Demoncember writing prompt — The demon you have ritually bound in your basement will not accept normal food. They insist on something…special
It wasn’t even Davina’s idea. She just comes home one day to find her housemates huddled in the kitchen looking various shades of embarrassed and/or pleased with themselves, and Rachel and Toasty tell her what’s up: they’ve summoned a demon into the basement.
“What the fuck,” Davina says, glaring at them.
Toasty gives her a meaningful head tilt and cuts her eyes to indicate that it’s Rachel’s fault; Rachel, simultaneously, is gesturing inconspicuously at waist level with a couple of fingers to blame Toasty.
“Don’t you idiots believe that Hell is a coercive social construct that confines demons in self-defeating patterns of complicity?” Davina says crossly. “We’re never getting any of our security deposits back, you stupid fuckers!”
“Well that’s why we did it,” Rachel explains, overemoted and vaguely condescending as always. “We’re taking direct action for the ILF!”
“For the what.”
“The Infernal Liberation Front!”
Davina clenches her fists against the temptation to walk outside and light a cigarette. She’s quitting, damn it, she’s quitting. “Striking a blow for demon freedom by kidnapping one and keeping it shut in our fucking basement,” she says dryly.
“Read some theory!” Rachel says angrily, and slams herself huffily into the bathroom.
“Has someone fed you?” Davina yells angrily down the basement stairs, once the housemate meeting has entirely scattered before her ire. Someone’s turned the light out; she can’t see what kind of scrungly horror they’ve got down there.
“Kinda!” a voice down in the dark says cheerily.
“Jesus wept,” Davina barks, and snaps the light on. “What the fuck, man, did they just buy an off-the-shelf succubus kit for this shit?”
“Yeah!” the succubus in the Sharpie confinement circle chirps.
“And what do you mean, kinda?”
“Well, they ordered me McDonalds,” the succubus says, beaming up at Davina. “But, y’know.”
“I don’t know shit,” Davina says angrily. “What, do I look like I summon succubi at the weekends? Do I look like an expert?”
“There isn’t really a look,” the succubus says. “No, I just meant — well, it’s one of those things, isn’t it? I dunno. Common knowledge. We don’t — we don’t really subsist off food?”
Davina scowls. “What do you eat,” she says, and can see the succubus stifling the urge to smugly say something dirty.
“We kinda — we — it’s hard to explain it exactly?” it says. “But we sort’ve siphon off your extremes. Like. Lust is a real easy non-damaging renewable way to generate — I mean I say non-damaging, you can get wicked post-nut clarity if we pull too hard—”
“So you need to — what, you need someone to get off?”
“Oh, thanks for offering!”
Davine knows, knows she’s being fucked with. She meets the demon’s eyes, seethes silently, slams the basement door.
“People who fill the basement with demonic hostages,” she announces stonily across the breakfast table in the morning, “are responsible for feeding them.”
“I fed her!” Rachel says.
“They don’t eat McDonalds,” Davina snarls.
“Tell that to the box of twenty chicken nuggets,” Rachels says self-righteously.
“It can eat McDonalds,” Davina amends murderously. “If you want it to get psychic scurvy. It’s a fucking lust demon, Rachel.”
There’s a pause.
“I’m saving myself for marriage,” Rachel informs them all.
“You fucking tradwife motherfucker—”
Davina refuses to go near it for three days. If Toasty or Rachel or any of their stupid demon lib friends do anything meaningful to feed their captive in the meantime, they keep it very quiet.
The succubus looks up, doe-eyed, expression innocent. It’s reading a book, down in the middle of its dismal barely-four-feet-across confinement seal, and Davina knows, knows it’s a mysteriously procured provocation. It’s something dire that none of them own, Fifty Shades or something. The demon is fucking with them.
She grits her teeth. Descends, one reluctant step at a time, trying not to look at the succubus, or think about the succubus, or—
—a terrible sharp image flashes through her mind, the demon on its back on the basement’s concrete floor, wet-mouthed, wet-eyed, head to the side as Davina presses the sole of one Doc Marten into its cheek, and with a dreadful care grinds her heel, just a little—
“Fucking stop that,” she says, raw and furious.
“I’m hungry,” it says back, looking at her over the book. Its not wet-eyed, not soft at all, almost crackling with intensity. “You try being shoved in a basement for three days by a gang calling itself milf.” It pauses, then lifts its chin. “Which is false advertising,” it adds.
“ILF,” Davina corrects through clenched teeth, “and don’t lump me in with those idiots, they’re just my housemates, I don’t want anything to do with that or with you and I don’t even want you here—” She can feel the back of her neck, flushed red with fury, arteries throbbing, hands almost shaking with the physicality of rage.
“I’m. Hungry,” the succubus repeats pointedly, staring.
“I know!” Davina snaps, and somehow she’s stumbled close enough for the succubus to grab a fistful of her flannel and yank her into the circle, rub its face almost violently into her shoulder like a determinedly affectionate cat, and make a long-drawn-out, shuddering noise of release.
“Ow,” Davina says, discovering that you can have jarringly abrupt post-nut clarity for being pissed off, which she suddenly is to only a normal extent.
The succubus moans into her shirt as Davina shakily peels the demon off her.
“You let that fucking demon go, or I’m telling the landlord you’re keeping a pet down there,” she threatens when Rachel gets in from her retail job, and Rachel pouts and shrieks and flounces around, but Davina has primed the rest of the house by direly hinting that a succubus that’s been shut in a basement and deliberately starved probably isn’t going to come to an ideological epiphany that Rachel’s doing it a favour, and furthermore whatever dollar-store demonology book the containment seal came out of probably won’t hold it for ever. Or, worse, if it does hold, Rachel probably didn’t use whatever’s the arcane equivalent of a VPN while summoning it, and there’s only so long it can be missing before something else comes looking for it.
Rachel stomps down into the basement with ill grace, outnumbered, to release the binding.
“Well, it wasn’t actually gonna starve,” Toasty mutters in a reluctant, subdued way. “Like. When you yelled at us about the whole thing, I figured you were right, and I, uh. I had a chat with it about it, and — yeah, anyway.”
“Wait,” says their other housemate, Di. “You—” and stops before she can say anything that’s more incriminating than the colour of her cheeks.
They all look at each other.
“Well, I figured it’s just — getting myself off and letting it siphon a little energy?” Toasty says in flustered little way.
“That’s all?” Di squeaks, then covers her face with her hands when they look at her again. “I made out with it a bit!” she adds hurriedly.
“You pair of gullible sluts,” Davina says virtuously, silently vowing never to speak a fucking word about the whole thing.
