Omg, what about the monster under your bed? A creature that scared you as a child who didn't understand but protected you as you grew. Your angry father goes missing while you're young. (You were never aware that he had hovered over your with bad intentions and was pulled under to never be seen again). As too you never had a problem with intruders, though sometimes you'd find the door to your open unlocked and sometimes even open. As you grow, you come to like your monster and as a grown adult, you even come to love them.
This is already so perfect, I’m not even sure what else to do with this so have these head canons and ramblings of my broken heart craving this sweet sweet man you’ve made😭😭😭😭😭😂
-The presence of it in the room was like your soul had been dipped down into a bucket of ice and left there to wilt. It was heavy wind inescapable and, when you were a child, it terrified you beyond reason
The click of its feet against the floor as your tossed in your bed, the feel of its fingers dancing across the ends of your hair as you froze against the covers, the sound of its rumbling growls when the door to your room popped open
You never turned. Never dared to look and see it, what it was doing, what it wanted.
You never wondered about the sounds, about what it could be trying to achieve, about what could possibly anger it so when all you did was lay dead-still against the bed.
You never wondered, never tried, too terrified to even breathe at the feel of the presence at your back. The weight of a hand hovering over your head. The sickening crunch and gurgle of a body moving beneath the bed.
The next day, your father was gone. The bruise of his anger across your cheek throbbed when your mother wailed about his missing, and the empty beat of your heart frightened you more than the beast beneath your bed. You didn’t cry, you didn’t miss, and you didn’t linger. You turned back down the hall, stumbled across the floor of your bedroom, and laid back down.
The feel of its finger across the ends of your hair felt warm, kind. The heat of its breath, hushed and directed away from you, felt so protective, loving. Your fear lingered, but something new began to stir within your chest. You whispered a gentle “thank you” against the cold air it had brought into the room.
“You’re welcome”. He’d whispered back before he’d slunk back into the darkness beneath you.
Your interactions stayed much like that throughout your life; never able to banish your fear completely, never able to turn and see this creature who lived beneath you. That was until then.
You’d come home, it sat empty and cold, as it always had. After your father had “left”, your mother had gone with him. Her abandoned room and the note on the kitchen table told you that. You’d been 16 then, only just hired at some run-down grocery store that paid you dirt and worms. But you’d made it. You didn’t know how, but you had.
A part of you suspected a cold, supernatural presence had played a part in that, but you could never ask, never even roll over in the bed to see him.
Your room was extra cold that day, as cold as the snow outside. And, when you turned to see the cracked window, the dust of snow on the floor, and the stain of a red struggle across the wooden floor, stretching from the open windowsill to beneath your bed, you connected the dots.
You’d felt the eyes of strangers against your back all day, since you’d left the rusty doors of your job and started down the backroads home. You’d ignored them and hoped that they’d simply go away, and they had, but now you became aware of the stare of something once again but it wasn’t a stranger. It was him.
The presence that had always been there. Silent and frightening, protective and warm. You heard him rumble a hello at you from his shadows beneath the bed, and you took a breath before you moved towards it.
Your legs trembled as you kneeled down beneath the edge of the bed, and the hot blue of his stare sent shivers down your spine, the rumble of his nervous greeting awoke memories in you that you had long forgotten. Long erased.
The memory of the father who hated you, who wanted more from you; the beast who tore him apart to protect you. But why?
What could he want from you? What did he need?
These questions and so many more you asked him and, for each one, he gave you his answer.
You’d been 18 then, and now you were 23.
Your relationship with the monster under your bed had changed since that day. He hid from you no longer, dancing now in the shadows of your rooms and asking you questions about any and everything. He no longer slept beneath your bed, he sat at the edge of it and whispered you into slumber. He no longer frightened you, but he made something new and just as suffocating bloom in your chest instead.
You didn’t want to call it love. This creature, he was your protector and even your friend, but he was still just a monster. You couldn’t love him, but the heat of your face when he brushed your hair back, the beat of your heart when he brushed against your back to point at something he thought was interesting, the pulse in your stomach when he looked above you and told you how special, beautiful, perfect you were.
It wasn’t love. It couldn’t be. Right?
You knew that answer to that and so much more the day he nearly died.
The day your mother came home, furious and wild and delusional. The day she took a knife in her hand to kill the child she knew had killed her husband. You weren’t sure where she’d found that answer, likely in the bottom of a drug pool with her head in another mans lap, but she’d found it all the same. And for it, she would kill you.
But not you, no. It wasn’t your blood on the floor, you didn’t bleed white. It wasn’t your howls of pain, your voice wasn’t nearly so deep.
The scream that left your mother when he’d taken her head from her shoulders, when his rage pushed beyond the gashes in his stomach and chest, when his need to protect you threw away the desire to protect himself. It shot through you. And the scream that left you when he crumpled to the floor sounded foreign to your own ears.
You’d held him and cried, you weren’t sure what you’d said, the exact words. But you knew they’d been the confession you didn’t even know was hiding in your chest.
You almost felt silly when he brushed your hair away from your face and the wounds in his torso began to close. But the look in the depths of his blue eyes, all four of them, they shook you deep inside your core and you weren’t sure who moved first, but the feel of him against your mouth was the only answer you needed.
When you were little, he terrified you, shook you to your core and made your fingers trembled. When you had grown, you understood his ways, his wants, and you had come to accept them. When you fell in love, you knew everything about him, and he you. You knew the best of his heart against your chest, the heat of his skin against yours, and the feel of his soul within your chest.
You couldn’t possibly love him. You couldn’t.
But you did just that.
