Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You threw your eyes open when you felt a presence close to you. Sitting up in your bed, you hastily looked around the room to find the source, noticing a silhouette standing at the end of your bed. With only the moon as your only light source, you couldn’t make out the features of its face, nor was it possible to identify their gender. Shocked to your bones and wondering just how this person has made its way into your apartment since you live on the 6th floor, you were unable to move a single inch of your body. Your invader, it was impossible that he didn’t notice that you were awake by now because of your fast and ragged breathing, did not show any intention of moving either. Which made you even more scared, since it was creeping you out that they were just staring at you, plus, how long was he already standing there before you woke up? Your eyes scanned frantically the room for an exit or at least a weapon to defend yourself. Calculating in your head if you would be able to get to the door before they could grab you so that you could have at least some wood separating and protecting you from them, you decided to just go for it. Since this person either was going to kill you or who knows what was going to do to you, what did you have to lose?

You quickly jumped up from your stiff position on your bed, hoping you would surprise them with your action. While keeping your eyed locked on the door and pushing yourself to go as fast as possible, you wondered just why those 5 metres to the door seemed to take that long. Frantically you tugged on the door knob, pushing it up a few centimetres before your wrist was grabbed and the door pulled shut right before your face. Tears started welling in your eyes, your hope of escaping faltering. However, if you were already going to die you’d at least go to heaven with pride. Kicking your foot back, you felt it colliding with something hard, followed with a grunt right above your head and the grip on your wrist becoming a little weaker. Not wasting any time you pulled your hand free and grabbed the first thing you could find, throwing a vase in the direction of your invader. They reacted quickly and ducked just in time to let it fly above their head, letting the glass shatter on the wall and the shards being spread on the ground. Not being taken aback one bit by their quick reaction you reached back to grab the next object you could find, just to feel your breath being taken away when a body collided into yours, throwing you back on your bed. Not a single second later said body sat itself on top of your surprised form, held your wrists together and pushed above your head on the pillow. All kicking and flaring didn’t help weakening the grip on your wrists at all, plus your legs were unable to move because of your attacker sitting on them. Soon your body grew tired because of your struggling and your body stilled underneath theirs. Trying to catch your breath you looked up at the invader, whose face was just a few inches away from yours, taking your breath away again.

Their face was now illuminated by the moonlight and you could make out a lot more about their appearance. The first thing you noticed was that they were unmistakingly male, even though you already had a kind of feeling, judging by his body height and the feeling of his hands. His red eyes, staring without blinking once into your [e/c] ones, seemed to look into the depths of your soul. Black hair, falling onto his shoulders and enframing his quite handsome face which you couldn’t deny, even in this situation. However, what made you want to close your eyes and wish even more that all of this had to be a dream were two small horns situated on the top of his head. No wonder you didn’t notice those before, since they were even blacker than his hair. When your eyes wandered to his lips, they turned into a grin that sent shivers down your spine.

“[Name]”

Chapter Text

You awoke with a scream leaving your throat sore. Quickly sitting up in your bed and scanning the room for any possible threats and that creature. A deep sigh left your lips as you noticed you were alone. Heavily breathing you clutched at your T-shirt, feeling the damp fabric because of your sweat and your rapidly beating heart. “It was just a dream, just a dream.”, you whispered to yourself, trying to calm down. Looking at the clock at your nightstand it said 4 a.m, meaning you still had more than two hours until you needed to get ready for work. You let yourself fall back into the mattress and looked up at the ceiling, stretching your hands above your head and heard a satisfying crack when your shoulder popped back into place. That’s when you noticed faint marks on your wrists, which started to turn a little blue. All colour drained from your face as you inspected the marks more closely, becoming more and more hysteric by the minute. Looking around in your room, you now also discovered the shards on the floor, which you somehow didn’t notice before. Breathing became harder again as you felt a panic attack beginning to bubble under your skin. Forcing your eyes away from the floor and your wrists, you pulled the window open, which creaked loudly in protest to your rough action. The fresh air flowing into your room felt like heaven as you soaked up as much of it as your lungs could handle.

After a few minutes you managed to calm yourself down enough to leave your bedroom and take a shower, thinking that the cold water will hopefully sooth the burning skin on your wrists. But before that, you made sure to check every corner in your apartment to confirm you are indeed alone and the man from your dream - or reality - your thoughts were a mess concerning that, was not hiding somewhere, just waiting for the right moment to jump at you. Luckily, your apartment was very small, only 4 rooms in total, and you were finished checking all of it sooner than you expected.

A little bit calmer now that you feel safe, at least for the moment, you went into the bathroom and turned on the water, still feeling a bit reluctant to take of your clothes and be even more vulnerable. You let the chilly water surround your body and carefully inspected your wrists again. Blueish hand marks were now evident and stood out easily because of your pale skin. Even though it was summer and everyone was determined to lay in the sun as often as possible, you seemed to be the only person to be the exact opposite. But what your few friends didn’t know was that you had a reason for always wearing long sleeves, not wanting to go to anywhere where you would have to take of your clothes and not wanting to expose your skin to the sun. Scars. They were on your arms and your back the most visible, and everyone knows where you would have gotten them just by looking at them. Thankfully, you learned how to cope with your feelings, but when you were a teenager it wasn’t that easy. Having your mother die when you were 4 years old, an abusive father and being bullied at school didn’t do your psyche or body any good, but now that you are 22 years old and far away from your father you are proud of yourself to make it that far. Even though living alone definitely wasn’t easy since you had to pay definitely too much for anything, you prefer living like you do now.

Feeling your skin become colder every minute that passed, you turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. Drying your skin with a towel, the area around your wrists treating carefully, you looked at yourself in the mirror. After making sure that you don’t have any other injuries on your body you took on fresh clothes and went into the kitchen to drink some hot chocolate. You never were the type of person wo liked to drink coffee or tea, all you needed was hot chocolate. With the help of your favourite sweet drink you made your way back to your room to clean up the mess you created that night. Carefully, you picked up the bigger shards and threw them away, the smaller ones were dealt with vacuuming. After cleaning up the last shards you seemed to sigh for the hundredth time since you woke up und checked the time again. You still had about one hour until work, so you decided to try and research about what happened that night on the Internet. Maybe something like that happened to others too? Determined to find out, you turned on your laptop and thought about what you should even search for. “Strange man with horns suddenly turns up at night”? You tried it with a little bit more professional words: [Insert whatever you would type in Google because I have no idea] The first website that popped up already sounded promising in finding out more information about that incident. After visiting about ten other pages and after half an hour in total you sat back and rubbed your suddenly very tired eyes. All websites you visited agreed on one thing: that you were visited by a demon. But why exactly he was visiting you was not clear since there were so many possibilities. Being cursed, sold your soul, purposely summoning a demon, … None of these sounded like they could be the reason why he showed up. What made you worried though was the fact that he knew your name and was not hesitating to hurt you. You could just hope that this was a onetime appearance of him and that you were safe.

Realising that you should get going you turned off your laptop and made your way to the front door. You took on your shoes, you didn’t like having them on inside since they made the floor dirty and were uncomfortable if you wore them too long, locked the door on your way out and waited for the elevator. Inside you nodded kindly to the old lady entering it too. Having Smalltalk with her belonged to your daily occurrences. The same applied to petting the dog that always wandered around aimlessly on the first floor. You knew that the dog indeed had an owner that took good care of him, but he just liked to wander around outside of his owner’s room.

You worked at a small café just around the corner which was very convenient for you since you didn’t have a driving licence. Once you opened the door to the café and stepped inside you were greeted with the wonderful smell of coffee and you instantly felt the stress of the previous night fall from your shoulders. Even though you disliked drinking coffee, the smell was marvellous.

“Good morning”, you greeted the other employees, a small, but genuine smile showing on your lips. They greeted you back and went on with their work. Then you heard a muffled “[Name], you’re early! Didn’t you sleep well?” from the door to the staff room. A tousled head full of red locks was the first thing popping out it, a face splitting with its smile following. Jake, 30 years old, but acting like he just got 21 was your boss and the café's pride and joy. The both of you were very good friends, nothing like an employee- boss relationship.

“I had a strange dream and couldn’t go back to sleep that’s all. Aren’t you always scolding me because I’m usually too late?”, I replied, laughing because his hair looks even worse than it usually does. “I’m never scolding you, I’m just saying that I’ll fire you if it happens again”, he said, winking at me. You rolled your eyes and were to retort a sassy response when one of the other workers asked Jake to help them with something related to today’s special offer. “I’ll catch you later, there will be a lot of costumers today, so try to stay positive”, he chirped and hurried to help. You watched him leave and made your way to the staff room to take on your uniform and were ready just in time the café opened.