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thetomorrowshow · 3 months ago

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Whumptober 2 - Trust Issues

title: the end of this road

fandom: traffic smp

cw: abuse, possible eye injury (unconfirmed)

When the Listeners first contacted Martyn and Jimmy, back in the days of the Property Police, Martyn had assumed that they were better than the Watchers. More benevolent, perhaps. Not cruel as the Watchers had been.

They'd properly entered his mind at the end of Third Life, but for the most part, they stayed quiet. He felt them, knew they were there, but he didn't do anything about it.

They were probably doing their best to protect him, after all. He didn't mention it to anyone—not to Grian, not to Jimmy, not to Scott, or anyone else who might have had some insight. It really wasn't a problem.

Then Last Life happened, and . . . well, they made their presence known, that was for sure.

Martyn has been with them since Last Life, and he's since revised his opinion on the goodness of the Listeners.

He knows, with a certainty, that they are far worse.

Martyn isn't sure when he finally escapes. Too long, too long, too long. He gets stuck on the two words, repeating them again and again, looping them through his brain, because if he's thinking them then at least he knows that the thoughts are his.

Too long. Too long.

He clutches his arms around his knees. His knees. His arms. He can feel them. He can feel them, how terrible is that?

His trembling fingers brush his own skin, a burning touch against his elbow.

They had taken everything from him. They had taken even his own bodily consciousness, and he hadn't known if he still had a body but now he does and he's forgotten how to breathe—

Martyn sucks in a deep breath, chokes on it when he feels his chest expanding.

He doesn't know where he is—his brain is skipping and stumbling over itself, trying to make sense of whatever happened—but he is.

He thinks he is.

He hopes he is.

“Oh! Martyn?”

He flinches away, his hands coming up to cover his ears. They haven't been able to do that in so long. He hasn't had hands in so long.

And everything's been so loud for forever.

Too long, too long.

He Knows the voice, right away, just as they had been teaching him to Know.

OwengeJuice. Owen. Twenty-five years old, six feet tall, his left foot slightly smaller than his right. More, more information on Owen that Martyn doesn’t want to know, that he tries to shut out.

“I’ll get help,” Owen says, his voice grating on Martyn’s ears, and Martyn just gasps in another shuddering breath and sits as still as possible (which is difficult to do when he can feel every inch of himself).

They had him for too long.

Too long.

They tried to talk directly to him. They tried, at first, but Martyn’s still getting used to his vocal cords so he didn’t respond.

Now they talk to each other, about him, and they’re so very worried.

“You don’t know where he’s been?”

Grian. Angry, whispered. If they’re trying not to let him hear, it doesn’t matter. Martyn can Hear whispers just as easily as anything else.

“Last I checked, I wasn’t his admin!”

Scott, his tone matching Grian’s.

The problem isn’t that they’re angry. It isn’t that they’re talking about him. It isn’t even that they gave up on talking to him so quickly.

The problem is that Martyn doesn’t know if they’re real.

He wants them to be real. Void above, he wants so desperately for them to be real. But it isn’t the first time that he’s heard the voices of his friends amidst the chaos of noise, and Martyn’s sure it won’t be the last, and he can’t let himself believe again that it’s actually them.

They’ve tricked him so many times. He can’t let his heart break all over again.

“Has he said anything?”

Scott shakes his head. Martyn doesn’t see it, but he Hears it, and that makes it so much worse.

He breathes again, and he hears a tinge of rasp in the breath, as if his throat is trying to make some kind of sound without his permission. Odd, seeing as he keeps failing to make it work manually.

Grian steps closer, raising his voice again. “Um, Martyn? Buddy? How are you feeling?”

It isn’t real. There’s no way it’s real, no way he actually escaped.

It’s been too long to believe it.

Then there’s a hand on his shoulder, a very real hand on his very real shoulder, and he jerks away, knocking his very real head against the wall.

He’s gotten better at muffling the background noise, but for a moment he lets it slip, and he Hears everything from the rush of blood pumping in and out of Grian’s fleshy heart to the clicking of a redstone contraption somewhere far off—

Martyn pulls his defenses back up, swallows back the instinct to dry heave. Swallows. His throat moves, and saliva moves in it. It’s so strange, so unexpected.

“Martyn, can . . . um, can you hear me?”

Martyn swallows again.

He nods. Up-down, up-down. Then he speaks.

“You’re not real,” he rasps, each word said so many times but now on a foreign tongue. “You aren’t.”

“I—yeah, I am—”

It isn’t Grian’s fault that he doesn’t know he’s an illusion. He doesn’t Sound quite like any illusion that Martyn’s experienced over the past however-long, something oddly . . . staticky about him, and Scott doesn’t Sound quite right either but in the opposite way. Scott’s words are crisp, and his movements come with depth, like there’s actually something of substance to him.

“Martyn, are you hurt?” Scott asks, stepping up to stand beside Grian.

There’s something against the skin of his arm where his face should be that isn’t quite his face. It’s a little rough, feels sickly medical, and Martyn finally lifts his real head (if only to get the feeling off his arm).

Grian makes some sort of cringing sound, and Scott sucks his breath in through his teeth.

“I wish you’d just stop,” Martyn manages, every word a battle that he almost loses. “I’m just—I get it, all right, I talk too much, I need to—to learn to Listen, but I’ve heard enough, honestly. I’ve heard my friends try to rescue me too many times. It’s tired, is what it is. Boring. Come up . . . come up with a new torture.”

A pause.

“I am real,” Grian says, and there’s definitely something more to him, something very staticky and not-right. Something he hasn’t Heard in—well, ever. “You know me, Martyn. We’re real, I promise.” Martyn knows that Grian’s a Watcher.

He knows that the Listeners can’t replicate Watchers. It’s impossible. There’s a certain quality to Watchers that they can’t imitate.

So Martyn knows that Grian is the real Grian.

Because he escaped. He has a real body, which he hasn’t felt in so long (too long), he has real hands and a real head and—

“Grian?” he whispers, and he Hears Grian smile.

“Yep,” Grian says.

He breathes—a sigh, this time, relieved and exhausted and so overwhelmed. He didn’t know he remembered how to sigh. “I—sorry—they’ve had me for so long—”

“Martyn,” Scott interrupts, “what—your eyes?”

He hasn’t had a stomach in so long. It’s weird when it feels like it drops out of him.

He had begged. He had begged, and they had promised. After they had taken every other part of him, he had begged to keep his eyes.

They had held him as close as possible when one didn’t have a body (and he would have leaned into the hold if he could), had promised that they wouldn’t take his eyes, that they would leave them alone.

He had begged.

He’s always been afraid of the dark.

When they took his eyes from him, he had screamed. He hadn’t had a throat anymore, he hadn’t made a sound, but he had screamed anyway. It hurt, it hurt different from everything else, it wasn’t a fading of what he was but precise cuts and stitches that he’d had to watch until he couldn’t see, that he’d had to Hear until it was over.

He hasn’t seen anything. It’s been darkness ever since his body returned.

(He had escaped. They had gotten comfortable in assuming that just because he couldn’t see he would have no way of knowing that they left his communicator within reach. They thought that just because they had taken his hands he wouldn’t be able to grab it.)

Why aren’t his eyes back? If everything else is back, why can’t he see?

“What—” his voice cracks— “Sorry, what do they look like?”

“You’ve got a bandage over them,” Grian says (Martyn Hears disgust, anger, fear—directed at him?). “We can take it off.”

Before he knows that he’s doing it, Martyn’s shaking his head.

“I don’t—don’t,” he says.

What if his eyes aren’t there? What if the dull ache where they should be is exactly what he fears it is? What if the last thing he saw is the last thing he’ll ever see—the destruction of his eyes?

“Does it hurt?” Scott asks, and Martyn shakes his head again.

“Don’t,” he says. “I don’t want to know.”

(They taught him how to Listen. Did they really think he was such a slow learner that he wouldn’t be able to Hear the layout of the room? That he wouldn’t Hear the way out?)

Martyn buries his head in his arms again, hands covering his ears. He can Hear too much. Too, too much.

Too long.

Time moves, slow and stuttering (time was always cold, there, smooth like glass), while Grian talks about protections and magic and whatnot, and Scott leaves to make a call.

He rubs each finger against his thumbs, feeling the cracks of his joints. There’s no calluses. Did he used to have calluses?

Too long, too long.

“Martyn?”

Martyn’s head jerks up.

The one voice that the Listeners had never even attempted to push at him. Back on Last Life had been the first and last time they tried, and it had just sounded like some twisted version of Martyn’s own voice.

That voice is different, inimitable, claimed by a power greater than the Listeners.

Jimmy.

“Timmy?” he whispers disbelievingly, because he knew, logically, that Timmy was alive, but the last time he saw him was his crumpled body in the ditch in front of Mumbo’s base, eyes glassy and unseeing while blood seeped from the gash in his back, and it’s kind of hard to shake that imagery.

Jimmy hurries across the room, falls to his knees beside Martyn, and hugs him.

There’s no warning, and Martyn flinches away at first because it’s a lot of touch for a body that didn’t exist until just a little bit ago, but Jimmy doesn’t let go. He holds him all the tighter, his chin hooked around Martyn’s shoulder.

It makes him feel frightfully, blessedly real.

Martyn sinks into the embrace, his head going limp against him, his arms uncoiling from his knees. The touch burns, almost too-much (too long), but it feels so good in an overwhelming kind of way.

His hands bunch in the front of Jimmy’s jacket—jean, by the feel of it. “This is new,” he mumbles into Jimmy’s shoulder. “What happened to the pajamas?”

Jimmy chuckles thickly. “Ditched that fit. Sorry, I know you loved it.”

“Wish you’d’ve let me burn it.”

This feels right. This feels natural, normal, wrapped around one of his oldest friends, trading long-old jokes, as Martyn’s body relearns how to exist.

“Your eyes,” Jimmy says after a moment. “Do you . . . still have them?”

It’s blunt. Far too blunt.

It’s Timmy.

Martyn just shrugs. “Don’t know. Don’t want to check.”

“We should really check,” Grian says.

Martyn just buries his face deeper into Jimmy’s shoulder.

“We don’t have to,” says Jimmy, rubbing Martyn’s back, slow, up-and-down movements. It’s grounding. It’s the only thing keeping his body tethered here.

“I’ve kind of been through hell,” Martyn says, the words coming out all choked-up. “I don’t—I don’t want to know. Not right now.”

Not after he’s only just become somewhat sure that his body is real. Not when he still isn’t quite solid on the fact that anyone other than Grian and Jimmy exists.

It doesn’t make sense, to have a real body and real Jimmy but everything else not be real, but he can’t quite wrap his head around the fact that he’s made it. It’s hard to trust his own senses after so long of only having one.

Too long.

Right now, he just wants to sit here and at least pretend that the place under his bandages doesn’t sting, that his throat isn’t stuck with emotion that won’t come out his eyes.

He wants to hug Jimmy, and at least pretend that it’s real.

#whumptober2024 #no.2 #trust issues #last life smp #fic #abuse #traffic smp #martyn inthelittlewood #itlw fanfic #trafficblr #MARTYN AND JIMMY FRIENDSHIP!!!!!#this one's a little bit trippy #but there is no on-screen gore like last time #so that's good!#lmk what you think #love you guys

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3liza · 6 months ago

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https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/theyre-not-human-how-19th-century-inuit-coped-with-a-real-life-invasion-of-the-walking-dead

Indigenous groups across the Americas had all encountered Europeans differently. But where other coastal groups such as the Haida or the Mi’kmaq had met white men who were well-fed and well-dressed, the Inuit frequently encountered their future colonizers as small parties on the edge of death.

“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.

And it’s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that came to the Arctic and discharged columns of death onto the ice.

Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.

“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.

Mark Tootiak, a stepson of Nicholas Qayutinuaq, related a story to Eber of a group of Inuit who had an early encounter with a small and “hairy” group of Franklin Expedition men evacuating south.

“Later … these Inuit heard that people had seen more white people, a lot more white people, dying,” he said. “They were seen carrying human meat.”

Even Eber’s translator, the late Tommy Anguttitauruq, recounted a goose hunting trip in which he had stumbled upon a Franklin Expedition skeleton still carrying a clay pipe.

By 1850, coves and beaches around King William Island were littered with the disturbing remnants of their advance: Scraps of clothing and camps still littered with their dead occupants. Decades later, researchers would confirm the Inuit accounts of cannibalism when they found bleached human bones with their flesh hacked clean.

“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.

The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.

“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.

The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.

But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.

The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.

When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.

Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.

Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.

“That night they got all their belongings together and took off towards the southwest,” Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.

But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.

The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.

The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.

#being so English you die of racism #because youd rather eat each other than a seal #or try to signal to the friendly locals that you need help #many such cases #UNIRONICALLY #the terror #the franklin expedition #dorothy eber #then they infected all these people with European disease of course #the national post is a chud rag so this is an unexpectedly good article for them

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