Friends With Time ⌛ (Tyler Galpin x Reader)

Day 80

Day 80:

Your head rests in his hand as your breath picks up speed, gasping in your chest. You try to pull yourself away. Your head feels stuffed with bricks. Every move your body makes scorches your side like fire.

"Shh," you hear him whisper to you, and he helps pull you upright, guiding your heavy head up to the wall. "There you go, Warden."

Your eyes dart around the room. The bathroom area is curtained off, and then there's the rest of the cage, and the door must be open.

He winces when he sees where you're looking. "You're in my cage," he tells you, gesturing to the curtain around his bathroom area. "I carried you here so we could get you cleaned up."

You feel your heart beating frantically in your chest. He has you here. You can't move.

When you speak, your voice is hardly more than a whisper. "What are you going to do to me?"

The monster turns his head.

"Where's my wetsuit?" You rasp out, fumbling for it, moving your hands to cover your arms. You press back into the wall, shaking. It hadn't hit you until now. You're at the monster's mercy. He could kill you. He has you, wounded, in his cage.

The monster frowns, tilting his head towards you. "What?"

His eyes trail up your body, running up to the gauze swathed around your middle to the curve of your neck, and your face flushes with heat, a little gasp escaping your lips. You pull your hair over your shoulder, moving it to hide your scar.

He coughs, then pulls off his coat, so quickly he almost drops it when he offers it to you. "No, it makes sense for you to be afraid of me. You're just human, aren't you? And you can't fight me like this, not when you're so fragile."

The world seems blue and shaky around you now, and you can barely breath, shaking so hard against the wall that you can feel the way it presses into your back. You can't. You can't fight him, not when you can't move or stand without help.

He strips off his jacket, and helps you into it, his touch deceptively soft, warm, so gentle that it makes you melt. "I had to cut off the wetsuit so I could see the extent of the damage," he explains, pointing to the myriad of cuts and bruises all over your arms and legs, mostly covered by smaller bandages. "I hope that's okay."

Everything inside of you seems made of a thousand brass tones, quivering and shivering in the light. You can't stop shaking.

"I know it's not much of a help, but here's my coat. It'll keep you covered if you're self-conscious. That's something you should have control over," he continues, eying you, but you barely hear the words.

"Are you going to hurt me?" The words come shooting out of you, even as he zippers the familiar jacket up to your collarbone. "Are you... are you going to..."

He sighs, glancing down at the floor. "Warden."

The words keep spilling out of you, the wave of fear building up in your chest, until you can't stop them. "They won't let you out, you know, no matter what you do to me, no matter how awful it is. Even if you pull out my stitches and let me bleed out. They won't care, they won't do anything, they'll just let me die."

Your last sentence is more of a choked sob. "Please don't let me die."

He moves over to you, and the smell of coffee and fresh sheets dousing you in a lull of quiet and calm. You resist the urge to lean into it, to lean into him. His scent reminds you of the jacket that comforted you when you were sick, but a thousand times more powerful, coating you in waves.