering resources for recovery.
Closing thoughts
Humans may be small and fragile, but they are resilient in their own way. By treating them with care and understanding, they will give you theirs in return.
"We honor the principles that make us Autobots." - Autobots
#transformers#transformers headcanons#transformers x reader#yandere transformers#transformers mtmte#transformers x human reader#transformers first contact#transformers first contact au#first contact au#idw mtmte#maccadams#mtmte drift#mtmte rodimus#mtmte ultra magnus#michaela o ramblings#michaela o writings
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Trust in me
Risk
What have you done?
Lower, lower, and stop in front of the playtime care, walking beside Harley in silence when you both walk by the toys, they cower or hiss. Kneeling down to their level to get a better look at the children, you hold one of the smaller critters. That was when Catnap came to view, he leaned in with a head tilt, you rubbed a hand over his head with careful poise, leaning into your hand the giant toy breathed out, Red...smoke...
"Enough." Harley orders and you both split apart, so the follow continues, "Who is that?"
"Theodore." It was quiet but he was prideful and held no remorse while you stared at each toy with a sad gaze, it was beside you. Any other time you held a gaze of firm animosity for every scientist who mistreated the toys. Scolding, yelling, even demonstrating the pain the toys experienced. But this is beyond you, Mommy and Huggy were easy access to your kind words and gentle touch. But these toys, these children, are out of reach.
Out of your hands, "Earth to my dear partner."
"Oh, sorry I was just spacing out."
"You seem to be doing that often." You both go silent knowing that this would wedge a rift if no one spoke, so you get ready to plead, but he cuts you off. "Listen, just because you cater to that bleeding heart of yours doesn't mean it'll save you from this moral veil you hide behind. You aren't the only one who had their moral compass challenged, and you will not be the last. I'm doing this because these orphans deserve better, I'm giving them better. Elliot didn't understand but you will soon enough."
He walks further ahead while your unshed tears begin to slide down your face, "......"
The walk was quieter than ever, the fight, flight, freeze or fawn triggers were rising in the head. All you can think of was, "Stop wallowing" or "Huggy is being patient for you." He was, wasn't he?
What have you done?
You first met Huggy, it was frightening, what happened to this toy? "What did you do?"
"We were training him; he's shown signs of complete obedience and respect.."
"Are you daft!? Damn it, he's practically seething!" You open the cell, bringing in a basket filled with fruits. "What are you doing!?"
Eddie tried to open the cell, but you continued your job, placing the basket down, holding Huggy's paw and then feeding the bigger toy. "You, okay?" He was quiet...
Unblinking, unmoving, he ate the apple, then the fruits after, and afterwards the giant toy was showing you his scars, so you wrap a bandage around them. "....."
It was irritating, to see these toys, above, below...
How much lower does this go?
That memory was so far behind, Eddie was furious, and you simply didn't care. Now that you know the truth, how dare he show signs of fury!? You're no better, the sinking feeling and the idea to manipulate Harley to be gentler. How stupid.
"Ya know, Elliot has a daughter. Poppy....she's further up, you and Poppy didn't meet yet, but I don't plan to let you both meet." Sawyer's words cut deep, he knew you well enough to know that if Poppy had any chance to whisper any form of the truth, you'd lose your mind.
What have you done?
That suspicion reaching your eyes, it made Harley shudder with excitement, he adores the reactions. The nights spent together, the breakfasts, or times you'd visit his place just to cook him some food or sometimes give him a loving break.
Spoiled is what he is, and he didn't even realize how badly this was hurting you and him both.
When you both went back up, the critters crawled up and you knelt down, hugging one of them. It was then Harley realized something, he noticed your gentle demeanor, somber smile, the way you cradled this critter...
"You're pregnant."
You try to avoid giving an obvious reaction, but the way his hands held your face, his fingers move to the back of your ears. He was searching for a pulse; you blink then chuckle out weakly. "Of course not, silly! I just really wanted to adopt Quinn, He's very sweet. Precious too."
He hums in thought, "Stella told me."
That made it skip two beats, and he was back to his calm apathetic demeanor. "So, when did you plan to tell me?"
"I...I don't know." You turn ahead as if that would even matter.
"You should have told me."
"Why?" Harley sighs as if he was tired of hearing you question his nuance, he suddenly snaps.
"Because it makes you more sentimental, your bleeding heart is already interrupting my handwork, because that simply means you're having our child, and it most of all means you are being a threat to yourself and this unborn life." You wince at each word, ignoring the rising tears that you blink away.
"I wouldn't have to put myself at risk if you weren't actively lying and manipulating me. But who am I kidding, I'm no better, those toys, those children. They were looking up to us, to Elliot. I'm not perfect but my worst mistake was letting you into my heart." The train stops, and you both go your separate ways.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
TW//bleeding, miscarriage, adoption plans, signs of depression (If you or a loved one is experiencing anything like this, seek help or call a trusted adult/loved one/ take the chance to therapy)
You were so stupid, it's all your fault, yes, your fault.
The metal floors clank with fury while you march past Stella, Leith, more scientists, Stella notices your angry tears and she follows.
"Hey- Hey!" She holds your face, while you sniffle weakly. "....Did..."
The woman looks at your stomach, then you while those unshed tears fall once more. "Oh..." She hugs you close, "It's okay."
"No, it's not..."
When you reach the door, her door....
"Poppy."
You open the door.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
Walking inside this playhouse, you see the doll. "Poppy."
She turns with her giant doll-like eyes, staring in fear of being hurt again, but you merely kneel down and hug her close. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Poppy didn't know what to say, are you a friend? Did Ollie....no.
You continue hugging her.
She told you everything, Elliot, Harley, Quinn, all these children...Ollie.
The stress was enough to create such a dark mindset, in the back of your mind you weren't any better.
Rich noticed the signs carefully placing a hand on your shoulder, "Hey, um...try not to let this place get to you."
"It's fine Rich, you don't have to comfort me. Especially with the privileges I have compared to you, yea." It was true but so what!? Rich knew that, yet he still cared, the idea was simply that you were grieving.
"Ya know, I loved that boy. Quinn, I cherished him as if he were my own. Then I stupidly...." You look at the cameras, letting more tears cascade down.
No amount of comfort could save you, even with how stressful things were getting.
Prototype acknowledged that the third time you visit him, "liFE gROwS wItHin....YOu, aRe not Happy?"
"No, I'm not..." His hand holds yours; a twisted form of comfort arises, he wasn't one of them and yet...his voice, Harley's voice.
You found comfort in them, ".....Catnap, in one of the files I read, he mentioned a further...down..."
"tHe pRIsOn..."
The prison, your eyes widen...No, no no..
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
Prototype knew what he was doing, surely you didn't.
Harley slams his fist down, "What have you done!?" He shouts, "What did you tell them!?"
Prototype chuckles darkly at Harley's anger, thriving off his agony even if it meant you were the one suffering. To Prototype you were indeed, no different than the rest, which is why you needed to find out the hard way.
You stare at this creature, files on the side, holding your stomach while Yarnaby breathes heavily through his cell. Unable to recognize you, Quinn, could not see the person who was so excited to take him in. Share the sweet life of home with Harley, what a stupid naive dream!
As you move further, you see Doey, and your mind races back to things you brushed off. "Experiment 1322 A and B.." Then to the accident, you were here long enough to acknowledge the dough incident. "Jack.." What of his parents?
Doey looks at you in confusion while you feel sweat beads going down your face, sensing your stress he begins to knock on the window, as if to warn the scientist. But no avail, suddenly you were on the ground, cradling your now shaking form.
Scientists only stopped when you were on the ground, the immediate thought was to call Stella.
You feel something...pain...contraption, Stella was beside you, once more hugging your feeble form. She breathes heavily, "How far- Hey. How far along was it!?"
"......T-Two months." Stelle sweats, while she anxiously orders for you to be taken to a lab.
Hours would pass, and she was on the floor weeping, sniffling with self-loathing. She had this chance to send you to the hospital, hell frame Harley or give up the evidence...but Lieth remains on her mind, his words. Their miracle working goal...
Now all she could remember was the blood curdling screams of anguish you let out; they filled the room. Her ears keep ringing as they start to turn into cries and then voices of another scientist trying to comfort you. Whispers upon rumors fill the prison and laboratory.
"Why would he do that?"
"What was even going on in their head?"
They blamed him, then you, then they'd call you ignorant or naive..
Privileged, Stella remembered when you tried so hard to protect that sweet bliss of hers. Keeping a smile, even sugarcoating Harley's words while she was a bit offended by his remarks. She remembered when you placed a yellow daisy in her vase, she enjoyed those a lot.
Her mind then went to Harley's when he placed that Tuberose, that Poppy flower, you tried so hard to protect her, and she failed you.
Harley had to cover this up, he sat beside the medical examination bed, while you say nothing. "I- didn't expect you to.."
"Be so naive?"
He sighs with regret of spilling out those words, "You didn't expect me to want to adopt Quinn?"
Harley merely covers his face while you list out more things that contradicted his work, for you to acknowledge your own flaws merely simply made it worse.
"I love you." Harley weakly responds, now holding your hand. "I should've just transferred or-"
"Fired me? Or baby trap me?" No not that that was cruel and just, uncalled for. It would be disgusting; he's seen cases like those. So, have you and for you to say that it made him want to cringe at the idea.
"I don't hate you Harley, I'm just disappointed in myself for falling for the facade I made up about you."
Harley stays silent when he realizes his perspective didn't match yours, his...you...
he failed; you were his failed experiment. He'd have to live with that forever.
When he left, Stella came in and hugged your hand to her head with sadness. You both were silent; it was a sad comfortable silence.
One week later and a Peony was resting in your vase, Stella's had a Yellow Carnation and Harley's had a butterfly weed.
Things were tense as they should be, Leith expected this but to find out the reason. He was disappointed rather than snarky about the incident, so he placed a white rose in the vase. You look at him while he walks away.
To him you were the one scientist he despised, not because of envy, or hatred, or disdain, but because he knew someone of your caliber and heart would get torn apart by Harley. Whether Harley wanted to or not, that was what made Leith, and you clash, he was usually bemused with your interaction with the toys.
He just wishes he could have stopped you in time.
#ppt harley sawyer#ppt2#ppt 3#ppt#ppt chapter 4#harley sawyer poppy playtime#harley sawyer x reader#harley sawyer#slight stella greyber x reader#leith pierre#kissy missy#doey the doughman#yarnaby mention#quinn poppy playtime#stella greyber#poppy playtime x reader#poppy playtime#poppy poppy playtime#huggy wuggy#tw miscarriage#reader is gn
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SCARY BOYFRIEND EX PRIVILEGES! ❤︎ — Endo Yamato x f!reader ノ Sfw ノ Cw harassment (not from Endo) ノ My response to:
ANON’S ASK — Random thought but what the wind breaker boys protect you in spite of being your ex. Whether it was a mutual, [etc], uncertain, or bittersweet break up is up to you.
Other warnings: one mention of reader typically wearing makeup
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As weird as it sounds, you’re not entirely sure if you and Endo have ever officially broken up. Dating through high school was one thing, but keeping the relationship strong after attending different universities was another.
At the very least, you’re 90% sure the relationship died, although you don’t remember exactly when the two of you stopped talking. After you switched your phone number following your first semester at university, you hadn’t even bothered to tell him. You don’t remember why you didn’t bother to either.
Everything is weird now.
Life has been entirely different without him. There’s one less free pocket in your bag now that you’ve started carrying pepper spray with you. You wear your headphones in one ear at a time, and your volume isn’t on full blast anymore.
You actually look where you’re going, and you pay attention to the time— take a mental note that it starts getting dark earlier at this point in the year.
Even with the precautions you’ve learned during your time at university, this type of thing would always be out of your control. How in the world did you get singled out wearing your pajamas and no makeup?
Life wasn’t being fair to you.
“What’s a pretty thing like you doing here all alone?”
“Midterms.” You narrow your eyes to the best of your ability, balling your hands into little fists to mask how they’ve started to tremble. “I’m meeting up with some friends now.”
You used to be able to just say “I have a boyfriend.”
You also used to be walked home, so this wouldn’t have happened in the first place. You’re sure that if Endo saw the way you are now, he’d be making a comment by now. Something along the lines of “gonna hurt your hands if you throw a punch with your fists like that, sweet thing.”
Nothing is fair. Why is it now that you start missing him for the first time in years? The feeling comes a little too easily for a relationship that faded into nothing, but you’re too scared to kick yourself in the shin right now.
“That so?” The man in front of you laughs when your fight or flight finally starts to kick in. You take a couple of steps backward, and your frame is suddenly a lot smaller compared to his. How easy. “Where are these friends of yours? Can’t believe you’re out here all by yourself..”
“T-they have my location, y’know.”
There’s the stutter that always gives you away.
He laughs at this, and you can feel yourself breaking into a cold sweat. Keep your words steady. Ignore the way your heart rate is spiking. Do absolutely anything to avoid letting him know that you’re scared out of your mind.
It doesn’t work at all. “They won’t know if you don’t have your phone on you, will they?”
All the words you know seem to slip out of your brain, and your face feels painfully hot. “U-um…”
“You’re exactly my type. It’s a compliment… I’m being nice, so just come with me. You won’t regret it— I’ll make it worth your time.”
It doesn’t like sound an offer, and it doesn’t sound like a suggestion either. Your body freezes against your will, and he catches onto this pretty fast. The pepper spray in your bag seems too far away for you to even consider, and you’ve never felt so helpless in your life.
“Yeah? That sound good?” He moves to close the distance between the two of you with a grin, reaching out to grab your wrist. Your eyes slam shut, lips trembling even when you try to say something to protest. “Damn… you’re so docile for such a pretty girl. Usually, they’d be a bitch, but you—”
“How mean.” Your eyes shoot open when you’re suddenly tugged backward, gasping when your back roughly collides with someone’s chest. “I was waiting all alone. What’s my girl doing over here with you?”
The tattooed arms that drape themselves over your shoulders don’t look familiar at first glance, but the muscles and his scent are. Painfully familiar, as a matter of fact. They’re the same arms you used to cling onto- and you always used to wrap your fingers around his bicep and rest your head on his shoulder.
He loved that.
It all registers in your head as soon as he puts his weight on you, head right beside yours and you feel his hair tickle your neck. He gives the man in front of you an unamused look before turning to you.
“M-me?” You want to dig a hole and stay there for eternity after hearing just how shaky your voice comes out. Endo’s so close that you could simply turn your head to the side and you’d be kissing him.
He laughs, and you feel your face heat up again. Only this time, there’s a gentle fluttering of your heart that comes with it instead. “Yeah, you. What? Did you think I was talking to the loser? I wouldn’t dream of it.”
The way you move to latch onto his arm in an instant is all he needs to confirm that your feelings haven’t changed. The man in front of you doesn’t speak— he can’t seem to move either. Your boyfriend has made quite the name for himself, but you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?
To you, he’s your bodyguard— and more, of course, but maybe you’d be honest and tell him about that another time. But to that guy, he’s pure danger. The way Endo looks over his shoulder to give him one last glance is already enough to have his knees buckling.
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#wind breaker x reader#wind breaker#wind breaker (satoru nii)#wind breaker fluff#windbreaker x reader#windbreaker#endo yamato#yamato endo#endo x reader#endo yamato x reader#endo yamato x you#yamato endo x reader#endo x you#endo yamato fluff#windbreaker fluff
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i feel like the fight/flight/freeze model of fear responses applies in the long term as well as the immediate. like in the aftermath of the event, do you lash out at every perceived instance of a threat? or do you practice avoidance, refusing to tread similar paths to the one that led you into danger before? or do you remain forever trapped in that moment, reliving it, unable to move on?
#🐉#and it doesnt necessarily follow that a short term response will correspond to a longer term one#you can be a short term flyer but long term fighter. for example.
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Writing Notes: Trauma Responses
Over-sharing
Over-explaining
Trauma dumping
Hyper-independence
Hypersexualization
People pleasing
Trauma is a mental injury, and our body may react to unconscious memories of significant negative events unknown even to us. Our body subconsciously protects us from future trauma.
How we respond to trauma has consequential implications on how we live our lives. Trauma responses ensure physical and emotional safety; however, these unintended reactions may interfere with our ability to flourish.
Trauma responses are innate; they occur without our consciousness.
A reaction to a perceived threat is called a trauma response. It is a survival instinct; it is reflexive and automatic.
Your body reacts to this perceived threat without your approval. Smells and sounds may remind your clients of the trauma they experienced and bring about memories that perhaps at one time were repressed. Despite the individual’s awareness, the unconscious self still remembers, and the body reacts.
A trauma response is how your nervous system has adapted following a significant situation and can manifest in various ways, whether there is an actual threat, or a threat is perceived.
Trauma responses cause a person to be hypervigilant, which may create an overwhelmed individual under normal circumstances. Contrarily, a person experiencing hypervigilance may also prove to be an effective person during crises. Trauma responses get a bad rap; however, if clients can recognize them, they can prevent them from controlling their lives.
Typical Trauma Response Types
Originally, fight and flight were thought to be the only responses to stress, which focused on the autonomic nervous system (McCarty, 2016; Katz et al., 2021).
Freeze, as a trauma response type, was later developed after observing lab rats in stressful situations (Katz et al., 2021).
Today, the 4 most commonly known trauma response types include fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Each of these actions is an adaptive, functional short-term survival counteraction.
Fight
As we know, the fight response involves combativeness toward the perpetrator. Example demonstrations of fight may include kicking, punching, or threatening the attacker (Katz et al., 2021). It may also include being verbally argumentative and yelling.
If an individual is quick to anger, they may be demonstrating a fight trauma response. This symptom of arousal may indicate self-criticism when someone feels internally threatened (Germer & Neff, 2015).
This reaction may include any attempt to stand up against a threat. It is a form of assertiveness. At a healthy level, it delineates healthy boundaries.
At a primal level, if an animal feels it is being attacked, it may choose to fight back if the threat is manageable. If the animal feels that it cannot successfully fight the threat, it may resort to our next trauma response.
Flight
Flight involves literally or metaphorically running from an actual or perceived danger. It is an act of nonconfrontation and avoidance of a threat. More importantly, it is a biologically determined sequence of responses to stress (Bracha, 2004). Flight is a disengagement from the stress-inducing stimulus. Paired with fight, it is the cornerstone of stress response research by Walter B. Cannon (McCarty, 2016).
Flight may include the habit of leaving the room or fleeing from the home following an argument. It may also include drug and alcohol abuse to avoid emotions. Further, individuals demonstrating the flight response may be disconnected from their family, friends, or coworkers. Someone exhibiting the flight response may isolate themselves.
Over-sharing, over-explaining, and trauma dumping may indicate compartmentalization. If an individual shows compartmentalization, it may mean that they are unconsciously trying to distance themselves from the trauma, thus allowing them to speak of the event nonchalantly.
Further, this practice allows the individual to avoid direct confrontation or processing of the distressing experience. Considering the purpose of divulging the information, this response could also be intended to gain attention (Shabahang et al., 2022), including sympathy or validation.
Individuals may be unconsciously seeking external support or validation to cope with the trauma. Seeking refuge or solace in the empathy or validation of others is an illustration of the flight response.
Hyper-independence occurs when an individual internalizes that dependence on others is unsafe. They avoid asking for help and instead build a wall. This could be a trauma response of flight, as the individual is avoiding an interaction or relationship.
Hypersexualization may also suggest a flight response. Someone who is hypersexual may be fleeing from other emotions.
Likewise, this response may also represent the fawn response as an attempt to please others, which we will discuss later.
Freeze
This is an effective technique when fight or flight are not an option (d’Andrea et al., 2013). When the typical fight-or-flight responses are put on hold, this is considered the freeze response (Kozlowska et al., 2015).
This stress response involves the typical stop, look, and listen response and commands hypervigilance (Bracha, 2004). An individual may resort to this response when assessing a situation. Some suggest this response precedes the fight-or-flight, as the animal or victim is determining which response to employ.
Example: During a bear encounter, physically attacking the bear may be unwise; likewise, running from the bear may not be helpful either. Feigning death may be your way out of this critical situation. This immobility eliminates auditory and visual clues that would otherwise provoke aggression (Baldwin, 2013).
Binge eating could be considered a freeze response (Rodriguez-Quiroga et al., 2021). Instead of facing the situation, a person who engages in binge eating consumes an unusually large amount of food in a relatively short amount of time. This type of food consumption may serve as self-soothing behavior or self-medication.
Eating large quantities of food may induce a dissociative state, thus providing an escape and helping to cope with the overwhelming experience of trauma. This type of eating disorder can be just as dangerous as bulimia and anorexia.
This stress response helps the individual to hide, and it shows that you are not a threat. Further, the person experiencing the freeze response is provided the opportunity to process the threat.
Fawn
This lesser-known and least-understood trauma response may be confused with being a character trait. Arguably, this may be the only response where one engages with the potential threat and attempts to change the other person’s behavior. The trauma response stems from our innate need for social connection and co-regulation.
In this response, a person may mirror the other individual’s gestures, facial expressions, or speech. They are hypervigilant about everyone’s happiness and safety in the room.
Physically speaking, individuals who consistently show fawning as their trauma response may also experience temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ), more commonly known as lockjaw, or pain in their jaw (Kim et al., 2009). They are overly agreeable and frequently sacrifice their boundaries.
For example, a man orders a well-done steak with a side salad from a notable restaurant. What he receives is a steak that is cooked medium rare with a side of French fries. That was not his order; however, he does not bring this oversight to the server’s attention for fear of disappointing someone, whether that be the wait staff or the chef.
People who frequently demonstrate the fawn response may be described as people pleasers, workaholics, over-explainers, and over-apologizers. During a traumatic event, a victim may experience Stockholm syndrome, which is when an individual attempts to appease one’s abuser or captor (Bailey et al., 2023).
Codependency can also be a fawn response (Walker, 2013). This is an unhealthy and dysfunctional relationship dynamic involving one person assuming the role of the “giver.” This response may also be referred to as the “friend” and “appease” response.
Lesser-Known Responses to Trauma
Besides the typical fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, there are a few more responses you may not be familiar with. Fright, flag, and faint are a few of the lesser-known trauma responses that are theorized by professionals of this field.
Fright
The fright response indicates tonic immobility. At first, the freeze response was theorized; however, it soon became apparent that this response could be differentiated from fright (Katz et al., 2021).
Similar to freeze and faint, the person experiencing fright will play dead, so to speak (Bracha, 2004). This is better understood when a predator has its prey in its grasp, and the prey goes limp and ceases its struggle to make itself less desirable for consumption. In this case, the fright response involves a heightened state of arousal and readiness to confront or flee from danger.
Flag
The flag response is characterized by numbness of emotion, cognitive failure, a drop in arousal, and surrender. Schauer and Elbert (2015) assert that the flag response is part of a sequence of six fear responses that progress as a function of defense during a life-threatening situation. The cascade consists of the following responses in sequential order: freeze – flight – fight – fright – flag – and faint.
The individual’s attention may be elsewhere, and they may feel like they are observing themself, which is an example of disassociation. This is a built-in defense mechanism that increases pain tolerance or numbs emotional response.
The person who experienced the trauma may exhibit memory lapses as their brain attempts to protect its emotional well-being.
Faint
Also a biologically determined response to acute stress defense, faint is a lesser-known response (Bracha, 2004).
This may also be referred to as the “flop” response, also indicative of tonic immobility and is a preferable option for the body when fight or flight is not possible. A common example of this phenomenon is when a person sees blood and literally faints from the sight of it. They are not “playing dead” as illustrated in the fright response; their body unconsciously suspends movement.
Instead of the arousal and readiness associated with the fright response, this type of response centers around immobility in response to overwhelming stress.
Clients who have been diagnosed with PTSD may benefit from the following techniques:
Sensory Grounding
To help them ground themself and bring awareness, encourage your client to try the following practice: Name 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can touch, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste.
They could also carry a grounding smell, such as a scented lotion, perfume, or cologne, or carry a grounding sensory object, such as a fidget or soft item.
These grounding tools can be used discretely and have profound effects.
Cognitive Grounding
A process where clients must show themselves that they are safe.
They could verbally review the following thoughts: Remind yourself where the trauma occurred and how physically far you are from that location. Remind yourself when the trauma occurred and how long ago that was. Repeat inspiring quotes say coping statements such as:
I can handle this.
These feelings are temporary.
My present situation is different.
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Fight, flight, freeze, fawn
When someone has adrenaline, they react with one pf the following four responses. If you want to write realistic characters, consider which they would do and then include it in your writing, even if it's very minor, it makes a big difference.
Fight; In an attempt to overcome the complication, the person fights back. Whether this is physical, emotional or spoken, the aim is to best the problem and be on top.
Flight; In an attempt to overcome the complication, the person flees. This can be physical (running from a predator) or mental (stop thinking about the problem). This reaction aims to put distance between the person and the problem.
Freeze; In an attempt to overcome the complication, the person stops their previous action. This can be physical, to avoid being seen or mental, like their thoughts or words stop. The freeze reaction aims to conceal themselves from the complication.
Fawn; In an attempt to overcome the complication, the person attempts to appease. The fawn reaction aims to avoid conflict, physically (talking to complication) or mentally (passing things off)
Keep in mind; sometimes their reactions aren't successful.
Thanks for reading, have a good day!
#writers#novel writing#writeblr#writing#authors#author#books#wip#write#writing tips#writing community#writing advice#on writing#creative writing#fight or flight#writing conflict
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Hey, remember that really cool witcher fic I never wrote bc it's living rent free in my head? Yes this one:
Lambert gets captured by a mage, for some plot reason, and to avoid getting killed by the rightfully angry witcher, the mage curses Lambert's senses.
His vision is terribly blurry, think dark vignette around the corners, messy shapes, more a constantly shifting, wobbly mess than anything else. He can't see. It hurts to open his eyes because he can't even control his pupils anymore so light just gets in and - yeah it's not great.
He is deafened. A normal human would probably be unable to hear anything, but he's a witcher. It all sounds like his head is held under water. He can't make out any of the quiet noises and everything loud sounds distorted and really far away. Lambert is in a lot of danger.
He also can't talk. Not in words at least. He can growl and whine and scream and- He doesn't need to be able to hear himself to know that he sounds more like an animal.
The only thing the mage has left him with is his sense of smell (and touch). The idiot probably had no idea just how good a witcher's sense of smellcan be and it's Lambert's main tool of survival now.
So Lambert somehow manages to escape anyways - because it's Lambert and Lambert is awesome and there needs to be plot to this. But it's also winter and everything is just loud and bright and cold and oh gods what the fuck is he supposed to do?
He can't see anything. Light reflects off of snow and right into his blown out pupils, effectively blinding him. The sound of his boots against the snow is incredibly disorienting. Every crunch seems to echo in his ears and he can't make out anything else. There's only one way for him to go and it's foreward. Away from the smell of ozone and into the forest.
He stumbles and falls and gets up just to stumble all over again - he just wants to get away, it doesn't matter into which direction he's walking, as long as he's getting further and further away from that hellhole
And then he stumbles again, trips through the snow and down a goddamn cliff - thankfully the snow cushions his fall but yeah... He's not doing so peachy. He loses his consciousness (like all good characters do) and he thinks that's it, he's going to die in a heap of snow. He hopes his brothers won't think he fell on purpose. Despite how much he complains he would never actually leave them behind like this....
What Lambert doesn't know is that he's basically fallen into the temporary camp of the cat caravan. And they look at him and decide yes, they are going to keep this absolutely pathetic (broken, bloody, too thin, shivering, wet, barely alive) looking witcher.
When Lambert wakes, he panics (obviously) and his fight or flight kicks in hard. There's strangers all around him and they're trying to hold him down and they're strong and gods above this is fucking scary! And then- then his hand meets a familiar object. A medallion. He freezes up, clutches at the medallion like he's holding onto his own lifeline- and then a hand takes hold of his and leads it to another medallion and with his hand against their chests he can feel their witcher-slow heartbeats and oh thank fuck-
(i am procrastinating by writing this down, need to post it now or else i will be sitting here til tomorrow, avoiding my actual task but do let me know if you want to hear how this continues because yes theres a lot more of this in my brain)
#rambles#the witcher#artistsfuneral about the witcher#witcher#aiden#lambert#witcher lambert#laiden#lambden
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the other strain was wistar-kyoto rats! also perfect angels obviously but they were so nervous and avoidant (as a result of their genetics! they are just born like that) i always felt bad handling them. always trying to burrow and hide under their bedding. some of the other lab assistants liked them more because they squirmed less upon handling (freeze response) but i wasn’t a huge fan of watching them get that anxious
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shoutout to sprague-dawley rats my big beautiful chunky babies. they were the main type of rats i looked after and did research on this semester. perfect perfect angels
#animal behavioral inhibition 🤝 human behavioral inhibition#i too am chronically avoidant of novel stimuli#and freeze instead of fight or flight. prob shouldn't be telling y'all that........#neither of these pics are from my lab btw these were from some lab that sells them to labs like my school's
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