Chapter Text
October
"Dude!” Sirius burst into visibility with so much intensity, a light bulb exploded in the next room. “You need to get some sleep, for fuck's sake! Like, shit, man."
Sirius’ punished human just stared at him. “Um.” He licked his chapped lips, stared thoughtfully at Sirius for a few minutes. He proceeded shoveling congealed noodles out of a white box and into his mouth. Days ago, a stranger brought the white box to the front door. “Thanks,” the punished human finally finished his thought, talking around the food.
Sirius nearly lost his visible form, barely regaining control. He spluttered. “Thanks?”
His punished human raised his eyebrows, taunting. “Thank you and goodbye,” he said, not unkindly.
“You’re not even going to threaten to call the police?” Sirius demanded. “Do you have any fucking self-preservation?”
“No, and not really,” his punished human said, setting his food box down and shifting his computer on the coffee table. Loud laughter crackled from within and after some clicking and a tap tap tap sound, the noise-level raised. He spared no glances for Sirius, listening to the voices from inside his computer, probably from that website he visited too often—Net-something.
Softly, Sirius muttered to himself, “What the fuck?”
“Want to watch with me?” His punished human absentmindedly patted the couch space beside him. “Do something. You’re making me anxious just standing there.”
Well, good to finally know his punished human had some qualms about a stranger appearing from thin air into his apartment, even if he didn’t show it. Unsure of what to do, Sirius joined him on the green couch that he normally invisibly haunted over. It was surprisingly cushiony when sitting on it in human form—Sirius greatly approved. He sank back into the pillows, running his hand over the soft corduroy material, still warm where his punished human’s legs had been propped up minutes prior.
“You’re more handsome than the others.”
All Dark demons naturally transformed gorgeous in any human form, unfailingly alluring. Just another annoyance that came with Sirius’ existence and why he rarely chose to be human. He loved being beautiful, but liking the purpose for it? Less so. “What do you mean ‘the others’?” Sirius asked.
“The other hallucinations,” his punished human said. One of the small people inside the computer demanded the other small person give them coffee and his punished human chuckled, his voice higher than Sirius expected.
“I’m not a hallucination.”
“Fine, then another one of the shadowy figures I see in the corners of my eyes sometimes. You know, imaginary.”
“I’m not imaginary!”
“Okay.”
“I’m not!”
“I said,” his punished human spoke plainly, “okay.”
“Can you just stop and go the fuck to sleep?”
His punished human puffed out a hysterical breath. “What, take my sleep meds and become too drugged out to defend myself from you?”
“I thought I was imaginary,” Sirius shot back, less bitter and more curious than earlier.
Raising a tense shoulder and dropping it, his punished human offered no reply. It didn’t make any sense and it made Sirius feel weird things in his stomach—human forms brought on so many annoying emotions. So Sirius faded away, not wanting to cause any more distress.
He could last another night with scorching energy scratching at him to be released.
Probably.
☽☽☽
“No!” Sirius smacked the plastic cup filled with stale cereal out of his punished human’s hand. He responded a touch more dramatically this time to Sirius’ sudden physical appearance, though it was mostly due to the fact that his food now covered the floor. “Eat some real food and go to sleep !” Sirius’ skin prickled with a thousand fiery needles—release, release, release.
“My Cheerios,” his punished human mumbled, eyes glued to the ground forlornly.
“How can you even be functioning on this little sleep?” Sirius’ voice pitched higher and higher as he spoke. He wondered if he was capable of yanking his fake human hair out.
“You know the others aren’t usually this rude. Just frightening.” His punished human looked back up and squinted at Sirius. Quickly, he shoved his finger forward and then retreated to cradle it after jabbing Sirius’ body. “Or as physical,” he added, cocking his head. “Huh. Weird.”
“I’m not imaginary,” Sirius scoffed, offense flaring up hot and quick. “And there are no others. I would know,” he said proudly. “I’d smell them.”
His punished human puffed out a snort of air. He preferred puffing and huffing as a form of communication, it seemed.
“I’m a sleep demon,” Sirius went on. He considered shifting into his true form and making it visible, but he got the impression that would do the opposite of good.
“Yeah, and I’m a werewolf.”
“No, you aren’t. I’ve seen you during full moons.” How dumb did this human think Sirius was?
His punished human chuckled and stepped over the Cheerios, throwing one last sad glance to the fallen cereal. He retreated to the green couch. “It’s called sarcasm.”
“Oh.”
They didn’t speak for a long time after that. Sirius’ punished human went about his business, putting on glasses and pulling out a stack of papers. He ignored Sirius’ presence to the point that Sirius thought he had slipped up and gone invisible again. Eventually, Sirius came over and perched on the couch armrest.
Sirius tried for a soft voice. Lily often told him he was too abrasive. “Why won’t you sleep?”
“Told you yesterday,” his punished human said, biting on the end of a red pen.
“Aren’t you supposed to take those bottle things? Pills?”
His shoulders stayed relaxed but Sirius heard the throat swallow, the new strain in his punished human’s voice. “I don’t like how they make me feel.”
“How do they make you feel?” Sirius tugged on the outfit he had conjured for himself, acting bored. He wasn’t used to this but he’d watched Lily in the field before—acting uninterested made people less nervous, sometimes.
His punished human stuck the pen in his mouth and waved his hands around his head, communicating something Sirius didn’t get, before taking the pen back in hand. “Fuzzy and strange. Sluggish. Like if something happened, I couldn’t do anything to defend myself, I’d just be fast asleep.”
“No control,” Sirius said, moving to sit on the couch cushion beside his punished human, who smiled sympathetically at Sirius. He paused. “Well, what if there was someone to watch over you? Make sure nothing happened.”
“I don’t—I don’t have anyone like that.”
A squiggly human emotion—what a bother, to feel things—rose in Sirius and he said, “I can.”
“Thanks,” the vulnerable moment ended, “but a ‘sleep demon’ isn’t a comforting presence to watch over me. Sorry.”
Sirius frowned. That didn’t sound like an apology at all. He breathed, trying to focus away from the toxic energy stirring inside him. He switched tactics. “Can we watch the small people again? In the computer?”
His punished human laughed. He seemed to find a lot of things Sirius said amusing, but he was kind, not hesitating to turn the lights off when Sirius said they hurt his eyes—a lie—and quietly explaining the show’s plot, patient when Sirius didn’t understand the small people’s conversations.
And just like Sirius had hoped, with the show and the lights off, his punished human fell asleep.
Sirius hovered—figuratively—knowing he needed to touch his punished human’s head to release the soon-to-be nightmares. He lifted a finger and a particular brand of strangeness washed over him, like something tumbled down his throat and into his stomach, crashing and sitting heavily. It was too wrong, Sirius realized, he couldn’t do this while he was in human form. He was too much of a coward.
Changing back into his invisible nothingness, he physically hovered around his punished human’s head. Sirius braced himself for a moment, but the energy roiling inside him became far too much, backed-up too many days.
He released, freeing himself as the negative energy surged forth and latched onto his punished human’s skull, seeping into his Innocent soul.
☽☽☽
Sirius would like it stated for the record that none of this was his fault.
Okay, maybe he’d make a few amendments here and there, but for the most part, it was harmless, alright?
All Sirius had wanted was to have a little fun. He’d been doing his duty as a Dark sleep demon perfectly for decades since the last accident. He deserved a nice slip-up. A little oopsie-daisy—you piece of abusive shit parent, now you suddenly have a three-hour nightmare of teddy bears eating your flesh.
Come on, it was a common slip-up mistake, was it not?
Nobody quite understood how sleep demon energy worked, so it was more than probable that a demon’s powers could naturally seek out the nearest sleeping human without the demon’s control. Surely, other Darks had unintentionally given teddy bear nightmare dreams, too.
Apparently, the Dark sleep demon Council didn’t agree with Sirius.
Apparently, he “targeted” an unassigned human on his own free will. And apparently, not only was he to be disciplined, his newest punishment would be inspired by how they dealt with him as a youngling.
Which brought him to his current predicament, stuck with his goddamn fucking punished human. Sleep demons—whether Dark or Light—generally never stayed with one person, always on the move, flitting from one human to the next to the next. Sirius didn’t care for humans himself, hadn’t for a long time on principle. In his young years, the Dark Council put him on a leash that didn’t allow a choice in which humans he infected. The Council created a randomly generated set of humans he had to stick to. When he had failed to follow that correctly, his strike two earned him a new list primarily made up of Innocents. Even after he completed those terrible years, the Council kept him chained to a list of assignments, though not specifically targeting one group of humans over others.
But now on his third strike—choosing to inflict nightmares on an abusive father rather than the assigned abused son—the Council shackled him to one Innocent, the same fucking Innocent every single fucking night.
It made this whole indifference act towards humans much more difficult. Especially this specific human.
Sirius hadn’t wanted to know how much of an Innocent his current punished human was, didn’t want to be briefed or to snoop through the human’s memories. But his punished human’s aura practically reeked of goodness, blindingly so—Sirius couldn’t even begin to pretend that his punished human was anything other than good. Scrambling for some kind of control, he had resisted actively watching his punished human’s daily life, but after a few weeks, resisting curiosity became impossible.
So Sirius started watching over his human, followed him about his day.
He looked into everything, trying to find something to justify giving his Innocent human nightmares. There had to be some impurity. His human snapped a few times at people, usually at his annoying friend with that horrid hair. Sirius eagerly collected these imperfect moments and tried to ignore that the sharp comments made by his punished human were generally fair and well-deserved.
Lupin, Sirius had discovered, was his punished human’s Official name. Sirius read it on a suitcase and on papers. But thinking of his punished human by name was tricky business, creating further attachment and care.
Now that they’ve met face-to-human face, Sirius wondered if it was futile to put off attachment and if he should address his punished human correctly.
But he did enjoy saying his human—Lupin probably would not appreciate that and Lily scolded Sirius when he said it, but it was a fact. Lupin was Sirius’ human. His punished human, perhaps, but his human nonetheless.
His stupid, stupid human.
Sirius was seriously mistaken thinking he was in the throes of a complete and utter shithole, as Lily would have put it, when he first learned of this assignment. No, no, now he was in a shithole. Because his punished human had to go be stupid and mess everything up. Last week, “Lupin” stopped taking those little tablets. Medication bottles cluttered the apartment, bottles that Sirius understood not at all expect for it apparently meant life dealt Lupin a shitty hand. And sometimes along with general life, people were shitty to Lupin, too.
Something nasty grew inside Sirius incessantly. At times he twisted horrific dreams, just like he had with the teddy bears to that father, into Lupin’s head, trying to goad him into breaking and rising up to the anger he deserved to release. He wanted to break Lupin down so that Lupin could rightfully break others down.
It never happened. If anything, Lupin became kinder, a deflection as he quietly retreated into himself. The last time Sirius meddled with the nightmares, Lupin woke up sobbing and Sirius almost, almost revealed himself to comfort his human and apologize.
Perhaps it was karma, his human stopping his pills. Lupin finally had a fault, even if he was unaware that it hurt others by foregoing sleeping.
What a shithole, indeed.
Sirius hardly ever went into human form. He didn’t like it. Demons had many forms, but generally preferred only one of them, whichever it may be. Sirius liked invisible nothingness, and demon form for when he was with Lily. Goddamn lucky Lily, blessed with the existence of gifting good dreams; a Light sleep demon. She loved the human form, found humans endlessly fascinating, and even attended and graduated from several colleges. She, unlike Sirius, was high up in the sleep demon ranks.
What would she think of him now, going into human form twice and interacting with a sleeper? Probably laugh hysterically at Sirius’ first spoken sentence, but he had wanted to blend in and he just regurgitated human phrases he had heard her say—man, fuck’s sake, dude.
He felt he pulled the act off pretty well, thank you very much.
So, as Sirius lingered over Lupin, his punished human, manipulated into sleeping for the first time in five days, whimpering from the nightmares Sirius had forced upon him—Sirius wanted it known, for the record, that really, none of this was his fault.
It wasn’t.
☽☽☽
“Ugh,” Sirius groaned.
Lily, sitting at a little table in France, didn’t startle even a little at Sirius’ sudden visit. It was a little insulting, really. She could have at least flinched or shown a little shock.
Paris felt sunny even with gloomy clouds and of course Lily would be here, in her plump human form, all red hair and flower-patterned clothing. She even wore a fucking sun hat with a wide brim and no one even cared how unnecessary that was, even more so in the shade of the cafe’s awning.
The person she sat with, a skinny thing of a woman, a real human, didn’t mind at all when Lily excused herself. The woman held no ill will at Lily’s departure, not insulted in the least that Lily just up and left. That was all Lily’s charm—no funny demon business to change minds.
Walking down the street at a leisurely pace, Lily remarked, “Haven’t seen you in a bit. What kept you?”
This was also a Lily thing, she just knew. It didn’t matter what or when or where or why, she just knew these things. They had gone longer times apart without popping in for a chat for no other reason than they hadn’t chosen to see each other or hadn’t the time. But she somehow knew that he had been unwillingly kept from seeing her.
“Ugh,” Sirius repeated loudly to her ears. He drifted alongside her, humans deaf and blind to him.
“Can’t I meet him?”
“Can we go somewhere private,” Sirius deflected as they turned a corner. “People will think you’re crazy talking to yourself.”
“I’m not talking to myself. I’m talking with you, you dramatic arse.”
“I hate you. Also, arse? What, British now, are you?” Sirius couldn’t grin while being nothingness but he knew Lily sensed it from the look she shot in his general direction. “Seriously, you look crazy.”
“Sometimes you’re so fucking naive, Ser. People have technology where they can talk to people across the world. People think I’m taking a phone call. Bluetooth and shit.” Lily adored teasing Sirius but there never was any heat behind it. She led them to a small park with only a few humans mingling about. The ones that were there walked past them with dogs or chatted rapidly with friends, uncaring to Lily and, unknowingly by extension, Sirius.
A breeze shifted Lily’s hair, untucking the strands from behind her ears under her stupid hat. Her hair was a shade darker than last time, cut closer to her chin, red still but with a darker auburn undertone. Relaxing at the lack of humans, Sirius changed into his demon form, kept hidden from all except her.
Lily cracked a smile at seeing him, her eyes lighting up in a way that they didn’t when he chose to be nothing. “Missed you.”
“Missed you more,” Sirius said, rolling his eyes, prompting Lily to roll her eyes back at him.
“So how is the Innocent human? I’d eat my hat before you’d admit to staying with him this long voluntarily.”
“Ugh,” Sirius said once more before regaling the story into a few simple sentences. Lily clutched his knee, her human knuckles turning white, when he admitted to not releasing the dark energy for so many days.
“So, he thinks you’re a hallucination?” Lily bypassed the fact that Sirius went visibly human for the first time in decades and he was infinitely grateful for that.
“I guess.” Sirius shrugged, shaking his knee so she’d let go. He didn’t want humans to see her holding what appeared to be just air.
Retracting her claws from Sirius’ leg, Lily blew out a breath. Unhelpfully, a vision of Lupin doing his weird air-puff communications came to mind. “That’s rough,” Lily said.
“Fucking annoying,” Sirius agreed.
Lily leveled him a look. “I meant for him, you arse.” She paused. “Do you think...people have visited him?” Validation flooded Sirius at knowing even Lily had limits to living freely in the human world, carefully saying people in substitute of Creatures.
“Of course not,” Sirius scoffed. “You know I’d know. It’s not like I give a fuck about his day but even if I go blank, I’d know if someone intruded his Perimeter. Fucking Perimeter, can’t believe I was stuck in there for like four, five days?”
If Lily holding Sirius’ knee looked weird to the oblivious outside world, then her stroking his hair was out of the question unless he decided to become visible. But like how Lily knew Sirius was grinning at her when he was a nothingness, Sirius also knew when Lily wished to touch him when he was in an invisible form. Just knowing that she wanted to touch-comfort him soothed him immensely.
“You’re free now,” she said. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.” Sirius slumped from his rigid form on the bench, giving into the weird human gesture of placing his head in his hands. Ugh, he’d been publicly human twice and he had already picked up stupid habits. “I feel the energy building up again. I’ll be forced to return to him soon.”
They sat silently. Time mattered little for their kind. A great big beast of a dog meandered past them with a frazzled looking man. A group of young girls chattered away in fast spoken French, none of which Sirius understood unless he forced his powers to translate. A small bird swooped by, chased soon after by another. If Sirius focused on it, he’d be able to feel the chill of the breeze creating temporary waves of wrinkles along the brim of Lily’s sunhat.
“Will you let him see you again?”
A few leaves scattered from the tree in front of them. Humans told time by nature, by seasons. Leaves falling probably meant something big or something small.
“I don’t know,” Sirius admitted.
Lily clearly didn’t care enough about her Paris reputation as a real human talking on “bluetooth”, choosing to thread her human fingers with Sirius’ invisible demon ones. He hadn’t known how much he craved the weight of another being. For a scary, fleeting second, he wished to be visibly present, to be able to touch more.