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muzzlemouths · 1 year

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Prompt: Hypothermic

Moon centric // Wordcount: 2407

You can recall the exact decisions that brought you to this point.

It started with a favor. Your coworker had a family emergency and needed to be out of there ASAP, but with an hour left to their shift, and no reason to expect that the company would honor the need behind their sudden departure, they were left with no other choice but to drop the remaining duties onto someone else.

You had generously offered to take on said responsibilities - after all, you had only just clocked out, and the required tasks could be done in a cinch. Off the clock, of course, so management wasn’t on your ass about overtime.

That was mistake number one.

Your second mistake came in the form of a locked door and pure, unadulterated stupidity.

The assignment had been simple; locate the walk-in freezer, find a spare bag of ice, and bring it to the food court. Easy. It was your last task of the night and there was absolutely, positively, no way you could fuck it up.

That brings you back to the here and now, where you stand blank-faced behind a solid, steel door, locked up tight from the outside, with no way out in sight.

You hadn’t bothered to prop the door open. In your defense, you didn’t think that was ever something you would need to even consider. Why bother installing a door - a door to a room that had the potential to make fucking employee-popsicles - that for some forsaken reason locked from the outside?

But this was Fazco. you were talking about. The number of poor design choices ranging from infrastructure to animatronic virus protection was so grand it exceeded the fingers on both hands. Of course they would design a freezer that turned into a deathtrap. Why make things easy for you? When have they ever!

Rant aside, you were in some serious trouble.

Your fists, pink and tender, ached with the force at which you beat them against the door and shook at the handle, your fingers having already gone numb, and trembling for another reason entirely.

Did you know most industrial freezers are kept at 0 Fahrenheit? That’s -17 Celsius. Thirty-two degrees under what is required to make snow.

You don’t have a jacket. Hell, you don’t even have long sleeves. You’re wearing the company uniform - a crew neck, polyester - and some old jeans. The forecast called for a steady breeze, not the fucking arctic plains.

Panicking won’t do you any good. You tell yourself this, mumbling it between chattering teeth, like a mantra, long after you’ve already given panic a fair shot. The panic came first from the very moment you realized you were trapped, only increasing when a failed attempt to call for help revealed that service wasn’t available in the deep freeze. Now it was time to be cool headed (pun intended), or you faced a near zero chance of escaping with your life.

Funny. You had always assumed, in the back of your mind, that your final breaths would be taken by this stupid company. But certainly not like this. Not by becoming freezer food.

No, think! You can’t afford to dawdle, not now, when the clock is already tick-tick-ticking away. You pace in circles, taking up the entirety of the 6'x 6' space, until remembering that movement increased blood-flow to your extremities and that warmth wasn’t coming back. So you sit, instead, regardless of how cold the floor is against your ass, and you put all of your remaining energy (what’s left of it, dwindling by the minute) into figuring out a proper plan.

You don’t have any medical knowledge beyond the first-aid training the pizzeria requires upon hiring, but you do have a handful of useless history knowledge - useless until today, that is. You pour over any detail from the books that might save you here and then recall a horrifying piece of trivia from your brief obsession with the Titanic; survivors had been cast into water that was 28 degrees, with the longest average of survival being forty-five minutes, and the shortest being only fifteen.

You sat in air twenty-eight degrees cooler. The clock in your phone tells you that five minutes have already passed. There is no life boat coming to your rescue.

Okay, so that information doesn’t exactly help your situation. If anything, it only rouses your panic into its second stage, and it takes everything to keep yourself from adding hyperventilation to your list of worries.

Speaking of symptoms, you were feeling your fair share of those already.

Shivering, obviously, pale fingers and exhaustion to name a few more, shallow breath, to boot, but that may be the panic. Though you try and try again to press your fingers to your wrist you come back short every time, your heart is screaming but your pulse is practically nonexistent, a bad sign to say the least.

You haven’t felt the urge to rip your clothes off, yet. You have that going for you if nothing else.

Another minute passes. Six in total. You find yourself leaning against the icy door despite the chill it brings to your already cold skin, if only from a lack of energy to keep yourself upright any longer. The breath forming in front of you feels like the warmest part of yourself right now, and slowly, doubtlessly, you feel yourself waning. Growing slow. Growing stiff.

You again try your phone, its 26% battery staring back at you uselessly. The call doesn’t go through, and neither do the texts. The back of your hand slams against metal in a another futile attempt to gain the attention of someone, anyone, who might be passing by. Again, and again, and again. Nothing. Your knuckles come back bloody and raw.

Something coils in your chest - terror and nausea all at once - it’s let out as a scream that echoes against the walls of this closed-in room and does not escape beyond it. You clocked out half an hour ago, the pizzeria having already closed before then. As far as your fellow coworkers are concerned you had already long since headed home. There stood no reason to check the kitchens or question your absence at all.

You are going to die here.

The thought doesn’t alarm you as much as it should. That realization in itself, however, does send some fickle wave of concern through your nerves, though there’s little energy remaining to do anything about it. Eight minutes have now passed since the door locked behind you. Thoughts come slow if at all, and your cries for help - slurring, now, you laxly notice - eventually fall silent.

Your hands run once over the goosebumps in a last ditch attempt to find some heat and you now realize, with a faint and humorless laugh, that even your shivering has come to a stop. A bad sign. The worst yet. Your world begins to fade one shadowy star before your eyes at a time.

Then comes the tapping. Nails on metal. Deliriously, you stare down at your own hands to see if you’re the one doing it, only to find them still wound tight around your elbows. The curious sound repeats, and then the door–

It opens.

Your body, still tucked in on itself, drifts forward all together with the weight of the metal as it’s drawn wide. And who enters next and stares down at you other than the man of the hour himself. Moon fucking drop. You’ve never been happier to see him.

At the same time, you think you’d rather take freezing to death.

“Breaks aren’t extended by hiding in freezers,” he says with a sneer, but it’s cut short, the smile wiped right off his stupid little face, and for a moment you swear you see his eyes change. Maybe it’s the delirium, but you see blue. For the very first time you see blue. And then he blinks, and the red returns, and he’s bending at the waist and shoving a cold hand against your forehead. “Bad.” Is all he says, whispered still. You don’t try to stop your laughter.

“Y-Yeah,” a cough escapes you, dry and heaving, “‘s real bad. C’n you help meyup?” You can’t believe the jumbled words even as they escape your dry, paling lips. Never before have you asked him for help, and hopefully, the occasion would be a first and a last. You expect nothing but mockery from him at the show of vulnerability.

Yet he bends ever further, bypassing your weakly extended hand all together in favor of gathering you into his arms. It’s awkward, at first, a hasty grab under your armpits that would have you squirming were it not for the cold stiffness in your limbs, and you hate to admit it, but the way he cradles you after - one hand tucked under your backside and the other pressed flat to your shoulders - it makes you relent. Your head falls against his shoulder with an effortless thud, and your arms wrap around him, feeling secure as they do so, the only thing on your mind being how warm he feels in that moment.

Before your eyes can fall shut completely you see him heading for the front entrance, and the confusion that realization carries with it stirs you from the seven layers of brain fog only enough to question him, “Wh’r we going?”

“Management,” the word is hissed, said flat, “hospital.”

“Wh’t?” That, if nothing else, brings you back to full attention. As much of it as the fog can spare, anyway. “Put me d’wn, ‘m fine,” you wade through layers of breaching unconsciousness to get the words out, and clearly, he doesn’t buy it, not even slowing to them, “Moon, don’t,” you try more insistently, “Please, I c’nt afford it. ‘ll be f-fine.”

This time, he slows to a stop, staring down at you with uncertainty. “Bad.” He repeats again, “Too cold.” The hand at your back raises to press sweetly against your forehead once more, “Hypothermic.”

His eyes scan the room, flickering back and forth before settling on a stream of light in the distance, and you watch him consider.

“No,” you coerce your head into shaking, the weight of it feeling like a slab of concrete on your neck, “n’t Sun either, he’ll j’st freak out.” Sluggishly, your head lifts to a point where you can kind of see his face, “I just need’a blanket, tha’s all.” Then, with a smile (albeit forced, and obvious about it), you add some cheek, “you’re good a’ blanket stuff, right, starboy?”

The way he stiffens around you signals your success. If nothing else, taking advantage of his attitude and making it conductive to your own needs remains one of your finest skills, and a habit you would milk until it inevitably came back to bite - or perhaps in Moon’s case - kill you. Today, however, he appears willing to cave, acting as if he’s truly worried about you. And maybe he is. But that was a question to pick apart another day.

For now, he seems fit to listen to your pleas, and you’re swept off to the daycare, instead.

It’s engulfed in darkness upon entering, as to be expected. Moon’s eyes cast an eerie red glow as he carries you further into the room. Bracing you firmly against him, he crouches by a chest of blankets and begins to pull one out, only to abandon the effort and instead take hold of the trunk’s side handle, dragging the heavy thing all the way to a corner fitted with bean bags and a crate of stuffed animals.

It’s here where he settles with you still in his arms, falling into a particularly large bean bag with a loud and tired sigh, and soon after reaching in for the chest again and drawing the cover away. While one hand stays snug around your waist, the other brings a patchwork blanket over your body, tucking it against your neck and shoulders, then he dives back in for a second blanket, and then a third, thoroughly nesting you beneath each one.

There’s little else for him to do here. He isn’t a doctor, he has no tools, no methods of getting heat into your body at a speed that’s more appropriate, so he goes about it the old fashioned way.

His other arm dips beneath the covers and together, both hands sooth over your exposed skin, drawing natural heat to the surface with careful, measured touches that feel like hellfire on your skin, but only briefly.

At one point he tugs at the hem of your shirt, and you smile into his chest, still somewhat loopy, “You aren’t gett’ng it off,” you tell him, all but mumbling, “I d’nt care how much it might help.”

“Cheeky,” comes his swift reply, “Just checking.”

“F’r what?”

“That they aren’t wet,” he says, “I don’t know how long you were trapped.”

“Mm,” your eyes fall shut again, “too long,” you say, “but ‘s fine now.”

He makes a noise in the back of his throat, muttering something that you don’t quite catch. Before you can bring it up, however, his hands distracted you, moving down your spine in soothing circles and then dipping kindly beneath your shirt, his palm flattening against the bare small of your back. “You should be more careful,” he says.

Your head lolls to the side, making an effort to look up at him once more, and you smile with a tease, “What, were you worried ab’t me?”

“Yes.”

Oh. The sass dies on your tongue.

When you smile again, this time, it’s something genuine, “Good thing you came to my rescue, then.” your eyes flutter closed, the weight of them too much to bear, “m g’nna take a little nap, okay?”

In the morning you’ll realize. Your words will come back to haunt you, and your willingness to let your guard down with him won’t go unnoticed. But tonight, you are content to stay just like this. Moon tucks his chin over your head and holds you in a way that makes you feel safe, nestled between three layers of blanket and a chest that plays you lullabies.

“You’re drinking some tea when you wake up,” he chides - but it’s soft, a whisper against your ear, followed by an exhale, you feel him smile against your head. “Nighty night,” he lulls.

Your heart beats warmly against his chest.

#drabbles #moondrop #fnaf moon #moon x reader #TWO DRABBLES POSTED IN ONE DAY LET'S GOOOOOOOOO #had an interesting time with this one #semi based off of a true experience #though mine was in a 34f room and not a goddamn thermal freezer thankfully #rip y/n you keep coming THIS close to death buddy

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uhyeahnoabsolutelynot · 1 year

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list of what i personally consider to be joel’s biggest “i forgot that i keep insisting i’m not your dad” moments:

-“well now i have to see it” / “i don’t want you to” just the tone in which he says this and the thing of being like i’m not going to stop this from happening but i’m going to make my disapproval known, very dad

-his face softening and posture opening up a little in ep1 when she’s like “but you know where to go? so we’re gonna be okay” because even though he’s pissed to be babysitting and thinks she’s more trouble than she’s worth, he is not immune to scared little kid

-also ep1, all of his annoyed eyerolling at ellie instantly respecting/listening to tess and not him

-the Single Silent Nod of Capitulation™️

-becoming increasingly able to sense when ellie is about to ask for a gun from a mile away

-becoming increasingly able to sense when ellie is about to ask him to explain something he doesn’t know jackshit about

-saying under his breath “just wait goddamn it” while jogging after her

-loud coffee slurp in response to being told it’s gross

-also, assuming a 14 y/o who grew up in military school would like coffee

-dad infodumping infused with mild griping (i.e. pre-pandemic air travel, gasoline, how fedra cleared the highways)

-“lookit”

-oH i ThouGht yOu weNt tO ScHooL

-“you’re gonna break your neck”/“slow down”/“what did i just say”

-impatiently telling someone to straighten up is very dad

-the white lie about everyone loving contractors and contractors being cool obv

-doing the “is there anything bad in here” / “just you” bit not once but twice. he really does cycle through the same like 6 weak-ass jokes

-asking someone else to navigate while driving and then stressing them out for not navigating well enough for his liking

-being able to guess her favorite astronaut, i am weeping

-laying down 3 ground rules and then pretty much immediately and continually letting ellie get away with breaking 2 out of 3

-starting to look over at her in surprise when she says “i don’t want to talk about it” because it’s the first time that’s happened and he can tell he’s touched on something that really bothers her, and you see him having to wrestle with the dad impulse to be concerned

-when ellie tries to get him not to go after the sniper; impatiently being like ugh come on that guy is not gonna shoot me he literally sucks (pedro’s read of this line always makes me laugh)

-and of course also the follow-up, when he sees he’s going to have to do better than that to convince her that everything will be fine and his tone softens and he asks her to trust him. the “no questions, just do it” to “do you trust me” pipeline bro, fuucckkk

-the wyoming scenes when they’re nearing jackson and joel’s losing his cool a little and acting kinda grumpy and agitated really remind me of when you have to run errands with your parent while they’re in a bad mood

#tlou #the last of us #not to admit to too much here but ive been gradually working on this list for like 3 weeks now #im sure i had other interests at one point #i can vaguely remember that time #maybe someday ill have other interests again! won’t that be a relief for my family and friends #my stuff

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