Let The Kinkiness Begin!

[cuddyclothes]

And we're off! Don't hold back! It's anonymous so let your freak flag fly! Not confident about your creative skills? Practice here!  The fills can be anything you want. Fics, videos, artwork and anything else that strikes your fancy. Prompts do not have to be Bertie and Jeeves only! All of the other characters are fair game (Honoria and Madeline tentacle sex, anybody?). As are characters from other books and stories. This meme might be slow to start, so please spread the word!

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Rules

1. No underage characters

2. No RPF/RPS

3. No bashing other people's kinks.

4. Please use content warnings. Put them at the start of your prompt. I.e. Prompt (Content Warning: Attempted Suicide)
Please warn for:
Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Major Character Death
Rape/Non-Con
Suicide
Attempted Suicide
Incest


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Comments

Seen

[(Anonymous)]

(Content warning: attempted suicide)

***

He was not expecting me to be home.

I had departed a few hours earlier for a short trip to visit family out of town for the weekend. The snow was falling hard and fast and I did not discover that the trains were cancelled until I had arrived at the station. I considered getting a room near the station and taking the first train in the morning. There was a housekeeper coming tomorrow morning so Mr. Wooster would be fine on his own. It was a close thing, but I decided to go back to the flat and sleep in my own bed instead.

The few cars still in the street, mostly just cabs, were fighting their way through the piling snow. It took ages to get back to Berkeley Mansions. As I opened the door, I heard alarming noises: a muffled yell and a crash. Without pausing to take off my snow-bestrewn outerwear, I hastened to the source of the sounds, Mr. Wooster’s bedroom. I rapped on the closed door.

“Sir? Are you all right?”

A soft, strained groan was the only response. Icy fear suffused me. I pushed open the door.

He was lying in a heap on the floor. He was clutching his knee and rocking, clearly in pain. Next to him, a chair from the sitting room was tipped onto its side. My attention was drawn above it, and as soon as I looked upward, my stomach lurched.

A rope hung from the ceiling. The word “noose” popped into my mind, but I could not connect it to reality. It didn’t feel like a real word at all. None of this felt real.

I could not speak, or act, or think. I felt numb. Mr. Wooster’s eyes were squeezed shut and his face contorted in a grimace.

“Sir…” I croaked. “I…”

Time had slowed to a crawl, stalled like the cars in the snowy streets below. As I absorbed the meaning of the tableau, realizations were hitting me, one after another.

- He was hurt.

- He had been standing on the chair.

- The sound of me opening the front door had startled him into falling off the chair.

- The chair had been right below the…the rope.

- He was not expecting anyone until the maid was to come the next morning.

Normally, when I am in an unexpected situation, my instinct is to find something I can control and take action. In this moment, nothing was presenting itself to me. I wanted to go to Mr. Wooster, but it felt like there was an invisible wall between us. It felt like he was on the other side of some quarantine, and if I were to cross over, the contagion might infect me, too.

Every question I wanted to ask was absurd, unanswerable. “What is going on?” “Are you okay?” “What were you thinking?” “How could you do this?”

Picking up the chair would be absurd. Cutting down the rope would be absurd. Leaving the rope to just dangle above our heads would be absurd. There was no right move here.

I surprised myself by striding to him, dropping to my knees, and gathering him into an embrace. He flinched and stiffened at first, resisting, but then suddenly flung his arms around my neck and pressed his face into my shoulder.

I thought, if he was willing to do something so desperate and unthinkable, to throw away everything, then it was nothing for me to dispense with something as comparably insignificant as propriety. I scooped him up carefully into my arms and laid him gently onto his bed. I shucked my thawing jacket and hat onto the floor and laid down next to him, taking him into my arms again.

He seemed to be beyond crying, too stunned for tears. All he could do was cling to me like I was the only solid object left on earth.

"I am so glad you're still here" came out of my mouth. I forgot the proper feudal appellative in my stupefaction.

We remained frozen in place. Sounds from the hallway drifted in, sounds from the street. No one outside this room had any clue, the magnitude of what had so nearly been lost.

"I wish I could say the same," he said flatly.

I held him for an eternity, trying to soothe him as best I could. The story trickled out in small drops, haltingly at first, and then the dam burst and the flood was released.

***

It is a fact of human nature that we only see what we want to see.

But I ask, how could I possibly have known? Who ever would have guessed? A man with nearly every advantage the world has to offer. Money, status, looks, talent, friends. To be sure, his family has its issues, but no life is without some trials. This was a man who constantly had light in his eyes and laughter on his lips. He came across not merely as content, but probably the happiest person I know. Many of his acquaintances thought of him that way, too. He was cheerful, playful, goofy, silly. Certainly not depressed. Certainly not…suicidal.

But I have to admit, the signs were there. For anyone who cared to look closely enough.

- All of Mr. Wooster's friends drank, but Mr. Wooster drank. His nights of excess frequently resulted in injury to person and property, not to mention run-ins with the law. But he kept at it ceaselessly, despite the mounting physical, legal, financial, and social consequences.

- Reckless behavior, even when sober, had gotten him maimed countless times. He sometimes acted as if he cared not a jot for his own safety. Most people in his life, including myself, chalked it up to recklessness and clumsiness, because we have words for those concepts. We do not have words for men who don't care if they hurt themselves because they don't think they are worth being careful of.

- What looked like a large circle of friends from the outside was, upon closer inspection, essentially an illusion. He had plenty of friends from school and from his club, but what kind of “friends” routinely take advantage of one's generous nature with no regard for his safety or happiness? They used him like a tool and discarded him when they were done. It was a similar situation with the endless string of women to whom he found himself engaged, despite there being no genuine connection between them to speak of. This pattern of unstable, one-sided interpersonal relationships had persisted for his entire life.

- Most telling was one thing that I suspected no one knew about besides me. A series of white lines could be seen on the insides of his thighs, ghosts of old scars, visible only from certain angles. I first noticed them on his right leg one day as he climbed into the bath and I didn’t think much of it. If I had, I probably would have assumed it was the product of some drunken escapade or childhood caper. But on another day while I was again attending him in the bath, my observant gaze found their mirror image on his left leg. This time, the suspicion crept into my mind. The lines were too straight and uniform to be accidental.

Yet it seemed ludicrous, absolutely preposterous. Mr. Wooster…cut himself? Happy-go-lucky Bertie, always so jovial and carefree? Who could have known what behind that sweet grin? Who would have guessed it was all a carefully maintained facade hiding inner torment? How could I or anyone comprehend why he would feel the need to inflict pain on himself, to punish himself, to externalize his private agony?

When I first noticed the scars, I thought about saying something, but I didn’t have the faintest idea how I would ever begin such a conversation. There are simply no words. No words that are acceptable to exchange between gentleman and valet, certainly. I had instead cordoned this knowledge off into a corner of my mind that I rarely revisited. I had no context for it, nothing to relate it to. There was nothing to do about it, so I just pretended it wasn’t there.

But I cannot ignore it anymore.

Now that I know, so much about his previous life and character has taken on a sinister hue, been imbued with a darker meaning. This whole time, he hasn’t been irresponsible; he has been self-destructive. He hasn’t been roped into a series of comical misunderstandings; he has been habitually mistreated. He hasn’t been irked by imperious relatives; he has been made to feel disposable.

After all, his friends use him and all his family members are either abusive, controlling, neglectful, or long dead. Why not destroy himself? Who does he know that is really going to care?

I care, of course. I care a great deal, but I do not show it. He has no real reason to believe that I think about him beyond the tasks I am obligated to do for him and the money he pays me. It's certainly not that I don't feel it, because I feel it so fervently that it threatens to overwhelm me. But there is no way to channel it that is proper. Showing him any affection would be indecorous. I have never let him know that I am impressed with him or proud of him. For all he knows, I agree with everyone else that he is nothing more than a mentally negligent wastrel. Of course, I am courteous and kind to him. But from his point of view, that's just duty, the service that any valet is contracted to do. When I go above and beyond, he interprets that as me living up to my own personal code of excellence, not something done specially for him. Our class distinction precludes most of what I could do to show him that I care, and our genders preclude the rest.

I am the person he is closest to, and yet, he hardly knows anything about me, because I made sure he didn’t know. And he doesn’t know how I feel about him, because I made sure he never saw.

He knew that what he was about to do would be a horrible thing to put the poor housekeeper through, but putting me through it instead was absolutely not an option. He knew he would not get a better chance than this to take this desperate action. And he sincerely felt he could not go on any longer.

As he explained his perspective, I began to understand his hopeless position. What does he really have to live for? What is his purpose? This life of transient relationships, pointless self-indulgence, endless pleasure-seeking that only leaves him empty. Nothing to anchor or sustain him.

But then again, what does any of us have to life for? We are all muddling through, trying to make the best of ourselves, trying to help others, or at least please them. Trying to find kindred spirits, trying to be understood.

I have as much to live for as he does. I have him. And I need to let him know that he has me.

***

Everything he was trying to escape…the grief he lives with, for his past, for his sham of a life…the persistent misery that he could hide from everyone but himself… As I sat and absorbed it all, I thought about how close I had come to never knowing any of it.

“I have no words to express how deeply sorry I am that I have not been there for you, sir.”

“Nonsense. You saved my life, my dear man.”

“But still, I should have—”

“You saved me,” he said firmly. “A million times, even before tonight.”

As dawn broke, I helped him change out of his clothes. I examined the bruised and swollen knee. After keeping such close contact during the course of a raw, emotional night, the physical barriers between us were down. I felt compelled to place a reassuring kiss on his knee. He sighed shakily and murmured his thanks. I took a chance and kissed the scars on his thigh, then kissed his cheek, before helping him finish changing. Under normal circumstances, taking such liberties would be unimaginable. But now that the truly unthinkable had been so narrowly avoided, I could tell that my reckoning of what was or wasn’t acceptable was going to be substantially transformed.

We laid there, entangled in one another, until he fell asleep.

I remained awake and watched him sleep. He looked so peaceful. As always, it was impossible to detect the storm brewing within. But at least now I know it is there. And that makes all the difference.

Now, things are going to change. As soon as he wakes up, I’m going to take his hands in mine and tell him what he means to me. I’m going to say everything I have been holding back, just in case I never get another chance.

His ordeal is far from over. He feels utterly defeated; he said that, after having failed at life, he has now failed at dying. The road ahead will not be easy. It might get even worse before it gets better. But it will be worth it. I will do everything in my power to make him okay.

I have kept him at a distance. I have let fear of impropriety stop me from doing what I should and, if it weren't for a fortunate accident, it would have cost me his life. But no longer.

The man has never been seen for who he really is. Most people look at him and see a means for getting what they want. But not me. I’m going to ask him to show me his real self. If he cannot just yet, that’s okay. Eventually I’ll prove that he is safe with me.

He will know that, no matter what happens, I’ll be there. Even if nothing else makes sense in the world, I’ll be enough. I cannot live his life for him. I cannot make him happy. But I can make sure he knows that, if he has me, he has everything he needs.

Re: Seen

[(Anonymous)]

This was exactly what I needed and I thank you ever so much for writing it.
Especially considering everything that happened around this prompt.
Really, thank you ! <3

Re: Seen

[(Anonymous)]

I'm so glad to hear it! <3

Re: Seen

[(Anonymous)]

A very serious topic but well-handled and well-written. It felt credible and touched me deeply.

Re: Seen

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks so much, I really appreciate you letting me know!