Whumptober 2024 Day 9: Bruises
Oct. 14th, 2024 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
No. 9: OBSESSION
Broken Window | Bruises | “Frame me up on the wall, just to keep me out of trouble.” (Fall Out Boy, Irresistible)
Catching up on missed prompts by, um, missing the new ones... this will definitely work out in the end. Today's prompts are almost too delicious and require more brain than I have this week (six hours of parent's evening incoming...).
430 words, Worrals & Frecks, somewhere in the WW2 era
“Oh, that looks nasty,” said Frecks. Worrals looked back at her, neck twisted so she could see over her shoulder. She had just removed her uniform blouse, stiff with sweat and not a little blood.
“What?” She asked, voice short. She couldn’t see whatever it was that had Frecks’ eyebrows furrowed, a concerned wrinkle at the centre of her forehead. Frecks had already changed - they were taking turns on watch, as they often did. Her nightgown was borrowed from the French couple they’d taken refuge with for the night, an elderly pair vouched for by Lucien and Raoul.
“That bruise,” Frecks explained. She pointed, which was unhelpful given that Worrals didn’t yet have the prehensile neck of some sort of owl. “It must be from when that brute kicked you. I can almost see the tread of his boot.”
Frecks had responded to the kick in question by cracking the Nazi’s skull with a shovel. She’d wielded the instrument with enough force to snap the handle, which had left her standing in somewhat comic disbelief until Worrals rallied enough to drag her away from the scene.
“I can’t see it,” said Worrals. She poked in the vague direction that Frecks had pointed and then, predictably, hissed. “Oh,” she continued. “I see what you mean.”
“It’s properly purple,” Frecks noted. “Does it not hurt when you move?”
“Not noticeably,” said Worrals, who had been running on adrenalin alone for most of the day. She sat down to take off her brassiere and immediately regretted it. “Ah.”
Frecks shook her head. “The glamour of the secret agent,” she said.
Worrals wriggled, then twisted, then shuffled the offending garment until she could pull it down over her hips. She flicked it to the corner of the room with her ankle and then shrugged on her nightshirt. The bruise vanished beneath a swathe of flannelette.
She turned to find Frecks making a face at her. Frecks was quite good at making faces across the entire range of human emotion, and in this case Worrals could tell quite easily which one she'd settled on for the evening.
“Oh, come here,” she said. She spread her arms wide as Frecks burrowed into her side, face pressed into the hollow of her shoulder. “It’s just a bruise, Frecks. We’ve both had worse.”
“Could’ve been worse today,” mumbled Frecks. She had a fistful of Worrals’ nightshirt clenched in one hand, knuckles white.
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Date: 2024-10-14 09:32 pm (UTC)