Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Demons — Demon who's met Santa Claus and thinks he's a bit of a tool
Her latest unheralded arrival is dusted with falling snow and limned with fairy-lights, blinking reflected colours shining on her teeth when you answer the door.
Christmas Eve.
She lets your wondering terror ratchet, flitting around your home and lounging on your couch, slowly sipping at the case of Swedish fruit cider she brought with her. She brought other things, too; a black refuse sack with somethings inside it, outward-pressing hints of corners and jumbled shapes. It squats menacingly on the kitchen counter, and she is simply here, smile sharp and knowing and eyes forever on you as you obediently wrack yourself on the torture-table of anticipation.
She presses you to drink with her, and you ratchet tighter and tighter, sitting on the couch with her, almost shaking. You imagine the sick dizziness of intoxication, of your ability to follow or predict what's happening dulled and swimming. You imagine the uses of empty bottles, of the sharp edges of broken glass.
She stretches out across the couch, in the end, louche and grinning, stretches you out atop her, cards her fingers through your hair with your nose pressed into her shoulder. Despite being knotted up with fear, the slow stroked of her hand along your spine and the warmth and the cider combine, eventually, to soften you, to lull you (even as you drowsily suspect an ambush at any time) and you drift and doze and sleep.
She wakes you at midnight. Gently. Slithers from beneath you into the kitchen, returns with a small and brightly giftwrapped gift, presses it into your nerveless hands, curls up again to watch you with the intensity of a cat beneath a bird-table.
Your imagination reels and faults at the immensity of possibility, sheer dread of the unknown. It takes you several minutes, picking at the paper with shaking fingers, to open it. And then it punches you in the chest with its reality: a pair of earrings, studs, set with your birthstone. The gift is a gift, with thought and attention. And you think of the black sack with its further mysterious shapes and quail at the feelings too big for your chest, at the ease with which she can destroy you by strategically not.
Her eyes drink you up. Her cool fingers carefully put the jewellery on you. And she pulls you back down to her chest, a thrumming reed, expertly played, and settles, feline and smiling, to nap beneath you some more.
The gifts come hourly. (Sleep deprivation, you whisper to yourself, dimly and familiarly.) They are tasteful, beautiful, personal. They pile on one side of an imagined scale, and you feel the ominous scale of the future counterweight swelling and darkening, angry and devastating.
"Santa," she murmurs over the rim of a mug of tea, your head in her lap, as she watches Christmas television as though it's of Lovecraftian novelty and strangeness. "Such a Christian conception. A secret police entire within one person: omnipresent surveillance, judge, jury, sentence and execution in one. A religion built of nesting dolls of totalitarian functionaries, from the Supreme Leader on down through such lieutenants. A faith comprised entire of Zersetzung followed by the gulag, punishment forever without end, only the specific vibes differing between the fate of the ingroup and outgroup and the overseers administrating it. Santa, ritually doling out collaborators' wages for another year of cooperation with the regime." She tugs on your hair, a little. "No wonder it frightens you, when I spoil you. No wonder you cling so tightly to the notion that everything is a labour or a wage, or both."
You could say: I'm only culturally Christian. You could say: No, that's not why I'm afraid of gifts from you.
You could stay quiet, instead.
She flashes amused teeth down at your silence, as if she knows every attempt you make at strategy.
She feeds you snacks, plays with your hair, twines your legs together on your couch and holds you to her chest and brings you, protractedly, almost lazily, to several orgasms, licking her fingers clean and soundlessly laughing after each. Cat-naps between watching you open gifts, bright-eyed.
Midnight rolls around again; Christmas Day ends.
"Which is your favourite present," she says, sitting on the kitchen counter by the now-empty sack, flattened and folded, swinging her feet; and you look at her through your lashes with dread-filled, worshipping eyes in silent answer until she laughs soundlessly again, reels you in with a finger hooked in your waistband, butterflies kisses on the pads of your fingers, the palms and backs of your hands, the tender inner of your wrists, your collarbones and jawline and ears, cheeks and lips and the centre of your forehead.
"You know this is part of breaking you," she says against your hair, amused.
Water splits boulders by running into cracks and freezing; its solid expansion a wedge and crowbar, rending rock from deep inside. The thaw is a necessary part of the cycle, to trickle into the new depths of ever-widened broken places.
You know. You close your eyes.
You nod.