The ache awoke earlier than usual. The clocks the body it rode had no connection to anymore were scheduled to turn the following day as it was so everything was out of sorts anyway.
The pain laid there, angrily splayed across his ride, pissed off over his audacity to have even tried to find a way back to circadian rhythms as of late, in spite of all the work the ache had done to wring that equilibrium out of his mainframe.
There would be no going back, long as it had any say in it.
The toxic sentiments echoed between the man’s sinews, aiming at his cerebral cortex as he twisted in the damp sheets strewn across his bed.
The demon riding the foot of the bed chuckled. It curled the longest of the six fingers on his right hand towards the cavity a heart had never seemingly been housed within and with great joy felt the man wince in agony in his sleep as the strand of shame tied to it slashed into his leg.
He did all he could to stay in the silent lucidity that danced before him along the sea of piezoelectricity within his head. Gazing into the sleepy, clear eyes of his beloved a squall of sweet calm slid down the surface of him and seeped in through his skin.
Pain pulsed up the knotted fascia along the back of the man’s body. It kept tugging despotically on the handles of every gate along the superhighway of the man’s spine that had always given him easy access at its leisure until now in a bewildered panic. It slammed into chakra after charka that refused to let him pass in outrage and began to dig it’s claws into the flesh surrounding each embedded, energetic wheel in defiance.
It’d get into and up through him , even if it had to rip his ride apart from the inside out in order to do so. Up was his Xanadu, the only place within this meat-sac its entire existence made sense. The place from which it could strum across any and every painful tape logged into the man that it felt like revisiting to rule over him for that chunk of relinquished to memories time. But nothing it did could shake the calm that had descended.
The quiet called the lethargic demon bathing in memories it had tucked away in itself back into the moment at hand. He looked back at his charge, curious, just in time to see peace that defied all comprehension coat him. The demon’s scowl cut deeper into his face.
The lucidity stealthily slid through the cell structure of the man in silence, dancing between signals shared by both skin and marrow in bone.
From bottom of soul to top of mind everything within and around him recalibrated whenever he could relax enough to be alongside her outside of space and time.
“We have to go back soon~” she whispered groggily.
“No, we don’t-” he huffed,” we can stay here forever-”
“Baby~ we ARE here forever… that’s Why we can go back.” she murmured, then paused. What was waiting for him was losing its shit on the other side of the energetic portals inside of himself that he’d finally figured out how to lock, not for her, but for the time apart doing so gave him with her.
Her brows knitted together. ”No matter what thinks it is laying in wait for us on the far side of this.”
He blushgrinned at the scowl scrawled across her face due to hearing and feeling what he’d once referred to as his pain trying to push through the sanctuary he had carved out within himself for the two of them.
She felt his eyes on her jutted out chin and relaxed, sinking back down onto the sunning rock they’d draped themselves across in the light of their shared inner suns.
He folded his arms around her like the mantle of love he was to her, gently dragged his hands up her spine into the restrained clouds of hair upon her head and unfurled them. “Is it still dark outside of us?” he asked softly.
She stretched her full body against his and, riled, looked up and out.
“Yes…but daybreak is coming. It won’t survive it.”
“I know,” he murmured, “I get it now. Pain only gains the passage we give it .”
“& Peace can be picked instead,” she giggled into the relaxed flesh behind his ear, “each and every…time.”
He chuckled “crazy that we chose to figure this shit out early enough for us to find one another this time and-”
“Keep it clean~” she growled, then instantly softened. “Look~” she laughed, “the sun is coming up! You made it…”
“Yeah… ” he drawled, “…and I…wanna sleep in~” he growled against her lightly scented skin.
She pulled back startled, understanding what it meant outside of him. ”That’s rather scorched earth for you~” she laughed.
“well~ you know I…if you remember, I always bring the fireworks, in full-on mode” he grinned.
They snuggled down to groggily enjoy the show.
The demon yanked on the strings of shame it had viciously knotted through the man again and again to no avail. Incensed, it hunched over and howled as the weight of the world shifting as the sun slid slowly back up into the upper, outer reaches of the sky pressed against the space he took up on this plain.
“No! NOO! He is not supposed to- arghhhh!” The gnarled, albino flesh stretched across the demon’s back became pockmarked with pockets of sulfuric sweat as the heat of a brand new day slid into the atmosphere around him before the light of day did.
”Fuck!Fuck! There’s too much invested in him- I can’t just fucking lose this-” He yanked ferociously on the cords that crawled through the man and coiled around every organ and artery they could.
Along the piezoelectric sea, some semblance of a pattern once recognized as “pain” slammed into the gate at the base of his throat like a battle ram, desperate to gain entry.” It grasped at the interior of the man, demanding to be spoken on, doing all it could to make him cry out, So that called out it could be once again accepted, owned, even if the exhaustion of this climb had telegraphed to it that it would indeed be its last feast, if it got to be at all.
Suddenly, the man’s mouth ripped away from his beloveds and flew open with a silent, plasma-quaking spasm that did everything it could to morph into a primal scream. The full weight of his soul roughly bowed away from the love of this and every life he could ever recall.
Her eyelashes started disintegrating in the churn of the gravitational pull of the vortex trying to forcibly tear open between them as she cried out his name. But her eyes remained steely, defiantly locked on his. He violently slammed his lips shut, lunged at her and kissed her again, like his life depended on it.
Everything erupted.
The Pain screeched as it dissolved into dust on the outskirts of his throat. The detritus was promptly swept into the pulsating rivers of lymph that had shadowed the poisonous sludge as it had traveled through the man’s system, bypassing his heart to try to be the king of Pain within the halls of his mind. Laying in wait to do its job the entire time, the toxicity was washed down and out.
The Demon hunched over the end of the bed gave one more furious yank on the strings of shame it had so painstakingly spun through the entire life of this often almost mortally wounded man. As they dissolved, he raised his knotted fists in astonishment.
“I… I’d gotten too… complacent… too- too lazy-” He muttered to himself in shock. ”too-”
“Too sloppy~” a harrowing voice called out coldly from behind him. “It was that…memory you tucked away~” It whispered darkly, “Wasn’t it? Admit it. It’ll make what comes next all the more easier-”
Petrified, the demon could not have turned around if he tried. Couldn’t face what he knew was next.
He instead looked up and then over at the silent lucidity seeping into the room from the hollow of the man he’d let slip through his ancient, venial hands. But instead of despising freed fowl, the snarl on the Skinwalker’s visage softened.
Because he too remembered.
Thanks to that memory he had indeed held onto-illegally, even toiling along in the pit of hell all these ages. What it looked like.
A man, finally allowing himself to bask, IN love.
“I’m ready-” the failed demon whispered, never looking back as his lease on a twisted afterlife spontaneously combusted, smote to whatever was truly beyond nothingness.
The smoke cleared.
The sun danced across the peace-filled man’s face. It felt just like her guffaws felt to him when she crumbled into fits of laughter in his arms, simply in heaven from being able to freely feel him again, after all the cutting through she too had once had to do in order to.
In so-called real life he grinned in his sleep and rolled over, winding himself up even deeper into his now so dry they were warm with spiritual wars won bedsheets…and slept all the way in for the first time in ages.
©AngelBrynner 2025
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