Whumptober 2025 Day 11: Laceration

[rosanicus]

No 11: "Can you get through all the pain inside you?"

Hidden Injury | Laceration | Forced Reveal | Alt Prompt: Concussion

It's Ted Scott! He's a fantastic pilot! A fearless mailman! A bearer of plot armour so thick he could jump out of a space shuttle and land with barely a scratch! And today I gave him a concussion <3

This is a sort of alt-canon for an early scene in Flying Against Time, the NINTH Ted Scott book. God. There's too many of them.

"Good lord, Ted!"

Walter Hapworth sprang from his armchair and hurried towards the door, which had just opened to admit his good friend Ted Scott. It was late in the evening, the moon was high, and Ted was bleeding heavily.

"Are you alright? What's happened? Come here, my boy, sit down. I'll fetch you some water."

Ted did not answer either question. He looked somewhat dazed as he sat, and took the glass of water pressed into his hands without drinking from it. The blood on his face came from a sizeable gash above his ear, Walter saw. It was still bleeding in the way that head wounds do, as all of them look worse than they truly are. He folded his handkerchief and pressed it into Ted's hand, then pressed his hand against the cut when it became clear he wasn't quite sure what he was supposed to do with a silk handkerchief.

Calling the hotel reception for a set of clean towels and a first aid kit was the work of moments. The concierge assured him that a doctor would be called, when Walter explained the situation. He knelt by the chair while he waited, not quite sure what he ought to do first.

He wasn't quite sure how Ted had managed to bypass the desk. Perhaps he was such a habitual visitor now that, on a dark evening with his collar turned up, they barely noticed him. It was an odd thought.

"Walter," said Ted, belatedly. His words were slurred. "I'm sorry to drop by so late."

"No trouble at all, Ted," Walter replied. He pressed his friend's hand between his own. "How did you come to be in such a state?"

Ted's shirt and trousers were neat enough, but his overcoat had a tear in one arm and a dusting of brick red powder across the shoulder. His dark hair was mussed and matted with blood on one side, and his freckled cheeks were littered with tiny nicks and cuts.

"I was walking home," he said. "Something fell on me." He gestured vaguely at the cut above his ear. "Lucky it didn't get me square, I s'pose. Would've laid me out flat for sure."

"Why didn't you go to the guest house?" Walter asked. "Your parents—"

Ted shook his head, which made his face pale rapidly. "Charity would faint at the sight of me," he confessed. He sounded a little clearer, which helped soothe some of the worry in Walter's heart. "Eben would go out looking for whoever might've dropped the brick. I don't want them in trouble."

It was so like Ted to think of his parents before himself. "I see," Walter replied. Then there was a knock on the door, and he could collect the supplies to actually do something about the state of his friend.

"Take that away, there's a good fellow," he muttered, as he helped Ted peel the handkerchief away from the wound. It had helped stem the bleeding, so Walter considered it a worthy sacrifice. The little pained noise Ted made as Walter began to clean it struck him to the core, but he kept working.

He wet the towel a little at a time, working in small circles, and before long he could see the full extent of the cut. It was about four inches wide and come close to slicing at the join where ear meets skull. He was very glad there was no damage there.

"A nasty little thing," he commented. "A brick, you said?" A dark suspicion was beginning to form in his mind. The upcoming wager over a coast-to-coast flight had seemed like a fine idea at the time, but as the date approached and the press excitement increased Walter was regretting it more by the hour.

Ted hummed in agreement. Walter rummaged in the first aid kit the hotel had provided. A bottle of iodine seemed like a good idea, he thought, although the size of the cut would probably need stitches. He was very thankful that a doctor could be called at such an hour, and paid for easily without even feeling the cost. It hadn't always been that way for him.

He poured iodine carefully onto a square of gauze and applied it, as gently as he could, to the wound. Ted made a much louder sound and recoiled, an action Walter had never seen from him, before settling back in his seat. He curled his fingers tightly around the arms of the chair, knuckles white.

"I'm sorry," Walter murmured. "I don't see a way around it. The thing has to be cleaned."

Ted nodded roughly. He said, "It hurts like a — well, it hurts a lot."

Walter smiled at the swallowed curse. Ted was utterly correct in his language, in a way which should have been pious or prudish but instead — because it was Ted, and Walter had a problem about the man — came off as charming.

He went back to the iodine, and within a minute or so the area was as clean as it would get without a doctor present.

"How are you feeling?" Walter asked.

"Not my best," Ted allowed. "Pretty sore that this'll take me off the refit for a few days."

"I'm glad you'll take care of your health," Walter replied. "Some men would try and fight through this sort of thing."

"No fear," said Ted. "I feel as if my head is in a vice, and I've been plunged underwater, and perhaps a bit like I'm at forty-thousand feet without an oxygen tank. I'm a determined sort, Walter, but I'm not suicidal."

Walter couldn't help but take Ted's hand at that. In just under three weeks, barring further injury, Ted would be flying solo from coast-to-coast, with nothing but his ingenuity and skill to guide him. Walter would have to watch from the airstrip as he took off, and then in twenty hours he would either win fifteen thousand dollars or lose the best man he'd ever known.

For now, he could look after him as best he could, and hope that the incident this evening had truly been an accident. But Walter, with the keen business sense which had made him his fortune, knew in his heart that it was not.

Comments

[tweague]

LET! TED! SAY! MOTHERFUCKER! Literally never going to happen but a girl can dream <3

I loved thisssss! Ted's plot armour cracking was delicious (loved the flinch when Walter applies the iodine, he is so unused to Consequences 😂), and Walter getting to fuss properly over his boyfriend for a change was a delight, especially since he's still got to fret impotently over the bet and Ted's usual massively dangerous lifestyle <3 Thank you for this treat!