Whumptober 2025 Day 6: "No grave can hold my body down."

[rosanicus]

No 6: "No grave can hold my body down."

Caught in a Net | Medical Restraints | Pinned to the Wall

A shorter one today. It's the sort of thing I might revisit later in the month, as at the moment I am battling an entrenched autumn cold and didn't have time for Proper Revenant EvS, which is the vibe I wanted to capture. Warning for MCD (This is my MCD icon. I've decided.)

The water in the bay nearest Onor may have thawed, but the air of Sakhalin was still bitingly cold. Animal carcasses were preserved as if in amber, the fur and muscle intact and ripe for scavengers. The ground was frozen solid.

It was difficult to avoid the fact that their journey had been wasted, at least in view of the presence of Fritz. The news Pat Manton brought them of his uncle's fate was valuable, as far as that went, but there was no way to know where he had been buried, and little point in searching for a grave without a marker.

Fritz had immediately jumped on the idea of revenge, as any young man would, and had only been stopped from running off to find the guard responsible by Ginger grabbing at his collar.

They had decided to stay, anyway. The prison itself could not be liberated without starting an international incident of the sort Raymond particularly wanted them to avoid, but the potential to release at least a few political dissidents and spirit them away had a certain appeal.

It was at the third or fourth step of their plan that one of the guards caught sight of Fritz as he darted through the thinner patch of trees at the edge of the forest.

The facts of what happened next were never quite clear. Fritz would insist to the day he died that he saw his uncle across the dirt path, dressed in the yellow-and-black uniform of the prisoners. Algy, who had spotted the guard and was turned towards Fritz at the time, too far to do anything but close enough to watch, only caught a glimpse of the uniform as whoever it was raised a heavy prisoner's shackle and struck him across the back of the head, hard enough that the guard instantly collapsed. None of the others were nearby, and the prisoner vanished between one moment and the next.

Whoever it had been, it had happened in the midst of a good deal of activity. Some time later, with Pat Manton trailing them and Miskoff hoisting his rifle, they discovered a shallow, rectangular pit near the work site. Just beside it were three fingertips, the nails broken. It looked, to an uneducated eye, as if they had been torn off.

Comments

[sholio]

Aaaahhhh! This is wonderful - excellently spooky, perfectly October-ish, and I love that they go ahead and decide to try to help even with the prisoner they came for beyond help (at least to all appearances). And maybe!revenant!Erich coming back to save Fritz, in that particularly familiar way, is fantastic - I love that it's only Fritz who sees him clearly (and even that is plausibly deniable in the sense that it might just be Fritz seeing what he wants to see, but then again it might not).

[philomytha]

Oh no, I completely believe this for EvS, he would come crawling out of the grave minus a few bits to get revenge ;_;

[tweague]

Fabulously creepy - love the intense cold, the frozen, unyielding ground, carrying on through to the shallow grave and the physical horror of the Thing clawing its way free of the hard soil - great stuff <3