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English
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Part 13 of whumptober 2025
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Whumptober 2025
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Published:
2025-10-15
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1,435
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1/1
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i swear (i will die trying)

Summary:

Melanie double checked to make sure the bathroom door was locked. Her hand was pale and sweaty around the handle of the awl. It could be over quickly.

“I can’t control the past.” She said out loud to nobody, inhaling, exhaling again. “I can’t see the future. I can only control the present.” It calmed her down, at least it made her laugh. “Sorry, LaVerne. You’d hate it if you knew why I was saying that.”

..

The events that transpired before the ambulance reached the institute

Notes:

Pay attention to the tags for this one pls!

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Melanie double checked to make sure the bathroom door was locked. It wouldn’t help, Elias almost definitely learned his lesson when Martin pulled that stunt with the statements, but she couldn’t pull something heavy in front of the door in case the paramedics needed to bust through. This would have to do. It could be over quickly.

Her hand was pale and sweaty around the handle of the awl. It gleamed almost with menace. She had used this same tool to hook a flesh thing to the wall by its handlike digit and stab the rest of it until it couldn’t move anymore.

She hoped she’d be able to move after this. She hoped she’d be able to move, to do it, to get it done with and not fuck it up. She could have if she was running on the Slaughter, she thought. It’d be- not easy, no, but certain. Maybe even exhilarating.

The scar on her leg hurt and it was a dull, dead pain, like the husk of an abandoned hospital where terrible things had happened. It hadn’t been long ago when her worst fear was Ghost Hunters UK tanking.

“I can’t control the past.” She said out loud, inhaling, exhaling again. “I can’t see the future. I can only control the present.” It calmed her down, at least it made her laugh. “Sorry, LaVerne. You’d hate it if you knew why I was saying that.”

The sink pressed against the wall, one of those ones that didn’t even have a cabinet under it, just a white sink and some exposed piping. The mirror sat directly in front of her. There was a little window right up top of the bathroom, cloaked in privacy glass. The sunlight danced across the tiles of the bathroom. Melanie stared into the mirror before stepping back, holding a hand to her head, exhaling in one shuddering gasp.

“I don’t want to do this.” She laughed to nobody. Nobody responded. Somewhere a time limit was ticking down, she was sure Jon had called people by now. She couldn’t even think about him, not here, not now. Maybe in therapy if they still let her there after this. Maybe with Georgie if all went according to plan.

Were those sirens? Not hers, surely. Focus. Concentrate.

“Fuck you.” She said to the walls, to the mirror, to the little window that barely let in enough light to see by. This would be her last time seeing any of this. Wrong choice of words? It would be her last time seeing anything.

She went back to the sink, gripping the edge, looking down into the water. She didn’t really care if she bled all over the institute. She wanted to, actually, wanted to let the essence of her resignation drip and seep into the foundation, but the sink gave her a nice place to hold while she did it.

Melanie looked up at the mirror. She stared back at herself. Her eyeliner was all smudgy from crying earlier, her eyebags heavy and her eyes bloodshot. Her hair was a mess. She looked like she had been dragged backwards through an electric fence.

Was this to be the last thing she ever saw?

She was stalling, but she couldn’t get it out of her head. The last thing she saw wouldn’t be her own misery reflected back at her. She was starting a new life, she was finally breaking free from her own choices and her own mistakes. She was leaving and never coming back. She was free, free, free.

She opened her phone and set it up on the back edge of the sink, directly in front of the mirror. Her lockscreen was a picture of Georgie holding the Admiral. The cat in question was struggling to free himself from a patented Georgie Bear Hug and Melanie could still hear herself laughing as she took it.

She took extra time to notice every curve of Georgie’s face, all the little things she didn’t notice normally. How her hair frizzed a bit at the edges. The mole on her cheek. Those eyes who said that one day it would all be okay and said it so firmly that Melanie believed her.

Melanie took a deep breath. She let it out. The bathroom was so, so quiet. She positioned the awl directly below her left eye. It was so incredibly sharp. Another deep breath. Her fingers shook on the polished wooden handle.

“Fuck this place.”

It was as good a time as any. She hesitated for another second nonetheless.

Then drove the awl up into her eye.

She immediately dropped it, tight grip not withstanding as a pain so blinding she didn’t think it was real clouded through her vision and focused as a screaming pounding fireball behind her skull. She thought she heard a scream and she wondered if it was hers as she gasped and instinctually reached her hands up to try to cup the blood running up from her eye. Her vision had gone crazy, not black as much as red.

Her hands scrambled for the awl before she could pass out or go delirious. Don’t fuck this up, she had one chance. But god, this hurt. Surprise leg surgery couldn’t hold a single match to this pain that blinded her more than the eye trauma did. Through her dizzy, disoriented vision she could see little bits of white dripping through the blood like a runny egg.

She was losing consciousness. She heard sirens. She glanced up like a wild animal looking for its herd before it died and she found Georgie’s smiling eyes. Soon, soon, soon.

She was crying as she took the awl again and pushed it as far as it could go into her right eye, feeling something squish and then pop and the pain hit her so hard she fell over, slashing and stabbing at her own face in a panic because please please please I can’t fuck this up I can’t fuck this up I can’t-

Someone busted down the door. She couldn’t think who it could be, she couldn’t think, she couldn’t do anything. Her entire body was writing in pain, knocking into the cold bathroom tiles. Her eyes squeezed shut, which only held the agony that much closer to her. She was putting a lot of faith in the UK health care system. She tried to flail with her hands but they were already dripping with blood and it was flying everywhere. This hurt, hurt more than getting a bullet dug out of her leg, worse than getting a bone removed, worse than getting shot by a far margin. She screamed again, maybe she had never stopped, she wasn’t sure.

Somebody was exclaiming, somebody was close to her face asking her a lot of things that she could only scream to, because that must be the answer, right? Somebody was touching her leg, grabbing her to pick her up and she flailed and screamed with renewed gusto because the logical part of her brain had all but ruptured and the pain flashing in front of her eyes was debilitating and sending hot and cold flashes through her nerves like someone was dragging a knife down the length of her, skinning her starting with the face down.

Somebody was maybe saying something that had the word okay and if Melanie was even a little bit less taken by this pain and suffering then she would have laughed, but as it was she could only sob even though it made the pain so much worse.

She was lifted up, she was on a stretcher, she begged for some kind of darkness or release, death, sleep, a coma, she wasn’t picky as long as she couldn’t feel pain in it.

What would she say to Georgie at the hospital?

Too late to think now, she supposed.

Something was put in her arm, long and thin stuck in like an awl and taped in place. The pain was too much for her brain to handle and she could feel it shutting down, almost section by section. She could just barely feel fresh London air by the time she was wheeled out and into something else, she was sure she knew the word for it somewhere but it was a part of her brain that was in a deep painless sleep and she wanted so badly to join it.

I did it. She sluggishly thought. I’m free.

As blood soaked through the gauze over her eyes and she faded from the world, she couldn’t help but smile.

 

Notes:

NOTHING LIKE SOME GOOD OLD FASHIONED EYE TRAUMA :D with some wtgfs mixed in for angst

I love comments! ❤️

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