Dawn Chorus (Proxies x Reader)

Rabbit

We are not friends. We are not roommates. I remind myself this as Masky works a brush through my damp, knotted hair. Soft tugs unwind tangles. He is methodical and thorough working around my head and through the layers. Toby is unusually quiet back in the kitchen. No humming, no bone cracking, just the occasional clicks of burners being turned on or the clacks of a knife hitting the cutting board. My arm is held up against my torso by a sling. It aches dully, not as bad as yesterday or the day before, not as bad as my ankle which refuses to heal after all I've put it through. Masky gently turns me, using only the very tips of his fingers and not touching my injured arm to reorient my body to work on the side of my head. My arm only seems to hurt more when I look at him. The memory of the break echoing through the bone as I catch a glimpse of his blank expression.

"I didn't enjoy breaking your arm," he had told me only a few hours after doing so. "You should be happy about that."

I wasn't and still am not happy. It had been a quick break, a clean one. That doesn't stop it from hurting, from healing at a crawl. Masky tests it every few hours. Hoodie checks it every day to make sure Masky hasn't made it worse. He always grabs my arm too hard, for too long, but he is the only one with the vaguest idea of what he is doing. That's what the other two say, insisted when, in my panic moments after the break, I held on to my temper and fear until Hoodie came in and I started kicking, screaming, scratching, and biting to keep them away. It took both Masky and Toby to hold me still for that. Pride still flairs in my chest, recalling how it took both of the men to properly still my thrashing body. My ankles ended up zip tied together for that. The white plastic bites into my ankle every time the swelling flares up, falls chaffingly loose when the swelling goes down. A raw, red ring sits over the blues and purples of that ankle.

Pain spikes through my arm. I jerk my attention back to Masky. His gloved fingers lightly prod around the most swollen regions on the limb. He makes a hmm sound when he lifts it from the sling. I grind my teeth until my jaw feels like it is going to crack to keep from reacting. He gently rolls and twists my arm, slow movements to get a view of all sides. His gloves are a little damp from fixing my wet hair. They can't be real leather if they haven't shrunk from all the moisture, water and blood. He refused to brush my hair without them on. My arm is placed back into the sling. He doesn't tell me how it is healing or what he is thinking. To me it just hurts, always hurts at least a little.

I'm complacent. I'm numb. Dipping in and out of extremer anger into a haze. Even in the basement, even lashing out when they touched me, I never spent my time planning an escape. I want to go back to being that kid that would hide in my mom-mom's bathroom, hoping if I pushed the right pattern in the designs on the wall, a secret passage would open and I'd be free, except making real plans instead of stupid dreams. Even when Hoodie let me out, I gave up on escape before I started. That knowledge gnaws at my stomach when I have the mental capacity to think of it. I've settled into a state of dull helplessness. I wonder if it is the helplessness I learned growing up or a dissociative state I fell into once Camilla was safe and my job felt done. Half the time, I don't even feel like I can move my body.

I shake the thoughts out. My hair is still damp enough that little droplets scatter from the sudden movement. I'm having a bad day, getting on myself when I don't need to be. I have been trying. I have been surviving. My teeth work on pealing the loose bits of skin off my chapped lips. Masky grabs the top of my head with his hand, gently stopping my shaking.

"Don't re-tangle your hair," he snaps.

Slowly he lets go off my head. Gently, he pushes the loose strands off my face. I think it calms him to play mom to the people in the cabin, or maybe I just think of moms as really angry people and my mind slots Masky into that role. He is plenty angry. I watch him from the corner of my eye, pain spiking through my arm again. I have to think about it when I look at him, thinking about it lets the pain dwell front and center in my thoughts. He leans back into the sofa, eyes scrunching closed.