Satan and Me was created by Orangeplum, and I take no credit par writing this story to her great comic. I was so hyper over her lovely work that I was up at three am writing this so... Yep :P Go and check it out, it's a great laugh with a hint of darkness (my favourite).
Enjoy, m'dearies :D
This had been the third consecutive night that there were storms over her little town. Honestly, Natalie couldn't take much more of it, her nerves were already shot from the first night and she was beginning to shake, covered up in a cocoon made from her quilt.
"Chill out, Kid. It's only a little lightening," she heard a muffled low voice from outside her fluffy sanctuary of warmth.
Her mouth chattered as she tried to reply, "E-e-easy f-for you t-t-to sa-" A loud gut retching roar cut her off with a squeak. She attempted to wrap herself up further, still clinging to that childish believe that once you're under the blanket nothing can harm you. She was so swift in her attempts she felt suddenly weightless and before the horror of what was happening reached her, she hit the floor mercilessly. She moaned, clutching her injured head but refused to even stick a leg out of her safety net. A laugh or maybe it was a sigh she wasn't all too concerned when another booming growl made her flinch and shake worse than before.
"Get up off the floor already."
She shook her vibrating head.
She heard a huff. Then she felt herself be lifted effortlessly and dropped again on a more yielding surface. "You really are a sack of potatoes."
Satan looked down at the shivering lump of a meat sack and scratched the back of his neck, still unbelieving that after all this time he had been lumped with a weird potato like her. Fucking blood pack. What a ridiculous way it had been brought about too. His brother must have had a riot watching him be humiliated... that was until he was also bound by blood. Irony way a cruel bitch, after all.
At first she was just irritating, a brat he had been forced to babysit, but he'd grown somewhat used to her annoying antics. Hell, he'd even go as far to admit that he had been awe of their absence when he had took off, a mistake he was not going to repeat for a number of reasons. None of which he was keen to analyse; mainly due to half of those reasons being curled up under a ball of puffy white and pink covers.
"Well, you're boring. I think I'll go annoy your stupid brother-" as he began to turn to leave a warm hand desperately grasped his forearm. He looked down at the pale vice with distaste. She always was all too comfortable touching him, despite his initial objection. Her grip was iron, or at least in her sense, and refused to budge as he tugged gently. "Let go, kid." Her hand squeezed tighter. Another lightening strike gave her the strength to tug him closer.
His horns slightly brimming, he flung the covers back quite done with all of this. Bright shining eyes stared widely back at him, although not in anger or her usual optimistic attitude. With pure, childish, fear. Satan tried to take some joy in her petrified expression but he couldn't bring himself to. At least not entirely. What a pain this girl was.
"S-s-stay with m-me."
Not exactly a question, neither a plea. It was open to his reaction in spite of her obvious need for company. She could have just ordered him to stay with her, but she didn't. Perplexed, Satan paused.
"T-t-talk to me, k-keep m-m-my mind off-" another strike. Natalie squeezed her eyes closed and her body jerked closer to a fetal position. The storms hadn't just brought up her fear but also the memories of her mother. In another other situation she would be delighted in reviling in the few precious memories of her dear mother that she could still recall, but these weren't those types of memories. These were from her nightmares, times where she was there with her mother during the accident. Watching the car as it is crushed, her body deformed, the blood...
Added weight caused the bed to buckle a little. Natalie opened her eyes to see Satan perched besides her looking pointedly at the other wall. His eyes were narrowed annoyed, but he seemed adamant to be there. Her hand was still rested on his arm, her nails hand dug out gashes which he didn't seem bothered about but her arm was beginning to feel its affects.
"What is it that you want to talk about?" Satan finally ground out. Why was he even sitting there? Again, he hasn't been ordered to. This was almost... Nice of him.
He withheld a shudder, vaguely awe of her warmth still seeping into his forearm.
Natalie thought for a moment but upon another thunder blast outside her window she blurted the first thing that came to her. "W-w-what is hell like?!"
Immediately she regretted it. She had been wondering that ever since she had encountered that dangerous creepy multi-eyed version of him. She had gotten a sense of the horror residing within him from those dreams and almost being absorbed by one of the souls posing as him... But the concept that he was stuck with that actually inside him? She couldn't even begin to imagine.
Satan tenses under her hand and withdrew once he had gotten over the shock of being asked such a rude intrusive question. The sound of the rain pelting at Natalie's window matched her pounding blood. She was never good in awkward silences. She had a bad habit of blurting out even more obtrusive or ridiculous things.
Thankfully, before she could tell him that when a queen bee dies, worker bees make a new queen by feeding a female bee "royal jelly" that makes her fertile, Satan had figured out what to say in response.
"You've seen it."
She peeked at his expression. "Yes, but... But I don't have to live with it."
He paused before giving her a sly smile, "you forget that I'm not really alive to begin with."
She pursed her lips, determined to not be rebuffed on a technicality. He hadn't reacted as negatively as she had thought so she couldn't help but pry as far as she was able. "Satan, really. Tell me." Another boom. She jerked against him slightly, smiling meekly at him. "It's okay to share things with friend, y-you know. A burden shared is a burden halved." Her father had acquired that saying not long after her mother died. She remembered how insistent he was that her and her brother could share absolutely anything with him and that he'd always be there to listen. And Natalie truly believed that the saying was true.
Satan cast a sideways glance at her. "Or a burden doubled."
Her flaring nostrils indicated her annoyance but her eyes remained wary, both of his reaction to her probing questions and the thunder and lightning she deemed so frightening outside. Maybe if he told someone, they might understand. He gave the idiot another glance. Or at the very least, shuts her up for a while.
"You remember those voices you heard?" She nodded. "And how I told you that these tattoo seals acted as a barrier of sorts?" He received another nod of acknowledgement. "Well..."
Natalie waited, almost forgetting the terrible weather and her haunting memories.
"It's all in your head, you've actually gone insane," he stood quickly and headed for the door, "okay, goodnight."
Natalie deflated, whining after him. "Sataaaaaan."
He opened the door and turned his head to give her his usual sneer like smile. "Sweet nightmares, Kid."
The next strike of lightening was close enough to illuminate the room. Satan stood ridged, the door only ajar in his hand. The other went to touch the arms encircling his waist like a constrictor.
"P-p-p-please..." The shaking of her voice mimicked the vibration of her body against his back.
Exhaling loudly, he slowly shut his immediate exit and tugged at the arms around him. She let go but remained uncomfortably close with a hand still touching him for reassurance. She was shaking so hard her legs appeared to be close to giving out. Satan led her back to her bed slowly, making her back up inside her cocoon once more. Although she was encouraged to lie down she remained fixated on his arm, causing him to have to lie besides her, his gaze directed up at the roof.
Green eyes peeked out from the bundled covers expectantly. Satan felt her staring but refused to cave so quickly. He searched for a way to explain, a way that wouldn't frighten her more or entice sympathy. Fuck that shit.
"The voices..." She prompted.
"Hmm?"
"Do you... Always hear them?" A mild squeak interrupted her as the storm continued to rage on.
"In a way. It's like their muffled till I focus on them."
"And the tattoos? What do those squiggly things even do?"
He rolled his eyes in the darkness. "Those squiggly things help block them from my mind."
"You didn't always have them, did you?"
"No, I didn't." He felt her snuggle up further against him, waiting like a child to hear the rest of his tale. He glowered at her eagerness. Reluctantly, he elaborated.
"When I was first presented with this... punishment, it was quite manageable, if not simply an inconvenience. The voices were fewer, less damned souls, but centuries past and the void just grew beyond my self control. It got to a point where my thoughts were no longer my own." Natalie tried to envision the multitude of glowing eyes and whispering voices growing till she wasn't sure which thoughts belonged to her.
"That sounds dreadful, how did you cope? Didn't it drive you mad?" Natalie could hardly stand the amount of voices she had been filled with in his absence. She had felt as if her sanity were wearing thin, talking to people who weren't there, asking if anyone have spoken when they hadn't.
"You should know by now Girl, I'm always mad." His self satisfied smile dropped, his joke falling flat at the shining in her eyes. "It was... Difficult."
"How did you know what symbols to get tattooed?"
"I-ah..." Satan paused. "There was an Angel called Procedorus. He had been fascinated with you meat bags since your creation and had dedicated himself to learning what he could about the creatures Fa-He had made for his own amusement. He had studied them to such an extent that he could predict their behavioural patterns, so when he heard of the first sin of mankind he..." Natalie was captivated.
"He what?"
"He disobeyed and withdrew the first sinner after his death to question him, study him and what had processed him to act out against Him. What he learned terrified him," Satan laughed darkly. Even higher beings were able to feel fear. The fundamental emotion seemed to be something all could share, but he... He couldn't feel fear in the traditional sense, the fears of others filling him so completely in their tortured existence that there was literally no room for such a feeling. Natalie's hand twitched, as if tempted to stroke his arm in a comforting gesture. Satan continued quickly, "this fear led him to performing now known as the darkest of rituals to protect himself. His fear turned to paranoia, he pulled away from all the other Angels and soon fell to be lost on Earth."
"Where is he now?"
Satan's lips tugged up at the ends, "what part of lost don't you understand?"
"Then how did you-"
"Before he fell he had documented all of his work, believing that if he could crack it, it'd be the saviour of their kind and of the humans from following the first few mortals steps. I was able to lay my hands on a few discarded pages."
Natalie listened to the pattering of the rain, puzzling over what he and said. "But how do normal tattoos help you to...?"
"Kid," he almost chastised her, "nothing about me is normal."
"Yes, I know. I know, but what did you have to do to- wait!" A dreadful thought fell onto her, making her skin prickle. "You didn't perform those rituals too, did you?"
Natalie felt Satan's chest raise and fall. "Not entirely. Procedorus had taken a wrong route in his research which had caused him to go off in the deep end of insanity. He had been all too concerned with the humans' immortal soul to focus on the very basics of life. To protect yourself from the dead you must possess what it is that makes you alive."
"And what's that?"
"Blood."
Natalie huffed, "Go figure. What a cliché."
Satan frowned into the darkness but refrained from barking at her for comparing their history to meat bags idea of history and pop culture that'd render this barbaric use of life as 'clichéd'. "Blood contains all the elements that allow something to live; water, earth and air. Combining those and a few other chosen items with fire creates a material which is able to transfix my soul to the living, to the foreground of my body sorta speak."
"Is that why blood is necessary for creating a pact?"
Satan's eyebrow quirked, "Yes, that's correct." Natalie did not feel like a child being commended for picking up the hints a teach was laying down, nor did she feel pretty happy with herself for getting Satan's approval. No, not at all.
"What about the symbols you had it made into? Do those have a special significance?"
"Ah-" Satan coughed, suppressing a surprised laugh. "They were what Procedorus used to retrieve the first's soul from damnation. It seemed fitting to use what was meant for recalling souls to repress them." Natalie now understood why Michael had reacted so violently to seeing her with similar tattoos on her shoulders. It's probably not nice to remember someone's betrayal so blatantly on another's skin. Plus, it was also another connection she had with Satan, which was never going to go down with any Angel.
Another booming roar shook Natalie who had been successfully distracted by Satan's voice. Satan felt her jerk closer, sighing. She was ridiculously warm crushed up against his side, her hand having shifted from his arm to be gripping blindly at his bare chest. "T-t-tell me something e-else!"
"Like?"
"A-a-anything! Like w-what heavens l-like or t-the o-other angels." Her breathing was heavy and fast, her body reacting in a stage of flight response to the lightening. Her quickly raising and falling chest was not lost on Satan. "J-just keep t-talking, p-p-please."
With that, Satan listed through the countless Angels he knew, starting with the most loyal of members that fell alongside him. Soon enough he heard the level breathing and soft mewing of a very content potato. Stealing a glance down at the difficult bundle he'd been lugged with he watched her eyes flutter as she dreamed peacefully practically on his chest. What a strange girl she was. Lightening was petrifying but the devil? Oh no, she'd sleep right on top of him no bother.
Carefully, Satan tried to push Natalie off of him and recede back to his beanbag of solitude to spend another boring night stuck on Earth in a teenager's bedroom but froze when said teenager mewed in displeasure. Fear of waking her, he resolved to staying put. He didn't have it in him to go through all that again. And it wasn't at all about him simply not wanting to wake her to just be scared again. That was until the note she wrote him the next day.
Snatching up the little yellow sticky from the side of the fridge he read the plainly scrawled note with a curl of his nose.
'Thank you for last night.
I really needed my marshmallow that night, or I'd have been a wreck getting up this morning.
Same again tonight?
~ Nat'
~~
Satan crushed the note. He should have woken her. His morning proceed with a hissy older brother who had read the note before he had had the opportunity to throw it away and a distraught father for believing that his daughter had been up to no good under his roof.
He really should have woken her up.
Maybe you should have thrown that note away quicker than you did, Stan ;) That note was a little too open ended for a bystander to understand how innocent it really was. You silly Marshmallow.
I do like these characters dynamics and I hope I was passible in my attempt keep them true to Orange's characterisation of them. Obviously, I had to take a little creative licence with this, because at this moment in time we don't know where he got the tattoos or how he'd figured out they would stop the hell inside him from consuming him. Something I'd greatly like to find out ^^
Anyways, same again tonight? ;P Let me know.