Demoncember writing prompt — Demon who has been waiting for you to say just the right thing, so they can finally show you what this has all been for
“How was your weekend?” Lily from Accounting says brightly, leaning on Sandra’s desk and twirling her hair round her finger. “You went trail hiking, right?”
Sandra smiles back, digs her phone out, shows off pictures of all the birds and flowers and fungi she saw. Lily seems deeply appreciative; says wow in all the right places; touches Sandra’s shoulder, once, a lingering of soft fingers.
Sandra smiles and smiles and screams internally, already planning to fake her death and move to Madrid or somewhere. Not for normal useless lesbian reasons. (Mostly not.)
On her weekend nature hike, Sandra dropped a handcrafted tablet of fired clay into the local dead drop. It’s only about a century since the last time she used it for anything but a routine intel report, and her handler Downstairs is probably going to get pissy about opsec, but Sandra — well, Sandra might believe in The Mission in the large, but sometimes it feels like the point gets lost in the details? For instance, someone from Lust clocked her last decade while she was taking a long weekend in the city, somewhere with a Helltown to speak of, somewhere she can go to a bar and get clocked. Turns out Downstairs has internet now — which explains Comcast, she supposes — and all this business still fucking about with clay tablets is just antique bureaucracy sniffily refusing to move with the times. Succubi get to email their boss!
But it’s not about the clay tablets. She could live with the clay tablet dead drops; she really does enjoy the hiking. It’s the fact that she’s been lurking up here in human disguise for long enough that the entire language her sleeper agent trigger phrase is in went extinct. She’s not sure enough of it survives for her to even jumpscare an academic in ancient languages if they said it — not that they’d know how to pronounce it, so she probably wouldn’t even recognise it if they did.
How many cute coworkers can Sandra be reasonably expected to fake her death to avoid, for the sake of her stupid really fucking obsolete cover?
It’s not like she has any real choice, she assures herself gloomily; angels get to fall and stay there, but that’s because their transgressive trajectory is in line with the rigged moral gravity of the cosmos. Demons’ helium-balloon escape from their own tethers ends in embarrassed bobbing along the metaphorical mall ceiling, while they slowly deflate and sink back to their own level as flattened and useless trash.
“—with some friends at the weekend,” Lily is saying, with massively fake nonchalance. “And I just wondered if you might be interested—”
Sandra scrunches her toes up inside her shoes, hard enough for her calves to hurt — anything to express a little of the tension she can’t visibly show. “Sure!” she chirps, smiling; “sounds fun!”
Maybe she can trip and fall in front of a truck, she thinks, mentally reviewing her calendar. Thursday? Or if she puts it off until her next hiking weekend, she can simply go missing, leave a bloodstained shoe or something, save all the unpleasantness with rebuilding a convincing mortal body.
Lily gives her a shy but megawatt smile, and Sandra mentally utters a curse that clogs every toilet on the third floor.
