Chapter Text
You don’t know why you had bothered really. Maybe because you were pretty sure you couldn’t take an incubus home to your Mom for family dinners. Maybe you thought you should try to do what society wanted you to do, get dressed up and find a romantic partner to spend the rest of your life with. Hell, maybe you were just bored. When a nice sounding guy had sent you a message on a dating profile you had forgotten to take down, you decided to take a chance. You had bought a new outfit even, spent over an hour getting ready. You had actually been pretty excited. Too bad the guy had turned out to be a complete asshole.
You should have just walked out after you called him out for being rude to the waiter and he had just laughed it off. You should have left the instant he commented on your choice of entree, saying that he didn’t usually date girls “that enjoyed eating so much.” You had only picked at your food after that, and there had been nothing to distract you from the bullshit coming out of his mouth. You couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise if you had wanted to. When he had finally gotten up to use the restroom you waited until he was out of sight, threw some money on the table and bolted for your car. You had been furious at yourself and the world the whole way home. All you wanted to do was delete asshole’s number from your phone, take a hot bath, drink some wine and go to bed.
You stomp through the door, throwing your keys on the table and flicking on the kitchen light as you kick off your shoes. The light flickers, or maybe the world does, because Dark is standing in the middle of the room, and you know that he wasn’t there before you turned on the light. He’s dressed in a suit and tie, and he looks so damn good in it that you almost forget he shouldn’t even be here at all, you didn’t summon him, hadn’t even thought his name. The look he’s giving you makes you want to run back out the door, and you can feel your heart banging against your ribs.
“I thought we had something special.” Dark’s voice isn’t smooth like it normally is. The tone is rough, the words distorting the air around him, and the sound of it makes your brain feel like it’s being stung by bees. You blink and he’s suddenly closer, inches away from you. You can smell the burnt coffee and clove smell of him. Dark’s eyes blaze red and black, angry burning coals. “Haven’t I been giving you everything you wanted?”
You back up against the kitchen door, feeling something warm trickle down your upper lip. When you bring a shaking hand up to your face you realize your nose is bleeding.
The fire in Dark’s eyes goes out in an instant, the furious snarl his face had twisted into immediately becoming an expression of concern. “Oh shit, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. That’s my fault. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.” He’s pressing a white handkerchief into your hand and you hold it to your nose as he leads you to a kitchen chair. You sit down and Dark sits across from you, taking your free hand.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just don’t understand. Why go out on a date with a complete and utter asshole when you have me? Haven’t I been good to you, all those times you summoned me?” He smiles at you and you feel the familiar thrill of arousal tingle slow in your belly. It’s hard to drag your thoughts to the surface. He knew about the date? And how was he here in the first place? You stare at the bloody handkerchief in your other hand, the nosebleed done as quickly as it had started.
“I can’t help watching you,” Dark says to the question you only thought. You had forgotten he could read your mind. “And your need called me here.” He reaches up and strokes your cheek, and you lean into the touch like a cat. “You need me to remind you that you’re mine, obviously.”
You find yourself nodding, your thoughts buried under a soft wave of arousal, your fear from a moment ago forgotten. Dark smiles at you, eyes bright.
“You don’t need anyone else. I can do anything a human can do, and I can do it better. You want dinner? I can provide that.”
You feel the hitch in reality, a sensation like your brain just blinked, and then there is food on the table, all your favorite things. You look up at him and he smiles, pleased.
“I can do more than that. I can take you wherever you’d like to go.” His smile twists a little. “I can especially take you places you don’t want to go.”
Reality doesn’t just blink this time, it screams, or maybe that’s you. You're standing somewhere dark. Not black, black would be the absence of color. The darkness here has colors that you can't describe. Just looking at them makes your stomach twist and your eyeballs ache. You take a deep breath and then another, gasping, the thin air giving you very little in the way of oxygen. You turn around, looking for Dark, looking for anything as your vision starts to gray at the corners. You don’t see Dark. What you do see—
Your mind slides away from what the thing in front of you actually looks or feels like. Vast doesn’t cover it, neither does ancient, or evil, but it is like those things. The longer you look, the more things you know, knowledge that you don’t want and that worms its way into your brain and heart and soul regardless. You know that whatever this is, even though it is sleeping and bound, that its dreams and nightmares still roam the worlds. Someday it will wake up and its eyes will open and all that it looks upon will die and the bonds will break and the Sleeping God will walk—
You’re back in your kitchen, Dark standing in front of you with the same twisted smile he was wearing seconds ago. You’re shaking, tears streaming down your face, and there’s a high pitched sound coming out of you that you don’t seem to be able to stop. Dark slowly tilts his head.
“I keep forgetting how fragile your tiny human mind is. Show it the deep mysteries of the world and it just goes to pieces.” He sighs as if this is all so terribly inconvenient for him. “Still, it’s easy enough to fix.” He tilts your chin up until you’re looking into his eyes, the burning red against the deep black, and for a second it feels like you’re falling, and then—
“Still with me?”
You blink, disoriented. You’re sitting at your kitchen table which is filled with your favorite foods, Dark sitting across from you. There’s this nagging feeling that something was horribly wrong a second ago, but when you try to focus on that thought it just slips away from you. Dark reaches across the table and takes your hand, and that touch alone is enough to make your breath quicken and your skin tingle.
“I was saying that I could take you anywhere that you would like to go. A walk on the beach? Go back to my place? Or would you rather just… stay in?” He raises his eyebrows suggestively.
Do you go to the beach? Go to Chapter 3.
Go to Dark’s place? Go to Chapter 4.
Stay home? Go to Chapter 2.