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forwhump · 4 months ago

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a/n; some belated robin backstory 🥲 for doughnut, who I promised this to months ago & then FORGOT IM SO SORRY IM JUST AN AIRHEAD I WASNT INTENTIONALLY BEING A DOUCHE I LOVE YOU MORE THAN ANYTHING (I remembered out of nowhere within like ten minutes of finding out liam died so that’s why it took even longer)(I loved 1d 💔)(& bleach finally animated my WORST CHARACTER DEATH so I’ve had a really hard week)(if I was still 13 I’d be institutionalized)

word count: 4k (I only feel like I need to add a word count when these are especially long so idk why everything I’ve posted recently has been especially long that’s my bad 😔)

tw/cw: kidnapping, captivity, implied rape/noncon, drug use, misgendering, transphobia, dehumanization, medical torture, lobotomies, mentions of the military, passing threats of violence against pregnant women, implied human experiments

When Robin’s a kid, just a couple weeks after his dad dies, his mom brings home a new baby. A girl.

She’s really little but she shrieks at a pitch so loud and so shrill that sometimes it gives him headaches. Other times, it puts him in such a bad mood he has to rip all the sheets off his bed or all the posters down from his walls. She doesn’t really do anything but scream or sleep and still, his mother dotes on her, treats her like she’s the most precious thing in the world.

Robin doesn’t get it. He doesn’t even really like her. He’d wanted a brother, anyway.

The baby’s first word is mama, which Robin doesn’t think is all that impressive. Her second word, however, is Rob, and he doesn’t know until he gets home from school and she squeals so loudly it makes his ears ring, clapping her little hands together.

“Rob!” She squeals. “Rob!”

“She’s been waiting all day for you,” his mother says with a smile.

He drops his backpack so he can pick her up, and she squeals again as she clings to him. “Rob!”

He doesn’t even try not to cry because he doesn’t realize he’s started crying until his mother wipes away his tears. After, of course, she takes a picture that she later has framed. A picture that he takes down and hides.

When Robin’s old enough, care of the farm falls pretty solely on his shoulders. He’d been expecting it — man of the house, all that. His sister’s very much a girl, all blonde and giggly, pink and frills, and their mother gets her into pageants when she’s still really small and pageantry comes with a pretty intense base level of maintenance. When mom washes her hair, it’s a whole day event. It’s kind of absurd.

When she first starts trying to follow him out onto the farm, he thinks it’s just to bother him. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s chosen to do something for the sake of being annoying. She asks, then she begs, then she just puts on her boots and tries to follow. When he ends up locking her in the basement to keep her inside, she tries tantrums, then she stomps to their mother and pouts.

“Take your sister with you,” she chastises.

Robin groans loudly. “She’s just gonna get in the way!”

She stomps a small foot and cries, “I can help!”

“No, you can’t!” Robin tells her. “You’re just a baby! And you’re scared of the horses!”

“You can’t tell me what I can’t do!” She shrieks. “I can help!”

“You can’t help!”

“Stop screaming,” their mother says, “both of you.”

“I can help, mama,” she whines.

“She’ll break a nail and throw a fit,” Robin groans.

“I don’t care!”

“You’d better care,” Mom says. “Be careful.”

She brightens, immediately done crying. “So I can go?”

“No,” Robin says, and her face falls again.

“I can help,” she whines. “Let me show you!”

“Let her show you,” Mom says.

Robin groans the whole way out. She skips beside him.

He eats his words, in the end. Even if it’s just to prove Robin wrong, she ends up being a big help. Not with the horses, not at all, but with almost everything else.

Turns out it’s because her motives aren’t to prove Robin wrong at all — she just wanted to get out to the cows. As soon as she’s finished, once Robin’s back is turned, he’s saying something like, “I can’t believe you weren’t totally useless,” and he looks back around and she’s gone, out to pasture. He finds her frolicking with the cows, laughing delightedly.

It’s like that for a few months. She follows him out, helps with actual farm work as quickly as she can, then disappears out to pasture to hang out with the cows. For the rest of their lives there together, in their childhood home, their jobs change; she tends to her cows, and Robin does everything else. It isn’t exactly fair, but Robin had grown up fully expecting to have to do all of it himself.

They settle into their routine, and they stick to it for years.

As soon as Robin’s eighteen, he enlists. He doesn’t hesitate. He’d always known he was going to.

His mom knows. She’s proud of him. He doesn’t tell his sister, because she won’t be.

When she finds out, she throws every plate in the house at him. Breaks every one.

The moon hangs low above the farm, casting everything in watery silver light. She sits on the fence in her boots and a pageant dress, this one so white and sparkly it kind of glows in the moonlight and it makes her look, frankly, like a ghost. She’d taken the pins out of her hair and it looks spectral, a cloud around her.

They’ve been passing a series of increasingly potent celebratory joints back and forth — she’d won a world title tonight, something that warranted a series of increasingly potent celebratory joints back and forth — and her ghost is really starting to crack him up.

“You’re being a dick,” she says, but she’s giggling helplessly. “I look so beautiful.”

“I can’t even look at you,” Robin says, and he isn’t lying, turned away as he laughs. “It’s making me mourn.”

She laughs so loudly she almost falls backwards off the fence, and that sets Robin off again.

He leaves next week. Six days exactly, the day after his very last high school exam. He hasn’t told her yet, and he doesn’t want to, especially not now, but he’s running out of time. He can’t leave without saying something, anything, but he’s tempted.

It’s almost like she’s read his mind. “Can I talk to you about something?” She asks carefully, and something in her tone makes Robin’s shoulders tense.

“If you’re pregnant you’re getting thrown down the stairs, girl,” he says. She snorts. “Mom’s gonna be pissed.”

“I’m not pregnant,” she says.

“I’m leaving on Friday,” Robin responds. He doesn’t mean to.

Uncomfortably quick, her face goes blank. “What?”

“Fuck,” Robin says. “I didn’t mean to tell you that.”

“What do you mean, you leave next week?” She asks slowly.

Robin looks away, out at her cows. “I fly out,” he says, “after exams.”

“Fly where?” She asks, now completely flat.

He doesn’t look at her, but he tries to smile. “My first tour.”

She doesn’t say anything for such a long time that he finally turns again, he looks at her.

She swings, and her fist gets him hard between the eyes. She doesn’t say another word to him as she leaves, and she doesn’t say goodbye to him before he goes. After that, he didn’t really expect her to.

War is hell.

Men are monsters.

The first time Robin gets to come home, it’s so good to be home. It’s the most unbelievably light thing he’s ever experienced, like taking his first, clean breath. He almost starts to understand the military appeal; the comedown after is the high.

When he gets home, his sister is trying not to be weird around him but she is, very blatantly. He thinks it’s because of how they left things; he’s wrong.

“Can we talk?” She asks, and there’s something so severe in her face that he thinks she’s probably cutting contact with him. It’s kind of a low blow. It stings.

He sits across from her, anyway. Waits.

For a long time, she doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t look at him. She doesn’t lift her head.

“Okay, what’s going on?” He asks finally. “Are you okay?”

She exhales loudly, but her voice is so small he can barely hear her when she says, “yes.”

“Then what’s up?” He probes. “What’s going on? You’re not pregnant, are you?”

“No,” she says into her hands, “I’m not always pregnant,” and takes another deep breath. Robin waits. He gives her the time she needs, watches the way her shoulders move as she takes deep breaths, watches the way her hands tremble, hiding her face. Robin keeps his voice level and his hands steady and he waits, but he’s waiting for the worst. He isn’t sure exactly what he’s expecting, but he’s expecting it to be bad. He isn’t expecting, “I’m trans, Rob.”

She still doesn’t look at him. She still doesn’t lift her head. Robin says, “what?”

“I’m trans,” she tells her hands.

“Trans what?” Robin asks, and she does lift her head, then.

“What?” She says, like she can’t tell if he’s serious. “Gender?”

“What?” Robin repeats.

“Oh my god,” she says. “I’m a boy, Robin.”

“What?” He says, because he still doesn’t get it. Then, “oh.”

“Yeah,” she says, and — well, he says, actually. He says it, and he drops his head again, covering his face with his hands and the sheet of his hair. “Sorry,” he mutters.

“What?” Robin repeats. He’s gotten himself stuck in a weird loop. He’s thinking faster and a lot more than he usually does. “What’s — why are you sorry?”

“I don’t know,” she says. He says. He’ll get better at that. He’s an adaptable guy.

“Gonna have to stop overthinking,” Robin tells him. “Guys don’t do that.”

His back stiffens. He doesn’t lift his head. “What?”

“It’s why we sleep better,” he explains.

Reluctantly, he lifts his head. He’s always had a deceptively sweet face, kind of doe eyed, but when he looks at Robin he looks so scared, genuinely scared, that it kind of hurts Robin’s feelings. “Rob,” he croaks.

“Can’t doubt yourself like that,” Robin tells him, trying to shrug off the tension, and when he still can’t quite meet his eye Robin stretches a foot out across the carpet to kick him in the ankle. “Guys don’t do that.”

He barely looks at him from beneath his eyelashes, but he looks at him, and that’s progress. “This isn’t a joke,” he says.

“I know,” Robin agrees.

“I’m serious,” he says. “I’m seriously coming out to you right now.”

“I know,” Robin agrees again.

She covers her face again, and — he covers his face again, and it isn’t until Robin really looks that he realizes his shoulders are shaking. That he realizes — “do you have a…name? A new one?”

He hesitates for a long time before finally pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. With a sniffle, he says, “Wren, I think.”

“Wren,” Robin considers. He looks across their mother’s favourite gaudy rug at Wren, tries it on for size. “It suits you,” he decides, and Wren chokes out a sound that’s obviously a sob but that he had tried hard enough to hide that Robin lets it go. “All the names in the world, though,” he says. “You still picked a bird.”

He sniffles again. “We still had to match.”

Robin feels that really low in his chest, a lot warmer than he would’ve expected. “I’ve always wanted a brother,” he says.

When he finally comes home for good, none of the colours are as bright as he remembers them being.

Wren had moved out while he’d been away, and the house is a lot bigger than he remembers it being. It’s too quiet. He can hear too much when it’s quiet.

Wren comes to stay for a few nights, to welcome Robin home, and he brings his girlfriend with him, introduces her. Julie. She’d probably be very beautiful if Robin’s type were outrageously scary people.

All tattoos, everywhere, and piercings studded with diamonds that catch the light whenever she moves. Her hair is like ink and all her tattoos are thick, black, and she looks a lot like Wren’s opposite in a way that’s endearing for a long time. He likes Julie in the beginning; she’s cordial to him.

She’s less cordial over time, slowly but surely. Then comes a time she’s rude, that she’ll snatch Wren’s phone out of his hands to tell Robin to get fucked on the other end. Once, Wren shows up in the middle of the night to post his bail and take him home. He spends that night, then the next few on their couch, and Julie doesn’t say a word to him once. Doesn’t even look at him.

It comes to a head at his mom’s house. He’s there because Wren is supposed to be there, but he never even gets to see him; he only sees his bitch girlfriend, sneering down the doorstep at him.

“I don’t think you like me very much,” he accuses.

“I don’t,” she says.

“Oh.” He already lnew she didn’t, so he doesn’t know why he’s surprised. That she’s so fuckin’ blunt about it, maybe. “Fuck you, too.”

“You’re a loser,” she tells him, and folds her arms. Robin’s quite a bit bigger than she is, but it doesn’t feel like it then. She’s an imposing little thing. “What’s there to like?”

“Okay,” he says tightly, “you suck, and —“

“You’re a cancer,” she says, “and I want you to leave Wren alone.”

That one hits Robin like a punch in the chest. He almost takes a step back, then pivots, because who the fuck does she think she is? Why should Robin cower? “Fuck you,” he says again. She just raises her eyebrows, smirks, and it’s so smug that it actually makes Robin hot all over. “Fuck you. He’s my brother.”

“Yeah?” She asks, and he doesn’t like her fuckin’ tone. “Because, from where I’m standing, it really seems like that didn’t matter to you all that much until Wren started making a lot of money.”

It makes all the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “You have no idea —“

“Did he tell you we had to move?” She asks.

He’s still fuming and it crackles in his ears. “What?”

“Do you remember his apartment?” Julie says. “How excited he was? How much he loved it? But we had to move,” she tells him, “because we couldn’t keep up with it anymore, because such a substantial chunk of your brother’s income goes to funding his junkie brother’s crack habit.”

He tenses his jaw so tightly his teeth click. “You’re a bitch.”

“I’m not kidding,” she says, “and I’m telling you as gently as I think you deserve. You’re ruining his life. Leave him alone.”

Robin tries.

Really, he tries. He does what’s best for everyone and clears out his mother’s purse before making a home for himself in the gutter. He sleeps in the street and sits in the sun during the day, usually high. High if he can help it, anyway.

He sustains it for as long as it takes Wren to find him. He isn’t quite sure how long that is. He thinks he might have lost a lot of time.

Wren looks different. This Wren still has his Wren’s hair, his Wren’s abnormally large eyes. He’s still a pretty boy, but he’s a pretty boy, right? His jaw is a bit more defined. He’s got more angles, sharper angles, less softness and curve. He wouldn’t look out of place in an eighties hair band. How long has Robin been gone? How long has he been sleeping?

“You look good,” he says.

“You look like shit,” Wren tells him blandly.

“Yeah,” Robin agrees, scratching his neck. He accidentally opens a sore he didn’t know was there and scratches a little harder. “Where’s Julie?”

“Left me,” Wren answers.

“Oh,” Robin says, and stops scratching. “Why?”

He raises his eyebrows. “Why do you think?”

He flinches. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“Well, y’know,” he says, scratching his forearm, “there’s other fish in the sea.”

Wren’s face falls. Sighing, he looks away, half hidden by his hair. Robin has half a mind to wonder if that’s why he hasn’t cut it. “I can’t do this shit with you anymore,” he says.

“What shit?” Robin says.

“All of this,” he says, but he turns back to reach out towards Robin and forcefully pry his hands away from the sides of his face. “And stop fuckin’ pickin’ your face.”

Contrarily, Robin’s skin doesn’t stop itching so he doesn’t stop scratching.

Wren doesn’t stop taking care of him, either.

For a while, Robin has a really good thing going, honestly, and there’s something comforting about being at home again with his mom and his brother. He doesn’t notice, for a long time, how much it eats away at Wren, because it eats away at him so slowly. He gets quieter.

Five months after Wren decides he’s done taking care of him — and takes care of him, still — Robin clears all of the big bills out of his wallet before he wanders out onto the farm to grovel and ask to borrow a measly fifty bucks. He never quite makes it that far.

The cows are out, so it isn’t hard to track Wren down, but Robin never quite makes it over to him. He’s sitting in the grass, back against a fence post. Daisy has her head in his lap, and he’s got a hand between her ears, but it’s still. He’s staring off into nothing. It looks like he might be crying.

And that makes Robin so dreadfully uncomfortable he turns right back around and goes inside. Because that’s probably a little bit his fault, right?

He doesn’t leave then, but he notices it more. Wren stares off into space a lot. Cries when he doesn’t think anybody else is around. Never mentions to Robin all the money that vanished from his wallet.

Robin leaves a week later.

It takes Wren three months, this time, to track him down.

Robin’s been sleeping on the floor of an abandoned apartment building, and it’s kind of surreal, waking up to Wren, cross legged on the floor with him. It’s a relief to see him. “Can I b-borrow a c-couple bucks?”

The way Wren looks at him makes him miserable. He tells Wren it’s their mother, it’s the way mom looks at him, and it is, to a degree. His mother still looks at him like she’s proud of him, her son the soldier, her son the patriot, but the way Wren looks at him is worse. Wren’s disappointed in him, and that could almost make him throw up.

He’s trying to get Robin to come home, to get clean, and Robin’s trying to get some money out of him. He’s having a hard time focusing, he’s shivering, but not with cold, with a sort of fever that makes his skin crawl too tightly over his restless bones. When the door explodes open, Robin registers it a second after it’s already happened. The soldiers he doesn’t even see until they’ve already swarmed the room, covered every exit, pulled Robin to his knees by his arms and his hair. They knock his blanket loose, and he shivers until one of them grabs Wren by his braided hair, wrenches his head back, points his gun.

Not everything comes into focus, but it tries. This is really happening and this is really bad.

Their captain is a big guy that looks more like the Hollywood movie version of a soldier than a soldier. He has an arrogance to him that puts Robin on edge, that he’s only ever seen in very dangerous, very powerful men. The way he looks at Wren makes Robin sick.

When he knocks Wren unconscious, it’s with a wet cloth and a gloved hand over his mouth.

Robin begs. He hasn’t been above begging for a long time. The way the captain is looking at Wren — he’s seen what happens to people who get looked at like that.

And this is Robin’s fault.

This is all his fault.

It makes him think of Julie. He can’t remember the last time he saw her, or even the last time he really thought about her, but he thinks of her now. You’re ruining his life, she’d told him once.

She was right.

For a long time, he’d been ruining. Now, it’s in ruins at his feet. And it’s all Robin’s fault.

They try to make him watch, but he struggles and vomits himself into unconsciousness.

They take him to a weird, grey place tens of minutes below ground. They give him weird, grey clothes and they throw him into a weird, grey prison.

Wren isn’t there.

He meets Hal, and he meets June, and he begs them, too. They have to know something, anything. Maybe they heard one of the soldiers say something, even in passing.

They look at him like he’s crazy. They don’t even believe him.

Robin spends his first week in his weird, grey prison completely hysterical. Then a couple of men, dressed almost liked orderlies but masked, all in black, come to haul him away, kicking and screaming. They drag him through this weird, grey hellscape to a surgical room from a nightmare, entirely black. They strap him down to a black surgical table. The surgeons that hover around him wear black masks and caps and gloves.

One of them takes a long, black needle. He holds it up, into Robin’s field of vision, before he turns the point into the inner corner of his eye. “This will probably hurt,” he explains, “but you won’t think to complain.”

“What the fuck?” Robin shouts. He thrashes, but he’s restrained to that table so tightly he can’t turn his face away, not even an inch. “What the fuck! Get the fuck away from me!”

“This will make your development easier,” another says. He speaks with the slow, flat voice of an old movie mad scientist and Robin’s heart physically aches in his chest. Never, not once in his life, has he been so scared it’s made his heart ache. “It’s in your best interest.”

“Get the fuck away from me!” Robin screams.

But he’s still. He tries to thrash, to turn away, and he can’t. He can only watch that needle close in on his eye, and scream as it pierces it.

He screams until he can’t.

#this is a little wren centric at times but that is obviously just because wren is a special love of my life & im obsessed with him #whump #whumpblr #whump scenes #whump blog #whump series #whump tag #whumpee #whump community #whump writing #whump fic #whump snippet #whump story #whump stuff #whump things #whump angst #whump wip

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honeyfizzly · 1 year ago

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I'm constantly flipping back and forth wether I should trust tabitha or not because Its really suspicious how protective she is of us, even if we're an complete asshole to her.

Also there's the whole ritual thing going on with the goat, it could be possible that tabitha has ulterior motives and wants us alive because ... well idk a sacrifice seems the most obvious option but whatever she needs done, it seems to hinge on the mc's health.

There's also her connection to Wayne and the death of her mother.

Wayne apparently disappeared at the estate around the same time pearlanne did and pearlanne died of sleep apnea but apparently had no autopsy. I've seen some people propose the idea that tabitha mightve smothered her mother with a pillow, and I think that could check out.

Apparently it's very hard to tell if someone was suffocated with a pillow or not, and often times investigators have to rely on checking fibers near the victims mouth and eyes to idenity what suffocated them, and handprints + finger marks.

You also have to be relatively strong to suffocate someone- which powerful build can say tabitha is surprising strong despite her size (it's if tabitha threatens you and then you push her off)- and most of the time the victims for suffocation are people who would be unable to fight back like children or elderly (I'm not sure how old pearlanne is, but her corpse looks pretty damn old. Since tabitha is in for early to mid twenties iirc, I think I would place pearlanne somewhere in her 50s-early 60s?).

Also it's very clear tabitha did not like her mother, and calls her a monster. So like I feel like it adds up that tabitha is perfectly capable of murder and able to do it again (rip reese) but also at the same time, I have a hard time thinking she's preparing to do something terrible to mc especially if you go down routes where you have a good (or good-ish) relationships with her.

Like, for example with my main mc Mckenna (yes I chose her name cause it had mc in it) I stayed the night at Stella's, hung out with her in the mines and on day 3 but didn't invite her ghost hunting, then when I got threatened in her office on day 4 and had mckenna cry I got a couple very interesting reactions.

(Sorry for not actually having a screenshot and just a picture, my computer is weird. Also one more note, this was when a strike was strong, I'll have to check what happens when the strike is weak but I have a similar relationship with Tabitha still)

This was the interaction I got when I said "im sorry, I know I haven't been the best cousin" iirc and she falt out admits she's jealous of us.

But we can also get this dialogue instead if we ask why she invited us at all if she hated us so much

(Once again sorry for bad pic 💔)

And idk maybe I'm the fool for trusting but that line about being family, and how that still means something to her feels so geninue it makes me doubt she actually intends to harm the mc.

Plus there's other interactions you can get with Tabitha, like if you have a very good relationship with her and question if she's happy in scarlet hollow or not she'll say no, but that she's happy you're here.

And idk, I just feel like somebody who had already planned to stab us in the back from the very start wouldnt be able to open up that much and be that vulnerable with their potential victim.

Also tabitha herself states she didn't want to like us (you get this by hanging out with tabby and calling her hypocritical for giving us such a hard time for living in the city), which of course could be spinned towards the idea that tabitha is planning to backstab us but also at the same time, it's not an uncommon defense mechanism for traumatized people to push away loved ones.

Tabitha has had a very hard life- from the pressure of being one of two scarlets left, having to run a dying coal mine, and the abuse from her mother to then her sudden death (and also her mother maybe possibly killing her ex).

It's very possible alot of her standoff-ness towards the player isn't because she has some malicious scheme, but rather it's her way of coping with the shitty cards she's been dealt in life (like the idea of pushing people away so you won't be hurt if they betray or leave you. It's a toxic mentality to have as it creates a self fulfilling prophecy, but it's a mentality some people have nonetheless).

I rambled alot but those are just some of my thoughts about tabitha. It's obvious she's gonna do something weird with that goat (my first idea is a sacrifice), but I'm not entirely sure wether she intended to betray the mc or not from the beginning (I lean towards not but I can still see a situation where she didn't intend to betray the mc from the start, but does so later depending on your relationship with her).

#not really sure if to call this a theory as its just a ramble about my thoughts LOL #speculation ig #scarlet hollow #scarlet hollow tabitha #tabitha scarlet #tw lots of talk about suffocation and death

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