Chapter Text
There is, supposedly, no shame in an incubus feeding on nothing but heated dreams and masturbation fantasies.
That isn’t so much a platitude meant to be washing away the bitter aftertaste on your tongue, the taste of being the voyeur drinking down the subpar sexual energy produced by two teenagers having mutually unsatisfying sex in a van on a chain supermarket parking lot. It’s a mantra, one that is meant to guide hundreds of incubi and succubi around the world away from sticking out their necks too far in the hunt for their next meal.
The knowledge does little to alleviate your general annoyance as you savour the bland, unremarkable taste of the first meal you’ve had in days.
Your name is Cronus Ampora, and you are the oldest son of one of the most influential and illustrious clans of lust demons in the Otherworld. It is only recently you have reached an age where you are meant to take care of your own, and it turns out feeding on human lust is a lot harder than your father made it look.
It isn’t until the couple in the battered old van is done and you’ve consumed every last ounce of desire in the air that you realise how hungry you are, sucking in deep breaths of air similarly to how a toddler might lick an already thoroughly emptied plate to just obtain that last bit of goodness while your stomach churns for more.
You’ve gone too long in between feeding, and it’s leaving you irritable and weak. Even the magic you use to shift into your human shape is waning, forcing you to abandon the hunt for a good lay earlier and earlier to try and find a quicker source to snack on lest it ends up falling away at a crucial moment.
Ok, so shape shifting is supposed to be advanced magic, and your teacher did warn you that there might be repercussions for using it too often; that you’d burn through your reserves before finding a sound strategy to sustain your current lifestyle. But you’ve seen your father hold onto his human form for days on end without any repercussions, and you never had much of an issue holding onto your other shape before in the Otherworld, and you really did think your reserves would be able to hold out at least until you managed to get a good fuck in.
Your stomach growls pointedly.
Energy gathered second hand isn’t strong enough to maintain the basic energy level you need to be able to keep using magic the way you have been, no matter how close you are to the humans while they get their jollies off. It’s through sex, which you can’t exactly ask for in your demon form, you’d get what you need to get your legs back below you, and you’re not sure how much longer you need to be hanging around humans before you’ll find one actually willing to let you in on the action.
With an annoyed huff you watch the young couple shuffle their clothes back on and start the engine of their car, apparently having scratched their itch. Good for them, you think bitterly, feeling utterly betrayed by the lack of satisfaction their low standards in sex provides you with.
Slipping back into the shadows of the alleyway, you take a quick look around to make absolutely sure there aren’t any bums laying around corners to spot you -having to explain to your dad how you accidentally caused an incident where a homeless woman went screaming (and ended up making an entire neighbourhood so superstitious it took weeks before any Otherworlders were able to enter the area without running into humans seeing through their disguises) was embarrassing enough the first time- before jumping up against the wall.
Unlike your shapeshifting magic, which you had to call out deliberately and wield with force, the sudden shift of energy that let your hands and feet find purchase on the smooth paint of the wall rather than be pulled back down by gravity was entirely natural.
With inhuman nimbleness you crawl up the wall, careful to avoid the lit windows. While it’s usually enough to just count on the assumption that humans who will look outside won’t expect to see anything otherworldly creeping around on the side of a building and let the wards between the Otherworld and the human world make sure they really won’t, it’s still not unwise to avoid getting too close into sight.
Turns out, humans are not as bad at noticing things that happen right under their noses as they seem to think they are.
Not that there are a great deal of people looking. It is well past midnight, and while the city may never go to sleep in it’s entirety, enough of the lights are off to make jumping between buildings without crossing over any lit windows stupidly simple.
The air is thick with the scent and taste of the dreaming, desires and fears that wouldn’t otherwise run rampant freely oozing from the sleeping humans’ imagination, but the air is woefully lacking the specific type of lust that you seek tonight.
Vague images accompany the tempting scents wafting from opened windows or ventilation shafts from time to time, negatives from scenarios the details of which you are not entirely privy to, often accompanied by a particularly strong emotion that makes them stand out from innocent lust. Guilt, unreturned affection, loneliness, pining; none of them particularly appetising, like particularly strong spices often applied too generously.
They are poison to you; in too large amounts they would clog your lifestream because you can’t digest them the way you can the thoughts and feelings that you feed on. As a source of energy, dreams are lesser than what you could draw from sex both because they don’t come in the quantity you need and because they are so diluted with garbage, so unsure and feeble compared to the energy of pure sex your father raised you on.
You cringe as a particularly unappealing thread of dreams wraps itself around you, seeped in terror. Like a macabre mist the scent of the nightmare eats at your other senses, intoxicating and overpowering, and you continue your climb upwards before you get drunk of terror. You know there are others who enjoy that sort of thing, who feed on whatever useable can be found in there, but you open your mouth and taste nothing but bile.
You’re gone before you even fully process that you are fleeing, reaching the upper part of the building without thinking through your options on how to get back down until the nightmare dissipates.
There are other dreams around even up here, vaguely sexual in nature, but when it comes to the unweaving of dreams your fingers are like sausages, swollen and clumsy. You know it is possible to peel them open, pull the unnecessary away from the necessary and consume only that small core of lust, but you don’t have the ability to do so, and it makes you angry.
You’re sitting on the windowsill of an abandoned apartment, contemplating whether the long drop down would be worth the pain in your knees if it meant minimising the time spent around the tendrils of nightmare still wafting around when a wisp of something you can’t quite make out catches your attention.
It’s only vague, more a hint than a solid scent, but there is something about it that sends a shiver of excitement down your spine. Whoever it is you are smelling, their lust is purer than you’ve sensed in the human world before and is lures you out like a moth to a flame.
In seconds you’ve crawled upwards to where the scent is at it’s strongest, the top floor. The air is thinner there, less polluted by the dreams of the many, and it is only because of that you can find the root of the intoxicating odour, repressed as it is.
Heavy, strong and oily against your lips, you’re distinctly aware that the taste is different from what your father would seek out, and for a brief moment you wonder if your preference might be different than his, and that you’re only just now finding out. Another wisp of energy pulses in the air tauntingly, and the thought is forgotten.
There is a window, open despite the evening chill, and you don’t waste any time making your way over to it and poking your head inside, not caring especially about the amount of regulations you break just by doing so.
A pair of glassy blue eyes stares back at you dead on.
With a muffled shout of surprise you drop a good ten feet back down, barely registering that the enticing scent around you briefly dips in prominence as the dreamer gains awareness.
Your heart hammers in your chest, but no blue-eyed humans stick their head over the windowsill to double-check what they saw and the silence of the night remains untouched. It is only seconds, before you’ve even had the chance to calm your erratic breath, before the dreamer sinks back into sleep.
The fact that whoever you locked eyes with has not made a move to seek you out after catching you is very weird and it says perhaps more about you than anything else that rather than skedaddle before you even get linked to any possible problems that could arise from this little misadventure, you climb back up and take another (more careful) peek inside.
The glassy blue eyes are still there, staring at you piercingly, but this time you manage to suppress your surprised squeak long enough to realise that they don’t belong to a human being, but to an unnerving looking… doll?
Taking a deep breath and forcibly swallowing down your relief you push the window open further to make space enough to crawl inside, managing to get in while mostly avoiding the creepy blue-eyed ventriloquist puppet sitting primly on the cupboard next to the tv.
There are little lights scattered around the room. Timers, clocks, general buttons that you wouldn’t know the function of on machinery you don’t recognise, and all the lights are making it hard for your eyes to adjust.
Even more of a wear on your focus is the thickness of the scent that drew you here in the first place, oozing through the room like a slowly pulsating bloodstream. You breathe in, and the energy you’ve been hungering for plays at the back of your mouth, simultaneously a taunt and an invitation.
Your eyesight focuses right around the same time it becomes apparent that just because the amount of energy inside is overwhelming, that doesn’t make it pure. Something about the source dreamer is doing something weird to the energy, and while it isn’t repressing the amount of lust charging the air one bit, what amounts you attempt to swallow leave a thick layer of gross residue behind in your own life force.
But that’s ok, you remind yourself as you subtly hack up some of the disgusting mess clogging your everything. This is what you’re an incubus for. Tapping into the source of the quality nourishment of pure lust is what your species was born for.
(And that sudden confidence in your own dream-unweaving skills, you hope, is a breakthrough of sorts rather than bravado inspired by that churning hunger in your belly.)
It is right about now that you’re finally beginning to pay attention to the dreamer himself rather than the assortment of random crap strewn across the room, half of which blinking at you almost like it is making fun of your lack of understanding of human machinery, and the other half obnoxious shades of neon or lethal looking.
He is sleeping sprawled on what looks to you like a couch with problems -but you’re not really an expert on human couches so you can’t say for sure- head rested on a pillow but without even so much as a blanket in sight and clutching a plush toy to his chest. You’re not sure why, but you feel instinctively drawn to it, despite it’s garish neon orange exterior.
You are absolutely one-hundred percent sure that his dreams are ranging somewhere between raunchy and erotic, but his face is strangely stoic, and beyond a slight lump in his also garishly neon hawaii print boxers he doesn’t seem to be especially affected.
Still, the scent enveloping you and pushing, taunting your starved instincts to suck it all down pollution be damned tells you otherwise; whatever he is dreaming of is intense, and if not for the fact that you know digesting the bogus energy his stupid human dreaming habits are mixing in with the nourishment so desperately need would take more magic to digest than it would gain you, you’d be feasting already.
Instead you perch on the armrest of the strange couch, close enough that even you should be able to properly affect him with your powers, and close your eyes.
Without the crazy colours and the blinking lights distracting you, you manage to stop focusing on the physical world and instead reach out with your magic, carefully plucking at the strings of life force.
In it’s purest shape, the human’s emotion is like a tangled coil of thread, one you’ll have to take apart to tell apart the boges energy you can’t use from the few treasured strands which you can so you can follow them to their source.
You frown, slightly annoyed at the amount of tangles and issues your fingers are encountering in their work. You’re not known for your immense patience, and it’s obvious that if this guy has ever had an Otherworldly visitor trying to influence his sexy dreams before at all it must have been a long time ago.
Tugging at the knots that are refusing to come apart, you bite back a curse as you accidentally break off a string of, rage, you think it is. The human won’t really notice anything amiss, but the stink of it is slightly dampening your appetite.
Still, you need to feed and the good scents coming from the lust tightly interwoven with everything else are enough to coerce you into continuing lovingly.
With some careful fidgeting you pull a depressing cord of regrets away from the cluster where the life-force you want to get your hands on is coming from, and finally flashes of dream begin to leak out. You lean forward to breathe in when-
It’s more sensations than anything else that flood over you as the human’s dream accidentally manages to seep into your consciousness; the feeling of a cold wall against your back while a warm hand runs over your thighs, of a searing hot mouth against your neck and a knee forcing itself against the seam of your pants.
You’re panting hard by the time you’ve managed to pull yourself loose from the dream, a strong flush burning bright on your face.
Interacting with human dreams is necessary for the sake of tapping more energy from them; find what gets them hot and insert it into their minds. Getting overwhelmed enough that you become a participant invited inside the human’s dreams instead of having them dance to your wiles is just poor self-control.
The human is still completely serene and, for all intents and purposes, does not look like he is dreaming of getting ready to fuck someone into a wall.
This time when you reach up to fiddle with the knots and twists in the string in front of you your fingers shake, and you steel yourself for the next opening to appear. You didn’t get as much energy as you would have had you remained in control, and while this particular dreamer produces much stronger stuff than you’re used to (your dad has a thing for treacherously mild tastes with a strong backlash, but this human tastes like upfront forcefulness and you’ve never encountered a taste like this before, but you think you might like it a lot, you really do), with how long you’ve been going hungry you were hoping to at least get enough to keep you going for a while.
What you want is to get inside the human’s head long enough to get him going and then tap into the outgoing flow while the knots you’ve just untangled are out of the way, unable to taint the energy you’re looking for. It won’t be as pure as what you’d get if you were fucking him, but considering how those kinds of attempts have been working out for you so far it seems this is the best you’re gonna get tonight.
You carefully unwind knot after knot, trying to swallow your annoyance at the realisation that you fully lost the leak you managed to find before when you got distracted. Despite getting there once, tapping back in is complex and boring, like the dent you made before was never there at all.
Of course this means that you manage to start zoning out (and accidentally breaking another chord of annoyance, fuck) exactly at the right time to be overwhelmed again when you accidentally pull the next gap wide-open.
The scene has shifted, and you have just enough time to berate yourself for not taking into account that of course the human would apply natural progression to his dreams before you feel the back of your skull slam into the wall as your spine arches in response to the unexpected set of fingers up your ass.
While that does somewhat shake the parameters of what you were expecting to find in this particular dream a little -normally, guys tended to go for the vagina in their sleep-haze and save the edgier stuff for the fantasies they were more actively steering. But then, normally the imaginary partner role you’re slipping into involves more breasts and less penis-, your sleeping partner is surprisingly conscious of how to work his fingers, and intriguingly focused on doing things that don’t seem to be involving his cock near any of your orifices.
You ponder on the unusual involvement in his fictional partner’s pleasure for all of half a second before a warm, deep-throated laugh right by your ear distracts you and sends shivers down your spine.
It’s not the sex itself that fuels an incubus’ life energy, nor is it how your species reproduces, but that doesn’t mean you’re not receptive. If you were Eridan you might wonder if it has something to do with the biology of being able to better sleep with humans or if it’s just an Otherworlder pastime existing beyond the laws of Earth logic, but seeing as you are not Eridan you instead try really hard to remind yourself you’re supposed to be trying to untangle yourself from the dream instead of letting those fingers do really nice things to you.
It is working about as well as one might expect, and you’re almost ready to just give yourself over to the dream and not worrying about the extra energy you could have gotten instead of this fantastic but tragically fictional lay when you suddenly become horrifically aware that out in the real world, your body has not gone unaffected by the change in moods.
You can feel the very real warm skin under your very real fingertips, and get only long enough for a no less real spike of fear to hit you before the fantasy spun around your awareness pops apart like a soap-bubble and you find yourself looking straight into a pair of uncanny amber coloured eyes, stretched wide in surprise.
While your mind was preoccupied otherwise, you find your body has crawled on top of the human, straddling his waist and rested one hand on his stomach tentatively, right where his shirt is bunched up a little below the bizarre orange plush.
And then, before you can even manage to finish a single mental ‘oh fuck’, you are flipped onto your back with your arms crushed above you, trapped under one surprisingly powerful human hand, and there is something very sharp pointed right under your jaw.
Well shit.