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colorfulcheshire · 10 years ago

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Neither Here Nor There [Ch 1]

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Tags: Demonstuck, demon!Dave, halfdemon!Karkat, davekat

Summary:

‘Please! Someone, anyone, save me! Please, I’ll do anything, I just want to live!’

‘Sounds like a good deal to me,’ says a voice entirely unlike the demon who’s been after you for a week. ‘Hold up a sec, sweetcheeks; I’ve got this covered.’

---

Karkat had feared things would come to this when he had first noticed the horns developing from his skull at age thirteen. His surprisingly calm mother had explained to him that he could never tell anyone under any circumstances, a rule that he followed without question while growing up in his small, incredibly religious southern community, for fear of his life. He only had one more semester until he could graduate early and move away with his mother to attend college somewhere much safer. They had it all planned out.

And then she showed up.

Notes: The desire to write demonstuck and the mental processes involving demons here were heavily inspired by Askerian's Midnight on the Demon Patrol because I just really love how it portrays interaction with demon's as far as ethereal beings go.

The night is clear, stars shining brightly against the black void of space, but with the new moon a dark blotch in the sky, it’s nearly impossible to see the road as well as you need to with these shitty headlights. They’re probably suited for sixty at most on a good night, and right now, you’re flooring it at a hundred, hunched over the steering wheel to keep your eyes on the road and away from the temptation of the mirrors. At this speed, you’re a little scared to even blink, but you’re more scared of what will happen if you slow down.

You shouldn’t have waited so long to leave the house. Maybe then, you could have jumped the fence while Terezi’s mom was still home and taken her new Kia. You’ve driven it enough times back from a party with Terezi, too drunk to drive herself, to be comfortable with the way it drives, and you know for a fact that those headlights could handle these speeds without much danger. You’d probably be able to push it thirty miles faster, too, and you’d be in the next town by now and then no one could find you and you’d be safe, relatively speaking at least.

But you didn’t leave early. You waited at home like the concerned son you were after your phone rang once with a call from your mom and you couldn’t get an answer when you tried to return the call multiple times to see what was up. You had held a bad feeling in your gut since first waking up in the morning, that feeling only growing stronger when your mother left you home alone to run a few errands. When she took longer than normal to get home and didn’t check in save for that single ring, you were left only with a sense of dread and started packing your backpack without knowing why, checking your phone every five minutes with the slim hope that she would call back and everything would be okay. It only took half an hour from that single ring and your dread grew into a sudden panic and you knew that something was terribly wrong. While it’s likely a part of the whole reason you’re in this mess, not that you had any choice, you can’t say that you’ve ever hated your sixth sense of just knowing when shit was about to hit the whirling device.

Like right now – you’re hit with a strong wave of sudden anxiety and you panic about how long you’ve been staring at the same stretch of road and how they could have caught up and you’re so stupid for not checking earlier. You ease off the gas quickly and lean back to glance frantically at both of mirrors, back to the road, and once more at the mirrors before leaning back over the wheel again to focus on driving. You’re okay for now, so what was that feeling abou- the gas pedal does nothing and you slam your foot down only to hear the awful empty rattling of the engine and no, no, no, no, this can’t be fucking happening right now.

Hands shaking against their knuckle-white grip on the steering wheel, you push yourself back to look down at the nearly non-existent glow of the dashboard's lights. The faint glow of the needle is resting solidly on the little peg beneath the ominous faint red line marked ‘E’. You watch in growing, silent horror as the speedometer’s needle travels slowly backwards from one-hundred to ninety to eighty, glancing frantically back to the road as it travels, stomping harshly against the gas in a desperate, futile attempt to keep the needle and truck from slowing.

“You’ve got to be fucking shitting me!!!” you scream at the cracked windshield, throat painfully dry and thick as the reality of your situation sinks in – not the whole running from death thing, but the whole vehicle running out of gas while running from death thing. You’ve got to be in a horror movie, or a dream . . . but if it’s not a dream, you can’t afford to stand still. They’ll catch up in a matter of minutes and then you’ll be dead. Well, you’ll be beaten by people you loved, tortured, and then dead. Oh, and not to forget probably double dead once that bitch gets your soul suddenly freed from your body. Joy. This is exactly how you wanted your young life to end, you remember telling yourself in the orphanage as a wee wide-eyed boy wishing upon stars. Great.

No. No no no no! Fuck this! You are not about to be roasted alive in front of the entire town, in front of your friends, neighbors, teachers. You have to live! You’ve made it this far and you can’t just let seventeen years struggling through life for something better go down the fucking drain all because a psychotic egomaniacal demon bitch decided you’d look hot on her dinner plate (or tied up and soul-tortured??? You’re really not sure which because those weird dreams you know she’s responsible for are incredibly vague and surreal in all the worst ways). No, fuck you, you psychotic hell-bitch; this soul is not for sale.

Instead of waiting for the truck to slow to a halt, you hit the brakes and kill the engine without bothering to park the rust-fucker. Not like you need to worry about the junk’s condition seeing as A, you won’t be needing it again, and B, it’s not like the owner isn’t part of a community that now wants to see you dowsed in holy water and burned at the stake. That second part kind of stings a little bit because you know the owner and used to do yard work for them during the fall, so yeah, wow, thanks for that, it’s not like you had feelings or something. However, you don’t have much time to contemplate exactly how bad all of this hurts and how you do actually feel a pang of guilt for stealing and abusing their truck, so you just grab your backpack, jump the fuck out of that truck, and lock the door before slamming it shut in the hopes that it will cause them to waste just a little more time trying to pry it open to see if you’re inside.

You stand at the edge of the road for a moment, glancing down both ends of the highway and mostly thankful to find darkness on either ends, before finally moving your gaze to your next destination, a thick wall of sugarcane standing sentry at the bottom of the shoulder. You’ve seen too many scary movies with your friends where scary shit either comes out of cornfields or drags unsuspecting teens into them, but at least corn crops have enough space to see the next three rows of plants. With sugarcane . . . well the boogey man and his entire army could be half a foot behind the outer limits of crops and you’d be none the wiser.

But what choice do you have? You can’t walk the road with half the town on your ass. Hell, a blanket of snakes has a better chance of survival out on these country roads than you do right now. At least people pause to run over a snake properly. Everyone in town knows your black and grey checkered backpack from freshman year and you know they wouldn’t hesitate to run you over now; you don’t stand a chance on the road. So you have no choice. Pushing aside your fear of crop monsters, and reminding yourself that you’re getting a far worse feeling from the road back to town than from the field in front of you, you hop cautiously down the shoulder of the road and slip past the first layer of sugarcane as carefully as you can, hoping not to mark your entrance into the field and give an easy path to follow from the start.

It’s even darker amongst the towering sugarcane stalks, the sky a small blotch of stars only directly above you, but you resist the urge to use your flashlight you packed earlier for fear of giving away your presence to anyone in the area. It’s the dead of night, and even with the thickness and height of the crops, you’re sure the glow of a flashlight would attract the wary eyes of farmers on the look-out for vandals and other suspicious activity among their livelihood. So you step carefully, but quickly, over the ground still soft and a bit muddy from heavy rain the day before, moving diagonally towards the next town to get some distance from the road before attempting to stay parallel to it. The next town is probably over a three hour walk and you have no idea how long your pursuers plan on tracking you, but there’s nothing you can do but try to stay on path so you don’t get hopelessly lost. Time is of the essence so you have to move quickly.

This of course, is a lot easier said than done. With so few cars traveling this road, it’s hard to listen to where you’re supposed be keep parallel. You lose all sense of direction, you find, when surrounded by stalks upon stalks of crop in the dark of the night, crickets coming from all around now that you’re directly in their territory instead of listening from a paved out driveway or someone’s porch. Everything looks the same and sounds the same, and the only stars you can make out are too close to really follow with your limited vision from your measly height beneath towering sugarcane.

‘Karkles, we’re here, sugar~,’ her voice filters into your mind in a twisted sing-song tone after maybe ten or fifteen minutes of scrambling through the field and you nearly stop mid-step before forcing yourself to keep going, focusing on the image of a thick, impenetrable wall around you, dark enough to keep prying eyes from finding you. ‘Aww,’ she croons like icy ocean waves, ‘just because I can’t get a hit on where exactly ya at, doesn’t mean I don’t know you’re here, crabcakes. Ya might as whale give up an’ let me get this contract inked up with ya.’

You bite your lip and focus harder on your barrier, speeding up but trying to keep quiet and not lose your way. You’re absolutely terrified, but adrenaline keeps you moving forward, and the thought of them catching you in a state of panic keeps you from freaking out and losing control completely. You need to stay calm if you want to have any chance of slipping past them unseen and making your escape to wherever it is you’ll end up. Hopefully, it won’t be back in town, burned in the church’s old parking lot.

Far behind you, but much closer than you would have hoped for, you hear wild shouts and jeers, and then, to your horror, a gun shot into the air. It’s followed immediately by another loud shout like a half-crazed cheer and you feel your bones ice over in terror. This is real, the town is trying to capture you, and they will kill you. There’s no home to return to and no one you can think to turn to without risking your life, and you see no way out of this, but you have to keep moving forward. You don’t know how you’ll live, but you have to live.

‘Found you~’ the demon practically purrs into your head, voice all ill-will and possessiveness, and you realize that the gunshot was more intentional than a random shot from an over-excited hunter because you’ve dropped your barrier in your surprise, and suddenly those shouts aren’t so scattered and lost, and they’re moving fast and in your direction. Fuck!!!

You desperately build your barrier back up as you break out into a run at a different angle, hoping to throw them off, but you’re gut tells you it’s of little use. Your barrier is weak, and she’s close enough to probably track your movements even with it up, now that she’s gotten a whiff of your soul. You can feel her eyes in your chest even as you focus all of your mental effort into blocking her out as you sprint away from the jeering calls of people you’ve grown up around for most of your life.

Another gun fires behind you, closer now, and you hear the bullet tearing past sugarcane leaves, guns now pointed to kill and not up into the night sky merely to frighten you. Another one soon follows and it’s close enough to make you choke on a cry of fear. You know you’ve been heard when a wave of excited hooting swells from the crowd closing in on you, and it dawns on you that you’re being hunted exactly like a small animal, minus the dogs that would normally be around to flush you out from your hiding spot. You’ve been reduced to being hunted like game by people who watched you graduate elementary school. You want to cry. You do.

‘Please! Someone, anyone, save me,’ you call out, dropping your barrier to reach out for something now that the crowd is close enough to follow your footsteps. You’re fucked regardless of whether you keep it up or not, not that you have the ability to with the rising levels of panic making it hard to breath and focus. You feel like you’re choking on your own heart as you try to run, the cool night air chilling streaks of tears down your cheeks. ‘Please, I’ll do anything, I just want to live!’

‘Sounds like a good deal to me,’ says a voice entirely unlike the demon who’s been after you for a week. ‘Hold up a sec, sweetcheeks; I’ve got this covered.’ While there’s still a dark tone of desire and hidden intent, something you’ve found to be common in demons, the tone is calm and passive, flowing around your thoughts and self without much push, as if it just happens to be passing by and doesn’t want to bother upheaving you from its path.

You feel this energy flowing around your physical body now, and even in the dark, you notice slow-moving streams of what looks like dark sands moving in your peripheral and then in front of you. It weaves through the sugarcane in thick rivers without disturbing the plants at all, the multiple branches joining up now to gather into the forming shape of a person. In your mind, or maybe outside of it too, you hear the vines of energy click into place like cogs and springs meeting each other for the first time in a machine, and you have to skid to a halt to avoid hitting what is now a very solid-looking person. You stumble backwards when the form turns to look at you, red eyes glowing brightly in the night as a faint energy seems to radiate off its entire form, but providing no light to its features.

“Holy shit,” the demon says in that same smooth, passive tone, looking down to their hands and then at you with what seems to be an inquisitive tilt of the head. “I didn’t know you were a halfie, oh damn sweetcheeks, consider my half of the deal signed, sealed, and delivered. I am all about that life.” From his words, you get the sense of longing hunger, like coming across your favorite holiday dish that you only get to enjoy once a year. It makes you wary, but the growing shouts and loud footsteps coming suddenly to a halt behind you remind you that you have much bigger worries right now.

There’s a tense silence as the crowd comes into view and someone turns a way-too-bright flashlight on you and you feel like a raccoon that’s been thrown into the middle of a dog pin during the brief moment it takes the pack to register what just happened before they attack, tearing the poor creature to bits of flesh, bones, and fur.

“H-he’s called another one!” someone finally shrieks from the crowd a bit nervously, causing you to look back over your shoulder at the summoned demon.

T-they can see him?! Demons aren’t supposed to be corporeal without a host to possess, but the way the lights are now focused on the new arrival, his silver-white hair shimmering in the rays and contrasting harshly with bright red irises on dark gray sclera, you know that the others can see him and that they know what he is. It’s hard not to with his thick horns curving out from beneath and back over the hood of his open jacket, or with the burning red-tinted skin marked with pale geometric lines up his torso and down his arms. If they didn’t really believe in demons before, they certainly do now. You know you do.

‘What the SHELL did you DO, VANTAS?!’ the demon after your ass screeches into your mind, her presence all cold tidal waves and snaring weeds around your terrified mind. You can feel her anger closing in on you, a giant squid squeezing the life out of you and drawing you close to its sharp beak.

And then the tentacles shrivel and wither away, the beak crumbling like old stone into dust and the demon shrieks in pain and rage.

‘Woah woah, so this is the halfie everyone says you’ve had your eyes on, M-Girl?’ The river is back in your mind, flowing quick like rapids and pushing back at the other demon’s anger and keeping her touch from your soul. Behind you, there’s a too-warm hand on your shoulder and you’re shoved back behind the demon as he steps forward in front of you. ‘Not sorry to say, but I’ve been signed to keep your glittery claws away from him, so it seems we have a conflict of interests. Besides, I’ve never had a taste of halfie power before and I’m kinda digging it. Watch me break it down, babe.’

You feel a tug from your chest and up through your spine, like something leaving from your neck and being drawn into the hand on your shoulder. The crops around you brown and wither as a flow of clean energy leaves them to collect into the demon at your side. The crowd of townspeople notices this too and you hear the old priest in the back, the one possessed by the other demon, scream for someone to shoot.

You hear half of a gunshot before the sound distorts, growing faint like a long, drawn out echo, and even though the gun is pointed directly at him, you see no bullet wound. Instead, you can see the bright flash from the barrel of the shotgun, frozen as if paused in a movie. There’s a dark shape standing out against the frozen rays of light and you realize that it’s the bullet. Everything but you and the demon is still; even the crickets have stopped chirping.

The hand on your shoulder is gone and you find the demon suddenly in front of the gun, plucking the bullet from the air casually, a faint trail of sparks following the bullet as it’s moved, and he turns it around, setting it in front of the shooter’s forehead by a few inches. He continues to stand there, placing a pale-clawed hand on the shooter’s shoulder before everything starts again, as if it had never stopped. The gunshot finishes its bang, but there’s screams of surprise and confusion as the shooter slumps beneath the demon's hand and the person behind them takes the same bullet to the face.

“No!” you scream, because these are people you know, people you’ve loved . . . and now they’re dying and you don’t want this. You never wanted this.

“Sorry, sweetcheeks,” says the new arrival, glancing over his shoulder at you despite the panicked screams from the people directly in front of him, and you can see how his eyes glow briefly brighter as a semi-visible energy flows from the shooter’s shoulder and up the demon’s arm. One person swings to grab for his neck but he’s suddenly not there and back in front of you, tilting your chin up with a pointed claw to look you in the eyes. “My deal is to save you and keep you alive, and I’ve already fed from you so there’s no going back now.”

There’s another half-gunshot behind him that’s cut off mid-fire and he’s disappeared from his spot in front of you again to where the shot fired from.

“No! Please!” you call out, finding him again as he’s grabbing the bullet from the air, sparks of red energy trailing behind it as he turns to look at you from the side. “Please, they don’t know what they’re doing. Sh-she got them riled up . . . I just want to get out of here.” He stares at you, unblinking, and you’re worried that your words are falling to deaf ears, so you call out again, shouting in desperation, fear, and anger. “Please, I don’t want anybody to die! I just . . . want to live.”

Someone presses ‘play’ on time again and the gunshot echoes in the field, but no one’s hit, to your confusion and relief; the ground off to the side explodes in a small burst of mud and plant where he’s deflected the bullet. The crowd seems too terrified to fire again now that they actually noticed the two injured (one likely dead) people who took the first bullet, and they hesitate, a few in the back turning to run before they’re next.

“But they’re trying to kill you,” says the demon, in front of you again, his back to you as he watches the mob carefully. “I mean, if you wanna let them go, I can do that,” he offers casually, as if talking about plans for lunch instead of people’s lives, “just thought it’d be easier to snuff out the problem before they try again.”

“No, just . . . let them go, please." You feel deflated, exhausted even, more than you should after running for so short a time. You just want this nightmare to end, not to stand here and make decisions about the lives of people trying to kill you. "I just want to live. Can’t we just . . . get away while you stop things again?” You don’t understand how demon powers work, but from the looks of his, all you really need is to stop things long enough to get away, right?

“Ugh, keeping an area on pause like that while I leave the range takes a lot more juice than just dealing with them now, but if that’s what you want . . .” He raises a white eyebrow to you over his shoulder.

“Yes! Please! Just do it!” you raise your voice to him, adrenaline pumping in your veins for fear of taking too long and things escalating should someone shoot at you or him again.

“If you say so, halfie,” he shrugs, turning back to you and placing both hands on your shoulders, leaning down to level you an even stare with glowing red eyes, “but this is gonna take a lot outta you.” He doesn’t give you time to respond, pulling you in and tilting your head to bite your neck harshly, causing you to cry out in pain.

‘Get your hands OFF OF HIM!!!’ you hear the demon, not from behind the river of energy flowing around your mind, but through him, her harsh voice filtering over the calm precision and clicks of his mind as you feel yourself flowing away from your center of gravity and into him through his mouth against your neck. It burns briefly, but the flow of your own energy soon numbs the pain as you lose the ability to focus on yourself.

‘Make me,’ you hear him challenge, voice floating loud and clear wrapped around your consciousness.

Behind him, you hear the priest order everyone to fire and then the clicks and beginning explosions of multiple shots, but something erupts from both you and the demon and everything goes quiet, and slowly, or maybe not so slowly, everything goes black.

#demonstuck #davekat #homestuck #colorfulwriting #Neither Here Nor There #long post #sorry mobile

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