A Slenderella Story (Slenderman x reader)

Chapter 4

"Unngh..." You groaned, slowly regaining consciousness. Your head hurt worse than the morning after you decided to try vodka for the first time, and now your lips and tongue were swollen to boot. You could feel your arms and legs crying out in protest to every little shift you made, and your ribs felt like they were being compressed by a hot sheet of metal. Your ribs...you could feel them! And your limbs! That meant you were still alive, whatever small mercy that was. Your hands shot to your face, pinching and prodding to ensure yourself that you were not dead and that this wasn't a dream. I must look like hell spat me back out, you thought as your fingers found the many scrapes and bruises that were now caked over with dried blood. Satisfied that your face had suffered no extra injury, your hands traveled towards your chest where you had fully expected a bleeding, gaping hole to be from the tentacle monster. Great, now I sound like I'm in some cheap hentai movie, you groaned, trying and failing to bring humor to the sordid situation. What you found, however, was that someone had carefully set and bandaged your broken ribs while you slumbered and your chest had been covered by a clean white gauze wound tightly several times.

You began to question whether the events of last night had really happened; after all, it seemed improbable that you had really stumbled across not one, but two supernatural beings in the same night and had almost been murdered twice. It seemed far more likely that all of it was your subconscious' way of coping with the trauma from the fire, and you were now being cared for in a hospital somewhere, safe from your night terrors. Heaving a sigh of relief that was somewhat constrained because of the bandages around your chest, you licked your parched lips and opened your eyes – to find not a starched white ceiling with fluorescent lights and a life signs monitor as you had begun to expect, but the dark red velvet canopy of a mahogany four poster bed large enough to be a small swimming pool.

This was definitely not a hospital, which meant that one: you really had encountered those creatures out in the woods and two: you hadn't actually died. Yet. You didn't want to bank on that last one for fear that speaking it would trigger the event. You would have knocked on the wood of the bed if there had been any in reach of your bandaged arms and hands. Instead, you lifted your arms to inspect the cloth that wrapped both to the elbow. Whoever had patched you up had done so meticulously and carefully, allowing no exposed skin to show and leaving several layers on each arm. The gauze was wrapped so tight that your arms were beginning to protest – you knew enough about medicine to understand that pressure was necessary to abate blood loss, but now your arms felt like miniature needles were digging into them.

Speaking of needles, your head wasn't faring too well either. You could still hear phantoms of the static that had filled your ears before you blacked out, and the resulting sensation felt like your entire head had been stuffed with cotton balls that were now threatening to explode from your ear canals. It was a sensation that both eased some of the pain into a numbness and made you fearful of any permanent damage that you might have incurred – what if this was a sign of being concussed? You didn't know the symptoms, and thus the sensation panicked you even more. Just to make sure, you lifted your bandaged hands to run them over your scalp to check for bleeding. You found no signs of head trauma, though you did learn that your hair was equally as much of a mess as the rest of your body, having been spared none of the events last night. From what you could feel, your (H/C) hair was now infested with twigs, leaves, dirt, vomit, and possibly singed around the edges. You'd probably have to cut off quite a bit of it before it would be salvageable.

You scoffed at your shallow behavior. Wounded and hardly able to move in a stranger's house, and you were concerned with how to manage your hair? It was amazing what the brain would fixate on during times of crisis. You dropped your hands to your sides and squirmed around to free up some of the tightly wrapped sheets on the bed. Whoever had found you had taken every expense to make sure you were comfortable and safe, which meant that you couldn't be in any immediate danger from your possible savior. Unless this was all part of some convoluted plan to lull people into a false sense of security...but that only happened in plays you performed, and probably couldn't happen in real life...right? Your recent encounter with death made you unsure of that fact. As you lay contemplating, you heard a key turn in the lock of the door opposite the bed. You closed your eyes and willed yourself to relax, feigning sleep to be able to catch a glimpse of your rescuer/kidnapper.